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» LIBER SCRIPTUM «
Sir James George Frazer
The Golden Bough
a study of magic and religion
(1922 ev.)
I
CONTENTS
Preface
Subject Index
Chapter 1. The King of the Wood
1. Diana and Virbius
2. Artemis and Hippolytus
3. Recapitulation
Chapter 2. Priestly Kings
Chapter 3. Sympathetic Magic
1. The Principles of Magic
2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic
3. Contagious Magic
4. The Magician's Progress
Chapter 4. Magic and Religion
Chapter 5. The Magical Control of the Weather
1. The Public Magician
2. The Magical Control of Rain
3. The Magical Control of the Sun
4. The Magical Control of the Wind
Chapter 6. Magicians as Kings
Chapter 7. Incarnate Human Gods
Chapter 8. Departmental Kings of Nature
Chapter 9. The Worship of Trees
1. Tree-spirits
2. Beneficent Powers of Tree-Spirits
Chapter 10. Relics of Tree Worship in Modern Europe
Chapter 11. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation
Chapter 12. The Sacred Marriage
1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility
2. The Marriage of the Gods
Chapter 13. The Kings of Rome and Alba
1. Numa and Egeria
2. The King as Jupiter
Chapter 14. Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium
Chapter 15. The Worship of the Oak
Chapter 16. Dianus and Diana
Chapter 17. The Burden of Royalty
1. Royal and Priestly Taboos
2. Divorce of the Spiritual from the Temporal Power
Chapter 18. The Perils of the Soul
1. The Soul as a Mannikin
2. Absence and Recall of the Soul
3. The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection
Chapter 19. Tabooed Acts
1. Taboos on Intercourse with Strangers
2. Taboos on Eating and Drinking
3. Taboos on Showing the Face
4. Taboos on Quitting the House
5. Taboos on Leaving Food over
Chapter 20. Tabooed Persons
1. Chiefs and Kings tabooed
2. Mourners tabooed
3. Women tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth
4. Warriors tabooed
5. Manslayers tabooed
6. Hunters and Fishers tabooed
Chapter 21. Tabooed Things
1. The Meaning of Taboo
2. Iron tabooed
3. Sharp Weapons tabooed
4. Blood tabooed
5. The Head tabooed
6. Hair tabooed
7. Ceremonies at Hair-cutting
8. Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails
9. Spittle tabooed
10. Foods tabooed
11. Knots and Rings tabooed
Chapter 22. Tabooed Words
1. Personal Names tabooed
2. Names of Relations tabooed
3. Names of the Dead tabooed
4. Names of Kings and other Sacred Persons tabooed
5. Names of Gods tabooed
Chapter 23. Our Debt to the Savage
Chapter 24. The Killing of the Divine King
1. The Mortality of the Gods
2. Kings killed when their Strength fails
3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term
Chapter 25. Temporary Kings
Chapter 26. Sacrifice of the King's Son
Chapter 27. Succession to the Soul
Chapter 28. The Killing of the Tree-Spirit
1. The Whitsuntide Mummers
2. Burying the Carnival
3. Carrying out Death
4. Bringing in Summer
5. Battle of Summer and Winter
6. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko
7. Death and Revival of Vegetation
8. Analogous Rites in India
9. The Magic Spring
Chapter 29. The Myth of Adonis
Chapter 30. Adonis in Syria
Chapter 31. Adonis in Cyprus
Chapter 32. The Ritual of Adonis
Chapter 33. The Gardens of Adonis
Chapter 34. The Myth and Ritual of Attis
Chapter 35. Attis as a God of Vegetation
Chapter 36. Human Representatives of Attis
Chapter 37. Oriental Religions in the West
Chapter 38. The Myth of Osiris
Chapter 39. The Ritual of Osiris
1. The Popular Rites
2. The Official Rites
Chapter 40. The Nature of Osiris
1. Osiris a Corn-god
2. Osiris a Tree-spirit
3. Osiris a God of Fertility
4. Osiris a God of the Dead
Chapter 41. Isis
Chapter 42. Osiris and the Sun
Chapter 43. Dionysus
Chapter 44. Demeter and Persephone
Chapter 45. Corn-Mother and Corn-Maiden in N. Europe
Chapter 46. Corn-Mother in Many Lands
1. The Corn-mother in America
2. The Rice-mother in the East Indies
3. The Spirit of the Corn embodied in Human Beings
4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter
Chapter 47. Lityerses
1. Songs of the Corn Reapers
2. Killing the Corn-spirit
3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops
4. The Corn-spirit slain in his Human Representatives
Chapter 48. The Corn-Spirit as an Animal
1. Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit
2. The Corn-spirit as a Wolf or a Dog
3. The Corn-spirit as a Cock
4. The Corn-spirit as a Hare
5. The Corn-spirit as a Cat
6. The Corn-spirit as a Goat
7. The Corn-spirit as a Bull, Cow, or Ox
8. The Corn-spirit as a Horse or Mare
9. The Corn-spirit as a Pig (Boar or Sow)
10. On the Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit
Chapter 49. Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals
1. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull
2. Demeter, the Pig and the Horse
3. Attis, Adonis, and the Pig
4. Osiris, the Pig and the Bull
5. Virbius and the Horse
Chapter 50. Eating the God
1. The Sacrament of First-Fruits
2. Eating the God among the Aztecs
3. Many Manii at Aricia
Chapter 51. Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet
Chapter 52. Killing the Divine Animal
1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard
2. Killing the Sacred Ram
3. Killing the Sacred Serpent
4. Killing the Sacred Turtles
5. Killing the Sacred Bear
Chapter 53. The Propitiation of Wild Animals By Hunters
Chapter 54. Types of Animal Sacrament
1. The Egyptian and the Aino Types of Sacrament
2. Processions with Sacred Animals
Chapter 55. The Transference of Evil
1. The Transference to Inanimate Objects
2. The Transference to Animals
3. The Transference to Men
4. The Transference of Evil in Europe
Chapter 56. The Public Expulsion of Evils
1. The Omnipresence of Demons
2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils
3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils
Chapter 57. Public Scapegoats
1. The Expulsion of Embodied Evils
2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle
3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle
4. On Scapegoats in General
Chapter 58. Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity
1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome
2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece
3. The Roman Saturnalia
Chapter 59. Killing the God in Mexico
Chapter 60. Between Heaven and Earth
1. Not to touch the Earth
2. Not to see the Sun
3. The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
4. Reasons for the Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
Chapter 61. The Myth of Balder
Chapter 62. The Fire-Festivals of Europe
1. The Fire-festivals in general
2. The Lenten Fires
3. The Easter Fires
4. The Beltane Fires
5. The Midsummer Fires
6. The Hallowe'en Fires
7. The Midwinter Fires
8. The Need-fire
Chapter 63. The Interpretation of the Fire-Festivals
1. On the Fire-festivals in general
2. The Solar Theory of the Fire-festivals
3. The Purificatory Theory of the Fire-festivals
Chapter 64. The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires
1. The Burning of Effigies in the Fires
2. The Burning of Men and Animals in the Fires
Chapter 65. Balder and the Mistletoe
Chapter 66. The External Soul in Folk-Tales
Chapter 67. The External Soul in Folk-Custom
1. The External Soul in Inanimate Things
2. The External Soul in Plants
3. The External Soul in Animals
4. The Ritual of Death and Resurrection
Chapter 68. The Golden Bough
Chapter 69. Farewell to Nemi
Preface
THE PRIMARY aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule
which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at
Aricia. When I first set myself to solve the problem more than
thirty years ago, I thought that the solution could be propounded
very briefly, but I soon found that to render it probable or even
intelligible it was necessary to discuss certain more general
questions, some of which had hardly been broached before. In
successive editions the discussion of these and kindred topics has
occupied more and more space, the enquiry has branched out in more
and more directions, until the two volumes of the original work
have expanded into twelve. Meantime a wish has often been expressed
that the book should be issued in a more compendious form. This
abridgment is an attempt to meet the wish and thereby to bring the
work within the range of a wider circle of readers. While the bulk
of the book has been greatly reduced, I have endeavoured to retain
its leading principles, together with an amount of evidence
sufficient to illustrate them clearly. The language of the original
has also for the most part been preserved, though here and there
the exposition has been somewhat condensed. In order to keep as
much of the text as possible I have sacrificed all the notes, and
with them all exact references to my authorities. Readers who
desire to ascertain the source of any particular statement must
therefore consult the larger work, which is fully documented and
provided with a complete bibliography.
In the abridgment I have neither added new matter nor altered
the views expressed in the last edition; for the evidence which has
come to my knowledge in the meantime has on the whole served either
to confirm my former conclusions or to furnish fresh illustrations
of old principles. Thus, for example, on the crucial question of
the practice of putting kings to death either at the end of a fixed
period or whenever their health and strength began to fail, the
body of evidence which points to the wide prevalence of such a
custom has been considerably augmented in the interval. A striking
instance of a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished by the
powerful mediaeval kingdom of the Khazars in Southern Russia, where
the kings were liable to be put to death either on the expiry of a
set term or whenever some public calamity, such as drought, dearth,
or defeat in war, seemed to indicate a failure of their natural
powers. The evidence for the systematic killing of the Khazar
kings, drawn from the accounts of old Arab travellers, has been
collected by me elsewhere.[1]
Africa, again, has supplied several fresh examples of a similar
practice of regicide. Among them the most notable perhaps is the
custom formerly observed in Bunyoro of choosing every year from a
particular clan a mock king, who was supposed to incarnate the late
king, cohabited with his widows at his temple-tomb, and after
reigning for a week was strangled.[2] The custom presents a close parallel
to the ancient Babylonian festival of the Sacaea, at which a mock
king was dressed in the royal robes, allowed to enjoy the real
king’s concubines, and after reigning for five days was
stripped, scourged, and put to death. That festival in its turn has
lately received fresh light from certain Assyrian
inscriptions,[3] which seem to
confirm the interpretation which I formerly gave of the festival as
a New Year celebration and the parent of the Jewish festival of
Purim.[4] Other recently
discovered parallels to the priestly kings of Aricia are African
priests and kings who used to be put to death at the end of seven
or of two years, after being liable in the interval to be attacked
and killed by a strong man, who thereupon succeeded to the
priesthood or the kingdom.[5]
[1] J. G. Frazer,
“The Killing of the Khazar Kings,” Folk-lore,
xxviii. (1917), pp. 382–407.
[2] Rev. J. Roscoe,
The Soul of Central Africa (London, 1922), p. 200. Compare
J. G. Frazer, &147;The Mackie Ethnological Expedition to
Central Africa,” Man, xx. (1920), p. 181.
[3] H. Zimmern, Zum
babylonischen Neujahrsfest (Leipzig, 1918). Compare A. H.
Sayce, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, July 1921,
pp. 440–442.
[4] The Golden
Bough, Part VI. The Scapegoat, pp. 354 sqq.,
412 sqq.
[5] P. Amaury Talbot in
Journal of the African Society, July 1916, pp. 309
sq.; id., in Folk-lore, xxvi. (1916), pp. 79
sq.; H. R. Palmer, in Journal of the African
Society, July 1912, pp. 403, 407 sq.
With these and other instances of like customs before us it is
no longer possible to regard the rule of succession to the
priesthood of Diana at Aricia as exceptional; it clearly
exemplifies a widespread institution, of which the most numerous
and the most similar cases have thus far been found in Africa. How
far the facts point to an early influence of Africa on Italy, or
even to the existence of an African population in Southern Europe,
I do not presume to say. The pre-historic historic relations
between the two continents are still obscure and still under
investigation.
Whether the explanation which I have offered of the institution
is correct or not must be left to the future to determine. I shall
always be ready to abandon it if a better can be suggested.
Meantime in committing the book in its new form to the judgment of
the public I desire to guard against a misapprehension of its scope
which appears to be still rife, though I have sought to correct it
before now. If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on
the worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its
importance in the history of religion, still less because I would
deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I
could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the
significance of a priest who bore the title of King of the Wood,
and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a
bough—the Golden Bough—from a tree in the sacred grove.
But I am so far from regarding the reverence for trees as of
supreme importance for the evolution of religion that I consider it
to have been altogether subordinate to other factors, and in
particular to the fear of the human dead, which, on the whole, I
believe to have been probably the most powerful force in the making
of primitive religion. I hope that after this explicit disclaimer I
shall no longer be taxed with embracing a system of mythology which
I look upon not merely as false but as preposterous and absurd. But
I am too familiar with the hydra of error to expect that by lopping
off one of the monster’s heads I can prevent another, or even
the same, from sprouting again. I can only trust to the candour and
intelligence of my readers to rectify this serious misconception of
my views by a comparison with my own express declaration.
J. G. FRAZER.
1 BRICK COURT, TEMPLE, LONDON,
June 1922.
I. The King of the Wood
1. Diana and Virbius
WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough?
The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which
the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest
natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland
lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was
called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped
in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two
characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the
equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to
the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of
the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore,
still haunt these woodlands wild.
In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange
and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right
under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is
perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis,
or Diana of the Wood. The lake and the grove were sometimes known
as the lake and grove of Aricia. But the town of Aricia (the modern
La Riccia) was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the
Alban Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which
lies in a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this
sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of
the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be
seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept
peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be
set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man
for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the
priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A
candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by
slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till
he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it
the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or
was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out,
in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep
his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it
was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his
vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill
of fence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his
death-warrant. To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight
of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a
cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day. The dreamy blue of
Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle
of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and
sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may
have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild
autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds
seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture,
set to melancholy music—the background of forest showing
black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of
the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under
foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the
foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a
dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the
pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him
through the matted boughs.
The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical
antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation
we must go farther afield. No one will probably deny that such a
custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial
times, stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian
society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a
smooth-shaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the
custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent
researches into the early history of man have revealed the
essential similarity with which, under many superficial
differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude
philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we can show that a barbarous
custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere;
if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; if we
can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps
universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a
variety of institutions specifically different but generically
alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some
of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in
classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age
the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an
inference, in default of direct evidence as to how the priesthood
did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration. But it will
be more or less probable according to the degree of completeness
with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. The object
of this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly
probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.
I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have
come down to us on the subject. According to one story the worship
of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing
Thoas, King of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his
sister to Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana
hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were
transported from Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple
of Saturn, on the Capitoline slope, beside the temple of Concord.
The bloody ritual which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is
familiar to classical readers; it is said that every stranger who
landed on the shore was sacrificed on her altar. But transported to
Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi
grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a
runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its
boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in
single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the
title of King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis). According to
the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch was that
Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked
before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead.
The flight of the slave represented, it was said, the flight of
Orestes; his combat with the priest was a reminiscence of the human
sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This rule of
succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for
amongst his other freaks Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi
had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to slay
him; and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the
Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still
the prize of victory in a single combat.
Of the worship of Diana at Nemi some leading features can still
be made out. From the votive offerings which have been found on the
site, it appears that she was conceived of especially as a
huntress, and further as blessing men and women with offspring, and
granting expectant mothers an easy delivery. Again, fire seems to
have played a foremost part in her ritual. For during her annual
festival, held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of
the year, her grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy
glare was reflected by the lake; and throughout the length and
breadth of Italy the day was kept with holy rites at every domestic
hearth. Bronze statuettes found in her precinct represent the
goddess herself holding a torch in her raised right hand; and women
whose prayers had been heard by her came crowned with wreaths and
bearing lighted torches to the sanctuary in fulfilment of their
vows. Some one unknown dedicated a perpetually burning lamp in a
little shrine at Nemi for the safety of the Emperor Claudius and
his family. The terra-cotta lamps which have been discovered in the
grove may perhaps have served a like purpose for humbler persons.
If so, the analogy of the custom to the Catholic practice of
dedicating holy candles in churches would be obvious. Further, the
title of Vesta borne by Diana at Nemi points clearly to the
maintenance of a perpetual holy fire in her sanctuary. A large
circular basement at the north-east corner of the temple, raised on
three steps and bearing traces of a mosaic pavement, probably
supported a round temple of Diana in her character of Vesta, like
the round temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum. Here the sacred fire
would seem to have been tended by Vestal Virgins, for the head of a
Vestal in terra-cotta was found on the spot, and the worship of a
perpetual fire, cared for by holy maidens, appears to have been
common in Latium from the earliest to the latest times. Further, at
the annual festival of the goddess, hunting dogs were crowned and
wild beasts were not molested; young people went through a
purificatory ceremony in her honour; wine was brought forth, and
the feast consisted of a kid cakes served piping hot on plates of
leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the boughs.
But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi. Two lesser
divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph
of the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to
fall in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Le
Mole, because here were established the mills of the modern village
of Nemi. The purling of the stream as it ran over the pebbles is
mentioned by Ovid, who tells us that he had often drunk of its
water. Women with child used to sacrifice to Egeria, because she
was believed, like Diana, to be able to grant them an easy
delivery. Tradition ran that the nymph had been the wife or
mistress of the wise king Numa, that he had consorted with her in
the secrecy of the sacred grove, and that the laws which he gave
the Romans had been inspired by communion with her divinity.
Plutarch compares the legend with other tales of the loves of
goddesses for mortal men, such as the love of Cybele and the Moon
for the fair youths Attis and Endymion. According to some, the
trysting-place of the lovers was not in the woods of Nemi but in a
grove outside the dripping Porta Capena at Rome, where another
sacred spring of Egeria gushed from a dark cavern. Every day the
Roman Vestals fetched water from this spring to wash the temple of
Vesta, carrying it in earthenware pitchers on their heads. In
Juvenal’s time the natural rock had been encased in marble,
and the hallowed spot was profaned by gangs of poor Jews, who were
suffered to squat, like gypsies, in the grove. We may suppose that
the spring which fell into the lake of Nemi was the true original
Egeria, and that when the first settlers moved down from the Alban
hills to the banks of the Tiber they brought the nymph with them
and found a new home for her in a grove outside the gates. The
remains of baths which have been discovered within the sacred
precinct, together with many terra-cotta models of various parts of
the human body, suggest that the waters of Egeria were used to heal
the sick, who may have signified their hopes or testified their
gratitude by dedicating likenesses of the diseased members to the
goddess, in accordance with a custom which is still observed in
many parts of Europe. To this day it would seem that the spring
retains medicinal virtues.
The other of the minor deities at Nemi was Virbius. Legend had
it that Virbius was the young Greek hero Hippolytus, chaste and
fair, who learned the art of venery from the centaur Chiron, and
spent all his days in the greenwood chasing wild beasts with the
virgin huntress Artemis (the Greek counterpart of Diana) for his
only comrade. Proud of her divine society, he spurned the love of
women, and this proved his bane. For Aphrodite, stung by his scorn,
inspired his stepmother Phaedra with love of him; and when he
disdained her wicked advances she falsely accused him to his father
Theseus. The slander was believed, and Theseus prayed to his sire
Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong. So while Hippolytus drove in
a chariot by the shore of the Saronic Gulf, the sea-god sent a
fierce bull forth from the waves. The terrified horses bolted,
threw Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged him at their hoofs
to death. But Diana, for the love she bore Hippolytus, persuaded
the leech Aesculapius to bring her fair young hunter back to life
by his simples. Jupiter, indignant that a mortal man should return
from the gates of death, thrust down the meddling leech himself to
Hades. But Diana hid her favourite from the angry god in a thick
cloud, disguised his features by adding years to his life, and then
bore him far away to the dells of Nemi, where she entrusted him to
the nymph Egeria, to live there, unknown and solitary, under the
name of Virbius, in the depth of the Italian forest. There he
reigned a king, and there he dedicated a precinct to Diana. He had
a comely son, Virbius, who, undaunted by his father’s fate,
drove a team of fiery steeds to join the Latins in the war against
Aeneas and the Trojans. Virbius was worshipped as a god not only at
Nemi but elsewhere; for in Campania we hear of a special priest
devoted to his service. Horses were excluded from the Arician grove
and sanctuary because horses had killed Hippolytus. It was unlawful
to touch his image. Some thought that he was the sun. “But
the truth is,” says Servius, “that he is a deity
associated with Diana, as Attis is associated with the Mother of
the Gods, and Erichthonius with Minerva, and Adonis with
Venus.” What the nature of that association was we shall
enquire presently. Here it is worth observing that in his long and
chequered career this mythical personage has displayed a remarkable
tenacity of life. For we can hardly doubt that the Saint Hippolytus
of the Roman calendar, who was dragged by horses to death on the
thirteenth of August, Diana’s own day, is no other than the
Greek hero of the same name, who, after dying twice over as a
heathen sinner, has been happily resuscitated as a Christian
saint.
It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the
stories told to account for Diana’s worship at Nemi are
unhistorical. Clearly they belong to that large class of myths
which are made up to explain the origin of a religious ritual and
have no other foundation than the resemblance, real or imaginary,
which may be traced between it and some foreign ritual. The
incongruity of these Nemi myths is indeed transparent, since the
foundation of the worship is traced now to Orestes and now to
Hippolytus, according as this or that feature of the ritual has to
be accounted for. The real value of such tales is that they serve
to illustrate the nature of the worship by providing a standard
with which to compare it; and further, that they bear witness
indirectly to its venerable age by showing that the true origin was
lost in the mists of a fabulous antiquity. In the latter respect
these Nemi legends are probably more to be trusted than the
apparently historical tradition, vouched for by Cato the Elder,
that the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana by a certain Egerius
Baebius or Laevius of Tusculum, a Latin dictator, on behalf of the
peoples of Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Cora, Tibur,
Pometia, and Ardea. This tradition indeed speaks for the great age
of the sanctuary, since it seems to date its foundation sometime
before 495 B.C., the year in which Pometia was sacked by the Romans
and disappears from history. But we cannot suppose that so
barbarous a rule as that of the Arician priesthood was deliberately
instituted by a league of civilised communities, such as the Latin
cities undoubtedly were. It must have been handed down from a time
beyond the memory of man, when Italy was still in a far ruder state
than any known to us in the historical period. The credit of the
tradition is rather shaken than confirmed by another story which
ascribes the foundation of the sanctuary to a certain Manius
Egerius, who gave rise to the saying, “There are many Manii
at Aricia.” This proverb some explained by alleging that
Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line,
whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and
deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from
Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman
satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in
wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of
opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of
Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance
of both names to the mythical Egeria, excite our suspicion. Yet the
tradition recorded by Cato seems too circumstantial, and its
sponsor too respectable, to allow us to dismiss it as an idle
fiction. Rather we may suppose that it refers to some ancient
restoration or reconstruction of the sanctuary, which was actually
carried out by the confederate states. At any rate it testifies to
a belief that the grove had been from early times a common place of
worship for many of the oldest cities of the country, if not for
the whole Latin confederacy.
2. Artemis and Hippolytus
I HAVE said that the Arician legends of Orestes and Hippolytus,
though worthless as history, have a certain value in so far as they
may help us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing
it with the ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask
ourselves, Why did the author of these legends pitch upon Orestes
and Hippolytus in order to explain Virbius and the King of the
Wood? In regard to Orestes, the answer is obvious. He and the image
of the Tauric Diana, which could only be appeased with human blood,
were dragged in to render intelligible the murderous rule of
succession to the Arician priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus the
case is not so plain. The manner of his death suggests readily
enough a reason for the exclusion of horses from the grove; but
this by itself seems hardly enough to account for the
identification. We must try to probe deeper by examining the
worship as well as the legend or myth of Hippolytus.
He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troezen,
situated on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay, where groves of
oranges and lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires
above the garden of Hesperides, now clothe the strip of fertile
shore at the foot of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of
the tranquil bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises
Poseidon’s sacred island, its peaks veiled in the sombre
green of the pines. On this fair coast Hippolytus was worshipped.
Within his sanctuary stood a temple with an ancient image. His
service was performed by a priest who held office for life; every
year a sacrificial festival was held in his honour; and his
untimely fate was yearly mourned, with weeping and doleful chants,
by unwedded maids. Youths and maidens dedicated locks of their hair
in his temple before marriage. His grave existed at Troezen, though
the people would not show it. It has been suggested, with great
plausibility, that in the handsome Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis,
cut off in his youthful prime, and yearly mourned by damsels, we
have one of those mortal lovers of a goddess who appear so often in
ancient religion, and of whom Adonis is the most familiar type. The
rivalry of Artemis and Phaedra for the affection of Hippolytus
reproduces, it is said, under different names, the rivalry of
Aphrodite and Proserpine for the love of Adonis, for Phaedra is
merely a double of Aphrodite. The theory probably does no injustice
either to Hippolytus or to Artemis. For Artemis was originally a
great goddess of fertility, and, on the principles of early
religion, she who fertilises nature must herself be fertile, and to
be that she must necessarily have a male consort. On this view,
Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis at Troezen, and the shorn
tresses offered to him by the Troezenian youths and maidens before
marriage were designed to strengthen his union with the goddess,
and so to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of cattle, and of
mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that within the
precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there were worshipped two female
powers named Damia and Auxesia, whose connexion with the fertility
of the ground is unquestionable. When Epidaurus suffered from a
dearth, the people, in obedience to an oracle, carved images of
Damia and Auxesia out of sacred olive wood, and no sooner had they
done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again. Moreover,
at Troezen itself, and apparently within the precinct of
Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing was held in honour
of these maidens, as the Troezenians called them; and it is easy to
show that similar customs have been practised in many lands for the
express purpose of ensuring good crops. In the story of the tragic
death of the youthful Hippolytus we may discern an analogy with
similar tales of other fair but mortal youths who paid with their
lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal goddess.
These hapless lovers were probably not always mere myths, and the
legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the
violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush of
the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty fleeting
as the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of
the relation of the life of man to the life of nature—a sad
philosophy which gave birth to a tragic practice. What that
philosophy and that practice were, we shall learn later on.
3. Recapitulation
WE can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified
Hippolytus, the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who, according to
Servius, stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the Mother
of the Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in
general, and of childbirth in particular. As such she, like her
Greek counterpart, needed a male partner. That partner, if Servius
is right, was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the
sacred grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the
mythical predecessor or archetype of the line of priests who served
Diana under the title of Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him,
one after the other, to a violent end. It is natural, therefore, to
conjecture that they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same
relation in which Virbius stood to her; in short, that the mortal
King of the Wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself. If
the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as
seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not
only have worshipped it as his goddess but embraced it as his wife.
There is at least nothing absurd in the supposition, since even in
the time of Pliny a noble Roman used thus to treat a beautiful
beech-tree in another sacred grove of Diana on the Alban hills. He
embraced it, he kissed it, he lay under its shadow, he poured wine
on its trunk. Apparently he took the tree for the goddess. The
custom of physically marrying men and women to trees is still
practised in India and other parts of the East. Why should it not
have obtained in ancient Latium?
Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the
worship of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great
importance and immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the
goddess of woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of
domestic cattle and of the fruits of the earth; that she was
believed to bless men and women with offspring and to aid mothers
in childbed; that her holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burned
perpetually in a round temple within the precinct; that associated
with her was a water-nymph Egeria who discharged one of
Diana’s own functions by succouring women in travail, and who
was popularly supposed to have mated with an old Roman king in the
sacred grove; further, that Diana of the Wood herself had a male
companion Virbius by name, who was to her what Adonis was to Venus,
or Attis to Cybele; and, lastly, that this mythical Virbius was
represented in historical times by a line of priests known as Kings
of the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their
successors, and whose lives were in a manner bound up with a
certain tree in the grove, because so long as that tree was
uninjured they were safe from attack.
Clearly these conclusions do not of themselves suffice to
explain the peculiar rule of succession to the priesthood. But
perhaps the survey of a wider field may lead us to think that they
contain in germ the solution of the problem. To that wider survey
we must now address ourselves. It will be long and laborious, but
may possess something of the interest and charm of a voyage of
discovery, in which we shall visit many strange foreign lands, with
strange foreign peoples, and still stranger customs. The wind is in
the shrouds: we shake out our sails to it, and leave the coast of
Italy behind us for a time.
II. Priestly Kings
THE questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly
two: first, why had Diana’s priest at Nemi, the King of the
Wood, to slay his predecessor? second, why before doing so had he
to pluck the branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of
the ancients identified with Virgil’s Golden Bough?
The first point on which we fasten is the priest’s title.
Why was he called the King of the Wood? Why was his office spoken
of as a kingdom?
The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in
ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium
there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the
Sacred Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred
Rites. In republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the
state was called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of
both were religious. Many other Greek democracies had titular
kings, whose duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been
priestly, and to have centered round the Common Hearth of the
state. Some Greek states had several of these titular kings, who
held office simultaneously. At Rome the tradition was that the
Sacrificial King had been appointed after the abolition of the
monarchy in order to offer the sacrifices which before had been
offered by the kings. A similar view as to the origin of the
priestly kings appears to have prevailed in Greece. In itself the
opinion is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of
Sparta, almost the only purely Greek state which retained the
kingly form of government in historical times. For in Sparta all
state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of the
god. One of the two Spartan kings held the priesthood of Zeus
Lacedaemon, the other the priesthood of Heavenly Zeus.
This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is
familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of
various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred
slaves, and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and
spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such
priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pessinus. Teutonic kings, again,
in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position, and to
have exercised the powers, of high priests. The Emperors of China
offered public sacrifices, the details of which were regulated by
the ritual books. The King of Madagascar was high-priest of the
realm. At the great festival of the new year, when a bullock was
sacrificed for the good of the kingdom, the king stood over the
sacrifice to offer prayer and thanksgiving, while his attendants
slaughtered the animal. In the monarchical states which still
maintain their independence among the Gallas of Eastern Africa, the
king sacrifices on the mountain tops and regulates the immolation
of human victims; and the dim light of tradition reveals a similar
union of temporal and spiritual power, of royal and priestly
duties, in the kings of that delightful region of Central America
whose ancient capital, now buried under the rank growth of the
tropical forest, is marked by the stately and mysterious ruins of
Palenque.
When we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests
also, we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of
their office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no
empty form of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings
were revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as
intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to
bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which
are commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are
sought, if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to
superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to
give rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and
so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a
piece with early modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the
distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the
natural and the supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent
worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting
on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved
by appeals to their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a world
so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the
course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or
threats may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the
gods; and if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to
become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no
higher being; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the powers
necessary to further his own well-being and that of his
fellow-men.
This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But
there is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by
spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still
older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern
notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events
occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of
personal agency. The germ of which I speak is involved in that
sympathetic magic, as it may be called, which plays a large part in
most systems of superstition. In early society the king is
frequently a magician as well as a priest; indeed he appears to
have often attained to power by virtue of his supposed proficiency
in the black or white art. Hence in order to understand the
evolution of the kingship and the sacred character with which the
office has commonly been invested in the eyes of savage or
barbarous peoples, it is essential to have some acquaintance with
the principles of magic and to form some conception of the
extraordinary hold which that ancient system of superstition has
had on the human mind in all ages and all countries. Accordingly I
propose to consider the subject in some detail.
III. Sympathetic Magic
1. The Principles of Magic
IF we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based,
they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first,
that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause;
and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each
other continue to act on each other at a distance after the
physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be
called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or
Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of
Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he
desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that
whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the
person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed
part of his body or not. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may
be called Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law
of Contact or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic. To denote
the first of these branches of magic the term Homoeopathic is
perhaps preferable, for the alternative term Imitative or Mimetic
suggests, if it does not imply, a conscious agent who imitates,
thereby limiting the scope of magic too narrowly. For the same
principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art
are implicitly believed by him to regulate the operations of
inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws
of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not
limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of
natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false
science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural
law, that is, as a statement of the rules which determine the
sequence of events throughout the world, it may be called
Theoretical Magic: regarded as a set of precepts which human beings
observe in order to compass their ends, it may be called Practical
Magic. At the same time it is to be borne in mind that the
primitive magician knows magic only on its practical side; he never
analyses the mental processes on which his practice is based, never
reflects on the abstract principles involved in his actions. With
him, as with the vast majority of men, logic is implicit, not
explicit: he reasons just as he digests his food in complete
ignorance of the intellectual and physiological processes which are
essential to the one operation and to the other. In short, to him
magic is always an art, never a science; the very idea of science
is lacking in his undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic
student to trace the train of thought which underlies the
magician’s practice; to draw out the few simple threads of
which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract
principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern
the spurious science behind the bastard art.
If my analysis of the magician’s logic is correct, its two
great principles turn out to be merely two different
misapplications of the association of ideas. Homoeopathic magic is
founded on the association of ideas by similarity: contagious magic
is founded on the association of ideas by contiguity. Homoeopathic
magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which resemble
each other are the same: contagious magic commits the mistake of
assuming that things which have once been in contact with each
other are always in contact. But in practice the two branches are
often combined; or, to be more exact, while homoeopathic or
imitative magic may be practised by itself, contagious magic will
generally be found to involve an application of the homoeopathic or
imitative principle. Thus generally stated the two things may be a
little difficult to grasp, but they will readily become
intelligible when they are illustrated by particular examples. Both
trains of thought are in fact extremely simple and elementary. It
could hardly be otherwise, since they are familiar in the concrete,
though certainly not in the abstract, to the crude intelligence not
only of the savage, but of ignorant and dull-witted people
everywhere. Both branches of magic, the homoeopathic and the
contagious, may conveniently be comprehended under the general name
of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each
other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being
transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive
as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated
by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to
explain how things can physically affect each other through a space
which appears to be empty.
It may be convenient to tabulate as follows the branches of
magic according to the laws of thought which underlie them:
Sympathetic Magic
(Law of Sympathy)
|
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| |
Homoeopathic Magic Contagious Magic
(Law of Similarity) (Law of Contact)
I will now illustrate these two great branches of sympathetic
magic by examples, beginning with homoeopathic magic.
2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic
PERHAPS the most familiar application of the principle that like
produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in
many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying
an image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so
does the man, and that when it perishes he must die. A few
instances out of many may be given to prove at once the wide
diffusion of the practice over the world and its remarkable
persistence through the ages. For thousands of years ago it was
known to the sorcerers of ancient India, Babylon, and Egypt, as
well as of Greece and Rome, and at this day it is still resorted to
by cunning and malignant savages in Australia, Africa, and
Scotland. Thus the North American Indians, we are told, believe
that by drawing the figure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or
by considering any object as his body, and then pricking it with a
sharp stick or doing it any other injury, they inflict a
corresponding injury on the person represented. For example, when
an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a
little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or
heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the
needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the
same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part
of his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he
burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain magic words as he does
so. The Peruvian Indians moulded images of fat mixed with grain to
imitate the persons whom they disliked or feared, and then burned
the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass. This
they called burning his soul.
A Malay charm of the same sort is as follows. Take parings of
nails, hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended
victim, enough to represent every part of his person, and then make
them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees’
comb. Scorch the figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every
night for seven nights, and say:
“It is not wax that I am scorching,
It is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I
scorch.”
After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will
die. This charm obviously combines the principles of homoeopathic
and contagious magic; since the image which is made in the likeness
of an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him,
namely, his nails, hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay
charm, which resembles the Ojebway practice still more closely, is
to make a corpse of wax from an empty bees’ comb and of the
length of a footstep; then pierce the eye of the image, and your
enemy is blind; pierce the stomach, and he is sick; pierce the
head, and his head aches; pierce the breast, and his breast will
suffer. If you would kill him outright, transfix the image from the
head downwards; enshroud it as you would a corpse; pray over it as
if you were praying over the dead; then bury it in the middle of a
path where your victim will be sure to step over it. In order that
his blood may not be on your head, you should say:
“It is not I who am burying him,
It is Gabriel who is burying him.”
Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of
the archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it
than you are.
If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images,
has commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting
obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more
rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping
others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate
childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among
the Bataks of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother,
will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap,
believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the
Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she
invites a man who is himself the father of a large family to pray
on her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of
red cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms, as if she would
suckle it. Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds
it by the legs to the woman’s head, saying, “O Upulero,
make use of the fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you,
I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and on my
lap.” Then he asks the woman, “Has the child
come?” and she answers, “Yes, it is sucking
already.” After that the man holds the fowl on the
husband’s head, and mumbles some form of words. Lastly, the
bird is killed and laid, together with some betel, on the domestic
place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is over, word goes about in
the village that the woman has been brought to bed, and her friends
come and congratulate her. Here the pretence that a child has been
born is a purely magical rite designed to secure, by means of
imitation or mimicry, that a child really shall be born; but an
attempt is made to add to the efficacy of the rite by means of
prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magic is here blent with
and reinforced by religion.
Among some of the Dyaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard
labour, a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the
delivery in a rational manner by manipulating the body of the
sufferer. Meantime another wizard outside the room exerts himself
to attain the same end by means which we should regard as wholly
irrational. He, in fact, pretends to be the expectant mother; a
large stone attached to his stomach by a cloth wrapt round his body
represents the child in the womb, and, following the directions
shouted to him by his colleague on the real scene of operations, he
moves this make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation
of the movements of the real baby till the infant is born.
The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led
other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of
adoption, and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to
life. If you pretend to give birth to a boy, or even to a great
bearded man who has not a drop of your blood in his veins, then, in
the eyes of primitive law and philosophy, that boy or man is really
your son to all intents and purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that
when Zeus persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the
goddess got into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom,
pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the ground in
imitation of a real birth; and the historian adds that in his own
day the same mode of adopting children was practised by the
barbarians. At the present time it is said to be still in use in
Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy whom
she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes; ever
afterwards he is regarded as her very son, and inherits the whole
property of his adoptive parents. Among the Berawans of Sarawak,
when a woman desires to adopt a grownup man or woman, a great many
people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated in
public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to
crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front
he is stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the areca palm and
tied to a woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son or
daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the house and
back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established
between the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very
strict; an offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned
more heinous than one committed against a real child. In ancient
Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and
for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed, was
treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of
being born again. He was passed through a woman’s lap, then
washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not
until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix
freely with living folk. In ancient India, under similar
circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night
after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water;
there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable,
like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the
sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman.
Next morning he got out of the tub and went through once more all
the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up;
in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again
with due solemnity.
Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or
prevent sickness. The ancient Hindoos performed an elaborate
ceremony, based on homoeopathic magic, for the cure of jaundice.
Its main drift was to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures
and yellow things, such as the sun, to which it properly belongs,
and to procure for the patient a healthy red colour from a living,
vigorous source, namely, a red bull. With this intention, a priest
recited the following spell: “Up to the sun shall go thy
heart-ache and thy jaundice: in the colour of the red bull do we
envelop thee! We envelop thee in red tints, unto long life. May
this person go unscathed and be free of yellow colour! The cows
whose divinity is Rohini, they who, moreover, are themselves red
(rohinih)—in their every form and every strength we
do envelop thee. Into the parrots, into the thrush, do we put thy
jaundice, and, furthermore, into the yellow wagtail do we put thy
jaundice.” While he uttered these words, the priest, in order
to infuse the rosy hue of health into the sallow patient, gave him
water to sip which was mixed with the hair of a red bull; he poured
water over the animal’s back and made the sick man drink it;
he seated him on the skin of a red bull and tied a piece of the
skin to him. Then in order to improve his colour by thoroughly
eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus. He first daubed
him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of tumeric or
curcuma (a yellow plant), set him on a bed, tied three yellow
birds, to wit, a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by means
of a yellow string to the foot of the bed; then pouring water over
the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with it no
doubt the jaundice, from him to the birds. After that, by way of
giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red
bull, wrapt them in gold leaf, and glued them to the
patient’s skin. The ancients held that if a person suffering
from jaundice looked sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked
steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. “Such is the
nature,” says Plutarch, “and such the temperament of
the creature that it draws out and receives the malady which
issues, like a stream, through the eyesight.” So well
recognised among birdfanciers was this valuable property of the
stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds for sale they
kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at
it and be cured for nothing. The virtue of the bird lay not in its
colour but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the
yellow jaundice. Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same, bird,
to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice, because if a
jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird. He
mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because
its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.
One of the great merits of homoeopathic magic is that it enables
the cure to be performed on the person of the doctor instead of on
that of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and
inconvenience, while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish
before him. For example, the peasants of Perche, in France, labour
under the impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought
about by the patient’s stomach becoming unhooked, as they
call it, and so falling down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called
in to restore the organ to its proper place. After hearing the
symptoms he at once throws himself into the most horrible
contortions, for the purpose of unhooking his own stomach. Having
succeeded in the effort, he next hooks it up again in another
series of contortions and grimaces, while the patient experiences a
corresponding relief. Fee five francs. In like manner a Dyak
medicine-man, who has been fetched in a case of illness, will lie
down and pretend to be dead. He is accordingly treated like a
corpse, is bound up in mats, taken out of the house, and deposited
on the ground. After about an hour the other medicine-men loose the
pretended dead man and bring him to life; and as he recovers, the
sick person is supposed to recover too. A cure for a tumour, based
on the principle of homoeopathic magic, is prescribed by Marcellus
of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius the First, in his
curious work on medicine. It is as follows. Take a root of vervain,
cut it across, and hang one end of it round the patient’s
neck, and the other in the smoke of the fire. As the vervain dries
up in the smoke, so the tumour will also dry up and disappear. If
the patient should afterwards prove ungrateful to the good
physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by
throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs the
moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer
recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a
falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting
from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that
comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples
will fall from your body; only you must be very careful not to wipe
them with your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to
it.
Further, homoeopathic and in general sympathetic magic plays a
great part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to
secure an abundant supply of food. On the principle that like
produces like, many things are done by him and his friends in
deliberate imitation of the result which he seeks to attain; and,
on the other hand, many things are scrupulously avoided because
they bear some more or less fanciful resemblance to others which
would really be disastrous.
Nowhere is the theory of sympathetic magic more systematically
carried into practice for the maintenance of the food supply than
in the barren regions of Central Australia. Here the tribes are
divided into a number of totem clans, each of which is charged with
the duty of multiplying their totem for the good of the community
by means of magical ceremonies. Most of the totems are edible
animals and plants, and the general result supposed to be
accomplished by these ceremonies is that of supplying the tribe
with food and other necessaries. Often the rites consist of an
imitation of the effect which the people desire to produce; in
other words, their magic is homoeopathic or imitative. Thus among
the Warramunga the headman of the white cockatoo totem seeks to
multiply white cockatoos by holding an effigy of the bird and
mimicking its harsh cry. Among the Arunta the men of the witchetty
grub totem perform ceremonies for multiplying the grub which the
other members of the tribe use as food. One of the ceremonies is a
pantomime representing the fully-developed insect in the act of
emerging from the chrysalis. A long narrow structure of branches is
set up to imitate the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure
a number of men, who have the grub for their totem, sit and sing of
the creature in its various stages. Then they shuffle out of it in
a squatting posture, and as they do so they sing of the insect
emerging from the chrysalis. This is supposed to multiply the
numbers of the grubs. Again, in order to multiply emus, which are
an important article of food, the men of the emu totem paint on the
ground the sacred design of their totem, especially the parts of
the emu which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs.
Round this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers,
wearing head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of
the emu, mimic the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly
peering about in all directions.
The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which
abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due
season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an
image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction
from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by
a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once.
The islanders of Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to
charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Toradjas of
Central Celebes believe that things of the same sort attract each
other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital ether. Hence
they hang up the jawbones of deer and wild pigs in their houses, in
order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the
living creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. In
the island of Nias, when a wild pig has fallen into the pit
prepared for it, the animal is taken out and its back is rubbed
with nine fallen leaves, in the belief that this will make nine
more wild pigs fall into the pit, just as the nine leaves fell from
the tree. In the East Indian islands of Saparoea, Haroekoe, and
Noessa Laut, when a fisherman is about to set a trap for fish in
the sea, he looks out for a tree, of which the fruit has been much
pecked at by birds. From such a tree he cuts a stout branch and
makes of it the principal post in his fish-trap; for he believes
that, just as the tree lured many birds to its fruit, so the branch
cut from that tree will lure many fish to the trap.
The western tribes of British New Guinea employ a charm to aid
the hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. A small beetle, which
haunts coco-nut trees, is placed in the hole of the spear-haft into
which the spear-head fits. This is supposed to make the spear-head
stick fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast
to a man’s skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter
has set his nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes
some way off, then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it,
lets himself be caught in it, and cries, “Hillo! what’s
this? I’m afraid I’m caught.” After that the net
is sure to catch game. A pantomime of the same sort has been acted
within the living memory in our Scottish Highlands. The Rev. James
Macdonald, now of Reay in Caithness, tells us that in his boyhood
when he was fishing with companions about Loch Aline and they had
had no bites for a long time, they used to make a pretence of
throwing one of their fellows overboard and hauling him out of the
water, as if he were a fish; after that the trout or silloch would
begin to nibble, according as the boat was on fresh or salt water.
Before a Carrier Indian goes out to snare martens, he sleeps by
himself for about ten nights beside the fire with a little stick
pressed down on his neck. This naturally causes the fall-stick of
his trap to drop down on the neck of the marten. Among the
Galelareese, who inhabit a district in the northern part of
Halmahera, a large island to the west of New Guinea, it is a maxim
that when you are loading your gun to go out shooting, you should
always put the bullet in your mouth before you insert it in the
gun; for by so doing you practically eat the game that is to be hit
by the bullet, which therefore cannot possibly miss the mark. A
Malay who has baited a trap for crocodiles, and is awaiting
results, is careful in eating his curry always to begin by
swallowing three lumps of rice successively; for this helps the
bait to slide more easily down the crocodile’s throat. He is
equally scrupulous not to take any bones out of his curry; for, if
he did, it seems clear that the sharp-pointed stick on which the
bait is skewered would similarly work itself loose, and the
crocodile would get off with the bait. Hence in these circumstances
it is prudent for the hunter, before he begins his meal, to get
somebody else to take the bones out of his curry, otherwise he may
at any moment have to choose between swallowing a bone and losing
the crocodile.
This last rule is an instance of the things which the hunter
abstains from doing lest, on the principle that like produces like,
they should spoil his luck. For it is to be observed that the
system of sympathetic magic is not merely composed of positive
precepts; it comprises a very large number of negative precepts,
that is, prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also
what to leave undone. The positive precepts are charms: the
negative precepts are taboos. In fact the whole doctrine of taboo,
or at all events a large part of it, would seem to be only a
special application of sympathetic magic, with its two great laws
of similarity and contact. Though these laws are certainly not
formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by
the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to
regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. He
thinks that if he acts in a certain way, certain consequences will
inevitably follow in virtue of one or other of these laws; and if
the consequences of a particular act appear to him likely to prove
disagreeable or dangerous, he is naturally careful not to act in
that way lest he should incur them. In other words, he abstains
from doing that which, in accordance with his mistaken notions of
cause and effect, he falsely believes would injure him; in short,
he subjects himself to a taboo. Thus taboo is so far a negative
application of practical magic. Positive magic or sorcery says,
“Do this in order that so and so may happen.” Negative
magic or taboo says, “Do not do this, lest so and so should
happen.” The aim of positive magic or sorcery is to produce a
desired event; the aim of negative magic or taboo is to avoid an
undesirable one. But both consequences, the desirable and the
undesirable, are supposed to be brought about in accordance with
the laws of similarity and contact. And just as the desired
consequence is not really effected by the observance of a magical
ceremony, so the dreaded consequence does not really result from
the violation of a taboo. If the supposed evil necessarily followed
a breach of taboo, the taboo would not be a taboo but a precept of
morality or common sense. It is not a taboo to say, “Do not
put your hand in the fire”; it is a rule of common sense,
because the forbidden action entails a real, not an imaginary evil.
In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just as
vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery.
The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great
disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of
ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the
negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole
erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be
defined as the negative side of practical magic. To put this in
tabular form:
Magic
|
----------------------
| |
Theoretical Practical
(Magic as a (Magic as a
pseudo-science) pseudo-art)
|
-----------------
| |
Positive Magic Negative Magic
or Sorcery or Taboo
I have made these remarks on taboo and its relations to magic
because I am about to give some instances of taboos observed by
hunters, fishermen, and others, and I wished to show that they fall
under the head of Sympathetic Magic, being only particular
applications of that general theory. Thus, among the Esquimaux boys
are forbidden to play cat’s cradle, because if they did so
their fingers might in later life become entangled in the
harpoon-line. Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law
of similarity, which is the basis of homoeopathic magic: as the
child’s fingers are entangled by the string in playing
cat’s cradle, so they will be entangled by the harpoonline
when he is a man and hunts whales. Again, among the Huzuls of the
Carpathian Mountains the wife of a hunter may not spin while her
husband is eating, or the game will turn and wind like the spindle,
and the hunter will be unable to hit it. Here again the taboo is
clearly derived from the law of similarity. So, too, in most parts
of ancient Italy women were forbidden by law to spin on the
highroads as they walked, or even to carry their spindles openly,
because any such action was believed to injure the crops. Probably
the notion was that the twirling of the spindle would twirl the
corn-stalks and prevent them from growing straight. So, too, among
the Ainos of Saghalien a pregnant woman may not spin nor twist
ropes for two months before her delivery, because they think that
if she did so the child’s guts might be entangled like the
thread. For a like reason in Bilaspore, a district of India, when
the chief men of a village meet in council, no one present should
twirl a spindle; for they think that if such a thing were to
happen, the discussion, like the spindle, would move in a circle
and never be wound up. In some of the East Indian islands any one
who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in; he may
not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would in
like manner stop in front of the hunter’s snares and then
turn back, instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar
reason it is a rule with the Toradjas of Central Celebes that no
one may stand or loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a
pregnant woman, for such delay would retard the birth of the child;
and in various parts of Sumatra the woman herself in these
circumstances is forbidden to stand at the door or on the top rung
of the house-ladder under pain of suffering hard labour for her
imprudence in neglecting so elementary a precaution. Malays engaged
in the search for camphor eat their food dry and take care not to
pound their salt fine. The reason is that the camphor occurs in the
form of small grains deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the
camphor tree. Accordingly it seems plain to the Malay that if,
while seeking for camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground,
the camphor would be found also in fine grains; whereas by eating
his salt coarse he ensures that the grains of the camphor will also
be large. Camphor hunters in Borneo use the leathery sheath of the
leaf-stalk of the Penang palm as a plate for food, and during the
whole of the expedition they will never wash the plate, for fear
that the camphor might dissolve and disappear from the crevices of
the tree. Apparently they think that to wash their plates would be
to wash out the camphor crystals from the trees in which they are
imbedded. The chief product of some parts of Laos, a province of
Siam, is lac. This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the
young branches of trees, to which the little creatures have to be
attached by hand. All who engage in the business of gathering the
gum abstain from washing themselves and especially from cleansing
their heads, lest by removing the parasites from their hair they
should detach the other insects from the boughs. Again, a Blackfoot
Indian who has set a trap for eagles, and is watching it, would not
eat rosebuds on any account; for he argues that if he did so, and
an eagle alighted near the trap, the rosebuds in his own stomach
would make the bird itch, with the result that instead of
swallowing the bait the eagle would merely sit and scratch himself.
Following this train of thought the eagle hunter also refrains from
using an awl when he is looking after his snares; for surely if he
were to scratch with an awl, the eagles would scratch him. The same
disastrous consequence would follow if his wives and children at
home used an awl while he is out after eagles, and accordingly they
are forbidden to handle the tool in his absence for fear of putting
him in bodily danger.
Among the taboos observed by savages none perhaps are more
numerous or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods,
and of such prohibitions many are demonstrably derived from the law
of similarity and are accordingly examples of negative magic. Just
as the savage eats many animals or plants in order to acquire
certain desirable qualities with which he believes them to be
endowed, so he avoids eating many other animals and plants lest he
should acquire certain undesirable qualities with which he believes
them to be infected. In eating the former he practises positive
magic; in abstaining from the latter he practises negative magic.
Many examples of such positive magic will meet us later on; here I
will give a few instances of such negative magic or taboo. For
example, in Madagascar soldiers are forbidden to eat a number of
foods lest on the principle of homoeopathic magic they should be
tainted by certain dangerous or undesirable properties which are
supposed to inhere in these particular viands. Thus they may not
taste hedgehog, “as it is feared that this animal, from its
propensity of coiling up into a ball when alarmed, will impart a
timid shrinking disposition to those who partake of it.”
Again, no soldier should eat an ox’s knee, lest like an ox he
should become weak in the knees and unable to march. Further, the
warrior should be careful to avoid partaking of a cock that has
died fighting or anything that has been speared to death; and no
male animal may on any account be killed in his house while he is
away at the wars. For it seems obvious that if he were to eat a
cock that had died fighting, he would himself be slain on the field
of battle; if he were to partake of an animal that had been
speared, he would be speared himself; if a male animal were killed
in his house during his absence, he would himself be killed in like
manner and perhaps at the same instant. Further, the Malagasy
soldier must eschew kidneys, because in the Malagasy language the
word for kidney is the same as that for “shot”; so shot
he would certainly be if he ate a kidney.
The reader may have observed that in some of the foregoing
examples of taboos the magical influence is supposed to operate at
considerable distances; thus among the Blackfeet Indians the wives
and children of an eagle hunter are forbidden to use an awl during
his absence, lest the eagles should scratch the distant husband and
father; and again no male animal may be killed in the house of a
Malagasy soldier while he is away at the wars, lest the killing of
the animal should entail the killing of the man. This belief in the
sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at
a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubts science may
entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has
none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern
advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would
have no difficulty in convincing a savage; the savage believed in
it long ago, and what is more, he acted on his belief with a
logical consistency such as his civilised brother in the faith has
not yet, so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct. For the
savage is convinced not only that magical ceremonies affect persons
and things afar off, but that the simplest acts of daily life may
do so too. Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends
and relations at a distance is often regulated by a more or less
elaborate code of rules, the neglect of which by the one set of
persons would, it is supposed, entail misfortune or even death on
the absent ones. In particular when a party of men are out hunting
or fighting, their kinsfolk at home are often expected to do
certain things or to abstain from doing certain others, for the
sake of ensuring the safety and success of the distant hunters or
warriors. I will now give some instances of this magical telepathy
both in its positive and in its negative aspect.
In Laos when an elephant hunter is starting for the chase, he
warns his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence;
for if she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she
oiled herself it would slip through them. When a Dyak village has
turned out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at
home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence
of their friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be
“butter-fingered” and the prey would slip through their
hands.
Elephant-hunters in East Africa believe that, if their wives
prove unfaithful in their absence, this gives the elephant power
over his pursuer, who will accordingly be killed or severely
wounded. Hence if a hunter hears of his wife’s misconduct, he
abandons the chase and returns home. If a Wagogo hunter is
unsuccessful, or is attacked by a lion, he attributes it to his
wife’s misbehaviour at home, and returns to her in great
wrath. While he is away hunting, she may not let any one pass
behind her or stand in front of her as she sits; and she must lie
on her face in bed. The Moxos Indians of Bolivia thought that if a
hunter’s wife was unfaithful to him in his absence he would
be bitten by a serpent or a jaguar. Accordingly, if such an
accident happened to him, it was sure to entail the punishment, and
often the death, of the woman, whether she was innocent or guilty.
An Aleutian hunter of sea-otters thinks that he cannot kill a
single animal if during his absence from home his wife should be
unfaithful or his sister unchaste.
The Huichol Indians of Mexico treat as a demi-god a species of
cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant
does not grow in their country, and has to be fetched every year by
men who make a journey of forty-three days for the purpose.
Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to the safety of their
absent husbands by never walking fast, much less running, while the
men are on the road. They also do their best to ensure the benefits
which, in the shape of rain, good crops, and so forth, are expected
to flow from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject
themselves to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their
husbands. During the whole of the time which elapses till the
festival of the cactus is held, neither party washes except on
certain occasions, and then only with water brought from the
distant country where the holy plant grows. They also fast much,
eat no salt, and are bound to strict continence. Any one who breaks
this law is punished with illness, and, moreover, jeopardises the
result which all are striving for. Health, luck, and life are to be
gained by gathering the cactus, the gourd of the God of Fire; but
inasmuch as the pure fire cannot benefit the impure, men and women
must not only remain chaste for the time being, but must also purge
themselves from the taint of past sin. Hence four days after the
men have started the women gather and confess to Grandfather Fire
with what men they have been in love from childhood till now. They
may not omit a single one, for if they did so the men would not
find a single cactus. So to refresh their memories each one
prepares a string with as many knots as she has had lovers. This
she brings to the temple, and, standing before the fire, she
mentions aloud all the men she has scored on her string, name after
name. Having ended her confession, she throws the string into the
fire, and when the god has consumed it in his pure flame, her sins
are forgiven her and she departs in peace. From now on the women
are averse even to letting men pass near them. The cactus-seekers
themselves make in like manner a clean breast of all their
frailties. For every peccadillo they tie a knot on a string, and
after they have “talked to all the five winds” they
deliver the rosary of their sins to the leader, who burns it in the
fire.
Many of the indigenous tribes of Sarawak are firmly persuaded
that were the wives to commit adultery while their husbands are
searching for camphor in the jungle, the camphor obtained by the
men would evaporate. Husbands can discover, by certain knots in the
tree, when the wives are unfaithful; and it is said that in former
days many women were killed by jealous husbands on no better
evidence than that of these knots. Further, the wives dare not
touch a comb while their husbands are away collecting the camphor;
for if they did so, the interstices between the fibres of the tree,
instead of being filled with the precious crystals, would be empty
like the spaces between the teeth of a comb. In the Kei Islands, to
the southwest of New Guinea, as soon as a vessel that is about to
sail for a distant port has been launched, the part of the beach on
which it lay is covered as speedily as possible with palm branches,
and becomes sacred. No one may thenceforth cross that spot till the
ship comes home. To cross it sooner would cause the vessel to
perish. Moreover, all the time that the voyage lasts three or four
young girls, specially chosen for the duty, are supposed to remain
in sympathetic connexion with the mariners and to contribute by
their behaviour to the safety and success of the voyage. On no
account, except for the most necessary purpose, may they quit the
room that has been assigned to them. More than that, so long as the
vessel is believed to be at sea they must remain absolutely
motionless, crouched on their mats with their hands clasped between
their knees. They may not turn their heads to the left or to the
right or make any other movement whatsoever. If they did, it would
cause the boat to pitch and toss; and they may not eat any sticky
stuff, such as rice boiled in coco-nut milk, for the stickiness of
the food would clog the passage of the boat through the water. When
the sailors are supposed to have reached their destination, the
strictness of these rules is somewhat relaxed; but during the whole
time that the voyage lasts the girls are forbidden to eat fish
which have sharp bones or stings, such as the sting-ray, lest their
friends at sea should be involved in sharp, stinging trouble.
Where beliefs like these prevail as to the sympathetic connexion
between friends at a distance, we need not wonder that above
everything else war, with its stern yet stirring appeal to some of
the deepest and tenderest of human emotions, should quicken in the
anxious relations left behind a desire to turn the sympathetic bond
to the utmost account for the benefit of the dear ones who may at
any moment be fighting and dying far away. Hence, to secure an end
so natural and laudable, friends at home are apt to resort to
devices which will strike us as pathetic or ludicrous, according as
we consider their object or the means adopted to effect it. Thus in
some districts of Borneo, when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife
or, if he is unmarried, his sister must wear a sword day and night
in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may
not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the morning,
lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his
sleep by an enemy. Among the Sea Dyaks of Banting in Sarawak the
women strictly observe an elaborate code of rules while the men are
away fighting. Some of the rules are negative and some are
positive, but all alike are based on the principles of magical
homoeopathy and telepathy. Amongst them are the following. The
women must wake very early in the morning and open the windows as
soon as it is light; otherwise their absent husbands will oversleep
themselves. The women may not oil their hair, or the men will slip.
The women may neither sleep nor doze by day, or the men will be
drowsy on the march. The women must cook and scatter popcorn on the
verandah every morning; so will the men be agile in their
movements. The rooms must be kept very tidy, all boxes being placed
near the walls; for if any one were to stumble over them, the
absent husbands would fall and be at the mercy of the foe. At every
meal a little rice must be left in the pot and put aside; so will
the men far away always have something to eat and need never go
hungry. On no account may the women sit at the loom till their legs
grow cramped, otherwise their husbands will likewise be stiff in
their joints and unable to rise up quickly or to run away from the
foe. So in order to keep their husbands’ joints supple the
women often vary their labours at the loom by walking up and down
the verandah. Further, they may not cover up their faces, or the
men would not to be able to find their way through the tall grass
or jungle. Again, the women may not sew with a needle, or the men
will tread on the sharp spikes set by the enemy in the path. Should
a wife prove unfaithful while her husband is away, he will lose his
life in the enemy’s country. Some years ago all these rules
and more were observed by the women of Banting, while their
husbands were fighting for the English against rebels. But alas!
these tender precautions availed them little; for many a man, whose
faithful wife was keeping watch and ward for him at home, found a
soldier’s grave.
In the island of Timor, while war is being waged, the
high-priest never quits the temple; his food is brought to him or
cooked inside; day and night he must keep the fire burning, for if
he were to let it die out, disaster would be fall the warriors and
would continue so long as the hearth was cold. Moreover, he must
drink only hot water during the time the army is absent; for every
draught of cold water would damp the spirits of the people, so that
they could not vanquish the enemy. In the Kei Islands, when the
warriors have departed, the women return indoors and bring out
certain baskets containing fruits and stones. These fruits and
stones they anoint and place on a board, murmuring as they do so,
“O lord sun, moon, let the bullets rebound from our husbands,
brothers, betrothed, and other relations, just as raindrops rebound
from these objects which are smeared with oil.” As soon as
the first shot is heard, the baskets are put aside, and the women,
seizing their fans, rush out of the houses. Then, waving their fans
in the direction of the enemy, they run through the village, while
they sing, “O golden fans! let our bullets hit, and those of
the enemy miss.” In this custom the ceremony of anointing
stones, in order that the bullets may recoil from the men like
raindrops from the stones, is a piece of pure homoeopathic or
imitative magic; but the prayer to the sun, that he will be pleased
to give effect to the charm, is a religious and perhaps later
addition. The waving of the fans seems to be a charm to direct the
bullets towards or away from their mark, according as they are
discharged from the guns of friends or foes.
An old historian of Madagascar informs us that “while the
men are at the wars, and until their return, the women and girls
cease not day and night to dance, and neither lie down nor take
food in their own houses. And although they are very voluptuously
inclined, they would not for anything in the world have an intrigue
with another man while their husband is at the war, believing
firmly that if that happened, their husband would be either killed
or wounded. They believe that by dancing they impart strength,
courage, and good fortune to their husbands; accordingly during
such times they give themselves no rest, and this custom they
observe very religiously.”
Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast the wives of
men who are away with the army paint themselves white, and adorn
their persons with beads and charms. On the day when a battle is
expected to take place, they run about armed with guns, or sticks
carved to look like guns, and taking green paw-paws (fruits shaped
somewhat like a melon), they hack them with knives, as if they were
chopping off the heads of the foe. The pantomime is no doubt merely
an imitative charm, to enable the men to do to the enemy as the
women do to the paw-paws. In the West African town of Framin, while
the Ashantee war was raging some years ago, Mr. Fitzgerald Marriott
saw a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers
to the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short
petticoat. At their head was a shrivelled old sorceress in a very
short white petticoat, her black hair arranged in a sort of long
projecting horn, and her black face, breasts, arms, and legs
profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried
long white brushes made of buffalo or horse tails, and as they
danced they sang, “Our husbands have gone to Ashanteeland;
may they sweep their enemies off the face of the earth!”
Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, when the men
were on the war-path, the women performed dances at frequent
intervals. These dances were believed to ensure the success of the
expedition. The dancers flourished their knives, threw long
sharp-pointed sticks forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends
repeatedly backward and forward. Throwing the sticks forward was
symbolic of piercing or warding off the enemy, and drawing them
back was symbolic of drawing their own men from danger. The hook at
the end of the stick was particularly well adapted to serve the
purpose of a life-saving apparatus. The women always pointed their
weapons towards the enemy’s country. They painted their faces
red and sang as they danced, and they prayed to the weapons to
preserve their husbands and help them to kill many foes. Some had
eagle-down stuck on the points of their sticks. When the dance was
over, these weapons were hidden. If a woman whose husband was at
the war thought she saw hair or a piece of a scalp on the weapon
when she took it out, she knew that her husband had killed an
enemy. But if she saw a stain of blood on it, she knew he was
wounded or dead. When the men of the Yuki tribe in California were
away fighting, the women at home did not sleep; they danced
continually in a circle, chanting and waving leafy wands. For they
said that if they danced all the time, their husbands would not
grow tired. Among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands,
when the men had gone to war, the women at home would get up very
early in the morning and pretend to make war by falling upon their
children and feigning to take them for slaves. This was supposed to
help their husbands to go and do likewise. If a wife were
unfaithful to her husband while he was away on the war-path, he
would probably be killed. For ten nights all the women at home lay
with their heads towards the point of the compass to which the
war-canoes had paddled away. Then they changed about, for the
warriors were supposed to be coming home across the sea. At Masset
the Haida women danced and sang war-songs all the time their
husbands were away at the wars, and they had to keep everything
about them in a certain order. It was thought that a wife might
kill her husband by not observing these customs. When a band of
Carib Indians of the Orinoco had gone on the war-path, their
friends left in the village used to calculate as nearly as they
could the exact moment when the absent warriors would be advancing
to attack the enemy. Then they took two lads, laid them down on a
bench, and inflicted a most severe scourging on their bare backs.
This the youths submitted to without a murmur, supported in their
sufferings by the firm conviction, in which they had been bred from
childhood, that on the constancy and fortitude with which they bore
the cruel ordeal depended the valour and success of their comrades
in the battle.
Among the many beneficent uses to which a mistaken ingenuity has
applied the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, is that
of causing trees and plants to bear fruit in due season. In
Thüringen the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag
which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with
long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is
believed that this will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the
interior of Sumatra rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their
hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow
luxuriantly and have long stalks. Similarly, in ancient Mexico a
festival was held in honour of the goddess of maize, or “the
long-haired mother,” as she was called. It began at the time
“when the plant had attained its full growth, and fibres
shooting forth from the top of the green ear indicated that the
grain was fully formed. During this festival the women wore their
long hair unbound, shaking and tossing it in the dances which were
the chief feature in the ceremonial, in order that the tassel of
the maize might grow in like profusion, that the grain might be
correspondingly large and flat, and that the people might have
abundance.” In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high
in the air are approved homoeopathic modes of making the crops grow
high. Thus in Franche-Comté they say that you should dance at the
Carnival in order to make the hemp grow tall.
The notion that a person can influence a plant homoeopathically
by his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a
Malay woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her
body naked in reaping the rice, she explained that she did it to
make the rice-husks thinner, as she was tired of pounding
thick-husked rice. Clearly, she thought that the less clothing she
wore the less husk there would be on the rice. The magic virtue of
a pregnant woman to communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and
Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a
tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth
abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a
barren wife infects her husband’s garden with her own
sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a
childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans
sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the
earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and the corn
swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest remonstrated with the
Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women to sow the fields in
the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts, the men answered,
“Father, you don’t understand these things, and that is
why they vex you. You know that women are accustomed to bear
children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of
the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two
or three basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now
why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and
know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them
sow, then; we men don’t know as much about it as they
do.”
Thus on the theory of homoeopathic magic a person can influence
vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the
bad character of his acts or states: for example, a fruitful woman
makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren. Hence this
belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal
qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions
or rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things
lest they should homoeopathically infect the fruits of the earth
with their own undesirable state or condition. All such customs of
abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative magic or
taboo. Thus, for example, arguing from what may be called the
infectiousness of personal acts or states, the Galelareese say that
you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit-tree, or
the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground;
and that when you are eating water-melon you ought not to mix the
pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have
put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat
out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep
falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these
pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought
leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft
of a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, the tree that springs from
that graft will let its fruit fall untimely. When the Chams of
Cochinchina are sowing their dry rice fields and desire that no
shower should fall, they eat their rice dry in order to prevent
rain from spoiling the crop.
In the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence
vegetation homoeopathically. He infects trees or plants with
qualities or accidents, good or bad, resembling and derived from
his own. But on the principle of homoeopathic magic the influence
is mutual: the plant can infect the man just as much as the man can
infect the plant. In magic, as I believe in physics, action and
reaction are equal and opposite. The Cherokee Indians are adepts in
practical botany of the homoeopathic sort. Thus wiry roots of the
catgut plant are so tough that they can almost stop a plowshare in
the furrow. Hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction
of the roots to make the hair strong, and Cherokee ball-players
wash themselves with it to toughen their muscles. It is a
Galelareese belief that if you eat a fruit which has fallen to the
ground, you will yourself contract a disposition to stumble and
fall; and that if you partake of something which has been forgotten
(such as a sweet potato left in the pot or a banana in the fire),
you will become forgetful. The Galelareese are also of opinion that
if a woman were to consume two bananas growing from a single head
she would give birth to twins. The Guarani Indians of South America
thought that a woman would become a mother of twins if she ate a
double grain of millet. In Vedic times a curious application of
this principle supplied a charm by which a banished prince might be
restored to his kingdom. He had to eat food cooked on a fire which
was fed with wood which had grown out of the stump of a tree which
had been cut down. The recuperative power manifested by such a tree
would in due course be communicated through the fire to the food,
and so to the prince, who ate the food which was cooked on the fire
which was fed with the wood which grew out of the tree. The
Sudanese think that if a house is built of the wood of thorny
trees, the life of the people who dwell in that house will likewise
be thorny and full of trouble.
There is a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic which works by
means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear
nor speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people
blind, deaf and dumb by the use of dead men’s bones or
anything else that is tainted by the infection of death. Thus among
the Galelareese, when a young man goes a-wooing at night, he takes
a little earth from a grave and strews it on the roof of his
sweetheart’s house just above the place where her parents
sleep. This, he fancies, will prevent them from waking while he
converses with his beloved, since the earth from the grave will
make them sleep as sound as the dead. Burglars in all ages and many
lands have been patrons of this species of magic, which is very
useful to them in the exercise of their profession. Thus a South
Slavonian housebreaker sometimes begins operations by throwing a
dead man’s bone over the house, saying, with pungent sarcasm,
“As this bone may waken, so may these people waken”;
after that not a soul in the house can keep his or her eyes open.
Similarly, in Java the burglar takes earth from a grave and
sprinkles it round the house which he intends to rob; this throws
the inmates into a deep sleep. With the same intention a Hindoo
will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the house; Indians of
Peru scatter the dust of dead men’s bones; and Ruthenian
burglars remove the marrow from a human shin-bone, pour tallow into
it, and having kindled the tallow, march thrice round the house
with this candle burning, which causes the inmates to sleep a
death-like sleep. Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human
leg-bone and play upon it; whereupon all persons within hearing are
overcome with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this
maleficent purpose the left fore-arm of a woman who had died in
giving birth to her first child; but the arm had to be stolen. With
it they beat the ground before they entered the house which they
designed to plunder; this caused every one in the house to lose all
power of speech and motion; they were as dead, hearing and seeing
everything, but perfectly powerless; some of them, however, really
slept and even snored. In Europe similar properties were ascribed
to the Hand of Glory, which was the dried and pickled hand of a man
who had been hanged. If a candle made of the fat of a malefactor
who had also died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the Hand
of Glory as in a candlestick, it rendered motionless all persons to
whom it was presented; they could not stir a finger any more than
if they were dead. Sometimes the dead man’s hand is itself
the candle, or rather bunch of candles, all its withered fingers
being set on fire; but should any member of the household be awake,
one of the fingers will not kindle. Such nefarious lights can only
be extinguished with milk. Often it is prescribed that the
thief’s candle should be made of the finger of a new-born or,
still better, unborn child; sometimes it is thought needful that
the thief should have one such candle for every person in the
house, for if he has one candle too little somebody in the house
will wake and catch him. Once these tapers begin to burn, there is
nothing but milk that will put them out. In the seventeenth century
robbers used to murder pregnant women in order thus to extract
candles from their wombs. An ancient Greek robber or burglar
thought he could silence and put to flight the fiercest watchdogs
by carrying with him a brand plucked from a funeral pyre. Again,
Servian and Bulgarian women who chafe at the restraints of domestic
life will take the copper coins from the eyes of a corpse, wash
them in wine or water, and give the liquid to their husbands to
drink. After swallowing it, the husband will be as blind to his
wife’s peccadilloes as the dead man was on whose eyes the
coins were laid.
Further, animals are often conceived to possess qualities of
properties which might be useful to man, and homoeopathic or
imitative magic seeks to communicate these properties to human
beings in various ways. Thus some Bechuanas wear a ferret as a
charm, because, being very tenacious of life, it will make them
difficult to kill. Others wear a certain insect, mutilated, but
living, for a similar purpose. Yet other Bechuana warriors wear the
hair of a hornless ox among their own hair, and the skin of a frog
on their mantle, because a frog is slippery, and the ox, having no
horns, is hard to catch; so the man who is provided with these
charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the
frog. Again, it seems plain that a South African warrior who twists
tufts of rat’s hair among his own curly black locks will have
just as many chances of avoiding the enemy’s spear as the
nimble rat has of avoiding things thrown at it; hence in these
regions rats’ hair is in great demand when war is expected.
One of the ancient books of India prescribes that when a sacrifice
is offered for victory, the earth out of which the altar is to be
made should be taken from a place where a boar has been wallowing,
since the strength of the boar will be in that earth. When you are
playing the one-stringed lute, and your fingers are stiff, the
thing to do is to catch some long-legged field spiders and roast
them, and then rub your fingers with the ashes; that will make your
fingers as lithe and nimble as the spiders’ legs—at
least so think the Galelareese. To bring back a runaway slave an
Arab will trace a magic circle on the ground, stick a nail in the
middle of it, and attach a beetle by a thread to the nail, taking
care that the sex of the beetle is that of the fugitive. As the
beetle crawls round and round, it will coil the thread about the
nail, thus shortening its tether and drawing nearer to the centre
at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopathic magic the runaway
slave will be drawn back to his master.
Among the western tribes of British New Guinea, a man who has
killed a snake will burn it and smear his legs with the ashes when
he goes into the forest; for no snake will bite him for some days
afterwards. If a South Slavonian has a mind to pilfer and steal at
market, he has nothing to do but to burn a blind cat, and then
throw a pinch of its ashes over the person with whom he is
higgling; after that he can take what he likes from the booth, and
the owner will not be a bit the wiser, having become as blind as
the deceased cat with whose ashes he has been sprinkled. The thief
may even ask boldly, “Did I pay for it?” and the
deluded huckster will reply, “Why, certainly.” Equally
simple and effectual is the expedient adopted by natives of Central
Australia who desire to cultivate their beards. They prick the chin
all over with a pointed bone, and then stroke it carefully with a
magic stick or stone, which represents a kind of rat that has very
long whiskers. The virtue of these whiskers naturally passes into
the representative stick or stone, and thence by an easy transition
to the chin, which, consequently, is soon adorned with a rich
growth of beard. The ancient Greeks thought that to eat the flesh
of the wakeful nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping; that
to smear the eyes of a blear-sighted person with the gall of an
eagle would give him the eagle’s vision; and that a
raven’s eggs would restore the blackness of the raven to
silvery hair. Only the person who adopted this last mode of
concealing the ravages of time had to be most careful to keep his
mouth full of oil all the time he applied the eggs to his venerable
locks, else his teeth as well as his hair would be dyed raven
black, and no amount of scrubbing and scouring would avail to
whiten them again. The hair-restorer was in fact a shade too
powerful, and in applying it you might get more than you bargained
for.
The Huichol Indians admire the beautiful markings on the backs
of serpents. Hence when a Huichol woman is about to weave or
embroider, her husband catches a large serpent and holds it in a
cleft stick, while the woman strokes the reptile with one hand down
the whole length of its back; then she passes the same hand over
her forehead and eyes, that she may be able to work as beautiful
patterns in the web as the markings on the back of the serpent.
On the principle of homoeopathic magic, inanimate things, as
well as plants and animals, may diffuse blessing or bane around
them, according to their own intrinsic nature and the skill of the
wizard to tap or dam, as the case may be, the stream of weal or
woe. In Samaracand women give a baby sugar candy to suck and put
glue in the palm of its hand, in order that, when the child grows
up, his words may be sweet and precious things may stick to his
hands as if they were glued. The Greeks thought that a garment made
from the fleece of a sheep that had been torn by a wolf would hurt
the wearer, setting up an itch or irritation in his skin. They were
also of opinion that if a stone which had been bitten by a dog were
dropped in wine, it would make all who drank of that wine to fall
out among themselves. Among the Arabs of Moab a childless woman
often borrows the robe of a woman who has had many children, hoping
with the robe to acquire the fruitfulness of its owner. The Caffres
of Sofala, in East Africa, had a great dread of being struck with
anything hollow, such as a reed or a straw, and greatly preferred
being thrashed with a good thick cudgel or an iron bar, even though
it hurt very much. For they thought that if a man were beaten with
anything hollow, his inside would waste away till he died. In
eastern seas there is a large shell which the Buginese of Celebes
call the “old man” (kadjâwo). On Fridays they
turn these “old men” upside down and place them on the
thresholds of their houses, believing that whoever then steps over
the threshold of the house will live to be old. At initiation a
Brahman boy is made to tread with his right foot on a stone, while
the words are repeated, “Tread on this stone; like a stone be
firm”; and the same ceremony is performed, with the same
words, by a Brahman bride at her marriage. In Madagascar a mode of
counteracting the levity of fortune is to bury a stone at the foot
of the heavy house-post. The common custom of swearing upon a stone
may be based partly on a belief that the strength and stability of
the stone lend confirmation to an oath. Thus the old Danish
historian Saxo Grammaticus tells us that “the ancients, when
they were to choose a king, were wont to stand on stones planted in
the ground, and to proclaim their votes, in order to foreshadow
from the steadfastness of the stones that the deed would be
lasting.”
But while a general magical efficacy may be supposed to reside
in all stones by reason of their common properties of weight and
solidity, special magical virtues are attributed to particular
stones, or kinds of stone, in accordance with their individual or
specific qualities of shape and colour. For example, the Indians of
Peru employed certain stones for the increase of maize, others for
the increase of potatoes, and others again for the increase of
cattle. The stones used to make maize grow were fashioned in the
likeness of cobs of maize, and the stones destined to multiply
cattle had the shape of sheep.
In some parts of Melanesia a like belief prevails that certain
sacred stones are endowed with miraculous powers which correspond
in their nature to the shape of the stone. Thus a piece of
water-worn coral on the beach often bears a surprising likeness to
a bread-fruit. Hence in the Banks Islands a man who finds such a
coral will lay it at the root of one of his bread-fruit trees in
the expectation that it will make the tree bear well. If the result
answers his expectation, he will then, for a proper remuneration,
take stones of less-marked character from other men and let them
lie near his, in order to imbue them with the magic virtue which
resides in it. Similarly, a stone with little discs upon it is good
to bring in money; and if a man found a large stone with a number
of small ones under it, like a sow among her litter, he was sure
that to offer money upon it would bring him pigs. In these and
similar cases the Melanesians ascribe the marvellous power, not to
the stone itself, but to its indwelling spirit; and sometimes, as
we have just seen, a man endeavours to propitiate the spirit by
laying down offerings on the stone. But the conception of spirits
that must be propitiated lies outside the sphere of magic, and
within that of religion. Where such a conception is found, as here,
in conjunction with purely magical ideas and practices, the latter
may generally be assumed to be the original stock on which the
religious conception has been at some later time engrafted. For
there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of
thought, magic has preceded religion. But to this point we shall
return presently.
The ancients set great store on the magical qualities of
precious stones; indeed it has been maintained, with great show of
reason, that such stones were used as amulets long before they were
worn as mere ornaments. Thus the Greeks gave the name of tree-agate
to a stone which exhibits tree-like markings, and they thought that
if two of these gems were tied to the horns or necks of oxen at the
plough, the crop would be sure to be plentiful. Again, they
recognised a milkstone which produced an abundant supply of milk in
women if only they drank it dissolved in honey-mead. Milk-stones
are used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and Melos at
the present day; in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in
order to ensure an abundant flow of milk. Again, the Greeks
believed in a stone which cured snake-bites, and hence was named
the snake-stone; to test its efficacy you had only to grind the
stone to powder and sprinkle the powder on the wound. The
wine-coloured amethyst received its name, which means “not
drunken,” because it was supposed to keep the wearer of it
sober; and two brothers who desired to live at unity were advised
to carry magnets about with them, which, by drawing the twain
together, would clearly prevent them from falling out.
The ancient books of the Hindoos lay down a rule that after
sunset on his marriage night a man should sit silent with his wife
till the stars begin to twinkle in the sky. When the pole-star
appears, he should point it out to her, and, addressing the star,
say, “Firm art thou; I see thee, the firm one. Firm be thou
with me, O thriving one!” Then, turning to his wife, he
should say, “To me Brihaspati has given thee; obtaining
offspring through me, thy husband, live with me a hundred
autumns.” The intention of the ceremony is plainly to guard
against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of earthly
bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It is the
wish expressed in Keats’s last sonnet:
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou
art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.
Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of
its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that
rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance which here engages our
attention, to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between
its tides and the life of man, of animals, and of plants. In the
flowing tide they see not merely a symbol, but a cause of
exuberance, of prosperity, and of life, while in the ebbing tide
they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of
failure, of weakness, and of death. The Breton peasant fancies that
clover sown when the tide is coming in will grow well, but that if
the plant be sown at low water or when the tide is going out, it
will never reach maturity, and that the cows which feed on it will
burst. His wife believes that the best butter is made when the tide
has just turned and is beginning to flow, that milk which foams in
the churn will go on foaming till the hour of high water is past,
and that water drawn from the well or milk extracted from the cow
while the tide is rising will boil up in the pot or saucepan and
overflow into the fire. According to some of the ancients, the
skins of seals, even after they had been parted from their bodies,
remained in secret sympathy with the sea, and were observed to
ruffle when the tide was on the ebb. Another ancient belief,
attributed to Aristotle, was that no creature can die except at ebb
tide. The belief, if we can trust Pliny, was confirmed by
experience, so far as regards human beings, on the coast of France.
Philostratus also assures us that at Cadiz dying people never
yielded up the ghost while the water was high. A like fancy still
lingers in some parts of Europe. On the Cantabrian coast they think
that persons who die of chronic or acute disease expire at the
moment when the tide begins to recede. In Portugal, all along the
coast of Wales, and on some parts of the coast of Brittany, a
belief is said to prevail that people are born when the tide comes
in, and die when it goes out. Dickens attests the existence of the
same superstition in England. “People can’t die, along
the coast,” said Mr. Pegotty, “except when the
tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless
it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born till
flood.” The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is
said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland
to Kent. Shakespeare must have been familiar with it, for he makes
Falstaff die “even just between twelve and one, e’en at
the turning o’ the tide.” We meet the belief again on
the Pacific coast of North America among the Haidas. Whenever a
good Haida is about to die he sees a canoe manned by some of his
dead friends, who come with the tide to bid him welcome to the
spirit land. “Come with us now,” they say, “for
the tide is about to ebb and we must depart.” At Port
Stephens, in New South Wales, the natives always buried their dead
at flood tide, never at ebb, lest the retiring water should bear
the soul of the departed to some distant country.
To ensure a long life the Chinese have recourse to certain
complicated charms, which concentrate in themselves the magical
essence emanating, on homoeopathic principles, from times and
seasons, from persons and from things. The vehicles employed to
transmit these happy influences are no other than grave-clothes.
These are provided by many Chinese in their lifetime, and most
people have them cut out and sewn by an unmarried girl or a very
young woman, wisely calculating that, since such a person is likely
to live a great many years to come, a part of her capacity to live
long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus stave off for many
years the time when they shall be put to their proper use. Further,
the garments are made by preference in a year which has an
intercalary month; for to the Chinese mind it seems plain that
grave-clothes made in a year which is unusually long will possess
the capacity of prolonging life in an unusually high degree.
Amongst the clothes there is one robe in particular on which
special pains have been lavished to imbue it with this priceless
quality. It is a long silken gown of the deepest blue colour, with
the word “longevity” embroidered all over it in thread
of gold. To present an aged parent with one of these costly and
splendid mantles, known as “longevity garments,” is
esteemed by the Chinese an act of filial piety and a delicate mark
of attention. As the garment purports to prolong the life of its
owner, he often wears it, especially on festive occasions, in order
to allow the influence of longevity, created by the many golden
letters with which it is bespangled, to work their full effect upon
his person. On his birthday, above all, he hardly ever fails to don
it, for in China common sense bids a man lay in a large stock of
vital energy on his birthday, to be expended in the form of health
and vigour during the rest of the year. Attired in the gorgeous
pall, and absorbing its blessed influence at every pore, the happy
owner receives complacently the congratulations of friends and
relations, who warmly express their admiration of these magnificent
cerements, and of the filial piety which prompted the children to
bestow so beautiful and useful a present on the author of their
being.
Another application of the maxim that like produces like is seen
in the Chinese belief that the fortunes of a town are deeply
affected by its shape, and that they must vary according to the
character of the thing which that shape most nearly resembles. Thus
it is related that long ago the town of Tsuen-cheu-fu, the outlines
of which are like those of a carp, frequently fell a prey to the
depredations of the neighbouring city of Yung-chun, which is shaped
like a fishing-net, until the inhabitants of the former town
conceived the plan of erecting two tall pagodas in their midst.
These pagodas, which still tower above the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu,
have ever since exercised the happiest influence over its destiny
by intercepting the imaginary net before it could descend and
entangle in its meshes the imaginary carp. Some forty years ago the
wise men of Shanghai were much exercised to discover the cause of a
local rebellion. On careful enquiry they ascertained that the
rebellion was due to the shape of a large new temple which had most
unfortunately been built in the shape of a tortoise, an animal of
the very worst character. The difficulty was serious, the danger
was pressing; for to pull down the temple would have been impious,
and to let it stand as it was would be to court a succession of
similar or worse disasters. However, the genius of the local
professors of geomancy, rising to the occasion, triumphantly
surmounted the difficulty and obviated the danger. By filling up
two wells, which represented the eyes of the tortoise, they at once
blinded that disreputable animal and rendered him incapable of
doing further mischief.
Sometimes homoeopathic or imitative magic is called in to annul
an evil omen by accomplishing it in mimicry. The effect is to
circumvent destiny by substituting a mock calamity for a real one.
In Madagascar this mode of cheating the fates is reduced to a
regular system. Here every man’s fortune is determined by the
day or hour of his birth, and if that happens to be an unlucky one
his fate is sealed, unless the mischief can be extracted, as the
phrase goes, by means of a substitute. The ways of extracting the
mischief are various. For example, if a man is born on the first
day of the second month (February), his house will be burnt down
when he comes of age. To take time by the forelock and avoid this
catastrophe, the friends of the infant will set up a shed in a
field or in the cattle-fold and burn it. If the ceremony is to be
really effective, the child and his mother should be placed in the
shed and only plucked, like brands, from the burning hut before it
is too late. Again, dripping November is the month of tears, and he
who is born in it is born to sorrow. But in order to disperse the
clouds that thus gather over his future, he has nothing to do but
to take the lid off a boiling pot and wave it about. The drops that
fall from it will accomplish his destiny and so prevent the tears
from trickling from his eyes. Again, if fate has decreed that a
young girl, still unwed, should see her children, still unborn,
descend before her with sorrow to the grave, she can avert the
calamity as follows. She kills a grasshopper, wraps it in a rag to
represent a shroud, and mourns over it like Rachel weeping for her
children and refusing to be comforted. Moreover, she takes a dozen
or more other grasshoppers, and having removed some of their
superfluous legs and wings she lays them about their dead and
shrouded fellow. The buzz of the tortured insects and the agitated
motions of their mutilated limbs represent the shrieks and
contortions of the mourners at a funeral. After burying the
deceased grasshopper she leaves the rest to continue their mourning
till death releases them from their pain; and having bound up her
dishevelled hair she retires from the grave with the step and
carriage of a person plunged in grief. Thenceforth she looks
cheerfully forward to seeing her children survive her; for it
cannot be that she should mourn and bury them twice over. Once
more, if fortune has frowned on a man at his birth and penury has
marked him for her own, he can easily erase the mark in question by
purchasing a couple of cheap pearls, price three halfpence, and
burying them. For who but the rich of this world can thus afford to
fling pearls away?
3. Contagious Magic
THUS far we have been considering chiefly that branch of
sympathetic magic which may be called homoeopathic or imitative.
Its leading principle, as we have seen, is that like produces like,
or, in other words, that an effect resembles its cause. The other
great branch of sympathetic magic, which I have called Contagious
Magic, proceeds upon the notion that things which have once been
conjoined must remain ever afterwards, even when quite dissevered
from each other, in such a sympathetic relation that whatever is
done to the one must similarly affect the other. Thus the logical
basis of Contagious Magic, like that of Homoeopathic Magic, is a
mistaken association of ideas; its physical basis, if we may speak
of such a thing, like the physical basis of Homoeopathic Magic, is
a material medium of some sort which, like the ether of modern
physics, is assumed to unite distant objects and to convey
impressions from one to the other. The most familiar example of
Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist
between a man and any severed portion of his person, as his hair or
nails; so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may
work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were
cut. This superstition is world-wide; instances of it in regard to
hair and nails will be noticed later on in this work.
Among the Australian tribes it was a common practice to knock
out one or more of a boy’s front teeth at those ceremonies of
initiation to which every male member had to submit before he could
enjoy the rights and privileges of a full-grown man. The reason of
the practice is obscure; all that concerns us here is the belief
that a sympathetic relation continued to exist between the lad and
his teeth after the latter had been extracted from his gums. Thus
among some of the tribes about the river Darling, in New South
Wales, the extracted tooth was placed under the bark of a tree near
a river or water-hole; if the bark grew over the tooth, or if the
tooth fell into the water, all was well; but if it were exposed and
the ants ran over it, the natives believed that the boy would
suffer from a disease of the mouth. Among the Murring and other
tribes of New South Wales the extracted tooth was at first taken
care of by an old man, and then passed from one headman to another,
until it had gone all round the community, when it came back to the
lad’s father, and finally to the lad himself. But however it
was thus conveyed from hand to hand, it might on no account be
placed in a bag containing magical substances, for to do so would,
they believed, put the owner of the tooth in great danger. The late
Dr. Howitt once acted as custodian of the teeth which had been
extracted from some novices at a ceremony of initiation, and the
old men earnestly besought him not to carry them in a bag in which
they knew that he had some quartz crystals. They declared that if
he did so the magic of the crystals would pass into the teeth, and
so injure the boys. Nearly a year after Dr. Howitt’s return
from the ceremony he was visited by one of the principal men of the
Murring tribe, who had travelled some two hundred and fifty miles
from his home to fetch back the teeth. This man explained that he
had been sent for them because one of the boys had fallen into ill
health, and it was believed that the teeth had received some injury
which had affected him. He was assured that the teeth had been kept
in a box apart from any substances, like quartz crystals, which
could influence them; and he returned home bearing the teeth with
him carefully wrapt up and concealed.
The Basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth, lest
these should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings who
haunt graves, and who could harm the owner of the tooth by working
magic on it. In Sussex some fifty years ago a maid-servant
remonstrated strongly against the throwing away of children’s
cast teeth, affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any
animal, the child’s new tooth would be, for all the world,
like the teeth of the animal that had bitten the old one. In proof
of this she named old Master Simmons, who had a very large
pig’s tooth in his upper jaw, a personal defect that he
always averred was caused by his mother, who threw away one of his
cast teeth by accident into the hog’s trough. A similar
belief has led to practices intended, on the principles of
homoeopathic magic, to replace old teeth by new and better ones.
Thus in many parts of the world it is customary to put extracted
teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat,
in the hope that, through the sympathy which continues to subsist
between them and their former owner, his other teeth may acquire
the same firmness and excellence as the teeth of these rodents. For
example, in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim
among the people that when you have had a tooth taken out you
should insert it in a mouse’s hole. To do so with a
child’s milk-tooth which has fallen out will prevent the
child from having toothache. Or you should go behind the stove and
throw your tooth backwards over your head, saying “Mouse,
give me your iron tooth; I will give you my bone tooth.”
After that your other teeth will remain good. Far away from Europe,
at Raratonga, in the Pacific, when a child’s tooth was
extracted, the following prayer used to be recited:
“Big rat! little rat!
Here is my old tooth.
Pray give me a new one.”
Then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house, because
rats make their nests in the decayed thatch. The reason assigned
for invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats’ teeth
were the strongest known to the natives.
Other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a
sympathetic union with the body, after the physical connexion has
been severed, are the navel-string and the afterbirth, including
the placenta. So intimate, indeed, is the union conceived to be,
that the fortunes of the individual for good or evil throughout
life are often supposed to be bound up with one or other of these
portions of his person, so that if his navel-string or afterbirth
is preserved and properly treated, he will be prosperous; whereas
if it be injured or lost, he will suffer accordingly. Thus certain
tribes of Western Australia believe that a man swims well or ill,
according as his mother at his birth threw the navel-string into
water or not. Among the natives on the Pennefather River in
Queensland it is believed that a part of the child’s spirit
(cho-i) stays in the afterbirth. Hence the grandmother
takes the afterbirth away and buries it in the sand. She marks the
spot by a number of twigs which she sticks in the ground in a
circle, tying their tops together so that the structure resembles a
cone. When Anjea, the being who causes conception in women by
putting mud babies into their wombs, comes along and sees the
place, he takes out the spirit and carries it away to one of his
haunts, such as a tree, a hole in a rock, or a lagoon where it may
remain for years. But sometime or other he will put the spirit
again into a baby, and it will be born once more into the world. In
Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands, the navel-string is placed in
a shell and then disposed of in such a way as shall best adapt the
child for the career which the parents have chosen for him; for
example, if they wish to make him a good climber, they will hang
the navel-string on a tree. The Kei islanders regard the
navel-string as the brother or sister of the child, according to
the sex of the infant. They put it in a pot with ashes, and set it
in the branches of a tree, that it may keep a watchful eye on the
fortunes of its comrade. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, as among many
other peoples of the Indian Archipelago, the placenta passes for
the child’s younger brother or sister, the sex being
determined by the sex of the child, and it is buried under the
house. According to the Bataks it is bound up with the
child’s welfare, and seems, in fact, to be the seat of the
transferable soul, of which we shall hear something later on. The
Karo Bataks even affirm that of a man’s two souls it is the
true soul that lives with the placenta under the house; that is the
soul, they say, which begets children.
The Baganda believe that every person is born with a double, and
this double they identify with the afterbirth, which they regard as
a second child. The mother buries the afterbirth at the root of a
plantain tree, which then becomes sacred until the fruit has
ripened, when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the
family. Among the Cherokees the navel-string of a girl is buried
under a corn-mortar, in order that the girl may grow up to be a
good baker; but the navel-string of a boy is hung up on a tree in
the woods, in order that he may be a hunter. The Incas of Peru
preserved the navel-string with the greatest care, and gave it to
the child to suck whenever it fell ill. In ancient Mexico they used
to give a boy’s navel-string to soldiers, to be buried by
them on a field of battle, in order that the boy might thus acquire
a passion for war. But the navel-string of a girl was buried beside
the domestic hearth, because this was believed to inspire her with
a love of home and taste for cooking and baking.
Even in Europe many people still believe that a person’s
destiny is more or less bound up with that of his navel-string or
afterbirth. Thus in Rhenish Bavaria the navel-string is kept for a
while wrapt up in a piece of old linen, and then cut or pricked to
pieces according as the child is a boy or a girl, in order that he
or she may grow up to be a skilful workman or a good sempstress. In
Berlin the midwife commonly delivers the dried navel-string to the
father with a strict injunction to preserve it carefully, for so
long as it is kept the child will live and thrive and be free from
sickness. In Beauce and Perche the people are careful to throw the
navel-string neither into water nor into fire, believing that if
that were done the child would be drowned or burned.
Thus in many parts of the world the navel-string, or more
commonly the afterbirth, is regarded as a living being, the brother
or sister of the infant, or as the material object in which the
guardian spirit of the child or part of its soul resides. Further,
the sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a person and
his afterbirth or navel-string comes out very clearly in the
widespread custom of treating the afterbirth or navel-string in
ways which are supposed to influence for life the character and
career of the person, making him, if it is a man, a nimble climber,
a strong swimmer, a skilful hunter, or a brave soldier, and making
her, if it is a woman, a cunning sempstress, a good baker, and so
forth. Thus the beliefs and usages concerned with the afterbirth or
placenta, and to a less extent with the navel-string, present a
remarkable parallel to the widespread doctrine of the transferable
or external soul and the customs founded on it. Hence it is hardly
rash to conjecture that the resemblance is no mere chance
coincidence, but that in the afterbirth or placenta we have a
physical basis (not necessarily the only one) for the theory and
practice of the external soul. The consideration of that subject is
reserved for a later part of this work.
A curious application of the doctrine of contagious magic is the
relation commonly believed to exist between a wounded man and the
agent of the wound, so that whatever is subsequently done by or to
the agent must correspondingly affect the patient either for good
or evil. Thus Pliny tells us that if you have wounded a man and are
sorry for it, you have only to spit on the hand that gave the
wound, and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated.
In Melanesia, if a man’s friends get possession of the arrow
which wounded him, they keep it in a damp place or in cool leaves,
for then the inflammation will be trifling and will soon subside.
Meantime the enemy who shot the arrow is hard at work to aggravate
the wound by all the means in his power. For this purpose he and
his friends drink hot and burning juices and chew irritating
leaves, for this will clearly inflame and irritate the wound.
Further, they keep the bow near the fire to make the wound which it
has inflicted hot; and for the same reason they put the arrow-head,
if it has been recovered, into the fire. Moreover, they are careful
to keep the bow-string taut and to twang it occasionally, for this
will cause the wounded man to suffer from tension of the nerves and
spasms of tetanus. “It is constantly received and
avouched,” says Bacon, “that the anointing of the
weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself. In this
experiment, upon the relation of men of credit (though myself, as
yet, am not fully inclined to believe it), you shall note the
points following: first, the ointment wherewith this is done is
made of divers ingredients, whereof the strangest and hardest to
come by are the moss upon the skull of a dead man unburied, and the
fats of a boar and a bear killed in the act of generation.”
The precious ointment compounded out of these and other ingredients
was applied, as the philosopher explains, not to the wound but to
the weapon, and that even though the injured man was at a great
distance and knew nothing about it. The experiment, he tells us,
had been tried of wiping the ointment off the weapon without the
knowledge of the person hurt, with the result that he was presently
in a great rage of pain until the weapon was anointed again.
Moreover, “it is affirmed that if you cannot get the weapon,
yet if you put an instrument of iron or wood resembling the weapon
into the wound, whereby it bleedeth, the anointing of that
instrument will serve and work the effect.” Remedies of the
sort which Bacon deemed worthy of his attention are still in vogue
in the eastern counties of England. Thus in Suffolk if a man cuts
himself with a bill-hook or a scythe he always takes care to keep
the weapon bright, and oils it to prevent the wound from festering.
If he runs a thorn or, as he calls it, a bush into his hand, he
oils or greases the extracted thorn. A man came to a doctor with an
inflamed hand, having run a thorn into it while he was hedging. On
being told that the hand was festering, he remarked, “That
didn’t ought to, for I greased the bush well after I pulled
it out.” If a horse wounds its foot by treading on a nail, a
Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the nail, clean it, and
grease it every day, to prevent the foot from festering. Similarly
Cambridgeshire labourers think that if a horse has run a nail into
its foot, it is necessary to grease the nail with lard or oil and
put it away in some safe place, or the horse will not recover. A
few years ago a veterinary surgeon was sent for to attend a horse
which had ripped its side open on the hinge of a farm gatepost. On
arriving at the farm he found that nothing had been done for the
wounded horse, but that a man was busy trying to pry the hinge out
of the gatepost in order that it might be greased and put away,
which, in the opinion of the Cambridge wiseacres, would conduce to
the recovery of the animal. Similarly Essex rustics opine that, if
a man has been stabbed with a knife, it is essential to his
recovery that the knife should be greased and laid across the bed
on which the sufferer is lying. So in Bavaria you are directed to
anoint a linen rag with grease and tie it on the edge of the axe
that cut you, taking care to keep the sharp edge upwards. As the
grease on the axe dries, your wound heals. Similarly in the Harz
Mountains they say that if you cut yourself, you ought to smear the
knife or the scissors with fat and put the instrument away in a dry
place in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
As the knife dries, the wound heals. Other people, however, in
Germany say that you should stick the knife in some damp place in
the ground, and that your hurt will heal as the knife rusts. Others
again, in Bavaria, recommend you to smear the axe or whatever it is
with blood and put it under the eaves.
The train of reasoning which thus commends itself to English and
German rustics, in common with the savages of Melanesia and
America, is carried a step further by the aborigines of Central
Australia, who conceive that under certain circumstances the near
relations of a wounded man must grease themselves, restrict their
diet, and regulate their behaviour in other ways in order to ensure
his recovery. Thus when a lad has been circumcised and the wound is
not yet healed, his mother may not eat opossum, or a certain kind
of lizard, or carpet snake, or any kind of fat, for otherwise she
would retard the healing of the boy’s wound. Every day she
greases her digging-sticks and never lets them out of her sight; at
night she sleeps with them close to her head. No one is allowed to
touch them. Every day also she rubs her body all over with grease,
as in some way this is believed to help her son’s recovery.
Another refinement of the same principle is due to the ingenuity of
the German peasant. It is said that when one of his pigs or sheep
breaks its leg, a farmer of Rhenish Bavaria or Hesse will bind up
the leg of a chair with bandages and splints in due form. For some
days thereafter no one may sit on that chair, move it, or knock up
against it; for to do so would pain the injured pig or sheep and
hinder the cure. In this last case it is clear that we have passed
wholly out of the region of contagious magic and into the region of
homoeopathic or imitative magic; the chair-leg, which is treated
instead of the beast’s leg, in no sense belongs to the
animal, and the application of bandages to it is a mere simulation
of the treatment which a more rational surgery would bestow on the
real patient.
The sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a man and
the weapon which has wounded him is probably founded on the notion
that the blood on the weapon continues to feel with the blood in
his body. For a like reason the Papuans of Tumleo, an island off
New Guinea, are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages
with which their wounds have been dressed, for they fear that if
these rags fell into the hands of an enemy he might injure them
magically thereby. Once when a man with a wound in his mouth, which
bled constantly, came to the missionaries to be treated, his
faithful wife took great pains to collect all the blood and cast it
into the sea. Strained and unnatural as this idea may seem to us,
it is perhaps less so than the belief that magic sympathy is
maintained between a person and his clothes, so that whatever is
done to the clothes will be felt by the man himself, even though he
may be far away at the time. In the Wotjobaluk tribe of Victoria a
wizard would sometimes get hold of a man’s opossum rug and
roast it slowly in the fire, and as he did so the owner of the rug
would fall sick. If the wizard consented to undo the charm, he
would give the rug back to the sick man’s friends, bidding
them put it in water, “so as to wash the fire out.”
When that happened, the sufferer would feel a refreshing coolness
and probably recover. In Tanna, one of the New Hebrides, a man who
had a grudge at another and desired his death would try to get
possession of a cloth which had touched the sweat of his
enemy’s body. If he succeeded, he rubbed the cloth carefully
over with the leaves and twigs of a certain tree, rolled and bound
cloth, twigs, and leaves into a long sausage-shaped bundle, and
burned it slowly in the fire. As the bundle was consumed, the
victim fell ill, and when it was reduced to ashes, he died. In this
last form of enchantment, however, the magical sympathy may be
supposed to exist not so much between the man and the cloth as
between the man and the sweat which issued from his body. But in
other cases of the same sort it seems that the garment by itself is
enough to give the sorcerer a hold upon his victim. The witch in
Theocritus, while she melted an image or lump of wax in order that
her faithless lover might melt with love of her, did not forget to
throw into the fire a shred of his cloak which he had dropped in
her house. In Prussia they say that if you cannot catch a thief,
the next best thing you can do is to get hold of a garment which he
may have shed in his flight; for if you beat it soundly, the thief
will fall sick. This belief is firmly rooted in the popular mind.
Some eighty or ninety years ago, in the neighbourhood of Berend, a
man was detected trying to steal honey, and fled, leaving his coat
behind him. When he heard that the enraged owner of the honey was
mauling his lost coat, he was so alarmed that he took to his bed
and died.
Again, magic may be wrought on a man sympathetically, not only
through his clothes and severed parts of himself, but also through
the impressions left by his body in sand or earth. In particular,
it is a world-wide superstition that by injuring footprints you
injure the feet that made them. Thus the natives of South-eastern
Australia think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of
quartz, glass, bone, or charcoal in his footprints. Rheumatic pains
are often attributed by them to this cause. Seeing a Tatungolung
man very lame, Mr. Howitt asked him what was the matter. He said,
“some fellow has put bottle in my foot.” He
was suffering from rheumatism, but believed that an enemy had found
his foot-track and had buried it in a piece of broken bottle, the
magical influence of which had entered his foot.
Similar practices prevail in various parts of Europe. Thus in
Mecklenburg it is thought that if you drive a nail into a
man’s footprint he will fall lame; sometimes it is required
that the nail should be taken from a coffin. A like mode of
injuring an enemy is resorted to in some parts of France. It is
said that there was an old woman who used to frequent Stow in
Suffolk, and she was a witch. If, while she walked, any one went
after her and stuck a nail or a knife into her footprint in the
dust, the dame could not stir a step till it was withdrawn. Among
the South Slavs a girl will dig up the earth from the footprints of
the man she loves and put it in a flower-pot. Then she plants in
the pot a marigold, a flower that is thought to be fadeless. And as
its golden blossom grows and blooms and never fades, so shall her
sweetheart’s love grow and bloom, and never, never fade. Thus
the love-spell acts on the man through the earth he trod on. An old
Danish mode of concluding a treaty was based on the same idea of
the sympathetic connexion between a man and his footprints: the
covenanting parties sprinkled each other’s footprints with
their own blood, thus giving a pledge of fidelity. In ancient
Greece superstitions of the same sort seem to have been current,
for it was thought that if a horse stepped on the track of a wolf
he was seized with numbness; and a maxim ascribed to Pythagoras
forbade people to pierce a man’s footprints with a nail or a
knife.
The same superstition is turned to account by hunters in many
parts of the world for the purpose of running down the game. Thus a
German huntsman will stick a nail taken from a coffin into the
fresh spoor of the quarry, believing that this will hinder the
animal from escaping. The aborigines of Victoria put hot embers in
the tracks of the animals they were pursuing. Hottentot hunters
throw into the air a handful of sand taken from the footprints of
the game, believing that this will bring the animal down. Thompson
Indians used to lay charms on the tracks of wounded deer; after
that they deemed it superfluous to pursue the animal any further
that day, for being thus charmed it could not travel far and would
soon die. Similarly, Ojebway Indians placed “medicine”
on the track of the first deer or bear they met with, supposing
that this would soon bring the animal into sight, even if it were
two or three days’ journey off; for this charm had power to
compress a journey of several days into a few hours. Ewe hunters of
West Africa stab the footprints of game with a sharp-pointed stick
in order to maim the quarry and allow them to come up with it.
But though the footprint is the most obvious it is not the only
impression made by the body through which magic may be wrought on a
man. The aborigines of South-eastern Australia believe that a man
may be injured by burying sharp fragments of quartz, glass, and so
forth in the mark made by his reclining body; the magical virtue of
these sharp things enters his body and causes those acute pains
which the ignorant European puts down to rheumatism. We can now
understand why it was a maxim with the Pythagoreans that in rising
from bed you should smooth away the impression left by your body on
the bed-clothes. The rule was simply an old precaution against
magic, forming part of a whole code of superstitious maxims which
antiquity fathered on Pythagoras, though doubtless they were
familiar to the barbarous forefathers of the Greeks long before the
time of that philosopher.
4. The Magician’s Progress
WE have now concluded our examination of the general principles
of sympathetic magic. The examples by which I have illustrated them
have been drawn for the most part from what may be called private
magic, that is from magical rites and incantations practised for
the benefit or the injury of individuals. But in savage society
there is commonly to be found in addition what we may call public
magic, that is, sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole
community. Wherever ceremonies of this sort are observed for the
common good, it is obvious that the magician ceases to be merely a
private practitioner and becomes to some extent a public
functionary. The development of such a class of functionaries is of
great importance for the political as well as the religious
evolution of society. For when the welfare of the tribe is supposed
to depend on the performance of these magical rites, the magician
rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily
acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession
accordingly draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most
ambitious men of the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect
of honour, wealth, and power such as hardly any other career could
offer. The acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their
weaker brother and to play on his superstition for their own
advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he
is often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those
wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to
him. But the more sagacious he is, the more likely he is to see
through the fallacies which impose on duller wits. Thus the ablest
members of the profession must tend to be more or less conscious
deceivers; and it is just these men who in virtue of their superior
ability will generally come to the top and win for themselves
positions of the highest dignity and the most commanding authority.
The pitfalls which beset the path of the professional sorcerer are
many, and as a rule only the man of coolest head and sharpest wit
will be able to steer his way through them safely. For it must
always be remembered that every single profession and claim put
forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be
maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious. Accordingly
the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant
pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be
cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor. The honest
wizard always expects that his charms and incantations will produce
their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only really, as they
always do, but conspicuously and disastrously, as they often do, he
is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish colleague, ready with a
plausible excuse to account for the failure, and before he can find
one he may be knocked on the head by his disappointed and angry
employers.
The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the
supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest
intelligence and the most unscrupulous character. If we could
balance the harm they do by their knavery against the benefits they
confer by their superior sagacity, it might well be found that the
good greatly outweighed the evil. For more mischief has probably
been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by
intelligent rascals. Once your shrewd rogue has attained the height
of his ambition, and has no longer any selfish end to further, he
may, and often does, turn his talents, his experience, his
resources, to the service of the public. Many men who have been
least scrupulous in the acquisition of power have been most
beneficent in the use of it, whether the power they aimed at and
won was that of wealth, political authority, or what not. In the
field of politics the wily intriguer, the ruthless victor, may end
by being a wise and magnanimous ruler, blessed in his lifetime,
lamented at his death, admired and applauded by posterity. Such
men, to take two of the most conspicuous instances, were Julius
Caesar and Augustus. But once a fool always a fool, and the greater
the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use
he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the
breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third
had not been an honest dullard.
Thus, so far as the public profession of magic affected the
constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of
affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of
power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a
democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general
the savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult
males, but by a council of elders. The change, by whatever causes
produced, and whatever the character of the early rulers, was on
the whole very beneficial. For the rise of monarchy appears to be
an essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery.
No human being is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your
democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress
so slow and difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest
of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed
to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead
forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him
with a rod of iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the
unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience.
The least possible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to
change old customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down
by the weakest and dullest, who necessarily sets the standard,
since he cannot rise, while the other can fall. The surface of such
a society presents a uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly
possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real
differences of inborn capacity and temper, to a false superficial
appearance of equality. From this low and stagnant condition of
affairs, which demagogues and dreamers in later times have lauded
as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity, everything that
helps to raise society by opening a career to talent and
proportioning the degrees of authority to men’s natural
abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all who have the real good of
their fellows at heart. Once these elevating influences have begun
to operate—and they cannot be for ever suppressed—the
progress of civilisation becomes comparatively rapid. The rise of
one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a
single lifetime which previously many generations might not have
sufficed to effect; and if, as will often happen, he is a man of
intellect and energy above the common, he will readily avail
himself of the opportunity. Even the whims and caprices of a tyrant
may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so
heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed
by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the
direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes
formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of
aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly
favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress. For
extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the
voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires
wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from
the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an
opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of
knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to
ameliorate the lot of man.
Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art
and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be
dissociated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its
turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no
mere accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the
human mind have followed close on the heels of victory, and that
the great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to
advance and spread civilisation, thus healing in peace the wounds
they inflicted in war. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the
Arabs are our witnesses in the past: we may yet live to see a
similar outburst in Japan. Nor, to remount the stream of history to
its sources, is it an accident that all the first great strides
towards civilisation have been made under despotic and theocratic
governments, like those of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the
supreme ruler claimed and received the servile allegiance of his
subjects in the double character of a king and a god. It is hardly
too much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best
friend of humanity and, paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty.
For after all there is more liberty in the best sense—liberty
to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own
destinies—under the most absolute despotism, the most
grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage life,
where the individual’s lot is cast from the cradle to the
grave in the iron mould of hereditary custom.
So far, therefore, as the public profession of magic has been
one of the roads by which the ablest men have passed to supreme
power, it has contributed to emancipate mankind from the thraldom
of tradition and to elevate them into a larger, freer life, with a
broader outlook on the world. This is no small service rendered to
humanity. And when we remember further that in another direction
magic has paved the way for science, we are forced to admit that if
the black art has done much evil, it has also been the source of
much good; that if it is the child of error, it has yet been the
mother of freedom and truth.
IV. Magic and Religion
THE examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to
illustrate the general principles of sympathetic magic in its two
branches, to which we have given the names of Homoeopathic and
Contagious respectively. In some cases of magic which have come
before us we have seen that the operation of spirits is assumed,
and that an attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and
sacrifice. But these cases are on the whole exceptional; they
exhibit magic tinged and alloyed with religion. Wherever
sympathetic magic occurs in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes
that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably
without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus
its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern
science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real
and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature. The magician does
not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same
effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony, accompanied
by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be attended by the
desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations should chance to
be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another
sorcerer. He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour of no
fickle and wayward being: he abases himself before no awful deity.
Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means
arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he
strictly conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called
the laws of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to
break these laws in the smallest particular, is to incur failure,
and may even expose the unskilful practitioner himself to the
utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a
constitutional sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and
exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy
between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is
close. In both of them the succession of events is assumed to be
perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws,
the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely;
the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished
from the course of nature. Both of them open up a seemingly
boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the causes of
things and can touch the secret springs that set in motion the vast
and intricate mechanism of the world. Hence the strong attraction
which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind;
hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of
knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on
through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their
endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an
exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and
rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off,
it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the
light of dreams.
The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a
sequence of events determined by law, but in its total
misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern
that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic
which have been passed in review in the preceding pages, and which
may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have
already indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one
or other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the
association of ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by
contiguity in space or time. A mistaken association of similar
ideas produces homoeopathic or imitative magic: a mistaken
association of contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The
principles of association are excellent in themselves, and indeed
absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately
applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield
magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism,
almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and
barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no
longer be magic but science. From the earliest times man has been
engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of
natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he
has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them
golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules
constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the
false are magic.
If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to
enquire how it stands related to religion. But the view we take of
that relation will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we
have formed of the nature of religion itself; hence a writer may
reasonably be expected to define his conception of religion before
he proceeds to investigate its relation to magic. There is probably
no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the
nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would
satisfy every one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer
can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and
afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout
his work. By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or
conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct
and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined,
religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical,
namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to
propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first,
since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we
can attempt to please him. But unless the belief leads to a
corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology;
in the language of St. James, “faith, if it hath not works,
is dead, being alone.” In other words, no man is religious
who does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love
of God. On the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious
belief, is also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the
same way, and yet one of them may be religious and the other not.
If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if
the other acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral
according as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general
good. Hence belief and practice or, in theological language, faith
and works are equally essential to religion, which cannot exist
without both of them. But it is not necessary that religious
practice should always take the form of a ritual; that is, it need
not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of
prayers, and other outward ceremonies. Its aim is to please the
deity, and if the deity is one who delights in charity and mercy
and purity more than in oblations of blood, the chanting of hymns,
and the fumes of incense, his worshippers will best please him, not
by prostrating themselves before him, by intoning his praises, and
by filling his temples with costly gifts, but by being pure and
merciful and charitable towards men, for in so doing they will
imitate, so far as human infirmity allows, the perfections of the
divine nature. It was this ethical side of religion which the
Hebrew prophets, inspired with a noble ideal of God’s
goodness and holiness, were never weary of inculcating. Thus Micah
says: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?” And at a later time much of
the force by which Christianity conquered the world was drawn from
the same high conception of God’s moral nature and the duty
laid on men of conforming themselves to it. “Pure religion
and undefiled,” says St. James, “before God and the
Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the
world.”
But if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings
who rule the world, and, second, an attempt to win their favour, it
clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic
or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings
who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events
from the channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this
implied elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed to
the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume
that the processes of nature are rigid and invariable in their
operation, and that they can as little be turned from their course
by persuasion and entreaty as by threats and intimidation. The
distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns
on their answer to the crucial question, Are the forces which
govern the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and
impersonal? Religion, as a conciliation of the superhuman powers,
assumes the former member of the alternative. For all conciliation
implies that the being conciliated is a conscious or personal
agent, that his conduct is in some measure uncertain, and that he
can be prevailed upon to vary it in the desired direction by a
judicious appeal to his interests, his appetites, or his emotions.
Conciliation is never employed towards things which are regarded as
inanimate, nor towards persons whose behaviour in the particular
circumstances is known to be determined with absolute certainty.
Thus in so far as religion assumes the world to be directed by
conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by
persuasion, it stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as
to science, both of which take for granted that the course of
nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal
beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically.
In magic, indeed, the assumption is only implicit, but in science
it is explicit. It is true that magic often deals with spirits,
which are personal agents of the kind assumed by religion; but
whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them exactly in
the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it
constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them
as religion would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings,
whether human or divine, are in the last resort subject to those
impersonal forces which control all things, but which nevertheless
can be turned to account by any one who knows how to manipulate
them by the appropriate ceremonies and spells. In ancient Egypt,
for example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even the
highest gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them with
destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes, without going quite
so far as that, the wizard declared that he would scatter the bones
of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved
contumacious. Similarly in India at the present day the great
Hindoo trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is subject to the
sorcerers, who, by means of their spells, exercise such an
ascendency over the mightiest deities, that these are bound
submissively to execute on earth below, or in heaven above,
whatever commands their masters the magicians may please to issue.
There is a saying everywhere current in India: “The whole
universe is subject to the gods; the gods are subject to the spells
(mantras); the spells to the Brahmans; therefore the
Brahmans are our gods.”
This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion
sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in
history the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty
self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards
the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like
theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful
sense of the divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence
of it, such claims and such a demeanour must have appeared an
impious and blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives that belong to
God alone. And sometimes, we may suspect, lower motives concurred
to whet the edge of the priest’s hostility. He professed to
be the proper medium, the true intercessor between God and man, and
no doubt his interests as well as his feelings were often injured
by a rival practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road to
fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour.
Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made
its appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an
earlier stage the functions of priest and sorcerer were often
combined or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet
differentiated from each other. To serve his purpose man wooed the
good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the
same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which he
hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without
the help of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and
magical rites simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations
almost in the same breath, knowing or recking little of the
theoretical inconsistency of his behaviour, so long as by hook or
crook he contrived to get what he wanted. Instances of this fusion
or confusion of magic with religion have already met us in the
practices of Melanesians and of other peoples.
The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among
peoples that have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in
ancient India and ancient Egypt; it is by no means extinct among
European peasantry at the present day. With regard to ancient India
we are told by an eminent Sanscrit scholar that “the
sacrificial ritual at the earliest period of which we have detailed
information is pervaded with practices that breathe the spirit of
the most primitive magic.” Speaking of the importance of
magic in the East, and especially in Egypt, Professor Maspero
remarks that “we ought not to attach to the word magic the
degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up in the mind of a
modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The
faithful who desired to obtain some favour from a god had no chance
of succeeding except by laying hands on the deity, and this arrest
could only be effected by means of a certain number of rites,
sacrifices, prayers, and chants, which the god himself had
revealed, and which obliged him to do what was demanded of
him.”
Among the ignorant classes of modern Europe the same confusion
of ideas, the same mixture of religion and magic, crops up in
various forms. Thus we are told that in France “the majority
of the peasants still believe that the priest possesses a secret
and irresistible power over the elements. By reciting certain
prayers which he alone knows and has the right to utter, yet for
the utterance of which he must afterwards demand absolution, he
can, on an occasion of pressing danger, arrest or reverse for a
moment the action of the eternal laws of the physical world. The
winds, the storms, the hail, and the rain are at his command and
obey his will. The fire also is subject to him, and the flames of a
conflagration are extinguished at his word.” For example,
French peasants used to be, perhaps are still, persuaded that the
priests could celebrate, with certain special rites, a Mass of the
Holy Spirit, of which the efficacy was so miraculous that it never
met with any opposition from the divine will; God was forced to
grant whatever was asked of Him in this form, however rash and
importunate might be the petition. No idea of impiety or
irreverence attached to the rite in the minds of those who, in some
of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular means to
take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The secular priests generally
refused to say the Mass of the Holy Spirit; but the monks,
especially the Capuchin friars, had the reputation of yielding with
less scruple to the entreaties of the anxious and distressed. In
the constraint thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to be laid by
the priest upon the deity we seem to have an exact counterpart of
the power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to their magicians.
Again, to take another example, in many villages of Provence the
priest is still reputed to possess the faculty of averting storms.
It is not every priest who enjoys this reputation; and in some
villages, when a change of pastors takes place, the parishioners
are eager to learn whether the new incumbent has the power
(pouder), as they call it. At the first sign of a heavy
storm they put him to the proof by inviting him to exorcise the
threatening clouds; and if the result answers to their hopes, the
new shepherd is assured of the sympathy and respect of his flock.
In some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this
respect stood higher than that of his rector, the relations between
the two have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has
had to translate the rector to another benefice. Again, Gascon
peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad
men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of
Saint Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths
of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None
but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you
may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to
render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the
archbishop of Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope
of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a
ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats
flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where
toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest
comes by night with his light o’ love, and at the first
stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends
just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts
as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he
consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into
which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the
sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot.
And many other things he does which no good Christian could look
upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of
his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little
by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the
doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly
dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.
Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with
religion in many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for
thinking that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was a
time when man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of such
wants as transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first
place a consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and
religion may incline us to surmise that magic is older than
religion in the history of humanity. We have seen that on the one
hand magic is nothing but a mistaken application of the very
simplest and most elementary processes of the mind, namely the
association of ideas by virtue of resemblance or contiguity; and
that on the other hand religion assumes the operation of conscious
or personal agents, superior to man, behind the visible screen of
nature. Obviously the conception of personal agents is more complex
than a simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas;
and a theory which assumes that the course of nature is determined
by conscious agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires
for its apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and
reflection, than the view that things succeed each other simply by
reason of their contiguity or resemblance. The very beasts
associate the ideas of things that are like each other or that have
been found together in their experience; and they could hardly
survive for a day if they ceased to do so. But who attributes to
the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a
multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous and prodigiously
strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the
brutes to assume that the honour of devising a theory of this
latter sort must be reserved for human reason. Thus, if magic be
deduced immediately from elementary processes of reasoning, and be,
in fact, an error into which the mind falls almost spontaneously,
while religion rests on conceptions which the merely animal
intelligence can hardly be supposed to have yet attained to, it
becomes probable that magic arose before religion in the evolution
of our race, and that man essayed to bend nature to his wishes by
the sheer force of spells and enchantments before he strove to coax
and mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible deity by the soft
insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.
The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a
consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is
confirmed inductively by the observation that among the aborigines
of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate
information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in
the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers
seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia
are magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can
influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic,
but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.
But if in the most backward state of human society now known to
us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion
conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the
civilised races of the world have also at some period of their
history passed through a similar intellectual phase, that they
attempted to force the great powers of nature to do their pleasure
before they thought of courting their favour by offerings and
prayer—in short that, just as on the material side of human
culture there has everywhere been an Age of Stone, so on the
intellectual side there has everywhere been an Age of Magic? There
are reasons for answering this question in the affirmative. When we
survey the existing races of mankind from Greenland to Tierra del
Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore, we observe that they are
distinguished one from the other by a great variety of religions,
and that these distinctions are not, so to speak, merely
coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but descend into
the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths, nay, that
they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that
the surface of society all over the world is cracked and seamed,
sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses
opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious dissension.
Yet when we have penetrated through these differences, which affect
mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we
shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual
agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the
superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of
mankind. One of the great achievements of the nineteenth century
was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts
of the world, and thus to discover its substantial identity
everywhere. It is beneath our feet—and not very far beneath
them—here in Europe at the present day, and it crops up on
the surface in the heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever
the advent of a higher civilisation has not crushed it under
ground. This universal faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a
belief in the efficacy of magic. While religious systems differ not
only in different countries, but in the same country in different
ages, the system of sympathetic magic remains everywhere and at all
times substantially alike in its principles and practice. Among the
ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much
what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it
now is among the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners
of the world. If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a
counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more
reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto,
“Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus,”
as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility.
It is not our business here to consider what bearing the
permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the
surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of
religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The
dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its
depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to
civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any
moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From
time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame
into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet. Now and
then the polite world is startled by a paragraph in a newspaper
which tells how in Scotland an image has been found stuck full of
pins for the purpose of killing an obnoxious laird or minister, how
a woman has been slowly roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or
how a girl has been murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those
candles of human tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their
midnight trade unseen. But whether the influences that make for
further progress, or those that threaten to undo what has already
been accomplished, will ultimately prevail; whether the impulsive
energy of the minority or the dead weight of the majority of
mankind will prove the stronger force to carry us up to higher
heights or to sink us into lower depths, are questions rather for
the sage, the moralist, and the statesman, whose eagle vision scans
the future, than for the humble student of the present and the
past. Here we are only concerned to ask how far the uniformity, the
universality, and the permanence of a belief in magic, compared
with the endless variety and the shifting character of religious
creeds, raises a presumption that the former represents a ruder and
earlier phase of the human mind, through which all the races of
mankind have passed or are passing on their way to religion and
science.
If an Age of Religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to
surmise, been preceded by an Age of Magic, it is natural that we
should enquire what causes have led mankind, or rather a portion of
them, to abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to
betake themselves to religion instead. When we reflect upon the
multitude, the variety, and the complexity of the facts to be
explained, and the scantiness of our information regarding them, we
shall be ready to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution
of so profound a problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the
most we can do in the present state of our knowledge is to hazard a
more or less plausible conjecture. With all due diffidence, then, I
would suggest that a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood
and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to
cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method
of turning her resources to account. The shrewder intelligences
must in time have come to perceive that magical ceremonies and
incantations did not really effect the results which they were
designed to produce, and which the majority of their simpler
fellows still believed that they did actually produce. This great
discovery of the inefficacy of magic must have wrought a radical
though probably slow revolution in the minds of those who had the
sagacity to make it. The discovery amounted to this, that men for
the first time recognised their inability to manipulate at pleasure
certain natural forces which hitherto they had believed to be
completely within their control. It was a confession of human
ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for causes what
were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of these
imaginary causes had been vain. His painful toil had been wasted,
his curious ingenuity had been squandered to no purpose. He had
been pulling at strings to which nothing was attached; he had been
marching, as he thought, straight to the goal, while in reality he
had only been treading in a narrow circle. Not that the effects
which he had striven so hard to produce did not continue to
manifest themselves. They were still produced, but not by him. The
rain still fell on the thirsty ground: the sun still pursued his
daily, and the moon her nightly journey across the sky: the silent
procession of the seasons still moved in light and shadow, in cloud
and sunshine across the earth: men were still born to labour and
sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were gathered to
their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things indeed went on
as before, yet all seemed different to him from whose eyes the old
scales had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the pleasing
illusion that it was he who guided the earth and the heaven in
their courses, and that they would cease to perform their great
revolutions were he to take his feeble hand from the wheel. In the
death of his enemies and his friends he no longer saw a proof of
the resistless potency of his own or of hostile enchantments; he
now knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a force
stronger than any that he could wield, and in obedience to a
destiny which he was powerless to control.
Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a
troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty, his old happy confidence in
himself and his powers rudely shaken, our primitive philosopher
must have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he came to rest,
as in a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new system of
faith and practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his
harassing doubts and a substitute, however precarious, for that
sovereignty over nature which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the
great world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows,
it must surely be because there were other beings, like himself,
but far stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its course and
brought about all the varied series of events which he had hitherto
believed to be dependent on his own magic. It was they, as he now
believed, and not he himself, who made the stormy wind to blow, the
lightning to flash, and the thunder to roll; who had laid the
foundations of the solid earth and set bounds to the restless sea
that it might not pass; who caused all the glorious lights of
heaven to shine; who gave the fowls of the air their meat and the
wild beasts of the desert their prey; who bade the fruitful land to
bring forth in abundance, the high hills to be clothed with
forests, the bubbling springs to rise under the rocks in the
valleys, and green pastures to grow by still waters; who breathed
into man’s nostrils and made him live, or turned him to
destruction by famine and pestilence and war. To these mighty
beings, whose handiwork he traced in all the gorgeous and varied
pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself, humbly confessing
his dependence on their invisible power, and beseeching them of
their mercy to furnish him with all good things, to defend him from
the perils and dangers by which our mortal life is compassed about
on every hand, and finally to bring his immortal spirit, freed from
the burden of the body, to some happier world, beyond the reach of
pain and sorrow, where he might rest with them and with the spirits
of good men in joy and felicity for ever.
In this, or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be
conceived to have made the great transition from magic to religion.
But even in them the change can hardly ever have been sudden;
probably it proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its
more or less perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of
man’s powerlessness to influence the course of nature on a
grand scale must have been gradual; he cannot have been shorn of
the whole of his fancied dominion at a blow. Step by step he must
have been driven back from his proud position; foot by foot he must
have yielded, with a sigh, the ground which he had once viewed as
his own. Now it would be the wind, now the rain, now the sunshine,
now the thunder, that he confessed himself unable to wield at will;
and as province after province of nature thus fell from his grasp,
till what had once seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a
prison, man must have been more and more profoundly impressed with
a sense of his own helplessness and the might of the invisible
beings by whom he believed himself to be surrounded. Thus religion,
beginning as a slight and partial acknowledgment of powers superior
to man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a
confession of man’s entire and absolute dependence on the
divine; his old free bearing is exchanged for an attitude of
lowliest prostration before the mysterious powers of the unseen,
and his highest virtue is to submit his will to theirs: In la
sua volontade è nostra pace. But this deepening sense of
religion, this more perfect submission to the divine will in all
things, affects only those higher intelligences who have breadth of
view enough to comprehend the vastness of the universe and the
littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their
narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really
great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into
religion at all. They are, indeed, drilled by their betters into an
outward conformity with its precepts and a verbal profession of its
tenets; but at heart they cling to their old magical superstitions,
which may be discountenanced and forbidden, but cannot be
eradicated by religion, so long as they have their roots deep down
in the mental framework and constitution of the great majority of
mankind.
The reader may well be tempted to ask, How was it that
intelligent men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How
could they continue to cherish expectations that were invariably
doomed to disappointment? With what heart persist in playing
venerable antics that led to nothing, and mumbling solemn
balderdash that remained without effect? Why cling to beliefs which
were so flatly contradicted by experience? How dare to repeat
experiments that had failed so often? The answer seems to be that
the fallacy was far from easy to detect, the failure by no means
obvious, since in many, perhaps in most cases, the desired event
did actually follow, at a longer or shorter interval, the
performance of the rite which was designed to bring it about; and a
mind of more than common acuteness was needed to perceive that,
even in these cases, the rite was not necessarily the cause of the
event. A ceremony intended to make the wind blow or the rain fall,
or to work the death of an enemy, will always be followed, sooner
or later, by the occurrence it is meant to bring to pass; and
primitive man may be excused for regarding the occurrence as a
direct result of the ceremony, and the best possible proof of its
efficacy. Similarly, rites observed in the morning to help the sun
to rise, and in spring to wake the dreaming earth from her winter
sleep, will invariably appear to be crowned with success, at least
within the temperate zones; for in these regions the sun lights his
golden lamp in the east every morning, and year by year the vernal
earth decks herself afresh with a rich mantle of green. Hence the
practical savage, with his conservative instincts, might well turn
a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical doubter, the
philosophic radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and spring
might not, after all, be direct consequences of the punctual
performance of certain daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun
might perhaps continue to rise and trees to blossom though the
ceremonies were occasionally intermitted, or even discontinued
altogether. These sceptical doubts would naturally be repelled by
the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries subversive of
the faith and manifestly contradicted by experience. “Can
anything be plainer,” he might say, “than that I light
my twopenny candle on earth and that the sun then kindles his great
fire in heaven? I should be glad to know whether, when I have put
on my green robe in spring, the trees do not afterwards do the
same? These are facts patent to everybody, and on them I take my
stand. I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and
splitters of hairs and choppers of logic. Theories and speculation
and all that may be very well in their way, and I have not the
least objection to your indulging in them, provided, of course, you
do not put them in practice. But give me leave to stick to facts;
then I know where I am.” The fallacy of this reasoning is
obvious to us, because it happens to deal with facts about which we
have long made up our minds. But let an argument of precisely the
same calibre be applied to matters which are still under debate,
and it may be questioned whether a British audience would not
applaud it as sound, and esteem the speaker who used it a safe
man—not brilliant or showy, perhaps, but thoroughly sensible
and hard-headed. If such reasonings could pass muster among
ourselves, need we wonder that they long escaped detection by the
savage?
V. The Magical Control of the Weather
1. The Public Magician
THE READER may remember that we were led to plunge into the
labyrinth of magic by a consideration of two different types of
man-god. This is the clue which has guided our devious steps
through the maze, and brought us out at last on higher ground,
whence, resting a little by the way, we can look back over the path
we have already traversed and forward to the longer and steeper
road we have still to climb.
As a result of the foregoing discussion, the two types of human
gods may conveniently be distinguished as the religious and the
magical man-god respectively. In the former, a being of an order
different from and superior to man is supposed to become incarnate,
for a longer or a shorter time, in a human body, manifesting his
super-human power and knowledge by miracles wrought and prophecies
uttered through the medium of the fleshly tabernacle in which he
has deigned to take up his abode. This may also appropriately be
called the inspired or incarnate type of man-god. In it the human
body is merely a frail earthly vessel filled with a divine and
immortal spirit. On the other hand, a man-god of the magical sort
is nothing but a man who possesses in an unusually high degree
powers which most of his fellows arrogate to themselves on a
smaller scale; for in rude society there is hardly a person who
does not dabble in magic. Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or
inspired type derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped to
hide his heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mould, a
man-god of the latter type draws his extraordinary power from a
certain physical sympathy with nature. He is not merely the
receptacle of a divine spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is
so delicately attuned to the harmony of the world that a touch of
his hand or a turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through
the universal framework of things; and conversely his divine
organism is acutely sensitive to such slight changes of environment
as would leave ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the line
between these two types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it
in theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and
in what follows I shall not insist on it.
We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for
the benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and
that according as it is directed to one or other of these two
objects it may be called private or public magic. Further, I
pointed out that the public magician occupies a position of great
influence, from which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may
advance step by step to the rank of a chief or king. Thus an
examination of public magic conduces to an understanding of the
early kingship, since in savage and barbarous society many chiefs
and kings appear to owe their authority in great measure to their
reputation as magicians.
Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed
to secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food. The
examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of
food—the hunter, the fisher, the farmer—all resort to
magical practices in the pursuit of their various callings; but
they do so as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and
their families, rather than as public functionaries acting in the
interest of the whole people. It is otherwise when the rites are
performed, not by the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves,
but by professional magicians on their behalf. In primitive
society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the
distribution of the community into various classes of workers has
hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he
practises charms and incantations for his own good and the injury
of his enemies. But a great step in advance has been taken when a
special class of magicians has been instituted; when, in other
words, a number of men have been set apart for the express purpose
of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that
skill be directed to the healing of diseases, the forecasting of
the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other object of
general utility. The impotence of the means adopted by most of
these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to blind us
to the immense importance of the institution itself. Here is a body
of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from
the need of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and
allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into
the secret ways of nature. It was at once their duty and their
interest to know more than their fellows, to acquaint themselves
with everything that could aid man in his arduous struggle with
nature, everything that could mitigate his sufferings and prolong
his life. The properties of drugs and minerals, the causes of rain
and drought, of thunder and lightning, the changes of the seasons,
the phases of the moon, the daily and yearly journeys of the sun,
the motions of the stars, the mystery of life, and the mystery of
death, all these things must have excited the wonder of these early
philosophers, and stimulated them to find solutions of problems
that were doubtless often thrust on their attention in the most
practical form by the importunate demands of their clients, who
expected them not merely to understand but to regulate the great
processes of nature for the good of man. That their first shots
fell very far wide of the mark could hardly be helped. The slow,
the never-ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming
and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at the time seem to
fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views of natural
causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear to us
manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were legitimate
hypotheses, though they have not stood the test of experience.
Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who devised
these crude theories, but of those who obstinately adhered to them
after better had been propounded. Certainly no men ever had
stronger incentives in the pursuit of truth than these savage
sorcerers. To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely
necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their life.
This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of
concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the most
powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge,
since, if you would appear to know anything, by far the best way is
actually to know it. Thus, however justly we may reject the
extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions
which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of
this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of
incalculable good to humanity. They were the direct predecessors,
not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators
and discoverers in every branch of natural science. They began the
work which has since been carried to such glorious and beneficent
issues by their successors in after ages; and if the beginning was
poor and feeble, this is to be imputed to the inevitable
difficulties which beset the path of knowledge rather than to the
natural incapacity or wilful fraud of the men themselves.
2. The Magical Control of Rain
OF THE THINGS which the public magician sets himself to do for
the good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the weather
and especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain. Water is an
essential of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends
upon showers. Without rain vegetation withers, animals and men
languish and die. Hence in savage communities the rain-maker is a
very important personage; and often a special class of magicians
exists for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water-supply. The
methods by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their
office are commonly, though not always, based on the principle of
homoeopathic or imitative magic. If they wish to make rain they
simulate it by sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their
object is to stop rain and cause drought, they avoid water and
resort to warmth and fire for the sake of drying up the too
abundant moisture. Such attempts are by no means confined, as the
cultivated reader might imagine, to the naked inhabitants of those
sultry lands like Central Australia and some parts of Eastern and
Southern Africa, where often for months together the pitiless sun
beats down out of a blue and cloudless sky on the parched and
gaping earth. They are, or used to be, common enough among
outwardly civilised folk in the moister climate of Europe. I will
now illustrate them by instances drawn from the practice both of
public and private magic.
Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when
rain was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of
an old sacred grove. One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle
or small cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two
fire-brands together and made the sparks fly, to imitate lightning;
and the third, who was called “the rain-maker,” had a
bunch of twigs with which he sprinkled water from a vessel on all
sides. To put an end to drought and bring down rain, women and
girls of the village of Ploska are wont to go naked by night to the
boundaries of the village and there pour water on the ground. In
Halmahera, or Gilolo, a large island to the west of New Guinea, a
wizard makes rain by dipping a branch of a particular kind of tree
in water and then scattering the moisture from the dripping bough
over the ground. In New Britain the rain-maker wraps some leaves of
a red and green striped creeper in a banana-leaf, moistens the
bundle with water, and buries it in the ground; then he imitates
with his mouth the plashing of rain. Amongst the Omaha Indians of
North America, when the corn is withering for want of rain, the
members of the sacred Buffalo Society fill a large vessel with
water and dance four times round it. One of them drinks some of the
water and spirts it into the air, making a fine spray in imitation
of a mist or drizzling rain. Then he upsets the vessel, spilling
the water on the ground; whereupon the dancers fall down and drink
up the water, getting mud all over their faces. Lastly, they squirt
the water into the air, making a fine mist. This saves the corn. In
spring-time the Natchez of North America used to club together to
purchase favourable weather for their crops from the wizards. If
rain was needed, the wizards fasted and danced with pipes full of
water in their mouths. The pipes were perforated like the nozzle of
a watering-can, and through the holes the rain-maker blew the water
towards that part of the sky where the clouds hung heaviest. But if
fine weather was wanted, he mounted the roof of his hut, and with
extended arms, blowing with all his might, he beckoned to the
clouds to pass by. When the rains do not come in due season the
people of Central Angoniland repair to what is called the
rain-temple. Here they clear away the grass, and the leader pours
beer into a pot which is buried in the ground, while he says,
“Master Chauta, you have hardened your heart towards
us, what would you have us do? We must perish indeed. Give your
children the rains, there is the beer we have given you.”
Then they all partake of the beer that is left over, even the
children being made to sip it. Next they take branches of trees and
dance and sing for rain. When they return to the village they find
a vessel of water set at the doorway by an old woman; so they dip
their branches in it and wave them aloft, so as to scatter the
drops. After that the rain is sure to come driving up in heavy
clouds. In these practices we see a combination of religion with
magic; for while the scattering of the water-drops by means of
branches is a purely magical ceremony, the prayer for rain and the
offering of beer are purely religious rites. In the Mara tribe of
Northern Australia the rain-maker goes to a pool and sings over it
his magic song. Then he takes some of the water in his hands,
drinks it, and spits it out in various directions. After that he
throws water all over himself, scatters it about, and returns
quietly to the camp. Rain is supposed to follow. The Arab historian
Makrizi describes a method of stopping rain which is said to have
been resorted to by a tribe of nomads called Alqamar in Hadramaut.
They cut a branch from a certain tree in the desert, set it on
fire, and then sprinkled the burning brand with water. After that
the vehemence of the rain abated, just as the water vanished when
it fell on the glowing brand. Some of the Eastern Angamis of
Manipur are said to perform a some-what similar ceremony for the
opposite purpose, in order, namely, to produce rain. The head of
the village puts a burning brand on the grave of a man who has died
of burns, and quenches the brand with water, while he prays that
rain may fall. Here the putting out the fire with water, which is
an imitation of rain, is reinforced by the influence of the dead
man, who, having been burnt to death, will naturally be anxious for
the descent of rain to cool his scorched body and assuage his
pangs.
Other people besides the Arabs have used fire as a means of
stopping rain. Thus the Sulka of New Britain heat stones red hot in
the fire and then put them out in the rain, or they throw hot ashes
in the air. They think that the rain will soon cease to fall, for
it does not like to be burned by the hot stones or ashes. The
Telugus send a little girl out naked into the rain with a burning
piece of wood in her hand, which she has to show to the rain. That
is supposed to stop the downpour. At Port Stevens in New South
Wales the medicine-men used to drive away rain by throwing
fire-sticks into the air, while at the same time they puffed and
shouted. Any man of the Anula tribe in Northern Australia can stop
rain by simply warming a green stick in the fire, and then striking
it against the wind.
In time of severe drought the Dieri of Central Australia, loudly
lamenting the impoverished state of the country and their own
half-starved condition, call upon the spirits of their remote
predecessors, whom they call Mura-muras, to grant them power to
make a heavy rain-fall. For they believe that the clouds are bodies
in which rain is generated by their own ceremonies or those of
neighbouring tribes, through the influence of the Mura-muras. The
way in which they set about drawing rain from the clouds is this. A
hole is dug about twelve feet long and eight or ten broad, and over
this hole a conical hut of logs and branches is made. Two wizards,
supposed to have received a special inspiration from the
Mura-muras, are bled by an old and influential man with a sharp
flint; and the blood, drawn from their arms below the elbow, is
made to flow on the other men of the tribe, who sit huddled
together in the hut. At the same time the two bleeding men throw
handfuls of down about, some of which adheres to the blood-stained
bodies of their comrades, while the rest floats in the air. The
blood is thought to represent the rain, and the down the clouds.
During the ceremony two large stones are placed in the middle of
the hut; they stand for gathering clouds and presage rain. Then the
wizards who were bled carry away the two stones for about ten or
fifteen miles, and place them as high as they can in the tallest
tree. Meanwhile the other men gather gypsum, pound it fine, and
throw it into a water-hole. This the Mura-muras see, and at once
they cause clouds to appear in the sky. Lastly, the men, young and
old, surround the hut, and, stooping down, butt at it with their
heads, like so many rams. Thus they force their way through it and
reappear on the other side, repeating the process till the hut is
wrecked. In doing this they are forbidden to use their hands or
arms; but when the heavy logs alone remain, they are allowed to
pull them out with their hands. “The piercing of the hut with
their heads symbolises the piercing of the clouds; the fall of the
hut, the fall of the rain.” Obviously, too, the act of
placing high up in trees the two stones, which stand for clouds, is
a way of making the real clouds to mount up in the sky. The Dieri
also imagine that the foreskins taken from lads at circumcision
have a great power of producing rain. Hence the Great Council of
the tribe always keeps a small stock of foreskins ready for use.
They are carefully concealed, being wrapt up in feathers with the
fat of the wild dog and of the carpet snake. A woman may not see
such a parcel opened on any account. When the ceremony is over, the
foreskin is buried, its virtue being exhausted. After the rains
have fallen, some of the tribe always undergo a surgical operation,
which consists in cutting the skin of their chest and arms with a
sharp flint. The wound is then tapped with a flat stick to increase
the flow of blood, and red ochre is rubbed into it. Raised scars
are thus produced. The reason alleged by the natives for this
practice is that they are pleased with the rain, and that there is
a connexion between the rain and the scars. Apparently the
operation is not very painful, for the patient laughs and jokes
while it is going on. Indeed, little children have been seen to
crowd round the operator and patiently take their turn; then after
being operated on, they ran away, expanding their little chests and
singing for the rain to beat upon them. However, they were not so
well pleased next day, when they felt their wounds stiff and sore.
In Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each
other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs; the
streaming blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to
make it fall on the ground. The people of Egghiou, a district of
Abyssinia, used to engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other,
village against village, for a week together every January for the
purpose of procuring rain. Some years ago the emperor Menelik
forbade the custom. However, the following year the rain was
deficient, and the popular outcry so great that the emperor yielded
to it, and allowed the murderous fights to be resumed, but for two
days a year only. The writer who mentions the custom regards the
blood shed on these occasions as a propitiatory sacrifice offered
to spirits who control the showers; but perhaps, as in the
Australian and Javanese ceremonies, it is an imitation of rain. The
prophets of Baal, who sought to procure rain by cutting themselves
with knives till the blood gushed out, may have acted on the same
principle.
There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical
powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather. This
curious superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of
British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular
restrictions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact
meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure. Thus the
Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control
the weather; therefore they pray to wind and rain, “Calm
down, breath of the twins.” Further, they think that the
wishes of twins are always fulfilled; hence twins are feared,
because they can harm the man they hate. They can also call the
salmon and the olachen or candle-fish, and so they are known by a
name which means “making plentiful.” In the opinion of
the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia twins are transformed
salmon; hence they may not go near water, lest they should be
changed back again into the fish. In their childhood they can
summon any wind by motions of their hands, and they can make fair
or foul weather, and also cure diseases by swinging a large wooden
rattle. The Nootka Indians of British Columbia also believe that
twins are somehow related to salmon. Hence among them twins may not
catch salmon, and they may not eat or even handle the fresh fish.
They can make fair or foul weather, and can cause rain to fall by
painting their faces black and then washing them, which may
represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds. The Shuswap
Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate twins with the
grizzly bear, for they call them “young grizzly bears.”
According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with
supernatural powers. In particular they can make good or bad
weather. They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the
air; they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood
attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down
on the ends of spruce branches.
The same power of influencing the weather is attributed to twins
by the Baronga, a tribe of Bantu negroes who, inhabit the shores of
Delagoa Bay in South-eastern Africa. They bestow the name of
Tilo—that is, the sky—on a woman who has given
birth to twins, and the infants themselves are called the children
of the sky. Now when the storms which generally burst in the months
of September and October have been looked for in vain, when a
drought with its prospect of famine is threatening, and all nature,
scorched and burnt up by a sun that has shone for six months from a
cloudless sky, is panting for the beneficent showers of the South
African spring, the women perform ceremonies to bring down the
longed-for rain on the parched earth. Stripping themselves of all
their garments, they assume in their stead girdles and head-dresses
of grass, or short petticoats made of the leaves of a particular
sort of creeper. Thus attired, uttering peculiar cries and singing
ribald songs, they go about from well to well, cleansing them of
the mud and impurities which have accumulated in them. The wells,
it may be said, are merely holes in the sand where a little turbid
unwholesome water stagnates. Further, the women must repair to the
house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and
must drench her with water, which they carry in little pitchers.
Having done so they go on their way, shrieking out their loose
songs and dancing immodest dances. No man may see these leaf-clad
women going their rounds. If they meet a man, they maul him and
thrust him aside. When they have cleansed the wells, they must go
and pour water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred
grove. It often happens, too, that at the bidding of the wizard
they go and pour water on the graves of twins. For they think that
the grave of a twin ought always to be moist, for which reason
twins are regularly buried near a lake. If all their efforts to
procure rain prove abortive, they will remember that such and such
a twin was buried in a dry place on the side of a hill. “No
wonder,” says the wizard in such a case, “that the sky
is fiery. Take up his body and dig him a grave on the shore of the
lake.” His orders are at once obeyed, for this is supposed to
be the only means of bringing down the rain.
Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation
which Professor Oldenberg has given of the rules to be observed by
a Brahman who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian
collection known as the Samaveda. The hymn, which bears the name of
the Sakvari¯ song, was believed to embody the might of
Indra’s weapon, the thunderbolt; and hence, on account of the
dreadful and dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the
bold student who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his
fellow-men, and to retire from the village into the forest. Here
for a space of time, which might vary, according to different
doctors of the law, from one to twelve years, he had to observe
certain rules of life, among which were the following. Thrice a day
he had to touch water; he must wear black garments and eat black
food; when it rained, he might not seek the shelter of a roof, but
had to sit in the rain and say, “Water is the Sakvari¯
song”; when the lightning flashed, he said, “That is
like the Sakvari¯ song”; when the thunder pealed, he said,
“The Great One is making a great noise.” He might never
cross a running stream without touching water; he might never set
foot on a ship unless his life were in danger, and even then he
must be sure to touch water when he went on board; “for in
water,” so ran the saying, “lies the virtue of the
Sakvari¯ song.” When at last he was allowed to learn the song
itself, he had to dip his hands in a vessel of water in which
plants of all sorts had been placed. If a man walked in the way of
all these precepts, the rain-god Parjanya, it was said, would send
rain at the wish of that man. It is clear, as Professor Oldenberg
well points out, that “all these rules are intended to bring
the Brahman into union with water, to make him, as it were, an ally
of the water powers, and to guard him against their hostility. The
black garments and the black food have the same significance; no
one will doubt that they refer to the rain-clouds when he remembers
that a black victim is sacrificed to procure rain; ‘it is
black, for such is the nature of rain.’ In respect of another
rain-charm it is said plainly, ‘He puts on a black garment
edged with black, for such is the nature of rain.’ We may
therefore assume that here in the circle of ideas and ordinances of
the Vedic schools there have been preserved magical practices of
the most remote antiquity, which were intended to prepare the
rain-maker for his office and dedicate him to it.”
It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is
desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather-doctor to observe
precisely opposite rules of conduct. In the tropical island of
Java, where the rich vegetation attests the abundance of the
rainfall, ceremonies for the making of rain are rare, but
ceremonies for the prevention of it are not uncommon. When a man is
about to give a great feast in the rainy season and has invited
many people, he goes to a weather-doctor and asks him to
“prop up the clouds that may be lowering.” If the
doctor consents to exert his professional powers, he begins to
regulate his behaviour by certain rules as soon as his customer has
departed. He must observe a fast, and may neither drink nor bathe;
what little he eats must be eaten dry, and in no case may he touch
water. The host, on his side, and his servants, both male and
female, must neither wash clothes nor bathe so long as the feast
lasts, and they have all during its continuance to observe strict
chastity. The doctor seats himself on a new mat in his bedroom, and
before a small oil-lamp he murmurs, shortly before the feast takes
place, the following prayer or incantation: “Grandfather and
Grandmother Sroekoel” (the name seems to be taken at random;
others are sometimes used), “return to your country. Akkemat
is your country. Put down your water-cask, close it properly, that
not a drop may fall out.” While he utters this prayer the
sorcerer looks upwards, burning incense the while. So among the
Toradjas the rain-doctor, whose special business it is to drive
away rain, takes care not to touch water before, during, or after
the discharge of his professional duties. He does not bathe, he
eats with unwashed hands, he drinks nothing but palm wine, and if
he has to cross a stream he is careful not to step in the water.
Having thus prepared himself for his task he has a small hut built
for himself outside of the village in a rice-field, and in this hut
he keeps up a little fire, which on no account may be suffered to
go out. In the fire he burns various kinds of wood, which are
supposed to possess the property of driving off rain; and he puffs
in the direction from which the rain threatens to come, holding in
his hand a packet of leaves and bark which derive a similar
cloud-compelling virtue, not from their chemical composition, but
from their names, which happen to signify something dry or
volatile. If clouds should appear in the sky while he is at work,
he takes lime in the hollow of his hand and blows it towards them.
The lime, being so very dry, is obviously well adapted to disperse
the damp clouds. Should rain afterwards be wanted, he has only to
pour water on his fire, and immediately the rain will descend in
sheets.
The reader will observe how exactly the Javanese and Toradja
observances, which are intended to prevent rain, form the
antithesis of the Indian observances, which aim at producing it.
The Indian sage is commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly
as well as on various special occasions; the Javanese and Toradja
wizards may not touch it at all. The Indian lives out in the
forest, and even when it rains he may not take shelter; the
Javanese and the Toradja sit in a house or a hut. The one signifies
his sympathy with water by receiving the rain on his person and
speaking of it respectfully; the others light a lamp or a fire and
do their best to drive the rain away. Yet the principle on which
all three act is the same; each of them, by a sort of childish
make-believe, identifies himself with the phenomenon which he
desires to produce. It is the old fallacy that the effect resembles
its cause: if you would make wet weather, you must be wet; if you
would make dry weather, you must be dry.
In South-eastern Europe at the present day ceremonies are
observed for the purpose of making rain which not only rest on the
same general train of thought as the preceding, but even in their
details resemble the ceremonies practised with the same intention
by the Baronga of Delagoa Bay. Among the Greeks of Thessaly and
Macedonia, when a drought has lasted a long time, it is customary
to send a procession of children round to all the wells and springs
of the neighbourhood. At the head of the procession walks a girl
adorned with flowers, whom her companions drench with water at
every halting-place, while they sing an invocation, of which the
following is part:
“Perperia all fresh bedewed,
Freshen all the neighbourhood;
By the woods, on the highway,
As thou goest, to God now pray:
O my God, upon the plain,
Send thou us a still, small rain;
That the fields may fruitful be,
And vines in blossom we may see;
That the grain be full and sound,
And wealthy grow the folks around.”
In time of drought the Serbians strip a girl to her skin and
clothe her from head to foot in grass, herbs, and flowers, even her
face being hidden behind a veil of living green. Thus disguised she
is called the Dodola, and goes through the village with a troop of
girls. They stop before every house; the Dodola keeps turning
herself round and dancing, while the other girls form a ring about
her singing one of the Dodola songs, and the housewife pours a pail
of water over her. One of the songs they sing runs thus:
“We go through the village;
The clouds go in the sky;
We go faster,
Faster go the clouds;
They have overtaken us,
And wetted the corn and the vine.”
At Poona in India, when rain is needed, the boys dress up one of
their number in nothing but leaves and call him King of Rain. Then
they go round to every house in the village, where the house-holder
or his wife sprinkles the Rain King with water, and gives the party
food of various kinds. When they have thus visited all the houses,
they strip the Rain King of his leafy robes and feast upon what
they have gathered.
Bathing is practised as a rain-charm in some parts of Southern
and Western Russia. Sometimes after service in church the priest in
his robes has been thrown down on the ground and drenched with
water by his parishioners. Sometimes it is the women who, without
stripping off their clothes, bathe in crowds on the day of St. John
the Baptist, while they dip in the water a figure made of branches,
grass, and herbs, which is supposed to represent the saint. In
Kursk, a province of Southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the
women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river, or
souse him from head to foot. Later on we shall see that a passing
stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some
natural power. It is recorded in official documents that during a
drought in 1790 the peasants of Scheroutz and Werboutz collected
all the women and compelled them to bathe, in order that rain might
fall. An Armenian rain-charm is to throw the wife of a priest into
the water and drench her. The Arabs of North Africa fling a holy
man, willy-nilly, into a spring as a remedy for drought. In
Minahassa, a province of North Celebes, the priest bathes as a
rain-charm. In Central Celebes when there has been no rain for a
long time and the rice-stalks begin to shrivel up, many of the
villagers, especially the young folk, go to a neighbouring brook
and splash each other with water, shouting noisily, or squirt water
on one another through bamboo tubes. Sometimes they imitate the
plump of rain by smacking the surface of the water with their
hands, or by placing an inverted gourd on it and drumming on the
gourd with their fingers.
Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by
ploughing, or pretending to plough. Thus the Pshaws and Chewsurs of
the Caucasus have a ceremony called “ploughing the
rain,” which they observe in time of drought. Girls yoke
themselves to a plough and drag it into a river, wading in the
water up to their girdles. In the same circumstances Armenian girls
and women do the same. The oldest woman, or the priest’s
wife, wears the priest’s dress, while the others, dressed as
men, drag the plough through the water against the stream. In the
Caucasian province of Georgia, when a drought has lasted long,
marriageable girls are yoked in couples with an ox-yoke on their
shoulders, a priest holds the reins, and thus harnessed they wade
through rivers, puddles, and marshes, praying, screaming, weeping,
and laughing. In a district of Transylvania when the ground is
parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led
by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry
it across the fields to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next
they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner
of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in the water and go
home. A similar rain-charm is resorted to in some parts of India;
naked women drag a plough across a field by night, while the men
keep carefully out of the way, for their presence would break the
spell.
Sometimes the rain-charm operates through the dead. Thus in New
Caledonia the rain-makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a
dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the
skeleton over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton
to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the
deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and showered it
down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not
long since the peasants of any district that chanced to be
afflicted with drought used to dig up the corpse of some one who
had drunk himself to death and sink it in the nearest swamp or
lake, fully persuaded that this would ensure the fall of the needed
rain. In 1868 the prospect of a bad harvest, caused by a prolonged
drought, induced the inhabitants of a village in the Tarashchansk
district to dig up the body of a Raskolnik, or Dissenter, who had
died in the preceding December. Some of the party beat the corpse,
or what was left of it, about the head, exclaiming, “Give us
rain!” while others poured water on it through a sieve. Here
the pouring of water through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of
a shower, and reminds us of the manner in which Strepsiades in
Aristophanes imagined that rain was made by Zeus. Sometimes, in
order to procure rain, the Toradjas make an appeal to the pity of
the dead. Thus, in the village of Kalingooa, there is the grave of
a famous chief, the grandfather of the present ruler. When the land
suffers from unseasonable drought, the people go to this grave,
pour water on it, and say, “O grandfather, have pity on us;
if it is your will that this year we should eat, then give
rain.” After that they hang a bamboo full of water over the
grave; there is a small hole in the lower end of the bamboo, so
that the water drips from it continually. The bamboo is always
refilled with water until rain drenches the ground. Here, as in New
Caledonia, we find religion blent with magic, for the prayer to the
dead chief, which is purely religious, is eked out with a magical
imitation of rain at his grave. We have seen that the Baronga of
Delagoa Bay drench the tombs of their ancestors, especially the
tombs of twins, as a raincharm. Among some of the Indian tribes in
the region of the Orinoco it was customary for the relations of a
deceased person to disinter his bones a year after burial, burn
them, and scatter the ashes to the winds, because they believed
that the ashes were changed into rain, which the dead man sent in
return for his obsequies. The Chinese are convinced that when human
bodies remain unburied, the souls of their late owners feel the
discomfort of rain, just as living men would do if they were
exposed without shelter to the inclemency of the weather. These
wretched souls, therefore, do all in their power to prevent the
rain from falling, and often their efforts are only too successful.
Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities in China,
because bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in its train. Hence
it has been a common practice of the Chinese authorities in time of
drought to inter the dry bones of the unburied dead for the purpose
of putting an end to the scourge and conjuring down the rain.
Animals, again, often play an important part in these
weather-charms. The Anula tribe of Northern Australia associate the
dollar-bird with rain, and call it the rain-bird. A man who has the
bird for his totem can make rain at a certain pool. He catches a
snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under
water for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the
side of the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks
in imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After
that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow;
sooner or later the rain will fall. They explain this procedure by
saying that long ago the dollar-bird had as a mate at this spot a
snake, who lived in the pool and used to make rain by spitting up
into the sky till a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell. A
common way of making rain in many parts of Java is to bathe a cat
or two cats, a male and a female; sometimes the animals are carried
in procession with music. Even in Batavia you may from time to time
see children going about with a cat for this purpose; when they
have ducked it in a pool, they let it go.
Among the Wambugwe of East Africa, when the sorcerer desires to
make rain, he takes a black sheep and a black calf in bright
sunshine, and has them placed on the roof of the common hut in
which the people live together. Then he slits the stomachs of the
animals and scatters their contents in all directions. After that
he pours water and medicine into a vessel; if the charm has
succeeded, the water boils up and rain follows. On the other hand,
if the sorcerer wishes to prevent rain from falling, he withdraws
into the interior of the hut, and there heats a rock-crystal in a
calabash. In order to procure rain the Wagogo sacrifice black
fowls, black sheep, and black cattle at the graves of dead
ancestors, and the rain-maker wears black clothes during the rainy
season. Among the Matabele the rain-charm employed by sorcerers was
made from the blood and gall of a black ox. In a district of
Sumatra, in order to procure rain, all the women of the village,
scantily clad, go to the river, wade into it, and splash each other
with the water. A black cat is thrown into the stream and made to
swim about for a while, then allowed to escape to the bank, pursued
by the splashing of the women. The Garos of Assam offer a black
goat on the top of a very high mountain in time of drought. In all
these cases the colour of the animal is part of the charm; being
black, it will darken the sky with rain-clouds. So the Bechuanas
burn the stomach of an ox at evening, because they say, “The
black smoke will gather the clouds and cause the rain to
come.” The Timorese sacrifice a black pig to the
Earth-goddess for rain, a white or red one to the Sun-god for
sunshine. The Angoni sacrifice a black ox for rain and a white one
for fine weather. Among the high mountains of Japan there is a
district in which, if rain has not fallen for a long time, a party
of villagers goes in procession to the bed of a mountain torrent,
headed by a priest, who leads a black dog. At the chosen spot they
tether the beast to a stone, and make it a target for their bullets
and arrows. When its life-blood bespatters the rocks, the peasants
throw down their weapons and lift up their voices in supplication
to the dragon divinity of the stream, exhorting him to send down
forthwith a shower to cleanse the spot from its defilement. Custom
has prescribed that on these occasions the colour of the victim
shall be black, as an emblem of the wished-for rain-clouds. But if
fine weather is wanted, the victim must be white, without a
spot.
The intimate association of frogs and toads with water has
earned for these creatures a widespread reputation as custodians of
rain; and hence they often play a part in charms designed to draw
needed showers from the sky. Some of the Indians of the Orinoco
held the toad to be the god or lord of the waters, and for that
reason feared to kill the creature. They have been known to keep
frogs under a pot and to beat them with rods when there was a
drought. It is said that the Aymara Indians often make little
images of frogs and other aquatic animals and place them on the
tops of the hills as a means of bringing down rain. The Thompson
Indians of British Columbia and some people in Europe think that to
kill a frog will cause rain to fall. In order to procure rain
people of low caste in the Central Provinces of India will tie a
frog to a rod covered with green leaves and branches of the
nîm tree (Azadirachta Indica) and carry it from
door to door singing:
“Send soon, O frog, the jewel of water!
And ripen the wheat and millet in the field.”
The Kapus or Reddis are a large caste of cultivators and
landowners in the Madras Presidency. When rain fails, women of the
caste will catch a frog and tie it alive to a new winnowing fan
made of bamboo. On this fan they spread a few margosa leaves and go
from door to door singing, “Lady frog must have her bath. Oh!
rain-god, give a little water for her at least.” While the
Kapu women sing this song, the woman of the house pours water over
the frog and gives an alms, convinced that by so doing she will
soon bring rain down in torrents.
Sometimes, when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop
the usual hocus-pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far
too angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and
curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of
heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off
at the main. In a Japanese village, when the guardian divinity had
long been deaf to the peasants’ prayers for rain, they at
last threw down his image and, with curses loud and long, hurled it
head foremost into a stinking rice-field. “There,” they
said, “you may stay yourself for a while, to see how
you will feel after a few days’ scorching in this
broiling sun that is burning the life from our cracking
fields.” In the like circumstances the Feloupes of Senegambia
cast down their fetishes and drag them about the fields, cursing
them till rain falls.
The Chinese are adepts in the art of taking the kingdom of
heaven by storm. Thus, when rain is wanted they make a huge dragon
of paper or wood to represent the rain-god, and carry it about in
procession; but if no rain follows, the mock-dragon is execrated
and torn to pieces. At other times they threaten and beat the god
if he does not give rain; sometimes they publicly depose him from
the rank of deity. On the other hand, if the wished-for rain falls,
the god is promoted to a higher rank by an imperial decree. In
April 1888 the mandarins of Canton prayed to the god Lung-wong to
stop the incessant downpour of rain; and when he turned a deaf ear
to their petitions they put him in a lock-up for five days. This
had a salutary effect. The rain ceased and the god was restored to
liberty. Some years before, in time of drought, the same deity had
been chained and exposed to the sun for days in the courtyard of
his temple in order that he might feel for himself the urgent need
of rain. So when the Siamese need rain, they set out their idols in
the blazing sun; but if they want dry weather, they unroof the
temples and let the rain pour down on the idols. They think that
the inconvenience to which the gods are thus subjected will induce
them to grant the wishes of their worshippers.
The reader may smile at the meteorology of the Far East; but
precisely similar modes of procuring rain have been resorted to in
Christian Europe within our own lifetime. By the end of April 1893
there was great distress in Sicily for lack of water. The drought
had lasted six months. Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of
cloudless blue. The gardens of the Conca d’Oro, which
surround Palermo with a magnificent belt of verdure, were
withering. Food was becoming scarce. The people were in great
alarm. All the most approved methods of procuring rain had been
tried without effect. Processions had traversed the streets and the
fields. Men, women, and children, telling their beads, had lain
whole nights before the holy images. Consecrated candles had burned
day and night in the churches. Palm branches, blessed on Palm
Sunday, had been hung on the trees. At Solaparuta, in accordance
with a very old custom, the dust swept from the churches on Palm
Sunday had been spread on the fields. In ordinary years these holy
sweepings preserve the crops; but that year, if you will believe
me, they had no effect whatever. At Nicosia the inhabitants,
bare-headed and bare-foot, carried the crucifixes through all the
wards of the town and scourged each other with iron whips. It was
all in vain. Even the great St. Francis of Paolo himself, who
annually performs the miracle of rain and is carried every spring
through the market-gardens, either could not or would not help.
Masses, vespers, concerts, illuminations, fire-works—nothing
could move him. At last the peasants began to lose patience. Most
of the saints were banished. At Palermo they dumped St. Joseph in a
garden to see the state of things for himself, and they swore to
leave him there in the sun till rain fell. Other saints were
turned, like naughty children, with their faces to the wall. Others
again, stripped of their beautiful robes, were exiled far from
their parishes, threatened, grossly insulted, ducked in
horse-ponds. At Caltanisetta the golden wings of St. Michael the
Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with wings of
pasteboard; his purple mantle was taken away and a clout wrapt
about him instead. At Licata the patron saint, St. Angelo, fared
even worse, for he was left without any garments at all; he was
reviled, he was put in irons, he was threatened with drowning or
hanging. “Rain or the rope!” roared the angry people at
him, as they shook their fists in his face.
Sometimes an appeal is made to the pity of the gods. When their
corn is being burnt up by the sun, the Zulus look out for a
“heaven bird,” kill it, and throw it into a pool. Then
the heaven melts with tenderness for the death of the bird;
“it wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral wail.”
In Zululand women sometimes bury their children up to the neck in
the ground, and then retiring to a distance keep up a dismal howl
for a long time. The sky is supposed to melt with pity at the
sight. Then the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain
will soon follow. They say that they call to “the lord
above” and ask him to send rain. If it comes they declare
that “Usondo rains.” In times of drought the Guanches
of Teneriffe led their sheep to sacred ground, and there they
separated the lambs from their dams, that their plaintive bleating
might touch the heart of the god. In Kumaon a way of stopping rain
is to pour hot oil in the left ear of a dog. The animal howls with
pain, his howls are heard by Indra, and out of pity for the
beast’s sufferings the god stops the rain. Sometimes the
Toradjas attempt to procure rain as follows. They place the stalks
of certain plants in water, saying, “Go and ask for rain, and
so long as no rain falls I will not plant you again, but there
shall you die.” Also they string some fresh-water snails on a
cord, and hang the cord on a tree, and say to the snails, “Go
and ask for rain, and so long as no rain comes, I will not take you
back to the water.” Then the snails go and weep, and the gods
take pity and send rain. However, the foregoing ceremonies are
religious rather than magical, since they involve an appeal to the
compassion of higher powers.
Stones are often supposed to possess the property of bringing on
rain, provided they be dipped in water or sprinkled with it, or
treated in some other appropriate manner. In a Samoan village a
certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the
rain-making god, and in time of drought his priests carried the
stone in procession and dipped it in a stream. Among the Ta-ta-thi
tribe of New South Wales, the rain-maker breaks off a piece of
quartz-crystal and spits it towards the sky; the rest of the
crystal he wraps in emu feathers, soaks both crystal and feathers
in water, and carefully hides them. In the Keramin tribe of New
South Wales the wizard retires to the bed of a creek, drops water
on a round flat stone, then covers up and conceals it. Among some
tribes of North-western Australia the rain-maker repairs to a piece
of ground which is set apart for the purpose of rain-making. There
he builds a heap of stones or sand, places on the top of it his
magic stone, and walks or dances round the pile chanting his
incantations for hours, till sheer exhaustion obliges him to
desist, when his place is taken by his assistant. Water is
sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are kindled. No layman may
approach the sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being
performed. When the Sulka of New Britain wish to procure rain they
blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits and set them out,
along with certain other plants and buds, in the sun. Then a
handful of twigs is dipped in water and weighted with stones, while
a spell is chanted. After that rain should follow. In Manipur, on a
lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a stone which the
popular imagination likens to an umbrella. When rain is wanted, the
rajah fetches water from a spring below and sprinkles it on the
stone. At Sagami in Japan there is a stone which draws down rain
whenever water is poured on it. When the Wakondyo, a tribe of
Central Africa, desire rain, they send to the Wawamba, who dwell at
the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a
“rain-stone.” In consideration of a proper payment, the
Wawamba wash the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in
a pot full of water. After that the rain cannot fail to come. In
the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to
make rain by carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it
on a particular point high up on a rock; after that they imagined
that the clouds would soon gather, and that rain would begin to
fall.
But customs of this sort are not confined to the wilds of Africa
and Asia or the torrid deserts of Australia and the New World. They
have been practised in the cool air and under the grey skies of
Europe. There is a fountain called Barenton, of romantic fame, in
those “wild woods of Broceliande,” where, if legend be
true, the wizard Merlin still sleeps his magic slumber in the
hawthorn shade. Thither the Breton peasants used to resort when
they needed rain. They caught some of the water in a tankard and
threw it on a slab near the spring. On Snowdon there is a lonely
tarn called Dulyn, or the Black Lake, lying “in a dismal
dingle surrounded by high and dangerous rocks.” A row of
stepping-stones runs out into the lake, and if any one steps on the
stones and throws water so as to wet the farthest stone, which is
called the Red Altar, “it is but a chance that you do not get
rain before night, even when it is hot weather.” In these
cases it appears probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded
as more or less divine. This appears from the custom sometimes
observed of dipping a cross in the Fountain of Barenton to procure
rain, for this is plainly a Christian substitute for the old pagan
way of throwing water on the stone. At various places in France it
is, or used till lately to be, the practice to dip the image of a
saint in water as a means of procuring rain. Thus, beside the old
priory of Commagny, there is a spring of St. Gervais, whither the
inhabitants go in procession to obtain rain or fine weather
according to the needs of the crops. In times of great drought they
throw into the basin of the fountain an ancient stone image of the
saint that stands in a sort of niche from which the fountain flows.
At Collobrières and Carpentras a similar practice was observed with
the images of St. Pons and St. Gens respectively. In several
villages of Navarre prayers for rain used to be offered to St.
Peter, and by way of enforcing them the villagers carried the image
of the saint in procession to the river, where they thrice invited
him to reconsider his resolution and to grant their prayers; then,
if he was still obstinate, they plunged him in the water, despite
the remonstrances of the clergy, who pleaded with as much truth as
piety that a simple caution or admonition administered to the image
would produce an equally good effect. After this the rain was sure
to fall within twenty-four hours. Catholic countries do not enjoy a
monopoly of making rain by ducking holy images in water. In
Mingrelia, when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they
take a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a
shower falls; and in the Far East the Shans drench the images of
Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought. In all
such cases the practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm,
however it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or
a threat.
Like other peoples, the Greeks and Romans sought to obtain rain
by magic, when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual. For
example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with
drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain
spring on Mount Lycaeus. Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty
cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land. A similar mode of
making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera near
New Guinea. The people of Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze chariot
which they kept in a temple. When they desired a shower they shook
the chariot and the shower fell. Probably the rattling of the
chariot was meant to imitate thunder; we have already seen that
mock thunder and lightning form part of a rain-charm in Russia and
Japan. The legendary Salmoneus, King of Elis, made mock thunder by
dragging bronze kettles behind his chariot, or by driving over a
bronze bridge, while he hurled blazing torches in imitation of
lightning. It was his impious wish to mimic the thundering car of
Zeus as it rolled across the vault of heaven. Indeed he declared
that he was actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to
himself as such. Near a temple of Mars, outside the walls of Rome,
there was kept a certain stone known as the lapis manalis.
In time of drought the stone was dragged into Rome, and this was
supposed to bring down rain immediately.
3. The Magical Control of the Sun
AS THE MAGICIAN thinks he can make rain, so he fancies he can
cause the sun to shine, and can hasten or stay its going down. At
an eclipse the Ojebways used to imagine that the sun was being
extinguished. So they shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping
thus to rekindle his expiring light. The Sencis of Peru also shot
burning arrows at the sun during an eclipse, but apparently they
did this not so much to relight his lamp as to drive away a savage
beast with which they supposed him to be struggling. Conversely
during an eclipse of the moon some tribes of the Orinoco used to
bury lighted brands in the ground; because, said they, if the moon
were to be extinguished, all fire on earth would be extinguished
with her, except such as was hidden from her sight. During an
eclipse of the sun the Kamtchatkans were wont to bring out fire
from their huts and pray the great luminary to shine as before. But
the prayer addressed to the sun shows that this ceremony was
religious rather than magical. Purely magical, on the other hand,
was the ceremony observed on similar occasions by the Chilcotin
Indians. Men and women tucked up their robes, as they do in
travelling, and then leaning on staves, as if they were heavy
laden, they continued to walk in a circle till the eclipse was
over. Apparently they thought thus to support the failing steps of
the sun as he trod his weary round in the sky. Similarly in ancient
Egypt the king, as the representative of the sun, walked solemnly
round the walls of a temple in order to ensure that the sun should
perform his daily journey round the sky without the interruption of
an eclipse or other mishap. And after the autumnal equinox the
ancient Egyptians held a festival called “the nativity of the
sun’s walking-stick,” because, as the luminary declined
daily in the sky, and his light and heat diminished, he was
supposed to need a staff on which to lean. In New Caledonia when a
wizard desires to make sunshine, he takes some plants and corals to
the burial-ground, and fashions them into a bundle, adding two
locks of hair cut from a living child of his family, also two teeth
or an entire jawbone from the skeleton of an ancestor. He then
climbs a mountain whose top catches the first rays of the morning
sun. Here he deposits three sorts of plants on a flat stone, places
a branch of dry coral beside them, and hangs the bundle of charms
over the stone. Next morning he returns to the spot and sets fire
to the bundle at the moment when the sun rises from the sea. As the
smoke curls up, he rubs the stone with the dry coral, invokes his
ancestors and says: “Sun! I do this that you may be burning
hot, and eat up all the clouds in the sky.” The same ceremony
is repeated at sunset. The New Caledonians also make a drought by
means of a disc-shaped stone with a hole in it. At the moment when
the sun rises, the wizard holds the stone in his hand and passes a
burning brand repeatedly into the hole, while he says: “I
kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up
our land, so that it may produce nothing.” The Banks
Islanders make sunshine by means of a mock sun. They take a very
round stone, called a vat loa or sunstone, wind red braid
about it, and stick it with owls’ feathers to represent rays,
singing the proper spell in a low voice. Then they hang it on some
high tree, such as a banyan or a casuarina, in a sacred place.
The offering made by the Brahman in the morning is supposed to
produce the sun, and we are told that “assuredly it would not
rise, were he not to make that offering.” The ancient
Mexicans conceived the sun as the source of all vital force; hence
they named him Ipalnemohuani, “He by whom men live.”
But if he bestowed life on the world, he needed also to receive
life from it. And as the heart is the seat and symbol of life,
bleeding hearts of men and animals were presented to the sun to
maintain him in vigour and enable him to run his course across the
sky. Thus the Mexican sacrifices to the sun were magical rather
than religious, being designed, not so much to please and
propitiate him, as physically to renew his energies of heat, light,
and motion. The constant demand for human victims to feed the solar
fire was met by waging war every year on the neighbouring tribes
and bringing back troops of captives to be sacrificed on the altar.
Thus the ceaseless wars of the Mexicans and their cruel system of
human sacrifices, the most monstrous on record, sprang in great
measure from a mistaken theory of the solar system. No more
striking illustration could be given of the disastrous consequences
that may flow in practice from a purely speculative error. The
ancient Greeks believed that the sun drove in a chariot across the
sky; hence the Rhodians, who worshipped the sun as their chief
deity, annually dedicated a chariot and four horses to him, and
flung them into the sea for his use. Doubtless they thought that
after a year’s work his old horses and chariot would be worn
out. From a like motive, probably, the idolatrous kings of Judah
dedicated chariots and horses to the sun, and the Spartans,
Persians, and Massagetae sacrificed horses to him. The Spartans
performed the sacrifice on the top of Mount Taygetus, the beautiful
range behind which they saw the great luminary set every night. It
was as natural for the inhabitants of the valley of Sparta to do
this as it was for the islanders of Rhodes to throw the chariot and
horses into the sea, into which the sun seemed to them to sink at
evening. For thus, whether on the mountain or in the sea, the fresh
horses stood ready for the weary god where they would be most
welcome, at the end of his day’s journey.
As some people think they can light up the sun or speed him on
his way, so others fancy they can retard or stop him. In a pass of
the Peruvian Andes stand two ruined towers on opposite hills. Iron
hooks are clamped into their walls for the purpose of stretching a
net from one tower to the other. The net is intended to catch the
sun. Stories of men who have caught the sun in a noose are widely
spread. When the sun is going southward in the autumn, and sinking
lower and lower in the Arctic sky, the Esquimaux of Iglulik play
the game of cat’s cradle in order to catch him in the meshes
of the string and so prevent his disappearance. On the contrary,
when the sun is moving northward in the spring, they play the game
of cup-and-ball to hasten his return. When an Australian
blackfellow wishes to stay the sun from going down till he gets
home, he puts a sod in the fork of a tree, exactly facing the
setting sun. On the other hand, to make it go down faster, the
Australians throw sand into the air and blow with their mouths
towards the sun, perhaps to waft the lingering orb westward and
bury it under the sands into which it appears to sink at night.
As some people imagine they can hasten the sun, so others fancy
they can jog the tardy moon. The natives of New Guinea reckon
months by the moon, and some of them have been known to throw
stones and spears at the moon, in order to accelerate its progress
and so to hasten the return of their friends, who were away from
home for twelve months working on a tobacco plantation. The Malays
think that a bright glow at sunset may throw a weak person into a
fever. Hence they attempt to extinguish the glow by spitting out
water and throwing ashes at it. The Shuswap Indians believe that
they can bring on cold weather by burning the wood of a tree that
has been struck by lightning. The belief may be based on the
observation that in their country cold follows a thunder-storm.
Hence in spring, when these Indians are travelling over the snow on
high ground, they burn splinters of such wood in the fire in order
that the crust of the snow may not melt.
4. The Magical Control of the Wind
ONCE more, the savage thinks he can make the wind to blow or to
be still. When the day is hot and a Yakut has a long way to go, he
takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an animal or fish,
winds a horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick.
He then waves the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze
begins to blow. In order to procure a cool wind for nine days the
stone should first be dipped in the blood of a bird or beast and
then presented to the sun, while the sorcerer makes three turns
contrary to the course of the luminary. If a Hottentot desires the
wind to drop, he takes one of his fattest skins and hangs it on the
end of a pole, in the belief that by blowing the skin down the wind
will lose all its force and must itself fall. Fuegian wizards throw
shells against the wind to make it drop. The natives of the island
of Bibili, off New Guinea, are reputed to make wind by blowing with
their mouths. In stormy weather the Bogadjim people say, “The
Bibili folk are at it again, blowing away.” Another way of
making wind which is practised in New Guinea is to strike a
“wind-stone” lightly with a stick; to strike it hard
would bring on a hurricane. So in Scotland witches used to raise
the wind by dipping a rag in water and beating it thrice on a
stone, saying:
“I knok this rag upone this stane
To raise the wind in the divellis name,
It sall not lye till I please againe.”
In Greenland a woman in child-bed and for some time after
delivery is supposed to possess the power of laying a storm. She
has only to go out of doors, fill her mouth with air, and coming
back into the house blow it out again. In antiquity there was a
family at Corinth which enjoyed the reputation of being able to
still the raging wind; but we do not know in what manner its
members exercised a useful function, which probably earned for them
a more solid recompense than mere repute among the seafaring
population of the isthmus. Even in Christian times, under the reign
of Constantine, a certain Sopater suffered death at Constantinople
on a charge of binding the winds by magic, because it happened that
the corn-ships of Egypt and Syria were detained afar off by calms
or head-winds, to the rage and disappointment of the hungry
Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used to sell wind to storm-stayed
mariners. The wind was enclosed in three knots; if they undid the
first knot, a moderate wind sprang up; if the second, it blew half
a gale; if the third, a hurricane. Indeed the Esthonians, whose
country is divided from Finland only by an arm of the sea, still
believe in the magical powers of their northern neighbours. The
bitter winds that blow in spring from the north and north-east,
bringing ague and rheumatic inflammations in their train, are set
down by the simple Esthonian peasantry to the machinations of the
Finnish wizards and witches. In particular they regard with special
dread three days in spring to which they give the name of Days of
the Cross; one of them falls on the Eve of Ascension Day. The
people in the neighbourhood of Fellin fear to go out on these days
lest the cruel winds from Lappland should smite them dead. A
popular Esthonian song runs:
Wind of the Cross! rushing and mighty!
Heavy the blow of thy wings sweeping past!
Wild wailing wind of misfortune and sorrow,
Wizards of Finland ride by on the blast.
It is said, too, that sailors, beating up against the wind in
the Gulf of Finland, sometimes see a strange sail heave in sight
astern and overhaul them hand over hand. On she comes with a cloud
of canvas—all her studding-sails out—right in the teeth
of the wind, forging her way through the foaming billows, dashing
back the spray in sheets from her cutwater, every sail swollen to
bursting, every rope strained to cracking. Then the sailors know
that she hails from Finland.
The art of tying up the wind in three knots, so that the more
knots are loosed the stronger will blow the wind, has been
attributed to wizards in Lappland and to witches in Shetland,
Lewis, and the Isle of Man. Shetland seamen still buy winds in the
shape of knotted handkerchiefs or threads from old women who claim
to rule the storms. There are said to be ancient crones in Lerwick
now who live by selling wind. Ulysses received the winds in a
leathern bag from Aeolus, King of the Winds. The Motumotu in New
Guinea think that storms are sent by an Oiabu sorcerer; for each
wind he has a bamboo which he opens at pleasure. On the top of
Mount Agu in Togo, a district of West Africa, resides a fetish
called Bagba, who is supposed to control the wind and the rain. His
priest is said to keep the winds shut up in great pots.
Often the stormy wind is regarded as an evil being who may be
intimidated, driven away, or killed. When storms and bad weather
have lasted long and food is scarce with the Central Esquimaux,
they endeavour to conjure the tempest by making a long whip of
seaweed, armed with which they go down to the beach and strike out
in the direction of the wind, crying “Taba (it is
enough)!” Once when north-westerly winds had kept the ice
long on the coast and food was becoming scarce, the Esquimaux
performed a ceremony to make a calm. A fire was kindled on the
shore, and the men gathered round it and chanted. An old man then
stepped up to the fire and in a coaxing voice invited the demon of
the wind to come under the fire and warm himself. When he was
supposed to have arrived, a vessel of water, to which each man
present had contributed, was thrown on the flames by an old man,
and immediately a flight of arrows sped towards the spot where the
fire had been. They thought that the demon would not stay where he
had been so badly treated. To complete the effect, guns were
discharged in various directions, and the captain of a European
vessel was invited to fire on the wind with cannon. On the
twenty-first of February 1883 a similar ceremony was performed by
the Esquimaux of Point Barrow, Alaska, with the intention of
killing the spirit of the wind. Women drove the demon from their
houses with clubs and knives, with which they made passes in the
air; and the men, gathering round a fire, shot him with their
rifles and crushed him under a heavy stone the moment that steam
rose in a cloud from the smouldering embers, on which a tub of
water had just been thrown.
The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco ascribe the rush of a
whirl-wind to the passage of a spirit and they fling sticks at it
to frighten it away. When the wind blows down their huts, the
Payaguas of South America snatch up firebrands and run against the
wind, menacing it with the blazing brands, while others beat the
air with their fists to frighten the storm. When the Guaycurus are
threatened by a severe storm, the men go out armed, and the women
and children scream their loudest to intimidate the demon. During a
tempest the inhabitants of a Batak village in Sumatra have been
seen to rush from their houses armed with sword and lance. The
rajah placed himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they
hewed and hacked at the invisible foe. An old woman was observed to
be specially active in the defence of her house, slashing the air
right and left with a long sabre. In a violent thunderstorm, the
peals sounding very near, the Kayans of Borneo have been seen to
draw their swords threateningly half out of their scabbards, as if
to frighten away the demons of the storm. In Australia the huge
columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are
thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an
athletic young black ran after one of these moving columns to kill
it with boomerangs. He was away two or three hours, and came back
very weary, saying he had killed Koochee (the demon), but that
Koochee had growled at him and he must die. Of the Bedouins of
Eastern Africa it is said that “no whirl-wind ever sweeps
across the path without being pursued by a dozen savages with drawn
creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to
drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the
blast.”
In the light of these examples a story told by Herodotus, which
his modern critics have treated as a fable, is perfectly credible.
He says, without however vouching for the truth of the tale, that
once in the land of the Psylli, the modern Tripoli, the wind
blowing from the Sahara had dried up all the water-tanks. So the
people took counsel and marched in a body to make war on the south
wind. But when they entered the desert the simoon swept down on
them and buried them to a man. The story may well have been told by
one who watched them disappearing, in battle array, with drums and
cymbals beating, into the red cloud of whirling sand.
VI. Magicians as Kings
THE FOREGOING evidence may satisfy us that in many lands and
many races magic has claimed to control the great forces of nature
for the good of man. If that has been so, the practitioners of the
art must necessarily be personages of importance and influence in
any society which puts faith in their extravagant pretensions, and
it would be no matter for surprise if, by virtue of the reputation
which they enjoy and of the awe which they inspire, some of them
should attain to the highest position of authority over their
credulous fellows. In point of fact magicians appear to have often
developed into chiefs and kings.
Let us begin by looking at the lowest race of men as to whom we
possess comparatively full and accurate information, the aborigines
of Australia. These savages are ruled neither by chiefs nor kings.
So far as their tribes can be said to have a political
constitution, it is a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and
influential men, who meet in council and decide on all measures of
importance to the practical exclusion of the younger men. Their
deliberative assembly answers to the senate of later times: if we
had to coin a word for such a government of elders we might call it
a gerontocracy. The elders who in aboriginal Australia
thus meet and direct the affairs of their tribe appear to be for
the most part the headmen of their respective totem clans. Now in
Central Australia, where the desert nature of the country and the
almost complete isolation from foreign influences have retarded
progress and preserved the natives on the whole in their most
primitive state, the headmen of the various totem clans are charged
with the important task of performing magical ceremonies for the
multiplication of the totems, and as the great majority of the
totems are edible animals or plants, it follows that these men are
commonly expected to provide the people with food by means of
magic. Others have to make the rain to fall or to render other
services to the community. In short, among the tribes of Central
Australia the headmen are public magicians. Further, their most
important function is to take charge of the sacred storehouse,
usually a cleft in the rocks or a hole in the ground, where are
kept the holy stones and sticks (churinga) with which the
souls of all the people, both living and dead, are apparently
supposed to be in a manner bound up. Thus while the headmen have
certainly to perform what we should call civil duties, such as to
inflict punishment for breaches of tribal custom, their principal
functions are sacred or magical.
When we pass from Australia to New Guinea we find that, though
the natives stand at a far higher level of culture than the
Australian aborigines, the constitution of society among them is
still essentially democratic or oligarchic, and chieftainship
exists only in embryo. Thus Sir William MacGregor tells us that in
British New Guinea no one has ever arisen wise enough, bold enough,
and strong enough to become the despot even of a single district.
“The nearest approach to this has been the very distant one
of some person becoming a renowned wizard; but that has only
resulted in levying a certain amount of blackmail.”
According to a native account, the origin of the power of
Melanesian chiefs lies entirely in the belief that they have
communication with mighty ghosts, and wield that supernatural power
whereby they can bring the influence of the ghosts to bear. If a
chief imposed a fine, it was paid because the people universally
dreaded his ghostly power, and firmly believed that he could
inflict calamity and sickness upon such as resisted him. As soon as
any considerable number of his people began to disbelieve in his
influence with the ghosts, his power to levy fines was shaken.
Again, Dr. George Brown tells us that in New Britain “a
ruling chief was always supposed to exercise priestly functions,
that is, he professed to be in constant communication with the
tebarans (spirits), and through their influence he was
enabled to bring rain or sunshine, fair winds or foul ones,
sickness or health, success or disaster in war, and generally to
procure any blessing or curse for which the applicant was willing
to pay a sufficient price.”
Still rising in the scale of culture we come to Africa, where
both the chieftainship and the kingship are fully developed; and
here the evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the
magician, and especially out of the rain-maker, is comparatively
plentiful. Thus among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa,
the original form of government was a family republic, but the
enormous power of the sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon
raised them to the rank of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three
chiefs living in the country in 1894 two were much dreaded as
magicians, and the wealth of cattle they possessed came to them
almost wholly in the shape of presents bestowed for their services
in that capacity. Their principal art was that of rain-making. The
chiefs of the Wataturu, another people of East Africa, are said to
be nothing but sorcerers destitute of any direct political
influence. Again, among the Wagogo of East Africa the main power of
the chiefs, we are told, is derived from their art of rain-making.
If a chief cannot make rain himself, he must procure it from some
one who can.
Again, among the tribes of the Upper Nile the medicine-men are
generally the chiefs. Their authority rests above all upon their
supposed power of making rain, for “rain is the one thing
which matters to the people in those districts, as if it does not
come down at the right time it means untold hardships for the
community. It is therefore small wonder that men more cunning than
their fellows should arrogate to themselves the power of producing
it, or that having gained such a reputation, they should trade on
the credulity of their simpler neighbours.” Hence “most
of the chiefs of these tribes are rain-makers, and enjoy a
popularity in proportion to their powers to give rain to their
people at the proper season… . Rain-making chiefs always
build their villages on the slopes of a fairly high hill, as they
no doubt know that the hills attract the clouds, and that they are,
therefore, fairly safe in their weather forecasts.” Each of
these rain-makers has a number of rain-stones, such as
rock-crystal, aventurine, and amethyst, which he keeps in a pot.
When he wishes to produce rain he plunges the stones in water, and
taking in his hand a peeled cane, which is split at the top, he
beckons with it to the clouds to come or waves them away in the way
they should go, muttering an incantation the while. Or he pours
water and the entrails of a sheep or goat into a hollow in a stone
and then sprinkles the water towards the sky. Though the chief
acquires wealth by the exercise of his supposed magical powers, he
often, perhaps generally, comes to a violent end; for in time of
drought the angry people assemble and kill him, believing that it
is he who prevents the rain from falling. Yet the office is usually
hereditary and passes from father to son. Among the tribes which
cherish these beliefs and observe these customs are the Latuka,
Bari, Laluba, and Lokoiya.
In Central Africa, again, the Lendu tribe, to the west of Lake
Albert, firmly believe that certain people possess the power of
making rain. Among them the rain-maker either is a chief or almost
invariably becomes one. The Banyoro also have a great respect for
the dispensers of rain, whom they load with a profusion of gifts.
The great dispenser, he who has absolute and uncontrollable power
over the rain, is the king; but he can depute his power to other
persons, so that the benefit may be distributed and the heavenly
water laid on over the various parts of the kingdom.
In Western as well as in Eastern and Central Africa we meet with
the same union of chiefly with magical functions. Thus in the Fan
tribe the strict distinction between chief and medicine-man does
not exist. The chief is also a medicine-man and a smith to boot;
for the Fans esteem the smith’s craft sacred, and none but
chiefs may meddle with it.
As to the relation between the offices of chief and rain-maker
in South Africa a well-informed writer observes: “In very old
days the chief was the great Rain-maker of the tribe. Some chiefs
allowed no one else to compete with them, lest a successful
Rain-maker should be chosen as chief. There was also another
reason: the Rain-maker was sure to become a rich man if he gained a
great reputation, and it would manifestly never do for the chief to
allow any one to be too rich. The Rain-maker exerts tremendous
control over the people, and so it would be most important to keep
this function connected with royalty. Tradition always places the
power of making rain as the fundamental glory of ancient chiefs and
heroes, and it seems probable that it may have been the origin of
chieftainship. The man who made the rain would naturally become the
chief. In the same way Chaka [the famous Zulu despot] used to
declare that he was the only diviner in the country, for if he
allowed rivals his life would be insecure.” Similarly
speaking of the South African tribes in general, Dr. Moffat says
that “the rain-maker is in the estimation of the people no
mean personage, possessing an influence over the minds of the
people superior even to that of the king, who is likewise compelled
to yield to the dictates of this arch-official.”
The foregoing evidence renders it probable that in Africa the
king has often been developed out of the public magician, and
especially out of the rain-maker. The unbounded fear which the
magician inspires and the wealth which he amasses in the exercise
of his profession may both be supposed to have contributed to his
promotion. But if the career of a magician and especially of a
rain-maker offers great rewards to the successful practitioner of
the art, it is beset with many pitfalls into which the unskilful or
unlucky artist may fall. The position of the public sorcerer is
indeed a very precarious one; for where the people firmly believe
that he has it in his power to make the rain to fall, the sun to
shine, and the fruits of the earth to grow, they naturally impute
drought and dearth to his culpable negligence or wilful obstinacy,
and they punish him accordingly. Hence in Africa the chief who
fails to procure rain is often exiled or killed. Thus, in some
parts of West Africa, when prayers and offerings presented to the
king have failed to procure rain, his subjects bind him with ropes
and take him by force to the grave of his forefathers that he may
obtain from them the needed rain. The Banjars in West Africa
ascribe to their king the power of causing rain or fine weather. So
long as the weather is fine they load him with presents of grain
and cattle. But if long drought or rain threatens to spoil the
crops, they insult and beat him till the weather changes. When the
harvest fails or the surf on the coast is too heavy to allow of
fishing, the people of Loango accuse their king of a “bad
heart” and depose him. On the Grain Coast the high priest or
fetish king, who bears the title of Bodio, is responsible for the
health of the community, the fertility of the earth, and the
abundance of fish in the sea and rivers; and if the country suffers
in any of these respects the Bodio is deposed from his office. In
Ussukuma, a great district on the southern bank of the Victoria
Nyanza, “the rain and locust question is part and parcel of
the Sultan’s government. He, too, must know how to make rain
and drive away the locusts. If he and his medicine-men are unable
to accomplish this, his whole existence is at stake in times of
distress. On a certain occasion, when the rain so greatly desired
by the people did not come, the Sultan was simply driven out (in
Ututwa, near Nassa). The people, in fact, hold that rulers must
have power over Nature and her phenomena.” Again, we are told
of the natives of the Nyanaza region generally that “they are
persuaded that rain only falls as a result of magic, and the
important duty of causing it to descend devolves on the chief of
the tribe. If rain does not come at the proper time, everybody
complains. More than one petty king has been banished his country
because of drought.” Among the Latuka of the Upper Nile, when
the crops are withering, and all the efforts of the chief to draw
down rain have proved fruitless, the people commonly attack him by
night, rob him of all he possesses, and drive him away. But often
they kill him.
In many other parts of the world kings have been expected to
regulate the course of nature for the good of their people and have
been punished if they failed to do so. It appears that the
Scythians, when food was scarce, used to put their king in bonds.
In ancient Egypt the sacred kings were blamed for the failure of
the crops, but the sacred beasts were also held responsible for the
course of nature. When pestilence and other calamities had fallen
on the land, in consequence of a long and severe drought, the
priests took the animals by night and threatened them, but if the
evil did not abate they slew the beasts. On the coral island of
Niue¯ or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, there formerly
reigned a line of kings. But as the kings were also high priests,
and were supposed to make the food grow, the people became angry
with them in times of scarcity and killed them; till at last, as
one after another was killed, no one would be king, and the
monarchy came to an end. Ancient Chinese writers inform us that in
Corea the blame was laid on the king whenever too much or too
little rain fell and the crops did not ripen. Some said that he
must be deposed, others that he must be slain.
Among the American Indians the furthest advance towards
civilisation was made under the monarchical and theocratic
governments of Mexico and Peru; but we know too little of the early
history of these countries to say whether the predecessors of their
deified kings were medicine-men or not. Perhaps a trace of such a
succession may be detected in the oath which the Mexican kings,
when they mounted the throne, swore that they would make the sun to
shine, the clouds to give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth
to bring forth fruits in abundance. Certainly, in aboriginal
America the sorcerer or medicine-man, surrounded by a halo of
mystery and an atmosphere of awe, was a personage of great
influence and importance, and he may well have developed into a
chief or king in many tribes, though positive evidence of such a
development appears to be lacking. Thus Catlin tells us that in
North America the medicine-men “are valued as dignitaries in
the tribe, and the greatest respect is paid to them by the whole
community; not only for their skill in their materia
medica, but more especially for their tact in magic and
mysteries, in which they all deal to a very great extent… .
In all tribes their doctors are conjurers—are
magicians—are sooth-sayers, and I had like to have said
high-priests, inasmuch as they superintend and conduct all their
religious ceremonies; they are looked upon by all as oracles of the
nation. In all councils of war and peace, they have a seat with the
chiefs, are regularly consulted before any public step is taken,
and the greatest deference and respect is paid to their
opinions.” Similarly in California “the shaman was, and
still is, perhaps the most important individual among the Maidu. In
the absence of any definite system of government, the word of a
shaman has great weight: as a class they are regarded with much
awe, and as a rule are obeyed much more than the chief.”
In South America also the magicians or medicine-men seem to have
been on the highroad to chieftainship or kingship. One of the
earliest settlers on the coast of Brazil, the Frenchman Thevet,
reports that the Indians “hold these pages (or
medicine-men) in such honour and reverence that they adore, or
rather idolise them. You may see the common folk go to meet them,
prostrate themselves, and pray to them, saying, ‘Grant that I
be not ill, that I do not die, neither I nor my children,’ or
some such request. And he answers, ‘You shall not die, you
shall not be ill,’ and such like replies. But sometimes if it
happens that these pages do not tell the truth, and things
turn out otherwise than they predicted, the people make no scruple
of killing them as unworthy of the title and dignity of
pages.” Among the Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco
every clan has its cazique or chief, but he possesses little
authority. In virtue of his office he has to make many presents, so
he seldom grows rich and is generally more shabbily clad than any
of his subjects. “As a matter of fact the magician is the man
who has most power in his hands, and he is accustomed to receive
presents instead of to give them.” It is the magician’s
duty to bring down misfortune and plagues on the enemies of his
tribe, and to guard his own people against hostile magic. For these
services he is well paid, and by them he acquires a position of
great influence and authority.
Throughout the Malay region the rajah or king is commonly
regarded with superstitious veneration as the possessor of
supernatural powers, and there are grounds for thinking that he
too, like apparently so many African chiefs, has been developed out
of a simple magician. At the present day the Malays firmly believe
that the king possesses a personal influence over the works of
nature, such as the growth of the crops and the bearing of
fruit-trees. The same prolific virtue is supposed to reside, though
in a lesser degree, in his delegates, and even in the persons of
Europeans who chance to have charge of districts. Thus in Selangor,
one of the native states of the Malay Peninsula, the success or
failure of the rice-crops is often attributed to a change of
district officers. The Toorateyas of Southern Celebes hold that the
prosperity of the rice depends on the behaviour of their princes,
and that bad government, by which they mean a government which does
not conform to ancient custom, will result in a failure of the
crops.
The Dyaks of Sarawak believed that their famous English ruler,
Rajah Brooke, was endowed with a certain magical virtue which, if
properly applied, could render the rice-crops abundant. Hence when
he visited a tribe, they used to bring him the seed which they
intended to sow next year, and he fertilised it by shaking over it
the women’s necklaces, which had been previously dipped in a
special mixture. And when he entered a village, the women would
wash and bathe his feet, first with water, and then with the milk
of a young coco-nut, and lastly with water again, and all this
water which had touched his person they preserved for the purpose
of distributing it on their farms, believing that it ensured an
abundant harvest. Tribes which were too far off for him to visit
used to send him a small piece of white cloth and a little gold or
silver, and when these things had been impregnated by his
generative virtue they buried them in their fields, and confidently
expected a heavy crop. Once when a European remarked that the
rice-crops of the Samban tribe were thin, the chief immediately
replied that they could not be otherwise, since Rajah Brooke had
never visited them, and he begged that Mr. Brooke might be induced
to visit his tribe and remove the sterility of their land.
The belief that kings possess magical or supernatural powers by
virtue of which they can fertilise the earth and confer other
benefits on their subjects would seem to have been shared by the
ancestors of all the Aryan races from India to Ireland, and it has
left clear traces of itself in our own country down to modern
times. Thus the ancient Hindoo law-book called The Laws of
Manu describes as follows the effects of a good king’s
reign: “In that country where the king avoids taking the
property of mortal sinners, men are born in due time and are
long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen spring up, each as it
was sown, and the children die not, and no misshaped offspring is
born.” In Homeric Greece kings and chiefs were spoken of as
sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine and their chariots
sacred; and it was thought that the reign of a good king caused the
black earth to bring forth wheat and barley, the trees to be loaded
with fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the sea to yield fish. In
the Middle Ages, when Waldemar I., King of Denmark, travelled in
Germany, mothers brought their infants and husbandmen their seed
for him to lay his hands on, thinking that children would both
thrive the better for the royal touch, and for a like reason
farmers asked him to throw the seed for them. It was the belief of
the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the customs of
their ancestors, the seasons were mild, the crops plentiful, the
cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and the fruit trees
had to be propped up on account of the weight of their produce. A
canon attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that
attend the reign of a just king “fine weather, calm seas,
crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit.” On the other
hand, dearth, dryness of cows, blight of fruit, and scarcity of
corn were regarded as infallible proofs that the reigning king was
bad.
Perhaps the last relic of such superstitions which lingered
about our English kings was the notion that they could heal
scrofula by their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the
King’s Evil. Queen Elizabeth often exercised this miraculous
gift of healing. On Midsummer Day 1633, Charles the First cured a
hundred patients at one swoop in the chapel royal at Holyrood. But
it was under his son Charles the Second that the practice seems to
have attained its highest vogue. It is said that in the course of
his reign Charles the Second touched near a hundred thousand
persons for scrofula. The press to get near him was sometimes
terrific. On one occasion six or seven of those who came to be
healed were trampled to death. The cool-headed William the Third
contemptuously refused to lend himself to the hocuspocus; and when
his palace was besieged by the usual unsavoury crowd, he ordered
them to be turned away with a dole. On the only occasion when he
was importuned into laying his hand on a patient, he said to him,
“God give you better health and more sense.” However,
the practice was continued, as might have been expected, by the
dull bigot James the Second and his dull daughter Queen Anne.
The kings of France also claimed to possess the same gift of
healing by touch, which they are said to have derived from Clovis
or from St. Louis, while our English kings inherited it from Edward
the Confessor. Similarly the savage chiefs of Tonga were believed
to heal scrofula and cases of indurated liver by the touch of their
feet; and the cure was strictly homoeopathic, for the disease as
well as the cure was thought to be caused by contact with the royal
person or with anything that belonged to it.
On the whole, then, we seem to be justified in inferring that in
many parts of the world the king is the lineal successor of the old
magician or medicine-man. When once a special class of sorcerers
has been segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the
discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are
believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and power,
till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings. But the great
social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in
despotism is attended by an intellectual revolution which affects
both the conception and the functions of royalty. For as time goes
on, the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent to the
acuter minds and is slowly displaced by religion; in other words,
the magician gives way to the priest, who, renouncing the attempt
to control directly the processes of nature for the good of man,
seeks to attain the same end indirectly by appealing to the gods to
do for him what he no longer fancies he can do for himself. Hence
the king, starting as a magician, tends gradually to exchange the
practice of magic for the priestly functions of prayer and
sacrifice. And while the distinction between the human and the
divine is still imperfectly drawn, it is often imagined that men
may themselves attain to godhead, not merely after their death, but
in their lifetime, through the temporary or permanent possession of
their whole nature by a great and powerful spirit. No class of the
community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the
possible incarnation of a god in human form. The doctrine of that
incarnation, and with it the theory of the divinity of kings in the
strict sense of the word, will form the subject of the following
chapter.
VII. Incarnate Human Gods
THE INSTANCES which in the preceding chapters I have drawn from
the beliefs and practices of rude peoples all over the world, may
suffice to prove that the savage fails to recognise those
limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us.
In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less
with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the
distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has
scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings
endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in
degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the
course of history. By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are
not regarded as greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may
be frightened and coerced by him into doing his will. At this stage
of thought the world is viewed as a great democracy; all beings in
it, whether natural or supernatural, are supposed to stand on a
footing of tolerable equality. But with the growth of his knowledge
man learns to realise more clearly the vastness of nature and his
own littleness and feebleness in presence of it. The recognition of
his helplessness does not, however, carry with it a corresponding
belief in the impotence of those supernatural beings with which his
imagination peoples the universe. On the contrary, it enhances his
conception of their power. For the idea of the world as a system of
impersonal forces acting in accordance with fixed and invariable
laws has not yet fully dawned or darkened upon him. The germ of the
idea he certainly has, and he acts upon it, not only in magic art,
but in much of the business of daily life. But the idea remains
undeveloped, and so far as he attempts to explain the world he
lives in, he pictures it as the manifestation of conscious will and
personal agency. If then he feels himself to be so frail and
slight, how vast and powerful must he deem the beings who control
the gigantic machinery of nature! Thus as his old sense of equality
with the gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at the same time the hope
of directing the course of nature by his own unaided resources,
that is, by magic, and looks more and more to the gods as the sole
repositories of those supernatural powers which he once claimed to
share with them. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer
and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and
magic, which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is
gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a
black art. It is not regarded as an encroachment, at once vain and
impious, on the domain of the gods, and as such encounters the
steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation and influence
rise or fall with those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period
the distinction between religion and superstition has emerged, we
find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and
enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of
the superstitious and ignorant. But when, still later, the
conception of the elemental forces as personal agents is giving way
to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it
implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of
cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the
obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by
investigating the causal sequences in nature, directly prepares the
way for science. Alchemy leads up to chemistry.
The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine
or supernatural powers, belongs essentially to that earlier period
of religious history in which gods and men are still viewed as
beings of much the same order, and before they are divided by the
impassable gulf which, to later thought, opens out between them.
Strange, therefore, as may seem to us the idea of a god incarnate
in human form, it has nothing very startling for early man, who
sees in a man-god or a god-man only a higher degree of the same
supernatural powers which he arrogates in perfect good faith to
himself. Nor does he draw any very sharp distinction between a god
and a powerful sorcerer. His gods are often merely invisible
magicians who behind the veil of nature work the same sort of
charms and incantations which the human magician works in a visible
and bodily form among his fellows. And as the gods are commonly
believed to exhibit themselves in the likeness of men to their
worshippers, it is easy for the magician, with his supposed
miraculous powers, to acquire the reputation of being an incarnate
deity. Thus beginning as little more than a simple conjurer, the
medicine-man or magician tends to blossom out into a full-blown god
and king in one. Only in speaking of him as a god we must beware of
importing into the savage conception of deity those very abstract
and complex ideas which we attach to the term. Our ideas on this
profound subject are the fruit of a long intellectual and moral
evolution, and they are so far from being shared by the savage that
he cannot even understand them when they are explained to him. Much
of the controversy which has raged as to the religion of the lower
races has sprung merely from a mutual misunderstanding. The savage
does not understand the thoughts of the civilised man, and few
civilised men understand the thoughts of the savage. When the
savage uses his word for god, he has in his mind a being of a
certain sort: when the civilised man uses his word for god, he has
in his mind a being of a very different sort; and if, as commonly
happens, the two men are equally unable to place themselves at the
other’s point of view, nothing but confusion and mistakes can
result from their discussions. If we civilised men insist on
limiting the name of God to that particular conception of the
divine nature which we ourselves have formed, then we must confess
that the savage has no god at all. But we shall adhere more closely
to the facts of history if we allow most of the higher savages at
least to possess a rudimentary notion of certain supernatural
beings who may fittingly be called gods, though not in the full
sense in which we use the word. That rudimentary notion represents
in all probability the germ out of which the civilised peoples have
gradually evolved their own high conceptions of deity; and if we
could trace the whole course of religious development, we might
find that the chain which links our idea of the Godhead with that
of the savage is one and unbroken.
With these explanations and cautions I will now adduce some
examples of gods who have been believed by their worshippers to be
incarnate in living human beings, whether men or women. The persons
in whom a deity is thought to reveal himself are by no means always
kings or descendants of kings; the supposed incarnation may take
place even in men of the humblest rank. In India, for example, one
human god started in life as a cotton-bleacher and another as the
son of a carpenter. I shall therefore not draw my examples
exclusively from royal personages, as I wish to illustrate the
general principle of the deification of living men, in other words,
the incarnation of a deity in human form. Such incarnate gods are
common in rude society. The incarnation may be temporary or
permanent. In the former case, the incarnation—commonly known
as inspiration or possession—reveals itself in supernatural
knowledge rather than in supernatural power. In other words, its
usual manifestations are divination and prophecy rather than
miracles. On the other hand, when the incarnation is not merely
temporary, when the divine spirit has permanently taken up its
abode in a human body, the god-man is usually expected to vindicate
his character by working miracles. Only we have to remember that by
men at this stage of thought miracles are not considered as
breaches of natural law. Not conceiving the existence of natural
law, primitive man cannot conceive a breach of it. A miracle is to
him merely an unusually striking manifestation of a common
power.
The belief in temporary incarnation or inspiration is
world-wide. Certain persons are supposed to be possessed from time
to time by a spirit or deity; while the possession lasts, their own
personality lies in abeyance, the presence of the spirit is
revealed by convulsive shiverings and shakings of the man’s
whole body, by wild gestures and excited looks, all of which are
referred, not to the man himself, but to the spirit which has
entered into him; and in this abnormal state all his utterances are
accepted as the voice of the god or spirit dwelling in him and
speaking through him. Thus, for example, in the Sandwich Islands,
the king, personating the god, uttered the responses of the oracle
from his concealment in a frame of wicker-work. But in the southern
islands of the Pacific the god “frequently entered the
priest, who, inflated as it were with the divinity, ceased to act
or speak as a voluntary agent, but moved and spoke as entirely
under supernatural influence. In this respect there was a striking
resemblance between the rude oracles of the Polynesians, and those
of the celebrated nations of ancient Greece. As soon as the god was
supposed to have entered the priest, the latter became violently
agitated, and worked himself up to the highest pitch of apparent
frenzy, the muscles of the limbs seemed convulsed, the body
swelled, the countenance became terrific, the features distorted,
and the eyes wild and strained. In this state he often rolled on
the earth, foaming at the mouth, as if labouring under the
influence of the divinity by whom he was possessed, and, in shrill
cries, and violent and often indistinct sounds, revealed the will
of the god. The priests, who were attending, and versed in the
mysteries, received, and reported to the people, the declarations
which had been thus received. When the priest had uttered the
response of the oracle, the violent paroxysm gradually subsided,
and comparative composure ensued. The god did not, however, always
leave him as soon as the communication had been made. Sometimes the
same taura, or priest, continued for two or three days
possessed by the spirit or deity; a piece of a native cloth, of a
peculiar kind, worn round one arm, was an indication of
inspiration, or of the indwelling of the god with the individual
who wore it. The acts of the man during this period were considered
as those of the god, and hence the greatest attention was paid to
his expressions, and the whole of his deportment… . When
uruhia (under the inspiration of the spirit), the priest
was always considered as sacred as the god, and was called, during
this period, atua, god, though at other times only
denominated taura or priest.”
But examples of such temporary inspiration are so common in
every part of the world and are now so familiar through books on
ethnology that it is needless to multiply illustrations of the
general principle. It may be well, however, to refer to two
particular modes of producing temporary inspiration, because they
are perhaps less known than some others, and because we shall have
occasion to refer to them later on. One of these modes of producing
inspiration is by sucking the fresh blood of a sacrificed victim.
In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed
by night once a month; a woman, who had to observe a rule of
chastity, tasted the blood of the lamb, and thus being inspired by
the god she prophesied or divined. At Aegira in Achaia the
priestess of Earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she
descended into the cave to prophesy. Similarly among the
Kuruvikkarans, a class of bird-catchers and beggars in Southern
India, the goddess Kali is believed to descend upon the priest, and
he gives oracular replies after sucking the blood which streams
from the cut throat of a goat. At a festival of the Alfoors of
Minahassa, in Northern Celebes, after a pig has been killed, the
priest rushes furiously at it, thrusts his head into the carcase,
and drinks of the blood. Then he is dragged away from it by force
and set on a chair, whereupon he begins to prophesy how the
rice-crop will turn out that year. A second time he runs at the
carcase and drinks of the blood; a second time he is forced into
the chair and continues his predictions. It is thought that there
is a spirit in him which possesses the power of prophecy.
The other mode of producing temporary inspiration, to which I
shall here refer, consists in the use of a sacred tree or plant.
Thus in the Hindoo Koosh a fire is kindled with twigs of the sacred
cedar; and the Dainyal or sibyl, with a cloth over her head,
inhales the thick pungent smoke till she is seized with convulsions
and falls senseless to the ground. Soon she rises and raises a
shrill chant, which is caught up and loudly repeated by her
audience. So Apollo’s prophetess ate the sacred laurel and
was fumigated with it before she prophesied. The Bacchanals ate
ivy, and their inspired fury was by some believed to be due to the
exciting and intoxicating properties of the plant. In Uganda the
priest, in order to be inspired by his god, smokes a pipe of
tobacco fiercely till he works himself into a frenzy; the loud
excited tones in which he then talks are recognised as the voice of
the god speaking through him. In Madura, an island off the north
coast of Java, each spirit has its regular medium, who is oftener a
woman than a man. To prepare herself for the reception of the
spirit she inhales the fumes of incense, sitting with her head over
a smoking censer. Gradually she falls into a sort of trance
accompanied by shrieks, grimaces, and violent spasms. The spirit is
now supposed to have entered into her, and when she grows calmer
her words are regarded as oracular, being the utterances of the
indwelling spirit, while her own soul is temporarily absent.
The person temporarily inspired is believed to acquire, not
merely divine knowledge, but also, at least occasionally, divine
power. In Cambodia, when an epidemic breaks out, the inhabitants of
several villages unite and go with a band of music at their head to
look for the man whom the local god is supposed to have chosen for
his temporary incarnation. When found, the man is conducted to the
altar of the god, where the mystery of incarnation takes place.
Then the man becomes an object of veneration to his fellows, who
implore him to protect the village against the plague. A certain
image of Apollo, which stood in a sacred cave at Hylae near
Magnesia, was thought to impart superhuman strength. Sacred men,
inspired by it, leaped down precipices, tore up huge trees by the
roots, and carried them on their backs along the narrowest defiles.
The feats performed by inspired dervishes belong to the same
class.
Thus far we have seen that the savage, failing to discern the
limits of his ability to control nature, ascribes to himself and to
all men certain powers which we should now call supernatural.
Further, we have seen that, over and above this general
supernaturalism, some persons are supposed to be inspired for short
periods by a divine spirit, and thus temporarily to enjoy the
knowledge and power of the indwelling deity. From beliefs like
these it is an easy step to the conviction that certain men are
permanently possessed by a deity, or in some other undefined way
are endued with so high a degree of supernatural power as to be
ranked as gods and to receive the homage of prayer and sacrifice.
Sometimes these human gods are restricted to purely supernatural or
spiritual functions. Sometimes they exercise supreme political
power in addition. In the latter case they are kings as well as
gods, and the government is a theocracy. Thus in the Marquesas or
Washington Islands there was a class of men who were deified in
their lifetime. They were supposed to wield a supernatural power
over the elements: they could give abundant harvests or smite the
ground with barrenness; and they could inflict disease or death.
Human sacrifices were offered to them to avert their wrath. There
were not many of them, at the most one or two in each island. They
lived in mystic seclusion. Their powers were sometimes, but not
always, hereditary. A missionary has described one of these human
gods from personal observation. The god was a very old man who
lived in a large house within an enclosure. In the house was a kind
of altar, and on the beams of the house and on the trees round it
were hung human skeletons, head down. No one entered the enclosure
except the persons dedicated to the service of the god; only on
days when human victims were sacrificed might ordinary people
penetrate into the precinct. This human god received more
sacrifices than all the other gods; often he would sit on a sort of
scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human
victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he
inspired was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and
offerings were sent to him from every side. Again, of the South Sea
Islands in general we are told that each island had a man who
represented or personified the divinity. Such men were called gods,
and their substance was confounded with that of the deity. The
man-god was sometimes the king himself; oftener he was a priest or
subordinate chief.
The ancient Egyptians, far from restricting their adoration to
cats and dogs and such small deer, very liberally extended it to
men. One of these human deities resided at the village of Anabis,
and burnt sacrifices were offered to him on the altars; after
which, says Porphyry, he would eat his dinner just as if he were an
ordinary mortal. In classical antiquity the Sicilian philosopher
Empedocles gave himself out to be not merely a wizard but a god.
Addressing his fellow-citizens in verse he said:
“O friends, in this great city that climbs the yellow
slope
Of Agrigentum’s citadel, who make good works your
scope,
Who offer to the stranger a haven quiet and fair,
All hail! Among you honoured I walk with lofty air.
With garlands, blooming garlands you crown my noble
brow,
A mortal man no longer, a deathless godhead now.
Where e’er I go, the people crowd round and worship
pay,
And thousands follow seeking to learn the better way.
Some crave prophetic visions, some smit with anguish
sore
Would fain hear words of comfort and suffer pain no
more.”
He asserted that he could teach his disciples how to make the
wind to blow or be still, the rain to fall and the sun to shine,
how to banish sickness and old age and to raise the dead. When
Demetrius Poliorcetes restored the Athenian democracy in 307 B.C.,
the Athenians decreed divine honours to him and his father
Antigonus, both of them being then alive, under the title of the
Saviour Gods. Altars were set up to the Saviours, and a priest
appointed to attend to their worship. The people went forth to meet
their deliverer with hymns and dances, with garlands and incense
and libations; they lined the streets and sang that he was the only
true god, for the other gods slept, or dwelt far away, or were not.
In the words of a contemporary poet, which were chanted in public
and sung in private:
“Of all the gods the greatest and the dearest
To the city are come.
For Demeter and Demetrius
Together time has brought.
She comes to hold the Maiden’s awful rites,
And he joyous and fair and laughing,
As befits a god.
A glorious sight, with all his friends about him,
He in their midst,
They like to stars, and he the sun.
Son of Poseidon the mighty, Aphrodite’s son,
All hail!
The other gods dwell far away,
Or have no ears,
Or are not, or pay us no heed.
But thee we present see,
No god of wood or stone, but godhead true.
Therefore to thee we pray.”
The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in
women, and accordingly consulted them as oracles. Their sacred
women, we are told, looked on the eddying rivers and listened to
the murmur or the roar of the water, and from the sight and sound
foretold what would come to pass. But often the veneration of the
men went further, and they worshipped women as true and living
goddesses. For example, in the reign of Vespasian a certain Veleda,
of the tribe of the Bructeri, was commonly held to be a deity, and
in that character reigned over her people, her sway being
acknowledged far and wide. She lived in a tower on the river Lippe,
a tributary of the Rhine. When the people of Cologne sent to make a
treaty with her, the ambassadors were not admitted to her presence;
the negotiations were conducted through a minister, who acted as
the mouthpiece of her divinity and reported her oracular
utterances. The example shows how easily among our rude forefathers
the ideas of divinity and royalty coalesced. It is said that among
the Getae down to the beginning of our era there was always a man
who personified a god and was called God by the people. He dwelt on
a sacred mountain and acted as adviser to the king.
According to the early Portuguese historian, Dos Santos, the
Zimbas, or Muzimbas, a people of South-eastern Africa, “do
not adore idols or recognize any god, but instead they venerate and
honour their king, whom they regard as a divinity, and they say he
is the greatest and best in the world. And the said king says of
himself that he alone is god of the earth, for which reason if it
rains when he does not wish it to do so, or is too hot, he shoots
arrows at the sky for not obeying him.” The Mashona of
Southern Africa informed their bishop that they had once had a god,
but that the Matabeles had driven him away. “This last was in
reference to a curious custom in some villages of keeping a man
they called their god. He seemed to be consulted by the people and
had presents given to him. There was one at a village belonging to
a chief Magondi, in the old days. We were asked not to fire off any
guns near the village, or we should frighten him away.” This
Mashona god was formerly bound to render an annual tribute to the
king of the Matabele in the shape of four black oxen and one dance.
A missionary has seen and described the deity discharging the
latter part of his duty in front of the royal hut. For three mortal
hours, without a break, to the banging of a tambourine, the click
of castanettes, and the drone of a monotonous song, the swarthy god
engaged in a frenzied dance, crouching on his hams like a tailor,
sweating like a pig, and bounding about with an agility which
testified to the strength and elasticity of his divine legs.
The Baganda of Central Africa believed in a god of Lake Nyanza,
who sometimes took up his abode in a man or woman. The incarnate
god was much feared by all the people, including the king and the
chiefs. When the mystery of incarnation had taken place, the man,
or rather the god, removed about a mile and a half from the margin
of the lake, and there awaited the appearance of the new moon
before he engaged in his sacred duties. From the moment that the
crescent moon appeared faintly in the sky, the king and all his
subjects were at the command of the divine man, or Lubare
(god), as he was called, who reigned supreme not only in matters of
faith and ritual, but also in questions of war and state policy. He
was consulted as an oracle; by his word he could inflict or heal
sickness, withhold rain, and cause famine. Large presents were made
him when his advice was sought. The chief of Urua, a large region
to the west of Lake Tanganyika, “arrogates to himself divine
honours and power and pretends to abstain from food for days
without feeling its necessity; and, indeed, declares that as a god
he is altogether above requiring food and only eats, drinks, and
smokes for the pleasure it affords him.” Among the Gallas,
when a woman grows tired of the cares of housekeeping, she begins
to talk incoherently and to demean herself extravagantly. This is a
sign of the descent of the holy spirit Callo upon her. Immediately
her husband prostrates himself and adores her; she ceases to bear
the humble title of wife and is called “Lord”; domestic
duties have no further claim on her, and her will is a divine
law.
The king of Loango is honoured by his people “as though he
were a god; and he is called Sambee and Pango, which mean god. They
believe that he can let them have rain when he likes; and once a
year, in December, which is the time they want rain, the people
come to beg of him to grant it to them.” On this occasion the
king, standing on his throne, shoots an arrow into the air, which
is supposed to bring on rain. Much the same is said of the king of
Mombasa. Down to a few years ago, when his spiritual reign on earth
was brought to an abrupt end by the carnal weapons of English
marines and bluejackets, the king of Benin was the chief object of
worship in his dominions. “He occupies a higher post here
than the Pope does in Catholic Europe; for he is not only
God’s vicegerent upon earth, but a god himself, whose
subjects both obey and adore him as such, although I believe their
adoration to arise rather from fear than love.” The king of
Iddah told the English officers of the Niger Expedition, “God
made me after his own image; I am all the same as God; and he
appointed me a king.”
A peculiarly bloodthirsty monarch of Burma, by name Badonsachen,
whose very countenance reflected the inbred ferocity of his nature,
and under whose reign more victims perished by the executioner than
by the common enemy, conceived the notion that he was something
more than mortal, and that this high distinction had been granted
him as a reward for his numerous good works. Accordingly he laid
aside the title of king and aimed at making himself a god. With
this view, and in imitation of Buddha, who, before being advanced
to the rank of a divinity, had quitted his royal palace and
seraglio and retired from the world, Badonsachen withdrew from his
palace to an immense pagoda, the largest in the empire, which he
had been engaged in constructing for many years. Here he held
conferences with the most learned monks, in which he sought to
persuade them that the five thousand years assigned for the
observance of the law of Buddha were now elapsed, and that he
himself was the god who was destined to appear after that period,
and to abolish the old law by substituting his own. But to his
great mortification many of the monks undertook to demonstrate the
contrary; and this disappointment, combined with his love of power
and his impatience under the restraints of an ascetic life, quickly
disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and drove him back to his
palace and his harem. The king of Siam “is venerated equally
with a divinity. His subjects ought not to look him in the face;
they prostrate themselves before him when he passes, and appear
before him on their knees, their elbows resting on the
ground.” There is a special language devoted to his sacred
person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or
of him. Even the natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar
vocabulary. The hairs of the monarch’s head, the soles of his
feet, the breath of his body, indeed every single detail of his
person, both outward and inward, have particular names. When he
eats or drinks, sleeps or walks, a special word indicates that
these acts are being performed by the sovereign, and such words
cannot possibly be applied to the acts of any other person
whatever. There is no word in the Siamese language by which any
creature of higher rank or greater dignity than a monarch can be
described; and the missionaries, when they speak of God, are forced
to use the native word for king.
But perhaps no country in the world has been so prolific of
human gods as India; nowhere has the divine grace been poured out
in a more liberal measure on all classes of society from kings down
to milkmen. Thus amongst the Todas, a pastoral people of the
Neilgherry Hills of Southern India, the dairy is a sanctuary, and
the milkman who attends to it has been described as a god. On being
asked whether the Todas salute the sun, one of these divine milkmen
replied, “Those poor fellows do so, but I,” tapping his
chest, “I, a god! why should I salute the sun?” Every
one, even his own father, prostrates himself before the milkman,
and no one would dare to refuse him anything. No human being,
except another milkman, may touch him; and he gives oracles to all
who consult him, speaking with the voice of a god.
Further, in India “every king is regarded as little short
of a present god.” The Hindoo law-book of Manu goes farther
and says that “even an infant king must not be despised from
an idea that he is a mere mortal; for he is a great deity in human
form.” There is said to have been a sect in Orissa some years
ago who worshipped the late Queen Victoria in her lifetime as their
chief divinity. And to this day in India all living persons
remarkable for great strength or valour or for supposed miraculous
powers run the risk of being worshipped as gods. Thus, a sect in
the Punjaub worshipped a deity whom they called Nikkal Sen. This
Nikkal Sen was no other than the redoubted General Nicholson, and
nothing that the general could do or say damped the ardour of his
adorers. The more he punished them, the greater grew the religious
awe with which they worshipped him. At Benares not many years ago a
celebrated deity was incarnate in the person of a Hindoo gentleman
who rejoiced in the euphonious name of Swami Bhaskaranandaji
Saraswati, and looked uncommonly like the late Cardinal Manning,
only more ingenuous. His eyes beamed with kindly human interest,
and he took what is described as an innocent pleasure in the divine
honours paid him by his confiding worshippers.
At Chinchvad, a small town about ten miles from Poona in Western
India, there lives a family of whom one in each generation is
believed by a large proportion of the Mahrattas to be an
incarnation of the elephant-headed god Gunputty. That celebrated
deity was first made flesh about the year 1640 in the person of a
Brahman of Poona, by name Mooraba Gosseyn, who sought to work out
his salvation by abstinence, mortification, and prayer. His piety
had its reward. The god himself appeared to him in a vision of the
night and promised that a portion of his, that is, of
Gunputty’s holy spirit should abide with him and with his
seed after him even to the seventh generation. The divine promise
was fulfilled. Seven successive incarnations, transmitted from
father to son, manifested the light of Gunputty to a dark world.
The last of the direct line, a heavy-looking god with very weak
eyes, died in the year 1810. But the cause of truth was too sacred,
and the value of the church property too considerable, to allow the
Brahmans to contemplate with equanimity the unspeakable loss that
would be sustained by a world which knew not Gunputty. Accordingly
they sought and found a holy vessel in whom the divine spirit of
the master had revealed itself anew, and the revelation has been
happily continued in an unbroken succession of vessels from that
time to this. But a mysterious law of spiritual economy, whose
operation in the history of religion we may deplore though we
cannot alter, has decreed that the miracles wrought by the god-man
in these degenerate days cannot compare with those which were
wrought by his predecessors in days gone by; and it is even
reported that the only sign vouchsafed by him to the present
generation of vipers is the miracle of feeding the multitude whom
he annually entertains to dinner at Chinchvad.
A Hindoo sect, which has many representatives in Bombay and
Central India, holds that its spiritual chiefs or Maharajas, as
they are called, are representatives or even actual incarnations on
earth of the god Krishna. And as Krishna looks down from heaven
with most favour on such as minister to the wants of his successors
and vicars on earth, a peculiar rite called Self-devotion has been
instituted, whereby his faithful worshippers make over their
bodies, their souls, and, what is perhaps still more important,
their worldly substance to his adorable incarnations; and women are
taught to believe that the highest bliss for themselves and their
families is to be attained by yielding themselves to the embraces
of those beings in whom the divine nature mysteriously coexists
with the form and even the appetites of true humanity.
Christianity itself has not uniformly escaped the taint of these
unhappy delusions; indeed it has often been sullied by the
extravagances of vain pretenders to a divinity equal to or even
surpassing that of its great Founder. In the second century
Montanus the Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting
in his single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost. Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a
single ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the
present day many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself,
is incarnate in every fully initiated Christian, and they have
carried this belief to its logical conclusion by adoring each
other. Tertullian records that this was done by his
fellow-Christians at Carthage in the second century; the disciples
of St. Columba worshipped him as an embodiment of Christ; and in
the eighth century Elipandus of Toledo spoke of Christ as “a
god among gods,” meaning that all believers were gods just as
truly as Jesus himself. The adoration of each other was customary
among the Albigenses, and is noticed hundreds of times in the
records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in the early part of the
fourteenth century.
In the thirteenth century there arose a sect called the Brethren
and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who held that by long and assiduous
contemplation any man might be united to the deity in an ineffable
manner and become one with the source and parent of all things, and
that he who had thus ascended to God and been absorbed in his
beatific essence, actually formed part of the Godhead, was the Son
of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself, and
enjoyed thereby a glorious immunity from the trammels of all laws
human and divine. Inwardly transported by this blissful persuasion,
though outwardly presenting in their aspect and manners a shocking
air of lunacy and distraction, the sectaries roamed from place to
place, attired in the most fantastic apparel and begging their
bread with wild shouts and clamour, spurning indignantly every kind
of honest labour and industry as an obstacle to divine
contemplation and to the ascent of the soul towards the Father of
spirits. In all their excursions they were followed by women with
whom they lived on terms of the closest familiarity. Those of them
who conceived they had made the greatest proficiency in the higher
spiritual life dispensed with the use of clothes altogether in
their assemblies, looking upon decency and modesty as marks of
inward corruption, characteristics of a soul that still grovelled
under the dominion of the flesh and had not yet been elevated into
communion with the divine spirit, its centre and source. Sometimes
their progress towards this mystic communion was accelerated by the
Inquisition, and they expired in the flames, not merely with
unclouded serenity, but with the most triumphant feelings of
cheerfulness and joy.
About the year 1830 there appeared, in one of the States of the
American Union bordering on Kentucky, an impostor who declared that
he was the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind, and that he had
reappeared on earth to recall the impious, the unbelieving, and
sinners to their duty. He protested that if they did not mend their
ways within a certain time, he would give the signal, and in a
moment the world would crumble to ruins. These extravagant
pretensions were received with favour even by persons of wealth and
position in society. At last a German humbly besought the new
Messiah to announce the dreadful catastrophe to his
fellow-countrymen in the German language, as they did not
understand English, and it seemed a pity that they should be damned
merely on that account. The would-be Saviour in reply confessed
with great candour that he did not know German. “What!”
retorted the German, “you the Son of God, and don’t
speak all languages, and don’t even know German? Come, come,
you are a knave, a hypocrite, and a madman. Bedlam is the place for
you.” The spectators laughed, and went away ashamed of their
credulity.
Sometimes, at the death of the human incarnation, the divine
spirit transmigrates into another man. The Buddhist Tartars believe
in a great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as Grand Lamas
at the head of the most important monasteries. When one of these
Grand Lamas dies his disciples do not sorrow, for they know that he
will soon reappear, being born in the form of an infant. Their only
anxiety is to discover the place of his birth. If at this time they
see a rainbow they take it as a sign sent them by the departed Lama
to guide them to his cradle. Sometimes the divine infant himself
reveals his identity. “I am the Grand Lama,” he says,
“the living Buddha of such and such a temple. Take me to my
old monastery. I am its immortal head.” In whatever way the
birthplace of the Buddha is revealed, whether by the Buddha’s
own avowal or by the sign in the sky, tents are struck, and the
joyful pilgrims, often headed by the king or one of the most
illustrious of the royal family, set forth to find and bring home
the infant god. Generally he is born in Tibet, the holy land, and
to reach him the caravan has often to traverse the most frightful
deserts. When at last they find the child they fall down and
worship him. Before, however, he is acknowledged as the Grand Lama
whom they seek he must satisfy them of his identity. He is asked
the name of the monastery of which he claims to be the head, how
far off it is, and how many monks live in it; he must also describe
the habits of the deceased Grand Lama and the manner of his death.
Then various articles, as prayer-books, tea-pots, and cups, are
placed before him, and he has to point out those used by himself in
his previous life. If he does so without a mistake his claims are
admitted, and he is conducted in triumph to the monastery. At the
head of all the Lamas is the Dalai Lama of Lhasa, the Rome of
Tibet. He is regarded as a living god, and at death his divine and
immortal spirit is born again in a child. According to some
accounts the mode of discovering the Dalai Lama is similar to the
method, already described, of discovering an ordinary Grand Lama.
Other accounts speak of an election by drawing lots from a golden
jar. Wherever he is born, the trees and plants put forth green
leaves; at his bidding flowers bloom and springs of water rise; and
his presence diffuses heavenly blessings.
But he is by no means the only man who poses as a god in these
regions. A register of all the incarnate gods in the Chinese empire
is kept in the Li fan yiian or Colonial Office at Peking.
The number of gods who have thus taken out a license is one hundred
and sixty. Tibet is blessed with thirty of them, Northern Mongolia
rejoices in nineteen, and Southern Mongolia basks in the sunshine
of no less than fifty-seven. The Chinese government, with a
paternal solicitude for the welfare of its subjects, forbids the
gods on the register to be reborn anywhere but in Tibet. They fear
lest the birth of a god in Mongolia should have serious political
consequences by stirring the dormant patriotism and warlike spirit
of the Mongols, who might rally round an ambitious native deity of
royal lineage and seek to win for him, at the point of the sword, a
temporal as well as a spiritual kingdom. But besides these public
or licensed gods there are a great many little private gods, or
unlicensed practitioners of divinity, who work miracles and bless
their people in holes and corners; and of late years the Chinese
government has winked at the rebirth of these pettifogging deities
outside of Tibet. However, once they are born, the government keeps
its eye on them as well as on the regular practitioners, and if any
of them misbehaves he is promptly degraded, banished to a distant
monastery, and strictly forbidden ever to be born again in the
flesh.
From our survey of the religious position occupied by the king
in rude societies we may infer that the claim to divine and
supernatural powers put forward by the monarchs of great historical
empires like those of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, was not the simple
outcome of inflated vanity or the empty expression of a grovelling
adulation; it was merely a survival and extension of the old savage
apotheosis of living kings. Thus, for example, as children of the
Sun the Incas of Peru were revered like gods; they could do no
wrong, and no one dreamed of offending against the person, honour,
or property of the monarch or of any of the royal race. Hence, too,
the Incas did not, like most people, look on sickness as an evil.
They considered it a messenger sent from their father the Sun to
call them to come and rest with him in heaven. Therefore the usual
words in which an Inca announced his approaching end were these:
“My father calls me to come and rest with him.” They
would not oppose their father’s will by offering sacrifice
for recovery, but openly declared that he had called them to his
rest. Issuing from the sultry valleys upon the lofty tableland of
the Colombian Andes, the Spanish conquerors were astonished to
find, in contrast to the savage hordes they had left in the
sweltering jungles below, a people enjoying a fair degree of
civilisation, practising agriculture, and living under a government
which Humboldt has compared to the theocracies of Tibet and Japan.
These were the Chibchas, Muyscas, or Mozcas, divided into two
kingdoms, with capitals at Bogota and Tunja, but united apparently
in spiritual allegiance to the high pontiff of Sogamozo or Iraca.
By a long and ascetic novitiate, this ghostly ruler was reputed to
have acquired such sanctity that the waters and the rain obeyed
him, and the weather depended on his will. The Mexican kings at
their accession, as we have seen, took an oath that they would make
the sun to shine, the clouds to give rain, the rivers to flow, and
the earth to bring forth fruits in abundance. We are told that
Montezuma, the last king of Mexico, was worshipped by his people as
a god.
The early Babylonian kings, from the time of Sargon I. till the
fourth dynasty of Ur or later, claimed to be gods in their
lifetime. The monarchs of the fourth dynasty of Ur in particular
had temples built in their honour; they set up their statues in
various sanctuaries and commanded the people to sacrifice to them;
the eighth month was especially dedicated to the kings, and
sacrifices were offered to them at the new moon and on the
fifteenth of each month. Again, the Parthian monarchs of the
Arsacid house styled themselves brothers of the sun and moon and
were worshipped as deities. It was esteemed sacrilege to strike
even a private member of the Arsacid family in a brawl.
The kings of Egypt were deified in their lifetime, sacrifices
were offered to them, and their worship was celebrated in special
temples and by special priests. Indeed the worship of the kings
sometimes cast that of the gods into the shade. Thus in the reign
of Merenra a high official declared that he had built many holy
places in order that the spirits of the king, the ever-living
Merenra, might be invoked “more than all the gods.”
“It has never been doubted that the king claimed actual
divinity; he was the ‘great god,’ the‘golden
Horus,’ and son of Ra. He claimed authority not only over
Egypt, but over‘all lands and nations,’‘the whole
world in its length and its breadth, the east and the
west,’‘the entire compass of the great circuit of the
sun,’‘the sky and what is in it, the earth and all that
is upon it,’‘every creature that walks upon two or upon
four legs, all that fly or flutter, the whole world offers her
productions to him.’ Whatever in fact might be asserted of
the Sun-god, was dogmatically predicable of the king of Egypt. His
titles were directly derived from those of the Sun-god.”
“In the course of his existence,” we are told,
“the king of Egypt exhausted all the possible conceptions of
divinity which the Egyptians had framed for themselves. A
superhuman god by his birth and by his royal office, he became the
deified man after his death. Thus all that was known of the divine
was summed up in him.”
We have now completed our sketch, for it is no more than a
sketch, of the evolution of that sacred kingship which attained its
highest form, its most absolute expression, in the monarchies of
Peru and Egypt. Historically, the institution appears to have
originated in the order of public magicians or medicine-men;
logically it rests on a mistaken deduction from the association of
ideas. Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of
nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or
seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a
corresponding control over things. The men who for one reason or
another, because of the strength or the weakness of their natural
parts, were supposed to possess these magical powers in the highest
degree, were gradually marked off from their fellows and became a
separate class, who were destined to exercise a most far-reaching
influence on the political, religious, and intellectual evolution
of mankind. Social progress, as we know, consists mainly in a
successive differentiation of functions, or, in simpler language, a
division of labour. The work which in primitive society is done by
all alike and by all equally ill, or nearly so, is gradually
distributed among different classes of workers and executed more
and more perfectly; and so far as the products, material or
immaterial, of this specialised labour are shared by all, the whole
community benefits by the increasing specialisation. Now magicians
or medicine-men appear to constitute the oldest artificial or
professional class in the evolution of society. For sorcerers are
found in every savage tribe known to us; and among the lowest
savages, such as the Australian aborigines, they are the only
professional class that exists. As time goes on, and the process of
differentiation continues, the order of medicine-men is itself
subdivided into such classes as the healers of disease, the makers
of rain, and so forth; while the most powerful member of the order
wins for himself a position as chief and gradually develops into a
sacred king, his old magical functions falling more and more into
the background and being exchanged for priestly or even divine
duties, in proportion as magic is slowly ousted by religion. Still
later, a partition is effected between the civil and the religious
aspect of the kingship, the temporal power being committed to one
man and the spiritual to another. Meanwhile the magicians, who may
be repressed but cannot be extirpated by the predominance of
religion, still addict themselves to their old occult arts in
preference to the newer ritual of sacrifice and prayer; and in time
the more sagacious of their number perceive the fallacy of magic
and hit upon a more effectual mode of manipulating the forces of
nature for the good of man; in short, they abandon sorcery for
science. I am far from affirming that the course of development has
everywhere rigidly followed these lines: it has doubtless varied
greatly in different societies. I merely mean to indicate in the
broadest outline what I conceive to have been its general trend.
Regarded from the industrial point of view the evolution has been
from uniformity to diversity of function: regarded from the
political point of view, it has been from democracy to despotism.
With the later history of monarchy, especially with the decay of
despotism and its displacement by forms of government better
adapted to the higher needs of humanity, we are not concerned in
this enquiry: our theme is the growth, not the decay, of a great
and, in its time, beneficent institution.
VIII. Departmental Kings of Nature
THE PRECEDING investigation has proved that the same union of
sacred functions with a royal title which meets us in the King of
the Wood at Nemi, the Sacrificial King at Rome, and the magistrate
called the King at Athens, occurs frequently outside the limits of
classical antiquity and is a common feature of societies at all
stages from barbarism to civilisation. Further, it appears that the
royal priest is often a king, not only in name but in fact, swaying
the sceptre as well as the crosier. All this confirms the
traditional view of the origin of the titular and priestly kings in
the republics of ancient Greece and Italy. At least by showing that
the combination of spiritual and temporal power, of which
Graeco-Italian tradition preserved the memory, has actually existed
in many places, we have obviated any suspicion of improbability
that might have attached to the tradition. Therefore we may now
fairly ask, May not the King of the Wood have had an origin like
that which a probable tradition assigns to the Sacrificial King of
Rome and the titular King of Athens? In other words, may not his
predecessors in office have been a line of kings whom a republican
revolution stripped of their political power, leaving them only
their religious functions and the shadow of a crown? There are at
least two reasons for answering this question in the negative. One
reason is drawn from the abode of the priest of Nemi; the other
from his title, the King of the Wood. If his predecessors had been
kings in the ordinary sense, he would surely have been found
residing, like the fallen kings of Rome and Athens, in the city of
which the sceptre had passed from him. This city must have been
Aricia, for there was none nearer. But Aricia was three miles off
from his forest sanctuary by the lake shore. If he reigned, it was
not in the city, but in the greenwood. Again his title, King of the
Wood, hardly allows us to suppose that he had ever been a king in
the common sense of the word. More likely he was a king of nature,
and of a special side of nature, namely, the woods from which he
took his title. If we could find instances of what we may call
departmental kings of nature, that is of persons supposed to rule
over particular elements or aspects of nature, they would probably
present a closer analogy to the King of the Wood than the divine
kings we have been hitherto considering, whose control of nature is
general rather than special. Instances of such departmental kings
are not wanting.
On a hill at Bomma near the mouth of the Congo dwells Namvulu
Vumu, King of the Rain and Storm. Of some of the tribes on the
Upper Nile we are told that they have no kings in the common sense;
the only persons whom they acknowledge as such are the Kings of the
Rain, Mata Kodou, who are credited with the power of
giving rain at the proper time, that is, the rainy season. Before
the rains begin to fall at the end of March the country is a
parched and arid desert; and the cattle, which form the
people’s chief wealth, perish for lack of grass. So, when the
end of March draws on, each householder betakes himself to the King
of the Rain and offers him a cow that he may make the blessed
waters of heaven to drip on the brown and withered pastures. If no
shower falls, the people assemble and demand that the king shall
give them rain; and if the sky still continues cloudless, they rip
up his belly, in which he is believed to keep the storms. Amongst
the Bari tribe one of these Rain Kings made rain by sprinkling
water on the ground out of a handbell.
Among tribes on the outskirts of Abyssinia a similar office
exists and has been thus described by an observer: “The
priesthood of the Alfai, as he is called by the Barea and Kunama,
is a remarkable one; he is believed to be able to make rain. This
office formerly existed among the Algeds and appears to be still
common to the Nuba negroes. The Alfai of the Barea, who is also
consulted by the northern Kunama, lives near Tembadere on a
mountain alone with his family. The people bring him tribute in the
form of clothes and fruits, and cultivate for him a large field of
his own. He is a kind of king, and his office passes by inheritance
to his brother or sister’s son. He is supposed to conjure
down rain and to drive away the locusts. But if he disappoints the
people’s expectation and a great drought arises in the land,
the Alfai is stoned to death, and his nearest relations are obliged
to cast the first stone at him. When we passed through the country,
the office of Alfai was still held by an old man; but I heard that
rain-making had proved too dangerous for him and that he had
renounced his office.”
In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns
known as the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame
is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula;
but only a faint echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few
years ago no European, so far as is known, had ever seen either of
them; and their very existence might have passed for a fable, were
it not that till lately communications were regularly maintained
between them and the King of Cambodia, who year by year exchanged
presents with them. Their royal functions are of a purely mystic or
spiritual order; they have no political authority; they are simple
peasants, living by the sweat of their brow and the offerings of
the faithful. According to one account they live in absolute
solitude, never meeting each other and never seeing a human face.
They inhabit successively seven towers perched upon seven
mountains, and every year they pass from one tower to another.
People come furtively and cast within their reach what is needful
for their subsistence. The kingship lasts seven years, the time
necessary to inhabit all the towers successively; but many die
before their time is out. The offices are hereditary in one or
(according to others) two royal families, who enjoy high
consideration, have revenues assigned to them, and are exempt from
the necessity of tilling the ground. But naturally the dignity is
not coveted, and when a vacancy occurs, all eligible men (they must
be strong and have children) flee and hide themselves. Another
account, admitting the reluctance of the hereditary candidates to
accept the crown, does not countenance the report of their
hermit-like seclusion in the seven towers. For it represents the
people as prostrating themselves before the mystic kings whenever
they appear in public, it being thought that a terrible hurricane
would burst over the country if this mark of homage were omitted.
Like many other sacred kings, of whom we shall read in the sequel,
the Kings of Fire and Water are not allowed to die a natural death,
for that would lower their reputation. Accordingly when one of them
is seriously ill, the elders hold a consultation and if they think
he cannot recover they stab him to death. His body is burned and
the ashes are piously collected and publicly honoured for five
years. Part of them is given to the widow, and she keeps them in an
urn, which she must carry on her back when she goes to weep on her
husband’s grave.
We are told that the Fire King, the more important of the two,
whose supernatural powers have never been questioned, officiates at
marriages, festivals, and sacrifices in honour of the Yan
or spirit. On these occasions a special place is set apart for him;
and the path by which he approaches is spread with white cotton
cloths. A reason for confining the royal dignity to the same family
is that this family is in possession of certain famous talismans
which would lose their virtue or disappear if they passed out of
the family. These talismans are three: the fruit of a creeper
called Cui, gathered ages ago at the time of the last
deluge, but still fresh and green; a rattan, also very old but
bearing flowers that never fade; and lastly, a sword containing a
Yan or spirit, who guards it constantly and works miracles
with it. The spirit is said to be that of a slave, whose blood
chanced to fall upon the blade while it was being forged, and who
died a voluntary death to expiate his involuntary offence. By means
of the two former talismans the Water King can raise a flood that
would drown the whole earth. If the Fire King draws the magic sword
a few inches from its sheath, the sun is hidden and men and beasts
fall into a profound sleep; were he to draw it quite out of the
scabbard, the world would come to an end. To this wondrous brand
sacrifices of buffaloes, pigs, fowls, and ducks are offered for
rain. It is kept swathed in cotton and silk; and amongst the annual
presents sent by the King of Cambodia were rich stuffs to wrap the
sacred sword.
Contrary to the common usage of the country, which is to bury
the dead, the bodies of both these mystic monarchs are burnt, but
their nails and some of their teeth and bones are religiously
preserved as amulets. It is while the corpse is being consumed on
the pyre that the kinsmen of the deceased magician flee to the
forest and hide themselves, for fear of being elevated to the
invidious dignity which he has just vacated. The people go and
search for them, and the first whose lurking place they discover is
made King of Fire or Water.
These, then, are examples of what I have called departmental
kings of nature. But it is a far cry to Italy from the forests of
Cambodia and the sources of the Nile. And though Kings of Rain,
Water, and Fire have been found, we have still to discover a King
of the Wood to match the Arician priest who bore that title.
Perhaps we shall find him nearer home.
IX. The Worship of Trees
1. Tree-spirits
IN THE RELIGIOUS history of the Aryan race in Europe the worship
of trees has played an important part. Nothing could be more
natural. For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense
primaeval forests, in which the scattered clearings must have
appeared like islets in an ocean of green. Down to the first
century before our era the Hercynian forest stretched eastward from
the Rhine for a distance at once vast and unknown; Germans whom
Caesar questioned had travelled for two months through it without
reaching the end. Four centuries later it was visited by the
Emperor Julian, and the solitude, the gloom, the silence of the
forest appear to have made a deep impression on his sensitive
nature. He declared that he knew nothing like it in the Roman
empire. In our own country the wealds of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex
are remnants of the great forest of Anderida, which once clothed
the whole of the south-eastern portion of the island. Westward it
seems to have stretched till it joined another forest that extended
from Hampshire to Devon. In the reign of Henry II. the citizens of
London still hunted the wild bull and the boar in the woods of
Hampstead. Even under the later Plantagenets the royal forests were
sixty-eight in number. In the forest of Arden it was said that down
to modern times a squirrel might leap from tree to tree for nearly
the whole length of Warwickshire. The excavation of ancient
pile-villages in the valley of the Po has shown that long before
the rise and probably the foundation of Rome the north of Italy was
covered with dense woods of elms, chestnuts, and especially of
oaks. Archaeology is here confirmed by history; for classical
writers contain many references to Italian forests which have now
disappeared. As late as the fourth century before our era Rome was
divided from central Etruria by the dreaded Ciminian forest, which
Livy compares to the woods of Germany. No merchant, if we may trust
the Roman historian, had ever penetrated its pathless solitudes;
and it was deemed a most daring feat when a Roman general, after
sending two scouts to explore its intricacies, led his army into
the forest and, making his way to a ridge of the wooded mountains,
looked down on the rich Etrurian fields spread out below. In Greece
beautiful woods of pine, oak, and other trees still linger on the
slopes of the high Arcadian mountains, still adorn with their
verdure the deep gorge through which the Ladon hurries to join the
sacred Alpheus, and were still, down to a few years ago, mirrored
in the dark blue waters of the lonely lake of Pheneus; but they are
mere fragments of the forests which clothed great tracts in
antiquity, and which at a more remote epoch may have spanned the
Greek peninsula from sea to sea.
From an examination of the Teutonic words for
“temple” Grimm has made it probable that amongst the
Germans the oldest sanctuaries were natural woods. However that may
be, tree-worship is well attested for all the great European
families of the Aryan stock. Amongst the Celts the oak-worship of
the Druids is familiar to every one, and their old word for
sanctuary seems to be identical in origin and meaning with the
Latin nemus, a grove or woodland glade, which still
survives in the name of Nemi. Sacred groves were common among the
ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct amongst their
descendants at the present day. How serious that worship was in
former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed
by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a
standing tree. The culprit’s navel was to be cut out and
nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was to
be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound
about its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to
replace the dead bark by a living substitute taken from the
culprit; it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life
of a tree. At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there
was a sacred grove in which every tree was regarded as divine. The
heathen Slavs worshipped trees and groves. The Lithuanians were not
converted to Christianity till towards the close of the fourteenth
century, and amongst them at the date of their conversion the
worship of trees was prominent. Some of them revered remarkable
oaks and other great shady trees, from which they received oracular
responses. Some maintained holy groves about their villages or
houses, where even to break a twig would have been a sin. They
thought that he who cut a bough in such a grove either died
suddenly or was crippled in one of his limbs. Proofs of the
prevalence of tree-worship in ancient Greece and Italy are
abundant. In the sanctuary of Aesculapius at Cos, for example, it
was forbidden to cut down the cypress-trees under a penalty of a
thousand drachms. But nowhere, perhaps, in the ancient world was
this antique form of religion better preserved than in the heart of
the great metropolis itself. In the Forum, the busy centre of Roman
life, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was worshipped down to the
days of the empire, and the withering of its trunk was enough to
spread consternation through the city. Again, on the slope of the
Palatine Hill grew a cornel-tree which was esteemed one of the most
sacred objects in Rome. Whenever the tree appeared to a passer-by
to be drooping, he set up a hue and cry which was echoed by the
people in the street, and soon a crowd might be seen running
helter-skelter from all sides with buckets of water, as if (says
Plutarch) they were hastening to put out a fire.
Among the tribes of the Finnish-Ugrian stock in Europe the
heathen worship was performed for the most part in sacred groves,
which were always enclosed with a fence. Such a grove often
consisted merely of a glade or clearing with a few trees dotted
about, upon which in former times the skins of the sacrificial
victims were hung. The central point of the grove, at least among
the tribes of the Volga, was the sacred tree, beside which
everything else sank into insignificance. Before it the worshippers
assembled and the priest offered his prayers, at its roots the
victim was sacrificed, and its boughs sometimes served as a pulpit.
No wood might be hewn and no branch broken in the grove, and women
were generally forbidden to enter it.
But it is necessary to examine in some detail the notions on
which the worship of trees and plants is based. To the savage the
world in general is animate, and trees and plants are no exception
to the rule. He thinks that they have souls like his own, and he
treats them accordingly. “They say,” writes the ancient
vegetarian Porphyry, “that primitive men led an unhappy life,
for their superstition did not stop at animals but extended even to
plants. For why should the slaughter of an ox or a sheep be a
greater wrong than the felling of a fir or an oak, seeing that a
soul is implanted in these trees also?” Similarly, the
Hidatsa Indians of North America believe that every natural object
has its spirit, or to speak more properly, its shade. To these
shades some consideration or respect is due, but not equally to
all. For example, the shade of the cottonwood, the greatest tree in
the valley of the Upper Missouri, is supposed to possess an
intelligence which, if properly approached, may help the Indians in
certain undertakings; but the shades of shrubs and grasses are of
little account. When the Missouri, swollen by a freshet in spring,
carries away part of its banks and sweeps some tall tree into its
current, it is said that the spirit of the tree cries, while the
roots still cling to the land and until the trunk falls with a
splash into the stream. Formerly the Indians considered it wrong to
fell one of these giants, and when large logs were needed they made
use only of trees which had fallen of themselves. Till lately some
of the more credulous old men declared that many of the misfortunes
of their people were caused by this modern disregard for the rights
of the living cottonwood. The Iroquois believed that each species
of tree, shrub, plant, and herb had its own spirit, and to these
spirits it was their custom to return thanks. The Wanika of Eastern
Africa fancy that every tree, and especially every coco-nut tree,
has its spirit; “the destruction of a cocoa-nut tree is
regarded as equivalent to matricide, because that tree gives them
life and nourishment, as a mother does her child.” Siamese
monks, believing that there are souls everywhere, and that to
destroy anything whatever is forcibly to dispossess a soul, will
not break a branch of a tree, “as they will not break the arm
of an innocent person.” These monks, of course, are
Buddhists. But Buddhist animism is not a philosophical theory. It
is simply a common savage dogma incorporated in the system of an
historical religion. To suppose, with Benfey and others, that the
theories of animism and transmigration current among rude peoples
of Asia are derived from Buddhism, is to reverse the facts.
Sometimes it is only particular sorts of trees that are supposed
to be tenanted by spirits. At Grbalj in Dalmatia it is said that
among great beeches, oaks, and other trees there are some that are
endowed with shades or souls, and whoever fells one of them must
die on the spot, or at least live an invalid for the rest of his
days. If a woodman fears that a tree which he has felled is one of
this sort, he must cut off the head of a live hen on the stump of
the tree with the very same axe with which he cut down the tree.
This will protect him from all harm, even if the tree be one of the
animated kind. The silk-cotton trees, which rear their enormous
trunks to a stupendous height, far out-topping all the other trees
of the forest, are regarded with reverence throughout West Africa,
from the Senegal to the Niger, and are believed to be the abode of
a god or spirit. Among the Ewespeaking peoples of the Slave Coast
the indwelling god of this giant of the forest goes by the name of
Huntin. Trees in which he specially dwells—for it is not
every silk-cotton tree that he thus honours—are surrounded by
a girdle of palm-leaves; and sacrifices of fowls, and occasionally
of human beings, are fastened to the trunk or laid against the foot
of the tree. A tree distinguished by a girdle of palm-leaves may
not be cut down or injured in any way; and even silk-cotton trees
which are not supposed to be animated by Huntin may not be felled
unless the woodman first offers a sacrifice of fowls and palm-oil
to purge himself of the proposed sacrilege. To omit the sacrifice
is an offence which may be punished with death. Among the Kangra
mountains of the Punjaub a girl used to be annually sacrificed to
an old cedar-tree, the families of the village taking it in turn to
supply the victim. The tree was cut down not very many years
ago.
If trees are animate, they are necessarily sensitive and the
cutting of them down becomes a delicate surgical operation, which
must be performed with as tender a regard as possible for the
feelings of the sufferers, who otherwise may turn and rend the
careless or bungling operator. When an oak is being felled
“it gives a kind of shriekes or groanes, that may be heard a
mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting. E. Wyld,
Esq., hath heard it severall times.” The Ojebways “very
seldom cut down green or living trees, from the idea that it puts
them to pain, and some of their medicine-men profess to have heard
the wailing of the trees under the axe.” Trees that bleed and
utter cries of pain or indignation when they are hacked or burned
occur very often in Chinese books, even in Standard Histories. Old
peasants in some parts of Austria still believe that forest-trees
are animate, and will not allow an incision to be made in the bark
without special cause; they have heard from their fathers that the
tree feels the cut not less than a wounded man his hurt. In felling
a tree they beg its pardon. It is said that in the Upper Palatinate
also old woodmen still secretly ask a fine, sound tree to forgive
them before they cut it down. So in Jarkino the woodman craves
pardon of the tree he fells. Before the Ilocanes of Luzon cut down
trees in the virgin forest or on the mountains, they recite some
verses to the following effect: “Be not uneasy, my friend,
though we fell what we have been ordered to fell.” This they
do in order not to draw down on themselves the hatred of the
spirits who live in the trees, and who are apt to avenge themselves
by visiting with grievous sickness such as injure them wantonly.
The Basoga of Central Africa think that, when a tree is cut down,
the angry spirit which inhabits it may cause the death of the chief
and his family. To prevent this disaster they consult a
medicine-man before they fell a tree. If the man of skill gives
leave to proceed, the woodman first offers a fowl and a goat to the
tree; then as soon as he has given the first blow with the axe, he
applies his mouth to the cut and sucks some of the sap. In this way
he forms a brotherhood with the tree, just as two men become
blood-brothers by sucking each other’s blood. After that he
can cut down his tree-brother with impunity.
But the spirits of vegetation are not always treated with
deference and respect. If fair words and kind treatment do not move
them, stronger measures are sometimes resorted to. The durian-tree
of the East Indies, whose smooth stem often shoots up to a height
of eighty or ninety feet without sending out a branch, bears a
fruit of the most delicious flavour and the most disgusting stench.
The Malays cultivate the tree for the sake of its fruit, and have
been known to resort to a peculiar ceremony for the purpose of
stimulating its fertility. Near Jugra in Selangor there is a small
grove of durian-trees, and on a specially chosen day the villagers
used to assemble in it. Thereupon one of the local sorcerers would
take a hatchet and deliver several shrewd blows on the trunk of the
most barren of the trees, saying, “Will you now bear fruit or
not? If you do not, I shall fell you.” To this the tree
replied through the mouth of another man who had climbed a
mangostin-tree hard by (the durian-tree being unclimbable),
“Yes, I will now bear fruit; I beg of you not to fell
me.” So in Japan to make trees bear fruit two men go into an
orchard. One of them climbs up a tree and the other stands at the
foot with an axe. The man with the axe asks the tree whether it
will yield a good crop next year and threatens to cut it down if it
does not. To this the man among the branches replies on behalf of
the tree that it will bear abundantly. Odd as this mode of
horticulture may seem to us, it has its exact parallels in Europe.
On Christmas Eve many a South Slavonian and Bulgarian peasant
swings an axe threateningly against a barren fruit-tree, while
another man standing by intercedes for the menaced tree, saying,
“Do not cut it down; it will soon bear fruit.” Thrice
the axe is swung, and thrice the impending blow is arrested at the
entreaty of the intercessor. After that the frightened tree will
certainly bear fruit next year.
The conception of trees and plants as animated beings naturally
results in treating them as male and female, who can be married to
each other in a real, and not merely a figurative or poetical,
sense of the word. The notion is not purely fanciful, for plants
like animals have their sexes and reproduce their kind by the union
of the male and female elements. But whereas in all the higher
animals the organs of the two sexes are regularly separated between
different individuals, in most plants they exist together in every
individual of the species. This rule, however, is by no means
universal, and in many species the male plant is distinct from the
female. The distinction appears to have been observed by some
savages, for we are told that the Maoris “are acquainted with
the sex of trees, etc., and have distinct names for the male and
female of some trees.” The ancients knew the difference
between the male and the female date-palm, and fertilised them
artificially by shaking the pollen of the male tree over the
flowers of the female. The fertilisation took place in spring.
Among the heathen of Harran the month during which the palms were
fertilised bore the name of the Date Month, and at this time they
celebrated the marriage festival of all the gods and goddesses.
Different from this true and fruitful marriage of the palm are the
false and barren marriages of plants which play a part in Hindoo
superstition. For example, if a Hindoo has planted a grove of
mangos, neither he nor his wife may taste of the fruit until he has
formally married one of the trees, as a bridegroom, to a tree of a
different sort, commonly a tamarind-tree, which grows near it in
the grove. If there is no tamarind to act as bride, a jasmine will
serve the turn. The expenses of such a marriage are often
considerable, for the more Brahmans are feasted at it, the greater
the glory of the owner of the grove. A family has been known to
sell its golden and silver trinkets, and to borrow all the money
they could in order to marry a mango-tree to a jasmine with due
pomp and ceremony. On Christmas Eve German peasants used to tie
fruit-trees together with straw ropes to make them bear fruit,
saying that the trees were thus married.
In the Moluccas, when the clove-trees are in blossom, they are
treated like pregnant women. No noise may be made near them; no
light or fire may be carried past them at night; no one may
approach them with his hat on, all must uncover in their presence.
These precautions are observed lest the tree should be alarmed and
bear no fruit, or should drop its fruit too soon, like the untimely
delivery of a woman who has been frightened in her pregnancy. So in
the East the growing rice-crop is often treated with the same
considerate regard as a breeding woman. Thus in Amboyna, when the
rice is in bloom, the people say that it is pregnant and fire no
guns and make no other noises near the field, for fear lest, if the
rice were thus disturbed, it would miscarry, and the crop would be
all straw and no grain.
Sometimes it is the souls of the dead which are believed to
animate trees. The Dieri tribe of Central Australia regard as very
sacred certain trees which are supposed to be their fathers
transformed; hence they speak with reverence of these trees, and
are careful that they shall not be cut down or burned. If the
settlers require them to hew down the trees, they earnestly protest
against it, asserting that were they to do so they would have no
luck, and might be punished for not protecting their ancestors.
Some of the Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their
ancestors are in certain trees, which they therefore spare. If they
are obliged to fell one of these trees, they excuse themselves to
it by saying that it was the priest who made them do it. The
spirits take up their abode, by preference, in tall and stately
trees with great spreading branches. When the wind rustles the
leaves, the natives fancy it is the voice of the spirit; and they
never pass near one of these trees without bowing respectfully, and
asking pardon of the spirit for disturbing his repose. Among the
Ignorrotes, every village has its sacred tree, in which the souls
of the dead forefathers of the hamlet reside. Offerings are made to
the tree, and any injury done to it is believed to entail some
misfortune on the village. Were the tree cut down, the village and
all its inhabitants would inevitably perish.
In Corea the souls of people who die of the plague or by the
roadside, and of women who expire in childbirth, invariably take up
their abode in trees. To such spirits offerings of cake, wine, and
pork are made on heaps of stones piled under the trees. In China it
has been customary from time immemorial to plant trees on graves in
order thereby to strengthen the soul of the deceased and thus to
save his body from corruption; and as the evergreen cypress and
pine are deemed to be fuller of vitality than other trees, they
have been chosen by preference for this purpose. Hence the trees
that grow on graves are sometimes identified with the souls of the
departed. Among the Miao-Kia, an aboriginal race of Southern and
Western China, a sacred tree stands at the entrance of every
village, and the inhabitants believe that it is tenanted by the
soul of their first ancestor and that it rules their destiny.
Sometimes there is a sacred grove near a village, where the trees
are suffered to rot and die on the spot. Their fallen branches
cumber the ground, and no one may remove them unless he has first
asked leave of the spirit of the tree and offered him a sacrifice.
Among the Maraves of Southern Africa the burial-ground is always
regarded as a holy place where neither a tree may be felled nor a
beast killed, because everything there is supposed to be tenanted
by the souls of the dead.
In most, if not all, of these cases the spirit is viewed as
incorporate in the tree; it animates the tree and must suffer and
die with it. But, according to another and probably later opinion,
the tree is not the body, but merely the abode of the tree-spirit,
which can quit it and return to it at pleasure. The inhabitants of
Siaoo, an East Indian island, believe in certain sylvan spirits who
dwell in forests or in great solitary trees. At full moon the
spirit comes forth from his lurking-place and roams about. He has a
big head, very long arms and legs, and a ponderous body. In order
to propitiate the wood-spirits people bring offerings of food,
fowls, goats, and so forth to the places which they are supposed to
haunt. The people of Nias think that, when a tree dies, its
liberated spirit becomes a demon, which can kill a coco-nut palm by
merely lighting on its branches, and can cause the death of all the
children in a house by perching on one of the posts that support
it. Further, they are of opinion that certain trees are at all
times inhabited by roving demons who, if the trees were damaged,
would be set free to go about on errands of mischief. Hence the
people respect these trees, and are careful not to cut them
down.
Not a few ceremonies observed at cutting down haunted trees are
based on the belief that the spirits have it in their power to quit
the trees at pleasure or in case of need. Thus when the Pelew
Islanders are felling a tree, they conjure the spirit of the tree
to leave it and settle on another. The wily negro of the Slave
Coast, who wishes to fell an ashorin tree, but knows that
he cannot do it so long as the spirit remains in the tree, places a
little palm-oil on the ground as a bait, and then, when the
unsuspecting spirit has quitted the tree to partake of this dainty,
hastens to cut down its late abode. When the Toboongkoos of Celebes
are about to clear a piece of forest in order to plant rice, they
build a tiny house and furnish it with tiny clothes and some food
and gold. Then they call together all the spirits of the wood,
offer them the little house with its contents, and beseech them to
quit the spot. After that they may safely cut down the wood without
fearing to wound themselves in so doing. Before the Tomori, another
tribe of Celebes, fell a tall tree they lay a quid of betel at its
foot, and invite the spirit who dwells in the tree to change his
lodging; moreover, they set a little ladder against the trunk to
enable him to descend with safety and comfort. The Mandelings of
Sumatra endeavour to lay the blame of all such misdeeds at the door
of the Dutch authorities. Thus when a man is cutting a road through
a forest and has to fell a tall tree which blocks the way, he will
not begin to ply his axe until he has said: “Spirit who
lodgest in this tree, take it not ill that I cut down thy dwelling,
for it is done at no wish of mine but by order of the
Controller.” And when he wishes to clear a piece of
forest-land for cultivation, it is necessary that he should come to
a satisfactory understanding with the woodland spirits who live
there before he lays low their leafy dwellings. For this purpose he
goes to the middle of the plot of ground, stoops down, and pretends
to pick up a letter. Then unfolding a bit of paper he reads aloud
an imaginary letter from the Dutch Government, in which he is
strictly enjoined to set about clearing the land without delay.
Having done so, he says: “You hear that, spirits. I must
begin clearing at once, or I shall be hanged.”
Even when a tree has been felled, sawn into planks, and used to
build a house, it is possible that the woodland spirit may still be
lurking in the timber, and accordingly some people seek to
propitiate him before or after they occupy the new house. Hence,
when a new dwelling is ready the Toradjas of Celebes kill a goat, a
pig, or a buffalo, and smear all the woodwork with its blood. If
the building is a lobo or spirit-house, a fowl or a dog is
killed on the ridge of the roof, and its blood allowed to flow down
on both sides. The ruder Tonapoo in such a case sacrifice a human
being on the roof. This sacrifice on the roof of a lobo or
temple serves the same purpose as the smearing of blood on the
woodwork of an ordinary house. The intention is to propitiate the
forest-spirits who may still be in the timber; they are thus put in
good humour and will do the inmates of the house no harm. For a
like reason people in Celebes and the Moluccas are much afraid of
planting a post upside down at the building of a house; for the
forest-spirit, who might still be in the timber, would very
naturally resent the indignity and visit the inmates with sickness.
The Kayans of Borneo are of opinion that tree-spirits stand very
stiffly on the point of honour and visit men with their displeasure
for any injury done to them. Hence after building a house, whereby
they have been forced to ill-treat many trees, these people observe
a period of penance for a year during which they must abstain from
many things, such as the killing of bears, tiger-cats, and
serpents.
2. Beneficent Powers of Tree-Spirits
WHEN a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the
tree-spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure,
an important advance has been made in religious thought. Animism is
passing into polytheism. In other words, instead of regarding each
tree as a living and conscious being, man now sees in it merely a
lifeless, inert mass, tenanted for a longer or shorter time by a
supernatural being who, as he can pass freely from tree to tree,
thereby enjoys a certain right of possession or lordship over the
trees, and, ceasing to be a tree-soul, becomes a forest god. As
soon as the tree-spirit is thus in a measure disengaged from each
particular tree, he begins to change his shape and assume the body
of a man, in virtue of a general tendency of early thought to
clothe all abstract spiritual beings in concrete human form. Hence
in classical art the sylvan deities are depicted in human shape,
their woodland character being denoted by a branch or some equally
obvious symbol. But this change of shape does not affect the
essential character of the tree-spirit. The powers which he
exercised as a tree-soul incorporate in a tree, he still continues
to wield as a god of trees. This I shall now attempt to prove in
detail. I shall show, first, that trees considered as animate
beings are credited with the power of making the rain to fall, the
sun to shine, flocks and herds to multiply, and women to bring
forth easily; and, second, that the very same powers are attributed
to tree-gods conceived as anthropomorphic beings or as actually
incarnate in living men.
First, then, trees or tree-spirits are believed to give rain and
sunshine. When the missionary Jerome of Prague was persuading the
heathen Lithuanians to fell their sacred groves, a multitude of
women besought the Prince of Lithuania to stop him, saying that
with the woods he was destroying the house of god from which they
had been wont to get rain and sunshine. The Mundaris in Assam think
that if a tree in the sacred grove is felled the sylvan gods evince
their displeasure by withholding rain. In order to procure rain the
inhabitants of Monyo, a village in the Sagaing district of Upper
Burma, chose the largest tamarind-tree near the village and named
it the haunt of the spirit (nat) who controls the rain.
Then they offered bread, coco-nuts, plantains, and fowls to the
guardian spirit of the village and to the spirit who gives rain,
and they prayed, “O Lord nat have pity on us poor
mortals, and stay not the rain. Inasmuch as our offering is given
ungrudgingly, let the rain fall day and night.” Afterwards
libations were made in honour of the spirit of the tamarind-tree;
and still later three elderly women, dressed in fine clothes and
wearing necklaces and earrings, sang the Rain Song.
Again, tree-spirits make the crops to grow. Amongst the Mundaris
every village has its sacred grove, and “the grove deities
are held responsible for the crops, and are especially honoured at
all the great agricultural festivals.” The negroes of the
Gold Coast are in the habit of sacrificing at the foot of certain
tall trees, and they think that if one of these were felled all the
fruits of the earth would perish. The Gallas dance in couples round
sacred trees, praying for a good harvest. Every couple consists of
a man and woman, who are linked together by a stick, of which each
holds one end. Under their arms they carry green corn or grass.
Swedish peasants stick a leafy branch in each furrow of their
corn-fields, believing that this will ensure an abundant crop. The
same idea comes out in the German and French custom of the
Harvest-May. This is a large branch or a whole tree, which is
decked with ears of corn, brought home on the last waggon from the
harvest-field, and fastened on the roof of the farmhouse or of the
barn, where it remains for a year. Mannhardt has proved that this
branch or tree embodies the tree-spirit conceived as the spirit of
vegetation in general, whose vivifying and fructifying influence is
thus brought to bear upon the corn in particular. Hence in Swabia
the Harvest-May is fastened amongst the last stalks of corn left
standing on the field; in other places it is planted on the
corn-field and the last sheaf cut is attached to its trunk.
Again, the tree-spirit makes the herds to multiply and blesses
women with offspring. In Northern India the Emblica
officinalis is a sacred tree. On the eleventh of the month
Phalgun (February) libations are poured at the foot of the tree, a
red or yellow string is bound about the trunk, and prayers are
offered to it for the fruitfulness of women, animals, and crops.
Again, in Northern India the coco-nut is esteemed one of the most
sacred fruits, and is called Sriphala, or the fruit of Sri, the
goddess of prosperity. It is the symbol of fertility, and all
through Upper India is kept in shrines and presented by the priests
to women who desire to become mothers. In the town of Qua, near Old
Calabar, there used to grow a palm-tree which ensured conception to
any barren woman who ate a nut from its branches. In Europe the
May-tree or May-pole is apparently supposed to possess similar
powers over both women and cattle. Thus in some parts of Germany on
the first of May the peasants set up May-trees or May-bushes at the
doors of stables and byres, one for each horse and cow; this is
thought to make the cows yield much milk. Of the Irish we are told
that “they fancy a green bough of a tree, fastened on May-day
against the house, will produce plenty of milk that
summer.”
On the second of July some of the Wends used to set up an
oak-tree in the middle of the village with an iron cock fastened to
its top; then they danced round it, and drove the cattle round it
to make them thrive. The Circassians regard the pear-tree as the
protector of cattle. So they cut down a young pear-tree in the
forest, branch it, and carry it home, where it is adored as a
divinity. Almost every house has one such pear-tree. In autumn, on
the day of the festival, the tree is carried into the house with
great ceremony to the sound of music and amid the joyous cries of
all the inmates, who compliment it on its fortunate arrival. It is
covered with candles, and a cheese is fastened to its top. Round
about it they eat, drink, and sing. Then they bid the tree good-bye
and take it back to the courtyard, where it remains for the rest of
the year, set up against the wall, without receiving any mark of
respect.
In the Tuhoe tribe of Maoris “the power of making women
fruitful is ascribed to trees. These trees are associated with the
navel-strings of definite mythical ancestors, as indeed the
navel-strings of all children used to be hung upon them down to
quite recent times. A barren woman had to embrace such a tree with
her arms, and she received a male or a female child according as
she embraced the east or the west side.” The common European
custom of placing a green bush on May Day before or on the house of
a beloved maiden probably originated in the belief of the
fertilising power of the tree-spirit. In some parts of Bavaria such
bushes are set up also at the houses of newly-married pairs, and
the practice is only omitted if the wife is near her confinement;
for in that case they say that the husband has “set up a
May-bush for himself.” Among the South Slavonians a barren
woman, who desires to have a child, places a new chemise upon a
fruitful tree on the eve of St. George’s Day. Next morning
before sunrise she examines the garment, and if she finds that some
living creature has crept on it, she hopes that her wish will be
fulfilled within the year. Then she puts on the chemise, confident
that she will be as fruitful as the tree on which the garment has
passed the night. Among the Kara-Kirghiz barren women roll
themselves on the ground under a solitary apple-tree, in order to
obtain offspring. Lastly, the power of granting to women an easy
delivery at child-birth is ascribed to trees both in Sweden and
Africa. In some districts of Sweden there was formerly a
bardträd or guardian-tree (lime, ash, or elm) in the
neighbourhood of every farm. No one would pluck a single leaf of
the sacred tree, any injury to which was punished by ill-luck or
sickness. Pregnant women used to clasp the tree in their arms in
order to ensure an easy delivery. In some negro tribes of the Congo
region pregnant women make themselves garments out of the bark of a
certain sacred tree, because they believe that this tree delivers
them from the dangers that attend child-bearing. The story that
Leto clasped a palm-tree and an olive-tree or two laurel-trees,
when she was about to give birth to the divine twins Apollo and
Artemis, perhaps points to a similar Greek belief in the efficacy
of certain trees to facilitate delivery.
X. Relics of Tree Worship in Modern Europe
FROM THE FOREGOING review of the beneficent qualities commonly
ascribed to tree-spirits, it is easy to understand why customs like
the May-tree or May-pole have prevailed so widely and figured so
prominently in the popular festivals of European peasants. In
spring or early summer or even on Midsummer Day, it was and still
is in many parts of Europe the custom to go out to the woods, cut
down a tree and bring it into the village, where it is set up amid
general rejoicings; or the people cut branches in the woods, and
fasten them on every house. The intention of these customs is to
bring home to the village, and to each house, the blessings which
the tree-spirit has in its power to bestow. Hence the custom in
some places of planting a May-tree before every house, or of
carrying the village May-tree from door to door, that every
household may receive its share of the blessing. Out of the mass of
evidence on this subject a few examples may be selected.
Sir Henry Piers, in his Description of Westmeath,
writing in 1682 says: “On May-eve, every family sets up
before their door a green bush, strewed over with yellow flowers,
which the meadows yield plentifully. In countries where timber is
plentiful, they erect tall slender trees, which stand high, and
they continue almost the whole year; so as a stranger would go nigh
to imagine that they were all signs of ale-sellers, and that all
houses were ale-houses.” In Northamptonshire a young tree ten
or twelve feet high used to be planted before each house on May Day
so as to appear growing; flowers were thrown over it and strewn
about the door. “Among ancient customs still retained by the
Cornish, may be reckoned that of decking their doors and porches on
the first of May with green boughs of sycamore and hawthorn, and of
planting trees, or rather stumps of trees, before their
houses.” In the north of England it was formerly the custom
for young people to rise a little after midnight on the morning of
the first of May, and go out with music and the blowing of horns
into the woods, where they broke branches and adorned them with
nosegays and crowns of flowers. This done, they returned about
sunrise and fastened the flower-decked branches over the doors and
windows of their houses. At Abingdon in Berkshire young people
formerly went about in groups on May morning, singing a carol of
which the following are two of the verses:
“We’ve been rambling all the night,
And sometime of this day;
And now returning back again,
We bring a garland gay.
A garland gay we bring you here;
And at your door we stand;
It is a sprout well budded out,
The work of our Lord’s hand.”
At the towns of Saffron Walden and Debden in Essex on the first
of May little girls go about in parties from door to door singing a
song almost identical with the above and carrying garlands; a doll
dressed in white is usually placed in the middle of each garland.
Similar customs have been and indeed are still observed in various
parts of England. The garlands are generally in the form of hoops
intersecting each other at right angles. It appears that a hoop
wreathed with rowan and marsh marigold, and bearing suspended
within it two balls, is still carried on May Day by villagers in
some parts of Ireland. The balls, which are sometimes covered with
gold and silver paper, are said to have originally represented the
sun and moon.
In some villages of the Vosges Mountains on the first Sunday of
May young girls go in bands from house to house, singing a song in
praise of May, in which mention is made of the “bread and
meal that come in May.” If money is given them, they fasten a
green bough to the door; if it is refused, they wish the family
many children and no bread to feed them. In the French department
of Mayenne, boys who bore the name of Maillotins used to
go about from farm to farm on the first of May singing carols, for
which they received money or a drink; they planted a small tree or
a branch of a tree. Near Saverne in Alsace bands of people go about
carrying May-trees. Amongst them is a man dressed in a white shirt
with his face blackened; in front of him is carried a large
May-tree, but each member of the band also carries a smaller one.
One of the company bears a huge basket, in which he collects eggs,
bacon, and so forth.
On the Thursday before Whitsunday the Russian villagers
“go out into the woods, sing songs, weave garlands, and cut
down a young birch-tree, which they dress up in woman’s
clothes, or adorn with many-coloured shreds and ribbons. After that
comes a feast, at the end of which they take the dressed-up
birch-tree, carry it home to their village with joyful dance and
song, and set it up in one of the houses, where it remains as an
honoured guest till Whitsunday. On the two intervening days they
pay visits to the house where their ‘guest’ is; but on
the third day, Whitsunday, they take her to a stream and fling her
into its waters,” throwing their garlands after her. In this
Russian custom the dressing of the birch in woman’s clothes
shows how clearly the tree is personified; and the throwing it into
a stream is most probably a raincharm.
In some parts of Sweden on the eve of May Day lads go about
carrying each a bunch of fresh birch twigs wholly or partly in
leaf. With the village fiddler at their head, they make the round
of the houses singing May songs; the burden of their songs is a
prayer for fine weather, a plentiful harvest, and worldly and
spiritual blessings. One of them carries a basket in which he
collects gifts of eggs and the like. If they are well received,
they stick a leafy twig in the roof over the cottage door. But in
Sweden midsummer is the season when these ceremonies are chiefly
observed. On the Eve of St. John (the twenty-third of June) the
houses are thoroughly cleansed and garnished with green boughs and
flowers. Young fir-trees are raised at the doorway and elsewhere
about the homestead; and very often small umbrageous arbours are
constructed in the garden. In Stockholm on this day a leaf-market
is held at which thousands of May-poles (Maj
Stǎnger), from six inches to twelve feet high,
decorated with leaves, flowers, slips of coloured paper, gilt
egg-shells strung on reeds, and so on, are exposed for sale.
Bonfires are lit on the hills, and the people dance round them and
jump over them. But the chief event of the day is setting up the
May-pole. This consists of a straight and tall sprucepine tree,
stripped of its branches. “At times hoops and at others
pieces of wood, placed crosswise, are attached to it at intervals;
whilst at others it is provided with bows, representing, so to say,
a man with his arms akimbo. From top to bottom not only the
‘Maj Stăng’ (May-pole) itself, but the
hoops, bows, etc., are ornamented with leaves, flowers, slips of
various cloth, gilt egg-shells, etc.; and on the top of it is a
large vane, or it may be a flag.” The raising of the
May-pole, the decoration of which is done by the village maidens,
is an affair of much ceremony; the people flock to it from all
quarters, and dance round it in a great ring. Midsummer customs of
the same sort used to be observed in some parts of Germany. Thus in
the towns of the Upper Harz Mountains tall fir-trees, with the bark
peeled off their lower trunks, were set up in open places and
decked with flowers and eggs, which were painted yellow and red.
Round these trees the young folk danced by day and the old folk in
the evening. In some parts of Bohemia also a May-pole or
midsummer-tree is erected on St. John’s Eve. The lads fetch a
tall fir or pine from the wood and set it up on a height, where the
girls deck it with nosegays, garlands, and red ribbons. It is
afterwards burned.
It would be needless to illustrate at length the custom, which
has prevailed in various parts of Europe, such as England, France,
and Germany, of setting up a village May-tree or May-pole on May
Day. A few examples will suffice. The puritanical writer Phillip
Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses, first published at
London in 1583, has described with manifest disgust how they used
to bring in the May-pole in the days of good Queen Bess. His
description affords us a vivid glimpse of merry England in the
olden time. “Against May, Whitsonday, or other time, all the
yung men and maides, olde men and wives, run gadding over night to
the woods, groves, hils, and mountains, where they spend all the
night in plesant pastimes; and in the morning they return, bringing
with them birch and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies
withall. And no mervaile, for there is a great Lord present amongst
them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sportes,
namely, Sathan, prince of hel. But the chiefest jewel they bring
from thence is their May-pole, which they bring home with great
veneration, as thus. They have twentie or fortie yoke of oxen,
every oxe having a sweet nose-gay of flouers placed on the tip of
his hornes, and these oxen drawe home this May-pole (this stinkyng
ydol, rather), which is covered all over with floures and hearbs,
bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottome, and
sometime painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred
men, women and children following it with great devotion. And thus
beeing reared up, with handkercheefs and flags hovering on the top,
they straw the ground rounde about, binde green boughes about it,
set up sommer haules, bowers, and arbors hard by it. And then fall
they to daunce about it, like as the heathen people did at the
dedication of the Idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or
rather the thing itself. I have heard it credibly reported (and
that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation,
that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood
over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned
home againe undefiled.”
In Swabia on the first of May a tall fir-tree used to be fetched
into the village, where it was decked with ribbons and set up; then
the people danced round it merrily to music. The tree stood on the
village green the whole year through, until a fresh tree was
brought in next May Day. In Saxony “people were not content
with bringing the summer symbolically (as king or queen) into the
village; they brought the fresh green itself from the woods even
into the houses: that is the May or Whitsuntide trees, which are
mentioned in documents from the thirteenth century onwards. The
fetching in of the May-tree was also a festival. The people went
out into the woods to seek the May (majum quaerere),
brought young trees, especially firs and birches, to the village
and set them up before the doors of the houses or of the
cattle-stalls or in the rooms. Young fellows erected such
May-trees, as we have already said, before the chambers of their
sweethearts. Besides these household Mays, a great May-tree or
May-pole, which had also been brought in solemn procession to the
village, was set up in the middle of the village or in the
market-place of the town. It had been chosen by the whole
community, who watched over it most carefully. Generally the tree
was stripped of its branches and leaves, nothing but the crown
being left, on which were displayed, in addition to many-coloured
ribbons and cloths, a variety of victuals such as sausages, cakes,
and eggs. The young folk exerted themselves to obtain these prizes.
In the greasy poles which are still to be seen at our fairs we have
a relic of these old May-poles. Not uncommonly there was a race on
foot or on horseback to the May-tree—a Whitsunday pastime
which in course of time has been divested of its goal and survives
as a popular custom to this day in many parts of Germany.” At
Bordeaux on the first of May the boys of each street used to erect
in it a May-pole, which they adorned with garlands and a great
crown; and every evening during the whole of the month the young
people of both sexes danced singing about the pole. Down to the
present day May-trees decked with flowers and ribbons are set up on
May Day in every village and hamlet of gay Provence. Under them the
young folk make merry and the old folk rest.
In all these cases, apparently, the custom is or was to bring in
a new May-tree each year. However, in England the village May-pole
seems as a rule, at least in later times, to have been permanent,
not renewed annually. Villages of Upper Bavaria renew their
May-pole once every three, four, or five years. It is a fir-tree
fetched from the forest, and amid all the wreaths, flags, and
inscriptions with which it is bedecked, an essential part is the
bunch of dark green foliage left at the top “as a memento
that in it we have to do, not with a dead pole, but with a living
tree from the greenwood.” We can hardly doubt that originally
the practice everywhere was to set up a new May-tree every year. As
the object of the custom was to bring in the fructifying spirit of
vegetation, newly awakened in spring, the end would have been
defeated if, instead of a living tree, green and sappy, an old
withered one had been erected year after year or allowed to stand
permanently. When, however, the meaning of the custom had been
forgotten, and the May-tree was regarded simply as a centre for
holiday merry-making, people saw no reason for felling a fresh tree
every year, and preferred to let the same tree stand permanently,
only decking it with fresh flowers on May Day. But even when the
May-pole had thus become a fixture, the need of giving it the
appearance of being a green tree, not a dead pole, was sometimes
felt. Thus at Weverham in Cheshire “are two May-poles, which
are decorated on this day (May Day) with all due attention to the
ancient solemnity; the sides are hung with garlands, and the top
terminated by a birch or other tall slender tree with its leaves
on; the bark being peeled, and the stem spliced to the pole, so as
to give the appearance of one tree from the summit.” Thus the
renewal of the May-tree is like the renewal of the Harvest-May;
each is intended to secure a fresh portion of the fertilising
spirit of vegetation, and to preserve it throughout the year. But
whereas the efficacy of the Harvest-May is restricted to promoting
the growth of the crops, that of the May-tree or May-branch extends
also, as we have seen, to women and cattle. Lastly, it is worth
noting that the old May-tree is sometimes burned at the end of the
year. Thus in the district of Prague young people break pieces of
the public May-tree and place them behind the holy pictures in
their rooms, where they remain till next May Day, and are then
burned on the hearth. In Würtemberg the bushes which are set up on
the houses on Palm Sunday are sometimes left there for a year and
then burnt.
So much for the tree-spirit conceived as incorporate or immanent
in the tree. We have now to show that the tree-spirit is often
conceived and represented as detached from the tree and clothed in
human form, and even as embodied in living men or women. The
evidence for this anthropomorphic representation of the tree-spirit
is largely to be found in the popular customs of European
peasantry.
There is an instructive class of cases in which the tree-spirit
is represented simultaneously in vegetable form and in human form,
which are set side by side as if for the express purpose of
explaining each other. In these cases the human representative of
the tree-spirit is sometimes a doll or puppet, sometimes a living
person, but whether a puppet or a person, it is placed beside a
tree or bough; so that together the person or puppet, and the tree
or bough, form a sort of bilingual inscription, the one being, so
to speak, a translation of the other. Here, therefore, there is no
room left for doubt that the spirit of the tree is actually
represented in human form. Thus in Bohemia, on the fourth Sunday in
Lent, young people throw a puppet called Death into the water; then
the girls go into the wood, cut down a young tree, and fasten to it
a puppet dressed in white clothes to look like a woman; with this
tree and puppet they go from house to house collecting gratuities
and singing songs with the refrain:
“We carry Death out of the village,
We bring Summer into the village.”
Here, as we shall see later on, the “Summer” is the
spirit of vegetation returning or reviving in spring. In some parts
of our own country children go about asking for pence with some
small imitations of May-poles, and with a finely-dressed doll which
they call the Lady of the May. In these cases the tree and the
puppet are obviously regarded as equivalent.
At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called the Little May Rose, dressed
in white, carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and
ribbons. Her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a
song:
“Little May Rose turn round three times,
Let us look at you round and round!
Rose of the May, come to the greenwood away,
We will be merry all.
So we go from the May to the roses.”
In the course of the song a wish is expressed that those who
give nothing may lose their fowls by the marten, that their vine
may bear no clusters, their tree no nuts, their field no corn; the
produce of the year is supposed to depend on the gifts offered to
these May singers. Here and in the cases mentioned above, where
children go about with green boughs or garlands on May Day singing
and collecting money, the meaning is that with the spirit of
vegetation they bring plenty and good luck to the house, and they
expect to be paid for the service. In Russian Lithuania, on the
first of May, they used to set up a green tree before the village.
Then the rustic swains chose the prettiest girl, crowned her,
swathed her in birch branches and set her beside the May-tree,
where they danced, sang, and shouted “O May! O May!” In
Brie (Isle de France) a May-tree is erected in the midst of the
village; its top is crowned with flowers; lower down it is twined
with leaves and twigs, still lower with huge green branches. The
girls dance round it, and at the same time a lad wrapt in leaves
and called Father May is led about. In the small towns of the
Franken Wald mountains in Northern Bavaria, on the second of May, a
Walber tree is erected before a tavern, and a man dances
round it, enveloped in straw from head to foot in such a way that
the ears of corn unite above his head to form a crown. He is called
the Walber, and used to be led in procession through the
streets, which were adorned with sprigs of birch.
Amongst the Slavs of Carinthia, on St. George’s Day (the
twentythird of April), the young people deck with flowers and
garlands a tree which has been felled on the eve of the festival.
The tree is then carried in procession, accompanied with music and
joyful acclamations, the chief figure in the procession being the
Green George, a young fellow clad from head to foot in green birch
branches. At the close of the ceremonies the Green George, that is
an effigy of him, is thrown into the water. It is the aim of the
lad who acts Green George to step out of his leafy envelope and
substitute the effigy so adroitly that no one shall perceive the
change. In many places, however, the lad himself who plays the part
of Green George is ducked in a river or pond, with the express
intention of thus ensuring rain to make the fields and meadows
green in summer. In some places the cattle are crowned and driven
from their stalls to the accompaniment of a song:
“Green George we bring,
Green George we accompany,
May he feed our herds well.
If not, to the water with him.”
Here we see that the same powers of making rain and fostering
the cattle, which are ascribed to the tree-spirit regarded as
incorporate in the tree, are also attributed to the tree-spirit
represented by a living man.
Among the gypsies of Transylvania and Roumania the festival of
Green George is the chief celebration of spring. Some of them keep
it on Easter Monday, others on St. George’s Day (the
twentythird of April). On the eve of the festival a young willow
tree is cut down, adorned with garlands and leaves, and set up in
the ground. Women with child place one of their garments under the
tree, and leave it there over night; if next morning they find a
leaf of the tree lying on the garment, they know that their
delivery will be easy. Sick and old people go to the tree in the
evening, spit on it thrice, and say, “You will soon die, but
let us live.” Next morning the gypsies gather about the
willow. The chief figure of the festival is Green George, a lad who
is concealed from top to toe in green leaves and blossoms. He
throws a few handfuls of grass to the beasts of the tribe, in order
that they may have no lack of fodder throughout the year. Then he
takes three iron nails, which have lain for three days and nights
in water, and knocks them into the willow; after which he pulls
them out and flings them into a running stream to propitiate the
water-spirits. Finally, a pretence is made of throwing Green George
into the water, but in fact it is only a puppet made of branches
and leaves which is ducked in the stream. In this version of the
custom the powers of granting an easy delivery to women and of
communicating vital energy to the sick and old are clearly ascribed
to the willow; while Green George, the human double of the tree,
bestows food on the cattle, and further ensures the favour of the
water-spirits by putting them in indirect communication with the
tree.
Without citing more examples to the same effect, we may sum up
the results of the preceding pages in the words of Mannhardt:
“The customs quoted suffice to establish with certainty the
conclusion that in these spring processions the spirit of
vegetation is often represented both by the May-tree and in
addition by a man dressed in green leaves or flowers or by a girl
similarly adorned. It is the same spirit which animates the tree
and is active in the inferior plants and which we have recognised
in the May-tree and the Harvest-May. Quite consistently the spirit
is also supposed to manifest his presence in the first flower of
spring and reveals himself both in a girl representing a May-rose,
and also, as giver of harvest, in the person of the
Walber. The procession with this representative of the
divinity was supposed to produce the same beneficial effects on the
fowls, the fruit-trees, and the crops as the presence of the deity
himself. In other words the mummer was regarded not as an image but
as an actual representative of the spirit of vegetation; hence the
wish expressed by the attendants on the May-rose and the May-tree
that those who refuse them gifts of eggs, bacon, and so forth, may
have no share in the blessings which it is in the power of the
itinerant spirit to bestow. We may conclude that these begging
processions with May-trees or May-boughs from door to door
(‘bringing the May or the summer’) had everywhere
originally a serious and, so to speak, sacramental significance;
people really believed that the god of growth was present unseen in
the bough; by the procession he was brought to each house to bestow
his blessing. The names May, Father May, May Lady, Queen of the
May, by which the anthropomorphic spirit of vegetation is often
denoted, show that the idea of the spirit of vegetation is blent
with a personification of the season at which his powers are most
strikingly manifested.”
So far we have seen that the tree-spirit or the spirit of
vegetation in general is represented either in vegetable form
alone, as by a tree, bough, or flower; or in vegetable and human
form simultaneously, as by a tree, bough, or flower in combination
with a puppet or a living person. It remains to show that the
representation of him by a tree, bough, or flower is sometimes
entirely dropped, while the representation of him by a living
person remains. In this case the representative character of the
person is generally marked by dressing him or her in leaves or
flowers; sometimes, too, it is indicated by the name he or she
bears.
Thus in some parts of Russia on St. George’s Day (the
twenty-third of April) a youth is dressed out, like our
Jack-in-the-Green, with leaves and flowers. The Slovenes call him
the Green George. Holding a lighted torch in one hand and a pie in
the other, he goes out to the corn-fields, followed by girls
singing appropriate songs. A circle of brushwood is next lighted,
in the middle of which is set the pie. All who take part in the
ceremony then sit down around the fire and divide the pie among
them. In this custom the Green George dressed in leaves and flowers
is plainly identical with the similarly disguised Green George who
is associated with a tree in the Carinthian, Transylvanian, and
Roumanian customs observed on the same day. Again, we saw that in
Russia at Whitsuntide a birch-tree is dressed in woman’s
clothes and set up in the house. Clearly equivalent to this is the
custom observed on Whit-Monday by Russian girls in the district of
Pinsk. They choose the prettiest of their number, envelop her in a
mass of foliage taken from the birch-trees and maples, and carry
her about through the village.
In Ruhla as soon as the trees begin to grow green in spring, the
children assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where they
choose one of their playmates to be the Little Leaf Man. They break
branches from the trees and twine them about the child till only
his shoes peep out from the leafy mantle. Holes are made in it for
him to see through, and two of the children lead the Little Leaf
Man that he may not stumble or fall. Singing and dancing they take
him from house to house, asking for gifts of food such as eggs,
cream, sausages, and cakes. Lastly, they sprinkle the Leaf Man with
water and feast on the food they have collected. In the Fricktal,
Switzerland, at Whitsuntide boys go out into a wood and swathe one
of their number in leafy boughs. He is called the Whitsuntide-lout,
and being mounted on horseback with a green branch in his hand he
is led back into the village. At the village-well a halt is called
and the leaf-clad lout is dismounted and ducked in the trough.
Thereby he acquires the right of sprinkling water on everybody, and
he exercises the right specially on girls and street urchins. The
urchins march before him in bands begging him to give them a
Whitsuntide wetting.
In England the best-known example of these leaf-clad mummers is
the Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who walks encased in a
pyramidal framework of wickerwork, which is covered with holly and
ivy, and surmounted by a crown of flowers and ribbons. Thus arrayed
he dances on May Day at the head of a troop of chimney-sweeps, who
collect pence. In Fricktal a similar frame of basketwork is called
the Whitsuntide Basket. As soon as the trees begin to bud, a spot
is chosen in the wood, and here the village lads make the frame
with all secrecy, lest others should forestall them. Leafy branches
are twined round two hoops, one of which rests on the shoulders of
the wearer, the other encircles his claves; holes are made for his
eyes and mouth; and a large nosegay crowns the whole. In this guise
he appears suddenly in the village at the hour of vespers, preceded
by three boys blowing on horns made of willow bark. The great
object of his supporters is to set up the Whitsuntide Basket on the
village well, and to keep it and him there, despite the efforts of
the lads from neighbouring villages, who seek to carry off the
Whitsuntide Basket and set it up on their own well.
In the class of cases of which the foregoing are specimens it is
obvious that the leaf-clad person who is led about is equivalent to
the May-tree, May-bough, or May-doll, which is carried from house
to house by children begging. Both are representatives of the
beneficent spirit of vegetation, whose visit to the house is
recompensed by a present of money or food.
Often the leaf-clad person who represents the spirit of
vegetation is known as the king or the queen; thus, for example, he
or she is called the May King, Whitsuntide King, Queen of May, and
so on. These titles, as Mannhardt observes, imply that the spirit
incorporate in vegetation is a ruler, whose creative power extends
far and wide.
In a village near Salzwedel a May-tree is set up at Whitsuntide
and the boys race to it; he who reaches it first is king; a garland
of flowers is put round his neck and in his hand he carries a
May-bush, with which, as the procession moves along, he sweeps away
the dew. At each house they sing a song, wishing the inmates good
luck, referring to the “black cow in the stall milking white
milk, black hen on the nest laying white eggs,” and begging a
gift of eggs, bacon, and so on. At the village of Ellgoth in
Silesia a ceremony called the King’s Race is observed at
Whitsuntide. A pole with a cloth tied to it is set up in a meadow,
and the young men ride past it on horseback, each trying to snatch
away the cloth as he gallops by. The one who succeeds in carrying
it off and dipping it in the neighbouring Oder is proclaimed King.
Here the pole is clearly a substitute for a May-tree. In some
villages of Brunswick at Whitsuntide a May King is completely
enveloped in a May-bush. In some parts of Thüringen also they have
a May King at Whitsuntide, but he is dressed up rather differently.
A frame of wood is made in which a man can stand; it is completely
covered with birch boughs and is surmounted by a crown of birch and
flowers, in which a bell is fastened. This frame is placed in the
wood and the May King gets into it. The rest go out and look for
him, and when they have found him they lead him back into the
village to the magistrate, the clergyman, and others, who have to
guess who is in the verdurous frame. If they guess wrong, the May
King rings his bell by shaking his head, and a forfeit of beer or
the like must be paid by the unsuccessful guesser. At Wahrstedt the
boys at Whitsuntide choose by lot a king and a high-steward. The
latter is completely concealed in a May-bush, wears a wooden crown
wreathen with flowers, and carries a wooden sword. The king, on the
other hand, is only distinguished by a nosegay in his cap, and a
reed, with a red ribbon tied to it, in his hand. They beg for eggs
from house to house, threatening that, where none are given, none
will be laid by the hens throughout the year. In this custom the
high-steward appears, for some reason, to have usurped the insignia
of the king. At Hildesheim five or six young fellows go about on
the afternoon of Whit-Monday cracking long whips in measured time
and collecting eggs from the houses. The chief person of the band
is the Leaf King, a lad swathed so completely in birchen twigs that
nothing of him can be seen but his feet. A huge head-dress of
birchen twigs adds to his apparent stature. In his hand he carries
a long crook, with which he tries to catch stray dogs and children.
In some parts of Bohemia on Whit-Monday the young fellows disguise
themselves in tall caps of birch bark adorned with flowers. One of
them is dressed as a king and dragged on a sledge to the village
green, and if on the way they pass a pool the sledge is always
overturned into it. Arrived at the green they gather round the
king; the crier jumps on a stone or climbs up a tree and recites
lampoons about each house and its inmates. Afterwards the disguises
of bark are stripped off and they go about the village in holiday
attire, carrying a May-tree and begging. Cakes, eggs, and corn are
sometimes given them. At Grossvargula, near Langensalza, in the
eighteenth century a Grass King used to be led about in procession
at Whitsuntide. He was encased in a pyramid of poplar branches, the
top of which was adorned with a royal crown of branches and
flowers. He rode on horseback with the leafy pyramid over him, so
that its lower end touched the ground, and an opening was left in
it only for his face. Surrounded by a cavalcade of young fellows,
he rode in procession to the town hall, the parsonage, and so on,
where they all got a drink of beer. Then under the seven lindens of
the neighbouring Sommerberg, the Grass King was stripped of his
green casing; the crown was handed to the Mayor, and the branches
were stuck in the flax fields in order to make the flax grow tall.
In this last trait the fertilising influence ascribed to the
representative of the tree-spirit comes out clearly. In the
neighbourhood of Pilsen (Bohemia) a conical hut of green branches,
without any door, is erected at Whitsuntide in the midst of the
village. To this hut rides a troop of village lads with a king at
their head. He wears a sword at his side and a sugar-loaf hat of
rushes on his head. In his train are a judge, a crier, and a
personage called the Frog-flayer or Hangman. This last is a sort of
ragged merryandrew, wearing a rusty old sword and bestriding a
sorry hack. On reaching the hut the crier dismounts and goes round
it looking for a door. Finding none, he says, “Ah, this is
perhaps an enchanted castle; the witches creep through the leaves
and need no door.” At last he draws his sword and hews his
way into the hut, where there is a chair, on which he seats himself
and proceeds to criticise in rhyme the girls, farmers, and
farm-servants of the neighbourhood. When this is over, the
Frog-flayer steps forward and, after exhibiting a cage with frogs
in it, sets up a gallows on which he hangs the frogs in a row. In
the neighbourhood of Plas the ceremony differs in some points. The
king and his soldiers are completely clad in bark, adorned with
flowers and ribbons; they all carry swords and ride horses, which
are gay with green branches and flowers. While the village dames
and girls are being criticised at the arbour, a frog is secretly
pinched and poked by the crier till it quacks. Sentence of death is
passed on the frog by the king; the hangman beheads it and flings
the bleeding body among the spectators. Lastly, the king is driven
from the hut and pursued by the soldiers. The pinching and
beheading of the frog are doubtless, as Mannhardt observes, a
rain-charm. We have seen that some Indians of the Orinoco beat
frogs for the express purpose of producing rain, and that killing a
frog is a European rain-charm.
Often the spirit of vegetation in spring is represented by a
queen instead of a king. In the neighbourhood of Libchowic
(Bohemia), on the fourth Sunday in Lent, girls dressed in white and
wearing the first spring flowers, as violets and daisies, in their
hair, lead about the village a girl who is called the Queen and is
crowned with flowers. During the procession, which is conducted
with great solemnity, none of the girls may stand still, but must
keep whirling round continually and singing. In every house the
Queen announces the arrival of spring and wishes the inmates good
luck and blessings, for which she receives presents. In German
Hungary the girls choose the prettiest girl to be their Whitsuntide
Queen, fasten a towering wreath on her brow, and carry her singing
through the streets. At every house they stop, sing old ballads,
and receive presents. In the south-east of Ireland on May Day the
prettiest girl used to be chosen Queen of the district for twelve
months. She was crowned with wild flowers; feasting, dancing, and
rustic sports followed, and were closed by a grand procession in
the evening. During her year of office she presided over rural
gatherings of young people at dances and merry-makings. If she
married before next May Day, her authority was at an end, but her
successor was not elected till that day came round. The May Queen
is common In France and familiar in England.
Again the spirit of vegetation is sometimes represented by a
king and queen, a lord and lady, or a bridegroom and bride. Here
again the parallelism holds between the anthropomorphic and the
vegetable representation of the tree-spirit, for we have seen above
that trees are sometimes married to each other. At Halford in South
Warwickshire the children go from house to house on May Day,
walking two and two in procession and headed by a King and Queen.
Two boys carry a May-pole some six or seven feet high, which is
covered with flowers and greenery. Fastened to it near the top are
two cross-bars at right angles to each other. These are also decked
with flowers, and from the ends of the bars hang hoops similarly
adorned. At the houses the children sing May songs and receive
money, which is used to provide tea for them at the schoolhouse in
the afternoon. In a Bohemian village near Königgrätz on Whit-Monday
the children play the king’s game, at which a king and queen
march about under a canopy, the queen wearing a garland, and the
youngest girl carrying two wreaths on a plate behind them. They are
attended by boys and girls called groomsmen and bridesmaids, and
they go from house to house collecting gifts. A regular feature in
the popular celebration of Whitsuntide in Silesia used to be, and
to some extent still is, the contest for the kingship. This contest
took various forms, but the mark or goal was generally the May-tree
or May-pole. Sometimes the youth who succeeded in climbing the
smooth pole and bringing down the prize was proclaimed the
Whitsuntide King and his sweetheart the Whitsuntide Bride.
Afterwards the king, carrying the May-bush, repaired with the rest
of the company to the alehouse, where a dance and a feast ended the
merry-making. Often the young farmers and labourers raced on
horseback to the May-pole, which was adorned with flowers, ribbons,
and a crown. He who first reached the pole was the Whitsuntide
King, and the rest had to obey his orders for that day. The worst
rider became the clown. At the May-tree all dismounted and hoisted
the king on their shoulders. He nimbly swarmed up the pole and
brought down the May-bush and the crown, which had been fastened to
the top. Meanwhile the clown hurried to the alehouse and proceeded
to bolt thirty rolls of bread and to swig four quart bottles of
brandy with the utmost possible despatch. He was followed by the
king, who bore the May-bush and crown at the head of the company.
If on their arrival the clown had already disposed of the rolls and
the brandy, and greeted the king with a speech and a glass of beer,
his score was paid by the king; otherwise he had to settle it
himself. After church time the stately procession wound through the
village. At the head of it rode the king, decked with flowers and
carrying the May-bush. Next came the clown with his clothes turned
inside out, a great flaxen beard on his chain, and the Whitsuntide
crown on his head. Two riders disguised as guards followed. The
procession drew up before every farmyard; the two guards
dismounted, shut the clown into the house, and claimed a
contribution from the housewife to buy soap with which to wash the
clown’s beard. Custom allowed them to carry off any victuals
which were not under lock and key. Last of all they came to the
house in which the king’s sweetheart lived. She was greeted
as Whitsuntide Queen and received suitable presents—to wit, a
many-coloured sash, a cloth, and an apron. The king got as a prize,
a vest, a neck-cloth, and so forth, and had the right of setting up
the May-bush or Whitsuntide-tree before his master’s yard,
where it remained as an honourable token till the same day next
year. Finally the procession took its way to the tavern, where the
king and queen opened the dance. Sometimes the Whitsuntide King and
Queen succeeded to office in a different way. A man of straw, as
large as life and crowned with a red cap, was conveyed in a cart,
between two men armed and disguised as guards, to a place where a
mock court was waiting to try him. A great crowd followed the cart.
After a formal trial the straw man was condemned to death and
fastened to a stake on the execution ground. The young men with
bandaged eyes tried to stab him with a spear. He who succeeded
became king and his sweetheart queen. The straw man was known as
the Goliath.
In a parish of Denmark it used to be the custom at Whitsuntide
to dress up a little girl as the Whitsun-bride and a little boy as
her groom. She was decked in all the finery of a grown-up bride,
and wore a crown of the freshest flowers of spring on her head. Her
groom was as gay as flowers, ribbons, and knots could make him. The
other children adorned themselves as best they could with the
yellow flowers of the trollius and caltha. Then they went in great
state from farmhouse to farmhouse, two little girls walking at the
head of the procession as bridesmaids, and six or eight outriders
galloping ahead on hobby-horses to announce their coming.
Contributions of eggs, butter, loaves, cream, coffee, sugar, and
tallow-candles were received and conveyed away in baskets. When
they had made the round of the farms, some of the farmers’
wives helped to arrange the wedding feast, and the children danced
merrily in clogs on the stamped clay floor till the sun rose and
the birds began to sing. All this is now a thing of the past. Only
the old folks still remember the little Whitsun-bride and her mimic
pomp.
We have seen that in Sweden the ceremonies associated elsewhere
with May Day or Whitsuntide commonly take place at Midsummer.
Accordingly we find that in some parts of the Swedish province of
Blekinge they still choose a Midsummer’s Bride, to whom the
“church coronet” is occasionally lent. The girl selects
for herself a Bridegroom, and a collection is made for the pair,
who for the time being are looked on as man and wife. The other
youths also choose each his bride. A similar ceremony seems to be
still kept up in Norway.
In the neighbourhood of Briançon (Dauphiné) on May Day the lads
wrap up in green leaves a young fellow whose sweetheart has
deserted him or married another. He lies down on the ground and
feigns to be asleep. Then a girl who likes him, and would marry
him, comes and wakes him, and raising him up offers him her arm and
a flag. So they go to the alehouse, where the pair lead off the
dancing. But they must marry within the year, or they are treated
as old bachelor and old maid, and are debarred the company of the
young folks. The lad is called the Bridegroom of the month of May.
In the alehouse he puts off his garment of leaves, out of which,
mixed with flowers, his partner in the dance makes a nosegay, and
wears it at her breast next day, when he leads her again to the
alehouse. Like this is a Russian custom observed in the district of
Nerechta on the Thursday before Whitsunday. The girls go out into a
birch-wood, wind a girdle or band round a stately birch, twist its
lower branches into a wreath, and kiss each other in pairs through
the wreath. The girls who kiss through the wreath call each other
gossips. Then one of the girls steps forward, and mimicking a
drunken man, flings herself on the ground, rolls on the grass, and
feigns to fall fast asleep. Another girl wakens the pretended
sleeper and kisses him; then the whole bevy trips singing through
the wood to twine garlands, which they throw into the water. In the
fate of the garlands floating on the stream they read their own.
Here the part of the sleeper was probably at one time played by a
lad. In these French and Russian customs we have a forsaken
bridegroom, in the following a forsaken bride. On Shrove Tuesday
the Slovenes of Oberkrain drag a straw puppet with joyous cries up
and down the village; then they throw it into the water or burn it,
and from the height of the flames they judge of the abundance of
the next harvest. The noisy crew is followed by a female masker,
who drags a great board by a string and gives out that she is a
forsaken bride.
Viewed in the light of what has gone before, the awakening of
the forsaken sleeper in these ceremonies probably represents the
revival of vegetation in spring. But it is not easy to assign their
respective parts to the forsaken bridegroom and to the girl who
wakes him from his slumber. Is the sleeper the leafless forest or
the bare earth of winter? Is the girl who awakens him the fresh
verdure or the genial sunshine of spring? It is hardly possible, on
the evidence before us, to answer these questions.
In the Highlands of Scotland the revival of vegetation in spring
used to be graphically represented on St. Bride’s Day, the
first of February. Thus in the Hebrides “the mistress and
servants of each family take a sheaf of oats, and dress it up in
women’s apparel, put it in a large basket and lay a wooden
club by it, and this they call Briid’s bed; and then the
mistress and servants cry three times, ‘Briid is come, Briid
is welcome.’ This they do just before going to bed, and when
they rise in the morning they look among the ashes, expecting to
see the impression of Briid’s club there; which if they do,
they reckon it a true presage of a good crop and prosperous year,
and the contrary they take as an ill omen.” The same custom
is described by another witness thus: “Upon the night before
Candlemas it is usual to make a bed with corn and hay, over which
some blankets are laid, in a part of the house, near the door. When
it is ready, a person goes out and repeats three times, …
‘Bridget, Bridget, come in; thy bed is ready.’ One or
more candles are left burning near it all night.” Similarly
in the Isle of Man “on the eve of the first of February, a
festival was formerly kept, called, in the Manks language,
Laa’l Breeshey, in honour of the Irish lady who went
over to the Isle of Man to receive the veil from St. Maughold. The
custom was to gather a bundle of green rushes, and standing with
them in the hand on the threshold of the door, to invite the holy
Saint Bridget to come and lodge with them that night. In the Manks
language, the invitation ran thus: ‘Brede, Brede, tar gys
my thie tar dyn thie ayms noght Foshil jee yn dorrys da Brede, as
lhig da Brede e heet staigh.’ In English:
‘Bridget, Bridget, come to my house, come to my house
to-night. Open the door for Bridget, and let Bridget come
in.’ After these words were repeated, the rushes were strewn
on the floor by way of a carpet or bed for St. Bridget. A custom
very similar to this was also observed in some of the Out-Isles of
the ancient Kingdom of Man.” In these Manx and Highland
ceremonies it is obvious that St. Bride, or St. Bridget, is an old
heathen goddess of fertility, disguised in a threadbare Christian
cloak. Probably she is no other than Brigit, the Celtic goddess of
fire and apparently of the crops.
Often the marriage of the spirit of vegetation in spring, though
not directly represented, is implied by naming the human
representative of the spirit, “the Bride,” and dressing
her in wedding attire. Thus in some villages of Altmark at
Whitsuntide, while the boys go about carrying a May-tree or leading
a boy enveloped in leaves and flowers, the girls lead about the May
Bride, a girl dressed as a bride with a great nosegay in her hair.
They go from house to house, the May Bride singing a song in which
she asks for a present and tells the inmates of each house that if
they give her something they will themselves have something the
whole year through; but if they give her nothing they will
themselves have nothing. In some parts of Westphalia two girls lead
a flower-crowned girl called the Whitsuntide Bride from door to
door, singing a song in which they ask for eggs.
XI. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation
FROM THE PRECEDING examination of the spring and summer
festivals of Europe we may infer that our rude forefathers
personified the powers of vegetation as male and female, and
attempted, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to
quicken the growth of trees and plants by representing the marriage
of the sylvan deities in the persons of a King and Queen of May, a
Whitsun Bridegroom and Bride, and so forth. Such representations
were accordingly no mere symbolic or allegorical dramas, pastoral
plays designed to amuse or instruct a rustic audience. They were
charms intended to make the woods to grow green, the fresh grass to
sprout, the corn to shoot, and the flowers to blow. And it was
natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the
leaf-clad or flower-decked mummers aped the real marriage of the
woodland sprites, the more effective would be the charm.
Accordingly we may assume with a high degree of probability that
the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at
one time not an accidental excess but an essential part of the
rites, and that in the opinion of those who performed them the
marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without the real
union of the human sexes. At the present day it might perhaps be
vain to look in civilised Europe for customs of this sort observed
for the explicit purpose of promoting the growth of vegetation. But
ruder races in other parts of the world have consciously employed
the intercourse of the sexes as a means to ensure the fruitfulness
of the earth; and some rites which are still, or were till lately,
kept up in Europe can be reasonably explained only as stunted
relics of a similar practice. The following facts will make this
plain.
For four days before they committed the seed to the earth the
Pipiles of Central America kept apart from their wives “in
order that on the night before planting they might indulge their
passions to the fullest extent; certain persons are even said to
have been appointed to perform the sexual act at the very moment
when the first seeds were deposited in the ground.” The use
of their wives at that time was indeed enjoined upon the people by
the priests as a religious duty, in default of which it was not
lawful to sow the seed. The only possible explanation of this
custom seems to be that the Indians confused the process by which
human beings reproduce their kind with the process by which plants
discharge the same function, and fancied that by resorting to the
former they were simultaneously forwarding the latter. In some
parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be on the
rice, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and
there engage in sexual intercourse for the purpose of promoting the
growth of the crop. In the Leti, Sarmata, and some other groups of
islands which lie between the western end of New Guinea and the
northern part of Australia, the heathen population regard the sun
as the male principle by whom the earth or female prínciple is
fertilised. They call him Upu-lera or Mr. Sun, and represent him
under the form of a lamp made of coco-nut leaves, which may be seen
hanging everywhere in their houses and in the sacred fig-tree.
Under the tree lies a large flat stone, which serves as a
sacrificial table. On it the heads of slain foes were and are still
placed in some of the islands. Once a year, at the beginning of the
rainy season, Mr. Sun comes down into the holy fig-tree to
fertilise the earth, and to facilitate his descent a ladder with
seven rungs is considerately placed at his disposal. It is set up
under the tree and is adorned with carved figures of the birds
whose shrill clarion heralds the approach of the sun in the east.
On this occasion pigs and dogs are sacrificed in profusion; men and
women alike indulge in a saturnalia; and the mystic union of the
sun and the earth is dramatically represented in public, amid song
and dance, by the real union of the sexes under the tree. The
object of the festival, we are told, is to procure rain, plenty of
food and drink, abundance of cattle and children and riches from
Grandfather Sun. They pray that he may make every she-goat to cast
two or three young, the people to multiply, the dead pigs to be
replaced by living pigs, the empty rice-baskets to be filled, and
so on. And to induce him to grant their requests they offer him
pork and rice and liquor, and invite him to fall to. In the Babar
Islands a special flag is hoisted at this festival as a symbol of
the creative energy of the sun; it is of white cotton, about nine
feet high, and consists of the figure of a man in an appropriate
attitude. It would be unjust to treat these orgies as a mere
outburst of unbridled passion; no doubt they are deliberately and
solemnly organised as essential to the fertility of the earth and
the welfare of man.
The same means which are thus adopted to stimulate the growth of
the crops are naturally employed to ensure the fruitfulness of
trees. In some parts of Amboyna, when the state of the clove
plantation indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men
go naked to the plantations by night, and there seek to fertilise
the trees precisely as they would impregnate women, while at the
same time they call out for “More cloves!” This is
supposed to make the trees bear fruit more abundantly.
The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the
intimate relation between the intercourse of the sexes and the
fertility of the ground that among them a barren wife is generally
sent away, because she is supposed to prevent her husband’s
garden from bearing fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given
proof of extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins
are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding
power of increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which
furnish them with their staple food. Some little time after the
birth of the twins a ceremony is performed, the object of which
clearly is to transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to
the plantains. The mother lies down on her back in the thick grass
near the house and places a flower of the plantain between her
legs; then her husband comes and knocks the flower away with his
genital member. Further, the parents go through the country
performing dances in the gardens of favoured friends, apparently
for the purpose of causing the plantain-trees to bear fruit more
abundantly.
In various parts of Europe customs have prevailed both at spring
and harvest which are clearly based on the same crude notion that
the relation of the human sexes to each other can be so used as to
quicken the growth of plants. For example, in the Ukraine on St.
George’s Day (the twenty-third of April) the priest in his
robes, attended by his acolytes, goes out to the fields of the
village, where the crops are beginning to show green above the
ground, and blesses them. After that the young married people lie
down in couples on the sown fields and roll several times over on
them, in the belief that this will promote the growth of the crops.
In some parts of Russia the priest himself is rolled by women over
the sprouting crop, and that without regard to the mud and holes
which he may encounter in his beneficent progress. If the shepherd
resists or remonstrates, his flock murmurs, “Little Father,
you do not really wish us well, you do not wish us to have corn,
although you do wish to live on our corn.” In some parts of
Germany at harvest the men and women, who have reaped the corn,
roll together on the field. This again is probably a mitigation of
an older and ruder custom designed to impart fertility to the
fields by methods like those resorted to by the Pipiles of Central
America long ago and by the cultivators of rice in Java at the
present time.
To the student who cares to track the devious course of the
human mind in its gropings after truth, it is of some interest to
observe that the same theoretical belief in the sympathetic
influence of the sexes on vegetation, which has led some peoples to
indulge their passions as a means of fertilising the earth, has led
others to seek the same end by directly opposite means. From the
moment that they sowed the maize till the time that they reaped it,
the Indians of Nicaragua lived chastely, keeping apart from their
wives and sleeping in a separate place. They ate no salt, and drank
neither cocoa nor chicha, the fermented liquor made from
maize; in short the season was for them, as the Spanish historian
observes, a time of abstinence. To this day some of the Indian
tribes of Central America practise continence for the purpose of
thereby promoting the growth of the crops. Thus we are told that
before sowing the maize the Kekchi Indians sleep apart from their
wives, and eat no flesh for five days, while among the Lanquineros
and Cajaboneros the period of abstinence from these carnal
pleasures extends to thirteen days. So amongst some of the Germans
of Transylvania it is a rule that no man may sleep with his wife
during the whole of the time that he is engaged in sowing his
fields. The same rule is observed at Kalotaszeg in Hungary; the
people think that if the custom were not observed the corn would be
mildewed. Similarly a Central Australian headman of the Kaitish
tribe strictly abstains from marital relations with his wife all
the time that he is performing magical ceremonies to make the grass
grow; for he believes that a breach of this rule would prevent the
grass seed from sprouting properly. In some of the Melanesian
islands, when the yam vines are being trained, the men sleep near
the gardens and never approach their wives; should they enter the
garden after breaking this rule of continence the fruits of the
garden would be spoilt.
If we ask why it is that similar beliefs should logically lead,
among different peoples, to such opposite modes of conduct as
strict chastity and more or less open debauchery, the reason, as it
presents itself to the primitive mind, is perhaps not very far to
seek. If rude man identifies himself, in a manner, with nature; if
he fails to distinguish the impulses and processes in himself from
the methods which nature adopts to ensure the reproduction of
plants and animals, he may leap to one of two conclusions. Either
he may infer that by yielding to his appetites he will thereby
assist in the multiplication of plants and animals; or he may
imagine that the vigour which he refuses to expend in reproducing
his own kind, will form as it were a store of energy whereby other
creatures, whether vegetable or animal, will somehow benefit in
propagating their species. Thus from the same crude philosophy, the
same primitive notions of nature and life, the savage may derive by
different channels a rule either of profligacy or of
asceticism.
To readers bred in religion which is saturated with the ascetic
idealism of the East, the explanation which I have given of the
rule of continence observed under certain circumstances by rude or
savage peoples may seem far-fetched and improbable. They may think
that moral purity, which is so intimately associated in their minds
with the observance of such a rule, furnishes a sufficient
explanation of it; they may hold with Milton that chastity in
itself is a noble virtue, and that the restraint which it imposes
on one of the strongest impulses of our animal nature marks out
those who can submit to it as men raised above the common herd, and
therefore worthy to receive the seal of the divine approbation.
However natural this mode of thought may seem to us, it is utterly
foreign and indeed incomprehensible to the savage. If he resists on
occasion the sexual instinct, it is from no high idealism, no
ethereal aspiration after moral purity, but for the sake of some
ulterior yet perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which
he is prepared to sacrifice the immediate gratification of his
senses. That this is or may be so, the examples I have cited are
amply sufficient to prove. They show that where the instinct of
self-preservation, which manifests itself chiefly in the search for
food, conflicts or appears to conflict with the instinct which
conduces to the propagation of the species, the former instinct, as
the primary and more fundamental, is capable of overmastering the
latter. In short, the savage is willing to restrain his sexual
propensity for the sake of food. Another object for the sake of
which he consents to exercise the same self-restraint is victory in
war. Not only the warrior in the field but his friends at home will
often bridle their sensual appetites from a belief that by so doing
they will the more easily overcome their enemies. The fallacy of
such a belief, like the belief that the chastity of the sower
conduces to the growth of the seed, is plain enough to us; yet
perhaps the self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain
and false as they are, have imposed on mankind, has not been
without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For
strength of character in the race as in the individual consists
mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of
disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for
more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the
power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character;
till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the
pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of keeping or
winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of
freedom and truth.
XII. The Sacred Marriage
1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility
WE have seen that according to a widespread belief, which is not
without a foundation in fact, plants reproduce their kinds through
the sexual union of male and female elements, and that on the
principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic this reproduction is
supposed to be stimulated by the real or mock marriage of men and
women, who masquerade for the time being as spirits of vegetation.
Such magical dramas have played a great part in the popular
festivals of Europe, and based as they are on a very crude
conception of natural law, it is clear that they must have been
handed down from a remote antiquity. We shall hardly, therefore,
err in assuming that they date from a time when the forefathers of
the civilised nations of Europe were still barbarians, herding
their cattle and cultivating patches of corn in the clearings of
the vast forests, which then covered the greater part of the
continent, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean. But if these
old spells and enchantments for the growth of leaves and blossoms,
of grass and flowers and fruit, have lingered down to our own time
in the shape of pastoral plays and popular merry-makings, is it not
reasonable to suppose that they survived in less attenuated forms
some two thousand years ago among the civilised peoples of
antiquity? Or, to put it otherwise, is it not likely that in
certain festivals of the ancients we may be able to detect the
equivalents of our May Day, Whitsuntide, and Midsummer
celebrations, with this difference, that in those days the
ceremonies had not yet dwindled into mere shows and pageants, but
were still religious or magical rites, in which the actors
consciously supported the high parts of gods and goddesses? Now in
the first chapter of this book we found reason to believe that the
priest who bore the title of King of the Wood at Nemi had for his
mate the goddess of the grove, Diana herself. May not he and she,
as King and Queen of the Wood, have been serious counterparts of
the merry mummers who play the King and Queen of May, the
Whitsuntide Bridegroom and Bride in modern Europe? and may not
their union have been yearly celebrated in a theogamy or
divine marriage? Such dramatic weddings of gods and goddesses, as
we shall see presently, were carried out as solemn religious rites
in many parts of the ancient world; hence there is no intrinsic
improbability in the supposition that the sacred grove at Nemi may
have been the scene of an annual ceremony of this sort. Direct
evidence that it was so there is none, but analogy pleads in favour
of the view, as I shall now endeavour to show.
Diana was essentially a goddess of the woodlands, as Ceres was a
goddess of the corn and Bacchus a god of the vine. Her sanctuaries
were commonly in groves, indeed every grove was sacred to her, and
she is often associated with the forest god Silvanus in
dedications. But whatever her origin may have been, Diana was not
always a mere goddess of trees. Like her Greek sister Artemis, she
appears to have developed into a personification of the teeming
life of nature, both animal and vegetable. As mistress of the
greenwood she would naturally be thought to own the beasts, whether
wild or tame, that ranged through it, lurking for their prey in its
gloomy depths, munching the fresh leaves and shoots among the
boughs, or cropping the herbage in the open glades and dells. Thus
she might come to be the patron goddess both of hunters and
herdsmen, just as Silvanus was the god not only of woods, but of
cattle. Similarly in Finland the wild beasts of the forest were
regarded as the herds of the woodland god Tapio and of his stately
and beautiful wife. No man might slay one of these animals without
the gracious permission of their divine owners. Hence the hunter
prayed to the sylvan deities, and vowed rich offerings to them if
they would drive the game across his path. And cattle also seem to
have enjoyed the protection of those spirits of the woods, both
when they were in their stalls and while they strayed in the
forest. Before the Gayos of Sumatra hunt deer, wild goats, or wild
pigs with hounds in the woods, they deem it necessary to obtain the
leave of the unseen Lord of the forest. This is done according to a
prescribed form by a man who has special skill in woodcraft. He
lays down a quid of betel before a stake which is cut in a
particular way to represent the Lord of the Wood, and having done
so he prays to the spirit to signify his consent or refusal. In his
treatise on hunting, Arrian tells us that the Celts used to offer
an annual sacrifice to Artemis on her birthday, purchasing the
sacrificial victim with the fines which they had paid into her
treasury for every fox, hare, and roe that they had killed in the
course of the year. The custom clearly implied that the wild beasts
belonged to the goddess, and that she must be compensated for their
slaughter.
But Diana was not merely a patroness of wild beasts, a mistress
of woods and hills, of lonely glades and sounding rivers; conceived
as the moon, and especially, it would seem, as the yellow harvest
moon, she filled the farmer’s grange with goodly fruits, and
heard the prayers of women in travail. In her sacred grove at Nemi,
as we have seen, she was especially worshipped as a goddess of
childbirth, who bestowed offspring on men and women. Thus Diana,
like the Greek Artemis, with whom she was constantly identified,
may be described as a goddess of nature in general and of fertility
in particular. We need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary
on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the
many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded
emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an
ancient Roman law, attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed
that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should
be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that
the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a dearth; hence
it would be meet that atonement for the offence should be made to
the goddess of fertility.
Now on the principle that the goddess of fertility must herself
be fertile, it behoved Diana to have a male partner. Her mate, if
the testimony of Servius may be trusted, was that Virbius who had
his representative, or perhaps rather his embodiment, in the King
of the Wood at Nemi. The aim of their union would be to promote the
fruitfulness of the earth, of animals, and of mankind; and it might
naturally be thought that this object would be more surely attained
if the sacred nuptials were celebrated every year, the parts of the
divine bride and bridegroom being played either by their images or
by living persons. No ancient writer mentions that this was done in
the grove at Nemi; but our knowledge of the Arician ritual is so
scanty that the want of information on this head can hardly count
as a fatal objection to the theory. That theory, in the absence of
direct evidence, must necessarily be based on the analogy of
similar customs practised elsewhere. Some modern examples of such
customs, more or less degenerate, were described in the last
chapter. Here we shall consider their ancient counterparts.
2. The Marriage of the Gods
AT BABYLON the imposing sanctuary of Bel rose like a pyramid
above the city in a series of eight towers or stories, planted one
on the top of the other. On the highest tower, reached by an ascent
which wound about all the rest, there stood a spacious temple, and
in the temple a great bed, magnificently draped and cushioned, with
a golden table beside it. In the temple no image was to be seen,
and no human being passed the night there, save a single woman,
whom, according to the Chaldean priests, the god chose from among
all the women of Babylon. They said that the deity himself came
into the temple at night and slept in the great bed; and the woman,
as a consort of the god, might have no intercourse with mortal
man.
At Thebes in Egypt a woman slept in the temple of Ammon as the
consort of the god, and, like the human wife of Bel at Babylon, she
was said to have no commerce with a man. In Egyptian texts she is
often mentioned as “the divine consort,” and usually
she was no less a personage than the Queen of Egypt herself. For,
according to the Egyptians, their monarchs were actually begotten
by the god Ammon, who assumed for the time being the form of the
reigning king, and in that disguise had intercourse with the queen.
The divine procreation is carved and painted in great detail on the
walls of two of the oldest temples in Egypt, those of Deir el
Bahari and Luxor; and the inscriptions attached to the paintings
leave no doubt as to the meaning of the scenes.
At Athens the god of the vine, Dionysus, was annually married to
the Queen, and it appears that the consummation of the divine
union, as well as the espousals, was enacted at the ceremony; but
whether the part of the god was played by a man or an image we do
not know. We learn from Aristotle that the ceremony took place in
the old official residence of the King, known as the Cattle-stall,
which stood near the Prytaneum or Town-hall on the north-eastern
slope of the Acropolis. The object of the marriage can hardly have
been any other than that of ensuring the fertility of the vines and
other fruit-trees of which Dionysus was the god. Thus both in form
and in meaning the ceremony would answer to the nuptials of the
King and Queen of May.
In the great mysteries solemnised at Eleusis in the month of
September the union of the sky-god Zeus with the corn-goddess
Demeter appears to have been represented by the union of the
hierophant with the priestess of Demeter, who acted the parts of
god and goddess. But their intercourse was only dramatic or
symbolical, for the hierophant had temporarily deprived himself of
his virility by an application of hemlock. The torches having been
extinguished, the pair descended into a murky place, while the
throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the
mystic congress, on which they believed their own salvation to
depend. After a time the hierophant reappeared, and in a blaze of
light silently exhibited to the assembly a reaped ear of corn, the
fruit of the divine marriage. Then in a loud voice he proclaimed,
“Queen Brimo has brought forth a sacred boy Brimos,” by
which he meant, “The Mighty One has brought forth the
Mighty.” The corn-mother in fact had given birth to her
child, the corn, and her travail-pangs were enacted in the sacred
drama. This revelation of the reaped corn appears to have been the
crowning act of the mysteries. Thus through the glamour shed round
these rites by the poetry and philosophy of later ages there still
looms, like a distant landscape through a sunlit haze, a simple
rustic festival designed to cover the wide Eleusinian plain with a
plenteous harvest by wedding the goddess of the corn to the
sky-god, who fertilised the bare earth with genial showers. Every
few years the people of Plataea, in Boeotia, held a festival called
the Little Daedala, at which they felled an oak-tree in an ancient
oak forest. Out of the tree they carved an image, and having
dressed it as a bride, they set it on a bullock-cart with a
bridesmaid beside it. The image seems then to have been drawn to
the bank of the river Asopus and back to the town, attended by a
piping and dancing crowd. Every sixty years the festival of the
Great Daedala was celebrated by all the people of Boeotia; and at
it all the images, fourteen in number, which had accumulated at the
lesser festivals, were dragged on wains in procession to the river
Asopus and then to the top of Mount Cithaeron, where they were
burnt on a great pyre. The story told to explain the festivals
suggests that they celebrated the marriage of Zeus to Hera,
represented by the oaken image in bridal array. In Sweden every
year a life-size image of Frey, the god of fertility, both animal
and vegetable, was drawn about the country in a waggon attended by
a beautiful girl who was called the god’s wife. She acted
also as his priestess in his great temple at Upsala. Wherever the
waggon came with the image of the god and his blooming young bride,
the people crowded to meet them and offered sacrifices for a
fruitful year.
Thus the custom of marrying gods either to images or to human
beings was widespread among the nations of antiquity. The ideas on
which such a custom is based are too crude to allow us to doubt
that the civilised Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks inherited it
from their barbarous or savage forefathers. This presumption is
strengthened when we find rites of a similar kind in vogue among
the lower races. Thus, for example, we are told that once upon a
time the Wotyaks of the Malmyz district in Russia were distressed
by a series of bad harvests. They did not know what to do, but at
last concluded that their powerful but mischievious god Keremet
must be angry at being unmarried. So a deputation of elders visited
the Wotyaks of Cura and came to an understanding with them on the
subject. Then they returned home, laid in a large stock of brandy,
and having made ready a gaily decked waggon and horses, they drove
in procession with bells ringing, as they do when they are fetching
home a bride, to the sacred grove at Cura. There they ate and drank
merrily all night, and next morning they cut a square piece of turf
in the grove and took it home with them. After that, though it
fared well with the people of Malmyz, it fared ill with the people
of Cura; for in Malmyz the bread was good, but in Cura it was bad.
Hence the men of Cura who had consented to the marriage were blamed
and roughly handled by their indignant fellow-villagers.
“What they meant by this marriage ceremony,” says the
writer who reports it, “it is not easy to imagine. Perhaps,
as Bechterew thinks, they meant to marry Keremet to the kindly and
fruitful Mukylcin, the Earth-wife, in order that she might
influence him for good.” When wells are dug in Bengal, a
wooden image of a god is made and married to the goddess of
water.
Often the bride destined for the god is not a log or a cloud,
but a living woman of flesh and blood. The Indians of a village in
Peru have been known to marry a beautiful girl, about fourteen
years of age, to a stone shaped like a human being, which they
regarded as a god (huaca). All the villagers took part in
the marriage ceremony, which lasted three days, and was attended
with much revelry. The girl thereafter remained a virgin and
sacrificed to the idol for the people. They showed her the utmost
reverence and deemed her divine. Every year about the middle of
March, when the season for fishing with the dragnet began, the
Algonquins and Hurons married their nets to two young girls, aged
six or seven. At the wedding feast the net was placed between the
two maidens, and was exhorted to take courage and catch many fish.
The reason for choosing the brides so young was to make sure that
they were virgins. The origin of the custom is said to have been
this. One year, when the fishing season came round, the Algonquins
cast their nets as usual, but took nothing. Surprised at their want
of success, they did not know what to make of it, till the soul or
genius (oki) of the net appeared to them in the likeness
of a tall well-built man, who said to them in a great passion,
“I have lost my wife and I cannot find one who has known no
other man but me; that is why you do not succeed, and why you never
will succeed till you give me satisfaction on this head.” So
the Algonquins held a council and resolved to appease the spirit of
the net by marrying him to two such very young girls that he could
have no ground of complaint on that score for the future. They did
so, and the fishing turned out all that could be wished. The thing
got wind among their neighbours the Hurons, and they adopted the
custom. A share of the catch was always given to the families of
the two girls who acted as brides of the net for the year.
The Oraons of Bengal worship the Earth as a goddess, and
annually celebrate her marriage with the Sun-god Dharme¯ at the
time when the sa¯l tree is in blossom. The ceremony is as
follows. All bathe, then the men repair to the sacred grove
(sarna), while the women assemble at the house of the
village priest. After sacrificing some fowls to the Sun-god and the
demon of the grove, the men eat and drink. “The priest is
then carried back to the village on the shoulders of a strong man.
Near the village the women meet the men and wash their feet. With
beating of drums and singing, dancing, and jumping, all proceed to
the priest’s house, which has been decorated with leaves and
flowers. Then the usual form of marriage is performed between the
priest and his wife, symbolising the supposed union between Sun and
Earth. After the ceremony all eat and drink and make merry; they
dance and sing obscene songs, and finally indulge in the vilest
orgies. The object is to move the mother earth to become
fruitful.” Thus the Sacred Marriage of the Sun and Earth,
personated by the priest and his wife, is celebrated as a charm to
ensure the fertility of the ground; and for the same purpose, on
the principle of homoeopathic magic, the people indulge in
licentious orgy.
It deserves to be remarked that the supernatural being to whom
women are married is often a god or spirit of water. Thus Mukasa,
the god of the Victoria Nyanza lake, who was propitiated by the
Baganda every time they undertook a long voyage, had virgins
provided for him to serve as his wives. Like the Vestals they were
bound to chastity, but unlike the Vestals they seem to have been
often unfaithful. The custom lasted until Mwanga was converted to
Christianity. The Akikuyu of British East Africa worship the snake
of a certain river, and at intervals of several years they marry
the snake-god to women, but especially to young girls. For this
purpose huts are built by order of the medicine-men, who there
consummate the sacred marriage with the credulous female devotees.
If the girls do not repair to the huts of their own accord in
sufficient numbers, they are seized and dragged thither to the
embraces of the deity. The offspring of these mystic unions appears
to be fathered on God (ngai); certainly there are children
among the Akikuyu who pass for children of God. It is said that
once, when the inhabitants of Cayeli in Buru—an East Indian
island—were threatened with destruction by a swarm of
crocodiles, they ascribed the misfortune to a passion which the
prince of the crocodiles had conceived for a certain girl.
Accordingly, they compelled the damsel’s father to dress her
in bridal array and deliver her over to the clutches of her
crocodile lover.
A usage of the same sort is reported to have prevailed in the
Maldive Islands before the conversion of the inhabitants to Islam.
The famous Arab traveller Ibn Batutah has described the custom and
the manner in which it came to an end. He was assured by several
trustworthy natives, whose names he gives, that when the people of
the islands were idolaters there appeared to them every month an
evil spirit among the jinn, who came from across the sea in the
likeness of a ship full of burning lamps. The wont of the
inhabitants, as soon as they perceived him, was to take a young
virgin, and, having adorned her, to lead her to a heathen temple
that stood on the shore, with a window looking out to sea. There
they left the damsel for the night, and when they came back in the
morning they found her a maid no more, and dead. Every month they
drew lots, and he upon whom the lot fell gave up his daughter to
the jinnee of the sea. The last of the maidens thus offered to the
demon was rescued by a pious Berber, who by reciting the Koran
succeeded in driving the jinnee back into the sea.
Ibn Batutah’s narrative of the demon lover and his mortal
brides closely resembles a well-known type of folk-tale, of which
versions have been found from Japan and Annam in the East to
Senegambia, Scandinavia, and Scotland in the West. The story varies
in details from people to people, but as commonly told it runs
thus. A certain country is infested by a many-headed serpent,
dragon, or other monster, which would destroy the whole people if a
human victim, generally a virgin, were not delivered up to him
periodically. Many victims have perished, and at last it has fallen
to the lot of the king’s own daughter to be sacrificed. She
is exposed to the monster, but the hero of the tale, generally a
young man of humble birth, interposes in her behalf, slays the
monster, and receives the hand of the princess as his reward. In
many of the tales the monster, who is sometimes described as a
serpent, inhabits the water of a sea, a lake, or a fountain. In
other versions he is a serpent or dragon who takes possession of
the springs of water, and only allows the water to flow or the
people to make use of it on condition of receiving a human
victim.
It would probably be a mistake to dismiss all these tales as
pure inventions of the story-teller. Rather we may suppose that
they reflect a real custom of sacrificing girls or women to be the
wives of waterspirits, who are very often conceived as great
serpents or dragons.
XIII. The Kings of Rome and Alba
1. Numa and Egeria
FROM THE FOREGOING survey of custom and legend we may infer that
the sacred marriage of the powers both of vegetation and of water
has been celebrated by many peoples for the sake of promoting the
fertility of the earth, on which the life of animals and men
ultimately depends, and that in such rites the part of the divine
bridegroom or bride is often sustained by a man or woman. The
evidence may, therefore, lend some countenance to the conjecture
that in the sacred grove at Nemi, where the powers of vegetation
and of water manifested themselves in the fair forms of shady
woods, tumbling cascades, and glassy lake, a marriage like that of
our King and Queen of May was annually celebrated between the
mortal King of the Wood and the immortal Queen of the Wood, Diana.
In this connexion an important figure in the grove was the
water-nymph Egeria, who was worshipped by pregnant women because
she, like Diana, could grant them an easy delivery. From this it
seems fairly safe to conclude that, like many other springs, the
water of Egeria was credited with a power of facilitating
conception as well as delivery. The votive offerings found on the
spot, which clearly refer to the begetting of children, may
possibly have been dedicated to Egeria rather than to Diana, or
perhaps we should rather say that the water-nymph Egeria is only
another form of the great nature-goddess Diana herself, the
mistress of sounding rivers as well as of umbrageous woods, who had
her home by the lake and her mirror in its calm waters, and whose
Greek counterpart Artemis loved to haunt meres and springs. The
identification of Egeria with Diana is confirmed by a statement of
Plutarch that Egeria was one of the oak-nymphs whom the Romans
believed to preside over every green oak-grove; for, while Diana
was a goddess of the woodlands in general, she appears to have been
intimately associated with oaks in particular, especially at her
sacred grove of Nemi. Perhaps, then, Egeria was the fairy of a
spring that flowed from the roots of a sacred oak. Such a spring is
said to have gushed from the foot of the great oak at Dodona, and
from its murmurous flow the priestess drew oracles. Among the
Greeks a draught of water from certain sacred springs or wells was
supposed to confer prophetic powers. This would explain the more
than mortal wisdom with which, according to tradition, Egeria
inspired her royal husband or lover Numa. When we remember how very
often in early society the king is held responsible for the fall of
rain and the fruitfulness of the earth, it seems hardly rash to
conjecture that in the legend of the nuptials of Numa and Egeria we
have a reminiscence of a sacred marriage which the old Roman kings
regularly contracted with a goddess of vegetation and water for the
purpose of enabling him to discharge his divine or magical
functions. In such a rite the part of the goddess might be played
either by an image or a woman, and if by a woman, probably by the
Queen. If there is any truth in this conjecture, we may suppose
that the King and Queen of Rome masqueraded as god and goddess at
their marriage, exactly as the King and Queen of Egypt appear to
have done. The legend of Numa and Egeria points to a sacred grove
rather than to a house as the scene of the nuptial union, which,
like the marriage of the King and Queen of May, or of the vine-god
and the Queen of Athens, may have been annually celebrated as a
charm to ensure the fertility not only of the earth but of man and
beast. Now, according to some accounts, the scene of the marriage
was no other than the sacred grove of Nemi, and on quite
independent grounds we have been led to suppose that in that same
grove the King of the Wood was wedded to Diana. The convergence of
the two distinct lines of enquiry suggests that the legendary union
of the Roman king with Egeria may have been a reflection or
duplicate of the union of the King of the Wood with Egeria or her
double Diana. This does not imply that the Roman kings ever served
as Kings of the Wood in the Arician grove, but only that they may
originally have been invested with a sacred character of the same
general kind, and may have held office on similar terms. To be more
explicit, it is possible that they reigned, not by right of birth,
but in virtue of their supposed divinity as representatives or
embodiments of a god, and that as such they mated with a goddess,
and had to prove their fitness from time to time to discharge their
divine functions by engaging in a severe bodily struggle, which may
often have proved fatal to them, leaving the crown to their
victorious adversary. Our knowledge of the Roman kingship is far
too scanty to allow us to affirm any one of these propositions with
confidence; but at least there are some scattered hints or
indications of a similarity in all these respects between the
priests of Nemi and the kings of Rome, or perhaps rather between
their remote predecessors in the dark ages which preceded the dawn
of legend.
2. The King as Jupiter
IN THE FIRST place, then, it would seem that the Roman king
personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself. For down to
imperial times victorious generals celebrating a triumph, and
magistrates presiding at the games in the Circus, wore the costume
of Jupiter, which was borrowed for the occasion from his great
temple on the Capitol; and it has been held with a high degree of
probability both by ancients and moderns that in so doing they
copied the traditionary attire and insignia of the Roman kings.
They rode a chariot drawn by four laurel-crowned horses through the
city, where every one else went on foot: they wore purple robes
embroidered or spangled with gold: in the right hand they bore a
branch of laurel, and in the left hand an ivory sceptre topped with
an eagle: a wreath of laurel crowned their brows: their face was
reddened with vermilion; and over their head a slave held a heavy
crown of massy gold fashioned in the likeness of oak leaves. In
this attire the assimilation of the man to the god comes out above
all in the eagle-topped sceptre, the oaken crown, and the reddened
face. For the eagle was the bird of Jove, the oak was his sacred
tree, and the face of his image standing in his four-horse chariot
on the Capitol was in like manner regularly dyed red on festivals;
indeed, so important was it deemed to keep the divine features
properly rouged that one of the first duties of the censors was to
contract for having this done. As the triumphal procession always
ended in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, it was peculiarly
appropriate that the head of the victor should be graced by a crown
of oak leaves, for not only was every oak consecrated to Jupiter,
but the Capitoline temple of the god was said to have been built by
Romulus beside a sacred oak, venerated by shepherds, to which the
king attached the spoils won by him from the enemy’s general
in battle. We are expressly told that the oak crown was sacred to
Capitoline Jupiter; a passage of Ovid proves that it was regarded
as the god’s special emblem.
According to a tradition which we have no reason to reject, Rome
was founded by settlers from Alba Longa, a city situated on the
slope of the Alban hills, overlooking the lake and the Campagna.
Hence if the Roman kings claimed to be representatives or
embodiments of Jupiter, the god of the sky, of the thunder, and of
the oak, it is natural to suppose that the kings of Alba, from whom
the founder of Rome traced his descent, may have set up the same
claim before them. Now the Alban dynasty bore the name of Silvii or
Wood, and it can hardly be without significance that in the vision
of the historic glories of Rome revealed to Aeneas in the
underworld, Virgil, an antiquary as well as a poet, should
represent all the line of Silvii as crowned with oak. A chaplet of
oak leaves would thus seem to have been part of the insignia of the
old kings of Alba Longa as of their successors the kings of Rome;
in both cases it marked the monarch as the human representative of
the oak-god. The Roman annals record that one of the kings of Alba,
Romulus, Remulus, or Amulius Silvius by name, set up for being a
god in his own person, the equal or superior of Jupiter. To support
his pretensions and overawe his subjects, he constructed machines
whereby he mimicked the clap of thunder and the flash of lightning.
Diodorus relates that in the season of fruitage, when thunder is
loud and frequent, the king commanded his soldiers to drown the
roar of heaven’s artillery by clashing their swords against
their shields. But he paid the penalty of his impiety, for he
perished, he and his house, struck by a thunderbolt in the midst of
a dreadful storm. Swollen by the rain, the Alban lake rose in flood
and drowned his palace. But still, says an ancient historian, when
the water is low and the surface unruffled by a breeze, you may see
the ruins of the palace at the bottom of the clear lake. Taken
along with the similar story of Salmoneus, king of Elis, this
legend points to a real custom observed by the early kings of
Greece and Italy, who, like their fellows in Africa down to modern
times, may have been expected to produce rain and thunder for the
good of the crops. The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in
the art of drawing down lightning from the sky. Mock thunder, we
know, has been made by various peoples as a rain-charm in modern
times; why should it not have been made by kings in antiquity?
Thus, if the kings of Alba and Rome imitated Jupiter as god of
the oak by wearing a crown of oak leaves, they seem also to have
copied him in his character of a weather-god by pretending to make
thunder and lightning. And if they did so, it is probable that,
like Jupiter in heaven and many kings on earth, they also acted as
public rain-makers, wringing showers from the dark sky by their
enchantments whenever the parched earth cried out for the
refreshing moisture. At Rome the sluices of heaven were opened by
means of a sacred stone, and the ceremony appears to have formed
part of the ritual of Jupiter Elicius, the god who elicits from the
clouds the flashing lightning and the dripping rain. And who so
well fitted to perform the ceremony as the king, the living
representative of the sky-god?
If the kings of Rome aped Capitoline Jove, their predecessors
the kings of Alba probably laid themselves out to mimic the great
Latian Jupiter, who had his seat above the city on the summit of
the Alban Mountain. Latinus, the legendary ancestor of the dynasty,
was said to have been changed into Latian Jupiter after vanishing
from the world in the mysterious fashion characteristic of the old
Latin kings. The sanctuary of the god on the top of the mountain
was the religious centre of the Latin League, as Alba was its
political capital till Rome wrested the supremacy from its ancient
rival. Apparently no temple, in our sense of the word, was ever
erected to Jupiter on this his holy mountain; as god of the sky and
thunder he appropriately received the homage of his worshippers in
the open air. The massive wall, of which some remains still enclose
the old garden of the Passionist monastery, seems to have been part
of the sacred precinct which Tarquin the Proud, the last king of
Rome, marked out for the solemn annual assembly of the Latin
League. The god’s oldest sanctuary on this airy mountain-top
was a grove; and bearing in mind not merely the special
consecration of the oak to Jupiter, but also the traditional oak
crown of the Alban kings and the analogy of the Capitoline Jupiter
at Rome, we may suppose that the trees in the grove were oaks. We
know that in antiquity Mount Algidus, an outlying group of the
Alban hills, was covered with dark forests of oak; and among the
tribes who belonged to the Latin League in the earliest days, and
were entitled to share the flesh of the white bull sacrificed on
the Alban Mount, there was one whose members styled themselves the
Men of the Oak, doubtless on account of the woods among which they
dwelt.
But we should err if we pictured to ourselves the country as
covered in historical times with an unbroken forest of oaks.
Theophrastus has left us a description of the woods of Latium as
they were in the fourth century before Christ. He says: “The
land of the Latins is all moist. The plains produce laurels,
myrtles, and wonderful beeches; for they fell trees of such a size
that a single stem suffices for the keel of a Tyrrhenian ship.
Pines and firs grow in the mountains. What they call the land of
Circe is a lofty headland thickly wooded with oak, myrtle, and
luxuriant laurels. The natives say that Circe dwelt there, and they
show the grave of Elpenor, from which grow myrtles such as wreaths
are made of, whereas the other myrtle-trees are tall.” Thus
the prospect from the top of the Alban Mount in the early days of
Rome must have been very different in some respects from what it is
to-day. The purple Apennines, indeed, in their eternal calm on the
one hand, and the shining Mediterranean in its eternal unrest on
the other, no doubt looked then much as they look now, whether
bathed in sunshine, or chequered by the fleeting shadows of clouds;
but instead of the desolate brown expanse of the fever-stricken
Campagna, spanned by its long lines of ruined aqueducts, like the
broken arches of the bridge in the vision of Mirza, the eye must
have ranged over woodlands that stretched away, mile after mile, on
all sides, till their varied hues of green or autumnal scarlet and
gold melted insensibly into the blue of the distant mountains and
sea.
But Jupiter did not reign alone on the top of his holy mountain.
He had his consort with him, the goddess Juno, who was worshipped
here under the same title, Moneta, as on the Capitol at Rome. As
the oak crown was sacred to Jupiter and Juno on the Capitol, so we
may suppose it was on the Alban Mount, from which the Capitoline
worship was derived. Thus the oak-god would have his oak-goddess in
the sacred oak grove. So at Dodona the oak-god Zeus was coupled
with Dione, whose very name is only a dialectically different form
of Juno; and so on the top of Mount Cithaeron, as we have seen, he
appears to have been periodically wedded to an oaken image of Hera.
It is probable, though it cannot be positively proved, that the
sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno was annually celebrated by all
the peoples of the Latin stock in the month which they named after
the goddess, the midsummer month of June.
If at any time of the year the Romans celebrated the sacred
marriage of Jupiter and Juno, as the Greeks commonly celebrated the
corresponding marriage of Zeus and Hera, we may suppose that under
the Republic the ceremony was either performed over images of the
divine pair or acted by the Flamen Dialis and his wife the
Flaminica. For the Flamen Dialis was the priest of Jove; indeed,
ancient and modern writers have regarded him, with much
probability, as a living image of Jupiter, a human embodiment of
the sky-god. In earlier times the Roman king, as representative of
Jupiter, would naturally play the part of the heavenly bridegroom
at the sacred marriage, while his queen would figure as the
heavenly bride, just as in Egypt the king and queen masqueraded in
the character of deities, and as at Athens the queen annually
wedded the vine-god Dionysus. That the Roman king and queen should
act the parts of Jupiter and Juno would seem all the more natural
because these deities themselves bore the title of King and
Queen.
Whether that was so or not, the legend of Numa and Egeria
appears to embody a reminiscence of a time when the priestly king
himself played the part of the divine bridegroom; and as we have
seen reason to suppose that the Roman kings personated the oak-god,
while Egeria is expressly said to have been an oak-nymph, the story
of their union in the sacred grove raises a presumption that at
Rome in the regal period a ceremony was periodically performed
exactly analogous to that which was annually celebrated at Athens
down to the time of Aristotle. The marriage of the King of Rome to
the oak-goddess, like the wedding of the vine-god to the Queen of
Athens, must have been intended to quicken the growth of vegetation
by homoeopathic magic. Of the two forms of the rite we can hardly
doubt that the Roman was the older, and that long before the
northern invaders met with the vine on the shores of the
Mediterranean their forefathers had married the tree-god to the
tree-goddess in the vast oak forests of Central and Northern
Europe. In the England of our day the forests have mostly
disappeared, yet still on many a village green and in many a
country lane a faded image of the sacred marriage lingers in the
rustic pageantry of May Day.
XIV. The Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium
IN REGARD to the Roman king, whose priestly functions were
inherited by his successor the king of the Sacred Rites, the
foregoing discussion has led us to the following conclusions. He
represented and indeed personated Jupiter, the great god of the
sky, the thunder, and the oak, and in that character made rain,
thunder, and lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more
kings of the weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not
only mimicked the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other
insignia of divinity, but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria,
who appears to have been merely a local form of Diana in her
character of a goddess of woods, of waters, and of child-birth. All
these conclusions, which we have reached mainly by a consideration
of the Roman evidence, may with great probability be applied to the
other Latin communities. They too probably had of old their divine
or priestly kings, who transmitted their religious functions,
without their civil powers, to their successors the Kings of the
Sacred Rites.
But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the
kingdom among the old Latin tribes? According to tradition, there
were in all eight kings of Rome, and with regard to the five last
of them, at all events, we can hardly doubt that they actually sat
on the throne, and that the traditional history of their reigns is,
in its main outlines, correct. Now it is very remarkable that
though the first king of Rome, Romulus, is said to have been
descended from the royal house of Alba, in which the kingship is
represented as hereditary in the male line, not one of the Roman
kings was immediately succeeded by his son on the throne. Yet
several left sons or grandsons behind them. On the other hand, one
of them was descended from a former king through his mother, not
through his father, and three of the kings, namely Tatius, the
elder Tarquin, and Servius Tullius, were succeeded by their
sons-in-law, who were all either foreigners or of foreign descent.
This suggests that the right to the kingship was transmitted in the
female line, and was actually exercised by foreigners who married
the royal princesses. To put it in technical language, the
succession to the kingship at Rome and probably in Latium generally
would seem to have been determined by certain rules which have
moulded early society in many parts of the world, namely exogamy,
beena marriage, and female kinship or mother-kin. Exogamy
is the rule which obliges a man to marry a woman of a different
clan from his own: beena marriage is the rule that he must
leave the home of his birth and live with his wife’s people;
and female kinship or mother-kin is the system of tracing
relationship and transmitting the family name through women instead
of through men. If these principles regulated descent of the
kingship among the ancient Latins, the state of things in this
respect would be somewhat as follows. The political and religious
centre of each community would be the perpetual fire on the
king’s hearth tended by Vestal Virgins of the royal clan. The
king would be a man of another clan, perhaps of another town or
even of another race, who had married a daughter of his predecessor
and received the kingdom with her. The children whom he had by her
would inherit their mother’s name, not his; the daughters
would remain at home; the sons, when they grew up, would go away
into the world, marry, and settle in their wives’ country,
whether as kings or commoners. Of the daughters who stayed at home,
some or all would be dedicated as Vestal Virgins for a longer or
shorter time to the service of the fire on the hearth, and one of
them would in time become the consort of her father’s
successor.
This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and
natural way some obscure features in the traditional history of the
Latin kingship. Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were
born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more
intelligible. For, stripped of their fabulous element, tales of
this sort mean no more than that a woman has been gotten with child
by a man unknown; and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is more
easily compatible with a system of kinship which ignores paternity
than with one which makes it all-important. If at the birth of the
Latin kings their fathers were really unknown, the fact points
either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a
special relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men
and women reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age.
Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social
evolution. In our own country traces of them long survived in the
practices of May Day and Whitsuntide, if not of Christmas. Children
born of more or less promiscuous intercourse which characterises
festivals of this kind would naturally be fathered on the god to
whom the particular festival was dedicated.
In this connexion it may be significant that a festival of
jollity and drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves
at Rome on Midsummer Day, and that the festival was specially
associated with the fireborn King Servius Tullius, being held in
honour of Fortuna, the goddess who loved Servius as Egeria loved
Numa. The popular merrymakings at this season included foot-races
and boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in
which young folk sat quaffing wine. The festival appears to have
been a sort of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real
Saturnalia which fell at Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall
learn later on, the great Midsummer festival has been above all a
festival of lovers and of fire; one of its principal features is
the pairing of sweethearts, who leap over the bonfires hand in hand
or throw flowers across the flames to each other. And many omens of
love and marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this
mystic season. It is the time of the roses and of love. Yet the
innocence and beauty of such festivals in modern times ought not to
blind us to the likelihood that in earlier days they were marked by
coarser features, which were probably of the essence of the rites.
Indeed, among the rude Esthonian peasantry these features seem to
have lingered down to our own generation, if not to the present
day. One other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer
deserves to be specially noticed. The custom of rowing in
flower-decked boats on the river on this day proves that it was to
some extent a water festival; and water has always, down to modern
times, played a conspicuous part in the rites of Midsummer Day,
which explains why the Church, in throwing its cloak over the old
heathen festival, chose to dedicate it to St. John the Baptist.
The hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten at an
annual festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture, though
the traditional birth of Numa at the festival of the Parilia, when
shepherds leaped across the spring bonfires, as lovers leap across
the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint
colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the
uncertainty as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after
the death of the kings, when their figures began to melt away into
the cloudland of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous
colouring as they passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien
immigrants, strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it
would be natural enough that the people should forget their
lineage, and forgetting it should provide them with another, which
made up in lustre what it lacked in truth. The final apotheosis,
which represented the kings not merely as sprung from gods but as
themselves deities incarnate, would be much facilitated if in their
lifetime, as we have seen reason to think, they had actually laid
claim to divinity.
If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at
home and received as their consorts men of another stock, and often
of another country, who reigned as kings in virtue of their
marriage with a native princess, we can understand not only why
foreigners wore the crown at Rome, but also why foreign names occur
in the list of the Alban kings. In a state of society where
nobility is reckoned only through women—in other words, where
descent through the mother is everything, and descent through the
father is nothing—no objection will be felt to uniting girls
of the highest rank to men of humble birth, even to aliens or
slaves, provided that in themselves the men appear to be suitable
mates. What really matters is that the royal stock, on which the
prosperity and even the existence of the people is supposed to
depend, should be perpetuated in a vigorous and efficient form, and
for this purpose it is necessary that the women of the royal family
should bear children to men who are physically and mentally fit,
according to the standard of early society, to discharge the
important duty of procreation. Thus the personal qualities of the
kings at this stage of social evolution are deemed of vital
importance. If they, like their consorts, are of royal and divine
descent, so much the better; but it is not essential that they
should be so.
At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the
throne by marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most
ancient kings of Athens, namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to
have married the daughters of their predecessors. This tradition is
to a certain extent confirmed by evidence, pointing to the
conclusion that at Athens male kinship was preceded by female
kinship.
Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the
royal families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their
sons to marry princesses and reign among their wives’ people,
it will follow that the male descendants would reign in successive
generations over different kingdoms. Now this seems to have
happened both in ancient Greece and in ancient Sweden; from which
we may legitimately infer that it was a custom practised by more
than one branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. Many Greek traditions
relate how a prince left his native land, and going to a far
country married the king’s daughter and succeeded to the
kingdom. Various reasons are assigned by ancient Greek writers for
these migrations of the princes. A common one is that the
king’s son had been banished for murder. This would explain
very well why he fled his own land, but it is no reason at all why
he should become king of another. We may suspect that such reasons
are afterthoughts devised by writers, who, accustomed to the rule
that a son should succeed to his father’s property and
kingdom, were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of
kings’ sons who quitted the land of their birth to reign over
a foreign kingdom. In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of
similar customs. For we read of daughters’ husbands who
received a share of the kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law,
even when these fathers-in-law had sons of their own; in
particular, during the five generations which preceded Harold the
Fair-haired, male members of the Ynglingar family, which is said to
have come from Sweden, are reported in the Heimskringla or
Sagas of the Norwegian Kings to have obtained at least six
provinces in Norway by marriage with the daughters of the local
kings.
Thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples, at a certain
stage of their social evolution, it has been customary to regard
women and not men as the channels in which royal blood flows, and
to bestow the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of
another family, and often of another country, who marries one of
the princesses and reigns over his wife’s people. A common
type of popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a
strange land, wins the hand of the king’s daughter and with
her the half or the whole of the kingdom, may well be a
reminiscence of a real custom.
Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that
the kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the
blood royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this
view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a
legendary queen of Scotland. “Indeed she was a queen,”
says Hermutrude, “and but that her sex gainsaid it, might be
deemed a king; nay (and this is yet truer), whomsoever she thought
worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom
with herself. Thus her sceptre and her hand went together.”
The statement is all the more significant because it appears to
reflect the actual practice of the Pictish kings. We know from the
testimony of Bede that, whenever a doubt arose as to the
succession, the Picts chose their kings from the female rather than
the male line.
The personal qualities which recommended a man for a royal
alliance and succession to the throne would naturally vary
according to the popular ideas of the time and the character of the
king or his substitute, but it is reasonable to suppose that among
them in early society physical strength and beauty would hold a
prominent place.
Sometimes apparently the right to the hand of the princess and
to the throne has been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Libyans
awarded the kingdom to the fleetest runner. Amongst the old
Prussians, candidates for nobility raced on horseback to the king,
and the one who reached him first was ennobled. According to
tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by Endymion, who
set his sons to run a race for the kingdom. His tomb was said to be
at the point of the racecourse from which the runners started. The
famous story of Pelops and Hippodamia is perhaps only another
version of the legend that the first races at Olympia were run for
no less a prize than a kingdom.
These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing
for a bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among
various peoples, though in practice it has degenerated into a mere
form or pretence. Thus “there is one race, called the
‘Love Chase,’ which may be considered a part of the
form of marriage among the Kirghiz. In this the bride, armed with a
formidable whip, mounts a fleet horse, and is pursued by all the
young men who make any pretensions to her hand. She will be given
as a prize to the one who catches her, but she has the right,
besides urging on her horse to the utmost, to use her whip, often
with no mean force, to keep off those lovers who are unwelcome to
her, and she will probably favour the one whom she has already
chosen in her heart.” The race for the bride is found also
among the Koryaks of North-eastern Asia. It takes place in a large
tent, round which many separate compartments called pologs
are arranged in a continuous circle. The girl gets a start and is
clear of the marriage if she can run through all the compartments
without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of the encampment
place every obstacle in the man’s way, tripping him up,
belabouring him with switches, and so forth, so that he has little
chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes it and waits for him.
Similar customs appear to have been practised by all the Teutonic
peoples; for the German, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse languages possess
in common a word for marriage which means simply bride-race.
Moreover, traces of the custom survived into modern times.
Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and especially a
princess, has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic
contest. There would be no reason, therefore, for surprise if the
Roman kings, before bestowing their daughters in marriage, should
have resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal
qualities of their future sons-in-law and successors. If my theory
is correct, the Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his
divine consort, and in the character of these divinities went
through the annual ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of
causing the crops to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and
multiply. Thus they did what in more northern lands we may suppose
the King and Queen of May were believed to do in days of old. Now
we have seen that the right to play the part of the King of May and
to wed the Queen of May has sometimes been determined by an
athletic contest, particularly by a race. This may have been a
relic of an old marriage custom of the sort we have examined, a
custom designed to test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony.
Such a test might reasonably be applied with peculiar rigour to the
king in order to ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate
him for the performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on
which, even more than on the despatch of his civil and military
duties, the safety and prosperity of the community were believed to
depend. And it would be natural to require of him that from time to
time he should submit himself afresh to the same ordeal for the
sake of publicly demonstrating that he was still equal to the
discharge of his high calling. A relic of that test perhaps
survived in the ceremony known as the Flight of the King
(regifugium), which continued to be annually observed at
Rome down to imperial times. On the twenty-fourth day of February a
sacrifice used to be offered in the Comitium, and when it was over
the King of the Sacred Rites fled from the Forum. We may conjecture
that the Flight of the King was originally a race for an annual
kingship, which may have been awarded as a prize to the fleetest
runner. At the end of the year the king might run again for a
second term of office; and so on, until he was defeated and deposed
or perhaps slain. In this way what had once been a race would tend
to assume the character of a flight and a pursuit. The king would
be given a start; he ran and his competitors ran after him, and if
he were overtaken he had to yield the crown and perhaps his life to
the lightest of foot among them. In time a man of masterful
character might succeed in seating himself permanently on the
throne and reducing the annual race or flight to the empty form
which it seems always to have been within historical times. The
rite was sometimes interpreted as a commemoration of the expulsion
of the kings from Rome; but this appears to have been a mere
afterthought devised to explain a ceremony of which the old meaning
was forgotten. It is far more likely that in acting thus the King
of the Sacred Rites was merely keeping up an ancient custom which
in the regal period had been annually observed by his predecessors
the kings. What the original intention of the rite may have been
must probably always remain more or less a matter of conjecture.
The present explanation is suggested with a full sense of the
difficulty and obscurity in which the subject is involved.
Thus if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman
king was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office
awarded, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious
athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride
as a god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the
fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. If I am right in
supposing that in very early times the old Latin kings personated a
god and were regularly put to death in that character, we can
better understand the mysterious or violent ends to which so many
of them are said to have come. We have seen that, according to
tradition, one of the kings of Alba was killed by a thunderbolt for
impiously mimicking the thunder of Jupiter. Romulus is said to have
vanished mysteriously like Aeneas, or to have been cut to pieces by
the patricians whom he had offended, and the seventh of July, the
day on which he perished, was a festival which bore some
resemblance to the Saturnalia. For on that day the female slaves
were allowed to take certain remarkable liberties. They dressed up
as free women in the attire of matrons and maids, and in this guise
they went forth from the city, scoffed and jeered at all whom they
met, and engaged among themselves in a fight, striking and throwing
stones at each other. Another Roman king who perished by violence
was Tatius, the Sabine colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was
at Lavinium offering a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when
some men, to whom he had given umbrage, despatched him with the
sacrificial knives and spits which they had snatched from the
altar. The occasion and the manner of his death suggest that the
slaughter may have been a sacrifice rather than an assassination.
Again, Tullus Hostilius, the successor of Numa, was commonly said
to have been killed by lightning, but many held that he was
murdered at the instigation of Ancus Marcius, who reigned after
him. Speaking of the more or less mythical Numa, the type of the
priestly king, Plutarch observes that “his fame was enhanced
by the fortunes of the later kings. For of the five who reigned
after him the last was deposed and ended his life in exile, and of
the remaining four not one died a natural death; for three of them
were assassinated and Tullus Hostilius was consumed by
thunderbolts.”
These legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest
that the contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have
been a mortal combat rather than a race. If that were so, the
analogy which we have traced between Rome and Nemi would be still
closer. At both places the sacred kings, the living representatives
of the godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death
at the hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to
the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not
be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom
should often have been settled by single combat; for down to
historical times the Umbrians regularly submitted their private
disputes to the ordeal of battle, and he who cut his
adversary’s throat was thought thereby to have proved the
justice of his cause beyond the reach of cavil.
XV. The Worship of the Oak
THE WORSHIP of the oak tree or of the oak god appears to have
been shared by all the branches of the Aryan stock in Europe. Both
Greeks and Italians associated the tree with their highest god,
Zeus or Jupiter, the divinity of the sky, the rain, and the
thunder. Perhaps the oldest and certainly one of the most famous
sanctuaries in Greece was that of Dodona, where Zeus was revered in
the oracular oak. The thunder-storms which are said to rage at
Dodona more frequently than anywhere else in Europe, would render
the spot a fitting home for the god whose voice was heard alike in
the rustling of the oak leaves and in the crash of thunder. Perhaps
the bronze gongs which kept up a humming in the wind round the
sanctuary were meant to mimick the thunder that might so often be
heard rolling and rumbling in the coombs of the stern and barren
mountains which shut in the gloomy valley. In Boeotia, as we have
seen, the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, the oak god and the oak
goddess, appears to have been celebrated with much pomp by a
religious federation of states. And on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia the
character of Zeus as god both of the oak and of the rain comes out
clearly in the rain charm practised by the priest of Zeus, who
dipped an oak branch in a sacred spring. In his latter capacity
Zeus was the god to whom the Greeks regularly prayed for rain.
Nothing could be more natural; for often, though not always, he had
his seat on the mountains where the clouds gather and the oaks
grow. On the Acropolis at Athens there was an image of Earth
praying to Zeus for rain. And in time of drought the Athenians
themselves prayed, “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the cornland
of the Athenians and on the plains.”
Again, Zeus wielded the thunder and lightning as well as the
rain. At Olympia and elsewhere he was worshipped under the surname
of Thunderbolt; and at Athens there was a sacrificial hearth of
Lightning Zeus on the city wall, where some priestly officials
watched for lightning over Mount Parnes at certain seasons of the
year. Further, spots which had been struck by lightning were
regularly fenced in by the Greeks and consecrated to Zeus the
Descender, that is, to the god who came down in the flash from
heaven. Altars were set up within these enclosures and sacrifices
offered on them. Several such places are known from inscriptions to
have existed in Athens.
Thus when ancient Greek kings claimed to be descended from Zeus,
and even to bear his name, we may reasonably suppose that they also
attempted to exercise his divine functions by making thunder and
rain for the good of their people or the terror and confusion of
their foes. In this respect the legend of Salmoneus probably
reflects the pretensions of a whole class of petty sovereigns who
reigned of old, each over his little canton, in the oak-clad
highlands of Greece. Like their kinsmen the Irish kings, they were
expected to be a source of fertility to the land and of fecundity
to the cattle; and how could they fulfil these expectations better
than by acting the part of their kinsman Zeus, the great god of the
oak, the thunder, and the rain? They personified him, apparently,
just as the Italian kings personified Jupiter.
In ancient Italy every oak was sacred to Jupiter, the Italian
counterpart of Zeus; and on the Capitol at Rome the god was
worshipped as the deity not merely of the oak, but of the rain and
the thunder. Contrasting the piety of the good old times with the
scepticism of an age when nobody thought that heaven was heaven, or
cared a fig for Jupiter, a Roman writer tells us that in former
days noble matrons used to go with bare feet, streaming hair, and
pure minds, up the long Capitoline slope, praying to Jupiter for
rain. And straightway, he goes on, it rained bucketsful, then or
never, and everybody returned dripping like drowned rats.
“But nowadays,” says he, “we are no longer
religious, so the fields lie baking.”
When we pass from Southern to Central Europe we still meet with
the great god of the oak and the thunder among the barbarous Aryans
who dwelt in the vast primaeval forests. Thus among the Celts of
Gaul the Druids esteemed nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and
the oak on which it grew; they chose groves of oaks for the scene
of their solemn service, and they performed none of their rites
without oak leaves. “The Celts,” says a Greek writer,
“worship Zeus, and the Celtic image of Zeus is a tall
oak.” The Celtic conquerors, who settled in Asia in the third
century before our era, appear to have carried the worship of the
oak with them to their new home; for in the heart of Asia Minor the
Galatian senate met in a place which bore the pure Celtic name of
Drynemetum, “the sacred oak grove” or “the temple
of the oak.” Indeed the very name of Druids is believed by
good authorities to mean no more than “oak men.”
In the religion of the ancient Germans the veneration for sacred
groves seems to have held the foremost place, and according to
Grimm the chief of their holy trees was the oak. It appears to have
been especially dedicated to the god of thunder, Donar or Thunar,
the equivalent of the Norse Thor; for a sacred oak near Geismar, in
Hesse, which Boniface cut down in the eighth century, went among
the heathen by the name of Jupiter’s oak (robur
Jovis), which in old German would be Donares eih,
“the oak of Donar.” That the Teutonic thunder god
Donar, Thunar, Thor was identified with the Italian thunder god
Jupiter appears from our word Thursday, Thunar’s day, which
is merely a rendering of the Latin dies Jovis. Thus among
the ancient Teutons, as among the Greeks and Italians, the god of
the oak was also the god of the thunder. Moreover, he was regarded
as the great fertilising power, who sent rain and caused the earth
to bear fruit; for Adam of Bremen tells us that “Thor
presides in the air; he it is who rules thunder and lightning, wind
and rains, fine weather and crops.” In these respects,
therefore, the Teutonic thunder god again resembled his southern
counterparts Zeus and Jupiter.
Amongst the Slavs also the oak appears to have been the sacred
tree of the thunder god Perun, the counterpart of Zeus and Jupiter.
It is said that at Novgorod there used to stand an image of Perun
in the likeness of a man with a thunder-stone in his hand. A fire
of oak wood burned day and night in his honour; and if ever it went
out the attendants paid for their negligence with their lives.
Perun seems, like Zeus and Jupiter, to have been the chief god of
his people; for Procopius tells us that the Slavs “believe
that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things,
and they sacrifice to him oxen and every victim.”
The chief deity of the Lithuanians was Perkunas or Perkuns, the
god of thunder and lightning, whose resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter
has often been pointed out. Oaks were sacred to him, and when they
were cut down by the Christian missionaries, the people loudly
complained that their sylvan deities were destroyed. Perpetual
fires, kindled with the wood of certain oak-trees, were kept up in
honour of Perkunas; if such a fire went out, it was lighted again
by friction of the sacred wood. Men sacrificed to oak-trees for
good crops, while women did the same to lime-trees; from which we
may infer that they regarded oaks as male and lime-trees as female.
And in time of drought, when they wanted rain, they used to
sacrifice a black heifer, a black he-goat, and a black cock to the
thunder god in the depths of the woods. On such occasions the
people assembled in great numbers from the country round about, ate
and drank, and called upon Perkunas. They carried a bowl of beer
thrice round the fire, then poured the liquor on the flames, while
they prayed to the god to send showers. Thus the chief Lithuanian
deity presents a close resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter, since he
was the god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain.
From the foregoing survey it appears that a god of the oak, the
thunder, and the rain was worshipped of old by all the main
branches of the Aryan stock in Europe, and was indeed the chief
deity of their pantheon.
XVI. Dianus and Diana
IN THIS CHAPTER I propose to recapitulate the conclusions to
which the enquiry has thus far led us, and drawing together the
scattered rays of light, to turn them on the dark figure of the
priest of Nemi.
We have found that at an early stage of society men, ignorant of
the secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits within
which it is in our power to control and direct them, have commonly
arrogated to themselves functions which in the present state of
knowledge we should deem superhuman or divine. The illusion has
been fostered and maintained by the same causes which begot it,
namely, the marvellous order and uniformity with which nature
conducts her operations, the wheels of her great machine revolving
with a smoothness and precision which enable the patient observer
to anticipate in general the season, if not the very hour, when
they will bring round the fulfilment of his hopes or the
accomplishment of his fears. The regularly recurring events of this
great cycle, or rather series of cycles, soon stamp themselves even
on the dull mind of the savage. He foresees them, and foreseeing
them mistakes the desired recurrence for an effect of his own will,
and the dreaded recurrence for an effect of the will of his
enemies. Thus the springs which set the vast machine in motion,
though they lie far beyond our ken, shrouded in a mystery which we
can never hope to penetrate, appear to ignorant man to lie within
his reach: he fancies he can touch them and so work by magic art
all manner of good to himself and evil to his foes. In time the
fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that
there are things he cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of
himself to procure, pains which even the most potent magician is
powerless to avoid. The unattainable good, the inevitable ill, are
now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers, whose favour
is joy and life, whose anger is misery and death. Thus magic tends
to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest. At
this stage of thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived
to be personal beings, many in number and often discordant in
character, who partake of the nature and even of the frailty of
man, though their might is greater than his, and their life far
exceeds the span of his ephemeral existence. Their sharply-marked
individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under
the powerful solvent of philosophy, to melt and coalesce into that
single unknown substratum of phenomena which, according to the
qualities with which our imagination invests it, goes by one or
other of the high-sounding names which the wit of man has devised
to hide his ignorance. Accordingly, so long as men look on their
gods as beings akin to themselves and not raised to an
unapproachable height above them, they believe it to be possible
for those of their own number who surpass their fellows to attain
to the divine rank after death or even in life. Incarnate human
deities of this latter sort may be said to halt midway between the
age of magic and the age of religion. If they bear the names and
display the pomp of deities, the powers which they are supposed to
wield are commonly those of their predecessor the magician. Like
him, they are expected to guard their people against hostile
enchantments, to heal them in sickness, to bless them with
offspring, and to provide them with an abundant supply of food by
regulating the weather and performing the other ceremonies which
are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth and the
multiplication of animals. Men who are credited with powers so
lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the
land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the temporal
spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in civil as
well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as well as
gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down
in human history, and long ages pass before these are sapped by a
profounder view of nature and man.
In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign
of kings was for the most part a thing of the past; yet the stories
of their lineage, titles, and pretensions suffice to prove that
they too claimed to rule by divine right and to exercise superhuman
powers. Hence we may without undue temerity assume that the King of
the Wood at Nemi, though shorn in later times of his glory and
fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred kings who
had once received not only the homage but the adoration of their
subjects in return for the manifold blessings which they were
supposed to dispense. What little we know of the functions of Diana
in the Arician grove seems to prove that she was here conceived as
a goddess of fertility, and particularly as a divinity of
childbirth. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that in the
discharge of these important duties she was assisted by her priest,
the two figuring as King and Queen of the Wood in a solemn
marriage, which was intended to make the earth gay with the
blossoms of spring and the fruits of autumn, and to gladden the
hearts of men and women with healthful offspring.
If the priest of Nemi posed not merely as a king, but as a god
of the grove, we have still to ask, What deity in particular did he
personate? The answer of antiquity is that he represented Virbius,
the consort or lover of Diana. But this does not help us much, for
of Virbius we know little more than the name. A clue to the mystery
is perhaps supplied by the Vestal fire which burned in the grove.
For the perpetual holy fires of the Aryans in Europe appear to have
been commonly kindled and fed with oak-wood, and in Rome itself,
not many miles from Nemi, the fuel of the Vestal fire consisted of
oaken sticks or logs, as has been proved by a microscopic analysis
of the charred embers of the Vestal fire, which were discovered by
Commendatore G. Boni in the course of the memorable excavations
which he conducted in the Roman forum at the end of the nineteenth
century. But the ritual of the various Latin towns seems to have
been marked by great uniformity; hence it is reasonable to conclude
that wherever in Latium a Vestal fire was maintained, it was fed,
as at Rome, with wood of the sacred oak. If this was so at Nemi, it
becomes probable that the hallowed grove there consisted of a
natural oak-wood, and that therefore the tree which the King of the
Wood had to guard at the peril of his life was itself an oak;
indeed, it was from an evergreen oak, according to Virgil, that
Aeneas plucked the Golden Bough. Now the oak was the sacred tree of
Jupiter, the supreme god of the Latins. Hence it follows that the
King of the Wood, whose life was bound up in a fashion with an oak,
personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself. At least the
evidence, slight as it is, seems to point to this conclusion. The
old Alban dynasty of the Silvii or Woods, with their crown of oak
leaves, apparently aped the style and emulated the powers of Latian
Jupiter, who dwelt on the top of the Alban Mount. It is not
impossible that the King of the Wood, who guarded the sacred oak a
little lower down the mountain, was the lawful successor and
representative of this ancient line of the Silvii or Woods. At all
events, if I am right in supposing that he passed for a human
Jupiter, it would appear that Virbius, with whom legend identified
him, was nothing but a local form of Jupiter, considered perhaps in
his original aspect as a god of the greenwood.
The hypothesis that in later times at all events the King of the
Wood played the part of the oak god Jupiter, is confirmed by an
examination of his divine partner Diana. For two distinct lines of
argument converge to show that if Diana was a queen of the woods in
general, she was at Nemi a goddess of the oak in particular. In the
first place, she bore the title of Vesta, and as such presided over
a perpetual fire, which we have seen reason to believe was fed with
oak wood. But a goddess of fire is not far removed from a goddess
of the fuel which burns in the fire; primitive thought perhaps drew
no sharp line of distinction between the blaze and the wood that
blazes. In the second place, the nymph Egeria at Nemi appears to
have been merely a form of Diana, and Egeria is definitely said to
have been a Dryad, a nymph of the oak. Elsewhere in Italy the
goddess had her home on oak-clad mountains. Thus Mount Algidus, a
spur of the Alban hills, was covered in antiquity with dark forests
of oak, both of the evergreen and the deciduous sort. In winter the
snow lay long on these cold hills, and their gloomy oak-woods were
believed to be a favourite haunt of Diana, as they have been of
brigands in modern times. Again, Mount Tifata, the long abrupt
ridge of the Apennines which looks down on the Campanian plain
behind Capua, was wooded of old with evergreen oaks, among which
Diana had a temple. Here Sulla thanked the goddess for his victory
over the Marians in the plain below, attesting his gratitude by
inscriptions which were long afterwards to be seen in the temple.
On the whole, then, we conclude that at Nemi the King of the Wood
personated the oak-god Jupiter and mated with the oak-goddess Diana
in the sacred grove. An echo of their mystic union has come down to
us in the legend of the loves of Numa and Egeria, who according to
some had their trysting-place in these holy woods.
To this theory it may naturally be objected that the divine
consort of Jupiter was not Diana but Juno, and that if Diana had a
mate at all he might be expected to bear the name not of Jupiter,
but of Dianus or Janus, the latter of these forms being merely a
corruption of the former. All this is true, but the objection may
be parried by observing that the two pairs of deities, Jupiter and
Juno on the one side, and Dianus and Diana, or Janus and Jana, on
the other side, are merely duplicates of each other, their names
and their functions being in substance and origin identical. With
regard to their names, all four of them come from the same Aryan
root DI, meaning “bright,” which occurs in the
names of the corresponding Greek deities, Zeus and his old female
consort Dione. In regard to their functions, Juno and Diana were
both goddesses of fecundity and childbirth, and both were sooner or
later identified with the moon. As to the true nature and functions
of Janus the ancients themselves were puzzled; and where they
hesitated, it is not for us confidently to decide. But the view
mentioned by Varro that Janus was the god of the sky is supported
not only by the etymological identity of his name with that of the
sky-god Jupiter, but also by the relation in which he appears to
have stood to Jupiter’s two mates, Juno and Juturna. For the
epithet Junonian bestowed on Janus points to a marriage union
between the two deities; and according to one account Janus was the
husband of the water-nymph Juturna, who according to others was
beloved by Jupiter. Moreover, Janus, like Jove, was regularly
invoked, and commonly spoken of under the title of Father. Indeed,
he was identified with Jupiter not merely by the logic of the
learned St. Augustine, but by the piety of a pagan worshipper who
dedicated an offering to Jupiter Dianus. A trace of his relation to
the oak may be found in the oakwoods of the Janiculum, the hill on
the right bank of the Tiber, where Janus is said to have reigned as
a king in the remotest ages of Italian history.
Thus, if I am right, the same ancient pair of deities was
variously known among the Greek and Italian peoples as Zeus and
Dione, Jupiter and Juno, or Dianus (Janus) and Diana (Jana), the
names of the divinities being identical in substance, though
varying in form with the dialect of the particular tribe which
worshipped them. At first, when the peoples dwelt near each other,
the difference between the deities would be hardly more than one of
name; in other words, it would be almost purely dialectical. But
the gradual dispersion of the tribes, and their consequent
isolation from each other, would favour the growth of divergent
modes of conceiving and worshipping the gods whom they had carried
with them from their old home, so that in time discrepancies of
myth and ritual would tend to spring up and thereby to convert a
nominal into a real distinction between the divinities. Accordingly
when, with the slow progress of culture, the long period of
barbarism and separation was passing away, and the rising political
power of a single strong community had begun to draw or hammer its
weaker neighbours into a nation, the confluent peoples would throw
their gods, like their dialects, into a common stock; and thus it
might come about that the same ancient deities, which their
forefathers had worshipped together before the dispersion, would
now be so disguised by the accumulated effect of dialectical and
religious divergencies that their original identity might fail to
be recognised, and they would take their places side by side as
independent divinities in the national pantheon.
This duplication of deities, the result of the final fusion of
kindred tribes who had long lived apart, would account for the
appearance of Janus beside Jupiter, and of Diana or Jana beside
Juno in the Roman religion. At least this appears to be a more
probable theory than the opinion, which has found favour with some
modern scholars, that Janus was originally nothing but the god of
doors. That a deity of his dignity and importance, whom the Romans
revered as a god of gods and the father of his people, should have
started in life as a humble, though doubtless respectable,
doorkeeper appears very unlikely. So lofty an end hardly consorts
with so lowly a beginning. It is more probable that the door
(janua) got its name from Janus than that he got his name
from it. This view is strengthened by a consideration of the word
janua itself. The regular word for door is the same in all
the languages of the Aryan family from India to Ireland. It is
dur in Sanscrit, thura in Greek, tür in
German, door in English, dorus in old Irish, and
foris in Latin. Yet besides this ordinary name for door,
which the Latins shared with all their Aryan brethren, they had
also the name janua, to which there is no corresponding
term in any Indo-European speech. The word has the appearance of
being an adjectival form derived from the noun Janus. I
conjecture that it may have been customary to set up an image or
symbol of Janus at the principal door of the house in order to
place the entrance under the protection of the great god. A door
thus guarded might be known as a janua foris, that is, a
Januan door, and the phrase might in time be abridged into
janua, the noun foris being understood but not
expressed. From this to the use of janua to designate a
door in general, whether guarded by an image of Janus or not, would
be an easy and natural transition.
If there is any truth in this conjecture, it may explain very
simply the origin of the double head of Janus, which has so long
exercised the ingenuity of mythologists. When it had become
customary to guard the entrance of houses and towns by an image of
Janus, it might well be deemed necessary to make the sentinel god
look both ways, before and behind, at the same time, in order that
nothing should escape his vigilant eye. For if the divine watchman
always faced in one direction, it is easy to imagine what mischief
might have been wrought with impunity behind his back. This
explanation of the double-headed Janus at Rome is confirmed by the
double-headed idol which the Bush negroes in the interior of
Surinam regularly set up as a guardian at the entrance of a
village. The idol consists of a block of wood with a human face
rudely carved on each side; it stands under a gateway composed of
two uprights and a cross-bar. Beside the idol generally lies a
white rag intended to keep off the devil; and sometimes there is
also a stick which seems to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some
sort. Further, from the cross-bar hangs a small log which serves
the useful purpose of knocking on the head any evil spirit who
might attempt to pass through the gateway. Clearly this
double-headed fetish at the gateway of the negro villages in
Surinam bears a close resemblance to the double-headed images of
Janus which, grasping a stick in one hand and a key in the other,
stood sentinel at Roman gates and doorways; and we can hardly doubt
that in both cases the heads facing two ways are to be similarly
explained as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian god, who
kept his eye on spiritual foes behind and before, and stood ready
to bludgeon them on the spot. We may, therefore, dispense with the
tedious and unsatisfactory explanations which, if we may trust
Ovid, the wily Janus himself fobbed off an anxious Roman
enquirer.
To apply these conclusions to the priest of Nemi, we may suppose
that as the mate of Diana he represented originally Dianus or Janus
rather than Jupiter, but that the difference between these deities
was of old merely superficial, going little deeper than the names,
and leaving practically unaffected the essential functions of the
god as a power of the sky, the thunder, and the oak. It was
fitting, therefore, that his human representative at Nemi should
dwell, as we have seen reason to believe he did, in an oak grove.
His title of King of the Wood clearly indicates the sylvan
character of the deity whom he served; and since he could only be
assailed by him who had plucked the bough of a certain tree in the
grove, his own life might be said to be bound up with that of the
sacred tree. Thus he not only served but embodied the great Aryan
god of the oak; and as an oak-god he would mate with the
oak-goddess, whether she went by the name of Egeria or Diana. Their
union, however consummated, would be deemed essential to the
fertility of the earth and the fecundity of man and beast. Further,
as the oak-god was also a god of the sky, the thunder, and the
rain, so his human representative would be required, like many
other divine kings, to cause the clouds to gather, the thunder to
peal, and the rain to descend in due season, that the fields and
orchards might bear fruit and the pastures be covered with
luxuriant herbage. The reputed possessor of powers so exalted must
have been a very important personage; and the remains of buildings
and of votive offerings which have been found on the site of the
sanctuary combine with the testimony of classical writers to prove
that in later times it was one of the greatest and most popular
shrines in Italy. Even in the old days, when the champaign country
around was still parcelled out among the petty tribes who composed
the Latin League, the sacred grove is known to have been an object
of their common reverence and care. And just as the kings of
Cambodia used to send offerings to the mystic kings of Fire and
Water far in the dim depths of the tropical forest, so, we may well
believe, from all sides of the broad Latian plain the eyes and
footsteps of Italian pilgrims turned to the quarter where, standing
sharply out against the faint blue line of the Apennines or the
deeper blue of the distant sea, the Alban Mountain rose before
them, the home of the mysterious priest of Nemi, the King of the
Wood. There, among the green woods and beside the still waters of
the lonely hills, the ancient Aryan worship of the god of the oak,
the thunder, and the dripping sky lingered in its early, almost
Druidical form, long after a great political and intellectual
revolution had shifted the capital of Latin religion from the
forest to the city, from Nemi to Rome.
XVII. The Burden of Royalty
1. Royal and Priestly Taboos
AT A CERTAIN stage of early society the king or priest is often
thought to be endowed with supernatural powers or to be an
incarnation of a deity, and consistently with this belief the
course of nature is supposed to be more or less under his control,
and he is held responsible for bad weather, failure of the crops,
and similar calamities. To some extent it appears to be assumed
that the king’s power over nature, like that over his
subjects and slaves, is exerted through definite acts of will; and
therefore if drought, famine, pestilence, or storms arise, the
people attribute the misfortune to the negligence or guilt of their
king, and punish him accordingly with stripes and bonds, or, if he
remains obdurate, with deposition and death. Sometimes, however,
the course of nature, while regarded as dependent on the king, is
supposed to be partly independent of his will. His person is
considered, if we may express it so, as the dynamical centre of the
universe, from which lines of force radiate to all quarters of the
heaven; so that any motion of his—the turning of his head,
the lifting of his hand—instantaneously affects and may
seriously disturb some part of nature. He is the point of support
on which hangs the balance of the world, and the slightest
irregularity on his part may overthrow the delicate equipoise. The
greatest care must, therefore, be taken both by and of him; and his
whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that
no act of his, voluntary or involuntary, may disarrange or upset
the established order of nature. Of this class of monarchs the
Mikado or Dairi, the spiritual emperor of Japan, is or rather used
to be a typical example. He is an incarnation of the sun goddess,
the deity who rules the universe, gods and men included; once a
year all the gods wait upon him and spend a month at his court.
During that month, the name of which means “without
gods,” no one frequents the temples, for they are believed to
be deserted. The Mikado receives from his people and assumes in his
official proclamations and decrees the title of “manifest or
incarnate deity,” and he claims a general authority over the
gods of Japan. For example, in an official decree of the year 646
the emperor is described as “the incarnate god who governs
the universe.”
The following description of the Mikado’s mode of life was
written about two hundred years ago:
“Even to this day the princes descended of this family,
more particularly those who sit on the throne, are looked upon as
persons most holy in themselves, and as Popes by birth. And, in
order to preserve these advantageous notions in the minds of their
subjects, they are obliged to take an uncommon care of their sacred
persons, and to do such things, which, examined according to the
customs of other nations, would be thought ridiculous and
impertinent. It will not be improper to give a few instances of it.
He thinks that it would be very prejudicial to his dignity and
holiness to touch the ground with his feet; for this reason, when
he intends to go anywhere, he must be carried thither on
men’s shoulders. Much less will they suffer that he should
expose his sacred person to the open air, and the sun is not
thought worthy to shine on his head. There is such a holiness
ascribed to all the parts of his body that he dares to cut off
neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails. However, lest he
should grow too dirty, they may clean him in the night when he is
asleep; because, they say, that which is taken from his body at
that time, hath been stolen from him, and that such a theft doth
not prejudice his holiness or dignity. In ancient times, he was
obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the
imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue,
without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any
part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he
could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if,
unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he
looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was
apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune
was near at hand to desolate the country. But it having been
afterwards discovered, that the imperial crown was the palladium,
which by its immobility could preserve peace in the empire, it was
thought expedient to deliver his imperial person, consecrated only
to idleness and pleasures, from this burthensome duty, and
therefore the crown is at present placed on the throne for some
hours every morning. His victuals must be dressed every time in new
pots, and served at table in new dishes: both are very clean and
neat, but made only of common clay; that without any considerable
expense they may be laid aside, or broke, after they have served
once. They are generally broke, for fear they should come into the
hands of laymen, for they believe religiously, that if any layman
should presume to eat his food out of these sacred dishes, it would
swell and inflame his mouth and throat. The like ill effect is
dreaded from the Dairi’s sacred habits; for they believe that
if a layman should wear them, without the Emperor’s express
leave or command, they would occasion swellings and pains in all
parts of his body.” To the same effect an earlier account of
the Mikado says: “It was considered as a shameful degradation
for him even to touch the ground with his foot. The sun and moon
were not even permitted to shine upon his head. None of the
superfluities of the body were ever taken from him, neither his
hair, his beard, nor his nails were cut. Whatever he eat was
dressed in new vessels.”
Similar priestly or rather divine kings are found, at a lower
level of barbarism, on the west coast of Africa. At Shark Point
near Cape Padron, in Lower Guinea, lives the priestly king Kukulu,
alone in a wood. He may not touch a woman nor leave his house;
indeed he may not even quit his chair, in which he is obliged to
sleep sitting, for if he lay down no wind would arise and
navigation would be stopped. He regulates storms, and in general
maintains a wholesome and equable state of the atmosphere. On Mount
Agu in Togo there lives a fetish or spirit called Bagba, who is of
great importance for the whole of the surrounding country. The
power of giving or withholding rain is ascribed to him, and he is
lord of the winds, including the Harmattan, the dry, hot wind which
blows from the interior. His priest dwells in a house on the
highest peak of the mountain, where he keeps the winds bottled up
in huge jars. Applications for rain, too, are made to him, and he
does a good business in amulets, which consist of the teeth and
claws of leopards. Yet though his power is great and he is indeed
the real chief of the land, the rule of the fetish forbids him ever
to leave the mountain, and he must spend the whole of his life on
its summit. Only once a year may he come down to make purchases in
the market; but even then he may not set foot in the hut of any
mortal man, and must return to his place of exile the same day. The
business of government in the villages is conducted by subordinate
chiefs, who are appointed by him. In the West African kingdom of
Congo there was a supreme pontiff called Chitomé or Chitombé, whom
the negroes regarded as a god on earth and all-powerful in heaven.
Hence before they would taste the new crops they offered him the
first-fruits, fearing that manifold misfortunes would befall them
if they broke this rule. When he left his residence to visit other
places within his jurisdiction, all married people had to observe
strict continence the whole time he was out; for it was supposed
that any act of incontinence would prove fatal to him. And if he
were to die a natural death, they thought that the world would
perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power and
merit, would immediately be annihilated. Amongst the semi-barbarous
nations of the New World, at the date of the Spanish conquest,
there were found hierarchies or theocracies like those of Japan; in
particular, the high pontiff of the Zapotecs appears to have
presented a close parallel to the Mikado. A powerful rival to the
king himself, this spiritual lord governed Yopaa, one of the chief
cities of the kingdom, with absolute dominion. It is impossible, we
are told, to overrate the reverence in which he was held. He was
looked on as a god whom the earth was not worthy to hold nor the
sun to shine upon. He profaned his sanctity if he even touched the
ground with his foot. The officers who bore his palanquin on their
shoulders were members of the highest families: he hardly deigned
to look on anything around him; and all who met him fell with their
faces to the earth, fearing that death would overtake them if they
saw even his shadow. A rule of continence was regularly imposed on
the Zapotec priests, especially upon the high pontiff; but
“on certain days in each year, which were generally
celebrated with feasts and dances, it was customary for the high
priest to become drunk. While in this state, seeming to belong
neither to heaven nor to earth, one of the most beautiful of the
virgins consecrated to the service of the gods was brought to
him.” If the child she bore him was a son, he was brought up
as a prince of the blood, and the eldest son succeeded his father
on the pontifical throne. The supernatural powers attributed to
this pontiff are not specified, but probably they resembled those
of the Mikado and Chitomé.
Wherever, as in Japan and West Africa, it is supposed that the
order of nature, and even the existence of the world, is bound up
with the life of the king or priest, it is clear that he must be
regarded by his subjects as a source both of infinite blessing and
of infinite danger. On the one hand, the people have to thank him
for the rain and sunshine which foster the fruits of the earth, for
the wind which brings ships to their coasts, and even for the solid
ground beneath their feet. But what he gives he can refuse; and so
close is the dependence of nature on his person, so delicate the
balance of the system of forces whereof he is the centre, that the
least irregularity on his part may set up a tremor which shall
shake the earth to its foundations. And if nature may be disturbed
by the slightest involuntary act of the king, it is easy to
conceive the convulsion which his death might provoke. The natural
death of the Chitomé, as we have seen, was thought to entail the
destruction of all things. Clearly, therefore, out of a regard for
their own safety, which might be imperilled by any rash act of the
king, and still more by his death, the people will exact of their
king or priest a strict conformity to those rules, the observance
of which is deemed necessary for his own preservation, and
consequently for the preservation of his people and the world. The
idea that early kingdoms are despotisms in which the people exist
only for the sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the monarchies we
are considering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them exists only
for his subjects; his life is only valuable so long as he
discharges the duties of his position by ordering the course of
nature for his people’s benefit. So soon as he fails to do
so, the care, the devotion, the religious homage which they had
hitherto lavished on him cease and are changed into hatred and
contempt; he is dismissed ignominiously, and may be thankful if he
escapes with his life. Worshipped as a god one day, he is killed as
a criminal the next. But in this changed behaviour of the people
there is nothing capricious or inconsistent. On the contrary, their
conduct is entirely of a piece. If their king is their god, he is
or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve
them, he must make room for another who will. So long, however, as
he answers their expectations, there is no limit to the care which
they take of him, and which they compel him to take of himself. A
king of this sort lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a
network of prohibitions and observances, of which the intention is
not to contribute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but to
restrain him from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of
nature, might involve himself, his people, and the universe in one
common catastrophe. Far from adding to his comfort, these
observances, by trammelling his every act, annihilate his freedom
and often render the very life, which it is their object to
preserve, a burden and sorrow to him.
Of the supernaturally endowed kings of Loango it is said that
the more powerful a king is, the more taboos is he bound to
observe; they regulate all his actions, his walking and his
standing, his eating and drinking, his sleeping and waking. To
these restraints the heir to the throne is subject from infancy;
but as he advances in life the number of abstinences and ceremonies
which he must observe increases, “until at the moment that he
ascends the throne he is lost in the ocean of rites and
taboos.” In the crater of an extinct volcano, enclosed on all
sides by grassy slopes, lie the scattered huts and yam-fields of
Riabba, the capital of the native king of Fernando Po. This
mysterious being lives in the lowest depths of the crater,
surrounded by a harem of forty women, and covered, it is said, with
old silver coins. Naked savage as he is, he yet exercises far more
influence in the island than the Spanish governor at Santa Isabel.
In him the conservative spirit of the Boobies or aboriginal
inhabitants of the island is, as it were, incorporate. He has never
seen a white man and, according to the firm conviction of all the
Boobies, the sight of a pale face would cause his instant death. He
cannot bear to look upon the sea; indeed it is said that he may
never see it even in the distance, and that therefore he wears away
his life with shackles on his legs in the dim twilight of his hut.
Certain it is that he has never set foot on the beach. With the
exception of his musket and knife, he uses nothing that comes from
the whites; European cloth never touches his person, and he scorns
tobacco, rum, and even salt.
Among the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast “the
king is at the same time high priest. In this quality he was,
particularly in former times, unapproachable by his subjects. Only
by night was he allowed to quit his dwelling in order to bathe and
so forth. None but his representative, the so-called ‘visible
king,’ with three chosen elders might converse with him, and
even they had to sit on an ox-hide with their backs turned to him.
He might not see any European nor any horse, nor might he look upon
the sea, for which reason he was not allowed to quit his capital
even for a few moments. These rules have been disregarded in recent
times.” The king of Dahomey himself is subject to the
prohibition of beholding the sea, and so are the kings of Loango
and Great Ardra in Guinea. The sea is the fetish of the Eyeos, to
the north-west of Dahomey, and they and their king are threatened
with death by their priests if ever they dare to look on it. It is
believed that the king of Cayor in Senegal would infallibly die
within the year if he were to cross a river or an arm of the sea.
In Mashonaland down to recent times the chiefs would not cross
certain rivers, particularly the Rurikwi and the Nyadiri; and the
custom was still strictly observed by at least one chief within
recent years. “On no account will the chief cross the river.
If it is absolutely necessary for him to do so, he is blindfolded
and carried across with shouting and singing. Should he walk
across, he will go blind or die and certainly lose the
chieftainship.” So among the Mahafalys and Sakalavas in the
south of Madagascar some kings are forbidden to sail on the sea or
to cross certain rivers. Among the Sakalavas the chief is regarded
as a sacred being, but “he is held in leash by a crowd of
restrictions, which regulate his behaviour like that of the emperor
of China. He can undertake nothing whatever unless the sorcerers
have declared the omens favourable; he may not eat warm food: on
certain days he may not quit his hut; and so on.” Among some
of the hill tribes of Assam both the headman and his wife have to
observe many taboos in respect of food; thus they may not eat
buffalo, pork, dog, fowl, or tomatoes. The headman must be chaste,
the husband of one wife, and he must separate himself from her on
the eve of a general or public observance of taboo. In one group of
tribes the headman is forbidden to eat in a strange village, and
under no provocation whatever may he utter a word of abuse.
Apparently the people imagine that the violation of any of these
taboos by a headman would bring down misfortune on the whole
village.
The ancient kings of Ireland, as well as the kings of the four
provinces of Leinster, Munster, Connaught, and Ulster, were subject
to certain quaint prohibitions or taboos, on the due observance of
which the prosperity of the people of the country, as well as their
own, was supposed to depend. Thus, for example, the sun might not
rise on the king of Ireland in his bed at Tara, the old capital of
Erin; he was forbidden to alight on Wednesday at Magh Breagh, to
traverse Magh Cuillinn after sunset, to incite his horse at
Fan-Chomair, to go in a ship upon the water the Monday after
Bealltaine (May day), and to leave the track of his army upon Ath
Maighne the Tuesday after All-Hallows. The king of Leinster might
not go round Tuath Laighean left-hand-wise on Wednesday, nor sleep
between the Dothair (Dodder) and the Duibhlinn with his head
inclining to one side, nor encamp for nine days on the plains of
Cualann, nor travel the road of Duibhlinn on Monday, nor ride a
dirty black-heeled horse across Magh Maistean. The king of Munster
was prohibited from enjoying the feast of Loch Lein from one Monday
to another; from banqueting by night in the beginning of harvest
before Geim at Leitreacha; from encamping for nine days upon the
Siuir; and from holding a border meeting at Gabhran. The king of
Connaught might not conclude a treaty respecting his ancient palace
of Cruachan after making peace on All-Hallows Day, nor go in a
speckled garment on a grey speckled steed to the heath of Dal
Chais, nor repair to an assembly of women at Seaghais, nor sit in
autumn on the sepulchral mounds of the wife of Maine, nor contend
in running with the rider of a grey one-eyed horse at Ath Gallta
between two posts. The king of Ulster was forbidden to attend the
horse fair at Rath Line among the youths of Dal Araidhe, to listen
to the fluttering of the flocks of birds of Linn Saileach after
sunset, to celebrate the feast of the bull of Daire-mic-Daire, to
go into Magh Cobha in the month of March, and to drink of the water
of Bo Neimhidh between two darknesses. If the kings of Ireland
strictly observed these and many other customs, which were enjoined
by immemorial usage, it was believed that they would never meet
with mischance or misfortune, and would live for ninety years
without experiencing the decay of old age; that no epidemic or
mortality would occur during their reigns; and that the seasons
would be favourable and the earth yield its fruit in abundance;
whereas, if they set the ancient usages at naught, the country
would be visited with plague, famine, and bad weather.
The kings of Egypt were worshipped as gods, and the routine of
their daily life was regulated in every detail by precise and
unvarying rules. “The life of the kings of Egypt,” says
Diodorus, “was not like that of other monarchs who are
irresponsible and may do just what they choose; on the contrary,
everything was fixed for them by law, not only their official
duties, but even the details of their daily life… . The hours
both of day and night were arranged at which the king had to do,
not what he pleased, but what was prescribed for him… . For
not only were the times appointed at which he should transact
public business or sit in judgment; but the very hours for his
walking and bathing and sleeping with his wife, and, in short,
performing every act of life were all settled. Custom enjoined a
simple diet; the only flesh he might eat was veal and goose, and he
might only drink a prescribed quantity of wine.” However,
there is reason to think that these rules were observed, not by the
ancient Pharaohs, but by the priestly kings who reigned at Thebes
and Ethiopia at the close of the twentieth dynasty.
Of the taboos imposed on priests we may see a striking example
in the rules of life prescribed for the Flamen Dialis at Rome, who
has been interpreted as a living image of Jupiter, or a human
embodiment of the sky-spirit. They were such as the following: The
Flamen Dialis might not ride or even touch a horse, nor see an army
under arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor have a knot
on any part of his garments; no fire except a sacred fire might be
taken out of his house; he might not touch wheaten flour or
leavened bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw
meat, beans, and ivy; he might not walk under a vine; the feet of
his bed had to be daubed with mud; his hair could be cut only by a
free man and with a bronze knife and his hair and nails when cut
had to be buried under a lucky tree; he might not touch a dead body
nor enter a place where one was burned; he might not see work being
done on holy days; he might not be uncovered in the open air; if a
man in bonds were taken into his house, the captive had to be
unbound and the cords had to be drawn up through a hole in the roof
and so let down into the street. His wife, the Flaminica, had to
observe nearly the same rules, and others of her own besides. She
might not ascend more than three steps of the kind of staircase
called Greek; at a certain festival she might not comb her hair;
the leather of her shoes might not be made from a beast that had
died a natural death, but only from one that had been slain or
sacrificed; if she heard thunder she was tabooed till she had
offered an expiatory sacrifice.
Among the Grebo people of Sierra Leone there is a pontiff who
bears the title of Bodia and has been compared, on somewhat slender
grounds, to the high priest of the Jews. He is appointed in
accordance with the behest of an oracle. At an elaborate ceremony
of installation he is anointed, a ring is put on his ankle as a
badge of office, and the door-posts of his house are sprinkled with
the blood of a sacrificed goat. He has charge of the public
talismans and idols, which he feeds with rice and oil every new
moon; and he sacrifices on behalf of the town to the dead and to
demons. Nominally his power is very great, but in practice it is
very limited; for he dare not defy public opinion, and he is held
responsible, even with his life, for any adversity that befalls the
country. It is expected of him that he should cause the earth to
bring forth abundantly, the people to be healthy, war to be driven
far away, and witchcraft to be kept in abeyance. His life is
trammelled by the observance of certain restrictions or taboos.
Thus he may not sleep in any house but his own official residence,
which is called the “anointed house” with reference to
the ceremony of anointing him at inauguration. He may not drink
water on the highway. He may not eat while a corpse is in the town,
and he may not mourn for the dead. If he dies while in office, he
must be buried at dead of night; few may hear of his burial, and
none may mourn for him when his death is made public. Should he
have fallen a victim to the poison ordeal by drinking a decoction
of sassywood, as it is called, he must be buried under a running
stream of water.
Among the Todas of Southern India the holy milkman, who acts as
priest of the sacred dairy, is subject to a variety of irksome and
burdensome restrictions during the whole time of his incumbency,
which may last many years. Thus he must live at the sacred dairy
and may never visit his home or any ordinary village. He must be
celibate; if he is married he must leave his wife. On no account
may any ordinary person touch the holy milkman or the holy dairy;
such a touch would so defile his holiness that he would forfeit his
office. It is only on two days a week, namely Mondays and
Thursdays, that a mere layman may even approach the milkman; on
other days if he has any business with him, he must stand at a
distance (some say a quarter of a mile) and shout his message
across the intervening space. Further, the holy milkman never cuts
his hair or pares his nails so long as he holds office; he never
crosses a river by a bridge, but wades through a ford and only
certain fords; if a death occurs in his clan, he may not attend any
of the funeral ceremonies, unless he first resigns his office and
descends from the exalted rank of milkman to that of a mere common
mortal. Indeed it appears that in old days he had to resign the
seals, or rather the pails, of office whenever any member of his
clan departed this life. However, these heavy restraints are laid
in their entirety only on milkmen of the very highest class.
2. Divorce of the Spiritual from the Temporal Power
THE BURDENSOME observances attached to the royal or priestly
office produced their natural effect. Either men refused to accept
the office, which hence tended to fall into abeyance; or accepting
it, they sank under its weight into spiritless creatures,
cloistered recluses, from whose nerveless fingers the reins of
government slipped into the firmer grasp of men who were often
content to wield the reality of sovereignty without its name. In
some countries this rift in the supreme power deepened into a total
and permanent separation of the spiritual and temporal powers, the
old royal house retaining their purely religious functions, while
the civil government passed into the hands of a younger and more
vigorous race.
To take examples. In a previous part of this work we saw that in
Cambodia it is often necessary to force the kingships of Fire and
Water upon the reluctant successors, and that in Savage Island the
monarchy actually came to an end because at last no one could be
induced to accept the dangerous distinction. In some parts of West
Africa, when the king dies, a family council is secretly held to
determine his successor. He on whom the choice falls is suddenly
seized, bound, and thrown into the fetish-house, where he is kept
in durance till he consents to accept the crown. Sometimes the heir
finds means of evading the honour which it is sought to thrust upon
him; a ferocious chief has been known to go about constantly armed,
resolute to resist by force any attempt to set him on the throne.
The savage Timmes of Sierra Leone, who elect their king, reserve to
themselves the right of beating him on the eve of his coronation;
and they avail themselves of this constitutional privilege with
such hearty goodwill that sometimes the unhappy monarch does not
long survive his elevation to the throne. Hence when the leading
chiefs have a spite at a man and wish to rid themselves of him,
they elect him king. Formerly, before a man was proclaimed king of
Sierra Leone, it used to be the custom to load him with chains and
thrash him. Then the fetters were knocked off, the kingly robe was
placed on him, and he received in his hands the symbol of royal
dignity, which was nothing but the axe of the executioner. It is
not therefore surprising to read that in Sierra Leone, where such
customs have prevailed, “except among the Mandingoes and
Suzees, few kings are natives of the countries they govern. So
different are their ideas from ours, that very few are solicitous
of the honour, and competition is very seldom heard of.”
The Mikados of Japan seem early to have resorted to the
expedient of transferring the honours and burdens of supreme power
to their infant children; and the rise of the Tycoons, long the
temporal sovereigns of the country, is traced to the abdication of
a certain Mikado in favour of his three-year-old son. The
sovereignty having been wrested by a usurper from the infant
prince, the cause of the Mikado was championed by Yoritomo, a man
of spirit and conduct, who overthrew the usurper and restored to
the Mikado the shadow, while he retained for himself the substance,
of power. He bequeathed to his descendants the dignity he had won,
and thus became the founder of the line of Tycoons. Down to the
latter half of the sixteenth century the Tycoons were active and
efficient rulers; but the same fate overtook them which had
befallen the Mikados. Immeshed in the same inextricable web of
custom and law, they degenerated into mere puppets, hardly stirring
from their palaces and occupied in a perpetual round of empty
ceremonies, while the real business of government was managed by
the council of state. In Tonquin the monarchy ran a similar course.
Living like his predecessors in effeminacy and sloth, the king was
driven from the throne by an ambitious adventurer named Mack, who
from a fisherman had risen to be Grand Mandarin. But the
king’s brother Tring put down the usurper and restored the
king, retaining, however, for himself and his descendants the
dignity of general of all the forces. Thenceforward the kings,
though invested with the title and pomp of sovereignty, ceased to
govern. While they lived secluded in their palaces, all real
political power was wielded by the hereditary generals.
In Mangaia, a Polynesian island, religious and civil authority
were lodged in separate hands, spiritual functions being discharged
by a line of hereditary kings, while the temporal government was
entrusted from time to time to a victorious war-chief, whose
investiture, however, had to be completed by the king. Similarly in
Tonga, besides the civil king whose right to the throne was partly
hereditary and partly derived from his warlike reputation and the
number of his fighting men, there was a great divine chief who
ranked above the king and the other chiefs in virtue of his
supposed descent from one of the chief gods. Once a year the
first-fruits of the ground were offered to him at a solemn
ceremony, and it was believed that if these offerings were not made
the vengeance of the gods would fall in a signal manner on the
people. Peculiar forms of speech, such as were applied to no one
else, were used in speaking of him, and everything that he chanced
to touch became sacred or tabooed. When he and the king met, the
monarch had to sit down on the ground in token of respect until his
holiness had passed by. Yet though he enjoyed the highest
veneration by reason of his divine origin, this sacred personage
possessed no political authority, and if he ventured to meddle with
affairs of state it was at the risk of receiving a rebuff from the
king, to whom the real power belonged, and who finally succeeded in
ridding himself of his spiritual rival.
In some parts of Western Africa two kings reign side by side, a
fetish or religious king and a civil king, but the fetish king is
really supreme. He controls the weather and so forth, and can put a
stop to everything. When he lays his red staff on the ground, no
one may pass that way. This division of power between a sacred and
a secular ruler is to be met with wherever the true negro culture
has been left unmolested, but where the negro form of society has
been disturbed, as in Dahomey and Ashantee, there is a tendency to
consolidate the two powers in a single king.
In some parts of the East Indian island of Timor we meet with a
partition of power like that which is represented by the civil king
and the fetish king of Western Africa. Some of the Timorese tribes
recognise two rajahs, the ordinary or civil rajah, who governs the
people, and the fetish or taboo rajah, who is charged with the
control of everything that concerns the earth and its products.
This latter ruler has the right of declaring anything taboo; his
permission must be obtained before new land may be brought under
cultivation, and he must perform certain necessary ceremonies when
the work is being carried out. If drought or blight threatens the
crops, his help is invoked to save them. Though he ranks below the
civil rajah, he exercises a momentous influence on the course of
events, for his secular colleague is bound to consult him in all
important matters. In some of the neighbouring islands, such as
Rotti and eastern Flores, a spiritual ruler of the same sort is
recognised under various native names, which all mean “lord
of the ground.” Similarly in the Mekeo district of British
New Guinea there is a double chieftainship. The people are divided
into two groups according to families, and each of the groups has
its chief. One of the two is the war chief, the other is the taboo
chief. The office of the latter is hereditary; his duty is to
impose a taboo on any of the crops, such as the coco-nuts and areca
nuts, whenever he thinks it desirable to prohibit their use. In his
office we may perhaps detect the beginning of a priestly dynasty,
but as yet his functions appear to be more magical than religious,
being concerned with the control of the harvests rather than with
the propitiation of higher powers.
XVIII. The Perils of the Soul
1. The Soul as a Mannikin
THE FOREGOING examples have taught us that the office of a
sacred king or priest is often hedged in by a series of burdensome
restrictions or taboos, of which a principal purpose appears to be
to preserve the life of the divine man for the good of his people.
But if the object of the taboos is to save his life, the question
arises, How is their observance supposed to effect this end? To
understand this we must know the nature of the danger which
threatens the king’s life, and which it is the intention of
these curious restrictions to guard against. We must, therefore,
ask: What does early man understand by death? To what causes does
he attribute it? And how does he think it may be guarded
against?
As the savage commonly explains the processes of inanimate
nature by supposing that they are produced by living beings working
in or behind the phenomena, so he explains the phenomena of life
itself. If an animal lives and moves, it can only be, he thinks,
because there is a little animal inside which moves it: if a man
lives and moves, it can only be because he has a little man or
animal inside who moves him. The animal inside the animal, the man
inside the man, is the soul. And as the activity of an animal or
man is explained by the presence of the soul, so the repose of
sleep or death is explained by its absence; sleep or trance being
the temporary, death being the permanent absence of the soul. Hence
if death be the permanent absence of the soul, the way to guard
against it is either to prevent the soul from leaving the body, or,
if it does depart, to ensure that it shall return. The precautions
adopted by savages to secure one or other of these ends take the
form of certain prohibitions or taboos, which are nothing but rules
intended to ensure either the continued presence or the return of
the soul. In short, they are life-preservers or life-guards. These
general statements will now be illustrated by examples.
Addressing some Australian blacks, a European missionary said,
“I am not one, as you think, but two.” Upon this they
laughed. “You may laugh as much as you like,” continued
the missionary, “I tell you that I am two in one; this great
body that you see is one; within that there is another little one
which is not visible. The great body dies, and is buried, but the
little body flies away when the great one dies.” To this some
of the blacks replied, “Yes, yes. We also are two, we also
have a little body within the breast.” On being asked where
the little body went after death, some said it went behind the
bush, others said it went into the sea, and some said they did not
know. The Hurons thought that the soul had a head and body, arms
and legs; in short, that it was a complete little model of the man
himself. The Esquimaux believe that “the soul exhibits the
same shape as the body it belongs to, but is of a more subtle and
ethereal nature.” According to the Nootkas the soul has the
shape of a tiny man; its seat is the crown of the head. So long as
it stands erect, its owner is hale and hearty; but when from any
cause it loses its upright position, he loses his senses. Among the
Indian tribes of the Lower Fraser River, man is held to have four
souls, of which the principal one has the form of a mannikin, while
the other three are shadows of it. The Malays conceive the human
soul as a little man, mostly invisible and of the bigness of a
thumb, who corresponds exactly in shape, proportion, and even in
complexion to the man in whose body he resides. This mannikin is of
a thin, unsubstantial nature, though not so impalpable but that it
may cause displacement on entering a physical object, and it can
flit quickly from place to place; it is temporarily absent from the
body in sleep, trance, and disease, and permanently absent after
death.
So exact is the resemblance of the mannikin to the man, in other
words, of the soul to the body, that, as there are fat bodies and
thin bodies, so there are fat souls and thin souls; as there are
heavy bodies and light bodies, long bodies and short bodies, so
there are heavy souls and light souls, long souls and short souls.
The people of Nias think that every man, before he is born, is
asked how long or how heavy a soul he would like, and a soul of the
desired weight or length is measured out to him. The heaviest soul
ever given out weighs about ten grammes. The length of a
man’s life is proportioned to the length of his soul;
children who die young had short souls. The Fijian conception of
the soul as a tiny human being comes clearly out in the customs
observed at the death of a chief among the Nakelo tribe. When a
chief dies, certain men, who are the hereditary undertakers, call
him, as he lies, oiled and ornamented, on fine mats, saying,
“Rise, sir, the chief, and let us be going. The day has come
over the land.” Then they conduct him to the river side,
where the ghostly ferryman comes to ferry Nakelo ghosts across the
stream. As they thus attend the chief on his last journey, they
hold their great fans close to the ground to shelter him, because,
as one of them explained to a missionary, “His soul is only a
little child.” People in the Punjaub who tattoo themselves
believe that at death the soul, “the little entire man or
woman” inside the mortal frame, will go to heaven blazoned
with the same tattoo patterns which adorned the body in life.
Sometimes, however, as we shall see, the human soul is conceived
not in human but in animal form.
2. Absence and Recall of the Soul
THE SOUL is commonly supposed to escape by the natural openings
of the body, especially the mouth and nostrils. Hence in Celebes
they sometimes fasten fish-hooks to a sick man’s nose, navel,
and feet, so that if his soul should try to escape it may be hooked
and held fast. A Turik on the Baram River, in Borneo, refused to
part with some hook-like stones, because they, as it were, hooked
his soul to his body, and so prevented the spiritual portion of him
from becoming detached from the material. When a Sea Dyak sorcerer
or medicine-man is initiated, his fingers are supposed to be
furnished with fish-hooks, with which he will thereafter clutch the
human soul in the act of flying away, and restore it to the body of
the sufferer. But hooks, it is plain, may be used to catch the
souls of enemies as well as of friends. Acting on this principle
head-hunters in Borneo hang wooden hooks beside the skulls of their
slain enemies in the belief that this helps them on their forays to
hook in fresh heads. One of the implements of a Haida medicine-man
is a hollow bone, in which he bottles up departing souls, and so
restores them to their owners. When any one yawns in their presence
the Hindoos always snap their thumbs, believing that this will
hinder the soul from issuing through the open mouth. The Marquesans
used to hold the mouth and nose of a dying man, in order to keep
him in life by preventing his soul from escaping; the same custom
is reported of the New Caledonians; and with the like intention the
Bagobos of the Philippine Islands put rings of brass wire on the
wrists or ankles of their sick. On the other hand, the Itonamas of
South America seal up the eyes, nose, and mouth of a dying person,
in case his ghost should get out and carry off others; and for a
similar reason the people of Nias, who fear the spirits of the
recently deceased and identify them with the breath, seek to
confine the vagrant soul in its earthly tabernacle by bunging up
the nose or tying up the jaws of the corpse. Before leaving a
corpse the Wakelbura of Australia used to place hot coals in its
ears in order to keep the ghost in the body, until they had got
such a good start that he could not overtake them. In Southern
Celebes, to hinder the escape of a woman’s soul in childbed,
the nurse ties a band as tightly as possible round the body of the
expectant mother. The Minangkabauers of Sumatra observe a similar
custom; a skein of thread or a string is sometimes fastened round
the wrist or loins of a woman in childbed, so that when her soul
seeks to depart in her hour of travail it may find the egress
barred. And lest the soul of a babe should escape and be lost as
soon as it is born, the Alfoors of Celebes, when a birth is about
to take place, are careful to close every opening in the house,
even the keyhole; and they stop up every chink and cranny in the
walls. Also they tie up the mouths of all animals inside and
outside the house, for fear one of them might swallow the
child’s soul. For a similar reason all persons present in the
house, even the mother herself, are obliged to keep their mouths
shut the whole time the birth is taking place. When the question
was put, Why they did not hold their noses also, lest the
child’s soul should get into one of them? the answer was that
breath being exhaled as well as inhaled through the nostrils, the
soul would be expelled before it could have time to settle down.
Popular expressions in the language of civilised peoples, such as
to have one’s heart in one’s mouth, or the soul on the
lips or in the nose, show how natural is the idea that the life or
soul may escape by the mouth or nostrils.
Often the soul is conceived as a bird ready to take flight. This
conception has probably left traces in most languages, and it
lingers as a metaphor in poetry. The Malays carry out the
conception of the bird-soul in a number of odd ways. If the soul is
a bird on the wing, it may be attracted by rice, and so either
prevented from flying away or lured back again from its perilous
flight. Thus in Java when a child is placed on the ground for the
first time (a moment which uncultured people seem to regard as
especially dangerous), it is put in a hen-coop and the mother makes
a clucking sound, as if she were calling hens. And in Sintang, a
district of Borneo, when a person, whether man, woman, or child,
has fallen out of a house or off a tree, and has been brought home,
his wife or other kinswoman goes as speedily as possible to the
spot where the accident happened, and there strews rice, which has
been coloured yellow, while she utters the words, “Cluck!
cluck! soul! So-and-so is in his house again. Cluck! cluck!
soul!” Then she gathers up the rice in a basket, carries it
to the sufferer, and drops the grains from her hand on his head,
saying again, “Cluck! cluck! soul!” Here the intention
clearly is to decoy back the loitering bird-soul and replace it in
the head of its owner.
The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body
and actually to visit the places, to see the persons, and to
perform the acts of which he dreams. For example, when an Indian of
Brazil or Guiana wakes up from a sound sleep, he is firmly
convinced that his soul has really been away hunting, fishing,
felling trees, or whatever else he has dreamed of doing, while all
the time his body has been lying motionless in his hammock. A whole
Bororo village has been thrown into a panic and nearly deserted
because somebody had dreamed that he saw enemies stealthily
approaching it. A Macusi Indian in weak health, who dreamed that
his employer had made him haul the canoe up a series of difficult
cataracts, bitterly reproached his master next morning for his want
of consideration in thus making a poor invalid go out and toil
during the night. The Indians of the Gran Chaco are often heard to
relate the most incredible stories as things which they have
themselves seen and heard; hence strangers who do not know them
intimately say in their haste that these Indians are liars. In
point of fact the Indians are firmly convinced of the truth of what
they relate; for these wonderful adventures are simply their
dreams, which they do not distinguish from waking realities.
Now the absence of the soul in sleep has its dangers, for if
from any cause the soul should be permanently detained away from
the body, the person thus deprived of the vital principle must die.
There is a German belief that the soul escapes from a
sleeper’s mouth in the form of a white mouse or a little
bird, and that to prevent the return of the bird or animal would be
fatal to the sleeper. Hence in Transylvania they say that you
should not let a child sleep with its mouth open, or its soul will
slip out in the shape of a mouse, and the child will never wake.
Many causes may detain the sleeper’s soul. Thus, his soul may
meet the soul of another sleeper and the two souls may fight; if a
Guinea negro wakens with sore bones in the morning, he thinks that
his soul has been thrashed by another soul in sleep. Or it may meet
the soul of a person just deceased and be carried off by it; hence
in the Aru Islands the inmates of a house will not sleep the night
after a death has taken place in it, because the soul of the
deceased is supposed to be still in the house and they fear to meet
it in a dream. Again, the soul of the sleeper may be prevented by
an accident or by physical force from returning to his body. When a
Dyak dreams of falling into the water, he supposes that this
accident has really befallen his spirit, and he sends for a wizard,
who fishes for the spirit with a hand-net in a basin of water till
he catches it and restores it to its owner. The Santals tell how a
man fell asleep, and growing very thirsty, his soul, in the form of
a lizard, left his body and entered a pitcher of water to drink.
Just then the owner of the pitcher happened to cover it; so the
soul could not return to the body and the man died. While his
friends were preparing to burn the body some one uncovered the
pitcher to get water. The lizard thus escaped and returned to the
body, which immediately revived; so the man rose up and asked his
friends why they were weeping. They told him they thought he was
dead and were about to burn his body. He said he had been down a
well to get water, but had found it hard to get out and had just
returned. So they saw it all.
It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a
sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get
back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick.
If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done
very gradually, to allow the soul time to return. A Fijian in
Matuku, suddenly wakened from a nap by somebody treading on his
foot, has been heard bawling after his soul and imploring it to
return. He had just been dreaming that he was far away in Tonga,
and great was his alarm on suddenly wakening to find his body in
Matuku. Death stared him in the face unless his soul could be
induced to speed at once across the sea and reanimate its deserted
tenement. The man would probably have died of fright if a
missionary had not been at hand to allay his terror.
Still more dangerous is it in the opinion of primitive man to
move a sleeper or alter his appearance, for if this were done the
soul on its return might not be able to find or recognise its body,
and so the person would die. The Minangkabauers deem it highly
improper to blacken or dirty the face of a sleeper, lest the absent
soul should shrink from re-entering a body thus disfigured. Patani
Malays fancy that if a person’s face be painted while he
sleeps, the soul which has gone out of him will not recognise him,
and he will sleep on till his face is washed. In Bombay it is
thought equivalent to murder to change the aspect of a sleeper, as
by painting his face in fantastic colours or giving moustaches to a
sleeping woman. For when the soul returns it will not know its own
body, and the person will die.
But in order that a man’s soul should quit his body, it is
not necessary that he should be asleep. It may quit him in his
waking hours, and then sickness, insanity, or death will be the
result. Thus a man of the Wurunjeri tribe in Australia lay at his
last gasp because his spirit had departed from him. A medicine-man
went in pursuit and caught the spirit by the middle just as it was
about to plunge into the sunset glow, which is the light cast by
the souls of the dead as they pass in and out of the under-world,
where the sun goes to rest. Having captured the vagrant spirit, the
doctor brought it back under his opossum rug, laid himself down on
the dying man, and put the soul back into him, so that after a time
he revived. The Karens of Burma are perpetually anxious about their
souls, lest these should go roving from their bodies, leaving the
owners to die. When a man has reason to fear that his soul is about
to take this fatal step, a ceremony is performed to retain or
recall it, in which the whole family must take part. A meal is
prepared consisting of a cock and hen, a special kind of rice, and
a bunch of bananas. Then the head of the family takes the bowl
which is used to skim rice, and knocking with it thrice on the top
of the houseladder says: “Prrrroo! Come back, soul,
do not tarry outside! If it rains, you will be wet. If the sun
shines, you will be hot. The gnats will sting you, the leeches will
bite you, the tigers will devour you, the thunder will crush you.
Prrrroo! Come back, soul! Here it will be well with you.
You shall want for nothing. Come and eat under shelter from the
wind and the storm.” After that the family partakes of the
meal, and the ceremony ends with everybody tying their right wrist
with a string which has been charmed by a sorcerer. Similarly the
Lolos of South-western China believe that the soul leaves the body
in chronic illness. In that case they read a sort of elaborate
litany, calling on the soul by name and beseeching it to return
from the hills, the vales, the rivers, the forests, the fields, or
from wherever it may be straying. At the same time cups of water,
wine, and rice are set at the door for the refreshment of the weary
wandering spirit. When the ceremony is over, they tie a red cord
round the arm of the sick man to tether the soul, and this cord is
worn by him until it decays and drops off.
Some of the Congo tribes believe that when a man is ill, his
soul has left his body and is wandering at large. The aid of the
sorcerer is then called in to capture the vagrant spirit and
restore it to the invalid. Generally the physician declares that he
has successfully chased the soul into the branch of a tree. The
whole town thereupon turns out and accompanies the doctor to the
tree, where the strongest men are deputed to break off the branch
in which the soul of the sick man is supposed to be lodged. This
they do and carry the branch back to the town, insinuating by their
gestures that the burden is heavy and hard to bear. When the branch
has been brought to the sick man’s hut, he is placed in an
upright position by its side, and the sorcerer performs the
enchantments by which the soul is believed to be restored to its
owner.
Pining, sickness, great fright, and death are ascribed by the
Bataks of Sumatra to the absence of the soul from the body. At
first they try to beckon the wanderer back, and to lure him, like a
fowl, by strewing rice. Then the following form of words is
commonly repeated: “Come back, O soul, whether thou art
lingering in the wood, or on the hills, or in the dale. See, I call
thee with a toemba bras, with an egg of the fowl Rajah
moelija, with the eleven healing leaves. Detain it not,
let it come straight here, detain it not, neither in the wood, nor
on the hill, nor in the dale. That may not be. O come straight
home!” Once when a popular traveller was leaving a Kayan
village, the mothers, fearing that their children’s souls
might follow him on his journey, brought him the boards on which
they carry their infants and begged him to pray that the souls of
the little ones would return to the familiar boards and not go away
with him into the far country. To each board was fastened a looped
string for the purpose of tethering the vagrant spirits, and
through the loop each baby was made to pass a chubby finger to make
sure that its tiny soul would not wander away.
In an Indian story a king conveys his soul into the dead body of
a Brahman, and a hunchback conveys his soul into the deserted body
of the king. The hunchback is now king and the king is a Brahman.
However, the hunchback is induced to show his skill by transferring
his soul to the dead body of a parrot, and the king seizes the
opportunity to regain possession of his own body. A tale of the
same type, with variations of detail, reappears among the Malays. A
king has incautiously transferred his soul to an ape, upon which
the vizier adroitly inserts his own soul into the king’s body
and so takes possession of the queen and the kingdom, while the
true king languishes at court in the outward semblance of an ape.
But one day the false king, who played for high stakes, was
watching a combat of rams, and it happened that the animal on which
he had laid his money fell down dead. All efforts to restore
animation proved unavailing till the false king, with the instinct
of a true sportsman, transferred his own soul to the body of the
deceased ram, and thus renewed the fray. The real king in the body
of the ape saw his chance, and with great presence of mind darted
back into his own body, which the vizier had rashly vacated. So he
came to his own again, and the usurper in the ram’s body met
with the fate he richly deserved. Similarly the Greeks told how the
soul of Hermotimus of Clazomenae used to quit his body and roam far
and wide, bringing back intelligence of what he had seen on his
rambles to his friends at home; until one day, when his spirit was
abroad, his enemies contrived to seize his deserted body and
committed it to the flames.
The departure of the soul is not always voluntary. It may be
extracted from the body against its will by ghosts, demons, or
sorcerers. Hence, when a funeral is passing the house, the Karens
tie their children with a special kind of string to a particular
part of the house, lest the souls of the children should leave
their bodies and go into the corpse which is passing. The children
are kept tied in this way until the corpse is out of sight. And
after the corpse has been laid in the grave, but before the earth
has been shovelled in, the mourners and friends range themselves
round the grave, each with a bamboo split lengthwise in one hand
and a little stick in the other; each man thrusts his bamboo into
the grave, and drawing the stick along the groove of the bamboo
points out to his soul that in this way it may easily climb up out
of the tomb. While the earth is being shovelled in, the bamboos are
kept out of the way, lest the souls should be in them, and so
should be inadvertently buried with the earth as it is being thrown
into the grave; and when the people leave the spot they carry away
the bamboos, begging their souls to come with them. Further, on
returning from the grave each Karen provides himself with three
little hooks made of branches of trees, and calling his spirit to
follow him, at short intervals, as he returns, he makes a motion as
if hooking it, and then thrusts the hook into the ground. This is
done to prevent the soul of the living from staying behind with the
soul of the dead. When the Karo-Bataks have buried somebody and are
filling in the grave, a sorceress runs about beating the air with a
stick. This she does in order to drive away the souls of the
survivors, for if one of these souls happened to slip into the
grave and to be covered up with earth, its owner would die.
In Uea, one of the Loyalty Islands, the souls of the dead seem
to have been credited with the power of stealing the souls of the
living. For when a man was sick the soul-doctor would go with a
large troop of men and women to the graveyard. Here the men played
on flutes and the women whistled softly to lure the soul home.
After this had gone on for some time they formed in procession and
moved homewards, the flutes playing and the women whistling all the
way, while they led back the wandering soul and drove it gently
along with open palms. On entering the patient’s dwelling
they commanded the soul in a loud voice to enter his body.
Often the abduction of a man’s soul is set down to demons.
Thus fits and convulsions are generally ascribed by the Chinese to
the agency of certain mischievous spirits who love to draw
men’s souls out of their bodies. At Amoy the spirits who
serve babies and children in this way rejoice in the high-sounding
titles of “celestial agencies bestriding galloping
horses” and “literary graduates residing halfway up in
the sky.” When an infant is writhing in convulsions, the
frightened mother hastens to the roof of the house, and, waving
about a bamboo pole to which one of the child’s garments is
attached, cries out several times “My child So-and-so, come
back, return home!” Meantime, another inmate of the house
bangs away at a gong in the hope of attracting the attention of the
strayed soul, which is supposed to recognise the familiar garment
and to slip into it. The garment containing the soul is then placed
on or beside the child, and if the child does not die recovery is
sure to follow, sooner or later. Similarly some Indians catch a
man’s lost soul in his boots and restore it to his body by
putting his feet into them.
In the Moluccas when a man is unwell it is thought that some
devil has carried away his soul to the tree, mountain, or hill
where he (the devil) resides. A sorcerer having pointed out the
devil’s abode, the friends of the patient carry thither
cooked rice, fruit, fish, raw eggs, a hen, a chicken, a silken
robe, gold, armlets, and so forth. Having set out the food in order
they pray, saying: “We come to offer to you, O devil, this
offering of food, clothes, gold, and so on; take it and release the
soul of the patient for whom we pray. Let it return to his body,
and he who now is sick shall be made whole.” Then they eat a
little and let the hen loose as a ransom for the soul of the
patient; also they put down the raw eggs; but the silken robe, the
gold, and the armlets they take home with them. As soon as they are
come to the house they place a flat bowl containing the offerings
which have been brought back at the sick man’s head, and say
to him: “Now is your soul released, and you shall fare well
and live to grey hairs on the earth.”
Demons are especially feared by persons who have just entered a
new house. Hence at a house-warming among the Alfoors of Minahassa
in Celebes the priest performs a ceremony for the purpose of
restoring their souls to the inmates. He hangs up a bag at the
place of sacrifice and then goes through a list of the gods. There
are so many of them that this takes him the whole night through
without stopping. In the morning he offers the gods an egg and some
rice. By this time the souls of the household are supposed to be
gathered in the bag. So the priest takes the bag, and holding it on
the head of the master of the house, says, “Here you have
your soul; go (soul) to-morrow away again.” He then does the
same, saying the same words, to the housewife and all the other
members of the family. Amongst the same Alfoors one way of
recovering a sick man’s soul is to let down a bowl by a belt
out of a window and fish for the soul till it is caught in the bowl
and hauled up. And among the same people, when a priest is bringing
back a sick man’s soul which he has caught in a cloth, he is
preceded by a girl holding the large leaf of a certain palm over
his head as an umbrella to keep him and the soul from getting wet,
in case it should rain; and he is followed by a man brandishing a
sword to deter other souls from any attempt at rescuing the
captured spirit.
Sometimes the lost soul is brought back in a visible shape. The
Salish or Flathead Indians of Oregon believe that a man’s
soul may be separated for a time from his body without causing
death and without the man being aware of his loss. It is necessary,
however, that the lost soul should be soon found and restored to
its owner or he will die. The name of the man who has lost his soul
is revealed in a dream to the medicine-man, who hastens to inform
the sufferer of his loss. Generally a number of men have sustained
a like loss at the same time; all their names are revealed to the
medicine-man, and all employ him to recover their souls. The whole
night long these soulless men go about the village from lodge to
lodge, dancing and singing. Towards daybreak they go into a
separate lodge, which is closed up so as to be totally dark. A
small hole is then made in the roof, through which the
medicine-man, with a bunch of feathers, brushes in the souls, in
the shape of bits of bone and the like, which he receives on a
piece of matting. A fire is next kindled, by the light of which the
medicine-man sorts out the souls. First he puts aside the souls of
dead people, of which there are usually several; for if he were to
give the soul of a dead person to a living man, the man would die
instantly. Next he picks out the souls of all the persons present,
and making them all to sit down before him, he takes the soul of
each, in the shape of a splinter of bone, wood, or shell, and
placing it on the owner’s head, pats it with many prayers and
contortions till it descends into the heart and so resumes its
proper place.
Again, souls may be extracted from their bodies or detained on
their wanderings not only by ghosts and demons but also by men,
especially by sorcerers. In Fiji, if a criminal refused to confess,
the chief sent for a scarf with which “to catch away the soul
of the rogue.” At the sight or even at the mention of the
scarf the culprit generally made a clean breast. For if he did not,
the scarf would be waved over his head till his soul was caught in
it, when it would be carefully folded up and nailed to the end of a
chief’s canoe; and for want of his soul the criminal would
pine and die. The sorcerers of Danger Island used to set snares for
souls. The snares were made of stout cinet, about fifteen to thirty
feet long, with loops on either side of different sizes, to suit
the different sizes of souls; for fat souls there were large loops,
for thin souls there were small ones. When a man was sick against
whom the sorcerers had a grudge, they set up these soul-snares near
his house and watched for the flight of his soul. If in the shape
of a bird or an insect it was caught in the snare, the man would
infallibly die. In some parts of West Africa, indeed, wizards are
continually setting traps to catch souls that wander from their
bodies in sleep; and when they have caught one, they tie it up over
the fire, and as it shrivels in the heat the owner sickens. This is
done, not out of any grudge towards the sufferer, but purely as a
matter of business. The wizard does not care whose soul he has
captured, and will readily restore it to its owner, if only he is
paid for doing so. Some sorcerers keep regular asylums for strayed
souls, and anybody who has lost or mislaid his own soul can always
have another one from the asylum on payment of the usual fee. No
blame whatever attaches to men who keep these private asylums or
set traps for passing souls; it is their profession, and in the
exercise of it they are actuated by no harsh or unkindly feelings.
But there are also wretches who from pure spite or for the sake of
lucre set and bait traps with the deliberate purpose of catching
the soul of a particular man; and in the bottom of the pot, hidden
by the bait, are knives and sharp hooks which tear and rend the
poor soul, either killing it outright or mauling it so as to impair
the health of its owner when it succeeds in escaping and returning
to him. Miss Kingsley knew a Kruman who became very anxious about
his soul, because for several nights he had smelt in his dreams the
savoury smell of smoked crawfish seasoned with red pepper. Clearly
some ill-wisher had set a trap baited with this dainty for his
dream-soul, intending to do him grievous bodily, or rather
spiritual, harm; and for the next few nights great pains were taken
to keep his soul from straying abroad in his sleep. In the
sweltering heat of the tropical night he lay sweating and snorting
under a blanket, his nose and mouth tied up with a handkerchief to
prevent the escape of his precious soul. In Hawaii there were
sorcerers who caught souls of living people, shut them up in
calabashes, and gave them to people to eat. By squeezing a captured
soul in their hands they discovered the place where people had been
secretly buried.
Nowhere perhaps is the art of abducting human souls more
carefully cultivated or carried to higher perfection than in the
Malay Peninsula. Here the methods by which the wizard works his
will are various, and so too are his motives. Sometimes he desires
to destroy an enemy, sometimes to win the love of a cold or bashful
beauty. Thus, to take an instance of the latter sort of charm, the
following are the directions given for securing the soul of one
whom you wish to render distraught. When the moon, just risen,
looks red above the eastern horizon, go out, and standing in the
moonlight, with the big toe of your right foot on the big toe of
your left, make a speaking-trumpet of your right hand and recite
through it the following words:
“OM. I loose my shaft, I loose it and the moon clouds
over,
I loose it, and the sun is extinguished.
I loose it, and the stars burn dim.
But it is not the sun, moon, and stars that I shoot
at,
It is the stalk of the heart of that child of the
congregation,
So-and-so.
Cluck! cluck! soul of So-and-so, come and walk with me,
Come and sit with me,
Come and sleep and share my pillow.
Cluck! cluck! soul.”
Repeat this thrice and after every repetition blow through your
hollow fist. Or you may catch the soul in your turban, thus. Go out
on the night of the full moon and the two succeeding nights; sit
down on an ant-hill facing the moon, burn incense, and recite the
following incantation:
“I bring you a betel leaf to chew,
Dab the lime on to it, Prince Ferocious,
For Somebody, Prince Distraction’s daughter, to
chew.
Somebody at sunrise be distraught for love of me
Somebody at sunset be distraught for love of me.
As you remember your parents, remember me;
As you remember your house and houseladder, remember
me;
When thunder rumbles, remember me;
When wind whistles, remember me;
When the heavens rain, remember me;
When cocks crow, remember me;
When the dial-bird tells its tales, remember me;
When you look up at the sun, remember me;
When you look up at the moon, remember me,
For in that self-same moon I am there.
Cluck! cluck! soul of Somebody come hither to me.
I do not mean to let you have my soul,
Let your soul come hither to mine.”
Now wave the end of your turban towards the moon seven times
each night. Go home and put it under your pillow, and if you want
to wear it in the daytime, burn incense and say, “It is not a
turban that I carry in my girdle, but the soul of
Somebody.”
The Indians of the Nass River, in British Columbia, are
impressed with a belief that a physician may swallow his
patient’s soul by mistake. A doctor who is believed to have
done so is made by the other members of the faculty to stand over
the patient, while one of them thrusts his fingers down the
doctor’s throat, another kneads him in the stomach with his
knuckles, and a third slaps him on the back. If the soul is not in
him after all, and if the same process has been repeated upon all
the medical men without success, it is concluded that the soul must
be in the head-doctor’s box. A party of doctors, therefore,
waits upon him at his house and requests him to produce his box.
When he has done so and arranged its contents on a new mat, they
take the votary of Aesculapius and hold him up by the heels with
his head in a hole in the floor. In this position they wash his
head, and “any water remaining from the ablution is taken and
poured upon the sick man’s head.” No doubt the lost
soul is in the water.
3. The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection
BUT the spiritual dangers I have enumerated are not the only
ones which beset the savage. Often he regards his shadow or
reflection as his soul, or at all events as a vital part of
himself, and as such it is necessarily a source of danger to him.
For if it is trampled upon, struck, or stabbed, he will feel the
injury as if it were done to his person; and if it is detached from
him entirely (as he believes that it may be) he will die. In the
island of Wetar there are magicians who can make a man ill by
stabbing his shadow with a pike or hacking it with a sword. After
Sankara had destroyed the Buddhists in India, it is said that he
journeyed to Nepaul, where he had some difference of opinion with
the Grand Lama. To prove his supernatural powers, he soared into
the air. But as he mounted up the Grand Lama, perceiving his shadow
swaying and wavering on the ground, struck his knife into it and
down fell Sankara and broke his neck.
In the Banks Islands there are some stones of a remarkably long
shape which go by the name of “eating ghosts,” because
certain powerful and dangerous ghosts are believed to lodge in
them. If a man’s shadow falls on one of these stones, the
ghost will draw his soul out from him, so that he will die. Such
stones, therefore, are set in a house to guard it; and a messenger
sent to a house by the absent owner will call out the name of the
sender, lest the watchful ghost in the stone should fancy that he
came with evil intent and should do him a mischief. At a funeral in
China, when the lid is about to be placed on the coffin, most of
the bystanders, with the exception of the nearest kin, retire a few
steps or even retreat to another room, for a person’s health
is believed to be endangered by allowing his shadow to be enclosed
in a coffin. And when the coffin is about to be lowered into the
grave most of the spectators recoil to a little distance lest their
shadows should fall into the grave and harm should thus be done to
their persons. The geomancer and his assistants stand on the side
of the grave which is turned away from the sun; and the
grave-diggers and coffin-bearers attach their shadows firmly to
their persons by tying a strip of cloth tightly round their waists.
Nor is it human beings alone who are thus liable to be injured by
means of their shadows. Animals are to some extent in the same
predicament. A small snail, which frequents the neighbourhood of
the limestone hills in Perak, is believed to suck the blood of
cattle through their shadows; hence the beasts grow lean and
sometimes die from loss of blood. The ancients supposed that in
Arabia, if a hyaena trod on a man’s shadow, it deprived him
of the power of speech and motion; and that if a dog, standing on a
roof in the moonlight, cast a shadow on the ground and a hyaena
trod on it, the dog would fall down as if dragged with a rope.
Clearly in these cases the shadow, if not equivalent to the soul,
is at least regarded as a living part of the man or the animal, so
that injury done to the shadow is felt by the person or animal as
if it were done to his body.
Conversely, if the shadow is a vital part of a man or an animal,
it may under certain circumstances be as hazardous to be touched by
it as it would be to come into contact with the person or animal.
Hence the savage makes it a rule to shun the shadow of certain
persons whom for various reasons he regards as sources of dangerous
influence. Amongst the dangerous classes he commonly ranks mourners
and women in general, but especially his mother-in-law. The Shuswap
Indians think that the shadow of a mourner falling upon a person
would make him sick. Amongst the Kurnai of Victoria novices at
initiation were cautioned not to let a woman’s shadow fall
across them, as this would make them thin, lazy, and stupid. An
Australian native is said to have once nearly died of fright
because the shadow of his mother-in-law fell on his legs as he lay
asleep under a tree. The awe and dread with which the untutored
savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar
facts of anthropology. In the Yuin tribes of New South Wales the
rule which forbade a man to hold any communication with his
wife’s mother was very strict. He might not look at her or
even in her direction. It was a ground of divorce if his shadow
happened to fall on his mother-in-law: in that case he had to leave
his wife, and she returned to her parents. In New Britain the
native imagination fails to conceive the extent and nature of the
calamities which would result from a man’s accidentally
speaking to his wife’s mother; suicide of one or both would
probably be the only course open to them. The most solemn form of
oath a New Briton can take is, “Sir, if I am not telling the
truth, I hope I may shake hands with my mother-in-law.”
Where the shadow is regarded as so intimately bound up with the
life of the man that its loss entails debility or death, it is
natural to expect that its diminution should be regarded with
solicitude and apprehension, as betokening a corresponding decrease
in the vital energy of its owner. In Amboyna and Uliase, two
islands near the equator, where necessarily there is little or no
shadow cast at noon, the people make it a rule not to go out of the
house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may
lose the shadow of his soul. The Mangaians tell of a mighty
warrior, Tukaitawa, whose strength waxed and waned with the length
of his shadow. In the morning, when his shadow fell longest, his
strength was greatest; but as the shadow shortened towards noon his
strength ebbed with it, till exactly at noon it reached its lowest
point; then, as the shadow stretched out in the afternoon, his
strength returned. A certain hero discovered the secret of
Tukaitawa’s strength and slew him at noon. The savage Besisis
of the Malay Peninsula fear to bury their dead at noon, because
they fancy that the shortness of their shadows at that hour would
sympathetically shorten their own lives.
Nowhere, perhaps, does the equivalence of the shadow to the life
or soul come out more clearly than in some customs practised to
this day in South-eastern Europe. In modern Greece, when the
foundation of a new building is being laid, it is the custom to
kill a cock, a ram, or a lamb, and to let its blood flow on the
foundation-stone, under which the animal is afterwards buried. The
object of the sacrifice is to give strength and stability to the
building. But sometimes, instead of killing an animal, the builder
entices a man to the foundation-stone, secretly measures his body,
or a part of it, or his shadow, and buries the measure under the
foundation-stone; or he lays the foundation-stone upon the
man’s shadow. It is believed that the man will die within the
year. The Roumanians of Transylvania think that he whose shadow is
thus immured will die within forty days; so persons passing by a
building which is in course of erection may hear a warning cry,
“Beware lest they take thy shadow!” Not long ago there
were still shadow-traders whose business it was to provide
architects with the shadows necessary for securing their walls. In
these cases the measure of the shadow is looked on as equivalent to
the shadow itself, and to bury it is to bury the life or soul of
the man, who, deprived of it, must die. Thus the custom is a
substitute for the old practice of immuring a living person in the
walls, or crushing him under the foundation-stone of a new
building, in order to give strength and durability to the
structure, or more definitely in order that the angry ghost may
haunt the place and guard it against the intrusion of enemies.
As some peoples believe a man’s soul to be in his shadow,
so other (or the same) peoples believe it to be in his reflection
in water or a mirror. Thus “the Andamanese do not regard
their shadows but their reflections (in any mirror) as their
souls.” When the Motumotu of New Guinea first saw their
likenesses in a looking-glass, they thought that their reflections
were their souls. In New Caledonia the old men are of opinion that
a person’s reflection in water or a mirror is his soul; but
the younger men, taught by the Catholic priests, maintain that it
is a reflection and nothing more, just like the reflection of
palm-trees in the water. The reflection-soul, being external to the
man, is exposed to much the same dangers as the shadow-soul. The
Zulus will not look into a dark pool because they think there is a
beast in it which will take away their reflections, so that they
die. The Basutos say that crocodiles have the power of thus killing
a man by dragging his reflection under water. When one of them dies
suddenly and from no apparent cause, his relatives will allege that
a crocodile must have taken his shadow some time when he crossed a
stream. In Saddle Island, Melanesia, there is a pool “into
which if any one looks he dies; the malignant spirit takes hold
upon his life by means of his reflection on the water.”
We can now understand why it was a maxim both in ancient India
and ancient Greece not to look at one’s reflection in water,
and why the Greeks regarded it as an omen of death if a man dreamed
of seeing himself so reflected. They feared that the water-spirits
would drag the person’s reflection or soul under water,
leaving him soulless to perish. This was probably the origin of the
classical story of the beautiful Narcissus, who languished and died
through seeing his reflection in the water.
Further, we can now explain the widespread custom of covering up
mirrors or turning them to the wall after a death has taken place
in the house. It is feared that the soul, projected out of the
person in the shape of his reflection in the mirror, may be carried
off by the ghost of the departed, which is commonly supposed to
linger about the house till the burial. The custom is thus exactly
parallel to the Aru custom of not sleeping in a house after a death
for fear that the soul, projected out of the body in a dream, may
meet the ghost and be carried off by it. The reason why sick people
should not see themselves in a mirror, and why the mirror in a
sick-room is therefore covered up, is also plain; in time of
sickness, when the soul might take flight so easily, it is
particularly dangerous to project it out of the body by means of
the reflection in a mirror. The rule is therefore precisely
parallel to the rule observed by some peoples of not allowing sick
people to sleep; for in sleep the soul is projected out of the
body, and there is always a risk that it may not return.
As with shadows and reflections, so with portraits; they are
often believed to contain the soul of the person portrayed. People
who hold this belief are naturally loth to have their likenesses
taken; for if the portrait is the soul, or at least a vital part of
the person portrayed, whoever possesses the portrait will be able
to exercise a fatal influence over the original of it. Thus the
Esquimaux of Bering Strait believe that persons dealing in
witchcraft have the power of stealing a person’s shade, so
that without it he will pine away and die. Once at a village on the
lower Yukon River an explorer had set up his camera to get a
picture of the people as they were moving about among their houses.
While he was focusing the instrument, the headman of the village
came up and insisted on peeping under the cloth. Being allowed to
do so, he gazed intently for a minute at the moving figures on the
ground glass, then suddenly withdrew his head and bawled at the top
of his voice to the people, “He has all of your shades in
this box.” A panic ensued among the group, and in an instant
they disappeared helterskelter into their houses. The Tepehuanes of
Mexico stood in mortal terror of the camera, and five days’
persuasion was necessary to induce them to pose for it. When at
last they consented, they looked like criminals about to be
executed. They believed that by photographing people the artist
could carry off their souls and devour them at his leisure moments.
They said that, when the pictures reached his country, they would
die or some other evil would befall them. When Dr. Catat and some
companions were exploring the Bara country on the west coast of
Madagascar, the people suddenly became hostile. The day before the
travellers, not without difficulty, had photographed the royal
family, and now found themselves accused of taking the souls of the
natives for the purpose of selling them when they returned to
France. Denial was vain; in compliance with the custom of the
country they were obliged to catch the souls, which were then put
into a basket and ordered by Dr. Catat to return to their
respective owners.
Some villagers in Sikhim betrayed a lively horror and hid away
whenever the lens of a camera, or “the evil eye of the
box” as they called it, was turned on them. They thought it
took away their souls with their pictures, and so put it in the
power of the owner of the pictures to cast spells on them, and they
alleged that a photograph of the scenery blighted the landscape.
Until the reign of the late King of Siam no Siamese coins were ever
stamped with the image of the king, “for at that time there
was a strong prejudice against the making of portraits in any
medium. Europeans who travel into the jungle have, even at the
present time, only to point a camera at a crowd to procure its
instant dispersion. When a copy of the face of a person is made and
taken away from him, a portion of his life goes with the picture.
Unless the sovereign had been blessed with the years of a
Methusaleh he could scarcely have permitted his life to be
distributed in small pieces together with the coins of the
realm.”
Beliefs of the same sort still linger in various parts of
Europe. Not very many years ago some old women in the Greek island
of Carpathus were very angry at having their likenesses drawn,
thinking that in consequence they would pine and die. There are
persons in the West of Scotland “who refuse to have their
likenesses taken lest it prove unlucky; and give as instances the
cases of several of their friends who never had a day’s
health after being photographed.”
XIX. Tabooed Acts
1. Taboos on Intercourse with Strangers
SO much for the primitive conceptions of the soul and the
dangers to which it is exposed. These conceptions are not limited
to one people or country; with variations of detail they are found
all over the world, and survive, as we have seen, in modern Europe.
Beliefs so deep-seated and so widespread must necessarily have
contributed to shape the mould in which the early kingship was
cast. For if every person was at such pains to save his own soul
from the perils which threatened it on so many sides, how much more
carefully must he have been guarded upon whose life hung
the welfare and even the existence of the whole people, and whom
therefore it was the common interest of all to preserve? Therefore
we should expect to find the king’s life protected by a
system of precautions or safeguards still more numerous and minute
than those which in primitive society every man adopts for the
safety of his own soul. Now in point of fact the life of the early
kings is regulated, as we have seen and shall see more fully
presently, by a very exact code of rules. May we not then
conjecture that these rules are in fact the very safeguards which
we should expect to find adopted for the protection of the
king’s life? An examination of the rules themselves confirms
this conjecture. For from this it appears that some of the rules
observed by the kings are identical with those observed by private
persons out of regard for the safety of their souls; and even of
those which seem peculiar to the king, many, if not all, are most
readily explained on the hypothesis that they are nothing but
safeguards or lifeguards of the king. I will now enumerate some of
these royal rules or taboos, offering on each of them such comments
and explanations as may serve to set the original intention of the
rule in its proper light.
As the object of the royal taboos is to isolate the king from
all sources of danger, their general effect is to compel him to
live in a state of seclusion, more or less complete, according to
the number and stringency of the rules he observes. Now of all
sources of danger none are more dreaded by the savage than magic
and witchcraft, and he suspects all strangers of practising these
black arts. To guard against the baneful influence exerted
voluntarily or involuntarily by strangers is therefore an
elementary dictate of savage prudence. Hence before strangers are
allowed to enter a district, or at least before they are permitted
to mingle freely with the inhabitants, certain ceremonies are often
performed by the natives of the country for the purpose of
disarming the strangers of their magical powers, of counteracting
the baneful influence which is believed to emanate from them, or of
disinfecting, so to speak, the tainted atmosphere by which they are
supposed to be surrounded. Thus, when the ambassadors sent by
Justin II., Emperor of the East, to conclude a peace with the Turks
had reached their destination, they were received by shamans, who
subjected them to a ceremonial purification for the purpose of
exorcising all harmful influence. Having deposited the goods
brought by the ambassadors in an open place, these wizards carried
burning branches of incense round them, while they rang a bell and
beat on a tambourine, snorting and falling into a state of frenzy
in their efforts to dispel the powers of evil. Afterwards they
purified the ambassadors themselves by leading them through the
flames. In the island of Nanumea (South Pacific) strangers from
ships or from other islands were not allowed to communicate with
the people until they all, or a few as representatives of the rest,
had been taken to each of the four temples in the island, and
prayers offered that the god would avert any disease or treachery
which these strangers might have brought with them. Meat offerings
were also laid upon the altars, accompanied by songs and dances in
honour of the god. While these ceremonies were going on, all the
people except the priests and their attendants kept out of sight.
Amongst the Ot Danoms of Borneo it is the custom that strangers
entering the territory should pay to the natives a certain sum,
which is spent in the sacrifice of buffaloes or pigs to the spirits
of the land and water, in order to reconcile them to the presence
of the strangers, and to induce them not to withdraw their favour
from the people of the country, but to bless the rice-harvest, and
so forth. The men of a certain district in Borneo, fearing to look
upon a European traveller lest he should make them ill, warned
their wives and children not to go near him. Those who could not
restrain their curiosity killed fowls to appease the evil spirits
and smeared themselves with the blood. “More dreaded,”
says a traveller in Central Borneo, “than the evil spirits of
the neighbourhood are the evil spirits from a distance which
accompany travellers. When a company from the middle Mahakam River
visited me among the Blu-u Kayans in the year 1897, no woman showed
herself outside her house without a burning bundle of
plehiding bark, the stinking smoke of which drives away
evil spirits.”
When Crevaux was travelling in South America he entered a
village of the Apalai Indians. A few moments after his arrival some
of the Indians brought him a number of large black ants, of a
species whose bite is painful, fastened on palm leaves. Then all
the people of the village, without distinction of age or sex,
presented themselves to him, and he had to sting them all with the
ants on their faces, thighs, and other parts of their bodies.
Sometimes, when he applied the ants too tenderly, they called out
“More! more!” and were not satisfied till their skin
was thickly studded with tiny swellings like what might have been
produced by whipping them with nettles. The object of this ceremony
is made plain by the custom observed in Amboyna and Uliase of
sprinkling sick people with pungent spices, such as ginger and
cloves, chewed fine, in order by the prickling sensation to drive
away the demon of disease which may be clinging to their persons.
In Java a popular cure for gout or rheumatism is to rub Spanish
pepper into the nails of the fingers and toes of the sufferer; the
pungency of the pepper is supposed to be too much for the gout or
rheumatism, who accordingly departs in haste. So on the Slave Coast
the mother of a sick child sometimes believes that an evil spirit
has taken possession of the child’s body, and in order to
drive him out, she makes small cuts in the body of the little
sufferer and inserts green peppers or spices in the wounds,
believing that she will thereby hurt the evil spirit and force him
to be gone. The poor child naturally screams with pain, but the
mother hardens her heart in the belief that the demon is suffering
equally.
It is probable that the same dread of strangers, rather than any
desire to do them honour, is the motive of certain ceremonies which
are sometimes observed at their reception, but of which the
intention is not directly stated. In the Ongtong Java Islands,
which are inhabited by Polynesians, the priests or sorcerers seem
to wield great influence. Their main business is to summon or
exorcise spirits for the purpose of averting or dispelling
sickness, and of procuring favourable winds, a good catch of fish,
and so on. When strangers land on the islands, they are first of
all received by the sorcerers, sprinkled with water, anointed with
oil, and girt with dried pandanus leaves. At the same time sand and
water are freely thrown about in all directions, and the newcomer
and his boat are wiped with green leaves. After this ceremony the
strangers are introduced by the sorcerers to the chief. In
Afghanistan and in some parts of Persia the traveller, before he
enters a village, is frequently received with a sacrifice of animal
life or food, or of fire and incense. The Afghan Boundary Mission,
in passing by villages in Afghanistan, was often met with fire and
incense. Sometimes a tray of lighted embers is thrown under the
hoofs of the traveller’s horse, with the words, “You
are welcome.” On entering a village in Central Africa Emin
Pasha was received with the sacrifice of two goats; their blood was
sprinkled on the path and the chief stepped over the blood to greet
Emin. Sometimes the dread of strangers and their magic is too great
to allow of their reception on any terms. Thus when Speke arrived
at a certain village, the natives shut their doors against him,
“because they had never before seen a white man nor the tin
boxes that the men were carrying: ‘Who knows,’ they
said, ‘but that these very boxes are the plundering Watuta
transformed and come to kill us? You cannot be admitted.’ No
persuasion could avail with them, and the party had to proceed to
the next village.”
The fear thus entertained of alien visitors is often mutual.
Entering a strange land the savage feels that he is treading
enchanted ground, and he takes steps to guard against the demons
that haunt it and the magical arts of its inhabitants. Thus on
going to a strange land the Maoris performed certain ceremonies to
make it “common,” lest it might have been previously
“sacred.” When Baron Miklucho-Maclay was approaching a
village on the Maclay Coast of New Guinea, one of the natives who
accompanied him broke a branch from a tree and going aside
whispered to it for a while; then stepping up to each member of the
party, one after another, he spat something upon his back and gave
him some blows with the branch. Lastly, he went into the forest and
buried the branch under withered leaves in the thickest part of the
jungle. This ceremony was believed to protect the party against all
treachery and danger in the village they were approaching. The idea
probably was that the malignant influences were drawn off from the
persons into the branch and buried with it in the depths of the
forest. In Australia, when a strange tribe has been invited into a
district and is approaching the encampment of the tribe which owns
the land, “the strangers carry lighted bark or burning sticks
in their hands, for the purpose, they say, of clearing and
purifying the air.” When the Toradjas are on a head-hunting
expedition and have entered the enemy’s country, they may not
eat any fruits which the foe has planted nor any animal which he
has reared until they have first committed an act of hostility, as
by burning a house or killing a man. They think that if they broke
this rule they would receive something of the soul or spiritual
essence of the enemy into themselves, which would destroy the
mystic virtue of their talismans.
Again, it is believed that a man who has been on a journey may
have contracted some magic evil from the strangers with whom he has
associated. Hence, on returning home, before he is readmitted to
the society of his tribe and friends, he has to undergo certain
purificatory ceremonies. Thus the Bechuanas “cleanse or
purify themselves after journeys by shaving their heads, etc., lest
they should have contracted from strangers some evil by witchcraft
or sorcery.” In some parts of Western Africa, when a man
returns home after a long absence, before he is allowed to visit
his wife, he must wash his person with a particular fluid, and
receive from the sorcerer a certain mark on his forehead, in order
to counteract any magic spell which a stranger woman may have cast
on him in his absence, and which might be communicated through him
to the women of his village. Two Hindoo ambassadors, who had been
sent to England by a native prince and had returned to India, were
considered to have so polluted themselves by contact with strangers
that nothing but being born again could restore them to purity.
“For the purpose of regeneration it is directed to make an
image of pure gold of the female power of nature, in the shape
either of a woman or of a cow. In this statue the person to be
regenerated is enclosed, and dragged through the usual channel. As
a statue of pure gold and of proper dimensions would be too
expensive, it is sufficient to make an image of the sacred
Yoni, through which the person to be regenerated is to
pass.” Such an image of pure gold was made at the
prince’s command, and his ambassadors were born again by
being dragged through it.
When precautions like these are taken on behalf of the people in
general against the malignant influence supposed to be exercised by
strangers, it is no wonder that special measures are adopted to
protect the king from the same insidious danger. In the middle ages
the envoys who visited a Tartar Khan were obliged to pass between
two fires before they were admitted to his presence, and the gifts
they brought were also carried between the fires. The reason
assigned for the custom was that the fire purged away any magic
influence which the strangers might mean to exercise over the Khan.
When subject chiefs come with their retinues to visit Kalamba (the
most powerful chief of the Bashilange in the Congo Basin) for the
first time or after being rebellious, they have to bathe, men and
women together, in two brooks on two successive days, passing the
nights under the open sky in the market-place. After the second
bath they proceed, entirely naked, to the house of Kalamba, who
makes a long white mark on the breast and forehead of each of them.
Then they return to the market-place and dress, after which they
undergo the pepper ordeal. Pepper is dropped into the eyes of each
of them, and while this is being done the sufferer has to make a
confession of all his sins, to answer all questions that may be put
to him, and to take certain vows. This ends the ceremony, and the
strangers are now free to take up their quarters in the town for as
long as they choose to remain.
2. Taboos on Eating and Drinking
IN THE OPINION of savages the acts of eating and drinking are
attended with special danger; for at these times the soul may
escape from the mouth, or be extracted by the magic arts of an
enemy present. Among the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast
“the common belief seems to be that the indwelling spirit
leaves the body and returns to it through the mouth; hence, should
it have gone out, it behoves a man to be careful about opening his
mouth, lest a homeless spirit should take advantage of the
opportunity and enter his body. This, it appears, is considered
most likely to take place while the man is eating.”
Precautions are therefore adopted to guard against these dangers.
Thus of the Bataks it is said that “since the soul can leave
the body, they always take care to prevent their soul from straying
on occasions when they have most need of it. But it is only
possible to prevent the soul from straying when one is in the
house. At feasts one may find the whole house shut up, in order
that the soul may stay and enjoy the good things set before
it.” The Zafimanelo in Madagascar lock their doors when they
eat, and hardly any one ever sees them eating. The Warua will not
allow any one to see them eating and drinking, being doubly
particular that no person of the opposite sex shall see them doing
so. “I had to pay a man to let me see him drink; I could not
make a man let a woman see him drink.” When offered a drink
they often ask that a cloth may be held up to hide them whilst
drinking.
If these are the ordinary precautions taken by common people,
the precautions taken by kings are extraordinary. The king of
Loango may not be seen eating or drinking by man or beast under
pain of death. A favourite dog having broken into the room where
the king was dining, the king ordered it to be killed on the spot.
Once the king’s own son, a boy of twelve years old,
inadvertently saw the king drink. Immediately the king ordered him
to be finely apparelled and feasted, after which he commanded him
to be cut in quarters, and carried about the city with a
proclamation that he had seen the king drink. “When the king
has a mind to drink, he has a cup of wine brought; he that brings
it has a bell in his hand, and as soon as he has delivered the cup
to the king, he turns his face from him and rings the bell, on
which all present fall down with their faces to the ground, and
continue so till the king has drank… . His eating is much in
the same style, for which he has a house on purpose, where his
victuals are set upon a bensa or table: which he goes to, and shuts
the door: when he has done, he knocks and comes out. So that none
ever see the king eat or drink. For it is believed that if any one
should, the king shall immediately die.” The remnants of his
food are buried, doubtless to prevent them from falling into the
hands of sorcerers, who by means of these fragments might cast a
fatal spell over the monarch. The rules observed by the
neighbouring king of Cacongo were similar; it was thought that the
king would die if any of his subjects were to see him drink. It is
a capital offence to see the king of Dahomey at his meals. When he
drinks in public, as he does on extraordinary occasions, he hides
himself behind a curtain, or handkerchiefs are held up round his
head, and all the people throw themselves with their faces to the
earth. When the king of Bunyoro in Central Africa went to drink
milk in the dairy, every man must leave the royal enclosure and all
the women had to cover their heads till the king returned. No one
might see him drink. One wife accompanied him to the dairy and
handed him the milk-pot, but she turned away her face while he
drained it.
3. Taboos on Showing the Face
IN SOME of the preceding cases the intention of eating and
drinking in strict seclusion may perhaps be to hinder evil
influences from entering the body rather than to prevent the escape
of the soul. This certainly is the motive of some drinking customs
observed by natives of the Congo region. Thus we are told of these
people that “there is hardly a native who would dare to
swallow a liquid without first conjuring the spirits. One of them
rings a bell all the time he is drinking; another crouches down and
places his left hand on the earth; another veils his head; another
puts a stalk of grass or a leaf in his hair, or marks his forehead
with a line of clay. This fetish custom assumes very varied forms.
To explain them, the black is satisfied to say that they are an
energetic mode of conjuring spirits.” In this part of the
world a chief will commonly ring a bell at each draught of beer
which he swallows, and at the same moment a lad stationed in front
of him brandishes a spear “to keep at bay the spirits which
might try to sneak into the old chief’s body by the same road
as the beer.” The same motive of warding off evil spirits
probably explains the custom observed by some African sultans of
veiling their faces. The Sultan of Darfur wraps up his face with a
piece of white muslin, which goes round his head several times,
covering his mouth and nose first, and then his forehead, so that
only his eyes are visible. The same custom of veiling the face as a
mark of sovereignty is said to be observed in other parts of
Central Africa. The Sultan of Wadai always speaks from behind a
curtain; no one sees his face except his intimates and a few
favoured persons.
4. Taboos on Quitting the House
BY AN EXTENSION of the like precaution kings are sometimes
forbidden ever to leave their palaces; or, if they are allowed to
do so, their subjects are forbidden to see them abroad. The fetish
king of Benin, who was worshipped as a deity by his subjects, might
not quit his palace. After his coronation the king of Loango is
confined to his palace, which he may not leave. The king of Onitsha
“does not step out of his house into the town unless a human
sacrifice is made to propitiate the gods: on this account he never
goes out beyond the precincts of his premises.” Indeed we are
told that he may not quit his palace under pain of death or of
giving up one or more slaves to be executed in his presence. As the
wealth of the country is measured in slaves, the king takes good
care not to infringe the law. Yet once a year at the Feast of Yams
the king is allowed, and even required by custom, to dance before
his people outside the high mud wall of the palace. In dancing he
carries a great weight, generally a sack of earth, on his back to
prove that he is still able to support the burden and cares of
state. Were he unable to discharge this duty, he would be
immediately deposed and perhaps stoned. The kings of Ethiopia were
worshipped as gods, but were mostly kept shut up in their palaces.
On the mountainous coast of Pontus there dwelt in antiquity a rude
and warlike people named the Mosyni or Mosynoeci, through whose
rugged country the Ten Thousand marched on their famous retreat
from Asia to Europe. These barbarians kept their king in close
custody at the top of a high tower, from which after his election
he was never more allowed to descend. Here he dispensed justice to
his people; but if he offended them, they punished him by stopping
his rations for a whole day, or even starving him to death. The
kings of Sabaea or Sheba, the spice country of Arabia, were not
allowed to go out of their palaces; if they did so, the mob stoned
them to death. But at the top of the palace there was a window with
a chain attached to it. If any man deemed he had suffered wrong, he
pulled the chain, and the king perceived him and called him in and
gave judgment.
5. Taboos on Leaving Food over
AGAIN, magic mischief may be wrought upon a man through the
remains of the food he has partaken of, or the dishes out of which
he has eaten. On the principles of sympathetic magic a real
connexion continues to subsist between the food which a man has in
his stomach and the refuse of it which he has left untouched, and
hence by injuring the refuse you can simultaneously injure the
eater. Among the Narrinyeri of South Australia every adult is
constantly on the look-out for bones of beasts, birds, or fish, of
which the flesh has been eaten by somebody, in order to construct a
deadly charm out of them. Every one is therefore careful to burn
the bones of the animals which he has eaten, lest they should fall
into the hands of a sorcerer. Too often, however, the sorcerer
succeeds in getting hold of such a bone, and when he does so he
believes that he has the power of life and death over the man,
woman, or child who ate the flesh of the animal. To put the charm
in operation he makes a paste of red ochre and fish oil, inserts in
it the eye of a cod and a small piece of the flesh of a corpse, and
having rolled the compound into a ball sticks it on the top of the
bone. After being left for some time in the bosom of a dead body,
in order that it may derive a deadly potency by contact with
corruption, the magical implement is set up in the ground near the
fire, and as the ball melts, so the person against whom the charm
is directed wastes with disease; if the ball is melted quite away,
the victim will die. When the bewitched man learns of the spell
that is being cast upon him, he endeavours to buy the bone from the
sorcerer, and if he obtains it he breaks the charm by throwing the
bone into a river or lake. In Tana, one of the New Hebrides, people
bury or throw into the sea the leavings of their food, lest these
should fall into the hands of the disease-makers. For if a
disease-maker finds the remnants of a meal, say the skin of a
banana, he picks it up and burns it slowly in the fire. As it
burns, the person who ate the banana falls ill and sends to the
disease-maker, offering him presents if he will stop burning the
banana skin. In New Guinea the natives take the utmost care to
destroy or conceal the husks and other remains of their food, lest
these should be found by their enemies and used by them for the
injury or destruction of the eaters. Hence they burn their
leavings, throw them into the sea, or otherwise put them out of
harm’s way.
From a like fear, no doubt, of sorcery, no one may touch the
food which the king of Loango leaves upon his plate; it is buried
in a hole in the ground. And no one may drink out of the
king’s vessel. In antiquity the Romans used immediately to
break the shells of eggs and of snails which they had eaten, in
order to prevent enemies from making magic with them. The common
practice, still observed among us, of breaking egg-shells after the
eggs have been eaten may very well have originated in the same
superstition.
The superstitious fear of the magic that may be wrought on a man
through the leavings of his food has had the beneficial effect of
inducing many savages to destroy refuse which, if left to rot,
might through its corruption have proved a real, not a merely
imaginary, source of disease and death. Nor is it only the sanitary
condition of a tribe which has benefited by this superstition;
curiously enough the same baseless dread, the same false notion of
causation, has indirectly strengthened the moral bonds of
hospitality, honour, and good faith among men who entertain it. For
it is obvious that no one who intends to harm a man by working
magic on the refuse of his food will himself partake of that food,
because if he did so he would, on the principles of sympathetic
magic, suffer equally with his enemy from any injury done to the
refuse. This is the idea which in primitive society lends sanctity
to the bond produced by eating together; by participation in the
same food two men give, as it were, hostages for their good
behaviour; each guarantees the other that he will devise no
mischief against him, since, being physically united with him by
the common food in their stomachs, any harm he might do to his
fellow would recoil on his own head with precisely the same force
with which it fell on the head of his victim. In strict logic,
however, the sympathetic bond lasts only so long as the food is in
the stomach of each of the parties. Hence the covenant formed by
eating together is less solemn and durable than the covenant formed
by transfusing the blood of the covenanting parties into each
other’s veins, for this transfusion seems to knit them
together for life.
XX. Tabooed Persons
1. Chiefs and Kings tabooed
WE have seen that the Mikado’s food was cooked every day
in new pots and served up in new dishes; both pots and dishes were
of common clay, in order that they might be broken or laid aside
after they had been once used. They were generally broken, for it
was believed that if any one else ate his food out of these sacred
dishes, his mouth and throat would become swollen and inflamed. The
same ill effect was thought to be experienced by any one who should
wear the Mikado’s clothes without his leave; he would have
swellings and pains all over his body. In Fiji there is a special
name (kana lama) for the disease supposed to be caused by
eating out of a chief’s dishes or wearing his clothes.
“The throat and body swell, and the impious person dies. I
had a fine mat given to me by a man who durst not use it because
Thakombau’s eldest son had sat upon it. There was always a
family or clan of commoners who were exempt from this danger. I was
talking about this once to Thakombau. ‘Oh yes,’ said
he. ‘Here, So-and-so! come and scratch my back.’ The
man scratched; he was one of those who could do it with
impunity.” The name of the men thus highly privileged was
Na nduka ni, or the dirt of the chief.
In the evil effects thus supposed to follow upon the use of the
vessels or clothes of the Mikado and a Fijian chief we see that
other side of the god-man’s character to which attention has
been already called. The divine person is a source of danger as
well as of blessing; he must not only be guarded, he must also be
guarded against. His sacred organism, so delicate that a touch may
disorder it, is also, as it were, electrically charged with a
powerful magical or spiritual force which may discharge itself with
fatal effect on whatever comes in contact with it. Accordingly the
isolation of the man-god is quite as necessary for the safety of
others as for his own. His magical virtue is in the strictest sense
of the word contagious: his divinity is a fire, which, under proper
restraints, confers endless blessings, but, if rashly touched or
allowed to break bounds, burns and destroys what it touches. Hence
the disastrous effects supposed to attend a breach of taboo; the
offender has thrust his hand into the divine fire, which shrivels
up and consumes him on the spot.
The Nubas, for example, who inhabit the wooded and fertile range
of Jebel Nuba in Eastern Africa, believe that they would die if
they entered the house of their priestly king; however, they can
evade the penalty of their intrusion by baring the left shoulder
and getting the king to lay his hand on it. And were any man to sit
on a stone which the king has consecrated to his own use, the
transgressor would die within the year. The Cazembes of Angola
regard their king as so holy that no one can touch him without
being killed by the magical power which pervades his sacred person.
But since contact with him is sometimes unavoidable, they have
devised a means whereby the sinner can escape with his life.
Kneeling down before the king he touches the back of the royal hand
with the back of his own, then snaps his fingers; afterwards he
lays the palm of his hand on the palm of the king’s hand,
then snaps his fingers again. This ceremony is repeated four or
five times, and averts the imminent danger of death. In Tonga it
was believed that if any one fed himself with his own hands after
touching the sacred person of a superior chief or anything that
belonged to him, he would swell up and die; the sanctity of the
chief, like a virulent poison, infected the hands of his inferior,
and, being communicated through them to the food, proved fatal to
the eater. A commoner who had incurred this danger could disinfect
himself by performing a certain ceremony, which consisted in
touching the sole of a chief’s foot with the palm and back of
each of his hands, and afterwards rinsing his hands in water. If
there was no water near, he rubbed his hands with the juicy stem of
a plantain or banana. After that he was free to feed himself with
his own hands without danger of being attacked by the malady which
would otherwise follow from eating with tabooed or sanctified
hands. But until the ceremony of expiation or disinfection had been
performed, if he wished to eat he had either to get some one to
feed him, or else to go down on his knees and pick up the food from
the ground with his mouth like a beast. He might not even use a
toothpick himself, but might guide the hand of another person
holding the toothpick. The Tongans were subject to induration of
the liver and certain forms of scrofula, which they often
attributed to a failure to perform the requisite expiation after
having inadvertently touched a chief or his belongings. Hence they
often went through the ceremony as a precaution, without knowing
that they had done anything to call for it. The king of Tonga could
not refuse to play his part in the rite by presenting his foot to
such as desired to touch it, even when they applied to him at an
inconvenient time. A fat unwieldy king, who perceived his subjects
approaching with this intention, while he chanced to be taking his
walks abroad, has been sometimes seen to waddle as fast as his legs
could carry him out of their way, in order to escape the
importunate and not wholly disinterested expression of their
homage. If any one fancied he might have already unwittingly eaten
with tabooed hands, he sat down before the chief, and, taking the
chief’s foot, pressed it against his own stomach, that the
food in his belly might not injure him, and that he might not swell
up and die. Since scrofula was regarded by the Tongans as a result
of eating with tabooed hands, we may conjecture that persons who
suffered from it among them often resorted to the touch or pressure
of the king’s foot as a cure for their malady. The analogy of
the custom with the old English practice of bringing scrofulous
patients to the king to be healed by his touch is sufficiently
obvious, and suggests, as I have already pointed out elsewhere,
that among our own remote ancestors scrofula may have obtained its
name of the King’s Evil, from a belief, like that of the
Tongans, that it was caused as well as cured by contact with the
divine majesty of kings.
In New Zealand the dread of the sanctity of chiefs was at least
as great as in Tonga. Their ghostly power, derived from an
ancestral spirit, diffused itself by contagion over everything they
touched, and could strike dead all who rashly or unwittingly
meddled with it. For instance, it once happened that a New Zealand
chief of high rank and great sanctity had left the remains of his
dinner by the wayside. A slave, a stout, hungry fellow, coming up
after the chief had gone, saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it up
without asking questions. Hardly had he finished when he was
informed by a horror-stricken spectator that the food of which he
had eaten was the chief’s. “I knew the unfortunate
delinquent well. He was remarkable for courage, and had signalised
himself in the wars of the tribe,” but “no sooner did
he hear the fatal news than he was seized by the most extraordinary
convulsions and cramp in the stomach, which never ceased till he
died, about sundown the same day. He was a strong man, in the prime
of life, and if any pakeha [European] freethinker should have said
he was not killed by the tapu of the chief, which had been
communicated to the food by contact, he would have been listened to
with feelings of contempt for his ignorance and inability to
understand plain and direct evidence.” This is not a solitary
case. A Maori woman having eaten of some fruit, and being
afterwards told that the fruit had been taken from a tabooed place,
exclaimed that the spirit of the chief, whose sanctity had been
thus profaned, would kill her. This was in the afternoon, and next
day by twelve o’clock she was dead. A Maori chief’s
tinder-box was once the means of killing several persons; for,
having been lost by him, and found by some men who used it to light
their pipes, they died of fright on learning to whom it had
belonged. So, too, the garments of a high New Zealand chief will
kill any one else who wears them. A chief was observed by a
missionary to throw down a precipice a blanket which he found too
heavy to carry. Being asked by the missionary why he did not leave
it on a tree for the use of a future traveller, the chief replied
that “it was the fear of its being taken by another which
caused him to throw it where he did, for if it were worn, his
tapu” (that is, his spiritual power communicated by contact
to the blanket and through the blanket to the man) “would
kill the person.” For a similar reason a Maori chief would
not blow a fire with his mouth; for his sacred breath would
communicate its sanctity to the fire, which would pass it on to the
pot on the fire, which would pass it on to the meat in the pot,
which would pass it on to the man who ate the meat, which was in
the pot, which stood on the fire, which was breathed on by the
chief; so that the eater, infected by the chief’s breath
conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die.
Thus in the Polynesian race, to which the Maoris belong,
superstition erected round the persons of sacred chiefs a real,
though at the same time purely imaginary barrier, to transgress
which actually entailed the death of the transgressor whenever he
became aware of what he had done. This fatal power of the
imagination working through superstitious terrors is by no means
confined to one race; it appears to be common among savages. For
example, among the aborigines of Australia a native will die after
the infliction of even the most superficial wound, if only he
believes that the weapon which inflicted the wound had been sung
over and thus endowed with magical virtue. He simply lies down,
refuses food, and pines away. Similarly among some of the Indian
tribes of Brazil, if the medicine-man predicted the death of any
one who had offended him, “the wretch took to his hammock
instantly in such full expectation of dying, that he would neither
eat nor drink, and the prediction was a sentence which faith
effectually executed.”
2. Mourners tabooed
THUS regarding his sacred chiefs and kings as charged with a
mysterious spiritual force which so to say explodes at contact, the
savage naturally ranks them among the dangerous classes of society,
and imposes upon them the same sort of restraints that he lays on
manslayers, menstruous women, and other persons whom he looks upon
with a certain fear and horror. For example, sacred kings and
priests in Polynesia were not allowed to touch food with their
hands, and had therefore to be fed by others; and as we have just
seen, their vessels, garments, and other property might not be used
by others on pain of disease and death. Now precisely the same
observances are exacted by some savages from girls at their first
menstruation, women after childbirth, homicides, mourners, and all
persons who have come into contact with the dead. Thus, for
example, to begin with the last class of persons, among the Maoris
any one who had handled a corpse, helped to convey it to the grave,
or touched a dead man’s bones, was cut off from all
intercourse and almost all communication with mankind. He could not
enter any house, or come into contact with any person or thing,
without utterly bedevilling them. He might not even touch food with
his hands, which had become so frightfully tabooed or unclean as to
be quite useless. Food would be set for him on the ground, and he
would then sit or kneel down, and, with his hands carefully held
behind his back, would gnaw at it as best he could. In some cases
he would be fed by another person, who with outstretched arm
contrived to do it without touching the tabooed man; but the feeder
was himself subjected to many severe restrictions, little less
onerous than those which were imposed upon the other. In almost
every populous village there lived a degraded wretch, the lowest of
the low, who earned a sorry pittance by thus waiting upon the
defiled. Clad in rags, daubed from head to foot with red ochre and
stinking shark oil, always solitary and silent, generally old,
haggard, and wizened, often half crazed, he might be seen sitting
motionless all day apart from the common path or thoroughfare of
the village, gazing with lack-lustre eyes on the busy doings in
which he might never take a part. Twice a day a dole of food would
be thrown on the ground before him to munch as well as he could
without the use of his hands; and at night, huddling his greasy
tatters about him, he would crawl into some miserable lair of
leaves and refuse, where, dirty, cold, and hungry, he passed, in
broken ghost-haunted slumbers, a wretched night as a prelude to
another wretched day. Such was the only human being deemed fit to
associate at arm’s length with one who had paid the last
offices of respect and friendship to the dead. And when, the dismal
term of his seclusion being over, the mourner was about to mix with
his fellows once more, all the dishes he had used in his seclusion
were diligently smashed, and all the garments he had worn were
carefully thrown away, lest they should spread the contagion of his
defilement among others, just as the vessels and clothes of sacred
kings and chiefs are destroyed or cast away for a similar reason.
So complete in these respects is the analogy which the savage
traces between the spiritual influences that emanate from
divinities and from the dead, between the odour of sanctity and the
stench of corruption.
The rule which forbids persons who have been in contact with the
dead to touch food with their hands would seem to have been
universal in Polynesia. Thus in Samoa “those who attended the
deceased were most careful not to handle food, and for days were
fed by others as if they were helpless infants. Baldness and the
loss of teeth were supposed to be the punishment inflicted by the
household god if they violated the rule.” Again, in Tonga,
“no person can touch a dead chief without being taboo’d
for ten lunar months, except chiefs, who are only taboo’d for
three, four, or five months, according to the superiority of the
dead chief; except again it be the body of Tooitonga [the great
divine chief], and then even the greatest chief would be
taboo’d ten months… . During the time a man is
taboo’d he must not feed himself with his own hands, but must
be fed by somebody else: he must not even use a toothpick himself,
but must guide another person’s hand holding the toothpick.
If he is hungry and there is no one to feed him, he must go down
upon his hands and knees, and pick up his victuals with his mouth:
and if he infringes upon any of these rules, it is firmly expected
that he will swell up and die.”
Among the Shuswap of British Columbia widows and widowers in
mourning are secluded and forbidden to touch their own head or
body; the cups and cooking-vessels which they use may be used by no
one else. They must build a sweat-house beside a creek, sweat there
all night and bathe regularly, after which they must rub their
bodies with branches of spruce. The branches may not be used more
than once, and when they have served their purpose they are stuck
into the ground all round the hut. No hunter would come near such
mourners, for their presence is unlucky. If their shadow were to
fall on any one, he would be taken ill at once. They employ thorn
bushes for bed and pillow, in order to keep away the ghost of the
deceased; and thorn bushes are also laid all around their beds.
This last precaution shows clearly what the spiritual danger is
which leads to the exclusion of such persons from ordinary society;
it is simply a fear of the ghost who is supposed to be hovering
near them. In the Mekeo district of British New Guinea a widower
loses all his civil rights and becomes a social outcast, an object
of fear and horror, shunned by all. He may not cultivate a garden,
nor show himself in public, nor traverse the village, nor walk on
the roads and paths. Like a wild beast he must skulk in the long
grass and the bushes; and if he sees or hears any one coming,
especially a woman, he must hide behind a tree or a thicket. If he
wishes to fish or hunt, he must do it alone and at night. If he
would consult any one, even the missionary, he does so by stealth
and at night; he seems to have lost his voice and speaks only in
whispers. Were he to join a party of fishers or hunters, his
presence would bring misfortune on them; the ghost of his dead wife
would frighten away the fish or the game. He goes about everywhere
and at all times armed with a tomahawk to defend himself, not only
against wild boars in the jungle, but against the dreaded spirit of
his departed spouse, who would do him an ill turn if she could; for
all the souls of the dead are malignant and their only delight is
to harm the living.
3. Women tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth
IN GENERAL, we may say that the prohibition to use the vessels,
garments, and so forth of certain persons, and the effects supposed
to follow an infraction of the rule, are exactly the same whether
the persons to whom the things belong are sacred or what we might
call unclean and polluted. As the garments which have been touched
by a sacred chief kill those who handle them, so do the things
which have been touched by a menstruous women. An Australian
blackfellow, who discovered that his wife had lain on his blanket
at her menstrual period, killed her and died of terror himself
within a fortnight. Hence Australian women at these times are
forbidden under pain of death to touch anything that men use, or
even to walk on a path that any man frequents. They are also
secluded at childbirth, and all vessels used by them during their
seclusion are burned. In Uganda the pots which a woman touches,
while the impurity of childbirth or of menstruation is on her,
should be destroyed; spears and shields defiled by her touch are
not destroyed, but only purified. “Among all the Déné and
most other American tribes, hardly any other being was the object
of so much dread as a menstruating woman. As soon as signs of that
condition made themselves apparent in a young girl she was
carefully segregated from all but female company, and had to live
by herself in a small hut away from the gaze of the villagers or of
the male members of the roving band. While in that awful state, she
had to abstain from touching anything belonging to man, or the
spoils of any venison or other animal, lest she would thereby
pollute the same, and condemn the hunters to failure, owing to the
anger of the game thus slighted. Dried fish formed her diet, and
cold water, absorbed through a drinking tube, was her only
beverage. Moreover, as the very sight of her was dangerous to
society, a special skin bonnet, with fringes falling over her face
down to her breast, hid her from the public gaze, even some time
after she had recovered her normal state.” Among the Bribri
Indians of Costa Rica a menstruous woman is regarded as unclean.
The only plates she may use for her food are banana leaves, which,
when she has done with them, she throws away in some sequestered
spot; for were a cow to find them and eat them, the animal would
waste away and perish. And she drinks out of a special vessel for a
like reason; because if any one drank out of the same cup after
her, he would surely die.
Among many peoples similar restrictions are imposed on women in
childbed and apparently for similar reasons; at such periods women
are supposed to be in a dangerous condition which would infect any
person or thing they might touch; hence they are put into
quarantine until, with the recovery of their health and strength,
the imaginary danger has passed away. Thus, in Tahiti a woman after
childbirth was secluded for a fortnight or three weeks in a
temporary hut erected on sacred ground; during the time of her
seclusion she was debarred from touching provisions, and had to be
fed by another. Further, if any one else touched the child at this
period, he was subjected to the same restrictions as the mother
until the ceremony of her purification had been performed.
Similarly in the island of Kadiak, off Alaska, a woman about to be
delivered retires to a miserable low hovel built of reeds, where
she must remain for twenty days after the birth of her child,
whatever the season may be, and she is considered so unclean that
no one will touch her, and food is reached to her on sticks. The
Bribri Indians regard the pollution of childbed as much more
dangerous even than that of menstruation. When a woman feels her
time approaching, she informs her husband, who makes haste to build
a hut for her in a lonely spot. There she must live alone, holding
no converse with anybody save her mother or another woman. After
her delivery the medicine-man purifies her by breathing on her and
laying an animal, it matters not what, upon her. But even this
ceremony only mitigates her uncleanness into a state considered to
be equivalent to that of a menstruous woman; and for a full lunar
month she must live apart from her housemates, observing the same
rules with regard to eating and drinking as at her monthly periods.
The case is still worse, the pollution is still more deadly, if she
has had a miscarriage or has been delivered of a stillborn child.
In that case she may not go near a living soul: the mere contact
with things she has used is exceedingly dangerous: her food is
handed to her at the end of a long stick. This lasts generally for
three weeks, after which she may go home, subject only to the
restrictions incident to an ordinary confinement.
Some Bantu tribes entertain even more exaggerated notions of the
virulent infection spread by a woman who has had a miscarriage and
has concealed it. An experienced observer of these people tells us
that the blood of childbirth “appears to the eyes of the
South Africans to be tainted with a pollution still more dangerous
than that of the menstrual fluid. The husband is excluded from the
hut for eight days of the lying-in period, chiefly from fear that
he might be contaminated by this secretion. He dare not take his
child in his arms for the three first months after the birth. But
the secretion of childbed is particularly terrible when it is the
product of a miscarriage, especially a concealed
miscarriage. In this case it is not merely the man who is
threatened or killed, it is the whole country, it is the sky itself
which suffers. By a curious association of ideas a physiological
fact causes cosmic troubles!” As for the disastrous effect
which a miscarriage may have on the whole country I will quote the
words of a medicine-man and rain-maker of the Ba-Pedi tribe:
“When a woman has had a miscarriage, when she has allowed her
blood to flow, and has hidden the child, it is enough to cause the
burning winds to blow and to parch the country with heat. The rain
no longer falls, for the country is no longer in order. When the
rain approaches the place where the blood is, it will not dare to
approach. It will fear and remain at a distance. That woman has
committed a great fault. She has spoiled the country of the chief,
for she has hidden blood which had not yet been well congealed to
fashion a man. That blood is taboo. It should never drip on the
road! The chief will assemble his men and say to them, ‘Are
you in order in your villages?’ Some one will answer,
‘Such and such a woman was pregnant and we have not yet seen
the child which she has given birth to.’ Then they go and
arrest the woman. They say to her, ‘Show us where you have
hidden it.’ They go and dig at the spot, they sprinkle the
hole with a decoction of two sorts of roots prepared in a special
pot. They take a little of the earth of this grave, they throw it
into the river, then they bring back water from the river and
sprinkle it where she shed her blood. She herself must wash every
day with the medicine. Then the country will be moistened again (by
rain). Further, we (medicine-men), summon the women of the country;
we tell them to prepare a ball of the earth which contains the
blood. They bring it to us one morning. If we wish to prepare
medicine with which to sprinkle the whole country, we crumble this
earth to powder; at the end of five days we send little boys and
little girls, girls that yet know nothing of women’s affairs
and have not yet had relations with men. We put the medicine in the
horns of oxen, and these children go to all the fords, to all the
entrances of the country. A little girl turns up the soil with her
mattock, the others dip a branch in the horn and sprinkle the
inside of the hole saying, ‘Rain! rain!’ So we remove
the misfortune which the women have brought on the roads; the rain
will be able to come. The country is purified!
4. Warriors tabooed
ONCE more, warriors are conceived by the savage to move, so to
say, in an atmosphere of spiritual danger which constrains them to
practise a variety of superstitious observances quite different in
their nature from those rational precautions which, as a matter of
course, they adopt against foes of flesh and blood. The general
effect of these observances is to place the warrior, both before
and after victory, in the same state of seclusion or spiritual
quarantine in which, for his own safety, primitive man puts his
human gods and other dangerous characters. Thus when the Maoris
went out on the war-path they were sacred or taboo in the highest
degree, and they and their friends at home had to observe strictly
many curious customs over and above the numerous taboos of ordinary
life. They became, in the irreverent language of Europeans who knew
them in the old fighting days, “tabooed an inch thick”;
and as for the leader of the expedition, he was quite
unapproachable. Similarly, when the Israelites marched forth to war
they were bound by certain rules of ceremonial purity identical
with rules observed by Maoris and Australian blackfellows on the
war-path. The vessels they used were sacred, and they had to
practise continence and a custom of personal cleanliness of which
the original motive, if we may judge from the avowed motive of
savages who conform to the same custom, was a fear lest the enemy
should obtain the refuse of their persons, and thus be enabled to
work their destruction by magic. Among some Indian tribes of North
America a young warrior in his first campaign had to conform to
certain customs, of which two were identical with the observances
imposed by the same Indians on girls at their first menstruation:
the vessels he ate and drank out of might be touched by no other
person, and he was forbidden to scratch his head or any other part
of his body with his fingers; if he could not help scratching
himself, he had to do it with a stick. The latter rule, like the
one which forbids a tabooed person to feed himself with his own
fingers, seems to rest on the supposed sanctity or pollution,
whichever we choose to call it, of the tabooed hands. Moreover
among these Indian tribes the men on the war-path had always to
sleep at night with their faces turned towards their own country;
however uneasy the posture, they might not change it. They might
not sit upon the bare ground, nor wet their feet, nor walk on a
beaten path if they could help it; when they had no choice but to
walk on a path, they sought to counteract the ill effect of doing
so by doctoring their legs with certain medicines or charms which
they carried with them for the purpose. No member of the party was
permitted to step over the legs, hands, or body of any other member
who chanced to be sitting or lying on the ground; and it was
equally forbidden to step over his blanket, gun, tomahawk, or
anything that belonged to him. If this rule was inadvertently
broken, it became the duty of the member whose person or property
had been stepped over to knock the other member down, and it was
similarly the duty of that other to be knocked down peaceably and
without resistance. The vessels out of which the warriors ate their
food were commonly small bowls of wood or birch bark, with marks to
distinguish the two sides; in marching from home the Indians
invariably drank out of one side of the bowl, and in returning they
drank out of the other. When on their way home they came within a
day’s march of the village, they hung up all their bowls on
trees, or threw them away on the prairie, doubtless to prevent
their sanctity or defilement from being communicated with
disastrous effects to their friends, just as we have seen that the
vessels and clothes of the sacred Mikado, of women at childbirth
and menstruation, and of persons defiled by contact with the dead
are destroyed or laid aside for a similar reason. The first four
times that an Apache Indian goes out on the war-path, he is bound
to refrain from scratching his head with his fingers and from
letting water touch his lips. Hence he scratches his head with a
stick, and drinks through a hollow reed or cane. Stick and reed are
attached to the warrior’s belt and to each other by a
leathern thong. The rule not to scratch their heads with their
fingers, but to use a stick for the purpose instead, was regularly
observed by Ojebways on the war-path.
With regard to the Creek Indians and kindred tribes we are told
they “will not cohabit with women while they are out at war;
they religiously abstain from every kind of intercourse even with
their own wives, for the space of three days and nights before they
go to war, and so after they return home, because they are to
sanctify themselves.” Among the Ba-Pedi and Ba-Thonga tribes
of South Africa not only have the warriors to abstain from women,
but the people left behind in the villages are also bound to
continence; they think that any incontinence on their part would
cause thorns to grow on the ground traversed by the warriors, and
that success would not attend the expedition.
Why exactly many savages have made it a rule to refrain from
women in time of war, we cannot say for certain, but we may
conjecture that their motive was a superstitious fear lest, on the
principles of sympathetic magic, close contact with women should
infect them with feminine weakness and cowardice. Similarly some
savages imagine that contact with a woman in childbed enervates
warriors and enfeebles their weapons. Indeed the Kayans of Central
Borneo go so far as to hold that to touch a loom or women’s
clothes would so weaken a man that he would have no success in
hunting, fishing, and war. Hence it is not merely sexual
intercourse with women that the savage warrior sometimes shuns; he
is careful to avoid the sex altogether. Thus among the hill tribes
of Assam, not only are men forbidden to cohabit with their wives
during or after a raid, but they may not eat food cooked by a
woman; nay, they should not address a word even to their own wives.
Once a woman, who unwittingly broke the rule by speaking to her
husband while he was under the war taboo, sickened and died when
she learned the awful crime she had committed.
5. Manslayers tabooed
IF THE READER still doubts whether the rules of conduct which we
have just been considering are based on superstitious fears or
dictated by a rational prudence, his doubts will probably be
dissipated when he learns that rules of the same sort are often
imposed even more stringently on warriors after the victory has
been won and when all fear of the living corporeal foe is at an
end. In such cases one motive for the inconvenient restrictions
laid on the victors in their hour of triumph is probably a dread of
the angry ghosts of the slain; and that the fear of the vengeful
ghosts does influence the behaviour of the slayers is often
expressly affirmed. The general effect of the taboos laid on sacred
chiefs, mourners, women at childbirth, men on the war-path, and so
on, is to seclude or isolate the tabooed persons from ordinary
society, this effect being attained by a variety of rules, which
oblige the men or women to live in separate huts or in the open
air, to shun the commerce of the sexes, to avoid the use of vessels
employed by others, and so forth. Now the same effect is produced
by similar means in the case of victorious warriors, particularly
such as have actually shed the blood of their enemies. In the
island of Timor, when a warlike expedition has returned in triumph
bringing the heads of the vanquished foe, the leader of the
expedition is forbidden by religion and custom to return at once to
his own house. A special hut is prepared for him, in which he has
to reside for two months, undergoing bodily and spiritual
purification. During this time he may not go to his wife nor feed
himself; the food must be put into his mouth by another person.
That these observances are dictated by fear of the ghosts of the
slain seems certain; for from another account of the ceremonies
performed on the return of a successful head-hunter in the same
island we learn that sacrifices are offered on this occasion to
appease the soul of the man whose head has been taken; the people
think that some misfortune would befall the victor were such
offerings omitted. Moreover, a part of the ceremony consists of a
dance accompanied by a song, in which the death of the slain man is
lamented and his forgiveness is entreated. “Be not
angry,” they say, “because your head is here with us;
had we been less lucky, our heads might now have been exposed in
your village. We have offered the sacrifice to appease you. Your
spirit may now rest and leave us at peace. Why were you our enemy?
Would it not have been better that we should remain friends? Then
your blood would not have been spilt and your head would not have
been cut off.” The people of Paloo in Central Celebes take
the heads of their enemies in war and afterwards propitiate the
souls of the slain in the temple.
Among the tribes at the mouth of the Wanigela River, in New
Guinea, “a man who has taken life is considered to be impure
until he has undergone certain ceremonies: as soon as possible
after the deed he cleanses himself and his weapon. This
satisfactorily accomplished, he repairs to his village and seats
himself on the logs of sacrificial staging. No one approaches him
or takes any notice whatever of him. A house is prepared for him
which is put in charge of two or three small boys as servants. He
may eat only toasted bananas, and only the centre portion of
them—the ends being thrown away. On the third day of his
seclusion a small feast is prepared by his friends, who also
fashion some new perineal bands for him. This is called ivi
poro. The next day the man dons all his best ornaments and
badges for taking life, and sallies forth fully armed and parades
the village. The next day a hunt is organised, and a kangaroo
selected from the game captured. It is cut open and the spleen and
liver rubbed over the back of the man. He then walks solemnly down
to the nearest water, and standing straddle-legs in it washes
himself. All the young untried warriors swim between his legs. This
is supposed to impart courage and strength to them. The following
day, at early dawn, he dashes out of his house, fully armed, and
calls aloud the name of his victim. Having satisfied himself that
he has thoroughly scared the ghost of the dead man, he returns to
his house. The beating of flooring-boards and the lighting of fires
is also a certain method of scaring the ghost. A day later his
purification is finished. He can then enter his wife’s
house.”
In Windessi, Dutch New Guinea, when a party of head-hunters has
been successful, and they are nearing home, they announce their
approach and success by blowing on triton shells. Their canoes are
also decked with branches. The faces of the men who have taken a
head are blackened with charcoal. If several have taken part in
killing the same victim, his head is divided among them. They
always time their arrival so as to reach home in the early morning.
They come rowing to the village with a great noise, and the women
stand ready to dance in the verandahs of the houses. The canoes row
past the room sram or house where the young men live; and
as they pass, the murderers throw as many pointed sticks or bamboos
at the wall or the roof as there were enemies killed. The day is
spent very quietly. Now and then they drum or blow on the conch; at
other times they beat the walls of the houses with loud shouts to
drive away the ghosts of the slain. So the Yabim of New Guinea
believe that the spirit of a murdered man pursues his murderer and
seeks to do him a mischief. Hence they drive away the spirit with
shouts and the beating of drums. When the Fijians had buried a man
alive, as they often did, they used at nightfall to make a great
uproar by means of bamboos, trumpet-shells, and so forth, for the
purpose of frightening away his ghost, lest he should attempt to
return to his old home. And to render his house unattractive to him
they dismantled it and clothed it with everything that to their
ideas seemed most repulsive. On the evening of the day on which
they had tortured a prisoner to death, the American Indians were
wont to run through the village with hideous yells, beating with
sticks on the furniture, the walls, and the roofs of the huts to
prevent the angry ghost of their victim from settling there and
taking vengeance for the torments that his body had endured at
their hands. “Once,” says a traveller, “on
approaching in the night a village of Ottawas, I found all the
inhabitants in confusion: they were all busily engaged in raising
noises of the loudest and most inharmonious kind. Upon inquiry, I
found that a battle had been lately fought between the Ottawas and
the Kickapoos, and that the object of all this noise was to prevent
the ghosts of the departed combatants from entering the
village.”
Among the Basutos “ablution is specially performed on
return from battle. It is absolutely necessary that the warriors
should rid themselves, as soon as possible, of the blood they have
shed, or the shades of their victims would pursue them incessantly,
and disturb their slumbers. They go in a procession, and in full
armour, to the nearest stream. At the moment they enter the water a
diviner, placed higher up, throws some purifying substances into
the current. This is, however, not strictly necessary. The javelins
and battle-axes also undergo the process of washing.” Among
the Bageshu of East Africa a man who has killed another may not
return to his own house on the same day, though he may enter the
village and spend the night in a friend’s house. He kills a
sheep and smears his chest, his right arm, and his head with the
contents of the animal’s stomach. His children are brought to
him and he smears them in like manner. Then he smears each side of
the doorway with the tripe and entrails, and finally throws the
rest of the stomach on the roof of his house. For a whole day he
may not touch food with his hands, but picks it up with two sticks
and so conveys it to his mouth. His wife is not under any such
restrictions. She may even go to mourn for the man whom her husband
has killed, if she wishes to do so. Among the Angoni, to the north
of the Zambesi, warriors who have slain foes on an expedition smear
their bodies and faces with ashes, hang garments of their victims
on their persons, and tie bark ropes round their necks, so that the
ends hang down over their shoulders or breasts. This costume they
wear for three days after their return, and rising at break of day
they run through the village uttering frightful yells to drive away
the ghosts of the slain, which, if they were not thus banished from
the houses, might bring sickness and misfortune on the inmates.
In some of these accounts nothing is said of an enforced
seclusion, at least after the ceremonial cleansing, but some South
African tribes certainly require the slayer of a very gallant foe
in war to keep apart from his wife and family for ten days after he
has washed his body in running water. He also receives from the
tribal doctor a medicine which he chews with his food. When a Nandi
of East Africa has killed a member of another tribe, he paints one
side of his body, spear, and sword red, and the other side white.
For four days after the slaughter he is considered unclean and may
not go home. He has to build a small shelter by a river and live
there; he may not associate with his wife or sweetheart, and he may
eat nothing but porridge, beef, and goat’s flesh. At the end
of the fourth day he must purify himself by taking a strong purge
made from the bark of the segetet tree and by drinking
goat’s milk mixed with blood. Among the Bantu tribes of
Kavirondo, when a man has killed an enemy in warfare he shaves his
head on his return home, and his friends rub a medicine, which
generally consists of goat’s dung, over his body to prevent
the spirit of the slain man from troubling him. Exactly the same
custom is practised for the same reason by the Wageia of East
Africa. With the Ja-Luo of Kavirondo the custom is somewhat
different. Three days after his return from the fight the warrior
shaves his head. But before he may enter his village he has to hang
a live fowl, head uppermost, round his neck; then the bird is
decapitated and its head left hanging round his neck. Soon after
his return a feast is made for the slain man, in order that his
ghost may not haunt his slayer. In the Pelew Islands, when the men
return from a warlike expedition in which they have taken a life,
the young warriors who have been out fighting for the first time,
and all who handled the slain, are shut up in the large
council-house and become tabooed. They may not quit the edifice,
nor bathe, nor touch a woman, nor eat fish; their food is limited
to coco-nuts and syrup. They rub themselves with charmed leaves and
chew charmed betel. After three days they go together to bathe as
near as possible to the spot where the man was killed.
Among the Natchez Indians of North America young braves who had
taken their first scalps were obliged to observe certain rules of
abstinence for six months. They might not sleep with their wives
nor eat flesh; their only food was fish and hasty-pudding. If they
broke these rules, they believed that the soul of the man they had
killed would work their death by magic, that they would gain no
more successes over the enemy, and that the least wound inflicted
on them would prove mortal. When a Choctaw had killed an enemy and
taken his scalp, he went into mourning for a month, during which he
might not comb his hair, and if his head itched he might not
scratch it except with a little stick which he wore fastened to his
wrist for the purpose. This ceremonial mourning for the enemies
they had slain was not uncommon among the North American
Indians.
Thus we see that warriors who have taken the life of a foe in
battle are temporarily cut off from free intercourse with their
fellows, and especially with their wives, and must undergo certain
rites of purification before they are readmitted to society. Now if
the purpose of their seclusion and of the expiatory rites which
they have to perform is, as we have been led to believe, no other
than to shake off, frighten, or appease the angry spirit of the
slain man, we may safely conjecture that the similar purification
of homicides and murderers, who have imbrued their hands in the
blood of a fellow-tribesman, had at first the same significance,
and that the idea of a moral or spiritual regeneration symbolised
by the washing, the fasting, and so on, was merely a later
interpretation put upon the old custom by men who had outgrown the
primitive modes of thought in which the custom originated. The
conjecture will be confirmed if we can show that savages have
actually imposed certain restrictions on the murderer of a
fellow-tribesman from a definite fear that he is haunted by the
ghost of his victim. This we can do with regard to the Omahas of
North America. Among these Indians the kinsmen of a murdered man
had the right to put the murderer to death, but sometimes they
waived their right in consideration of presents which they
consented to accept. When the life of the murderer was spared, he
had to observe certain stringent rules for a period which varied
from two to four years. He must walk barefoot, and he might eat no
warm food, nor raise his voice, nor look around. He was compelled
to pull his robe about him and to have it tied at the neck even in
hot weather; he might not let it hang loose or fly open. He might
not move his hands about, but had to keep them close to his body.
He might not comb his hair, and it might not be blown about by the
wind. When the tribe went out hunting, he was obliged to pitch his
tent about a quarter of mile from the rest of the people
“lest the ghost of his victim should raise a high wind, which
might cause damage.” Only one of his kindred was allowed to
remain with him at his tent. No one wished to eat with him, for
they said, “If we eat with him whom Wakanda hates, Wakanda
will hate us.” Sometimes he wandered at night crying and
lamenting his offence. At the end of his long isolation the kinsmen
of the murdered man heard his crying and said, “It is enough.
Begone, and walk among the crowd. Put on moccasins and wear a good
robe.” Here the reason alleged for keeping the murderer at a
considerable distance from the hunters gives the clue to all the
other restrictions laid on him: he was haunted and therefore
dangerous. The ancient Greeks believed that the soul of a man who
had just been killed was wroth with his slayer and troubled him;
wherefore it was needful even for the involuntary homicide to
depart from his country for a year until the anger of the dead man
had cooled down; nor might the slayer return until sacrifice had
been offered and ceremonies of purification performed. If his
victim chanced to be a foreigner, the homicide had to shun the
native country of the dead man as well as his own. The legend of
the matricide Orestes, how he roamed from place to place pursued by
the Furies of his murdered mother, and none would sit at meat with
him, or take him in, till he had been purified, reflects faithfully
the real Greek dread of such as were still haunted by an angry
ghost.
6. Hunters and Fishers tabooed
IN SAVAGE society the hunter and the fisherman have often to
observe rules of abstinence and to submit to ceremonies of
purification of the same sort as those which are obligatory on the
warrior and the manslayer; and though we cannot in all cases
perceive the exact purpose which these rules and ceremonies are
supposed to serve, we may with some probability assume that, just
as the dread of the spirits of his enemies is the main motive for
the seclusion and purification of the warrior who hopes to take or
has already taken their lives, so the huntsman or fisherman who
complies with similar customs is principally actuated by a fear of
the spirits of the beasts, birds, or fish which he has killed or
intends to kill. For the savage commonly conceives animals to be
endowed with souls and intelligences like his own, and hence he
naturally treats them with similar respect. Just as he attempts to
appease the ghosts of the men he has slain, so he essays to
propitiate the spirits of the animals he has killed. These
ceremonies of propitiation will be described later on in this work;
here we have to deal, first, with the taboos observed by the hunter
and the fisherman before or during the hunting and fishing seasons,
and, second, with the ceremonies of purification which have to be
practised by these men on returning with their booty from a
successful chase.
While the savage respects, more or less, the souls of all
animals, he treats with particular deference the spirits of such as
are either especially useful to him or formidable on account of
their size, strength, or ferocity. Accordingly the hunting and
killing of these valuable or dangerous beasts are subject to more
elaborate rules and ceremonies than the slaughter of comparatively
useless and insignificant creatures. Thus the Indians of Nootka
Sound prepared themselves for catching whales by observing a fast
for a week, during which they ate very little, bathed in the water
several times a day, sang, and rubbed their bodies, limbs, and
faces with shells and bushes till they looked as if they had been
severely torn with briars. They were likewise required to abstain
from any commerce with their women for the like period, this last
condition being considered indispensable to their success. A chief
who failed to catch a whale has been known to attribute his failure
to a breach of chastity on the part of his men. It should be
remarked that the conduct thus prescribed as a preparation for
whaling is precisely that which in the same tribe of Indians was
required of men about to go on the war-path. Rules of the same sort
are, or were formerly, observed by Malagasy whalers. For eight days
before they went to sea the crew of a whaler used to fast,
abstaining from women and liquor, and confessing their most secret
faults to each other; and if any man was found to have sinned
deeply, he was forbidden to share in the expedition. In the island
of Mabuiag continence was imposed on the people both before they
went to hunt the dugong and while the turtles were pairing. The
turtle-season lasts during parts of October and November; and if at
that time unmarried persons had sexual intercourse with each other,
it was believed that when the canoe approached the floating turtle,
the male would separate from the female and both would dive down in
different directions. So at Mowat in New Guinea men have no
relation with women when the turtles are coupling, though there is
considerable laxity of morals at other times. In the island of Uap,
one of the Caroline group, every fisherman plying his craft lies
under a most strict taboo during the whole of the fishing season,
which lasts for six or eight weeks. Whenever he is on shore he must
spend all his time in the men’s clubhouse, and under no
pretext whatever may he visit his own house or so much as look upon
the faces of his wife and womenkind. Were he but to steal a glance
at them, they think that flying fish must inevitably bore out his
eyes at night. If his wife, mother, or daughter brings any gift for
him or wishes to talk with him, she must stand down towards the
shore with her back turned to the men’s clubhouse. Then the
fisherman may go out and speak to her, or with his back turned to
her he may receive what she has brought him; after which he must
return at once to his rigorous confinement. Indeed the fishermen
may not even join in dance and song with the other men of the
clubhouse in the evening; they must keep to themselves and be
silent. In Mirzapur, when the seed of the silkworm is brought into
the house, the Kol or Bhuiyar puts it in a place which has been
carefully plastered with holy cowdung to bring good luck. From that
time the owner must be careful to avoid ceremonial impurity. He
must give up cohabitation with his wife; he may not sleep on a bed,
nor shave himself, nor cut his nails, nor anoint himself with oil,
nor eat food cooked with butter, nor tell lies, nor do anything
else that he deems wrong. He vows to Singarmati Devi that, if the
worms are duly born, he will make her an offering. When the cocoons
open and the worms appear, he assembles the women of the house and
they sing the same song as at the birth of a baby, and red lead is
smeared on the parting of the hair of all the married women of the
neighbourhood. When the worms pair, rejoicings are made as at a
marriage. Thus the silkworms are treated as far as possible like
human beings. Hence the custom which prohibits the commerce of the
sexes while the worms are hatching may be only an extension, by
analogy, of the rule which is observed by many races, that the
husband may not cohabit with his wife during pregnancy and
lactation.
In the island of Nias the hunters sometimes dig pits, cover them
lightly over with twigs, grass, and leaves, and then drive the game
into them. While they are engaged in digging the pits, they have to
observe a number of taboos. They may not spit, or the game would
turn back in disgust from the pits. They may not laugh, or the
sides of the pit would fall in. They may eat no salt, prepare no
fodder for swine, and in the pit they may not scratch themselves,
for if they did, the earth would be loosened and would collapse.
And the night after digging the pit they may have no intercourse
with a woman, or all their labour would be in vain.
This practice of observing strict chastity as a condition of
success in hunting and fishing is very common among rude races; and
the instances of it which have been cited render it probable that
the rule is always based on a superstition rather than on a
consideration of the temporary weakness which a breach of the
custom may entail on the hunter or fisherman. In general it appears
to be supposed that the evil effect of incontinence is not so much
that it weakens him, as that, for some reason or other, it offends
the animals, who in consequence will not suffer themselves to be
caught. A Carrier Indian of British Columbia used to separate from
his wife for a full month before he set traps for bears, and during
this time he might not drink from the same vessel as his wife, but
had to use a special cup made of birch bark. The neglect of these
precautions would cause the game to escape after it had been
snared. But when he was about to snare martens, the period of
continence was cut down to ten days.
An examination of all the many cases in which the savage bridles
his passions and remains chaste from motives of superstition, would
be instructive, but I cannot attempt it now. I will only add a few
miscellaneous examples of the custom before passing to the
ceremonies of purification which are observed by the hunter and
fisherman after the chase and the fishing are over. The workers in
the salt-pans near Siphoum, in Laos, must abstain from all sexual
relations at the place where they are at work; and they may not
cover their heads nor shelter themselves under an umbrella from the
burning rays of the sun. Among the Kachins of Burma the ferment
used in making beer is prepared by two women, chosen by lot, who
during the three days that the process lasts may eat nothing acid
and may have no conjugal relations with their husbands; otherwise
it is supposed that the beer would be sour. Among the Masai
honey-wine is brewed by a man and a woman who live in a hut set
apart for them till the wine is ready for drinking. But they are
strictly forbidden to have sexual intercourse with each other
during this time; it is deemed essential that they should be chaste
for two days before they begin to brew and for the whole of the six
days that the brewing lasts. The Masai believe that were the couple
to commit a breach of chastity, not only would the wine be
undrinkable but the bees which made the honey would fly away.
Similarly they require that a man who is making poison should sleep
alone and observe other taboos which render him almost an outcast.
The Wandorobbo, a tribe of the same region as the Masai, believe
that the mere presence of a woman in the neighbourhood of a man who
is brewing poison would deprive the poison of its venom, and that
the same thing would happen if the wife of the poison-maker were to
commit adultery while her husband was brewing the poison. In this
last case it is obvious that a rationalistic explanation of the
taboo is impossible. How could the loss of virtue in the poison be
a physical consequence of the loss of virtue in the
poison-maker’s wife? Clearly the effect which the
wife’s adultery is supposed to have on the poison is a case
of sympathetic magic; her misconduct sympathetically affects her
husband and his work at a distance. We may, accordingly, infer with
some confidence that the rule of continence imposed on the
poison-maker himself is also a simple case of sympathetic magic,
and not, as a civilised reader might be disposed to conjecture, a
wise precaution designed to prevent him from accidentally poisoning
his wife.
Among the Ba-Pedi and Ba-Thonga tribes of South Africa, when the
site of a new village has been chosen and the houses are building,
all the married people are forbidden to have conjugal relations
with each other. If it were discovered that any couple had broken
this rule, the work of building would immediately be stopped, and
another site chosen for the village. For they think that a breach
of chastity would spoil the village which was growing up, that the
chief would grow lean and perhaps die, and that the guilty woman
would never bear another child. Among the Chams of Cochin-China,
when a dam is made or repaired on a river for the sake of
irrigation, the chief who offers the traditional sacrifices and
implores the protection of the deities on the work has to stay all
the time in a wretched hovel of straw, taking no part in the
labour, and observing the strictest continence; for the people
believe that a breach of his chastity would entail a breach of the
dam. Here, it is plain, there can be no idea of maintaining the
mere bodily vigour of the chief for the accomplishment of a task in
which he does not even bear a hand.
If the taboos or abstinences observed by hunters and fishermen
before and during the chase are dictated, as we have seen reason to
believe, by superstitious motives, and chiefly by a dread of
offending or frightening the spirits of the creatures whom it is
proposed to kill, we may expect that the restraints imposed after
the slaughter has been perpetrated will be at least as stringent,
the slayer and his friends having now the added fear of the angry
ghosts of his victims before their eyes. Whereas on the hypothesis
that the abstinences in question, including those from food, drink,
and sleep, are merely salutary precautions for maintaining the men
in health and strength to do their work, it is obvious that the
observance of these abstinences or taboos after the work is done,
that is, when the game is killed and the fish caught, must be
wholly superfluous, absurd, and inexplicable. But as I shall now
show, these taboos often continue to be enforced or even increased
in stringency after the death of the animals, in other words, after
the hunter or fisher has accomplished his object by making his bag
or landing his fish. The rationalistic theory of them therefore
breaks down entirely; the hypothesis of superstition is clearly the
only one open to us.
Among the Inuit or Esquimaux of Bering Strait “the dead
bodies of various animals must be treated very carefully by the
hunter who obtains them, so that their shades may not be offended
and bring bad luck or even death upon him or his people.”
Hence the Unalit hunter who has had a hand in the killing of a
white whale, or even has helped to take one from the net, is not
allowed to do any work for the next four days, that being the time
during which the shade or ghost of the whale is supposed to stay
with its body. At the same time no one in the village may use any
sharp or pointed instrument for fear of wounding the whale’s
shade, which is believed to be hovering invisible in the
neighbourhood; and no loud noise may be made lest it should
frighten or offend the ghost. Whoever cuts a whale’s body
with an iron axe will die. Indeed the use of all iron instruments
is forbidden in the village during these four days.
These same Esquimaux celebrate a great annual festival in
December when the bladders of all the seals, whales, walrus, and
white bears that have been killed in the year are taken into the
assembly-house of the village. They remain there for several days,
and so long as they do so the hunters avoid all intercourse with
women, saying that if they failed in that respect the shades of the
dead animals would be offended. Similarly among the Aleuts of
Alaska the hunter who had struck a whale with a charmed spear would
not throw again, but returned at once to his home and separated
himself from his people in a hut specially constructed for the
purpose, where he stayed for three days without food or drink, and
without touching or looking upon a woman. During this time of
seclusion he snorted occasionally in imitation of the wounded and
dying whale, in order to prevent the whale which he had struck from
leaving the coast. On the fourth day he emerged from his seclusion
and bathed in the sea, shrieking in a hoarse voice and beating the
water with his hands. Then, taking with him a companion, he
repaired to that part of the shore where he expected to find the
whale stranded. If the beast was dead, he at once cut out the place
where the death-wound had been inflicted. If the whale was not
dead, he again returned to his home and continued washing himself
until the whale died. Here the hunter’s imitation of the
wounded whale is probably intended by means of homoeopathic magic
to make the beast die in earnest. Once more the soul of the grim
polar bear is offended if the taboos which concern him are not
observed. His soul tarries for three days near the spot where it
left his body, and during these days the Esquimaux are particularly
careful to conform rigidly to the laws of taboo, because they
believe that punishment overtakes the transgressor who sins against
the soul of a bear far more speedily than him who sins against the
souls of the sea-beasts.
When the Kayans have shot one of the dreaded Bornean panthers,
they are very anxious about the safety of their souls, for they
think that the soul of a panther is almost more powerful than their
own. Hence they step eight times over the carcase of the dead beast
reciting the spell, “Panther, thy soul under my soul.”
On returning home they smear themselves, their dogs, and their
weapons with the blood of fowls in order to calm their souls and
hinder them from fleeing away; for, being themselves fond of the
flesh of fowls, they ascribe the same taste to their souls. For
eight days afterwards they must bathe by day and by night before
going out again to the chase. Among the Hottentots, when a man has
killed a lion, leopard, elephant, or rhinoceros, he is esteemed a
great hero, but he has to remain at home quite idle for three days,
during which his wife may not come near him; she is also enjoined
to restrict herself to a poor diet and to eat no more than is
barely necessary to keep her in health. Similarly the Lapps deem it
the height of glory to kill a bear, which they consider the king of
beasts. Nevertheless, all the men who take part in the slaughter
are regarded as unclean, and must live by themselves for three days
in a hut or tent made specially for them, where they cut up and
cook the bear’s carcase. The reindeer which brought in the
carcase on a sledge may not be driven by a woman for a whole year;
indeed, according to one account, it may not be used by anybody for
that period. Before the men go into the tent where they are to be
secluded, they strip themselves of the garments they had worn in
killing the bear, and their wives spit the red juice of alder bark
in their faces. They enter the tent not by the ordinary door but by
an opening at the back. When the bear’s flesh has been
cooked, a portion of it is sent by the hands of two men to the
women, who may not approach the men’s tent while the cooking
is going on. The men who convey the flesh to the women pretend to
be strangers bringing presents from a foreign land; the women keep
up the pretence and promise to tie red threads round the legs of
the strangers. The bear’s flesh may not be passed in to the
women through the door of their tent, but must be thrust in at a
special opening made by lifting up the hem of the tent-cover. When
the three days’ seclusion is over and the men are at liberty
to return to their wives, they run, one after the other, round the
fire, holding the chain by which pots are suspended over it. This
is regarded as a form of purification; they may now leave the tent
by the ordinary door and rejoin the women. But the leader of the
party must still abstain from cohabitation with his wife for two
days more.
Again, the Caffres are said to dread greatly the boa-constrictor
or an enormous serpent resembling it; “and being influenced
by certain superstitious notions they even fear to kill it. The man
who happened to put it to death, whether in self-defence or
otherwise, was formerly required to lie in a running stream of
water during the day for several weeks together; and no beast
whatever was allowed to be slaughtered at the hamlet to which he
belonged, until this duty had been fully performed. The body of the
snake was then taken and carefully buried in a trench, dug close to
the cattle-fold, where its remains, like those of a chief, were
henceforward kept perfectly undisturbed. The period of penance, as
in the case of mourning for the dead, is now happily reduced to a
few days.” In Madras it is considered a great sin to kill a
cobra. When this has happened, the people generally burn the body
of the serpent, just as they burn the bodies of human beings. The
murderer deems himself polluted for three days. On the second day
milk is poured on the remains of the cobra. On the third day the
guilty wretch is free from pollution.
In these last cases the animal whose slaughter has to be atoned
for is sacred, that is, it is one whose life is commonly spared
from motives of superstition. Yet the treatment of the sacrilegious
slayer seems to resemble so closely the treatment of hunters and
fishermen who have killed animals for food in the ordinary course
of business, that the ideas on which both sets of customs are based
may be assumed to be substantially the same. Those ideas, if I am
right, are the respect which the savage feels for the souls of
beasts, especially valuable or formidable beasts, and the dread
which he entertains of their vengeful ghosts. Some confirmation of
this view may be drawn from the ceremonies observed by fishermen of
Annam when the carcase of a whale is washed ashore. These
fisherfolk, we are told, worship the whale on account of the
benefits they derive from it. There is hardly a village on the
sea-shore which has not its small pagoda, containing the bones,
more or less authentic, of a whale. When a dead whale is washed
ashore, the people accord it a solemn burial. The man who first
caught sight of it acts as chief mourner, performing the rites
which as chief mourner and heir he would perform for a human
kinsman. He puts on all the garb of woe, the straw hat, the white
robe with long sleeves turned inside out, and the other
paraphernalia of full mourning. As next of kin to the deceased he
presides over the funeral rites. Perfumes are burned, sticks of
incense kindled, leaves of gold and silver scattered, crackers let
off. When the flesh has been cut off and the oil extracted, the
remains of the carcase are buried in the sand. After wards a shed
is set up and offerings are made in it. Usually some time after the
burial the spirit of the dead whale takes possession of some person
in the village and declares by his mouth whether he is a male or a
female.
XXI. Tabooed Things
1. The Meaning of Taboo
THUS in primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity
observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many
respects with the rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in
childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us
these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in
character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others
we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no
such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness
and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the
common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and
in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they
expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and
therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because
it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really as does
gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic
acid. To seclude these persons from the rest of the world so that
the dreaded spiritual danger shall neither reach them nor spread
from them, is the object of the taboos which they have to observe.
These taboos act, so to say, as electrical insulators to preserve
the spiritual force with which these persons are charged from
suffering or inflicting harm by contact with the outer world.
To the illustrations of these general principles which have been
already given I shall now add some more, drawing my examples,
first, from the class of tabooed things, and, second, from the
class of tabooed words; for in the opinion of the savage both
things and words may, like persons, be charged or electrified,
either temporarily or permanently, with the mysterious virtue of
taboo, and may therefore require to be banished for a longer or
shorter time from the familiar usage of common life. And the
examples will be chosen with special reference to those sacred
chiefs, kings and priests, who, more than anybody else, live fenced
about by taboo as by a wall. Tabooed things will be illustrated in
the present chapter, and tabooed words in the next.
2. Iron tabooed
IN THE FIRST place we may observe that the awful sanctity of
kings naturally leads to a prohibition to touch their sacred
persons. Thus it was unlawful to lay hands on the person of a
Spartan king: no one might touch the body of the king or queen of
Tahiti: it is forbidden to touch the person of the king of Siam
under pain of death; and no one may touch the king of Cambodia, for
any purpose whatever, without his express command. In July 1874 the
king was thrown from his carriage and lay insensible on the ground,
but not one of his suite dared to touch him; a European coming to
the spot carried the injured monarch to his palace. Formerly no one
might touch the king of Corea; and if he deigned to touch a
subject, the spot touched became sacred, and the person thus
honoured had to wear a visible mark (generally a cord of red silk)
for the rest of his life. Above all, no iron might touch the
king’s body. In 1800 King Tieng-tsong-tai-oang died of a
tumour in the back, no one dreaming of employing the lancet, which
would probably have saved his life. It is said that one king
suffered terribly from an abscess in the lip, till his physician
called in a jester, whose pranks made the king laugh heartily, and
so the abscess burst. Roman and Sabine priests might not be shaved
with iron but only with bronze razors or shears; and whenever an
iron graving-tool was brought into the sacred grove of the Arval
Brothers at Rome for the purpose of cutting an inscription in
stone, an expiatory sacrifice of a lamb and a pig must be offered,
which was repeated when the graving-tool was removed from the
grove. As a general rule iron might not be brought into Greek
sanctuaries. In Crete sacrifices were offered to Menedemus without
the use of iron, because the legend ran that Menedemus had been
killed by an iron weapon in the Trojan war. The Archon of Plataea
might not touch iron; but once a year, at the annual commemoration
of the men who fell at the battle of Plataea, he was allowed to
carry a sword wherewith to sacrifice a bull. To this day a
Hottentot priest never uses an iron knife, but always a sharp
splint of quartz, in sacrificing an animal or circumcising a lad.
Among the Ovambo of South-west Africa custom requires that lads
should be circumcised with a sharp flint; if none is to hand, the
operation may be performed with iron, but the iron must afterwards
be buried. Amongst the Moquis of Arizona stone knives, hatchets,
and so on have passed out of common use, but are retained in
religious ceremonies. After the Pawnees had ceased to use stone
arrow-heads for ordinary purposes, they still employed them to slay
the sacrifices, whether human captives or buffalo and deer. Amongst
the Jews no iron tool was used in building the Temple at Jerusalem
or in making an altar. The old wooden bridge (Pons
Sublicius) at Rome, which was considered sacred, was made and
had to be kept in repair without the use of iron or bronze. It was
expressly provided by law that the temple of Jupiter Liber at Furfo
might be repaired with iron tools. The council chamber at Cyzicus
was constructed of wood without any iron nails, the beams being so
arranged that they could be taken out and replaced.
This superstitious objection to iron perhaps dates from that
early time in the history of society when iron was still a novelty,
and as such was viewed by many with suspicion and dislike. For
everything new is apt to excite the awe and dread of the savage.
“It is a curious superstition,” says a pioneer in
Borneo, “this of the Dusuns, to attribute
anything—whether good or bad, lucky or unlucky—that
happens to them to something novel which has arrived in their
country. For instance, my living in Kindram has caused the
intensely hot weather we have experienced of late.” The
unusually heavy rains which happened to follow the English survey
of the Nicobar Islands in the winter of 1886–1887 were
imputed by the alarmed natives to the wrath of the spirits at the
theodolites, dumpy-levellers, and other strange instruments which
had been set up in so many of their favourite haunts; and some of
them proposed to soothe the anger of the spirits by sacrificing a
pig. In the seventeenth century a succession of bad seasons excited
a revolt among the Esthonian peasantry, who traced the origin of
the evil to a watermill, which put a stream to some inconvenience
by checking its flow. The first introduction of iron ploughshares
into Poland having been followed by a succession of bad harvests,
the farmers attributed the badness of the crops to the iron
ploughshares, and discarded them for the old wooden ones. To this
day the primitive Baduwis of Java, who live chiefly by husbandry,
will use no iron tools in tilling their fields.
The general dislike of innovation, which always makes itself
strongly felt in the sphere of religion, is sufficient by itself to
account for the superstitious aversion to iron entertained by kings
and priests and attributed by them to the gods; possibly this
aversion may have been intensified in places by some such
accidental cause as the series of bad seasons which cast discredit
on iron ploughshares in Poland. But the disfavour in which iron is
held by the gods and their ministers has another side. Their
antipathy to the metal furnishes men with a weapon which may be
turned against the spirits when occasion serves. As their dislike
of iron is supposed to be so great that they will not approach
persons and things protected by the obnoxious metal, iron may
obviously be employed as a charm for banning ghosts and other
dangerous spirits. And often it is so used. Thus in the Highlands
of Scotland the great safeguard against the elfin race is iron, or,
better yet, steel. The metal in any form, whether as a sword, a
knife, a gun-barrel, or what not, is all-powerful for this purpose.
Whenever you enter a fairy dwelling you should always remember to
stick a piece of steel, such as a knife, a needle, or a fish-hook,
in the door; for then the elves will not be able to shut the door
till you come out again. So, too, when you have shot a deer and are
bringing it home at night, be sure to thrust a knife into the
carcase, for that keeps the fairies from laying their weight on it.
A knife or nail in your pocket is quite enough to prevent the
fairies from lifting you up at night. Nails in the front of a bed
ward off elves from women “in the straw” and from their
babes; but to make quite sure it is better to put the
smoothing-iron under the bed, and the reaping-hook in the window.
If a bull has fallen over a rock and been killed, a nail stuck into
it will preserve the flesh from the fairies. Music discoursed on a
Jew’s harp keeps the elfin women away from the hunter,
because the tongue of the instrument is of steel. In Morocco iron
is considered a great protection against demons; hence it is usual
to place a knife or dagger under a sick man’s pillow. The
Singhalese believe that they are constantly surrounded by evil
spirits, who lie in wait to do them harm. A peasant would not dare
to carry good food, such as cakes or roast meat, from one place to
another without putting an iron nail on it to prevent a demon from
taking possession of the viands and so making the eater ill. No
sick person, whether man or woman, would venture out of the house
without a bunch of keys or a knife in his hand, for without such a
talisman he would fear that some devil might take advantage of his
weak state to slip into his body. And if a man has a large sore on
his body he tries to keep a morsel of iron on it as a protection
against demons. On the Slave Coast when a mother sees her child
gradually wasting away, she concludes that a demon has entered into
the child, and takes her measures accordingly. To lure the demon
out of the body of her offspring, she offers a sacrifice of food;
and while the devil is bolting it, she attaches iron rings and
small bells to her child’s ankles and hangs iron chains round
his neck. The jingling of the iron and the tinkling of the bells
are supposed to prevent the demon, when he has concluded his
repast, from entering again into the body of the little sufferer.
Hence many children may be seen in this part of Africa weighed down
with iron ornaments.
3. Sharp Weapons tabooed
THERE is a priestly king to the north of Zengwih in Burma,
revered by the Sotih as the highest spiritual and temporal
authority, into whose house no weapon or cutting instrument may be
brought. This rule may perhaps be explained by a custom observed by
various peoples after a death; they refrain from the use of sharp
instruments so long as the ghost of the deceased is supposed to be
near, lest they should wound it. Thus among the Esquimaux of Bering
Strait “during the day on which a person dies in the village
no one is permitted to work, and the relatives must perform no
labour during the three following days. It is especially forbidden
during this period to cut with any edged instrument, such as a
knife or an axe; and the use of pointed instruments, like needles
or bodkins, is also forbidden. This is said to be done to avoid
cutting or injuring the shade, which may be present at any time
during this period, and, if accidentally injured by any of these
things, it would become very angry and bring sickness or death to
the people. The relatives must also be very careful at this time
not to make any loud or harsh noises that may startle or anger the
shade.” We have seen that in like manner after killing a
white whale these Esquimaux abstain from the use of cutting or
pointed instruments for four days, lest they should unwittingly cut
or stab the whale’s ghost. The same taboo is sometimes
observed by them when there is a sick person in the village,
probably from a fear of injuring his shade which may be hovering
outside of his body. After a death the Roumanians of Transylvania
are careful not to leave a knife lying with the sharp edge
uppermost so long as the corpse remains in the house, “or
else the soul will be forced to ride on the blade.” For seven
days after a death, the corpse being still in the house, the
Chinese abstain from the use of knives and needles, and even of
chopsticks, eating their food with their fingers. On the third,
sixth, ninth, and fortieth days after the funeral the old Prussians
and Lithuanians used to prepare a meal, to which, standing at the
door, they invited the soul of the deceased. At these meals they
sat silent round the table and used no knives and the women who
served up the food were also without knives. If any morsels fell
from the table they were left lying there for the lonely souls that
had no living relations or friends to feed them. When the meal was
over the priest took a broom and swept the souls out of the house,
saying, “Dear souls, ye have eaten and drunk. Go forth, go
forth.” We can now understand why no cutting instrument may
be taken into the house of the Burmese pontiff. Like so many
priestly kings, he is probably regarded as divine, and it is
therefore right that his sacred spirit should not be exposed to the
risk of being cut or wounded whenever it quits his body to hover
invisible in the air or to fly on some distant mission.
4. Blood tabooed
WE have seen that the Flamen Dialis was forbidden to touch or
even name raw flesh. At certain times a Brahman teacher is enjoined
not to look on raw flesh, blood, or persons whose hands have been
cut off. In Uganda the father of twins is in a state of taboo for
some time after birth; among other rules he is forbidden to kill
anything or to see blood. In the Pelew Islands when a raid has been
made on a village and a head carried off, the relations of the
slain man are tabooed and have to submit to certain observances in
order to escape the wrath of his ghost. They are shut up in the
house, touch no raw flesh, and chew betel over which an incantation
has been uttered by the exorcist. After this the ghost of the
slaughtered man goes away to the enemy’s country in pursuit
of his murderer. The taboo is probably based on the common belief
that the soul or spirit of the animal is in the blood. As tabooed
persons are believed to be in a perilous state—for example,
the relations of the slain man are liable to the attacks of his
indignant ghost—it is especially necessary to isolate them
from contact with spirits; hence the prohibition to touch raw meat.
But as usual the taboo is only the special enforcement of a general
precept; in other words, its observance is particularly enjoined in
circumstances which seem urgently to call for its application, but
apart from such circumstances the prohibition is also observed,
though less strictly, as a common rule of life. Thus some of the
Esthonians will not taste blood because they believe that it
contains the animal’s soul, which would enter the body of the
person who tasted the blood. Some Indian tribes of North America,
“through a strong principle of religion, abstain in the
strictest manner from eating the blood of any animal, as it
contains the life and spirit of the beast.” Jewish hunters
poured out the blood of the game they had killed and covered it up
with dust. They would not taste the blood, believing that the soul
or life of the animal was in the blood, or actually was the
blood.
It is a common rule that royal blood may not be shed upon the
ground. Hence when a king or one of his family is to be put to
death a mode of execution is devised by which the royal blood shall
not be spilt upon the earth. About the year 1688 the generalissimo
of the army rebelled against the king of Siam and put him to death
“after the manner of royal criminals, or as princes of the
blood are treated when convicted of capital crimes, which is by
putting them into a large iron caldron, and pounding them to pieces
with wooden pestles, because none of their royal blood must be
spilt on the ground, it being, by their religion, thought great
impiety to contaminate the divine blood by mixing it with
earth.” When Kublai Khan defeated and took his uncle Nayan,
who had rebelled against him, he caused Nayan to be put to death by
being wrapt in a carpet and tossed to and fro till he died,
“because he would not have the blood of his Line Imperial
spilt upon the ground or exposed in the eye of Heaven and before
the Sun.” “Friar Ricold mentions the Tartar maxim:
‘One Khan will put another to death to get possession of the
throne, but he takes great care that the blood be not spilt. For
they say that it is highly improper that the blood of the Great
Khan should be spilt upon the ground; so they cause the victim to
be smothered somehow or other.’ The like feeling prevails at
the court of Burma, where a peculiar mode of execution without
bloodshed is reserved for princes of the blood.”
The reluctance to spill royal blood seems to be only a
particular case of a general unwillingness to shed blood or at
least to allow it to fall on the ground. Marco Polo tells us that
in his day persons caught in the streets of Cambaluc (Peking) at
unseasonable hours were arrested, and if found guilty of a
misdemeanor were beaten with a stick. “Under this punishment
people sometimes die, but they adopt it in order to eschew
bloodshed, for their Bacsis say that it is an evil thing
to shed man’s blood.” In West Sussex people believe
that the ground on which human blood has been shed is accursed and
will remain barren for ever. Among some primitive peoples, when the
blood of a tribesman has to be spilt it is not suffered to fall
upon the ground, but is received upon the bodies of his
fellow-tribesmen. Thus in some Australian tribes boys who are being
circumcised are laid on a platform, formed by the living bodies of
the tribesmen; and when a boy’s tooth is knocked out as an
initiatory ceremony, he is seated on the shoulders of a man, on
whose breast the blood flows and may not be wiped away. “Also
the Gauls used to drink their enemies’ blood and paint
themselves therewith. So also they write that the old Irish were
wont; and so have I seen some of the Irish do, but not their
enemies’ but friends’ blood, as, namely, at the
execution of a notable traitor at Limerick, called Murrogh
O’Brien, I saw an old woman, which was his foster-mother,
take up his head whilst he was quartered and suck up all the blood
that ran thereout, saying that the earth was not worthy to drink
it, and therewith also steeped her face and breast and tore her
hair, crying out and shrieking most terribly.” Among the
Latuka of Central Africa the earth on which a drop of blood has
fallen at childbirth is carefully scraped up with an iron shovel,
put into a pot along with the water used in washing the mother, and
buried tolerably deep outside the house on the left-hand side. In
West Africa, if a drop of your blood has fallen on the ground, you
must carefully cover it up, rub and stamp it into the soil; if it
has fallen on the side of a canoe or a tree, the place is cut out
and the chip destroyed. One motive of these African customs may be
a wish to prevent the blood from falling into the hands of
magicians, who might make an evil use of it. That is admittedly the
reason why people in West Africa stamp out any blood of theirs
which has dropped on the ground or cut out any wood that has been
soaked with it. From a like dread of sorcery natives of New Guinea
are careful to burn any sticks, leaves, or rags which are stained
with their blood; and if the blood has dripped on the ground they
turn up the soil and if possible light a fire on the spot. The same
fear explains the curious duties discharged by a class of men
called ramanga or “blue blood” among the
Betsileo of Madagascar. It is their business to eat all the
nail-parings and to lick up all the spilt blood of the nobles. When
the nobles pare their nails, the parings are collected to the last
scrap and swallowed by these ramanga. If the parings are
too large, they are minced small and so gulped down. Again, should
a nobleman wound himself, say in cutting his nails or treading on
something, the ramanga lick up the blood as fast as
possible. Nobles of high rank hardly go anywhere without these
humble attendants; but if it should happen that there are none of
them present, the cut nails and the spilt blood are carefully
collected to be afterwards swallowed by the ramanga. There
is scarcely a nobleman of any pretensions who does not strictly
observe this custom, the intention of which probably is to prevent
these parts of his person from falling into the hands of sorcerers,
who on the principles of contagious magic could work him harm
thereby.
The general explanation of the reluctance to shed blood on the
ground is probably to be found in the belief that the soul is in
the blood, and that therefore any ground on which it may fall
necessarily becomes taboo or sacred. In New Zealand anything upon
which even a drop of a high chief’s blood chances to fall
becomes taboo or sacred to him. For instance, a party of natives
having come to visit a chief in a fine new canoe, the chief got
into it, but in doing so a splinter entered his foot, and the blood
trickled on the canoe, which at once became sacred to him. The
owner jumped out, dragged the canoe ashore opposite the
chief’s house, and left it there. Again, a chief in entering
a missionary’s house knocked his head against a beam, and the
blood flowed. The natives said that in former times the house would
have belonged to the chief. As usually happens with taboos of
universal application, the prohibition to spill the blood of a
tribesman on the ground applies with peculiar stringency to chiefs
and kings, and is observed in their case long after it has ceased
to be observed in the case of others.
5. The Head tabooed
MANY peoples regard the head as peculiarly sacred; the special
sanctity attributed to it is sometimes explained by a belief that
it contains a spirit which is very sensitive to injury or
disrespect. Thus the Yorubas hold that every man has three
spiritual inmates, of whom the first, called Olori, dwells in the
head and is the man’s protector, guardian, and guide.
Offerings are made to this spirit, chiefly of fowls, and some of
the blood mixed with palmoil is rubbed on the forehead. The Karens
suppose that a being called the tso resides in the upper
part of the head, and while it retains its seat no harm can befall
the person from the efforts of the seven Kelahs, or
personified passions. “But if the tso becomes
heedless or weak certain evil to the person is the result. Hence
the head is carefully attended to, and all possible pains are taken
to provide such dress and attire as will be pleasing to the
tso.” The Siamese think that a spirit called
khuan or kwun dwells in the human head, of which
it is the guardian spirit. The spirit must be carefully protected
from injury of every kind; hence the act of shaving or cutting the
hair is accompanied with many ceremonies. The kwun is very
sensitive on points of honour, and would feel mortally insulted if
the head in which he resides were touched by the hand of a
stranger. The Cambodians esteem it a grave offence to touch a
man’s head; some of them will not enter a place where
anything whatever is suspended over their heads; and the meanest
Cambodian would never consent to live under an inhabited room.
Hence the houses are built of one story only; and even the
Government respects the prejudice by never placing a prisoner in
the stocks under the floor of a house, though the houses are raised
high above the ground. The same superstition exists amongst the
Malays; for an early traveller reports that in Java people
“wear nothing on their heads, and say that nothing must be on
their heads … and if any person were to put his hand upon
their head they would kill him; and they do not build houses with
storeys, in order that they may not walk over each other’s
heads.”
The same superstition as to the head is found in full force
throughout Polynesia. Thus of Gattanewa, a Marquesan chief, it is
said that “to touch the top of his head, or anything which
had been on his head, was sacrilege. To pass over his head was an
indignity never to be forgotten.” The son of a Marquesan high
priest has been seen to roll on the ground in an agony of rage and
despair, begging for death, because some one had desecrated his
head and deprived him of his divinity by sprinkling a few drops of
water on his hair. But it was not the Marquesan chiefs only whose
heads were sacred. The head of every Marquesan was taboo, and might
neither be touched nor stepped over by another; even a father might
not step over the head of his sleeping child; women were forbidden
to carry or touch anything that had been in contact with, or had
merely hung over, the head of their husband or father. No one was
allowed to be over the head of the king of Tonga. In Tahiti any one
who stood over the king or queen, or passed his hand over their
heads, might be put to death. Until certain rites were performed
over it, a Tahitian infant was especially taboo; whatever touched
the child’s head, while it was in this state, became sacred
and was deposited in a consecrated place railed in for the purpose
at the child’s house. If a branch of a tree touched the
child’s head, the tree was cut down; and if in its fall it
injured another tree so as to penetrate the bark, that tree also
was cut down as unclean and unfit for use. After the rites were
performed these special taboos ceased; but the head of a Tahitian
was always sacred, he never carried anything on it, and to touch it
was an offence. So sacred was the head of a Maori chief that
“if he only touched it with his fingers, he was obliged
immediately to apply them to his nose, and snuff up the sanctity
which they had acquired by the touch, and thus restore it to the
part from whence it was taken.” On account of the sacredness
of his head a Maori chief “could not blow the fire with his
mouth, for the breath being sacred, communicated his sanctity to
it, and a brand might be taken by a slave, or a man of another
tribe, or the fire might be used for other purposes, such as
cooking, and so cause his death.”
6. Hair tabooed
WHEN the head was considered so sacred that it might not even be
touched without grave offence, it is obvious that the cutting of
the hair must have been a delicate and difficult operation. The
difficulties and dangers which, on the primitive view, beset the
operation are of two kinds. There is first the danger of disturbing
the spirit of the head, which may be injured in the process and may
revenge itself upon the person who molests him. Secondly, there is
the difficulty of disposing of the shorn locks. For the savage
believes that the sympathetic connexion which exists between
himself and every part of his body continues to exist even after
the physical connexion has been broken, and that therefore he will
suffer from any harm that may befall the several parts of his body,
such as the clippings of his hair or the parings of his nails.
Accordingly he takes care that these severed portions of himself
shall not be left in places where they might either be exposed to
accidental injury or fall into the hands of malicious persons who
might work magic on them to his detriment or death. Such dangers
are common to all, but sacred persons have more to fear from them
than ordinary people, so the precautions taken by them are
proportionately stringent. The simplest way of evading the peril is
not to cut the hair at all; and this is the expedient adopted where
the risk is thought to be more than usually great. The Frankish
kings were never allowed to crop their hair; from their childhood
upwards they had to keep it unshorn. To poll the long locks that
floated on their shoulders would have been to renounce their right
to the throne. When the wicked brothers Clotaire and Childebert
coveted the kingdom of their dead brother Clodomir, they inveigled
into their power their little nephews, the two sons of Clodomir;
and having done so, they sent a messenger bearing scissors and a
naked sword to the children’s grandmother, Queen Clotilde, at
Paris. The envoy showed the scissors and the sword to Clotilde, and
bade her choose whether the children should be shorn and live or
remain unshorn and die. The proud queen replied that if her
grandchildren were not to come to the throne she would rather see
them dead than shorn. And murdered they were by their ruthless
uncle Clotaire with his own hand. The king of Ponape, one of the
Caroline Islands, must wear his hair long, and so must his
grandees. Among the Hos, a negro tribe of West Africa, “there
are priests on whose head no razor may come during the whole of
their lives. The god who dwells in the man forbids the cutting of
his hair on pain of death. If the hair is at last too long, the
owner must pray to his god to allow him at least to clip the tips
of it. The hair is in fact conceived as the seat and lodging-place
of his god, so that were it shorn the god would lose his abode in
the priest.” The members of a Masai clan, who are believed to
possess the art of making rain, may not pluck out their beards,
because the loss of their beards would, it is supposed, entail the
loss of their rain-making powers. The head chief and the sorcerers
of the Masai observe the same rule for a like reason: they think
that were they to pull out their beards, their supernatural gifts
would desert them.
Again, men who have taken a vow of vengeance sometimes keep
their hair unshorn till they have fulfilled their vow. Thus of the
Marquesans we are told that “occasionally they have their
head entirely shaved, except one lock on the crown, which is worn
loose or put up in a knot. But the latter mode of wearing the hair
is only adopted by them when they have a solemn vow, as to revenge
the death of some near relation, etc. In such case the lock is
never cut off until they have fulfilled their promise.” A
similar custom was sometimes observed by the ancient Germans; among
the Chatti the young warriors never clipped their hair or their
beard till they had slain an enemy. Among the Toradjas, when a
child’s hair is cut to rid it of vermin, some locks are
allowed to remain on the crown of the head as a refuge for one of
the child’s souls. Otherwise the soul would have no place in
which to settle, and the child would sicken. The Karo-Bataks are
much afraid of frightening away the soul of a child; hence when
they cut its hair, they always leave a patch unshorn, to which the
soul can retreat before the shears. Usually this lock remains
unshorn all through life, or at least up till manhood.
7. Ceremonies at Hair-cutting
BUT when it becomes necessary to crop the hair, measures are
taken to lessen the dangers which are supposed to attend the
operation. The chief of Namosi in Fiji always ate a man by way of
precaution when he had had his hair cut. “There was a certain
clan that had to provide the victim, and they used to sit in solemn
council among themselves to choose him. It was a sacrificial feast
to avert evil from the chief.” Amongst the Maoris many spells
were uttered at hair-cutting; one, for example, was spoken to
consecrate the obsidian knife with which the hair was cut; another
was pronounced to avert the thunder and lightning which
hair-cutting was believed to cause. “He who has had his hair
cut is in immediate charge of the Atua (spirit); he is removed from
the contact and society of his family and his tribe; he dare not
touch his food himself; it is put into his mouth by another person;
nor can he for some days resume his accustomed occupations or
associate with his fellow-men.” The person who cuts the hair
is also tabooed; his hands having been in contact with a sacred
head, he may not touch food with them or engage in any other
employment; he is fed by another person with food cooked over a
sacred fire. He cannot be released from the taboo before the
following day, when he rubs his hands with potato or fern root
which has been cooked on a sacred fire; and this food having been
taken to the head of the family in the female line and eaten by
her, his hands are freed from the taboo. In some parts of New
Zealand the most sacred day of the year was that appointed for
hair-cutting; the people assembled in large numbers on that day
from all the neighbourhood.
8. Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails
BUT even when the hair and nails have been safely cut, there
remains the difficulty of disposing of them, for their owner
believes himself liable to suffer from any harm that may befall
them. The notion that a man may be bewitched by means of the
clippings of his hair, the parings of his nails, or any other
severed portion of his person is almost world-wide, and attested by
evidence too ample, too familiar, and too tedious in its uniformity
to be here analysed at length. The general idea on which the
superstition rests is that of the sympathetic connexion supposed to
persist between a person and everything that has once been part of
his body or in any way closely related to him. A very few examples
must suffice. They belong to that branch of sympathetic magic which
may be called contagious. Dread of sorcery, we are told, formed one
of the most salient characteristics of the Marquesan islanders in
the old days. The sorcerer took some of the hair, spittle, or other
bodily refuse of the man he wished to injure, wrapped it up in a
leaf, and placed the packet in a bag woven of threads or fibres,
which were knotted in an intricate way. The whole was then buried
with certain rites, and thereupon the victim wasted away of a
languishing sickness which lasted twenty days. His life, however,
might be saved by discovering and digging up the buried hair,
spittle, or what not; for as soon as this was done the power of the
charm ceased. A Maori sorcerer intent on bewitching somebody sought
to get a tress of his victim’s hair, the parings of his
nails, some of his spittle, or a shred of his garment. Having
obtained the object, whatever it was, he chanted certain spells and
curses over it in a falsetto voice and buried it in the ground. As
the thing decayed, the person to whom it had belonged was supposed
to waste away. When an Australian blackfellow wishes to get rid of
his wife, he cuts off a lock of her hair in her sleep, ties it to
his spear-thrower, and goes with it to a neighbouring tribe, where
he gives it to a friend. His friend sticks the spear-thrower up
every night before the camp fire, and when it falls down it is a
sign that the wife is dead. The way in which the charm operates was
explained to Dr. Howitt by a Wirajuri man. “You see,”
he said, “when a blackfellow doctor gets hold of something
belonging to a man and roasts it with things, and sings over it,
the fire catches hold of the smell of the man, and that settles the
poor fellow.”
The Huzuls of the Carpathians imagine that if mice get a
person’s shorn hair and make a nest of it, the person will
suffer from headache or even become idiotic. Similarly in Germany
it is a common notion that if birds find a person’s cut hair,
and build their nests with it, the person will suffer from
headache; sometimes it is thought that he will have an eruption on
the head. The same superstition prevails, or used to prevail, in
West Sussex.
Again it is thought that cut or combed-out hair may disturb the
weather by producing rain and hail, thunder and lightning. We have
seen that in New Zealand a spell was uttered at hair-cutting to
avert thunder and lightning. In the Tyrol, witches are supposed to
use cut or combed-out hair to make hailstones or thunderstorms
with. Thlinkeet Indians have been known to attribute stormy weather
to the rash act of a girl who had combed her hair outside of the
house. The Romans seem to have held similar views, for it was a
maxim with them that no one on shipboard should cut his hair or
nails except in a storm, that is, when the mischief was already
done. In the Highlands of Scotland it is said that no sister should
comb her hair at night if she have a brother at sea. In West
Africa, when the Mani of Chitombe or Jumba died, the people used to
run in crowds to the corpse and tear out his hair, teeth, and
nails, which they kept as a rain-charm, believing that otherwise no
rain would fall. The Makoko of the Anzikos begged the missionaries
to give him half their beards as a rain-charm.
If cut hair and nails remain in sympathetic connexion with the
person from whose body they have been severed, it is clear that
they can be used as hostages for his good behaviour by any one who
may chance to possess them; for on the principles of contagious
magic he has only to injure the hair or nails in order to hurt
simultaneously their original owner. Hence when the Nandi have
taken a prisoner they shave his head and keep the shorn hair as a
surety that he will not attempt to escape; but when the captive is
ransomed, they return his shorn hair with him to his own
people.
To preserve the cut hair and nails from injury and from the
dangerous uses to which they may be put by sorcerers, it is
necessary to deposit them in some safe place. The shorn locks of a
Maori chief were gathered with much care and placed in an adjoining
cemetery. The Tahitians buried the cuttings of their hair at the
temples. In the streets of Soku a modern traveller observed cairns
of large stones piled against walls with tufts of human hair
inserted in the crevices. On asking the meaning of this, he was
told that when any native of the place polled his hair he carefully
gathered up the clippings and deposited them in one of these
cairns, all of which were sacred to the fetish and therefore
inviolable. These cairns of sacred stones, he further learned, were
simply a precaution against witchcraft, for if a man were not thus
careful in disposing of his hair, some of it might fall into the
hands of his enemies, who would, by means of it, be able to cast
spells over him and so compass his destruction. When the top-knot
of a Siamese child has been cut with great ceremony, the short
hairs are put into a little vessel made of plantain leaves and set
adrift on the nearest river or canal. As they float away, all that
was wrong or harmful in the child’s disposition is believed
to depart with them. The long hairs are kept till the child makes a
pilgrimage to the holy Footprint of Buddha on the sacred hill at
Prabat. They are then presented to the priests, who are supposed to
make them into brushes with which they sweep the Footprint; but in
fact so much hair is thus offered every year that the priests
cannot use it all, so they quietly burn the superfluity as soon as
the pilgrims’ backs are turned. The cut hair and nails of the
Flamen Dialis were buried under a lucky tree. The shorn tresses of
the Vestal Virgins were hung on an ancient lotus-tree.
Often the clipped hair and nails are stowed away in any secret
place, not necessarily in a temple or cemetery or at a tree, as in
the cases already mentioned. Thus in Swabia you are recommended to
deposit your clipped hair in some spot where neither sun nor moon
can shine on it, for example in the earth or under a stone. In
Danzig it is buried in a bag under the threshold. In Ugi, one of
the Solomon Islands, men bury their hair lest it should fall into
the hands of an enemy, who would make magic with it and so bring
sickness or calamity on them. The same fear seems to be general in
Melanesia, and has led to a regular practice of hiding cut hair and
nails. The same practice prevails among many tribes of South
Africa, from a fear lest wizards should get hold of the severed
particles and work evil with them. The Caffres carry still further
this dread of allowing any portion of themselves to fall into the
hands of an enemy; for not only do they bury their cut hair and
nails in a secret spot, but when one of them cleans the head of
another he preserves the vermin which he catches, “carefully
delivering them to the person to whom they originally appertained,
supposing, according to their theory, that as they derived their
support from the blood of the man from whom they were taken, should
they be killed by another, the blood of his neighbour would be in
his possession, thus placing in his hands the power of some
superhuman influence.”
Sometimes the severed hair and nails are preserved, not to
prevent them from falling into the hands of a magician, but that
the owner may have them at the resurrection of the body, to which
some races look forward. Thus the Incas of Peru “took extreme
care to preserve the nail-parings and the hairs that were shorn off
or torn out with a comb; placing them in holes or niches in the
walls; and if they fell out, any other Indian that saw them picked
them up and put them in their places again. I very often asked
different Indians, at various times, why they did this, in order to
see what they would say, and they all replied in the same words
saying, ‘Know that all persons who are born must return to
life’ (they have no word to express resurrection), ‘and
the souls must rise out of their tombs with all that belonged to
their bodies. We, therefore, in order that we may not have to
search for our hair and nails at a time when there will be much
hurry and confusion, place them in one place, that they may be
brought together more conveniently, and, whenever it is possible,
we are also careful to spit in one place.’” Similarly
the Turks never throw away the parings of their nails, but
carefully stow them in cracks of the walls or of the boards, in the
belief that they will be needed at the resurrection. The Armenians
do not throw away their cut hair and nails and extracted teeth, but
hide them in places that are esteemed holy, such as a crack in the
church wall, a pillar of the house, or a hollow tree. They think
that all these severed portions of themselves will be wanted at the
resurrection, and that he who has not stowed them away in a safe
place will have to hunt about for them on the great day. In the
village of Drumconrath in Ireland there used to be some old women
who, having ascertained from Scripture that the hairs of their
heads were all numbered by the Almighty, expected to have to
account for them at the day of judgment. In order to be able to do
so they stuffed the severed hair away in the thatch of their
cottages.
Some people burn their loose hair to save it from falling into
the hands of sorcerers. This is done by the Patagonians and some of
the Victorian tribes. In the Upper Vosges they say that you should
never leave the clippings of your hair and nails lying about, but
burn them to hinder the sorcerers from using them against you. For
the same reason Italian women either burn their loose hairs or
throw them into a place where no one is likely to look for them.
The almost universal dread of witchcraft induces the West African
negroes, the Makololo of South Africa, and the Tahitians to burn or
bury their shorn hair. In the Tyrol many people burn their hair
lest the witches should use it to raise thunderstorms; others burn
or bury it to prevent the birds from lining their nests with it,
which would cause the heads from which the hair came to ache.
This destruction of the hair and nails plainly involves an
inconsistency of thought. The object of the destruction is avowedly
to prevent these severed portions of the body from being used by
sorcerers. But the possibility of their being so used depends upon
the supposed sympathetic connexion between them and the man from
whom they were severed. And if this sympathetic connexion still
exists, clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed without
injury to the man.
9. Spittle tabooed
THE SAME fear of witchcraft which has led so many people to hide
or destroy their loose hair and nails has induced other or the same
people to treat their spittle in a like fashion. For on the
principles of sympathetic magic the spittle is part of the man, and
whatever is done to it will have a corresponding effect on him. A
Chilote Indian, who has gathered up the spittle of an enemy, will
put it in a potato, and hang the potato in the smoke, uttering
certain spells as he does so in the belief that his foe will waste
away as the potato dries in the smoke. Or he will put the spittle
in a frog and throw the animal into an inaccessible, unnavigable
river, which will make the victim quake and shake with ague. The
natives of Urewera, a district of New Zealand, enjoyed a high
reputation for their skill in magic. It was said that they made use
of people’s spittle to bewitch them. Hence visitors were
careful to conceal their spittle, lest they should furnish these
wizards with a handle for working them harm. Similarly among some
tribes of South Africa no man will spit when an enemy is near, lest
his foe should find the spittle and give it to a wizard, who would
then mix it with magical ingredients so as to injure the person
from whom it fell. Even in a man’s own house his saliva is
carefully swept away and obliterated for a similar reason.
If common folk are thus cautious, it is natural that kings and
chiefs should be doubly so. In the Sandwich Islands chiefs were
attended by a confidential servant bearing a portable spittoon, and
the deposit was carefully buried every morning to put it out of the
reach of sorcerers. On the Slave Coast, for the same reason,
whenever a king or chief expectorates, the saliva is scrupulously
gathered up and hidden or buried. The same precautions are taken
for the same reason with the spittle of the chief of Tabali in
Southern Nigeria.
The magical use to which spittle may be put marks it out, like
blood or nail-parings, as a suitable material basis for a covenant,
since by exchanging their saliva the covenanting parties give each
other a guarantee of good faith. If either of them afterwards
foreswears himself, the other can punish his perfidy by a magical
treatment of the purjurer’s spittle which he has in his
custody. Thus when the Wajagga of East Africa desire to make a
covenant, the two parties will sometimes sit down with a bowl of
milk or beer between them, and after uttering an incantation over
the beverage they each take a mouthful of the milk or beer and spit
it into the other’s mouth. In urgent cases, when there is no
time to spend on ceremony, the two will simply spit into each
other’s mouth, which seals the covenant just as well.
10. Foods tabooed
AS MIGHT have been expected, the superstitions of the savage
cluster thick about the subject of food; and he abstains from
eating many animals and plants, wholesome enough in themselves,
which for one reason or another he fancies would prove dangerous or
fatal to the eater. Examples of such abstinence are too familiar
and far too numerous to quote. But if the ordinary man is thus
deterred by superstitious fear from partaking of various foods, the
restraints of this kind which are laid upon sacred or tabooed
persons, such as kings and priests, are still more numerous and
stringent. We have already seen that the Flamen Dialis was
forbidden to eat or even name several plants and animals, and that
the flesh diet of Egyptian kings was restricted to veal and goose.
In antiquity many priests and many kings of barbarous peoples
abstained wholly from a flesh diet. The Gangas or fetish
priests of the Loango Coast are forbidden to eat or even see a
variety of animals and fish, in consequence of which their flesh
diet is extremely limited; often they live only on herbs and roots,
though they may drink fresh blood. The heir to the throne of Loango
is forbidden from infancy to eat pork; from early childhood he is
interdicted the use of the cola fruit in company; at
puberty he is taught by a priest not to partake of fowls except
such as he has himself killed and cooked; and so the number of
taboos goes on increasing with his years. In Fernando Po the king
after installation is forbidden to eat cocco (arum
acaule), deer, and porcupine, which are the ordinary foods of
the people. The head chief of the Masai may eat nothing but milk,
honey, and the roasted livers of goats; for if he partook of any
other food he would lose his power of soothsaying and of
compounding charms.
11. Knots and Rings tabooed
WE have seen that among the many taboos which the Flamen Dialis
at Rome had to observe, there was one that forbade him to have a
knot on any part of his garments, and another that obliged him to
wear no ring unless it were broken. In like manner Moslem pilgrims
to Mecca are in a state of sanctity or taboo and may wear on their
persons neither knots nor rings. These rules are probably of
kindred significance, and may conveniently be considered together.
To begin with knots, many people in different parts of the world
entertain a strong objection to having any knot about their person
at certain critical seasons, particularly childbirth, marriage, and
death. Thus among the Saxons of Transylvania, when a woman is in
travail all knots on her garments are untied, because it is
believed that this will facilitate her delivery, and with the same
intention all the locks in the house, whether on doors or boxes,
are unlocked. The Lapps think that a lying-in woman should have no
knot on her garments, because a knot would have the effect of
making the delivery difficult and painful. In the East Indies this
superstition is extended to the whole time of pregnancy; the people
believe that if a pregnant woman were to tie knots, or braid, or
make anything fast, the child would thereby be constricted or the
woman would herself be “tied up” when her time came.
Nay, some of them enforce the observance of the rule on the father
as well as the mother of the unborn child. Among the Sea Dyaks
neither of the parents may bind up anything with a string or make
anything fast during the wife’s pregnancy. In the Toumbuluh
tribe of North Celebes a ceremony is performed in the fourth or
fifth month of a woman’s pregnancy, and after it her husband
is forbidden, among many other things, to tie any fast knots and to
sit with his legs crossed over each other.
In all these cases the idea seems to be that the tying of a knot
would, as they say in the East Indies, “tie up” the
woman, in other words, impede and perhaps prevent her delivery, or
delay her convalescence after the birth. On the principles of
homoeopathic or imitative magic the physical obstacle or impediment
of a knot on a cord would create a corresponding obstacle or
impediment in the body of the woman. That this is really the
explanation of the rule appears from a custom observed by the Hos
of West Africa at a difficult birth. When a woman is in hard labour
and cannot bring forth, they call in a magician to her aid. He
looks at her and says, “The child is bound in the womb, that
is why she cannot be delivered.” On the entreaties of her
female relations he then promises to loosen the bond so that she
may bring forth. For that purpose he orders them to fetch a tough
creeper from the forest, and with it he binds the hands and feet of
the sufferer on her back. Then he takes a knife and calls out the
woman’s name, and when she answers he cuts through the
creeper with a knife, saying, “I cut through to-day thy bonds
and thy child’s bonds.” After that he chops up the
creeper small, puts the bits in a vessel of water, and bathes the
woman with the water. Here the cutting of the creeper with which
the woman’s hands and feet are bound is a simple piece of
homoeopathic or imitative magic: by releasing her limbs from their
bonds the magician imagines that he simultaneously releases the
child in her womb from the trammels which impede its birth. The
same train of thought underlies a practice observed by some peoples
of opening all locks, doors, and so on, while a birth is taking
place in the house. We have seen that at such a time the Germans of
Transylvania open all the locks, and the same thing is done also in
Voigtland and Mecklenburg. In North-western Argyllshire
superstitious people used to open every lock in the house at
childbirth. In the island of Salsette near Bombay, when a woman is
in hard labour, all locks of doors or drawers are opened with a key
to facilitate her delivery. Among the Mandelings of Sumatra the
lids of all chests, boxes, pans, and so forth are opened; and if
this does not produce the desired effect, the anxious husband has
to strike the projecting ends of some of the house-beams in order
to loosen them; for they think that “everything must be open
and loose to facilitate the delivery.” In Chittagong, when a
woman cannot bring her child to the birth, the midwife gives orders
to throw all doors and windows wide open, to uncork all bottles, to
remove the bungs from all casks, to unloose the cows in the stall,
the horses in the stable, the watchdog in his kennel, to set free
sheep, fowls, ducks, and so forth. This universal liberty accorded
to the animals and even to inanimate things is, according to the
people, an infallible means of ensuring the woman’s delivery
and allowing the babe to be born. In the island of Saghalien, when
a woman is in labour, her husband undoes everything that can be
undone. He loosens the plaits of his hair and the laces of his
shoes. Then he unties whatever is tied in the house or its
vicinity. In the courtyard he takes the axe out of the log in which
it is stuck; he unfastens the boat, if it is moored to a tree, he
withdraws the cartridges from his gun, and the arrows from his
crossbow.
Again, we have seen that a Toumbuluh man abstains not only from
tying knots, but also from sitting with crossed legs during his
wife’s pregnancy. The train of thought is the same in both
cases. Whether you cross threads in tying a knot, or only cross
your legs in sitting at your ease, you are equally, on the
principles of homoeopathic magic, crossing or thwarting the free
course of things, and your action cannot but check and impede
whatever may be going forward in your neighbourhood. Of this
important truth the Romans were fully aware. To sit beside a
pregnant woman or a patient under medical treatment with clasped
hands, says the grave Pliny, is to cast a malignant spell over the
person, and it is worse still if you nurse your leg or legs with
your clasped hands, or lay one leg over the other. Such postures
were regarded by the old Romans as a let and hindrance to business
of every sort, and at a council of war or a meeting of magistrates,
at prayers and sacrifices, no man was suffered to cross his legs or
clasp his hands. The stock instance of the dreadful consequences
that might flow from doing one or the other was that of Alcmena,
who travailed with Hercules for seven days and seven nights,
because the goddess Lucina sat in front of the house with clasped
hands and crossed legs, and the child could not be born until the
goddess had been beguiled into changing her attitude. It is a
Bulgarian superstition that if a pregnant woman is in the habit of
sitting with crossed legs, she will suffer much in childbed. In
some parts of Bavaria, when conversation comes to a standstill and
silence ensues, they say, “Surely somebody has crossed his
legs.”
The magical effect of knots in trammelling and obstructing human
activity was believed to be manifested at marriage not less than at
birth. During the Middle Ages, and down to the eighteenth century,
it seems to have been commonly held in Europe that the consummation
of marriage could be prevented by any one who, while the wedding
ceremony was taking place, either locked a lock or tied a knot in a
cord, and then threw the lock or the cord away. The lock or the
knotted cord had to be flung into water; and until it had been
found and unlocked, or untied, no real union of the married pair
was possible. Hence it was a grave offence, not only to cast such a
spell, but also to steal or make away with the material instrument
of it, whether lock or knotted cord. In the year 1718 the
parliament of Bordeaux sentenced some one to be burned alive for
having spread desolation through a whole family by means of knotted
cords; and in 1705 two persons were condemned to death in Scotland
for stealing certain charmed knots which a woman had made, in order
thereby to mar the wedded happiness of Spalding of Ashintilly. The
belief in the efficacy of these charms appears to have lingered in
the Highlands of Pertshire down to the end of the eighteenth
century, for at that time it was still customary in the beautiful
parish of Logierait, between the river Tummel and the river Tay, to
unloose carefully every knot in the clothes of the bride and
bridegroom before the celebration of the marriage ceremony. We meet
with the same superstition and the same custom at the present day
in Syria. The persons who help a Syrian bridegroom to don his
wedding garments take care that no knot is tied on them and no
button buttoned, for they believe that a button buttoned or a knot
tied would put it within the power of his enemies to deprive him of
his nuptial rights by magical means. The fear of such charms is
diffused all over North Africa at the present day. To render a
bridegroom impotent the enchanter has only to tie a knot in a
handkerchief which he had previously placed quietly on some part of
the bridegroom’s body when he was mounted on horseback ready
to fetch his bride: so long as the knot in the handkerchief remains
tied, so long will the bridegroom remain powerless to consummate
the marriage.
The maleficent power of knots may also be manifested in the
infliction of sickness, disease, and all kinds of misfortune. Thus
among the Hos of West Africa a sorcerer will sometimes curse his
enemy and tie a knot in a stalk of grass, saying, “I have
tied up So-and-so in this knot. May all evil light upon him! When
he goes into the field, may a snake sting him! When he goes to the
chase, may a ravening beast attack him! And when he steps into a
river, may the water sweep him away! When it rains, may the
lightning strike him! May evil nights be his!” It is believed
that in the knot the sorcerer has bound up the life of his enemy.
In the Koran there is an allusion to the mischief of “those
who puff into the knots,” and an Arab commentator on the
passage explains that the words refer to women who practise magic
by tying knots in cords, and then blowing and spitting upon them.
He goes on to relate how, once upon a time, a wicked Jew bewitched
the prophet Mohammed himself by tying nine knots on a string, which
he then hid in a well. So the prophet fell ill, and nobody knows
what might have happened if the archangel Gabriel had not
opportunely revealed to the holy man the place where the knotted
cord was concealed. The trusty Ali soon fetched the baleful thing
from the well; and the prophet recited over it certain charms,
which were specially revealed to him for the purpose. At every
verse of the charms a knot untied itself, and the prophet
experienced a certain relief.
If knots are supposed to kill, they are also supposed to cure.
This follows from the belief that to undo the knots which are
causing sickness will bring the sufferer relief. But apart from
this negative virtue of maleficent knots, there are certain
beneficent knots to which a positive power of healing is ascribed.
Pliny tells us that some folk cured diseases of the groin by taking
a thread from a web, tying seven or nine knots on it, and then
fastening it to the patient’s groin; but to make the cure
effectual it was necessary to name some widow as each knot was
tied. O’Donovan describes a remedy for fever employed among
the Turcomans. The enchanter takes some camel hair and spins it
into a stout thread, droning a spell the while. Next he ties seven
knots on the thread, blowing on each knot before he pulls it tight.
This knotted thread is then worn as a bracelet on his wrist by the
patient. Every day one of the knots is untied and blown upon, and
when the seventh knot is undone the whole thread is rolled up into
a ball and thrown into a river, bearing away (as they imagine) the
fever with it.
Again knots may be used by an enchantress to win a lover and
attach him firmly to herself. Thus the love-sick maid in Virgil
seeks to draw Daphnis to her from the city by spells and by tying
three knots on each of three strings of different colours. So an
Arab maiden, who had lost her heart to a certain man, tried to gain
his love and bind him to herself by tying knots in his whip; but
her jealous rival undid the knots. On the same principle magic
knots may be employed to stop a runaway. In Swazieland you may
often see grass tied in knots at the side of the footpaths. Every
one of these knots tells of a domestic tragedy. A wife has run away
from her husband, and he and his friends have gone in pursuit,
binding up the paths, as they call it, in this fashion to prevent
the fugitive from doubling back over them. A net, from its
affluence of knots, has always been considered in Russia very
efficacious against sorcerers; hence in some places, when a bride
is being dressed in her wedding attire, a fishing-net is flung over
her to keep her out of harm’s way. For a similar purpose the
bridegroom and his companions are often girt with pieces of net, or
at least with tight-drawn girdles, for before a wizard can begin to
injure them he must undo all the knots in the net, or take off the
girdles. But often a Russian amulet is merely a knotted thread. A
skein of red wool wound about the arms and legs is thought to ward
off agues and fevers; and nine skeins, fastened round a
child’s neck, are deemed a preservative against scarlatina.
In the Tver Government a bag of a special kind is tied to the neck
of the cow which walks before the rest of a herd, in order to keep
off wolves; its force binds the maw of the ravening beast. On the
same principle, a padlock is carried thrice round a herd of horses
before they go afield in the spring, and the bearer locks and
unlocks it as he goes, saying, “I lock from my herd the
mouths of the grey wolves with this steel lock.”
Knots and locks may serve to avert not only wizards and wolves
but death itself. When they brought a woman to the stake at St.
Andrews in 1572 to burn her alive for a witch, they found on her a
white cloth like a collar, with strings and many knots on the
strings. They took it from her, sorely against her will, for she
seemed to think that she could not die in the fire, if only the
cloth with the knotted strings was on her. When it was taken away,
she said, “Now I have no hope of myself.” In many parts
of England it is thought that a person cannot die so long as any
locks are locked or bolts shot in the house. It is therefore a very
common practice to undo all locks and bolts when the sufferer is
plainly near his end, in order that his agony may not be unduly
prolonged. For example, in the year 1863, at Taunton, a child lay
sick of scarlatina and death seemed inevitable. “A jury of
matrons was, as it were, empanelled, and to prevent the child
‘dying hard’ all the doors in the house, all the
drawers, all the boxes, all the cupboards were thrown wide open,
the keys taken out, and the body of the child placed under a beam,
whereby a sure, certain, and easy passage into eternity could be
secured.” Strange to say, the child declined to avail itself
of the facilities for dying so obligingly placed at its disposal by
the sagacity and experience of the British matrons of Taunton; it
preferred to live rather than give up the ghost just then.
The rule which prescribes that at certain magical and religious
ceremonies the hair should hang loose and the feet should be bare
is probably based on the same fear of trammelling and impeding the
action in hand, whatever it may be, by the presence of any knot or
constriction, whether on the head or on the feet of the performer.
A similar power to bind and hamper spiritual as well as bodily
activities is ascribed by some people to rings. Thus in the island
of Carpathus people never button the clothes they put upon a dead
body and they are careful to remove all rings from it; “for
the spirit, they say, can even be detained in the little finger,
and cannot rest.” Here it is plain that even if the soul is
not definitely supposed to issue at death from the finger-tips, yet
the ring is conceived to exercise a certain constrictive influence
which detains and imprisons the immortal spirit in spite of its
efforts to escape from the tabernacle of clay; in short the ring,
like the knot, acts as a spiritual fetter. This may have been the
reason of an ancient Greek maxim, attributed to Pythagoras, which
forbade people to wear rings. Nobody might enter the ancient
Arcadian sanctuary of the Mistress at Lycosura with a ring on his
or her finger. Persons who consulted the oracle of Faunus had to be
chaste, to eat no flesh, and to wear no rings.
On the other hand, the same constriction which hinders the
egress of the soul may prevent the entrance of evil spirits; hence
we find rings used as amulets against demons, witches, and ghosts.
In the Tyrol it is said that a woman in childbed should never take
off her wedding-ring, or spirits and witches will have power over
her. Among the Lapps, the person who is about to place a corpse in
the coffin receives from the husband, wife, or children of the
deceased a brass ring, which he must wear fastened to his right arm
until the corpse is safely deposited in the grave. The ring is
believed to serve the person as an amulet against any harm which
the ghost might do to him. How far the custom of wearing
finger-rings may have been influenced by, or even have sprung from,
a belief in their efficacy as amulets to keep the soul in the body,
or demons out of it, is a question which seems worth considering.
Here we are only concerned with the belief in so far as it seems to
throw light on the rule that the Flamen Dialis might not wear a
ring unless it were broken. Taken in conjunction with the rule
which forbade him to have a knot on his garments, it points to a
fear that the powerful spirit embodied in him might be trammelled
and hampered in its goings-out and comings-in by such corporeal and
spiritual fetters as rings and knots.
XXII. Tabooed Words
1. Personal Names tabooed
UNABLE to discriminate clearly between words and things, the
savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person
or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal
association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two
in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily
through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other
material part of his person. In fact, primitive man regards his
name as a vital portion of himself and takes care of it
accordingly. Thus, for example, the North American Indian
“regards his name, not as a mere label, but as a distinct
part of his personality, just as much as are his eyes or his teeth,
and believes that injury will result as surely from the malicious
handling of his name as from a wound inflicted on any part of his
physical organism. This belief was found among the various tribes
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and has occasioned a number of
curious regulations in regard to the concealment and change of
names.” Some Esquimaux take new names when they are old,
hoping thereby to get a new lease of life. The Tolampoos of Celebes
believe that if you write a man’s name down you can carry off
his soul along with it. Many savages at the present day regard
their names as vital parts of themselves, and therefore take great
pains to conceal their real names, lest these should give to
evil-disposed persons a handle by which to injure their owners.
Thus, to begin with the savages who rank at the bottom of the
social scale, we are told that the secrecy with which among the
Australian aborigines personal names are often kept from general
knowledge “arises in great measure from the belief that an
enemy, who knows your name, has in it something which he can use
magically to your detriment.” “An Australian
black,” says another writer, “is always very unwilling
to tell his real name, and there is no doubt that this reluctance
is due to the fear that through his name he may be injured by
sorcerers.” Amongst the tribes of Central Australia every
man, woman, and child has, besides a personal name which is in
common use, a secret or sacred name which is bestowed by the older
men upon him or her soon after birth, and which is known to none
but the fully initiated members of the group. This secret name is
never mentioned except upon the most solemn occasions; to utter it
in the hearing of women or of men of another group would be a most
serious breach of tribal custom, as serious as the most flagrant
case of sacrilege among ourselves. When mentioned at all, the name
is spoken only in a whisper, and not until the most elaborate
precautions have been taken that it shall be heard by no one but
members of the group. “The native thinks that a stranger
knowing his secret name would have special power to work him ill by
means of magic.”
The same fear seems to have led to a custom of the same sort
amongst the ancient Egyptians, whose comparatively high
civilisation was strangely dashed and chequered with relics of the
lowest savagery. Every Egyptian received two names, which were
known respectively as the true name and the good name, or the great
name and the little name; and while the good or little name was
made public, the true or great name appears to have been carefully
concealed. A Brahman child receives two names, one for common use,
the other a secret name which none but his father and mother should
know. The latter is only used at ceremonies such as marriage. The
custom is intended to protect the person against magic, since a
charm only becomes effectual in combination with the real name.
Similarly, the natives of Nias believe that harm may be done to a
person by the demons who hear his name pronounced. Hence the names
of infants, who are especially exposed to the assaults of evil
sprits, are never spoken; and often in haunted spots, such as the
gloomy depths of the forest, the banks of a river, or beside a
bubbling spring, men will abstain from calling each other by their
names for a like reason.
The Indians of Chiloe keep their names secret and do not like to
have them uttered aloud; for they say that there are fairies or
imps on the mainland or neighbouring islands who, if they knew
folk’s names, would do them an injury; but so long as they do
not know the names, these mischievous sprites are powerless. The
Araucanians will hardly ever tell a stranger their names because
they fear that he would thereby acquire some supernatural power
over themselves. Asked his name by a stranger, who is ignorant of
their superstitions, an Araucanian will answer, “I have
none.” When an Ojebway is asked his name, he will look at
some bystander and ask him to answer. “This reluctance arises
from an impression they receive when young, that if they repeat
their own names it will prevent their growth, and they will be
small in stature. On account of this unwillingness to tell their
names, many strangers have fancied that they either have no names
or have forgotten them.”
In this last case no scruple seems to be felt about
communicating a man’s name to strangers, and no ill effects
appear to be dreaded as a consequence of divulging it; harm is only
done when a name is spoken by its owner. Why is this? and why in
particular should a man be thought to stunt his growth by uttering
his own name? We may conjecture that to savages who act and think
thus a person’s name only seems to be a part of himself when
it is uttered with his own breath; uttered by the breath of others
it has no vital connexion with him, and no harm can come to him
through it. Whereas, so these primitive philosophers may have
argued, when a man lets his own name pass his lips, he is parting
with a living piece of himself, and if he persists in so reckless a
course he must certainly end by dissipating his energy and
shattering his constitution. Many a broken-down debauchee, many a
feeble frame wasted with disease, may have been pointed out by
these simple moralists to their awe-struck disciples as a fearful
example of the fate that must sooner or later overtake the
profligate who indulges immoderately in the seductive habit of
mentioning his own name.
However we may explain it, the fact is certain that many a
savage evinces the strongest reluctance to pronounce his own name,
while at the same time he makes no objection at all to other people
pronouncing it, and will even invite them to do so for him in order
to satisfy the curiosity of an inquisitive stranger. Thus in some
parts of Madagascar it is taboo for a person to tell his own name,
but a slave or attendant will answer for him. The same curious
inconsistency, as it may seem to us, is recorded of some tribes of
American Indians. Thus we are told that “the name of an
American Indian is a sacred thing, not to be divulged by the owner
himself without due consideration. One may ask a warrior of any
tribe to give his name, and the question will be met with either a
point-blank refusal or the more diplomatic evasion that he cannot
understand what is wanted of him. The moment a friend approaches,
the warrior first interrogated will whisper what is wanted, and the
friend can tell the name, receiving a reciprocation of the courtesy
from the other.” This general statement applies, for example,
to the Indian tribes of British Columbia, as to whom it is said
that “one of their strangest prejudices, which appears to
pervade all tribes alike, is a dislike to telling their
names—thus you never get a man’s right name from
himself; but they will tell each other’s names without
hesitation.” In the whole of the East Indian Archipelago the
etiquette is the same. As a general rule no one will utter his own
name. To enquire, “What is your name?” is a very
indelicate question in native society. When in the course of
administrative or judicial business a native is asked his name,
instead of replying he will look at his comrade to indicate that he
is to answer for him, or he will say straight out, “Ask
him.” The superstition is current all over the East Indies
without exception, and it is found also among the Motu and Motumotu
tribes, the Papuans of Finsch Haven in North New Guinea, the
Nufoors of Dutch New Guinea, and the Melanesians of the Bismarck
Archipelago. Among many tribes of South Africa men and women never
mention their names if they can get any one else to do it for them,
but they do not absolutely refuse when it cannot be avoided.
Sometimes the embargo laid on personal names is not permanent;
it is conditional on circumstances, and when these change it ceases
to operate. Thus when the Nandi men are away on a foray, nobody at
home may pronounce the names of the absent warriors; they must be
referred to as birds. Should a child so far forget itself as to
mention one of the distant ones by name, the mother would rebuke
it, saying, “Don’t talk of the birds who are in the
heavens.” Among the Bangala of the Upper Congo, while a man
is fishing and when he returns with his catch, his proper name is
in abeyance and nobody may mention it. Whatever the
fisherman’s real name may be, he is called mwele
without distinction. The reason is that the river is full of
spirits, who, if they heard the fisherman’s real name, might
so work against him that he would catch little or nothing. Even
when he has caught his fish and landed with them, the buyer must
still not address him by his proper name, but must only call him
mwele; for even then, if the spirits were to hear his
proper name, they would either bear it in mind and serve him out
another day, or they might so mar the fish he had caught that he
would get very little for them. Hence the fisherman can extract
heavy damages from anybody who mentions his name, or can compel the
thoughtless speaker to relieve him of the fish at a good price so
as to restore his luck. When the Sulka of New Britain are near the
territory of their enemies the Gaktei, they take care not to
mention them by their proper name, believing that were they to do
so, their foes would attack and slay them. Hence in these
circumstances they speak of the Gaktei as o lapsiek, that
is, “the rotten tree-trunks,” and they imagine that by
calling them that they make the limbs of their dreaded enemies
ponderous and clumsy like logs. This example illustrates the
extremely materialistic view which these savages take of the nature
of words; they suppose that the mere utterance of an expression
signifying clumsiness will homoeopathically affect with clumsiness
the limbs of their distant foemen. Another illustration of this
curious misconception is furnished by a Caffre superstition that
the character of a young thief can be reformed by shouting his name
over a boiling kettle of medicated water, then clapping a lid on
the kettle and leaving the name to steep in the water for several
days. It is not in the least necessary that the thief should be
aware of the use that is being made of his name behind his back;
the moral reformation will be effected without his knowledge.
When it is deemed necessary that a man’s real name should
be kept secret, it is often customary, as we have seen, to call him
by a surname or nickname. As distinguished from the real or primary
names, these secondary names are apparently held to be no part of
the man himself, so that they may be freely used and divulged to
everybody without endangering his safety thereby. Sometimes in
order to avoid the use of his own name a man will be called after
his child. Thus we are informed that “the Gippsland blacks
objected strongly to let any one outside the tribe know their
names, lest their enemies, learning them, should make them vehicles
of incantation, and so charm their lives away. As children were not
thought to have enemies, they used to speak of a man as ‘the
father, uncle, or cousin of So-and-so,’ naming a child; but
on all occasions abstained from mentioning the name of a grown-up
person.” The Alfoors of Poso in Celebes will not pronounce
their own names. Among them, accordingly, if you wish to ascertain
a person’s name, you ought not to ask the man himself, but
should enquire of others. But if this is impossible, for example,
when there is no one else near, you should ask him his
child’s name, and then address him as the “Father of
So-and-so.” Nay, these Alfoors are shy of uttering the names
even of children; so when a boy or girl has a nephew or niece, he
or she is addressed as “Uncle of So-and-so,” or
“Aunt of So-and-so.” In pure Malay society, we are
told, a man is never asked his name, and the custom of naming
parents after their children is adopted only as a means of avoiding
the use of the parents’ own names. The writer who makes this
statement adds in confirmation of it that childless persons are
named after their younger brothers. Among the Land Dyaks children
as they grow up are called, according to their sex, the father or
mother of a child of their father’s or mother’s younger
brother or sister, that is, they are called the father or mother of
what we should call their first cousin. The Caffres used to think
it discourteous to call a bride by her own name, so they would call
her “the Mother of So-and-so,” even when she was only
betrothed, far less a wife and a mother. Among the Kukis and Zemis
or Kacha Nagas of Assam parents drop their names after the birth of
a child and are named Father and Mother of So-and-so. Childless
couples go by the name of “the childless father,”
“the childless mother,” “the father of no
child,” “the mother of no child.” The widespread
custom of naming a father after his child has sometimes been
supposed to spring from a desire on the father’s part to
assert his paternity, apparently as a means of obtaining those
rights over his children which had previously, under a system of
mother-kin, been possessed by the mother. But this explanation does
not account for the parallel custom of naming the mother after her
child, which seems commonly to co-exist with the practice of naming
the father after the child. Still less, if possible, does it apply
to the customs of calling childless couples the father and mother
of children which do not exist, of naming people after their
younger brothers, and of designating children as the uncles and
aunts of So-and-so, or as the fathers and mothers of their first
cousins. But all these practices are explained in a simple and
natural way if we suppose that they originate in a reluctance to
utter the real names of persons addressed or directly referred to.
That reluctance is probably based partly on a fear of attracting
the notice of evil spirits, partly on a dread of revealing the name
to sorcerers, who would thereby obtain a handle for injuring the
owner of the name.
2. Names of Relations tabooed
IT might naturally be expected that the reserve so commonly
maintained with regard to personal names would be dropped or at
least relaxed among relations and friends. But the reverse of this
is often the case. It is precisely the persons most intimately
connected by blood and especially by marriage to whom the rule
applies with the greatest stringency. Such people are often
forbidden, not only to pronounce each other’s names, but even
to utter ordinary words which resemble or have a single syllable in
common with these names. The persons who are thus mutually debarred
from mentioning each other’s names are especially husbands
and wives, a man and his wife’s parents, and a woman and her
husband’s father. For example, among the Caffres a woman may
not publicly pronounce the birth-name of her husband or of any of
his brothers, nor may she use the interdicted word in its ordinary
sense. If her husband, for instance, be called u-Mpaka, from
impaka, a small feline animal, she must speak of that
beast by some other name. Further, a Caffre wife is forbidden to
pronounce even mentally the names of her father-in-law and of all
her husband’s male relations in the ascending line; and
whenever the emphatic syllable of any of their names occurs in
another word, she must avoid it by substituting either an entirely
new word, or, at least, another syllable in its place. Hence this
custom has given rise to an almost distinct language among the
women, which the Caffres call “women’s speech.”
The interpretation of this “women’s speech” is
naturally very difficult, “for no definite rules can be given
for the formation of these substituted words, nor is it possible to
form a dictionary of them, their number being so great—since
there may be many women, even in the same tribe, who would be no
more at liberty to use the substitutes employed by some others,
than they are to use the original words themselves.” A Caffre
man, on his side, may not mention the name of his mother-in-law,
nor may she pronounce his; but he is free to utter words in which
the emphatic syllable of her name occurs. A Kirghiz woman dares not
pronounce the names of the older relations of her husband, nor even
use words which resemble them in sound. For example, if one of
these relations is called Shepherd, she may not speak of sheep, but
must call them “the bleating ones”; if his name is
Lamb, she must refer to lambs as “the young bleating
ones.” In Southern India wives believe that to tell their
husband’s name or to pronounce it even in a dream would bring
him to an untimely end. Among the Sea Dyaks a man may not pronounce
the name of his father-in-law or mother-in-law without incurring
the wrath of the spirits. And since he reckons as his father-in-law
and mother-in-law not only the father and mother of his own wife,
but also the fathers and mothers of his brothers’ wives and
sisters’ husbands, and likewise the fathers and mothers of
all his cousins, the number of tabooed names may be very
considerable and the opportunities of error correspondingly
numerous. To make confusion worse confounded, the names of persons
are often the names of common things, such as moon, bridge, barley,
cobra, leopard; so that when any of a man’s many
fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law are called by such names, these
common words may not pass his lips. Among the Alfoors of Minahassa,
in Celebes, the custom is carried still further so as to forbid the
use even of words which merely resemble the personal names in
sound. It is especially the name of a father-in-law which is thus
laid under an interdict. If he, for example, is called Kalala, his
son-in-law may not speak of a horse by its common name
kawalo; he must call it a “riding-beast”
(sasakajan). So among the Alfoors of the island of Buru it
is taboo to mention the names of parents and parents-in-law, or
even to speak of common objects by words which resemble these names
in sound. Thus, if your mother-in-law is called Dalu, which means
“betel,” you may not ask for betel by its ordinary
name, you must ask for “red mouth”; if you want
betel-leaf, you may not say betel-leaf (dalu ’mun),
you must say karon fenna. In the same island it is also
taboo to mention the name of an elder brother in his presence.
Transgressions of these rules are punished with fines. In Sunda it
is thought that a particular crop would be spoilt if a man were to
mention the names of his father and mother.
Among the Nufoors of Dutch New Guinea persons who are related to
each other by marriage are forbidden to mention each other’s
names. Among the connexions whose names are thus tabooed are wife,
mother-in-law, father-in-law, your wife’s uncles and aunts
and also her grand-uncles and grand-aunts, and the whole of your
wife’s or your husband’s family in the same generation
as yourself, except that men may mention the names of their
brothers-in-law, though women may not. The taboo comes into
operation as soon as the betrothal has taken place and before the
marriage has been celebrated. Families thus connected by the
betrothal of two of their members are not only forbidden to
pronounce each other’s names; they may not even look at each
other, and the rule gives rise to the most comical scenes when they
happen to meet unexpectedly. And not merely the names themselves,
but any words that sound like them are scrupulously avoided and
other words used in their place. If it should chance that a person
has inadvertently uttered a forbidden name, he must at once throw
himself on the floor and say, “I have mentioned a wrong name.
I throw it through the chinks of the floor in order that I may eat
well.”
In the western islands of Torres Straits a man never mentioned
the personal names of his father-in-law, mother-in-law,
brother-in-law, and sister-in-law; and a woman was subject to the
same restrictions. A brother-in-law might be spoken of as the
husband or brother of some one whose name it was lawful to mention;
and similarly a sister-in-law might be called the wife of
So-and-so. If a man by chance used the personal name of his
brother-in-law, he was ashamed and hung his head. His shame was
only relieved when he had made a present as compensation to the man
whose name he had taken in vain. The same compensation was made to
a sister-in-law, a father-in-law, and a mother-in-law for the
accidental mention of their names. Among the natives who inhabit
the coast of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain to mention the
name of a brother-in-law is the grossest possible affront you can
offer to him; it is a crime punishable with death. In the
Banks’ Islands, Melanesia, the taboos laid on the names of
persons connected by marriage are very strict. A man will not
mention the name of his father-in-law, much less the name of his
mother-in-law, nor may he name his wife’s brother; but he may
name his wife’s sister—she is nothing to him. A woman
may not name her father-in-law, nor on any account her son-in-law.
Two people whose children have intermarried are also debarred from
mentioning each other’s names. And not only are all these
persons forbidden to utter each other’s names; they may not
even pronounce ordinary words which chance to be either identical
with these names or to have any syllables in common with them. Thus
we hear of a native of these islands who might not use the common
words for “pig” and “to die,” because these
words occurred in the polysyllabic name of his son-in-law; and we
are told of another unfortunate who might not pronounce the
everyday words for “hand” and “hot” on
account of his wife’s brother’s name, and who was even
debarred from mentioning the number “one,” because the
word for “one” formed part of the name of his
wife’s cousin.
The reluctance to mention the names or even syllables of the
names of persons connected with the speaker by marriage can hardly
be separated from the reluctance evinced by so many people to utter
their own names or the names of the dead or of the dead or of
chiefs and kings; and if the reticence as to these latter names
springs mainly from superstition, we may infer that the reticence
as to the former has no better foundation. That the savage’s
unwillingness to mention his own name is based, at least in part,
on a superstitious fear of the ill use that might be made of it by
his foes, whether human or spiritual, has already been shown. It
remains to examine the similar usage in regard to the names of the
dead and of royal personages.
3. Names of the Dead tabooed
THE CUSTOM of abstaining from all mention of the names of the
dead was observed in antiquity by the Albanians of the Caucasus,
and at the present day it is in full force among many savage
tribes. Thus we are told that one of the customs most rigidly
observed and enforced amongst the Australian aborigines is never to
mention the name of a deceased person, whether male or female; to
name aloud one who has departed this life would be a gross
violation of their most sacred prejudices, and they carefully
abstain from it. The chief motive for this abstinence appears to be
a fear of evoking the ghost, although the natural unwillingness to
revive past sorrows undoubtedly operates also to draw the veil of
oblivion over the names of the dead. Once Mr. Oldfield so terrified
a native by shouting out the name of a deceased person, that the
man fairly took to his heels and did not venture to show himself
again for several days. At their next meeting he bitterly
reproached the rash white man for his indiscretion; “nor
could I,” adds Mr. Oldfield, “induce him by any means
to utter the awful sound of a dead man’s name, for by so
doing he would have placed himself in the power of the malign
spirits.” Among the aborigines of Victoria the dead were very
rarely spoken of, and then never by their names; they were referred
to in a subdued voice as “the lost one” or “the
poor fellow that is no more.” To speak of them by name would,
it was supposed, excite the malignity of Couit-gil, the spirit of
the departed, which hovers on earth for a time before it departs
for ever towards the setting sun. Of the tribes on the Lower Murray
River we are told that when a person dies “they carefully
avoid mentioning his name; but if compelled to do so, they
pronounce it in a very low whisper, so faint that they imagine the
spirit cannot hear their voice.” Amongst the tribes of
Central Australia no one may utter the name of the deceased during
the period of mourning, unless it is absolutely necessary to do so,
and then it is only done in a whisper for fear of disturbing and
annoying the man’s spirit which is walking about in ghostly
form. If the ghost hears his name mentioned he concludes that his
kinsfolk are not mourning for him properly; if their grief were
genuine they could not bear to bandy his name about. Touched to the
quick by their hard-hearted indifference the indignant ghost will
come and trouble them in dreams.
The same reluctance to utter the names of the dead appears to
prevail among all the Indian tribes of America from Hudson’s
Bay Territory to Patagonia. Among the Goajiros of Colombia to
mention the dead before his kinsmen is a dreadful offence, which is
often punished with death; for if it happens on the rancho
of the deceased, in presence of his nephew or uncle, they will
assuredly kill the offender on the spot if they can. But if he
escapes, the penalty resolves itself into a heavy fine, usually of
two or more oxen.
A similar reluctance to mention the names of the dead is
reported of peoples so widely separated from each other as the
Samoyeds of Siberia and the Todas of Southern India; the Mongols of
Tartary and the Tuaregs of the Sahara; the Ainos of Japan and the
Akamba and Nandi of Eastern Africa; the Tinguianes of the
Philippines and the inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands, of Borneo,
of Madagascar, and of Tasmania. In all cases, even where it is not
expressly stated, the fundamental reason for this avoidance is
probably the fear of the ghost. That this is the real motive with
the Tuaregs we are positively informed. They dread the return of
the dead man’s spirit, and do all they can to avoid it by
shifting their camp after a death, ceasing for ever to pronounce
the name of the departed, and eschewing everything that might be
regarded as an evocation or recall of his soul. Hence they do not,
like the Arabs, designate individuals by adding to their personal
names the names of their fathers; they never speak of So-and-so,
son of So-and-so; they give to every man a name which will live and
die with him. So among some of the Victorian tribes in Australia
personal names were rarely perpetuated, because the natives
believed that any one who adopted the name of a deceased person
would not live long; probably his ghostly namesake was supposed to
come and fetch him away to the spirit-land.
The same fear of the ghost, which moves people to suppress his
old name, naturally leads all persons who bear a similar name to
exchange it for another, lest its utterance should attract the
attention of the ghost, who cannot reasonably be expected to
discriminate between all the different applications of the same
name. Thus we are told that in the Adelaide and Encounter Bay
tribes of South Australia the repugnance to mentioning the names of
those who have died lately is carried so far, that persons who bear
the same name as the deceased abandon it, and either adopt
temporary names or are known by any others that happen to belong to
them. A similar custom prevails among some of the Queensland
tribes; but the prohibition to use the names of the dead is not
permanent, though it may last for many years. In some Australian
tribes the change of name thus brought about is permanent; the old
name is laid aside for ever, and the man is known by his new name
for the rest of his life, or at least until he is obliged to change
it again for a like reason. Among the North American Indians all
persons, whether men or women, who bore the name of one who had
just died were obliged to abandon it and to adopt other names,
which was formally done at the first ceremony of mourning for the
dead. In some tribes to the east of the Rocky Mountains this change
of name lasted only during the season of mourning, but in other
tribes on the Pacific Coast of North America it seems to have been
permanent.
Sometimes by an extension of the same reasoning all the near
relations of the deceased change their names, whatever they may
happen to be, doubtless from a fear that the sound of the familiar
names might lure back the vagrant spirit to its old home. Thus in
some Victorian tribes the ordinary names of all the next of kin
were disused during the period of mourning, and certain general
terms, prescribed by custom, were substituted for them. To call a
mourner by his own name was considered an insult to the departed,
and often led to fighting and bloodshed. Among Indian tribes of
North-western America near relations of the deceased often change
their names “under an impression that spirits will be
attracted back to earth if they hear familiar names often
repeated.” Among the Kiowa Indians the name of the dead is
never spoken in the presence of the relatives, and on the death of
any member of a family all the others take new names. This custom
was noted by Raleigh’s colonists on Roanoke Island more than
three centuries ago. Among the Lengua Indians not only is a dead
man’s name never mentioned, but all the survivors change
their names also. They say that Death has been among them and has
carried off a list of the living, and that he will soon come back
for more victims; hence in order to defeat his fell purpose they
change their names, believing that on his return Death, though he
has got them all on his list, will not be able to identify them
under their new names, and will depart to pursue the search
elsewhere. Nicobarese mourners take new names in order to escape
the unwelcome attentions of the ghost; and for the same purpose
they disguise themselves by shaving their heads so that the ghost
is unable to recognise them.
Further, when the name of the deceased happens to be that of
some common object, such as an animal, or plant, or fire, or water,
it is sometimes considered necessary to drop that word in ordinary
speech and replace it by another. A custom of this sort, it is
plain, may easily be a potent agent of change in language; for
where it prevails to any considerable extent many words must
constantly become obsolete and new ones spring up. And this
tendency has been remarked by observers who have recorded the
custom in Australia, America, and elsewhere. For example, with
regard to the Australian aborigines it has been noted that
“the dialects change with almost every tribe. Some tribes
name their children after natural objects; and when the person so
named dies, the word is never again mentioned; another word has
therefore to be invented for the object after which the child was
called.” The writer gives as an instance the case of a man
whose name Karla signified “fire”; when Karla died, a
new word for fire had to be introduced. “Hence,” adds
the writer, “the language is always changing.” Again,
in the Encounter Bay tribe of South Australia, if a man of the name
of Ngnke, which means “water,” were to die, the whole
tribe would be obliged to use some other word to express water for
a considerable time after his decease. The writer who records this
custom surmises that it may explain the presence of a number of
synonyms in the language of the tribe. This conjecture is confirmed
by what we know of some Victorian tribes whose speech comprised a
regular set of synonyms to be used instead of the common terms by
all members of a tribe in times of mourning. For instance, if a man
called Waa ( “crow”) departed this life, during the
period of mourning for him nobody might call a crow a waa;
everybody had to speak of the bird as a narrapart. When a
person who rejoiced in the title of Ringtail Opossum
(weearn) had gone the way of all flesh, his sorrowing
relations and the tribe at large were bound for a time to refer to
ringtail opossums by the more sonorous name of
manuungkuurt. If the community were plunged in grief for
the loss of a respected female who bore the honourable name of
Turkey Bustard, the proper name for turkey bustards, which was
barrim barrim, went out, and tillit tilliitsh
came in. And so mutatis mutandis with the names of Black
Cockatoo, Grey Duck, Gigantic Crane, Kangaroo, Eagle, Dingo, and
the rest.
A similar custom used to be constantly transforming the language
of the Abipones of Paraguay, amongst whom, however, a word once
abolished seems never to have been revived. New words, says the
missionary Dobrizhoffer, sprang up every year like mushrooms in a
night, because all words that resembled the names of the dead were
abolished by proclamation and others coined in their place. The
mint of words was in the hands of the old women of the tribe, and
whatever term they stamped with their approval and put in
circulation was immediately accepted without a murmur by high and
low alike, and spread like wildfire through every camp and
settlement of the tribe. You would be astonished, says the same
missionary, to see how meekly the whole nation acquiesces in the
decision of a withered old hag, and how completely the old familiar
words fall instantly out of use and are never repeated either
through force of habit or forgetfulness. In the seven years that
Dobrizhoffer spent among these Indians the native word for jaguar
was changed thrice, and the words for crocodile, thorn, and the
slaughter of cattle underwent similar though less varied
vicissitudes. As a result of this habit, the vocabularies of the
missionaries teemed with erasures, old words having constantly to
be struck out as obsolete and new ones inserted in their place. In
many tribes of British New Guinea the names of persons are also the
names of common things. The people believe that if the name of a
deceased person is pronounced, his spirit will return, and as they
have no wish to see it back among them the mention of his name is
tabooed and a new word is created to take its place, whenever the
name happens to be a common term of the language. Consequently many
words are permanently lost or revived with modified or new
meanings. In the Nicobar Islands a similar practice has similarly
affected the speech of the natives. “A most singular
custom,” says Mr. de Roepstorff, “prevails among them
which one would suppose must most effectually hinder the
‘making of history,’ or, at any rate, the transmission
of historical narrative. By a strict rule, which has all the
sanction of Nicobar superstition, no man’s name may be
mentioned after his death! To such a length is this carried that
when, as very frequently happens, the man rejoiced in the name of
‘Fowl,’ ‘Hat’, ‘Fire,’
‘Road,’ etc., in its Nicobarese equivalent, the use of
these words is carefully eschewed for the future, not only as being
the personal designation of the deceased, but even as the names of
the common things they represent; the words die out of the
language, and either new vocables are coined to express the thing
intended, or a substitute for the disused word is found in other
Nicobarese dialects or in some foreign tongue. This extraordinary
custom not only adds an element of instability to the language, but
destroys the continuity of political life, and renders the record
of past events precarious and vague, if not impossible.”
That a superstition which suppresses the names of the dead must
cut at the very root of historical tradition has been remarked by
other workers in this field. “The Klamath people,”
observes Mr. A. S. Gatschet, “possess no historic traditions
going further back in time than a century, for the simple reason
that there was a strict law prohibiting the mention of the person
or acts of a deceased individual by using his name. This
law was rigidly observed among the Californians no less than among
the Oregonians, and on its transgression the death penalty could be
inflicted. This is certainly enough to suppress all historical
knowledge within a people. How can history be written without
names?”
In many tribes, however, the power of this superstition to blot
out the memory of the past is to some extent weakened and impaired
by a natural tendency of the human mind. Time, which wears out the
deepest impressions, inevitably dulls, if it does not wholly
efface, the print left on the savage mind by the mystery and horror
of death. Sooner or later, as the memory of his loved ones fades
slowly away, he becomes more willing to speak of them, and thus
their rude names may sometimes be rescued by the philosophic
enquirer before they have vanished, like autumn leaves or winter
snows, into the vast undistinguished limbo of the past. In some of
the Victorian tribes the prohibition to mention the names of the
dead remained in force only during the period of mourning; in the
Port Lincoln tribe of South Australia it lasted many years. Among
the Chinook Indians of North America “custom forbids the
mention of a dead man’s name, at least till many years have
elapsed after the bereavement.” Among the Puyallup Indians
the observance of the taboo is relaxed after several years, when
the mourners have forgotten their grief; and if the deceased was a
famous warrior, one of his descendants, for instance a
great-grandson, may be named after him. In this tribe the taboo is
not much observed at any time except by the relations of the dead.
Similarly the Jesuit missionary Lafitau tells us that the name of
the departed and the similar names of the survivors were, so to
say, buried with the corpse until, the poignancy of their grief
being abated, it pleased the relations “to lift up the tree
and raise the dead.” By raising the dead they meant bestowing
the name of the departed upon some one else, who thus became to all
intents and purposes a reincarnation of the deceased, since on the
principles of savage philosophy the name is a vital part, if not
the soul, of the man.
Among the Lapps, when a woman was with child and near the time
of her delivery, a deceased ancestor or relation used to appear to
her in a dream and inform her what dead person was to be born again
in her infant, and whose name the child was therefore to bear. If
the woman had no such dream, it fell to the father or the relatives
to determine the name by divination or by consulting a wizard.
Among the Khonds a birth is celebrated on the seventh day after the
event by a feast given to the priest and to the whole village. To
determine the child’s name the priest drops grains of rice
into a cup of water, naming with each grain a deceased ancestor.
From the movements of the seed in the water, and from observations
made on the person of the infant, he pronounces which of his
progenitors has reappeared in him, and the child generally, at
least among the northern tribes, receives the name of that
ancestor. Among the Yorubas, soon after a child has been born, a
priest of Ifa, the god of divination, appears on the scene to
ascertain what ancestral soul has been reborn in the infant. As
soon as this has been decided, the parents are told that the child
must conform in all respects to the manner of life of the ancestor
who now animates him or her, and if, as often happens, they profess
ignorance, the priest supplies the necessary information. The child
usually receives the name of the ancestor who has been born again
in him.
4. Names of Kings and other Sacred Persons tabooed
WHEN we see that in primitive society the names of mere
commoners, whether alive or dead, are matters of such anxious care,
we need not be surprised that great precautions should be taken to
guard from harm the names of sacred kings and priests. Thus the
name of the king of Dahomey is always kept secret, lest the
knowledge of it should enable some evil-minded person to do him a
mischief. The appellations by which the different kings of Dahomey
have been known to Europeans are not their true names, but mere
titles, or what the natives call “strong names.” The
natives seem to think that no harm comes of such titles being
known, since they are not, like the birth-names, vitally connected
with their owners. In the Galla kingdom of Ghera the birth-name of
the sovereign may not be pronounced by a subject under pain of
death, and common words which resemble it in sound are changed for
others. Among the Bahima of Central Africa, when the king dies, his
name is abolished from the language, and if his name was that of an
animal, a new appellation must be found for the creature at once.
For example, the king is often called a lion; hence at the death of
a king named Lion a new name for lions in general has to be coined.
In Siam it used to be difficult to ascertain the king’s real
name, since it was carefully kept secret from fear of sorcery; any
one who mentioned it was clapped into gaol. The king might only be
referred to under certain high-sounding titles, such as “the
august,” “the perfect,” “the
supreme,” “the great emperor,” “descendant
of the angels,” and so on. In Burma it was accounted an
impiety of the deepest dye to mention the name of the reigning
sovereign; Burmese subjects, even when they were far from their
country, could not be prevailed upon to do so; after his accession
to the throne the king was known by his royal titles only.
Among the Zulus no man will mention the name of the chief of his
tribe or the names of the progenitors of the chief, so far as he
can remember them; nor will he utter common words which coincide
with or merely resemble in sound tabooed names. In the tribe of the
Dwandwes there was a chief called Langa, which means the sun; hence
the name of the sun was changed from langa to
gala, and so remains to this day, though Langa died more
than a hundred years ago. Again, in the Xnumayo tribe the word
meaning “to herd cattle” was changed from alusa or
ayusa to kagesa, because u-Mayusi was the name of the
chief. Besides these taboos, which were observed by each tribe
separately, all the Zulu tribes united in tabooing the name of the
king who reigned over the whole nation. Hence, for example, when
Panda was king of Zululand, the word for “a root of a
tree,” which is impando, was changed to
nxabo. Again, the word for “lies” or
“slander” was altered from amacebo to
amakwata, because amacebo contains a syllable of
the name of the famous King Cetchwayo. These substitutions are not,
however, carried so far by the men as by the women, who omit every
sound even remotely resembling one that occurs in a tabooed name.
At the king’s kraal, indeed, it is sometimes difficult to
understand the speech of the royal wives, as they treat in this
fashion the names not only of the king and his forefathers, but
even of his and their brothers back for generations. When to these
tribal and national taboos we add those family taboos on the names
of connexions by marriage which have been already described, we can
easily understand how it comes about that in Zululand every tribe
has words peculiar to itself, and that the women have a
considerable vocabulary of their own. Members, too, of one family
may be debarred from using words employed by those of another. The
women of one kraal, for instance, may call a hyaena by its ordinary
name; those of the next may use the common substitute; while in a
third the substitute may also be unlawful and another term may have
to be invented to supply its place. Hence the Zulu language at the
present day almost presents the appearance of being a double one;
indeed, for multitudes of things it possesses three or four
synonyms, which through the blending of tribes are known all over
Zululand.
In Madagascar a similar custom everywhere prevails and has
resulted, as among the Zulus, in producing certain dialectic
differences in the speech of the various tribes. There are no
family names in Madagascar, and almost every personal name is drawn
from the language of daily life and signifies some common object or
action or quality, such as a bird, a beast, a tree, a plant, a
colour, and so on. Now, whenever one of these common words forms
the name or part of the name of the chief of the tribe, it becomes
sacred and may no longer be used in its ordinary signification as
the name of a tree, an insect, or what not. Hence a new name for
the object must be invented to replace the one which has been
discarded. It is easy to conceive what confusion and uncertainty
may thus be introduced into a language when it is spoken by many
little local tribes each ruled by a petty chief with his own sacred
name. Yet there are tribes and people who submit to this tyranny of
words as their fathers did before them from time immemorial. The
inconvenient results of the custom are especially marked on the
western coast of the island, where, on account of the large number
of independent chieftains, the names of things, places, and rivers
have suffered so many changes that confusion often arises, for when
once common words have been banned by the chiefs the natives will
not acknowledge to have ever known them in their old sense.
But it is not merely the names of living kings and chiefs which
are tabooed in Madagascar; the names of dead sovereigns are equally
under a ban, at least in some parts of the island. Thus among the
Sakalavas, when a king has died, the nobles and people meet in
council round the dead body and solemnly choose a new name by which
the deceased monarch shall be henceforth known. After the new name
has been adopted, the old name by which the king was known during
his life becomes sacred and may not be pronounced under pain of
death. Further, words in the common language which bear any
resemblance to the forbidden name also become sacred and have to be
replaced by others. Persons who uttered these forbidden words were
looked on not only as grossly rude, but even as felons; they had
committed a capital crime. However, these changes of vocabulary are
confined to the district over which the deceased king reigned; in
the neighbouring districts the old words continue to be employed in
the old sense.
The sanctity attributed to the persons of chiefs in Polynesia
naturally extended also to their names, which on the primitive view
are hardly separable from the personality of their owners. Hence in
Polynesia we find the same systematic prohibition to utter the
names of chiefs or of common words resembling them which we have
already met with in Zululand and Madagascar. Thus in New Zealand
the name of a chief is held so sacred that, when it happens to be a
common word, it may not be used in the language, and another has to
be found to replace it. For example, a chief of the southward of
East Cape bore the name of Maripi, which signified a knife, hence a
new word (nekra) for knife was introduced, and the old one
became obsolete. Elsewhere the word for water (wai) had to
be changed, because it chanced to be the name of the chief, and
would have been desecrated by being applied to the vulgar fluid as
well as to his sacred person. This taboo naturally produced a
plentiful crop of synonyms in the Maori language, and travellers
newly arrived in the country were sometimes puzzled at finding the
same things called by quite different names in neighbouring tribes.
When a king comes to the throne in Tahiti, any words in the
language that resemble his name in sound must be changed for
others. In former times, if any man were so rash as to disregard
this custom and to use the forbidden words, not only he but all his
relations were immediately put to death. But the changes thus
introduced were only temporary; on the death of the king the new
words fell into disuse, and the original ones were revived.
In ancient Greece the names of the priests and other high
officials who had to do with the performance of the Eleusinian
mysteries might not be uttered in their lifetime. To pronounce them
was a legal offence The pedant in Lucian tells how he fell in with
these august personages haling along to the police court a ribald
fellow who had dared to name them, though well he knew that ever
since their consecration it was unlawful to do so, because they had
become anonymous, having lost their old names and acquired new and
sacred titles. From two inscriptions found at Eleusis it appears
that the names of the priests were committed to the depths of the
sea; probably they were engraved on tablets of bronze or lead,
which were then thrown into deep water in the Gulf of Salamis. The
intention doubtless was to keep the names a profound secret; and
how could that be done more surely than by sinking them in the sea?
what human vision could spy them glimmering far down in the dim
depths of the green water? A clearer illustration of the confusion
between the incorporeal and the corporeal, between the name and its
material embodiment, could hardly be found than in this practice of
civilised Greece.
5. Names of Gods tabooed
PRIMITIVE man creates his gods in his own image. Xenophanes
remarked long ago that the complexion of negro gods was black and
their noses flat; that Thracian gods were ruddy and blue-eyed; and
that if horses, oxen, and lions only believed in gods and had hands
wherewith to portray them, they would doubtless fashion their
deities in the form of horses, and oxen, and lions. Hence just as
the furtive savage conceals his real name because he fears that
sorcerers might make an evil use of it, so he fancies that his gods
must likewise keep their true name secret, lest other gods or even
men should learn the mystic sounds and thus be able to conjure with
them. Nowhere was this crude conception of the secrecy and magical
virtue of the divine name more firmly held or more fully developed
than in ancient Egypt, where the superstitions of a dateless past
were embalmed in the hearts of the people hardly less effectually
than the bodies of cats and crocodiles and the rest of the divine
menagerie in their rock-cut tombs. The conception is well
illustrated by a story which tells how the subtle Isis wormed his
secret name from Ra, the great Egyptian god of the sun. Isis, so
runs the tale, was a woman mighty in words, and she was weary of
the world of men, and yearned after the world of the gods. And she
meditated in her heart, saying, “Cannot I by virtue of the
great name of Ra make myself a goddess and reign like him in heaven
and earth?” For Ra had many names, but the great name which
gave him all power over gods and men was known to none but himself.
Now the god was by this time grown old; he slobbered at the mouth
and his spittle fell upon the ground. So Isis gathered up the
spittle and the earth with it, and kneaded thereof a serpent and
laid it in the path where the great god passed every day to his
double kingdom after his heart’s desire. And when he came
forth according to his wont, attended by all his company of gods,
the sacred serpent stung him, and the god opened his mouth and
cried, and his cry went up to heaven. And the company of gods
cried, “What aileth thee?” and the gods shouted,
“Lo and behold!” But he could not answer; his jaws
rattled, his limbs shook, the poison ran through his flesh as the
Nile floweth over the land. When the great god had stilled his
heart, he cried to his followers, “Come to me, O my children,
offspring of my body. I am a prince, the son of a prince, the
divine seed of a god. My father devised my name; my father and my
mother gave me my name, and it remained hidden in my body since my
birth, that no magician might have magic power over me. I went out
to behold that which I have made, I walked in the two lands which I
have created, and lo! something stung me. What it was, I know not.
Was it fire? was it water? My heart is on fire, my flesh trembleth,
all my limbs do quake. Bring me the children of the gods with
healing words and understanding lips, whose power reacheth to
heaven.” Then came to him the children of the gods, and they
were very sorrowful. And Isis came with her craft, whose mouth is
full of the breath of life, whose spells chase pain away, whose
word maketh the dead to live. She said, “What is it, divine
Father? what is it?” The holy god opened his mouth, he spake
and said, “I went upon my way, I walked after my
heart’s desire in the two regions which I have made to behold
that which I have created, and lo! a serpent that I saw not stung
me. Is it fire? is it water? I am colder than water, I am hotter
than fire, all my limbs sweat, I tremble, mine eye is not
steadfast, I behold not the sky, the moisture bedeweth my face as
in summer-time.” Then spake Isis, “Tell me thy name,
divine Father, for the man shall live who is called by his
name.” Then answered Ra, “I created the heavens and the
earth, I ordered the mountains, I made the great and wide sea, I
stretched out the two horizons like a curtain. I am he who openeth
his eyes and it is light, and who shutteth them and it is dark. At
his command the Nile riseth, but the gods know not his name. I am
Khepera in the morning, I am Ra at noon, I am Tum at eve.”
But the poison was not taken away from him; it pierced deeper, and
the great god could no longer walk. Then said Isis to him,
“That was not thy name that thou spakest unto me. Oh tell it
me, that the poison may depart; for he shall live whose name is
named.” Now the poison burned like fire, it was hotter than
the flame of fire. The god said, “I consent that Isis shall
search into me, and that my name shall pass from my breast into
hers.” Then the god hid himself from the gods, and his place
in the ship of eternity was empty. Thus was the name of the great
god taken from him, and Isis, the witch, spake, “Flow away,
poison, depart from Ra. It is I, even I, who overcome the poison
and cast it to the earth; for the name of the great god hath been
taken away from him. Let Ra live and let the poison die.”
Thus spake great Isis, the queen of the gods, she who knows Ra and
his true name.
From this story it appears that the real name of the god, with
which his power was inextricably bound up, was supposed to be
lodged, in an almost physical sense, somewhere in his breast, from
which Isis extracted it by a sort of surgical operation and
transferred it with all its supernatural powers to herself. In
Egypt attempts like that of Isis to appropriate the power of a high
god by possessing herself of his name were not mere legends told of
the mythical beings of a remote past; every Egyptian magician
aspired to wield like powers by similar means. For it was believed
that he who possessed the true name possessed the very being of god
or man, and could force even a deity to obey him as a slave obeys
his master. Thus the art of the magician consisted in obtaining
from the gods a revelation of their sacred names, and he left no
stone unturned to accomplish his end. When once a god in a moment
of weakness or forgetfulness had imparted to the wizard the
wondrous lore, the deity had no choice but to submit humbly to the
man or pay the penalty of his contumacy.
The belief in the magic virtue of divine names was shared by the
Romans. When they sat down before a city, the priests addressed the
guardian deity of the place in a set form of prayer or incantation,
inviting him to abandon the beleaguered city and come over to the
Romans, who would treat him as well as or better than he had ever
been treated in his old home. Hence the name of the guardian deity
of Rome was kept a profound secret, lest the enemies of the
republic might lure him away, even as the Romans themselves had
induced many gods to desert, like rats, the falling fortunes of
cities that had sheltered them in happier days. Nay, the real name,
not merely of its guardian deity, but of the city itself, was wrapt
in mystery and might never be uttered, not even in the sacred
rites. A certain Valerius Soranus, who dared to divulge the
priceless secret, was put to death or came to a bad end. In like
manner, it seems, the ancient Assyrians were forbidden to mention
the mystic names of their cities; and down to modern times the
Cheremiss of the Caucasus keep the names of their communal villages
secret from motives of superstition.
If the reader has had the patience to follow this examination of
the superstitions attaching to personal names, he will probably
agree that the mystery in which the names of royal personages are
so often shrouded is no isolated phenomenon, no arbitrary
expression of courtly servility and adulation, but merely the
particular application of a general law of primitive thought, which
includes within its scope common folk and gods as well as kings and
priests.
XXIII. Our Debt to the Savage
IT would be easy to extend the list of royal and priestly
taboos, but the instances collected in the preceding pages may
suffice as specimens. To conclude this part of our subject it only
remains to state summarily the general conclusions to which our
enquiries have thus far conducted us. We have seen that in savage
or barbarous society there are often found men to whom the
superstition of their fellows ascribes a controlling influence over
the general course of nature. Such men are accordingly adored and
treated as gods. Whether these human divinities also hold temporal
sway over the lives and fortunes of their adorers, or whether their
functions are purely spiritual and supernatural, in other words,
whether they are kings as well as gods or only the latter, is a
distinction which hardly concerns us here. Their supposed divinity
is the essential fact with which we have to deal. In virtue of it
they are a pledge and guarantee to their worshippers of the
continuance and orderly succession of those physical phenomena upon
which mankind depends for subsistence. Naturally, therefore, the
life and health of such a god-man are matters of anxious concern to
the people whose welfare and even existence are bound up with his;
naturally he is constrained by them to conform to such rules as the
wit of early man has devised for averting the ills to which flesh
is heir, including the last ill, death. These rules, as an
examination of them has shown, are nothing but the maxims with
which, on the primitive view, every man of common prudence must
comply if he would live long in the land. But while in the case of
ordinary men the observance of the rules is left to the choice of
the individual, in the case of the god-man it is enforced under
penalty of dismissal from his high station, or even of death. For
his worshippers have far too great a stake in his life to allow him
to play fast and loose with it. Therefore all the quaint
superstitions, the old-world maxims, the venerable saws which the
ingenuity of savage philosophers elaborated long ago, and which old
women at chimney corners still impart as treasures of great price
to their descendants gathered round the cottage fire on winter
evenings—all these antique fancies clustered, all these
cobwebs of the brain were spun about the path of the old king, the
human god, who, immeshed in them like a fly in the toils of a
spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of custom,
“light as air but strong as links of iron,” that
crossing and recrossing each other in an endless maze bound him
fast within a network of observances from which death or deposition
alone could release him.
Thus to students of the past the life of the old kings and
priests teems with instruction. In it was summed up all that passed
for wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect pattern
after which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless model
constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by a
barbarous philosophy. Crude and false as that philosophy may seem
to us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical
consistency. Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a
tiny being or soul existing in, but distinct and separable from,
the living being, it deduces for the practical guidance of life a
system of rules which in general hangs well together and forms a
fairly complete and harmonious whole. The flaw—and it is a
fatal one—of the system lies not in its reasoning, but in its
premises; in its conception of the nature of life, not in any
irrelevancy of the conclusions which it draws from that conception.
But to stigmatise these premises as ridiculous because we can
easily detect their falseness, would be ungrateful as well as
unphilosophical. We stand upon the foundation reared by the
generations that have gone before, and we can but dimly realise the
painful and prolonged efforts which it has cost humanity to
struggle up to the point, no very exalted one after all, which we
have reached. Our gratitude is due to the nameless and forgotten
toilers, whose patient thought and active exertions have largely
made us what we are. The amount of new knowledge which one age,
certainly which one man, can add to the common store is small, and
it argues stupidity or dishonesty, besides ingratitude, to ignore
the heap while vaunting the few grains which it may have been our
privilege to add to it. There is indeed little danger at present of
undervaluing the contributions which modern times and even
classical antiquity have made to the general advancement of our
race. But when we pass these limits, the case is different.
Contempt and ridicule or abhorrence and denunciation are too often
the only recognition vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of
the benefactors whom we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many,
perhaps most, were savages. For when all is said and done our
resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our
differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and
deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage
forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to us
by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt
to regard as original and intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune
which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of
those who built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time
being regard it as having been an original and unalterable
possession of their race since the beginning of the world. But
reflection and enquiry should satisfy us that to our predecessors
we are indebted for much of what we thought most our own, and that
their errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of
insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time
when they were propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved
to be inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of
hypotheses and rejection of the false that truth is at last
elicited. After all, what we call truth is only the hypothesis
which is found to work best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions
and practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with
leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search
for truth, and to give them the benefit of that indulgence which we
ourselves may one day stand in need of: cum excusatione itaque
veteres audiendi sunt.
XXIV. The Killing of the Divine King
1. The Mortality of the Gods
MAN has created gods in his own likeness and being himself
mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same
sad predicament. Thus the Greenlanders believed that a wind could
kill their most powerful god, and that he would certainly die if he
touched a dog. When they heard of the Christian God, they kept
asking if he never died, and being informed that he did not, they
were much surprised, and said that he must be a very great god
indeed. In answer to the enquiries of Colonel Dodge, a North
American Indian stated that the world was made by the Great Spirit.
Being asked which Great Spirit he meant, the good one or the bad
one, “Oh, neither of them,” replied he,
“the Great Spirit that made the world is dead long ago. He
could not possibly have lived as long as this.” A tribe in
the Philippine Islands told the Spanish conquerors that the grave
of the Creator was upon the top of Mount Cabunian. Heitsi-eibib, a
god or divine hero of the Hottentots, died several times and came
to life again. His graves are generally to be met with in narrow
defiles between mountains. When the Hottentots pass one of them,
they throw a stone on it for good luck, sometimes muttering,
“Give us plenty of cattle.” The grave of Zeus, the
great god of Greece, was shown to visitors in Crete as late as
about the beginning of our era. The body of Dionysus was buried at
Delphi beside the golden statue of Apollo, and his tomb bore the
inscription, “Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of
Semele.” According to one account, Apollo himself was buried
at Delphi; for Pythagoras is said to have carved an inscription on
his tomb, setting forth how the god had been killed by the python
and buried under the tripod.
The great gods of Egypt themselves were not exempt from the
common lot. They too grew old and died. But when at a later time
the discovery of the art of embalming gave a new lease of life to
the souls of the dead by preserving their bodies for an indefinite
time from corruption, the deities were permitted to share the
benefit of an invention which held out to gods as well as to men a
reasonable hope of immortality. Every province then had the tomb
and mummy of its dead god. The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at
Mendes; Thinis boasted of the mummy of Anhouri; and Heliopolis
rejoiced in the possession of that of Toumou. The high gods of
Babylon also, though they appeared to their worshippers only in
dreams and visions, were conceived to be human in their bodily
shape, human in their passions, and human in their fate; for like
men they were born into the world, and like men they loved and
fought and died.
2. Kings killed when their Strength fails
IF THE HIGH gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of
this earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be
expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh
should escape the same fate, though we hear of African kings who
have imagined themselves immortal by virtue of their sorceries. Now
primitive peoples, as we have seen, sometimes believe that their
safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one
of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. Naturally,
therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard
for their own. But no amount of care and precaution will prevent
the man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His
worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and
to meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if
the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what
catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of
his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one
way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon
as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his
soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been
seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus
putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old
age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough. For if the
man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means, according to
the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed from his
body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been
extracted, or at least detained in its wanderings, by a demon or
sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to
his worshippers, and with it their prosperity is gone and their
very existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the
soul of the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so
transfer it to a successor, this would not effect their purpose;
for, dying of disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in
the last stage of weakness and exhaustion, and so enfeebled it
would continue to drag out a languid, inert existence in any body
to which it might be transferred. Whereas by slaying him his
worshippers could, in the first place, make sure of catching his
soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable successor;
and, in the second place, by putting him to death before his
natural force was abated, they would secure that the world should
not fall into decay with the decay of the man-god. Every purpose,
therefore, was answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing
the man-god and transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a
vigorous successor.
The mystic kings of Fire and Water in Cambodia are not allowed
to die a natural death. Hence when one of them is seriously ill and
the elders think that he cannot recover, they stab him to death.
The people of Congo believed, as we have seen, that if their
pontiff the Chitomé were to die a natural death, the world would
perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power and
merit, would immediately be annihilated. Accordingly when he fell
ill and seemed likely to die, the man who was destined to be his
successor entered the pontiff’s house with a rope or a club
and strangled or clubbed him to death. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe
were worshipped as gods; but whenever the priests chose, they sent
a messenger to the king, ordering him to die, and alleging an
oracle of the gods as their authority for the command. This command
the kings always obeyed down to the reign of Ergamenes, a
contemporary of Ptolemy II., King of Egypt. Having received a Greek
education which emancipated him from the superstitions of his
countrymen, Ergamenes ventured to disregard the command of the
priests, and, entering the Golden Temple with a body of soldiers,
put the priests to the sword.
Customs of the same sort appear to have prevailed in this part
of Africa down to modern times. In some tribes of Fazoql the king
had to administer justice daily under a certain tree. If from
sickness or any other cause he was unable to discharge this duty
for three whole days, he was hanged on the tree in a noose, which
contained two razors so arranged that when the noose was drawn
tight by the weight of the king’s body they cut his
throat.
A custom of putting their divine kings to death at the first
symptoms of infirmity or old age prevailed until lately, if indeed
it is even now extinct and not merely dormant, among the Shilluk of
the White Nile, and in recent years it has been carefully
investigated by Dr. C. G. Seligman. The reverence which the Shilluk
pay to their king appears to arise chiefly from the conviction that
he is a reincarnation of the spirit of Nyakang, the semi-divine
hero who founded the dynasty and settled the tribe in their present
territory. It is a fundamental article of the Shilluk creed that
the spirit of the divine or semi-divine Nyakang is incarnate in the
reigning king, who is accordingly himself invested to some extent
with the character of a divinity. But while the Shilluk hold their
kings in high, indeed religious reverence and take every precaution
against their accidental death, nevertheless they cherish
“the conviction that the king must not be allowed to become
ill or senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the cattle should
sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the
fields, and man, stricken with disease, should die in
ever-increasing numbers.” To prevent these calamities it used
to be the regular custom with the Shilluk to put the king to death
whenever he showed signs of ill-health or failing strength. One of
the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be an incapacity to
satisfy the sexual passions of his wives, of whom he has very many,
distributed in a large number of houses at Fashoda. When this
ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the
chiefs, who are popularly said to have intimated to the king his
doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay
slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon
followed the sentence of death. A hut was specially built for the
occasion: the king was led into it and lay down with his head
resting on the lap of a nubile virgin: the door of the hut was then
walled up; and the couple were left without food, water, or fire to
die of hunger and suffocation. This was the old custom, but it was
abolished some five generations ago on account of the excessive
sufferings of one of the kings who perished in this way. It is said
that the chiefs announce his fate to the king, and that afterwards
he is strangled in a hut which has been specially built for the
occasion.
From Dr. Seligman’s enquiries it appears that not only was
the Shilluk king liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first
symptoms of incipient decay, but even while he was yet in the prime
of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival
and have to defend his crown in a combat to the death. According to
the common Shilluk tradition any son of a king had the right thus
to fight the king in possession and, if he succeeded in killing
him, to reign in his stead. As every king had a large harem and
many sons, the number of possible candidates for the throne at any
time may well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning
monarch must have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on
him could only take place with any prospect of success at night;
for during the day the king surrounded himself with his friends and
bodyguards, and an aspirant to the throne could hardly hope to cut
his way through them and strike home. It was otherwise at night.
For then the guards were dismissed and the king was alone in his
enclosure with his favourite wives, and there was no man near to
defend him except a few herdsmen, whose huts stood a little way
off. The hours of darkness were therefore the season of peril for
the king. It is said that he used to pass them in constant
watchfulness, prowling round his huts fully armed, peering into the
blackest shadows, or himself standing silent and alert, like a
sentinel on duty, in some dark corner. When at last his rival
appeared, the fight would take place in grim silence, broken only
by the clash of spears and shields, for it was a point of honour
with the king not to call the herdsmen to his assistance.
Like Nyakang himself, their founder, each of the Shilluk kings
after death is worshipped at a shrine, which is erected over his
grave, and the grave of a king is always in the village where he
was born. The tomb-shrine of a king resembles the shrine of
Nyakang, consisting of a few huts enclosed by a fence; one of the
huts is built over the king’s grave, the others are occupied
by the guardians of the shrine. Indeed the shrines of Nyakang and
the shrines of the kings are scarcely to be distinguished from each
other, and the religious rituals observed at all of them are
identical in form and vary only in matters of detail, the
variations being due apparently to the far greater sanctity
attributed to the shrines of Nyakang. The grave-shrines of the
kings are tended by certain old men or women, who correspond to the
guardians of the shrines of Nyakang. They are usually widows or old
men-servants of the deceased king, and when they die they are
succeeded in their office by their descendants. Moreover, cattle
are dedicated to the grave-shrines of the kings and sacrifices are
offered at them just as at the shrines of Nyakang.
In general the principal element in the religion of the Shilluk
would seem to be the worship which they pay to their sacred or
divine kings, whether dead or alive. These are believed to be
animated by a single divine spirit, which has been transmitted from
the semi-mythical, but probably in substance historical, founder of
the dynasty through all his successors to the present day. Hence,
regarding their kings as incarnate divinities on whom the welfare
of men, of cattle, and of the corn implicitly depends, the Shilluk
naturally pay them the greatest respect and take every care of
them; and however strange it may seem to us, their custom of
putting the divine king to death as soon as he shows signs of
ill-health or failing strength springs directly from their profound
veneration for him and from their anxiety to preserve him, or
rather the divine spirit by which he is animated, in the most
perfect state of efficiency: nay, we may go further and say that
their practice of regicide is the best proof they can give of the
high regard in which they hold their kings. For they believe, as we
have seen, that the king’s life or spirit is so
sympathetically bound up with the prosperity of the whole country,
that if he fell ill or grew senile the cattle would sicken and
cease to multiply, the crops would rot in the fields, and men would
perish of widespread disease. Hence, in their opinion, the only way
of averting these calamities is to put the king to death while he
is still hale and hearty, in order that the divine spirit which he
has inherited from his predecessors may be transmitted in turn by
him to his successor while it is still in full vigour and has not
yet been impaired by the weakness of disease and old age. In this
connexion the particular symptom which is commonly said to seal the
king’s death-warrant is highly significant; when he can no
longer satisfy the passions of his numerous wives, in other words,
when he has ceased, whether partially or wholly, to be able to
reproduce his kind, it is time for him to die and to make room for
a more vigorous successor. Taken along with the other reasons which
are alleged for putting the king to death, this one suggests that
the fertility of men, of cattle, and of the crops is believed to
depend sympathetically on the generative power of the king, so that
the complete failure of that power in him would involve a
corresponding failure in men, animals, and plants, and would
thereby entail at no distant date the entire extinction of all
life, whether human, animal, or vegetable. No wonder, that with
such a danger before their eyes the Shilluk should be most careful
not to let the king die what we should call a natural death of
sickness or old age. It is characteristic of their attitude towards
the death of the kings that they refrain from speaking of it as
death: they do not say that a king has died but simply that he has
“gone away” like his divine ancestors Nyakang and Dag,
the two first kings of the dynasty, both of whom are reported not
to have died but to have disappeared. The similar legends of the
mysterious disappearance of early kings in other lands, for example
at Rome and in Uganda, may well point to a similar custom of
putting them to death for the purpose of preserving their life.
On the whole the theory and practice of the divine kings of the
Shilluk correspond very nearly to the theory and practice of the
priests of Nemi, the Kings of the Wood, if my view of the latter is
correct. In both we see a series of divine kings on whose life the
fertility of men, of cattle, and of vegetation is believed to
depend, and who are put to death, whether in single combat or
otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to
their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and
decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the
part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a
corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops.
Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting divine
kings to death, particularly the method of transmitting their
divine souls to their successors, will be dealt with more fully in
the sequel. Meantime we pass to other examples of the general
practice.
The Dinka are a congeries of independent tribes in the valley of
the White Nile. They are essentially a pastoral people,
passionately devoted to the care of their numerous herds of oxen,
though they also keep sheep and goats, and the women cultivate
small quantities of millet and sesame. For their crops and above
all for their pastures they depend on the regularity of the rains:
in seasons of prolonged drought they are said to be reduced to
great extremities. Hence the rain-maker is a very important
personage among them to this day; indeed the men in authority whom
travellers dub chiefs or sheikhs are in fact the actual or
potential rain-makers of the tribe or community. Each of them is
believed to be animated by the spirit of a great rain-maker, which
has come down to him through a succession of rain-makers; and in
virtue of this inspiration a successful rain-maker enjoys very
great power and is consulted on all important matters. Yet in
spite, or rather in virtue, of the high honour in which he is held,
no Dinka rain-maker is allowed to die a natural death of sickness
or old age; for the Dinka believe that if such an untoward event
were to happen, the tribe would suffer from disease and famine, and
the herds would not yield their increase. So when a rain-maker
feels that he is growing old and infirm, he tells his children that
he wishes to die. Among the Agar Dinka a large grave is dug and the
rain-maker lies down in it, surrounded by his friends and
relatives. From time to time he speaks to the people, recalling the
past history of the tribe, reminding them how he has ruled and
advised them, and instructing them how they are to act in the
future. Then, when he has concluded his admonition, he bids them
cover him up. So the earth is thrown down on him as he lies in the
grave, and he soon dies of suffocation. Such, with minor
variations, appears to be the regular end of the honourable career
of a rain-maker in all the Dinka tribes. The Khor-Adar Dinka told
Dr. Seligman that when they have dug the grave for their rain-maker
they strangle him in his house. The father and paternal uncle of
one of Dr. Seligman’s informants had both been rain-makers
and both had been killed in the most regular and orthodox fashion.
Even if a rain-maker is quite young he will be put to death should
he seem likely to perish of disease. Further, every precaution is
taken to prevent a rain-maker from dying an accidental death, for
such an end, though not nearly so serious a matter as death from
illness or old age, would be sure to entail sickness on the tribe.
As soon as a rain-maker is killed, his valuable spirit is supposed
to pass to a suitable successor, whether a son or other near blood
relation.
In the Central African kingdom of Bunyoro down to recent years
custom required that as soon as the king fell seriously ill or
began to break up from age, he should die by his own hand; for,
according to an old prophecy, the throne would pass away from the
dynasty if ever the king were to die a natural death. He killed
himself by draining a poisoned cup. If he faltered or were too ill
to ask for the cup, it was his wife’s duty to administer the
poison. When the king of Kibanga, on the Upper Congo, seems near
his end, the sorcerers put a rope round his neck, which they draw
gradually tighter till he dies. If the king of Gingiro happens to
be wounded in war, he is put to death by his comrades, or, if they
fail to kill him, by his kinsfolk, however hard he may beg for
mercy. They say they do it that he may not die by the hands of his
enemies. The Jukos are a heathen tribe of the Benue River, a great
tributary of the Niger. In their country “the town of Gatri
is ruled by a king who is elected by the big men of the town as
follows. When in the opinion of the big men the king has reigned
long enough, they give out that ‘the king is
sick’—a formula understood by all to mean that they are
going to kill him, though the intention is never put more plainly.
They then decide who is to be the next king. How long he is to
reign is settled by the influential men at a meeting; the question
is put and answered by each man throwing on the ground a little
piece of stick for each year he thinks the new king should rule.
The king is then told, and a great feast prepared, at which the
king gets drunk on guinea-corn beer. After that he is speared, and
the man who was chosen becomes king. Thus each Juko king knows that
he cannot have very many more years to live, and that he is certain
of his predecessor’s fate. This, however, does not seem to
frighten candidates. The same custom of king-killing is said to
prevail at Quonde and Wukari as well as at Gatri.” In the
three Hausa kingdoms of Gobir, Katsina, and Daura, in Northern
Nigeria, as soon as a king showed signs of failing health or
growing infirmity, an official who bore the title of Killer of the
Elephant appeared and throttled him.
The Matiamvo is a great king or emperor in the interior of
Angola. One of the inferior kings of the country, by name Challa,
gave to a Portuguese expedition the following account of the manner
in which the Matiamvo comes by his end. “It has been
customary,” he said, “for our Matiamvos to die either
in war or by a violent death, and the present Matiamvo must meet
this last fate, as, in consequence of his great exactions, he has
lived long enough. When we come to this understanding, and decide
that he should be killed, we invite him to make war with our
enemies, on which occasion we all accompany him and his family to
the war, when we lose some of our people. If he escapes unhurt, we
return to the war again and fight for three or four days. We then
suddenly abandon him and his family to their fate, leaving him in
the enemy’s hands. Seeing himself thus deserted, he causes
his throne to be erected, and, sitting down, calls his family
around him. He then orders his mother to approach; she kneels at
his feet; he first cuts off her head, then decapitates his sons in
succession, next his wives and relatives, and, last of all, his
most beloved wife, called Anacullo. This slaughter being
accomplished, the Matiamvo, dressed in all his pomp, awaits his own
death, which immediately follows, by an officer sent by the
powerful neighbouring chiefs, Caniquinha and Canica. This officer
first cuts off his legs and arms at the joints, and lastly he cuts
off his head; after which the head of the officer is struck off.
All the potentates retire from the encampment, in order not to
witness his death. It is my duty to remain and witness his death,
and to mark the place where the head and arms have been deposited
by the two great chiefs, the enemies of the Matiamvo. They also
take possession of all the property belonging to the deceased
monarch and his family, which they convey to their own residence. I
then provide for the funeral of the mutilated remains of the late
Matiamvo, after which I retire to his capital and proclaim the new
government. I then return to where the head, legs, and arms have
been deposited, and, for forty slaves, I ransom them, together with
the merchandise and other property belonging to the deceased, which
I give up to the new Matiamvo, who has been proclaimed. This is
what has happened to many Matiamvos, and what must happen to the
present one.”
It appears to have been a Zulu custom to put the king to death
as soon as he began to have wrinkles or grey hairs. At least this
seems implied in the following passage written by one who resided
for some time at the court of the notorious Zulu tyrant Chaka, in
the early part of the nineteenth century: “The extraordinary
violence of the king’s rage with me was mainly occasioned by
that absurd nostrum, the hair oil, with the notion of which Mr.
Farewell had impressed him as being a specific for removing all
indications of age. From the first moment of his having heard that
such a preparation was attainable, he evinced a solicitude to
procure it, and on every occasion never forgot to remind us of his
anxiety respecting it; more especially on our departure on the
mission his injunctions were particularly directed to this object.
It will be seen that it is one of the barbarous customs of the
Zoolas in their choice or election of their kings that he must
neither have wrinkles nor grey hairs, as they are both
distinguishing marks of disqualification for becoming a monarch of
a warlike people. It is also equally indispensable that their king
should never exhibit those proofs of having become unfit and
incompetent to reign; it is therefore important that they should
conceal these indications so long as they possibly can. Chaka had
become greatly apprehensive of the approach of grey hairs; which
would at once be the signal for him to prepare to make his exit
from this sublunary world, it being always followed by the death of
the monarch.” The writer to whom we are indebted for this
instructive anecdote of the hair oil omits to specify the mode in
which a grey-haired and wrinkled Zulu chief used “to make his
exit from this sublunary world”; but on analogy we may
conjecture that he was killed.
The custom of putting kings to death as soon as they suffered
from any personal defect prevailed two centuries ago in the Caffre
kingdom of Sofala. We have seen that these kings of Sofala were
regarded as gods by their people, being entreated to give rain or
sunshine, according as each might be wanted. Nevertheless a slight
bodily blemish, such as the loss of a tooth, was considered a
sufficient cause for putting one of these god-men to death, as we
learn from the following passage of an old Portuguese historian:
“It was formerly the custom of the kings of this land to
commit suicide by taking poison when any disaster or natural
physical defect fell upon them, such as impotence, infectious
disease, the loss of their front teeth, by which they were
disfigured, or any other deformity or affliction. To put an end to
such defects they killed themselves, saying that the king should be
free from any blemish, and if not, it was better for his honour
that he should die and seek another life where he would be made
whole, for there everything was perfect. But the Quiteve (king) who
reigned when I was in those parts would not imitate his
predecessors in this, being discreet and dreaded as he was; for
having lost a front tooth he caused it to be proclaimed throughout
the kingdom that all should be aware that he had lost a tooth and
should recognise him when they saw him without it, and if his
predecessors killed themselves for such things they were very
foolish, and he would not do so; on the contrary, he would be very
sorry when the time came for him to die a natural death, for his
life was very necessary to preserve his kingdom and defend it from
his enemies; and he recommended his successors to follow his
example.”
The king of Sofala who dared to survive the loss of his front
tooth was thus a bold reformer like Ergamenes, king of Ethiopia. We
may conjecture that the ground for putting the Ethiopian kings to
death was, as in the case of the Zulu and Sofala kings, the
appearance on their person of any bodily defect or sign of decay;
and that the oracle which the priests alleged as the authority for
the royal execution was to the effect that great calamities would
result from the reign of a king who had any blemish on his body;
just as an oracle warned Sparta against a “lame reign,”
that is, the reign of a lame king. It is some confirmation of this
conjecture that the kings of Ethiopia were chosen for their size,
strength, and beauty long before the custom of killing them was
abolished. To this day the Sultan of Wadai must have no obvious
bodily defect, and the king of Angoy cannot be crowned if he has a
single blemish, such as a broken or a filed tooth or the scar of an
old wound. According to the Book of Acaill and many other
authorities no king who was afflicted with a personal blemish might
reign over Ireland at Tara. Hence, when the great King Cormac Mac
Art lost one eye by an accident, he at once abdicated.
Many days’ journey to the north-east of Abomey, the old
capital of Dahomey, lies the kingdom of Eyeo. “The Eyeos are
governed by a king, no less absolute than the king of Dahomey, yet
subject to a regulation of state, at once humiliating and
extraordinary. When the people have conceived an opinion of his
ill-government, which is sometimes insidiously infused into them by
the artifice of his discontented ministers, they send a deputation
to him with a present of parrots’ eggs, as a mark of its
authenticity, to represent to him that the burden of government
must have so far fatigued him that they consider it full time for
him to repose from his cares and indulge himself with a little
sleep. He thanks his subjects for their attention to his ease,
retires to his own apartment as if to sleep, and there gives
directions to his women to strangle him. This is immediately
executed, and his son quietly ascends the throne upon the usual
terms of holding the reins of government no longer than whilst he
merits the approbation of the people.” About the year 1774, a
king of Eyeo, whom his ministers attempted to remove in the
customary manner, positively refused to accept the proffered
parrots’ eggs at their hands, telling them that he had no
mind to take a nap, but on the contrary was resolved to watch for
the benefit of his subjects. The ministers, surprised and indignant
at his recalcitrancy, raised a rebellion, but were defeated with
great slaughter, and thus by his spirited conduct the king freed
himself from the tyranny of his councillors and established a new
precedent for the guidance of his successors. However, the old
custom seems to have revived and persisted until late in the
nineteenth century, for a Catholic missionary, writing in 1884,
speaks of the practice as if it were still in vogue. Another
missionary, writing in 1881, thus describes the usage of the Egbas
and the Yorubas of West Africa: “Among the customs of the
country one of the most curious is unquestionably that of judging,
and punishing the king. Should he have earned the hatred of his
people by exceeding his rights, one of his councillors, on whom the
heavy duty is laid, requires of the prince that he shall ‘go
to sleep,’ which means simply ‘take poison and
die.’ If his courage fails him at the supreme moment, a
friend renders him this last service, and quietly, without
betraying the secret, they prepare the people for the news of the
king’s death. In Yoruba the thing is managed a little
differently. When a son is born to the king of Oyo, they make a
model of the infant’s right foot in clay and keep it in the
house of the elders (ogboni). If the king fails to observe
the customs of the country, a messenger, without speaking a word,
shows him his child’s foot. The king knows what that means.
He takes poison and goes to sleep.” The old Prussians
acknowledged as their supreme lord a ruler who governed them in the
name of the gods, and was known as “God’s Mouth.”
When he felt himself weak and ill, if he wished to leave a good
name behind him, he had a great heap made of thorn-bushes and
straw, on which he mounted and delivered a long sermon to the
people, exhorting them to serve the gods and promising to go to the
gods and speak for the people. Then he took some of the perpetual
fire which burned in front of the holy oak-tree, and lighting the
pile with it burned himself to death.
3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term
IN THE CASES hitherto described, the divine king or priest is
suffered by his people to retain office until some outward defect,
some visible symptom of failing health or advancing age, warns them
that he is no longer equal to the discharge of his divine duties;
but not until such symptoms have made their appearance is he put to
death. Some peoples, however, appear to have thought it unsafe to
wait for even the slightest symptom of decay and have preferred to
kill the king while he was still in the full vigour of life.
Accordingly, they have fixed a term beyond which he might not
reign, and at the close of which he must die, the term fixed upon
being short enough to exclude the probability of his degenerating
physically in the interval. In some parts of Southern India the
period fixed was twelve years. Thus, according to an old traveller,
in the province of Quilacare, “there is a Gentile house of
prayer, in which there is an idol which they hold in great account,
and every twelve years they celebrate a great feast to it, whither
all the Gentiles go as to a jubilee. This temple possesses many
lands and much revenue: it is a very great affair. This province
has a king over it, who has not more than twelve years to reign
from jubilee to jubilee. His manner of living is in this wise, that
is to say: when the twelve years are completed, on the day of this
feast there assemble together innumerable people, and much money is
spent in giving food to Bramans. The king has a wooden scaffolding
made, spread over with silken hangings: and on that day he goes to
bathe at a tank with great ceremonies and sound of music, after
that he comes to the idol and prays to it, and mounts on to the
scaffolding, and there before all the people he takes some very
sharp knives, and begins to cut off his nose, and then his ears,
and his lips, and all his members, and as much flesh off himself as
he can; and he throws it away very hurriedly until so much of his
blood is spilled that he begins to faint, and then he cuts his
throat himself. And he performs this sacrifice to the idol, and
whoever desires to reign another twelve years and undertake this
martyrdom for love of the idol, has to be present looking on at
this: and from that place they raise him up as king.”
The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, bears the title of
Samorin or Samory. He “pretends to be of a higher rank than
the Brahmans, and to be inferior only to the invisible gods; a
pretention that was acknowledged by his subjects, but which is held
as absurd and abominable by the Brahmans, by whom he is only
treated as a Sudra.” Formerly the Samorin had to cut his
throat in public at the end of a twelve years’ reign. But
towards the end of the seventeenth century the rule had been
modified as follows: “Many strange customs were observed in
this country in former times, and some very odd ones are still
continued. It was an ancient custom for the Samorin to reign but
twelve years, and no longer. If he died before his term was
expired, it saved him a troublesome ceremony of cutting his own
throat, on a publick scaffold erected for the purpose. He first
made a feast for all his nobility and gentry, who are very
numerous. After the feast he saluted his guests, and went on the
scaffold, and very decently cut his own throat in the view of the
assembly, and his body was, a little while after, burned with great
pomp and ceremony, and the grandees elected a new Samorin. Whether
that custom was a religious or a civil ceremony, I know not, but it
is now laid aside. And a new custom is followed by the modern
Samorins, that jubilee is proclaimed throughout his dominions, at
the end of twelve years, and a tent is pitched for him in a
spacious plain, and a great feast is celebrated for ten or twelve
days, with mirth and jollity, guns firing night and day, so at the
end of the feast any four of the guests that have a mind to gain a
crown by a desperate action, in fighting their way through 30 or
40,000 of his guards, and kill the Samorin in his tent, he that
kills him succeeds him in his empire. In anno 1695, one of those
jubilees happened, and the tent pitched near Pennany, a seaport of
his, about fifteen leagues to the southward of Calicut. There were
but three men that would venture on that desperate action, who fell
in, with sword and target, among the guard, and, after they had
killed and wounded many, were themselves killed. One of the
desperados had a nephew of fifteen or sixteen years of age, that
kept close by his uncle in the attack on the guards, and, when he
saw him fall, the youth got through the guards into the tent, and
made a stroke at his Majesty’s head, and had certainly
despatched him if a large brass lamp which was burning over his
head had not marred the blow; but, before he could make another, he
was killed by the guards; and, I believe, the same Samorin reigns
yet. I chanced to come that time along the coast and heard the guns
for two or three days and nights successively.”
The English traveller, whose account I have quoted, did not
himself witness the festival he describes, though he heard the
sound of the firing in the distance. Fortunately, exact records of
these festivals and of the number of men who perished at them have
been preserved in the archives of the royal family at Calicut. In
the latter part of the nineteenth century they were examined by Mr.
W. Logan, with the personal assistance of the reigning king, and
from his work it is possible to gain an accurate conception both of
the tragedy and of the scene where it was periodically enacted down
to 1743, when the ceremony took place for the last time.
The festival at which the king of Calicut staked his crown and
his life on the issue of battle was known as the “Great
Sacrifice.” It fell every twelfth year, when the planet
Jupiter was in retrograde motion in the sign of the Crab, and it
lasted twenty-eight days, culminating at the time of the eighth
lunar asterism in the month of Makaram. As the date of the festival
was determined by the position of Jupiter in the sky, and the
interval between two festivals was twelve years, which is roughly
Jupiter’s period of revolution round the sun, we may
conjecture that the splendid planet was supposed to be in a special
sense the king’s star and to rule his destiny, the period of
its revolution in heaven corresponding to the period of his reign
on earth. However that may be, the ceremony was observed with great
pomp at the Tirunavayi temple, on the north bank of the Ponnani
River. The spot is close to the present railway line. As the train
rushes by, you can just catch a glimpse of the temple, almost
hidden behind a clump of trees on the river bank. From the western
gateway of the temple a perfectly straight road, hardly raised
above the level of the surrounding rice-fields and shaded by a fine
avenue, runs for half a mile to a high ridge with a precipitous
bank, on which the outlines of three or four terraces can still be
traced. On the topmost of these terraces the king took his stand on
the eventful day. The view which it commands is a fine one. Across
the flat expanse of the rice-fields, with the broad placid river
winding through them, the eye ranges eastward to high tablelands,
their lower slopes embowered in woods, while afar off looms the
great chain of the western Ghauts, and in the furthest distance the
Neilgherries or Blue Mountains, hardly distinguishable from the
azure of the sky above.
But it was not to the distant prospect that the king’s
eyes naturally turned at this crisis of his fate. His attention was
arrested by a spectacle nearer at hand. For all the plain below was
alive with troops, their banners waving gaily in the sun, the white
tents of their many camps standing sharply out against the green
and gold of the ricefields. Forty thousand fighting men or more
were gathered there to defend the king. But if the plain swarmed
with soldiers, the road that cuts across it from the temple to the
king’s stand was clear of them. Not a soul was stirring on
it. Each side of the way was barred by palisades, and from the
palisades on either hand a long hedge of spears, held by strong
arms, projected into the empty road, their blades meeting in the
middle and forming a glittering arch of steel. All was now ready.
The king waved his sword. At the same moment a great chain of massy
gold, enriched with bosses, was placed on an elephant at his side.
That was the signal. On the instant a stir might be seen half a
mile away at the gate of the temple. A group of swordsmen, decked
with flowers and smeared with ashes, has stepped out from the
crowd. They have just partaken of their last meal on earth, and
they now receive the last blessings and farewells of their friends.
A moment more and they are coming down the lane of spears, hewing
and stabbing right and left at the spearmen, winding and turning
and writhing among the blades as if they had no bones in their
bodies. It is all in vain. One after the other they fall, some
nearer the king, some farther off, content to die, not for the
shadow of a crown, but for the mere sake of approving their
dauntless valour and swordsmanship to the world. On the last days
of the festival the same magnificent display of gallantry, the same
useless sacrifice of life was repeated again and again. Yet perhaps
no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves that there are men who
prefer honour to life.
“It is a singular custom in Bengal,” says an old
native historian of India, “that there is little of
hereditary descent in succession to the sovereignty… .
Whoever kills the king, and succeeds in placing himself on that
throne, is immediately acknowledged as king; all the amirs,
wazirs, soldiers, and peasants instantly obey and submit to
him, and consider him as being as much their sovereign as they did
their former prince, and obey his orders implicitly. The people of
Bengal say, ‘We are faithful to the throne; whoever fills the
throne we are obedient and true to it.’” A custom of
the same sort formerly prevailed in the little kingdom of Passier,
on the northern coast of Sumatra. The old Portuguese historian De
Barros, who informs us of it, remarks with surprise that no wise
man would wish to be king of Passier, since the monarch was not
allowed by his subjects to live long. From time to time a sort of
fury seized the people, and they marched through the streets of the
city chanting with loud voices the fatal words, “The king
must die!” When the king heard that song of death he knew
that his hour had come. The man who struck the fatal blow was of
the royal lineage, and as soon as he had done the deed of blood and
seated himself on the throne he was regarded as the legitimate
king, provided that he contrived to maintain his seat peaceably for
a single day. This, however, the regicide did not always succeed in
doing. When Fernão Peres d’Andrade, on a voyage to China, put
in at Passier for a cargo of spices, two kings were massacred, and
that in the most peaceable and orderly manner, without the smallest
sign of tumult or sedition in the city, where everything went on in
its usual course, as if the murder or execution of a king were a
matter of everyday occurrence. Indeed, on one occasion three kings
were raised to the dangerous elevation and followed each other in
the dusty road of death in a single day. The people defended the
custom, which they esteemed very laudable and even of divine
institution, by saying that God would never allow so high and
mighty a being as a king, who reigned as his vicegerent on earth,
to perish by violence unless for his sins he thoroughly deserved
it. Far away from the tropical island of Sumatra a rule of the same
sort appears to have obtained among the old Slavs. When the
captives Gunn and Jarmerik contrived to slay the king and queen of
the Slavs and made their escape, they were pursued by the
barbarians, who shouted after them that if they would only come
back they would reign instead of the murdered monarch, since by a
public statute of the ancients the succession to the throne fell to
the king’s assassin. But the flying regicides turned a deaf
ear to promises which they regarded as mere baits to lure them back
to destruction; they continued their flight, and the shouts and
clamour of the barbarians gradually died away in the distance.
When kings were bound to suffer death, whether at their own
hands or at the hands of others, on the expiration of a fixed term
of years, it was natural that they should seek to delegate the
painful duty, along with some of the privileges of sovereignty, to
a substitute who should suffer vicariously in their stead. This
expedient appears to have been resorted to by some of the princes
of Malabar. Thus we are informed by a native authority on that
country that “in some places all powers both executive and
judicial were delegated for a fixed period to natives by the
sovereign. This institution was styled Thalavettiparothiam
or authority obtained by decapitation…. It was an office
tenable for five years during which its bearer was invested with
supreme despotic powers within his jurisdiction. On the expiry of
the five years the man’s head was cut off and thrown up in
the air amongst a large concourse of villagers, each of whom vied
with the other in trying to catch it in its course down. He who
succeeded was nominated to the post for the next five
years.”
When once kings, who had hitherto been bound to die a violent
death at the end of a term of years, conceived the happy thought of
dying by deputy in the persons of others, they would very naturally
put it in practice; and accordingly we need not wonder at finding
so popular an expedient, or traces of it, in many lands.
Scandinavian traditions contain some hints that of old the Swedish
kings reigned only for periods of nine years, after which they were
put to death or had to find a substitute to die in their stead.
Thus Aun or On, king of Sweden, is said to have sacrificed to Odin
for length of days and to have been answered by the god that he
should live so long as he sacrificed one of his sons every ninth
year. He sacrificed nine of them in this manner, and would have
sacrificed the tenth and last, but the Swedes would not allow him.
So he died and was buried in a mound at Upsala. Another indication
of a similar tenure of the crown occurs in a curious legend of the
deposition and banishment of Odin. Offended at his misdeeds, the
other gods outlawed and exiled him, but set up in his place a
substitute, Oller by name, a cunning wizard, to whom they accorded
the symbols both of royalty and of godhead. The deputy bore the
name of Odin, and reigned for nearly ten years, when he was driven
from the throne, while the real Odin came to his own again. His
discomfited rival retired to Sweden and was afterwards slain in an
attempt to repair his shattered fortunes. As gods are often merely
men who loom large through the mists of tradition, we may
conjecture that this Norse legend preserves a confused reminiscence
of ancient Swedish kings who reigned for nine or ten years
together, then abdicated, delegating to others the privilege of
dying for their country. The great festival which was held at
Upsala every nine years may have been the occasion on which the
king or his deputy was put to death. We know that human sacrifices
formed part of the rites.
There are some grounds for believing that the reign of many
ancient Greek kings was limited to eight years, or at least that at
the end of every period of eight years a new consecration, a fresh
outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order
to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus
it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year
the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting
down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a
meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned
against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until
the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them. This
custom, which has all the air of great antiquity, was not suffered
to remain a dead letter even in the last period of the Spartan
monarchy; for in the third century before our era a king, who had
rendered himself obnoxious to the reforming party, was actually
deposed on various trumped-up charges, among which the allegation
that the ominous sign had been seen in the sky took a prominent
place.
If the tenure of the regal office was formerly limited among the
Spartans to eight years, we may naturally ask, why was that precise
period selected as the measure of a king’s reign? The reason
is probably to be found in those astronomical considerations which
determined the early Greek calendar. The difficulty of reconciling
lunar with solar time is one of the standing puzzles which has
taxed the ingenuity of men who are emerging from barbarism. Now an
octennial cycle is the shortest period at the end of which sun and
moon really mark time together after overlapping, so to say,
throughout the whole of the interval. Thus, for example, it is only
once in every eight years that the full moon coincides with the
longest or shortest day; and as this coincidence can be observed
with the aid of a simple dial, the observation is naturally one of
the first to furnish a base for a calendar which shall bring lunar
and solar times into tolerable, though not exact, harmony. But in
early days the proper adjustment of the calendar is a matter of
religious concern, since on it depends a knowledge of the right
seasons for propitiating the deities whose favour is indispensable
to the welfare of the community. No wonder, therefore, that the
king, as the chief priest of the state, or as himself a god, should
be liable to deposition or death at the end of an astronomical
period. When the great luminaries had run their course on high, and
were about to renew the heavenly race, it might well be thought
that the king should renew his divine energies, or prove them
unabated, under pain of making room for a more vigorous successor.
In Southern India, as we have seen, the king’s reign and life
terminated with the revolution of the planet Jupiter round the sun.
In Greece, on the other hand, the king’s fate seems to have
hung in the balance at the end of every eight years, ready to fly
up and kick the beam as soon as the opposite scale was loaded with
a falling star.
Whatever its origin may have been, the cycle of eight years
appears to have coincided with the normal length of the
king’s reign in other parts of Greece besides Sparta. Thus
Minos, king of Cnossus in Crete, whose great palace has been
unearthed in recent years, is said to have held office for periods
of eight years together. At the end of each period he retired for a
season to the oracular cave on Mount Ida, and there communed with
his divine father Zeus, giving him an account of his kingship in
the years that were past, and receiving from him instructions for
his guidance in those which were to come. The tradition plainly
implies that at the end of every eight years the king’s
sacred powers needed to be renewed by intercourse with the godhead,
and that without such a renewal he would have forfeited his right
to the throne.
Without being unduly rash we may surmise that the tribute of
seven youths and seven maidens whom the Athenians were bound to
send to Minos every eight years had some connexion with the renewal
of the king’s power for another octennial cycle. Traditions
varied as to the fate which awaited the lads and damsels on their
arrival in Crete; but the common view appears to have been that
they were shut up in the labyrinth, there to be devoured by the
Minotaur, or at least to be imprisoned for life. Perhaps they were
sacrificed by being roasted alive in a bronze image of a bull, or
of a bull-headed man, in order to renew the strength of the king
and of the sun, whom he personated. This at all events is suggested
by the legend of Talos, a bronze man who clutched people to his
breast and leaped with them into the fire, so that they were
roasted alive. He is said to have been given by Zeus to Europa, or
by Hephaestus to Minos, to guard the island of Crete, which he
patrolled thrice daily. According to one account he was a bull,
according to another he was the sun. Probably he was identical with
the Minotaur, and stripped of his mythical features was nothing but
a bronze image of the sun represented as a man with a bull’s
head. In order to renew the solar fires, human victims may have
been sacrificed to the idol by being roasted in its hollow body or
placed on its sloping hands and allowed to roll into a pit of fire.
It was in the latter fashion that the Carthaginians sacrificed
their offspring to Moloch. The children were laid on the hands of a
calf-headed image of bronze, from which they slid into a fiery
oven, while the people danced to the music of flutes and timbrels
to drown the shrieks of the burning victims. The resemblance which
the Cretan traditions bear to the Carthaginian practice suggests
that the worship associated with the names of Minos and the
Minotaur may have been powerfully influenced by that of a Semitic
Baal. In the tradition of Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum, and his
brazen bull we may have an echo of similar rites in Sicily, where
the Carthaginian power struck deep roots.
In the province of Lagos, the Ijebu tribe of the Yoruba race is
divided into two branches, which are known respectively as the
Ijebu Ode and the Ijebu Remon. The Ode branch of the tribe is ruled
by a chief who bears the title of Awujale and is surrounded by a
great deal of mystery. Down to recent times his face might not be
seen even by his own subjects, and if circumstances obliged him to
communicate with them he did so through a screen which hid him from
view. The other or Remon branch of the Ijebu tribe is governed by a
chief, who ranks below the Awujale. Mr. John Parkinson was informed
that in former times this subordinate chief used to be killed with
ceremony after a rule of three years. As the country is now under
British protection the custom of putting the chief to death at the
end of a three years’ reign has long been abolished, and Mr.
Parkinson was unable to ascertain any particulars on the
subject.
At Babylon, within historical times, the tenure of the kingly
office was in practice lifelong, yet in theory it would seem to
have been merely annual. For every year at the festival of Zagmuk
the king had to renew his power by seizing the hands of the image
of Marduk in his great temple of Esagil at Babylon. Even when
Babylon passed under the power of Assyria, the monarchs of that
country were expected to legalise their claim to the throne every
year by coming to Babylon and performing the ancient ceremony at
the New Year festival, and some of them found the obligation so
burdensome that rather than discharge it they renounced the title
of king altogether and contented themselves with the humbler one of
Governor. Further, it would appear that in remote times, though not
within the historical period, the kings of Babylon or their
barbarous predecessors forfeited not merely their crown but their
life at the end of a year’s tenure of office. At least this
is the conclusion to which the following evidence seems to point.
According to the historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest
spoke with ample knowledge, there was annually celebrated in
Babylon a festival called the Sacaea. It began on the sixteenth day
of the month Lous, and lasted for five days, during which masters
and servants changed places, the servants giving orders and the
masters obeying them. A prisoner condemned to death was dressed in
the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed
to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy
himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines. But at the
end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged,
and hanged or impaled. During his brief term of office he bore the
title of Zoganes. This custom might perhaps have been explained as
merely a grim jest perpetrated in a season of jollity at the
expense of an unhappy criminal. But one circumstance—the
leave given to the mock king to enjoy the king’s
concubines—is decisive against this interpretation.
Considering the jealous seclusion of an oriental despot’s
harem we may be quite certain that permission to invade it would
never have been granted by the despot, least of all to a condemned
criminal, except for the very gravest cause. This cause could
hardly be other than that the condemned man was about to die in the
king’s stead, and that to make the substitution perfect it
was necessary he should enjoy the full rights of royalty during his
brief reign. There is nothing surprising in this substitution. The
rule that the king must be put to death either on the appearance of
any symptom of bodily decay or at the end of a fixed period is
certainly one which, sooner or later, the kings would seek to
abolish or modify. We have seen that in Ethiopia, Sofala, and Eyeo
the rule was boldly set aside by enlightened monarchs; and that in
Calicut the old custom of killing the king at the end of twelve
years was changed into a permission granted to any one at the end
of the twelve years’ period to attack the king, and, in the
event of killing him, to reign in his stead; though, as the king
took care at these times to be surrounded by his guards, the
permission was little more than a form. Another way of modifying
the stern old rule is seen in the Babylonian custom just described.
When the time drew near for the king to be put to death (in Babylon
this appears to have been at the end of a single year’s
reign) he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king
reigned and suffered in his stead. At first the temporary king may
have been an innocent person, possibly a member of the king’s
own family; but with the growth of civilisation the sacrifice of an
innocent person would be revolting to the public sentiment, and
accordingly a condemned criminal would be invested with the brief
and fatal sovereignty. In the sequel we shall find other examples
of a dying criminal representing a dying god. For we must not
forget that, as the case of the Shilluk kings clearly shows, the
king is slain in his character of a god or a demigod, his death and
resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life
unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people
and the world.
A vestige of a practice of putting the king to death at the end
of a year’s reign appears to have survived in the festival
called Macahity, which used to be celebrated in Hawaii during the
last month of the year. About a hundred years ago a Russian voyager
described the custom as follows: “The taboo Macahity is not
unlike to our festival of Christmas. It continues a whole month,
during which the people amuse themselves with dances, plays, and
sham-fights of every kind. The king must open this festival
wherever he is. On this occasion his majesty dresses himself in his
richest cloak and helmet, and is paddled in a canoe along the
shore, followed sometimes by many of his subjects. He embarks
early, and must finish his excursion at sunrise. The strongest and
most expert of the warriors is chosen to receive him on his
landing. This warrior watches the canoe along the beach; and as
soon as the king lands, and has thrown off his cloak, he darts his
spear at him, from a distance of about thirty paces, and the king
must either catch the spear in his hand, or suffer from it: there
is no jesting in the business. Having caught it, he carries it
under his arm, with the sharp end downwards, into the temple or
heavoo. On his entrance, the assembled multitude begin
their sham-fights, and immediately the air is obscured by clouds of
spears, made for the occasion with blunted ends. Hamamea [the king]
has been frequently advised to abolish this ridiculous ceremony, in
which he risks his life every year; but to no effect. His answer
always is, that he is as able to catch a spear as any one on the
island is to throw it at him. During the Macahity, all punishments
are remitted throughout the country; and no person can leave the
place in which he commences these holidays, let the affair be ever
so important.”
That a king should regularly have been put to death at the close
of a year’s reign will hardly appear improbable when we learn
that to this day there is still a kingdom in which the reign and
the life of the sovereign are limited to a single day. In Ngoio, a
province of the ancient kingdom of Congo, the rule obtains that the
chief who assumes the cap of sovereignty is always killed on the
night after his coronation. The right of succession lies with the
chief of the Musurongo; but we need not wonder that he does not
exercise it, and that the throne stands vacant. “No one likes
to lose his life for a few hours’ glory on the Ngoio
throne.”
XXV. Temporary Kings
IN SOME places the modified form of the old custom of regicide
which appears to have prevailed at Babylon has been further
softened down. The king still abdicates annually for a short time
and his place is filled by a more or less nominal sovereign; but at
the close of his short reign the latter is no longer killed, though
sometimes a mock execution still survives as a memorial of the time
when he was actually put to death. To take examples. In the month
of Méac (February) the king of Cambodia annually abdicated for
three days. During this time he performed no act of authority, he
did not touch the seals, he did not even receive the revenues which
fell due. In his stead there reigned a temporary king called Sdach
Méac, that is, King February. The office of temporary king was
hereditary in a family distantly connected with the royal house,
the sons succeeding the fathers and the younger brothers the elder
brothers just as in the succession to the real sovereignty. On a
favourable day fixed by the astrologers the temporary king was
conducted by the mandarins in triumphal procession. He rode one of
the royal elephants, seated in the royal palanquin, and escorted by
soldiers who, dressed in appropriate costumes, represented the
neighbouring peoples of Siam, Annam, Laos, and so on. In place of
the golden crown he wore a peaked white cap, and his regalia,
instead of being of gold encrusted with diamonds, were of rough
wood. After paying homage to the real king, from whom he received
the sovereignty for three days, together with all the revenues
accruing during that time (though this last custom has been omitted
for some time), he moved in procession round the palace and through
the streets of the capital. On the third day, after the usual
procession, the temporary king gave orders that the elephants
should trample under foot the “mountain of rice,” which
was a scaffold of bamboo surrounded by sheaves of rice. The people
gathered up the rice, each man taking home a little with him to
secure a good harvest. Some of it was also taken to the king, who
had it cooked and presented to the monks.
In Siam on the sixth day of the moon in the sixth month (the end
of April) a temporary king is appointed, who for three days enjoys
the royal prerogatives, the real king remaining shut up in his
palace. This temporary king sends his numerous satellites in all
directions to seize and confiscate whatever they can find in the
bazaar and open shops; even the ships and junks which arrive in
harbour during the three days are forfeited to him and must be
redeemed. He goes to a field in the middle of the city, whither
they bring a gilded plough drawn by gaily-decked oxen. After the
plough has been anointed and the oxen rubbed with incense, the mock
king traces nine furrows with the plough, followed by aged dames of
the palace scattering the first seed of the season. As soon as the
nine furrows are drawn, the crowd of spectators rushes in and
scrambles for the seed which has just been sown, believing that,
mixed with the seed-rice, it will ensure a plentiful crop. Then the
oxen are unyoked, and rice, maize, sesame, sago, bananas,
sugar-cane, melons, and so on, are set before them; whatever they
eat first will, it is thought, be dear in the year following,
though some people interpret the omen in the opposite sense. During
this time the temporary king stands leaning against a tree with his
right foot resting on his left knee. From standing thus on one
foot he is popularly known as King Hop; but his official title is
Phaya Phollathep “Lord of the Heavenly Hosts.” He is a
sort of Minister of Agriculture; all disputes about fields, rice,
and so forth, are referred to him. There is moreover another
ceremony in which he personates the king. It takes place in the
second month (which falls in the cold season) and lasts three days.
He is conducted in procession to an open place opposite the Temple
of the Brahmans, where there are a number of poles dressed like
May-poles, upon which the Brahmans swing. All the while that they
swing and dance, the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has to stand on one
foot upon a seat which is made of bricks plastered over, covered
with a white cloth, and hung with tapestry. He is supported by a
wooden frame with a gilt canopy, and two Brahmans stand one on each
side of him. The dancing Brahmans carry buffalo horns with which
they draw water from a large copper caldron and sprinkle it on the
spectators; this is supposed to bring good luck, causing the people
to dwell in peace and quiet, health and prosperity. The time during
which the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has to stand on one foot is
about three hours. This is thought “to prove the dispositions
of the Devattas and spirits.” If he lets his foot down
“he is liable to forfeit his property and have his family
enslaved by the king, as it is believed to be a bad omen,
portending destruction to the state, and instability to the throne.
But if he stand firm he is believed to have gained a victory over
evil spirits, and he has moreover the privilege, ostensibly at
least, of seizing any ship which may enter the harbour during these
three days, and taking its contents, and also of entering any open
shop in the town and carrying away what he chooses.”
Such were the duties and privileges of the Siamese King Hop down
to about the middle of the nineteenth century or later. Under the
reign of the late enlightened monarch this quaint personage was to
some extent both shorn of the glories and relieved of the burden of
his office. He still watches, as of old, the Brahmans rushing
through the air in a swing suspended between two tall masts, each
some ninety feet high; but he is allowed to sit instead of stand,
and, although public opinion still expects him to keep his right
foot on his left knee during the whole of the ceremony, he would
incur no legal penalty were he, to the great chagrin of the people,
to put his weary foot to the ground. Other signs, too, tell of the
invasion of the East by the ideas and civilisation of the West. The
thoroughfares that lead to the scene of the performance are blocked
with carriages: lamp-posts and telegraph posts, to which eager
spectators cling like monkeys, rise above the dense crowd; and,
while a tatterdemalion band of the old style, in gaudy garb of
vermilion and yellow, bangs and tootles away on drums and trumpets
of an antique pattern, the procession of barefooted soldiers in
brilliant uniforms steps briskly along to the lively strains of a
modern military band playing “Marching through
Georgia.”
On the first day of the sixth month, which was regarded as the
beginning of the year, the king and people of Samarcand used to put
on new clothes and cut their hair and beards. Then they repaired to
a forest near the capital where they shot arrows on horseback for
seven days. On the last day the target was a gold coin, and he who
hit it had the right to be king for one day. In Upper Egypt on the
first day of the solar year by Coptic reckoning, that is, on the
tenth of September, when the Nile has generally reached its highest
point, the regular government is suspended for three days and every
town chooses its own ruler. This temporary lord wears a sort of
tall fool’s cap and a long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in
a strange mantle. With a wand of office in his hand and attended by
men disguised as scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds
to the Governor’s house. The latter allows himself to be
deposed; and the mock king, mounting the throne, holds a tribunal,
to the decisions of which even the governor and his officials must
bow. After three days the mock king is condemned to death; the
envelope or shell in which he was encased is committed to the
flames, and from its ashes the Fellah creeps forth. The custom
perhaps points to an old practice of burning a real king in grim
earnest. In Uganda the brothers of the king used to be burned,
because it was not lawful to shed the royal blood.
The Mohammedan students of Fez, in Morocco, are allowed to
appoint a sultan of their own, who reigns for a few weeks, and is
known as Sultan t-tulba, “the Sultan of the
Scribes.” This brief authority is put up for auction and
knocked down to the highest bidder. It brings some substantial
privileges with it, for the holder is freed from taxes
thenceforward, and he has the right of asking a favour from the
real sultan. That favour is seldom refused; it usually consists in
the release of a prisoner. Moreover, the agents of the
student-sultan levy fines on the shopkeepers and householders,
against whom they trump up various humorous charges. The temporary
sultan is surrounded with the pomp of a real court, and parades the
streets in state with music and shouting, while a royal umbrella is
held over his head. With the so-called fines and free-will
offerings, to which the real sultan adds a liberal supply of
provisions, the students have enough to furnish forth a magnificent
banquet; and altogether they enjoy themselves thoroughly, indulging
in all kinds of games and amusements. For the first seven days the
mock sultan remains in the college; then he goes about a mile out
of the town and encamps on the bank of the river, attended by the
students and not a few of the citizens. On the seventh day of his
stay outside the town he is visited by the real sultan, who grants
him his request and gives him seven more days to reign, so that the
reign of “the Sultan of the Scribes” nominally lasts
three weeks. But when six days of the last week have passed the
mock sultan runs back to the town by night. This temporary
sultanship always falls in spring, about the beginning of April.
Its origin is said to have been as follows. When Mulai Rasheed II.
was fighting for the throne in 1664 or 1665, a certain Jew usurped
the royal authority at Taza. But the rebellion was soon suppressed
through the loyalty and devotion of the students. To effect their
purpose they resorted to an ingenious stratagem. Forty of them
caused themselves to be packed in chests which were sent as a
present to the usurper. In the dead of night, while the
unsuspecting Jew was slumbering peacefully among the packing-cases,
the lids were stealthily raised, the brave forty crept forth, slew
the usurper, and took possession of the city in the name of the
real sultan, who, to mark his gratitude for the help thus rendered
him in time of need, conferred on the students the right of
annually appointing a sultan of their own. The narrative has all
the air of a fiction devised to explain an old custom, of which the
real meaning and origin had been forgotten.
A custom of annually appointing a mock king for a single day was
observed at Lostwithiel in Cornwall down to the sixteenth century.
On “little Easter Sunday” the freeholders of the town
and manor assembled together, either in person or by their
deputies, and one among them, as it fell to his lot by turn, gaily
attired and gallantly mounted, with a crown on his head, a sceptre
in his hand, and a sword borne before him, rode through the
principal street to the church, dutifully attended by all the rest
on horseback. The clergyman in his best robes received him at the
churchyard stile and conducted him to hear divine service. On
leaving the church he repaired, with the same pomp, to a house
provided for his reception. Here a feast awaited him and his suite,
and being set at the head of the table he was served on bended
knees, with all the rites due to the estate of a prince. The
ceremony ended with the dinner, and every man returned home.
Sometimes the temporary king occupies the throne, not annually,
but once for all at the beginning of each reign. Thus in the
kingdom of Jambi in Sumatra it is the custom that at the beginning
of a new reign a man of the people should occupy the throne and
exercise the royal prerogatives for a single day. The origin of the
custom is explained by a tradition that there were once five royal
brothers, the four elder of whom all declined the throne on the
ground of various bodily defects, leaving it to their youngest
brother. But the eldest occupied the throne for one day, and
reserved for his descendants a similar privilege at the beginning
of every reign. Thus the office of temporary king is hereditary in
a family akin to the royal house. In Bilaspur it seems to be the
custom, after the death of a Rajah, for a Brahman to eat rice out
of the dead Rajah’s hand, and then to occupy the throne for a
year. At the end of the year the Brahman receives presents and is
dismissed from the territory, being forbidden apparently to return.
“The idea seems to be that the spirit of the Rájá enters into
the Bráhman who eats the khir (rice and milk) out of his
hand when he is dead, as the Brahman is apparently carefully
watched during the whole year, and not allowed to go away.”
The same or a similar custom is believed to obtain among the hill
states about Kangra. The custom of banishing the Brahman who
represents the king may be a substitute for putting him to death.
At the installation of a prince of Carinthia a peasant, in whose
family the office was hereditary, ascended a marble stone which
stood surrounded by meadows in a spacious valley; on his right
stood a black mother-cow, on his left a lean ugly mare. A rustic
crowd gathered about him. Then the future prince, dressed as a
peasant and carrying a shepherd’s staff, drew near, attended
by courtiers and magistrates. On perceiving him the peasant called
out, “Who is this whom I see coming so proudly along?”
The people answered, “The prince of the land.” The
peasant was then prevailed on to surrender the marble seat to the
prince on condition of receiving sixty pence, the cow and mare, and
exemption from taxes. But before yielding his place he gave the
prince a light blow on the cheek.
Some points about these temporary kings deserve to be specially
noticed before we pass to the next branch of the evidence. In the
first place, the Cambodian and Siamese examples show clearly that
it is especially the divine or magical functions of the king which
are transferred to his temporary substitute. This appears from the
belief that by keeping up his foot the temporary king of Siam
gained a victory over the evil spirits, whereas by letting it down
he imperilled the existence of the state. Again, the Cambodian
ceremony of trampling down the “mountain of rice,” and
the Siamese ceremony of opening the ploughing and sowing, are
charms to produce a plentiful harvest, as appears from the belief
that those who carry home some of the trampled rice, or of the seed
sown, will thereby secure a good crop. Moreover, when the Siamese
representative of the king is guiding the plough, the people watch
him anxiously, not to see whether he drives a straight furrow, but
to mark the exact point on his leg to which the skirt of his silken
robe reaches; for on that is supposed to hang the state of the
weather and the crops during the ensuing season. If the Lord of the
Heavenly Hosts hitches up his garment above his knee, the weather
will be wet and heavy rains will spoil the harvest. If he lets it
trail to his ankle, a drought will be the consequence. But fine
weather and heavy crops will follow if the hem of his robe hangs
exactly half-way down the calf of his leg. So closely is the course
of nature, and with it the weal or woe of the people, dependent on
the minutest act or gesture of the king’s representative. But
the task of making the crops grow, thus deputed to the temporary
kings, is one of the magical functions regularly supposed to be
discharged by kings in primitive society. The rule that the mock
king must stand on one foot upon a raised seat in the rice-field
was perhaps originally meant as a charm to make the crop grow high;
at least this was the object of a similar ceremony observed by the
old Prussians. The tallest girl, standing on one foot upon a seat,
with her lap full of cakes, a cup of brandy in her right hand and a
piece of elm-bark or linden-bark in her left, prayed to the god
Waizganthos that the flax might grow as high as she was standing.
Then, after draining the cup, she had it refilled, and poured the
brandy on the ground as an offering to Waizganthos, and threw down
the cakes for his attendant sprites. If she remained steady on one
foot throughout the ceremony, it was an omen that the flax crop
would be good; but if she let her foot down, it was feared that the
crop might fail. The same significance perhaps attaches to the
swinging of the Brahmans, which the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts had
formerly to witness standing on one foot. On the principles of
homoeopathic or imitative magic it might be thought that the higher
the priests swing the higher will grow the rice. For the ceremony
is described as a harvest festival, and swinging is practised by
the Letts of Russia with the avowed intention of influencing the
growth of the crops. In the spring and early summer, between Easter
and St. John’s Day (the summer solstice), every Lettish
peasant is said to devote his leisure hours to swinging diligently;
for the higher he rises in the air the higher will his flax grow
that season.
In the foregoing cases the temporary king is appointed annually
in accordance with a regular custom. But in other cases the
appointment is made only to meet a special emergency, such as to
relieve the real king from some actual or threatened evil by
diverting it to a substitute, who takes his place on the throne for
a short time. The history of Persia furnishes instances of such
occasional substitutes for the Shah. Thus Shah Abbas the Great,
being warned by his astrologers in the year 1591 that a serious
danger impended over him, attempted to avert the omen by abdicating
the throne and appointing a certain unbeliever named Yusoofee,
probably a Christian, to reign in his stead. The substitute was
accordingly crowned, and for three days, if we may trust the
Persian historians, he enjoyed not only the name and the state but
the power of the king. At the end of his brief reign he was put to
death: the decree of the stars was fulfilled by this sacrifice; and
Abbas, who reascended his throne in a most propitious hour, was
promised by his astrologers a long and glorious reign.
XXVI. Sacrifice of the King’s Son
A POINT to notice about the temporary kings described in the
foregoing chapter is that in two places (Cambodia and Jambi) they
come of a stock which is believed to be akin to the royal family.
If the view here taken of the origin of these temporary kingships
is correct, we can easily understand why the king’s
substitute should sometimes be of the same race as the king. When
the king first succeeded in getting the life of another accepted as
a sacrifice instead of his own, he would have to show that the
death of that other would serve the purpose quite as well as his
own would have done. Now it was as a god or demigod that the king
had to die; therefore the substitute who died for him had to be
invested, at least for the occasion, with the divine attributes of
the king. This, as we have just seen, was certainly the case with
the temporary kings of Siam and Cambodia; they were invested with
the supernatural functions, which in an earlier stage of society
were the special attributes of the king. But no one could so well
represent the king in his divine character as his son, who might be
supposed to share the divine afflatus of his father. No one,
therefore, could so appropriately die for the king and, through
him, for the whole people, as the king’s son.
We have seen that according to tradition, Aun or On, King of
Sweden, sacrificed nine of his sons to Odin at Upsala in order that
his own life might be spared. After he had sacrificed his second
son he received from the god an answer that he should live so long
as he gave him one of his sons every ninth year. When he had
sacrificed his seventh son, he still lived, but was so feeble that
he could not walk but had to be carried in a chair. Then he offered
up his eighth son, and lived nine years more, lying in his bed.
After that he sacrificed his ninth son, and lived another nine
years, but so that he drank out of a horn like a weaned child. He
now wished to sacrifice his only remaining son to Odin, but the
Swedes would not allow him. So he died and was buried in a mound at
Upsala.
In ancient Greece there seems to have been at least one kingly
house of great antiquity of which the eldest sons were always
liable to be sacrificed in room of their royal sires. When Xerxes
was marching through Thessaly at the head of his mighty host to
attack the Spartans at Thermopylae, he came to the town of Alus.
Here he was shown the sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, about which his
guides told him a strange tale. It ran somewhat as follows. Once
upon a time the king of the country, by name Athamas, married a
wife Nephele, and had by her a son called Phrixus and a daughter
named Helle. Afterwards he took to himself a second wife called
Ino, by whom he had two sons, Learchus and Melicertes. But his
second wife was jealous of her stepchildren, Phrixus and Helle, and
plotted their death. She went about very cunningly to compass her
bad end. First of all she persuaded the women of the country to
roast the seed corn secretly before it was committed to the ground.
So next year no crops came up and the people died of famine. Then
the king sent messengers to the oracle at Delphi to enquire the
cause of the dearth. But the wicked stepmother bribed the messenger
to give out as the answer of the god that the dearth would never
cease till the children of Athamas by his first wife had been
sacrificed to Zeus. When Athamas heard that, he sent for the
children, who were with the sheep. But a ram with a fleece of gold
opened his lips, and speaking with the voice of a man warned the
children of their danger. So they mounted the ram and fled with him
over land and sea. As they flew over the sea, the girl slipped from
the animal’s back, and falling into water was drowned. But
her brother Phrixus was brought safe to the land of Colchis, where
reigned a child of the sun. Phrixus married the king’s
daughter, and she bore him a son Cytisorus. And there he sacrificed
the ram with the golden fleece to Zeus the God of Flight; but some
will have it that he sacrificed the animal to Laphystian Zeus. The
golden fleece itself he gave to his wife’s father, who nailed
it to an oak tree, guarded by a sleepless dragon in a sacred grove
of Ares. Meanwhile at home an oracle had commanded that King
Athamas himself should be sacrificed as an expiatory offering for
the whole country. So the people decked him with garlands like a
victim and led him to the altar, where they were just about to
sacrifice him when he was rescued either by his grandson Cytisorus,
who arrived in the nick of time from Colchis, or by Hercules, who
brought tidings that the king’s son Phrixus was yet alive.
Thus Athamas was saved, but afterward he went mad, and mistaking
his son Learchus for a wild beast, shot him dead. Next he attempted
the life of his remaining son Melicertes, but the child was rescued
by his mother Ino, who ran and threw herself and him from a high
rock into the sea. Mother and son were changed into marine
divinities, and the son received special homage in the isle of
Tenedos, where babes were sacrificed to him. Thus bereft of wife
and children the unhappy Athamas quitted his country, and on
enquiring of the oracle where he should dwell was told to take up
his abode wherever he should be entertained by wild beasts. He fell
in with a pack of wolves devouring sheep, and when they saw him
they fled and left him the bleeding remnants of their prey. In this
way the oracle was fulfilled. But because King Athamas had not been
sacrificed as a sin-offering for the whole country, it was divinely
decreed that the eldest male scion of his family in each generation
should be sacrificed without fail, if ever he set foot in the
town-hall, where the offerings were made to Laphystian Zeus by one
of the house of Athamas. Many of the family, Xerxes was informed,
had fled to foreign lands to escape this doom; but some of them had
returned long afterwards, and being caught by the sentinels in the
act of entering the town-hall were wreathed as victims, led forth
in procession, and sacrificed. These instances appear to have been
notorious, if not frequent; for the writer of a dialogue attributed
to Plato, after speaking of the immolation of human victims by the
Carthaginians, adds that such practices were not unknown among the
Greeks, and he refers with horror to the sacrifices offered on
Mount Lycaeus and by the descendants of Athamas.
The suspicion that this barbarous custom by no means fell into
disuse even in later days is strengthened by a case of human
sacrifice which occurred in Plutarch’s time at Orchomenus, a
very ancient city of Boeotia, distant only a few miles across the
plain from the historian’s birthplace. Here dwelt a family of
which the men went by the name of Psoloeis or “Sooty,”
and the women by the name of Oleae or “Destructive.”
Every year at the festival of the Agrionia the priest of Dionysus
pursued these women with a drawn sword, and if he overtook one of
them he had the right to slay her. In Plutarch’s lifetime the
right was actually exercised by a priest Zoilus. The family thus
liable to furnish at least one human victim every year was of royal
descent, for they traced their lineage to Minyas, the famous old
king of Orchomenus, the monarch of fabulous wealth, whose stately
treasury, as it is called, still stands in ruins at the point where
the long rocky hill of Orchomenus melts into the vast level expanse
of the Copaic plain. Tradition ran that the king’s three
daughters long despised the other women of the country for yielding
to the Bacchic frenzy, and sat at home in the king’s house
scornfully plying the distaff and the loom, while the rest,
wreathed with flowers, their dishevelled locks streaming to the
wind, roamed in ecstasy the barren mountains that rise above
Orchomenus, making the solitude of the hills to echo to the wild
music of cymbals and tambourines. But in time the divine fury
infected even the royal damsels in their quiet chamber; they were
seized with a fierce longing to partake of human flesh, and cast
lots among themselves which should give up her child to furnish a
cannibal feast. The lot fell on Leucippe, and she surrendered her
son Hippasus, who was torn limb from limb by the three. From these
misguided women sprang the Oleae and the Psoloeis, of whom the men
were said to be so called because they wore sad-coloured raiment in
token of their mourning and grief.
Now this practice of taking human victims from a family of royal
descent at Orchomenus is all the more significant because Athamas
himself is said to have reigned in the land of Orchomenus even
before the time of Minyas, and because over against the city there
rises Mount Laphystius, on which, as at Alus in Thessaly, there was
a sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, where, according to tradition,
Athamas purposed to sacrifice his two children Phrixus and Helle.
On the whole, comparing the traditions about Athamas with the
custom that obtained with regard to his descendants in historical
times, we may fairly infer that in Thessaly and probably in Boeotia
there reigned of old a dynasty of which the kings were liable to be
sacrificed for the good of the country to the god called Laphystian
Zeus, but that they contrived to shift the fatal responsibility to
their offspring, of whom the eldest son was regularly destined to
the altar. As time went on, the cruel custom was so far mitigated
that a ram was accepted as a vicarious sacrifice in room of the
royal victim, provided always that the prince abstained from
setting foot in the town-hall where the sacrifices were offered to
Laphystian Zeus by one of his kinsmen. But if he were rash enough
to enter the place of doom, to thrust himself wilfully, as it were,
on the notice of the god who had good-naturedly winked at the
substitution of a ram, the ancient obligation which had been
suffered to lie in abeyance recovered all its force, and there was
no help for it but he must die. The tradition which associated the
sacrifice of the king or his children with a great dearth points
clearly to the belief, so common among primitive folk, that the
king is responsible for the weather and the crops, and that he may
justly pay with his life for the inclemency of the one or the
failure of the other. Athamas and his line, in short, appear to
have united divine or magical with royal functions; and this view
is strongly supported by the claims to divinity which Salmoneus,
the brother of Athamas, is said to have set up. We have seen that
this presumptuous mortal professed to be no other than Zeus
himself, and to wield the thunder and lightning, of which he made a
trumpery imitation by the help of tinkling kettles and blazing
torches. If we may judge from analogy, his mock thunder and
lightning were no mere scenic exhibition designed to deceive and
impress the beholders; they were enchantments practised by the
royal magician for the purpose of bringing about the celestial
phenomena which they feebly mimicked.
Among the Semites of Western Asia the king, in a time of
national danger, sometimes gave his own son to die as a sacrifice
for the people. Thus Philo of Byblus, in his work on the Jews,
says: “It was an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger
that the ruler of a city or nation should give his beloved son to
die for the whole people, as a ransom offered to the avenging
demons; and the children thus offered were slain with mystic rites.
So Cronus, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, being king of the land
and having an only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the Phoenician
tongue Jeoud signifies ‘only begotten’), dressed him in
royal robes and sacrificed him upon an altar in a time of war, when
the country was in great danger from the enemy.” When the
king of Moab was besieged by the Israelites and hard beset, he took
his eldest son, who should have reigned in his stead, and offered
him for a burnt offering on the wall.
XXVII. Succession to the Soul
TO THE VIEW that in early times, and among barbarous races,
kings have frequently been put to death at the end of a short
reign, it may be objected that such a custom would tend to the
extinction of the royal family. The objection may be met by
observing, first, that the kingship is often not confined to one
family, but may be shared in turn by several; second, that the
office is frequently not hereditary, but is open to men of any
family, even to foreigners, who may fulfil the requisite
conditions, such as marrying a princess or vanquishing the king in
battle; and, third, that even if the custom did tend to the
extinction of a dynasty, that is not a consideration which would
prevent its observance among people less provident of the future
and less heedful of human life than ourselves. Many races, like
many individuals, have indulged in practices which must in the end
destroy them. The Polynesians seem regularly to have killed
two-thirds of their children. In some parts of East Africa the
proportion of infants massacred at birth is said to be the same.
Only children born in certain presentations are allowed to live.
The Jagas, a conquering tribe in Angola, are reported to have put
to death all their children, without exception, in order that the
women might not be cumbered with babies on the march. They
recruited their numbers by adopting boys and girls of thirteen or
fourteen years of age, whose parents they had killed and eaten.
Among the Mbaya Indians of South America the women used to murder
all their children except the last, or the one they believed to be
the last. If one of them had another child afterwards, she killed
it. We need not wonder that this practice entirely destroyed a
branch of the Mbaya nation, who had been for many years the most
formidable enemies of the Spaniards. Among the Lengua Indians of
the Gran Chaco, the missionaries discovered what they describe as
“a carefully planned system of racial suicide, by the
practice of infanticide by abortion, and other methods.” Nor
is infanticide the only mode in which a savage tribe commits
suicide. A lavish use of the poison ordeal may be equally
effective. Some time ago a small tribe named Uwet came down from
the hill country, and settled on the left branch of the Calabar
River in West Africa. When the missionaries first visited the
place, they found the population considerable, distributed into
three villages. Since then the constant use of the poison ordeal
has almost extinguished the tribe. On one occasion the whole
population took poison to prove their innocence. About half
perished on the spot, and the remnant, we are told, still
continuing their superstitious practice, must soon become extinct.
With such examples before us we need not hesitate to believe that
many tribes have felt no scruple or delicacy in observing a custom
which tends to wipe out a single family. To attribute such scruples
to them is to commit the common, the perpetually repeated mistake
of judging the savage by the standard of European civilisation. If
any of my readers set out with the notion that all races of men
think and act much in the same way as educated Englishmen, the
evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected in this work
should suffice to disabuse him of so erroneous a prepossession.
The explanation here given of the custom of killing divine
persons assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea
that the soul of the slain divinity is transmitted to his
successor. Of this transmission I have no direct proof except in
the case of the Shilluk, among whom the practice of killing the
divine king prevails in a typical form, and with whom it is a
fundamental article of faith that the soul of the divine founder of
the dynasty is immanent in every one of his slain successors. But
if this is the only actual example of such a belief which I can
adduce, analogy seems to render it probable that a similar
succession to the soul of the slain god has been supposed to take
place in other instances, though direct evidence of it is wanting.
For it has been already shown that the soul of the incarnate deity
is often supposed to transmigrate at death into another
incarnation; and if this takes place when the death is a natural
one, there seems no reason why it should not take place when the
death has been brought about by violence. Certainly the idea that
the soul of a dying person may be transmitted to his successor is
perfectly familiar to primitive peoples. In Nias the eldest son
usually succeeds his father in the chieftainship. But if from any
bodily or mental defect the eldest son is disqualified for ruling,
the father determines in his lifetime which of his sons shall
succeed him. In order, however, to establish his right of
succession, it is necessary that the son upon whom his
father’s choice falls shall catch in his mouth or in a bag
the last breath, and with it the soul, of the dying chief. For
whoever catches his last breath is chief equally with the appointed
successor. Hence the other brothers, and sometimes also strangers,
crowd round the dying man to catch his soul as it passes. The
houses in Nias are raised above the ground on posts, and it has
happened that when the dying man lay with his face on the floor,
one of the candidates has bored a hole in the floor and sucked in
the chief’s last breath through a bamboo tube. When the chief
has no son, his soul is caught in a bag, which is fastened to an
image made to represent the deceased; the soul is then believed to
pass into the image.
Sometimes it would appear that the spiritual link between a king
and the souls of his predecessors is formed by the possession of
some part of their persons. In southern Celebes the regalia often
consist of corporeal portions of deceased rajahs, which are
treasured as sacred relics and confer the right to the throne.
Similarly among the Sakalavas of southern Madagascar a vertebra of
the neck, a nail, and a lock of hair of a deceased king are placed
in a crocodile’s tooth and carefully kept along with the
similar relics of his predecessors in a house set apart for the
purpose. The possession of these relics constitutes the right to
the throne. A legitimate heir who should be deprived of them would
lose all his authority over the people, and on the contrary a
usurper who should make himself master of the relics would be
acknowledged king without dispute. When the Alake or king of
Abeokuta in West Africa dies, the principal men decapitate his
body, and placing the head in a large earthen vessel deliver it to
the new sovereign; it becomes his fetish and he is bound to pay it
honours. Sometimes, in order apparently that the new sovereign may
inherit more surely the magical and other virtues of the royal
line, he is required to eat a piece of his dead predecessor. Thus
at Abeokuta not only was the head of the late king presented to his
successor, but the tongue was cut out and given him to eat. Hence,
when the natives wish to signify that the sovereign reigns, they
say, “He has eaten the king.” A custom of the same sort
is still practised at Ibadan, a large town in the interior of
Lagos, West Africa. When the king dies his head is cut off and sent
to his nominal suzerain, the Alafin of Oyo, the paramount king of
Yoruba land; but his heart is eaten by his successor. This ceremony
was performed not very many years ago at the accession of a new
king of Ibadan.
Taking the whole of the preceding evidence into account, we may
fairly suppose that when the divine king or priest is put to death
his spirit is believed to pass into his successor. In point of
fact, among the Shilluk of the White Nile, who regularly kill their
divine kings, every king on his accession has to perform a ceremony
which appears designed to convey to him the same sacred and
worshipful spirit which animated all his predecessors, one after
the other, on the throne.
XXVIII. The Killing of the Tree-Spirit
1. The Whitsuntide Mummers
IT remains to ask what light the custom of killing the divine
king or priest sheds upon the special subject to our enquiry. In an
earlier part of this work we saw reason to suppose that the King of
the Wood at Nemi was regarded as an incarnation of a tree-spirit or
of the spirit of vegetation, and that as such he would be endowed,
in the belief of his worshippers, with a magical power of making
the trees to bear fruit, the crops to grow, and so on. His life
must therefore have been held very precious by his worshippers, and
was probably hedged in by a system of elaborate precautions or
taboos like those by which, in so many places, the life of the
man-god has been guarded against the malignant influence of demons
and sorcerers. But we have seen that the very value attached to the
life of the man-god necessitates his violent death as the only
means of preserving it from the inevitable decay of age. The same
reasoning would apply to the King of the Wood; he, too, had to be
killed in order that the divine spirit, incarnate in him, might be
transferred in its integrity to his successor. The rule that he
held office till a stronger should slay him might be supposed to
secure both the preservation of his divine life in full vigour and
its transference to a suitable successor as soon as that vigour
began to be impaired. For so long as he could maintain his position
by the strong hand, it might be inferred that his natural force was
not abated; whereas his defeat and death at the hands of another
proved that his strength was beginning to fail and that it was time
his divine life should be lodged in a less dilapidated tabernacle.
This explanation of the rule that the King of the Wood had to be
slain by his successor at least renders that rule perfectly
intelligible. It is strongly supported by the theory and practice
of the Shilluk, who put their divine king to death at the first
signs of failing health, lest his decrepitude should entail a
corresponding failure of vital energy on the corn, the cattle, and
men. Moreover, it is countenanced by the analogy of the Chitomé,
upon whose life the existence of the world was supposed to hang,
and who was therefore slain by his successor as soon as he showed
signs of breaking up. Again, the terms on which in later times the
King of Calicut held office are identical with those attached to
the office of King of the Wood, except that whereas the former
might be assailed by a candidate at any time, the King of Calicut
might only be attacked once every twelve years. But as the leave
granted to the King of Calicut to reign so long as he could defend
himself against all comers was a mitigation of the old rule which
set a fixed term to his life, so we may conjecture that the similar
permission granted to the King of the Wood was a mitigation of an
older custom of putting him to death at the end of a definite
period. In both cases the new rule gave to the god-man at least a
chance for his life, which under the old rule was denied him; and
people probably reconciled themselves to the change by reflecting
that so long as the god-man could maintain himself by the sword
against all assaults, there was no reason to apprehend that the
fatal decay had set in.
The conjecture that the King of the Wood was formerly put to
death at the expiry of a fixed term, without being allowed a chance
for his life, will be confirmed if evidence can be adduced of a
custom of periodically killing his counterparts, the human
representatives of the tree-spirit, in Northern Europe. Now in
point of fact such a custom has left unmistakable traces of itself
in the rural festivals of the peasantry. To take examples.
At Niederpöring, in Lower Bavaria, the Whitsuntide
representative of the tree-spirit—the Pfingstl as he
was called—was clad from top to toe in leaves and flowers. On
his head he wore a high pointed cap, the ends of which rested on
his shoulders, only two holes being left in it for his eyes. The
cap was covered with water-flowers and surmounted with a nosegay of
peonies. The sleeves of his coat were also made of water-plants,
and the rest of his body was enveloped in alder and hazel leaves.
On each side of him marched a boy holding up one of the
Pfingstl’s arms. These two boys carried drawn
swords, and so did most of the others who formed the procession.
They stopped at every house where they hoped to receive a present;
and the people, in hiding, soused the leaf-clad boy with water. All
rejoiced when he was well drenched. Finally he waded into the brook
up to his middle; whereupon one of the boys, standing on the
bridge, pretended to cut off his head. At Wurmlingen, in Swabia, a
score of young fellows dress themselves on Whit-Monday in white
shirts and white trousers, with red scarves round their waists and
swords hanging from the scarves. They ride on horseback into the
wood, led by two trumpeters blowing their trumpets. In the wood
they cut down leafy oak branches, in which they envelop from head
to foot him who was the last of their number to ride out of the
village. His legs, however, are encased separately, so that he may
be able to mount his horse again. Further, they give him a long
artificial neck, with an artificial head and a false face on the
top of it. Then a May-tree is cut, generally an aspen or beech
about ten feet high; and being decked with coloured handkerchiefs
and ribbons it is entrusted to a special “May-bearer.”
The cavalcade then returns with music and song to the village.
Amongst the personages who figure in the procession are a Moorish
king with a sooty face and a crown on his head, a Dr. Iron-Beard, a
corporal, and an executioner. They halt on the village green, and
each of the characters makes a speech in rhyme. The executioner
announces that the leaf-clad man has been condemned to death, and
cuts off his false head. Then the riders race to the May-tree,
which has been set up a little way off. The first man who succeeds
in wrenching it from the ground as he gallops past keeps it with
all its decorations. The ceremony is observed every second or third
year.
In Saxony and Thüringen there is a Whitsuntide ceremony called
“chasing the Wild Man out of the bush,” or
“fetching the Wild Man out of the wood.” A young fellow
is enveloped in leaves or moss and called the Wild Man. He hides in
the wood and the other lads of the village go out to seek him. They
find him, lead him captive out of the wood, and fire at him with
blank muskets. He falls like dead to the ground, but a lad dressed
as a doctor bleeds him, and he comes to life again. At this they
rejoice, and, binding him fast on a waggon, take him to the
village, where they tell all the people how they have caught the
Wild Man. At every house they receive a gift. In the Erzgebirge the
following custom was annually observed at Shrovetide about the
beginning of the seventeenth century. Two men disguised as Wild
Men, the one in brushwood and moss, the other in straw, were led
about the streets, and at last taken to the market-place, where
they were chased up and down, shot and stabbed. Before falling they
reeled about with strange gestures and spirted blood on the people
from bladders which they carried. When they were down, the huntsmen
placed them on boards and carried them to the ale-house, the miners
marching beside them and winding blasts on their mining tools as if
they had taken a noble head of game. A very similar Shrovetide
custom is still observed near Schluckenau in Bohemia. A man dressed
up as a Wild Man is chased through several streets till he comes to
a narrow lane across which a cord is stretched. He stumbles over
the cord and, falling to the ground, is overtaken and caught by his
pursuers. The executioner runs up and stabs with his sword a
bladder filled with blood which the Wild Man wears round his body;
so the Wild Man dies, while a stream of blood reddens the ground.
Next day a straw-man, made up to look like the Wild Man, is placed
on a litter, and, accompanied by a great crowd, is taken to a pool
into which it is thrown by the executioner. The ceremony is called
“burying the Carnival.”
In Semic (Bohemia) the custom of beheading the King is observed
on Whit-Monday. A troop of young people disguise themselves; each
is girt with a girdle of bark and carries a wooden sword and a
trumpet of willow-bark. The King wears a robe of tree-bark adorned
with flowers, on his head is a crown of bark decked with flowers
and branches, his feet are wound about with ferns, a mask hides his
face, and for a sceptre he has a hawthorn switch in his hand. A lad
leads him through the village by a rope fastened to his foot, while
the rest dance about, blow their trumpets, and whistle. In every
farmhouse the King is chased round the room, and one of the troop,
amid much noise and outcry, strikes with his sword a blow on the
King’s robe of bark till it rings again. Then a gratuity is
demanded. The ceremony of decapitation, which is here somewhat
slurred over, is carried out with a greater semblance of reality in
other parts of Bohemia. Thus in some villages of the Königgrätz
district on Whit-Monday the girls assemble under one lime-tree and
the young men under another, all dressed in their best and tricked
out with ribbons. The young men twine a garland for the Queen, and
the girls another for the King. When they have chosen the King and
Queen they all go in procession two and two, to the ale-house, from
the balcony of which the crier proclaims the names of the King and
Queen. Both are then invested with the insignia of their office and
are crowned with the garlands, while the music plays up. Then some
one gets on a bench and accuses the King of various offences, such
as ill-treating the cattle. The King appeals to witnesses and a
trial ensues, at the close of which the judge, who carries a white
wand as his badge of office, pronounces a verdict of
“Guilty,” or “Not guilty.” If the verdict
is “Guilty,” the judge breaks his wand, the King kneels
on a white cloth, all heads are bared, and a soldier sets three or
four hats, one above the other, on his Majesty’s head. The
judge then pronounces the word “Guilty” thrice in a
loud voice, and orders the crier to behead the King. The crier
obeys by striking off the King’s hats with the wooden
sword.
But perhaps, for our purpose, the most instructive of these
mimic executions is the following Bohemian one. In some places of
the Pilsen district (Bohemia) on Whit-Monday the King is dressed in
bark, ornamented with flowers and ribbons; he wears a crown of gilt
paper and rides a horse, which is also decked with flowers.
Attended by a judge, an executioner, and other characters, and
followed by a train of soldiers, all mounted, he rides to the
village square, where a hut or arbour of green boughs has been
erected under the May-trees, which are firs, freshly cut, peeled to
the top, and dressed with flowers and ribbons. After the dames and
maidens of the village have been criticised and a frog beheaded,
the cavalcade rides to a place previously determined upon, in a
straight, broad street. Here they draw up in two lines and the King
takes to flight. He is given a short start and rides off at full
speed, pursued by the whole troop. If they fail to catch him he
remains King for another year, and his companions must pay his
score at the ale-house in the evening. But if they overtake and
catch him he is scourged with hazel rods or beaten with the wooden
swords and compelled to dismount. Then the executioner asks,
“Shall I behead this King?” The answer is given,
“Behead him”; the executioner brandishes his axe, and
with the words, “One, two, three, let the King headless
be!” he strikes off the King’s crown. Amid the loud
cries of the bystanders the King sinks to the ground; then he is
laid on a bier and carried to the nearest farmhouse.
In most of the personages who are thus slain in mimicry it is
impossible not to recognise representatives of the tree-spirit or
spirit of vegetation, as he is supposed to manifest himself in
spring. The bark, leaves, and flowers in which the actors are
dressed, and the season of the year at which they appear, show that
they belong to the same class as the Grass King, King of the May,
Jack-in-the-Green, and other representatives of the vernal spirit
of vegetation which we examined in an earlier part of this work. As
if to remove any possible doubt on this head, we find that in two
cases these slain men are brought into direct connexion with
May-trees, which are the impersonal, as the May King, Grass King,
and so forth, are the personal representatives of the tree-spirit.
The drenching of the Pfingstl with water and his wading up
to the middle into the brook are, therefore, no doubt rain-charms
like those which have been already described.
But if these personages represent, as they certainly do, the
spirit of vegetation in spring, the question arises, Why kill them?
What is the object of slaying the spirit of vegetation at any time
and above all in spring, when his services are most wanted? The
only probable answer to this question seems to be given in the
explanation already proposed of the custom of killing the divine
king or priest. The divine life, incarnate in a material and mortal
body, is liable to be tainted and corrupted by the weakness of the
frail medium in which it is for a time enshrined; and if it is to
be saved from the increasing enfeeblement which it must necessarily
share with its human incarnation as he advances in years, it must
be detached from him before, or at least as soon as, he exhibits
signs of decay, in order to be transferred to a vigorous successor.
This is done by killing the old representative of the god and
conveying the divine spirit from him to a new incarnation. The
killing of the god, that is, of his human incarnation, is therefore
merely a necessary step to his revival or resurrection in a better
form. Far from being an extinction of the divine spirit, it is only
the beginning of a purer and stronger manifestation of it. If this
explanation holds good of the custom of killing divine kings and
priests in general, it is still more obviously applicable to the
custom of annually killing the representative of the tree-spirit or
spirit of vegetation in spring. For the decay of plant life in
winter is readily interpreted by primitive man as an enfeeblement
of the spirit of vegetation; the spirit has, he thinks, grown old
and weak and must therefore be renovated by being slain and brought
to life in a younger and fresher form. Thus the killing of the
representative of the tree-spirit in spring is regarded as a means
to promote and quicken the growth of vegetation. For the killing of
the tree-spirit is associated always (we must suppose) implicitly,
and sometimes explicitly also, with a revival or resurrection of
him in a more youthful and vigorous form. So in the Saxon and
Thüringen custom, after the Wild Man has been shot he is brought to
life again by a doctor; and in the Wurmlingen ceremony there
figures a Dr. Iron-Beard, who probably once played a similar part;
certainly in another spring ceremony, which will be described
presently, Dr. Iron-Beard pretends to restore a dead man to life.
But of this revival or resurrection of the god we shall have more
to say anon.
The points of similarity between these North European personages
and the subject of our enquiry—the King of the Wood or priest
of Nemi—are sufficiently striking. In these northern maskers
we see kings, whose dress of bark and leaves along with the hut of
green boughs and the fir-trees, under which they hold their court,
proclaim them unmistakably as, like their Italian counterpart,
Kings of the Wood. Like him they die a violent death, but like him
they may escape from it for a time by their bodily strength and
agility; for in several of these northern customs the flight and
pursuit of the king is a prominent part of the ceremony, and in one
case at least if the king can outrun his pursuers he retains his
life and his office for another year. In this last case the king in
fact holds office on condition of running for his life once a year,
just as the King of Calicut in later times held office on condition
of defending his life against all comers once every twelve years,
and just as the priest of Nemi held office on condition of
defending himself against any assault at any time. In every one of
these instances the life of the god-man is prolonged on condition
of his showing, in a severe physical contest of fight or flight,
that his bodily strength is not decayed, and that, therefore, the
violent death, which sooner or later is inevitable, may for the
present be postponed. With regard to flight it is noticeable that
flight figured conspicuously both in the legend and in the practice
of the King of the Wood. He had to be a runaway slave in memory of
the flight of Orestes, the traditional founder of the worship;
hence the Kings of the Wood are described by an ancient writer as
“both strong of hand and fleet of foot.” Perhaps if we
knew the ritual of the Arician grove fully we might find that the
king was allowed a chance for his life by flight, like his Bohemian
brother. I have already conjectured that the annual flight of the
priestly king at Rome (regifugium) was at first a flight
of the same kind; in other words, that he was originally one of
those divine kings who are either put to death after a fixed period
or allowed to prove by the strong hand or the fleet foot that their
divinity is vigorous and unimpaired. One more point of resemblance
may be noted between the Italian King of the Wood and his northern
counterparts. In Saxony and Thüringen the representative of the
tree-spirit, after being killed, is brought to life again by a
doctor. This is exactly what legend affirmed to have happened to
the first King of the Wood at Nemi, Hippolytus or Virbius, who
after he had been killed by his horses was restored to life by the
physician Aesculapius. Such a legend tallies well with the theory
that the slaying of the King of the Wood was only a step to his
revival or resurrection in his successor.
2. Burying the Carnival
THUS far I have offered an explanation of the rule which
required that the priest of Nemi should be slain by his successor.
The explanation claims to be no more than probable; our scanty
knowledge of the custom and of its history forbids it to be more.
But its probability will be augmented in proportion to the extent
to which the motives and modes of thought which it assumes can be
proved to have operated in primitive society. Hitherto the god with
whose death and resurrection we have been chiefly concerned has
been the tree-god. But if I can show that the custom of killing the
god and the belief in his resurrection originated, or at least
existed, in the hunting and pastoral stage of society, when the
slain god was an animal, and that it survived into the agricultural
stage, when the slain god was the corn or a human being
representing the corn, the probability of my explanation will have
been considerably increased. This I shall attempt to do in the
sequel, and in the course of the discussion I hope to clear up some
obscurities which still remain, and to answer some objections which
may have suggested themselves to the reader.
We start from the point at which we left off—the spring
customs of European peasantry. Besides the ceremonies already
described there are two kindred sets of observances in which the
simulated death of a divine or supernatural being is a conspicuous
feature. In one of them the being whose death is dramatically
represented is a personification of the Carnival; in the other it
is Death himself. The former ceremony falls naturally at the end of
the Carnival, either on the last day of that merry season, namely
Shrove Tuesday, or on the first day of Lent, namely Ash Wednesday.
The date of the other ceremony—the Carrying or Driving out of
Death, as it is commonly called—is not so uniformly fixed.
Generally it is the fourth Sunday in Lent, which hence goes by the
name of Dead Sunday; but in some places the celebration falls a
week earlier, in others, as among the Czechs of Bohemia, a week
later, while in certain German villages of Moravia it is held on
the first Sunday after Easter. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the
date may originally have been variable, depending on the appearance
of the first swallow or some other herald of the spring. Some
writers regard the ceremony as Slavonic in its origin. Grimm
thought it was a festival of the New Year with the old Slavs, who
began their year in March. We shall first take examples, of the
mimic death of the Carnival, which always falls before the other in
the calendar.
At Frosinone, in Latium, about half-way between Rome and Naples,
the dull monotony of life in a provincial Italian town is agreeably
broken on the last day of the Carnival by the ancient festival
known as the Radica. About four o’clock in the
afternoon the town band, playing lively tunes and followed by a
great crowd, proceeds to the Piazza del Plebiscito, where is the
Sub-Prefecture as well as the rest of the Government buildings.
Here, in the middle of the square, the eyes of the expectant
multitude are greeted by the sight of an immense car decked with
many-coloured festoons and drawn by four horses. Mounted on the car
is a huge chair, on which sits enthroned the majestic figure of the
Carnival, a man of stucco about nine feet high with a rubicund and
smiling countenance. Enormous boots, a tin helmet like those which
grace the heads of officers of the Italian marine, and a coat of
many colours embellished with strange devices, adorn the outward
man of this stately personage. His left hand rests on the arm of
the chair, while with his right he gracefully salutes the crowd,
being moved to this act of civility by a string which is pulled by
a man who modestly shrinks from publicity under the mercy-seat. And
now the crowd, surging excitedly round the car, gives vent to its
feelings in wild cries of joy, gentle and simple being mixed up
together and all dancing furiously the Saltarello. A
special feature of the festival is that every one must carry in his
hand what is called a radica ( “root”), by
which is meant a huge leaf of the aloe or rather the agave. Any one
who ventured into the crowd without such a leaf would be
unceremoniously hustled out of it, unless indeed he bore as a
substitute a large cabbage at the end of a long stick or a bunch of
grass curiously plaited. When the multitude, after a short turn,
has escorted the slow-moving car to the gate of the Sub-Prefecture,
they halt, and the car, jolting over the uneven ground, rumbles
into the courtyard. A hush now falls on the crowd, their subdued
voices sounding, according to the description of one who has heard
them, like the murmur of a troubled sea. All eyes are turned
anxiously to the door from which the Sub-Prefect himself and the
other representatives of the majesty of the law are expected to
issue and pay their homage to the hero of the hour. A few moments
of suspense and then a storm of cheers and hand-clapping salutes
the appearance of the dignitaries, as they file out and, descending
the staircase, take their place in the procession. The hymn of the
Carnival is now thundered out, after which, amid a deafening roar,
aloe leaves and cabbages are whirled aloft and descend impartially
on the heads of the just and the unjust, who lend fresh zest to the
proceedings by engaging in a free fight. When these preliminaries
have been concluded to the satisfaction of all concerned, the
procession gets under weigh. The rear is brought up by a cart laden
with barrels of wine and policemen, the latter engaged in the
congenial task of serving out wine to all who ask for it, while a
most internecine struggle, accompanied by a copious discharge of
yells, blows, and blasphemy, goes on among the surging crowd at the
cart’s tail in their anxiety not to miss the glorious
opportunity of intoxicating themselves at the public expense.
Finally, after the procession has paraded the principal streets in
this majestic manner, the effigy of Carnival is taken to the middle
of a public square, stripped of his finery, laid on a pile of wood,
and burnt amid the cries of the multitude, who thundering out once
more the song of the Carnival fling their so-called
“roots” on the pyre and give themselves up without
restraint to the pleasures of the dance.
In the Abruzzi a pasteboard figure of the Carnival is carried by
four grave-diggers with pipes in their mouths and bottles of wine
slung at their shoulder-belts. In front walks the wife of the
Carnival, dressed in mourning and dissolved in tears. From time to
time the company halts, and while the wife addresses the
sympathising public, the grave-diggers refresh the inner man with a
pull at the bottle. In the open square the mimic corpse is laid on
a pyre, and to the roll of drums, the shrill screams of the women,
and the gruffer cries of the men a light is set to it. While the
figure burns, chestnuts are thrown about among the crowd. Sometimes
the Carnival is represented by a straw-man at the top of a pole
which is borne through the town by a troop of mummers in the course
of the afternoon. When evening comes on, four of the mummers hold
out a quilt or sheet by the corners, and the figure of the Carnival
is made to tumble into it. The procession is then resumed, the
performers weeping crocodile tears and emphasising the poignancy of
their grief by the help of saucepans and dinner bells. Sometimes,
again, in the Abruzzi the dead Carnival is personified by a living
man who lies in a coffin, attended by another who acts the priest
and dispenses holy water in great profusion from a bathing tub.
At Lerida, in Catalonia, the funeral of the Carnival was
witnessed by an English traveller in 1877. On the last Sunday of
the Carnival a grand procession of infantry, cavalry, and maskers
of many sorts, some on horseback and some in carriages, escorted
the grand car of His Grace Pau Pi, as the effigy was called, in
triumph through the principal streets. For three days the revelry
ran high, and then at midnight on the last day of the Carnival the
same procession again wound through the streets, but under a
different aspect and for a different end. The triumphal car was
exchanged for a hearse, in which reposed the effigy of his dead
Grace: a troop of maskers, who in the first procession had played
the part of Students of Folly with many a merry quip and jest, now,
robed as priests and bishops, paced slowly along holding aloft huge
lighted tapers and singing a dirge. All the mummers wore crape, and
all the horsemen carried blazing flambeaux. Down the high street,
between the lofty, many-storeyed and balconied houses, where every
window, every balcony, every housetop was crammed with a dense mass
of spectators, all dressed and masked in fantastic gorgeousness,
the procession took its melancholy way. Over the scene flashed and
played the shifting cross-lights and shadows from the moving
torches: red and blue Bengal lights flared up and died out again;
and above the trampling of the horses and the measured tread of the
marching multitude rose the voices of the priests chanting the
requiem, while the military bands struck in with the solemn roll of
the muffled drums. On reaching the principal square the procession
halted, a burlesque funeral oration was pronounced over the defunct
Pau Pi, and the lights were extinguished. Immediately the devil and
his angels darted from the crowd, seized the body and fled away
with it, hotly pursued by the whole multitude, yelling, screaming,
and cheering. Naturally the fiends were overtaken and dispersed;
and the sham corpse, rescued from their clutches, was laid in a
grave that had been made ready for its reception. Thus the Carnival
of 1877 at Lerida died and was buried.
A ceremony of the same sort is observed in Provence on Ash
Wednesday. An effigy called Caramantran, whimsically attired, is
drawn in a chariot or borne on a litter, accompanied by the
populace in grotesque costumes, who carry gourds full of wine and
drain them with all the marks, real or affected, of intoxication.
At the head of the procession are some men disguised as judges and
barristers, and a tall gaunt personage who masquerades as Lent;
behind them follow young people mounted on miserable hacks and
attired as mourners who pretend to bewail the fate that is in store
for Caramantran. In the principal square the procession halts, the
tribunal is constituted, and Caramantran placed at the bar. After a
formal trial he is sentenced to death amid the groans of the mob:
the barrister who defended him embraces his client for the last
time: the officers of justice do their duty: the condemned is set
with his back to a wall and hurried into eternity under a shower of
stones. The sea or a river receives his mangled remains. Throughout
nearly the whole of the Ardennes it was and still is customary on
Ash Wednesday to burn an effigy which is supposed to represent the
Carnival, while appropriate verses are sung round about the blazing
figure. Very often an attempt is made to fashion the effigy in the
likeness of the husband who is reputed to be least faithful to his
wife of any in the village. As might perhaps have been anticipated,
the distinction of being selected for portraiture under these
painful circumstances has a slight tendency to breed domestic jars,
especially when the portrait is burnt in front of the house of the
gay deceiver whom it represents, while a powerful chorus of
caterwauls, groans, and other melodious sounds bears public
testimony to the opinion which his friends and neighbours entertain
of his private virtues. In some villages of the Ardennes a young
man of flesh and blood, dressed up in hay and straw, used to act
the part of Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), as the
personification of the Carnival is often called in France after the
last day of the period which he personates. He was brought before a
mock tribunal, and being condemned to death was placed with his
back to a wall, like a soldier at a military execution, and fired
at with blank cartridges. At Vrigne-aux-Bois one of these harmless
buffoons, named Thierry, was accidentally killed by a wad that had
been left in a musket of the firing-party. When poor Shrove Tuesday
dropped under the fire, the applause was loud and long, he did it
so naturally; but when he did not get up again, they ran to him and
found him a corpse. Since then there have been no more of these
mock executions in the Ardennes.
In Normandy on the evening of Ash Wednesday it used to be the
custom to hold a celebration called the Burial of Shrove Tuesday. A
squalid effigy scantily clothed in rags, a battered old hat crushed
down on his dirty face, his great round paunch stuffed with straw,
represented the disreputable old rake who, after a long course of
dissipation, was now about to suffer for his sins. Hoisted on the
shoulders of a sturdy fellow, who pretended to stagger under the
burden, this popular personification of the Carnival promenaded the
streets for the last time in a manner the reverse of triumphal.
Preceded by a drummer and accompanied by a jeering rabble, among
whom the urchins and all the tag-rag and bobtail of the town
mustered in great force, the figure was carried about by the
flickering light of torches to the discordant din of shovels and
tongs, pots and pans, horns and kettles, mingled with hootings,
groans, and hisses. From time to time the procession halted, and a
champion of morality accused the broken-down old sinner of all the
excesses he had committed and for which he was now about to be
burned alive. The culprit, having nothing to urge in his own
defence, was thrown on a heap of straw, a torch was put to it, and
a great blaze shot up, to the delight of the children who frisked
round it screaming out some old popular verses about the death of
the Carnival. Sometimes the effigy was rolled down the slope of a
hill before being burnt. At Saint-Lô the ragged effigy of Shrove
Tuesday was followed by his widow, a big burly lout dressed as a
woman with a crape veil, who emitted sounds of lamentation and woe
in a stentorian voice. After being carried about the streets on a
litter attended by a crowd of maskers, the figure was thrown into
the River Vire. The final scene has been graphically described by
Madame Octave Feuillet as she witnessed it in her childhood some
sixty years ago. “My parents invited friends to see, from the
top of the tower of Jeanne Couillard, the funeral procession
passing. It was there that, quaffing lemonade—the only
refreshment allowed because of the fast—we witnessed at
nightfall a spectacle of which I shall always preserve a lively
recollection. At our feet flowed the Vire under its old stone
bridge. On the middle of the bridge lay the figure of Shrove
Tuesday on a litter of leaves, surrounded by scores of maskers
dancing, singing, and carrying torches. Some of them in their
motley costumes ran along the parapet like fiends. The rest, worn
out with their revels, sat on the posts and dozed. Soon the dancing
stopped, and some of the troop, seizing a torch, set fire to the
effigy, after which they flung it into the river with redoubled
shouts and clamour. The man of straw, soaked with resin, floated
away burning down the stream of the Vire, lighting up with its
funeral fires the woods on the bank and the battlements of the old
castle in which Louis XI. and Francis I. had slept. When the last
glimmer of the blazing phantom had vanished, like a falling star,
at the end of the valley, every one withdrew, crowd and maskers
alike, and we quitted the ramparts with our guests.”
In the neighbourhood of Tübingen on Shrove Tuesday a straw-man,
called the Shrovetide Bear, is made up; he is dressed in a pair of
old trousers, and a fresh black-pudding or two squirts filled with
blood are inserted in his neck. After a formal condemnation he is
beheaded, laid in a coffin, and on Ash Wednesday is buried in the
churchyard. This is called “Burying the Carnival.”
Amongst some of the Saxons of Transylvania the Carnival is hanged.
Thus at Braller on Ash Wednesday or Shrove Tuesday two white and
two chestnut horses draw a sledge on which is placed a straw-man
swathed in a white cloth; beside him is a cart-wheel which is kept
turning round. Two lads disguised as old men follow the sledge
lamenting. The rest of the village lads, mounted on horseback and
decked with ribbons, accompany the procession, which is headed by
two girls crowned with evergreen and drawn in a waggon or sledge. A
trial is held under a tree, at which lads disguised as soldiers
pronounce sentence of death. The two old men try to rescue the
straw-man and to fly with him, but to no purpose; he is caught by
the two girls and handed over to the executioner, who hangs him on
a tree. In vain the old men try to climb up the tree and take him
down; they always tumble down, and at last in despair they throw
themselves on the ground and weep and howl for the hanged man. An
official then makes a speech in which he declares that the Carnival
was condemned to death because he had done them harm, by wearing
out their shoes and making them tired and sleepy. At the
“Burial of Carnival” in Lechrain, a man dressed as a
woman in black clothes is carried on a litter or bier by four men;
he is lamented over by men disguised as women in black clothes,
then thrown down before the village dung-heap, drenched with water,
buried in the dung-heap, and covered with straw. On the evening of
Shrove Tuesday the Esthonians make a straw figure called
metsik or “wood-spirit”; one year it is
dressed with a man’s coat and hat, next year with a hood and
a petticoat. This figure is stuck on a long pole, carried across
the boundary of the village with loud cries of joy, and fastened to
the top of a tree in the wood. The ceremony is believed to be a
protection against all kinds of misfortune.
Sometimes at these Shrovetide or Lenten ceremonies the
resurrection of the pretended dead person is enacted. Thus, in some
parts of Swabia on Shrove Tuesday Dr. Iron-Beard professes to bleed
a sick man, who thereupon falls as dead to the ground; but the
doctor at last restores him to life by blowing air into him through
a tube. In the Harz Mountains, when Carnival is over, a man is laid
on a baking-trough and carried with dirges to the grave; but in the
grave a glass of brandy is buried instead of the man. A speech is
delivered and then the people return to the village-green or
meeting-place, where they smoke the long clay pipes which are
distributed at funerals. On the morning of Shrove Tuesday in the
following year the brandy is dug up and the festival begins by
every one tasting the spirit which, as the phrase goes, has come to
life again.
3. Carrying out Death
THE CEREMONY of “Carrying out Death” presents much
the same features as “Burying the Carnival”; except
that the carrying out of Death is generally followed by a ceremony,
or at least accompanied by a profession, of bringing in Summer,
Spring, or Life. Thus in Middle Franken, a province of Bavaria, on
the fourth Sunday in Lent, the village urchins used to make a straw
effigy of Death, which they carried about with burlesque pomp
through the streets, and afterwards burned with loud cries beyond
the bounds. The Frankish custom is thus described by a writer of
the sixteenth century: “At Mid-Lent, the season when the
church bids us rejoice, the young people of my native country make
a straw image of Death, and fastening it to a pole carry it with
shouts to the neighbouring villages. By some they are kindly
received, and after being refreshed with milk, peas, and dried
pears, the usual food of that season, are sent home again. Others,
however, treat them with anything but hospitality; for, looking on
them as harbingers of misfortune, to wit of death, they drive them
from their boundaries with weapons and insults.” In the
villages near Erlangen, when the fourth Sunday in Lent came around,
the peasant girls used to dress themselves in all their finery with
flowers in their hair. Thus attired they repaired to the
neighbouring town, carrying puppets which were adorned with leaves
and covered with white cloths. These they took from house to house
in pairs, stopping at every door where they expected to receive
something, and singing a few lines in which they announced that it
was Mid-Lent and that they were about to throw Death into the
water. When they had collected some trifling gratuities they went
to the river Regnitz and flung the puppets representing Death into
the stream. This was done to ensure a fruitful and prosperous year;
further, it was considered a safeguard against pestilence and
sudden death. At Nuremberg girls of seven to eighteen years of age
go through the streets bearing a little open coffin, in which is a
doll hidden under a shroud. Others carry a beech branch, with an
apple fastened to it for a head, in an open box. They sing,
“We carry Death into the water, it is well,” or
“We carry Death into the water, carry him in and out
again.” In some parts of Bavaria down to 1780 it was believed
that a fatal epidemic would ensue if the custom of “Carrying
out Death” were not observed.
In some villages of Thüringen, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, the
children used to carry a puppet of birchen twigs through the
village, and then threw it into a pool, while they sang, “We
carry the old Death out behind the herdman’s old house; we
have got Summer, and Kroden’s (?) power is destroyed.”
At Debschwitz or Dobschwitz, near Gera, the ceremony of
“Driving out Death” is or was annually observed on the
first of March. The young people make up a figure of straw or the
like materials, dress it in old clothes, which they have begged
from houses in the village, and carry it out and throw it into the
river. On returning to the village they break the good news to the
people, and receive eggs and other victuals as a reward. The
ceremony is or was supposed to purify the village and to protect
the inhabitants from sickness and plague. In other villages of
Thüringen, in which the population was originally Slavonic, the
carrying out of the puppet is accompanied with the singing of a
song, which begins, “Now we carry Death out of the village
and Spring into the village.” At the end of the seventeenth
and beginning of the eighteenth century the custom was observed in
Thüringen as follows. The boys and girls made an effigy of straw or
the like materials, but the shape of the figure varied from year to
year. In one year it would represent an old man, in the next an old
woman, in the third a young man, and in the fourth a maiden, and
the dress of the figure varied with the character it personated.
There used to be a sharp contest as to where the effigy was to be
made, for the people thought that the house from which it was
carried forth would not be visited with death that year. Having
been made, the puppet was fastened to a pole and carried by a girl
if it represented an old man, but by a boy if it represented an old
woman. Thus it was borne in procession, the young people holding
sticks in their hands and singing that they were driving out Death.
When they came to water they threw the effigy into it and ran
hastily back, fearing that it might jump on their shoulders and
wring their necks. They also took care not to touch it, lest it
should dry them up. On their return they beat the cattle with the
sticks, believing that this would make the animals fat or fruitful.
Afterwards they visited the house or houses from which they had
carried the image of Death; where they received a dole of
half-boiled peas. The custom of “Carrying out Death”
was practised also in Saxony. At Leipsic the bastards and public
women used to make a straw effigy of Death every year at Mid-Lent.
This they carried through all the streets with songs and showed it
to the young married women. Finally they threw it into the river
Parthe. By this ceremony they professed to make the young wives
fruitful, to purify the city, and to protect the inhabitants for
that year from plague and other epidemics.
Ceremonies of the same sort are observed at Mid-Lent in Silesia.
Thus in many places the grown girls with the help of the young men
dress up a straw figure with women’s clothes and carry it out
of the village towards the setting sun. At the boundary they strip
it of its clothes, tear it in pieces, and scatter the fragments
about the fields. This is called “Burying Death.” As
they carry the image out, they sing that they are about to bury
Death under an oak, that he may depart from the people. Sometimes
the song runs that they are bearing Death over hill and dale to
return no more. In the Polish neighbourhood of Gross-Strehlitz the
puppet is called Goik. It is carried on horseback and thrown into
the nearest water. The people think that the ceremony protects them
from sickness of every sort in the coming year. In the districts of
Wohlau and Guhrau the image of Death used to be thrown over the
boundary of the next village. But as the neighbours feared to
receive the ill-omened figure, they were on the look-out to repel
it, and hard knocks were often exchanged between the two parties.
In some Polish parts of Upper Silesia the effigy, representing an
old woman, goes by the name of Marzana, the goddess of death. It is
made in the house where the last death occurred, and is carried on
a pole to the boundary of the village, where it is thrown into a
pond or burnt. At Polkwitz the custom of “Carrying out
Death” fell into abeyance; but an outbreak of fatal sickness
which followed the intermission of the ceremony induced the people
to resume it.
In Bohemia the children go out with a straw-man, representing
Death, to the end of the village, where they burn it,
singing—
“Now carry we Death out of the village,
The new Summer into the village,
Welcome, dear Summer,
Green little corn.”
At Tabor in Bohemia the figure of Death is carried out of the
town and flung from a high rock into the water, while they
sing—
“Death swims on the water,
Summer will soon be here,
We carried Death away for you
We brought the Summer.
And do thou, O holy Marketa,
Give us a good year
For wheat and for rye.”
In other parts of Bohemia they carry Death to the end of the
village, singing—
“We carry Death out of the village,
And the New Year into the village.
Dear Spring, we bid you welcome,
Green grass, we bid you welcome.”
Behind the village they erect a pyre, on which they burn the
straw figure, reviling and scoffing at it the while. Then they
return, singing—
“We have carried away Death,
And brought Life back.
He has taken up his quarters in the village,
Therefore sing joyous songs.”
In some German villages of Moravia, as in Jassnitz and
Seitendorf, the young folk assemble on the third Sunday in Lent and
fashion a straw-man, who is generally adorned with a fur cap and a
pair of old leathern hose, if such are to be had. The effigy is
then hoisted on a pole and carried by the lads and lasses out into
the open fields. On the way they sing a song, in which it is said
that they are carrying Death away and bringing dear Summer into the
house, and with Summer the May and the flowers. On reaching an
appointed place they dance in a circle round the effigy with loud
shouts and screams, then suddenly rush at it and tear it to pieces
with their hands. Lastly, the pieces are thrown together in a heap,
the pole is broken, and fire is set to the whole. While it burns
the troop dances merrily round it, rejoicing at the victory won by
Spring; and when the fire has nearly died out they go to the
householders to beg for a present of eggs wherewith to hold a
feast, taking care to give as a reason for the request that they
have carried Death out and away.
The preceding evidence shows that the effigy of Death is often
regarded with fear and treated with marks of hatred and abhorrence.
Thus the anxiety of the villagers to transfer the figure from their
own to their neighbours’ land, and the reluctance of the
latter to receive the ominous guest, are proof enough of the dread
which it inspires. Further, in Lusatia and Silesia the puppet is
sometimes made to look in at the window of a house, and it is
believed that some one in the house will die within the year unless
his life is redeemed by the payment of money. Again, after throwing
the effigy away, the bearers sometimes run home lest Death should
follow them, and if one of them falls in running, it is believed
that he will die within the year. At Chrudim, in Bohemia, the
figure of Death is made out of a cross, with a head and mask stuck
at the top, and a shirt stretched out on it. On the fifth Sunday in
Lent the boys take this effigy to the nearest brook or pool, and
standing in a line throw it into the water. Then they all plunge in
after it; but as soon as it is caught no one more may enter the
water. The boy who did not enter the water or entered it last will
die within the year, and he is obliged to carry the Death back to
the village. The effigy is then burned. On the other hand, it is
believed that no one will die within the year in the house out of
which the figure of Death has been carried; and the village out of
which Death has been driven is sometimes supposed to be protected
against sickness and plague. In some villages of Austrian Silesia
on the Saturday before Dead Sunday an effigy is made of old
clothes, hay, and straw, for the purpose of driving Death out of
the village. On Sunday the people, armed with sticks and straps,
assemble before the house where the figure is lodged. Four lads
then draw the effigy by cords through the village amid exultant
shouts, while all the others beat it with their sticks and straps.
On reaching a field which belongs to a neighbouring village they
lay down the figure, cudgel it soundly, and scatter the fragments
over the field. The people believe that the village from which
Death has been thus carried out will be safe from any infectious
disease for the whole year.
4. Bringing in Summer
IN THE PRECEDING ceremonies the return of Spring, Summer, or
Life, as a sequel to the expulsion of Death, is only implied or at
most announced. In the following ceremonies it is plainly enacted.
Thus in some parts of Bohemia the effigy of Death is drowned by
being thrown into the water at sunset; then the girls go out into
the wood and cut down a young tree with a green crown, hang a doll
dressed as a woman on it, deck the whole with green, red, and white
ribbons, and march in procession with their Líto (Summer)
into the village, collecting gifts and singing—
“Death swims in the water,
Spring comes to visit us,
With eggs that are red,
With yellow pancakes.
We carried Death out of the village,
We are carrying Summer into the village.”
In many Silesian villages the figure of Death, after being
treated with respect, is stript of its clothes and flung with
curses into the water, or torn to pieces in a field. Then the young
folk repair to a wood, cut down a small fir-tree, peel the trunk,
and deck it with festoons of evergreens, paper roses, painted
egg-shells, motley bits of cloth, and so forth. The tree thus
adorned is called Summer or May. Boys carry it from house to house
singing appropriate songs and begging for presents. Among their
songs is the following:
“We have carried Death out,
We are bringing the dear Summer back,
The Summer and the May
And all the flowers gay.”
Sometimes they also bring back from the wood a prettily adorned
figure, which goes by the name of Summer, May, or the Bride; in the
Polish districts it is called Dziewanna, the goddess of spring.
At Eisenach on the fourth Sunday in Lent young people used to
fasten a straw-man, representing Death, to a wheel, which they
trundled to the top of a hill. Then setting fire to the figure they
allowed it and the wheel to roll down the slope. Next day they cut
a tall fir-tree, tricked it out with ribbons, and set it up in the
plain. The men then climbed the tree to fetch down the ribbons. In
Upper Lusatia the figure of Death, made of straw and rags, is
dressed in a veil furnished by the last bride and a shirt provided
by the house in which the last death took place. Thus arrayed the
figure is stuck on the end of a long pole and carried at full speed
by the tallest and strongest girl, while the rest pelt the effigy
with sticks and stones. Whoever hits it will be sure to live
through the year. In this way Death is carried out of the village
and thrown into the water or over the boundary of the next village.
On their way home each one breaks a green branch and carries it
gaily with him till he reaches the village, when he throws it away.
Sometimes the young people of the next village, upon whose land the
figure has been thrown, run after them and hurl it back, not
wishing to have Death among them. Hence the two parties
occasionally come to blows.
In these cases Death is represented by the puppet which is
thrown away, Summer or Life by the branches or trees which are
brought back. But sometimes a new potency of life seems to be
attributed to the image of Death itself, and by a kind of
resurrection it becomes the instrument of the general revival. Thus
in some parts of Lusatia women alone are concerned in carrying out
Death, and suffer no male to meddle with it. Attired in mourning,
which they wear the whole day, they make a puppet of straw, clothe
it in a white shirt, and give it a broom in one hand and a scythe
in the other. Singing songs and pursued by urchins throwing stones,
they carry the puppet to the village boundary, where they tear it
in pieces. Then they cut down a fine tree, hang the shirt on it,
and carry it home singing. On the Feast of Ascension the Saxons of
Braller, a village of Transylvania, not far from Hermannstadt,
observe the ceremony of “Carrying out Death” in the
following manner. After morning service all the school-girls repair
to the house of one of their number, and there dress up the Death.
This is done by tying a threshed-out sheaf of corn into a rough
semblance of a head and body, while the arms are simulated by a
broomstick thrust through it horizontally. The figure is dressed in
the holiday attire of a young peasant woman, with a red hood,
silver brooches, and a profusion of ribbons at the arms and breast.
The girls bustle at their work, for soon the bells will be ringing
to vespers, and the Death must be ready in time to be placed at the
open window, that all the people may see it on their way to church.
When vespers are over, the longed-for moment has come for the first
procession with the Death to begin; it is a privilege that belongs
to the school-girls alone. Two of the older girls seize the figure
by the arms and walk in front: all the rest follow two and two.
Boys may take no part in the procession, but they troop after it
gazing with open-mouthed admiration at the “beautiful
Death.” So the procession goes through all the streets of the
village, the girls singing the old hymn that begins—
“Gott mein Vater, deine Liebe
Reicht so weit der Himmel ist,”
to a tune that differs from the ordinary one. When the
procession has wound its way through every street, the girls go to
another house, and having shut the door against the eager prying
crowd of boys who follow at their heels, they strip the Death and
pass the naked truss of straw out of the window to the boys, who
pounce on it, run out of the village with it without singing, and
fling the dilapidated effigy into the neighbouring brook. This
done, the second scene of the little drama begins. While the boys
were carrying away the Death out of the village, the girls remained
in the house, and one of them is now dressed in all the finery
which had been worn by the effigy. Thus arrayed she is led in
procession through all the streets to the singing of the same hymn
as before. When the procession is over they all betake themselves
to the house of the girl who played the leading part. Here a feast
awaits them from which also the boys are excluded. It is a popular
belief that the children may safely begin to eat gooseberries and
other fruit after the day on which Death has thus been carried out;
for Death, which up to that time lurked especially in gooseberries,
is now destroyed. Further, they may now bathe with impunity out of
doors. Very similar is the ceremony which, down to recent years,
was observed in some of the German villages of Moravia. Boys and
girls met on the afternoon of the first Sunday after Easter, and
together fashioned a puppet of straw to represent Death. Decked
with bright-coloured ribbons and cloths, and fastened to the top of
a long pole, the effigy was then borne with singing and clamour to
the nearest height, where it was stript of its gay attire and
thrown or rolled down the slope. One of the girls was next dressed
in the gauds taken from the effigy of Death, and with her at its
head the procession moved back to the village. In some villages the
practice is to bury the effigy in the place that has the most evil
reputation of all the country-side: others throw it into running
water.
In the Lusatian ceremony described above, the tree which is
brought home after the destruction of the figure of Death is
plainly equivalent to the trees or branches which, in the preceding
customs, were brought back as representatives of Summer or Life,
after Death had been thrown away or destroyed. But the transference
of the shirt worn by the effigy of Death to the tree clearly
indicates that the tree is a kind of revivification, in a new form,
of the destroyed effigy. This comes out also in the Transylvanian
and Moravian customs: the dressing of a girl in the clothes worn by
the Death, and the leading her about the village to the same song
which had been sung when the Death was being carried about, show
that she is intended to be a kind of resuscitation of the being
whose effigy has just been destroyed. These examples therefore
suggest that the Death whose demolition is represented in these
ceremonies cannot be regarded as the purely destructive agent which
we understand by Death. If the tree which is brought back as an
embodiment of the reviving vegetation of spring is clothed in the
shirt worn by the Death which has just been destroyed, the object
certainly cannot be to check and counteract the revival of
vegetation: it can only be to foster and promote it. Therefore the
being which has just been destroyed—the so-called
Death—must be supposed to be endowed with a vivifying and
quickening influence, which it can communicate to the vegetable and
even the animal world. This ascription of a life-giving virtue to
the figure of Death is put beyond a doubt by the custom, observed
in some places, of taking pieces of the straw effigy of Death and
placing them in the fields to make the crops grow, or in the manger
to make the cattle thrive. Thus in Spachendorf, a village of
Austrian Silesia, the figure of Death, made of straw, brushwood,
and rags, is carried with wild songs to an open place outside the
village and there burned, and while it is burning a general
struggle takes place for the pieces, which are pulled out of the
flames with bare hands. Each one who secures a fragment of the
effigy ties it to a branch of the largest tree in his garden, or
buries it in his field, in the belief that this causes the crops to
grow better. In the Troppau district of Austrian Silesia the straw
figure which the boys make on the fourth Sunday in Lent is dressed
by the girls in woman’s clothes and hung with ribbons,
necklace, and garlands. Attached to a long pole it is carried out
of the village, followed by a troop of young people of both sexes,
who alternately frolic, lament, and sing songs. Arrived at its
destination—a field outside the village—the figure is
stripped of its clothes and ornaments; then the crowd rushes at it
and tears it to bits, scuffling for the fragments. Every one tries
to get a wisp of the straw of which the effigy was made, because
such a wisp, placed in the manger, is believed to make the cattle
thrive. Or the straw is put in the hens’ nest, it being
supposed that this prevents the hens from carrying away their eggs,
and makes them brood much better. The same attribution of a
fertilising power to the figure of Death appears in the belief that
if the bearers of the figure, after throwing it away, beat cattle
with their sticks, this will render the beasts fat or prolific.
Perhaps the sticks had been previously used to beat the Death, and
so had acquired the fertilising power ascribed to the effigy. We
have seen, too, that at Leipsic a straw effigy of Death was shown
to young wives to make them fruitful.
It seems hardly possible to separate from the May-trees the
trees or branches which are brought into the village after the
destruction of the Death. The bearers who bring them in profess to
be bringing in the Summer, therefore the trees obviously represent
the Summer; indeed in Silesia they are commonly called the Summer
or the May, and the doll which is sometimes attached to the
Summer-tree is a duplicate representative of the Summer, just as
the May is sometimes represented at the same time by a May-tree and
a May Lady. Further, the Summer-trees are adorned like May-trees
with ribbons and so on; like May-trees, when large, they are
planted in the ground and climbed up; and like May-trees, when
small, they are carried from door to door by boys or girls singing
songs and collecting money. And as if to demonstrate the identity
of the two sets of customs the bearers of the Summer-tree sometimes
announce that they are bringing in the Summer and the May. The
customs, therefore, of bringing in the May and bringing in the
Summer are essentially the same; and the Summer-tree is merely
another form of the May-tree, the only distinction (besides that of
name) being in the time at which they are respectively brought in;
for while the May-tree is usually fetched in on the first of May or
at Whitsuntide, the Summer-tree is fetched in on the fourth Sunday
in Lent. Therefore, if the May-tree is an embodiment of the
tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation, the Summer-tree must likewise
be an embodiment of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation. But we
have seen that the Summer-tree is in some cases a revivification of
the effigy of Death. It follows, therefore, that in these cases the
effigy called Death must be an embodiment of the tree-spirit or
spirit of vegetation. This inference is confirmed, first, by the
vivifying and fertilising influence which the fragments of the
effigy of Death are believed to exercise both on vegetable and on
animal life; for this influence, as we saw in an earlier part of
this work, is supposed to be a special attribute of the
tree-spirit. It is confirmed, secondly, by observing that the
effigy of Death is sometimes decked with leaves or made of twigs,
branches, hemp, or a threshed-out sheaf of corn; and that sometimes
it is hung on a little tree and so carried about by girls
collecting money, just as is done with the May-tree and the May
Lady, and with the Summer-tree and the doll attached to it. In
short we are driven to regard the expulsion of Death and the
bringing in of Summer as, in some cases at least, merely another
form of that death and revival of the spirit of vegetation in
spring which we saw enacted in the killing and resurrection of the
Wild Man. The burial and resurrection of the Carnival is probably
another way of expressing the same idea. The interment of the
representative of the Carnival under a dung-heap is natural, if he
is supposed to possess a quickening and fertilising influence like
that ascribed to the effigy of Death. The Esthonians, indeed, who
carry the straw figure out of the village in the usual way on
Shrove Tuesday, do not call it the Carnival, but the Wood-spirit
(Metsik), and they clearly indicate the identity of the
effigy with the wood-spirit by fixing it to the top of a tree in
the wood, where it remains for a year, and is besought almost daily
with prayers and offerings to protect the herds; for like a true
wood-spirit the Metsik is a patron of cattle. Sometimes
the Metsik is made of sheaves of corn.
Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death,
and Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for
the beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we
have been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a
modern origin; for the personification of times and seasons like
the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is
not primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a
dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in
their origin the ideas which they embodied were of a more simple
and concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a particular
kind of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general),
or even of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a
basis from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider
idea of a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general
idea of vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in
which it manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring,
Summer, or May for the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be
easy and natural. Again, the concrete notion of the dying tree or
dying vegetation would by a similar process of generalisation glide
into a notion of death in general; so that the practice of carrying
out the dying or dead vegetation in spring, as a preliminary to its
revival, would in time widen out into an attempt to banish Death in
general from the village or district. The view that in these spring
ceremonies Death meant originally the dying or dead vegetation of
winter has the high support of W. Mannhardt; and he confirms it by
the analogy of the name Death as applied to the spirit of the ripe
corn. Commonly the spirit of the ripe corn is conceived, not as
dead, but as old, and hence it goes by the name of the Old Man or
the Old Woman. But in some places the last sheaf cut at harvest,
which is generally believed to be the seat of the corn spirit, is
called “the Dead One”: children are warned against
entering the corn-fields because Death sits in the corn; and, in a
game played by Saxon children in Transylvania at the maize harvest,
Death is represented by a child completely covered with maize
leaves.
5. Battle of Summer and Winter
SOMETIMES in the popular customs of the peasantry the contrast
between the dormant powers of vegetation in winter and their
awakening vitality in spring takes the form of a dramatic contest
between actors who play the parts respectively of Winter and
Summer. Thus in the towns of Sweden on May Day two troops of young
men on horseback used to meet as if for mortal combat. One of them
was led by a representative of Winter clad in furs, who threw
snowballs and ice in order to prolong the cold weather. The other
troop was commanded by a representative of Summer covered with
fresh leaves and flowers. In the sham fight which followed the
party of Summer came off victorious, and the ceremony ended with a
feast. Again, in the region of the middle Rhine, a representative
of Summer clad in ivy combats a representative of Winter clad in
straw or moss and finally gains a victory over him. The vanquished
foe is thrown to the ground and stripped of his casing of straw,
which is torn to pieces and scattered about, while the youthful
comrades of the two champions sing a song to commemorate the defeat
of Winter by Summer. Afterwards they carry about a summer garland
or branch and collect gifts of eggs and bacon from house to house.
Sometimes the champion who acts the part of Summer is dressed in
leaves and flowers and wears a chaplet of flowers on his head. In
the Palatinate this mimic conflict takes place on the fourth Sunday
in Lent. All over Bavaria the same drama used to be acted on the
same day, and it was still kept up in some places down to the
middle of the nineteenth century or later. While Summer appeared
clad all in green, decked with fluttering ribbons, and carrying a
branch in blossom or a little tree hung with apples and pears,
Winter was muffled up in cap and mantle of fur and bore in his hand
a snow-shovel or a flail. Accompanied by their respective retinues
dressed in corresponding attire, they went through all the streets
of the village, halting before the houses and singing staves of old
songs, for which they received presents of bread, eggs, and fruit.
Finally, after a short struggle, Winter was beaten by Summer and
ducked in the village well or driven out of the village with shouts
and laughter into the forest.
At Goepfritz in Lower Austria, two men personating Summer and
Winter used to go from house to house on Shrove Tuesday, and were
everywhere welcomed by the children with great delight. The
representative of Summer was clad in white and bore a sickle; his
comrade, who played the part of Winter, had a fur-cap on his head,
his arms and legs were swathed in straw, and he carried a flail. In
every house they sang verses alternately. At Drömling in Brunswick,
down to the present time, the contest between Summer and Winter is
acted every year at Whitsuntide by a troop of boys and a troop of
girls. The boys rush singing, shouting, and ringing bells from
house to house to drive Winter away; after them come the girls
singing softly and led by a May Bride, all in bright dresses and
decked with flowers and garlands to represent the genial advent of
spring. Formerly the part of Winter was played by a straw-man which
the boys carried with them; now it is acted by a real man in
disguise.
Among the Central Esquimaux of North America the contest between
representatives of summer and winter, which in Europe has long
degenerated into a mere dramatic performance, is still kept up as a
magical ceremony of which the avowed intention is to influence the
weather. In autumn, when storms announce the approach of the dismal
Arctic winter, the Esquimaux divide themselves into two parties
called respectively the ptarmigans and the ducks, the ptarmigans
comprising all persons born in winter, and the ducks all persons
born in summer. A long rope of sealskin is then stretched out, and
each party laying hold of one end of it seeks by tugging with might
and main to drag the other party over to its side. If the
ptarmigans get the worst of it, then summer has won the game and
fine weather may be expected to prevail through the winter.
6. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko
I RUSSIA funeral ceremonies like those of “Burying the
Carnival” and “Carrying out Death” are celebrated
under the names, not of Death or the Carnival, but of certain
mythic figures, Kostrubonko, Kostroma, Kupalo, Lada, and Yarilo.
These Russian ceremonies are observed both in spring and at
midsummer. Thus “in Little Russia it used to be the custom at
Eastertide to celebrate the funeral of a being called Kostrubonko,
the deity of the spring. A circle was formed of singers who moved
slowly around a girl who lay on the ground as if dead, and as they
went they sang:
‘Dead, dead is our Kostrubonko!
Dead, dead is our dear one!’
until the girl suddenly sprang up, on which the chorus joyfully
exclaimed:
‘Come to life, come to life has our
Kostrubonko!
Come to life, come to life has our dear
one!’”
On the Eve of St. John (Midsummer Eve) a figure of Kupalo is
made of straw and “is dressed in woman’s clothes, with
a necklace and a floral crown. Then a tree is felled, and, after
being decked with ribbons, is set up on some chosen spot. Near this
tree, to which they give the name of Marena [Winter or Death], the
straw figure is placed, together with a table, on which stand
spirits and viands. Afterwards a bonfire is lit, and the young men
and maidens jump over it in couples, carrying the figure with them.
On the next day they strip the tree and the figure of their
ornaments, and throw them both into a stream.” On St.
Peter’s Day, the twenty-ninth of June, or on the following
Sunday, “the Funeral of Kostroma” or of Lada or of
Yarilo is celebrated in Russia. In the Governments of Penza and
Simbirsk the funeral used to be represented as follows. A bonfire
was kindled on the twenty-eighth of June, and on the next day the
maidens chose one of their number to play the part of Kostroma. Her
companions saluted her with deep obeisances, placed her on a board,
and carried her to the bank of a stream. There they bathed her in
the water, while the oldest girl made a basket of lime-tree bark
and beat it like a drum. Then they returned to the village and
ended the day with processions, games, and dances. In the Murom
district Kostroma was represented by a straw figure dressed in
woman’s clothes and flowers. This was laid in a trough and
carried with songs to the bank of a lake or river. Here the crowd
divided into two sides, of which the one attacked and the other
defended the figure. At last the assailants gained the day,
stripped the figure of its dress and ornaments, tore it in pieces,
trod the straw of which it was made under foot, and flung it into
the stream; while the defenders of the figure hid their faces in
their hands and pretended to bewail the death of Kostroma. In the
district of Kostroma the burial of Yarilo was celebrated on the
twenty-ninth or thirtieth of June. The people chose an old man and
gave him a small coffin containing a Priapus-like figure
representing Yarilo. This he carried out of the town, followed by
women chanting dirges and expressing by their gestures grief and
despair. In the open fields a grave was dug, and into it the figure
was lowered amid weeping and wailing, after which games and dances
were begun, “calling to mind the funeral games celebrated in
old times by the pagan Slavonians.” In Little Russia the
figure of Yarilo was laid in a coffin and carried through the
streets after sunset surrounded by drunken women, who kept
repeating mournfully, “He is dead! he is dead!” The men
lifted and shook the figure as if they were trying to recall the
dead man to life. Then they said to the women, “Women, weep
not. I know what is sweeter than honey.” But the women
continued to lament and chant, as they do at funerals. “Of
what was he guilty? He was so good. He will arise no more. O how
shall we part from thee? What is life without thee? Arise, if only
for a brief hour. But he rises not, he not.” At last the
Yarilo was buried in a grave.
7. Death and Revival of Vegetation
THESE Russian customs are plainly of the same nature as those
which in Austria and Germany are known as “Carrying out
Death.” Therefore if the interpretation here adopted of the
latter is right, the Russian Kostrubonko, Yarilo, and the rest must
also have been originally embodiments of the spirit of vegetation,
and their death must have been regarded as a necessary preliminary
to their revival. The revival as a sequel to the death is enacted
in the first of the ceremonies described, the death and
resurrection of Kostrubonko. The reason why in some of these
Russian ceremonies the death of the spirit of vegetation is
celebrated at midsummer may be that the decline of summer is dated
from Midsummer Day, after which the days begin to shorten, and the
sun sets out on his downward journey:
“To the darksome hollows
Where the frosts of winter lie.”
Such a turning-point of the year, when vegetation might be
thought to share the incipient though still almost imperceptible
decay of summer, might very well be chosen by primitive man as a
fit moment for resorting to those magic rites by which he hopes to
stay the decline, or at least to ensure the revival, of plant
life.
But while the death of vegetation appears to have been
represented in all, and its revival in some, of these spring and
midsummer ceremonies, there are features in some of them which can
hardly be explained on this hypothesis alone. The solemn funeral,
the lamentations, and the mourning attire, which often characterise
these rites, are indeed appropriate at the death of the beneficent
spirit of vegetation. But what shall we say of the glee with which
the effigy is often carried out, of the sticks and stones with
which it is assailed, and the taunts and curses which are hurled at
it? What shall we say of the dread of the effigy evinced by the
haste with which the bearers scamper home as soon as they have
thrown it away, and by the belief that some one must soon die in
any house into which it has looked? This dread might perhaps be
explained by a belief that there is a certain infectiousness in the
dead spirit of vegetation which renders its approach dangerous. But
this explanation, besides being rather strained, does not cover the
rejoicings which often attend the carrying out of Death. We must
therefore recognise two distinct and seemingly opposite features in
these ceremonies: on the one hand, sorrow for the death, and
affection and respect for the dead; on the other hand, fear and
hatred of the dead, and rejoicings at his death. How the former of
these features is to be explained I have attempted to show: how the
latter came to be so closely associated with the former is a
question which I shall try to answer in the sequel.
8. Analogous Rites in India
IN THE KANAGRA district of India there is a custom observed by
young girls in spring which closely resembles some of the European
spring ceremonies just described. It is called the Ralî Ka
melâ, or fair of Ralî, the Ralî being a small painted
earthen image of Siva or Pârvatî. The custom is in vogue all over
the Kanagra district, and its celebration, which is entirely
confined to young girls, lasts through most of Chet (March-April)
up to the Sankrânt of Baisâkh (April). On a morning in March all
the young girls of the village take small baskets of dûb
grass and flowers to an appointed place, where they throw them in a
heap. Round this heap they stand in a circle and sing. This goes on
every day for ten days, till the heap of grass and flowers has
reached a fair height. Then they cut in the jungle two branches,
each with three prongs at one end, and place them, prongs
downwards, over the heap of flowers, so as to make two tripods or
pyramids. On the single uppermost points of these branches they get
an image-maker to construct two clay images, one to represent Siva,
and the other Pârvatî. The girls then divide themselves into two
parties, one for Siva and one for Pârvatî, and marry the images in
the usual way, leaving out no part of the ceremony. After the
marriage they have a feast, the cost of which is defrayed by
contributions solicited from their parents. Then at the next
Sankrânt (Baisâkh) they all go together to the river-side, throw
the images into a deep pool, and weep over the place, as though
they were performing funeral obsequies. The boys of the
neighbourhood often tease them by diving after the images, bringing
them up, and waving them about while the girls are crying over
them. The object of the fair is said to be to secure a good
husband.
That in this Indian ceremony the deities Siva and Pârvatî are
conceived as spirits of vegetation seems to be proved by the
placing of their images on branches over a heap of grass and
flowers. Here, as often in European folk-custom, the divinities of
vegetation are represented in duplicate, by plants and by puppets.
The marriage of these Indian deities in spring corresponds to the
European ceremonies in which the marriage of the vernal spirits of
vegetation is represented by the King and Queen of May, the May
Bride, Bridegroom of the May, and so forth. The throwing of the
images into the water, and the mourning for them, are the
equivalents of the European customs of throwing the dead spirit of
vegetation under the name of Death, Yarilo, Kostroma, and the rest,
into the water and lamenting over it. Again, in India, as often in
Europe, the rite is performed exclusively by females. The notion
that the ceremony helps to procure husbands for the girls can be
explained by the quickening and fertilising influence which the
spirit of vegetation is believed to exert upon the life of man as
well as of plants.
9. The Magic Spring
THE GENERAL explanation which we have been led to adopt of these
and many similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their
origin, magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in
spring. The means by which they were supposed to effect this end
were imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the
true causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to
produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he
had only to imitate them, and that immediately by a secret sympathy
or mystic influence the little drama which he acted in forest glade
or mountain dell, on desert plain or wind-swept shore, would be
taken up and repeated by mightier actors on a vaster stage. He
fancied that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the
bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the
death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and
made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning spring. If we
find it hard to throw ourselves even in fancy into a mental
condition in which such things seem possible, we can more easily
picture to ourselves the anxiety which the savage, when he first
began to lift his thoughts above the satisfaction of his merely
animal wants, and to meditate on the causes of things, may have
felt as to the continued operation of what we now call the laws of
nature. To us, familiar as we are with the conception of the
uniformity and regularity with which the great cosmic phenomena
succeed each other, there seems little ground for apprehension that
the causes which produce these effects will cease to operate, at
least within the near future. But this confidence in the stability
of nature is bred only by the experience which comes of wide
observation and long tradition; and the savage, with his narrow
sphere of observation and his short-lived tradition, lacks the very
elements of that experience which alone could set his mind at rest
in face of the ever-changing and often menacing aspects of nature.
No wonder, therefore, that he is thrown into a panic by an eclipse,
and thinks that the sun or the moon would surely perish, if he did
not raise a clamour and shoot his puny shafts into the air to
defend the luminaries from the monster who threatens to devour
them. No wonder he is terrified when in the darkness of night a
streak of sky is suddenly illumined by the flash of a meteor, or
the whole expanse of the celestial arch glows with the fitful light
of the Northern Streamers. Even phenomena which recur at fixed and
uniform intervals may be viewed by him with apprehension, before he
has come to recognise the orderliness of their recurrence. The
speed or slowness of his recognition of such periodic or cyclic
changes in nature will depend largely on the length of the
particular cycle. The cycle, for example, of day and night is
everywhere, except in the polar regions, so short and hence so
frequent that men probably soon ceased to discompose themselves
seriously as to the chance of its failing to recur, though the
ancient Egyptians, as we have seen, daily wrought enchantments to
bring back to the east in the morning the fiery orb which had sunk
at evening in the crimson west. But it was far otherwise with the
annual cycle of the seasons. To any man a year is a considerable
period, seeing that the number of our years is but few at the best.
To the primitive savage, with his short memory and imperfect means
of marking the flight of time, a year may well have been so long
that he failed to recognise it as a cycle at all, and watched the
changing aspects of earth and heaven with a perpetual wonder,
alternately delighted and alarmed, elated and cast down, according
as the vicissitudes of light and heat, of plant and animal life,
ministered to his comfort or threatened his existence. In autumn
when the withered leaves were whirled about the forest by the
nipping blast, and he looked up at the bare boughs, could he feel
sure that they would ever be green again? As day by day the sun
sank lower and lower in the sky, could he be certain that the
luminary would ever retrace his heavenly road? Even the waning
moon, whose pale sickle rose thinner and thinner every night over
the rim of the eastern horizon, may have excited in his mind a fear
lest, when it had wholly vanished, there should be moons no
more.
These and a thousand such misgivings may have thronged the fancy
and troubled the peace of the man who first began to reflect on the
mysteries of the world he lived in, and to take thought for a more
distant future than the morrow. It was natural, therefore, that
with such thoughts and fears he should have done all that in him
lay to bring back the faded blossom to the bough, to swing the low
sun of winter up to his old place in the summer sky, and to restore
its orbed fulness to the silver lamp of the waning moon. We may
smile at his vain endeavours if we please, but it was only by
making a long series of experiments, of which some were almost
inevitably doomed to failure, that man learned from experience the
futility of some of his attempted methods and the fruitfulness of
others. After all, magical ceremonies are nothing but experiments
which have failed and which continue to be repeated merely because,
for reasons which have already been indicated, the operator is
unaware of their failure. With the advance of knowledge these
ceremonies either cease to be performed altogether or are kept up
from force of habit long after the intention with which they were
instituted has been forgotten. Thus fallen from their high estate,
no longer regarded as solemn rites on the punctual performance of
which the welfare and even the life of the community depend, they
sink gradually to the level of simple pageants, mummeries, and
pastimes, till in the final stage of degeneration they are wholly
abandoned by older people, and, from having once been the most
serious occupation of the sage, become at last the idle sport of
children. It is in this final stage of decay that most of the old
magical rites of our European forefathers linger on at the present
day, and even from this their last retreat they are fast being
swept away by the rising tide of those multitudinous forces, moral,
intellectual, and social, which are bearing mankind onward to a new
and unknown goal. We may feel some natural regret at the
disappearance of quaint customs and picturesque ceremonies, which
have preserved to an age often deemed dull and prosaic something of
the flavour and freshness of the olden time, some breath of the
springtime of the world; yet our regret will be lessened when we
remember that these pretty pageants, these now innocent diversions,
had their origin in ignorance and superstition; that if they are a
record of human endeavour, they are also a monument of fruitless
ingenuity, of wasted labour, and of blighted hopes; and that for
all their gay trappings—their flowers, their ribbons, and
their music—they partake far more of tragedy than of
farce.
The interpretation which, following in the footsteps of W.
Mannhardt, I have attempted to give of these ceremonies has been
not a little confirmed by the discovery, made since this book was
first written, that the natives of Central Australia regularly
practise magical ceremonies for the purpose of awakening the
dormant energies of nature at the approach of what may be called
the Australian spring. Nowhere apparently are the alternations of
the seasons more sudden and the contrasts between them more
striking than in the deserts of Central Australia, where at the end
of a long period of drought the sandy and stony wilderness, over
which the silence and desolation of death appear to brood, is
suddenly, after a few days of torrential rain, transformed into a
landscape smiling with verdure and peopled with teeming multitudes
of insects and lizards, of frogs and birds. The marvellous change
which passes over the face of nature at such times has been
compared even by European observers to the effect of magic; no
wonder, then, that the savage should regard it as such in very
deed. Now it is just when there is promise of the approach of a
good season that the natives of Central Australia are wont
especially to perform those magical ceremonies of which the avowed
intention is to multiply the plants and animals they use as food.
These ceremonies, therefore, present a close analogy to the spring
customs of our European peasantry not only in the time of their
celebration, but also in their aim; for we can hardly doubt that in
instituting rites designed to assist the revival of plant life in
spring our primitive forefathers were moved, not by any sentimental
wish to smell at early violets, or pluck the rathe primrose, or
watch yellow daffodils dancing in the breeze, but by the very
practical consideration, certainly not formulated in abstract
terms, that the life of man is inextricably bound up with that of
plants, and that if they were to perish he could not survive. And
as the faith of the Australian savage in the efficacy of his magic
rites is confirmed by observing that their performance is
invariably followed, sooner or later, by that increase of vegetable
and animal life which it is their object to produce, so, we may
suppose, it was with European savages in the olden time. The sight
of the fresh green in brake and thicket, of vernal flowers blowing
on mossy banks, of swallows arriving from the south, and of the sun
mounting daily higher in the sky, would be welcomed by them as so
many visible signs that their enchantments were indeed taking
effect, and would inspire them with a cheerful confidence that all
was well with a world which they could thus mould to suit their
wishes. Only in autumn days, as summer slowly faded, would their
confidence again be dashed by doubts and misgivings at symptoms of
decay, which told how vain were all their efforts to stave off for
ever the approach of winter and of death.
XXIX. The Myth of Adonis
THE SPECTACLE of the great changes which annually pass over the
face of the earth has powerfully impressed the minds of men in all
ages, and stirred them to meditate on the causes of transformations
so vast and wonderful. Their curiosity has not been purely
disinterested; for even the savage cannot fail to perceive how
intimately his own life is bound up with the life of nature, and
how the same processes which freeze the stream and strip the earth
of vegetation menace him with extinction. At a certain stage of
development men seem to have imagined that the means of averting
the threatened calamity were in their own hands, and that they
could hasten or retard the flight of the seasons by magic art.
Accordingly they performed ceremonies and recited spells to make
the rain to fall, the sun to shine, animals to multiply, and the
fruits of the earth to grow. In course of time the slow advance of
knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions,
convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the
alternations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not
merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper
cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes
of nature. They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of
vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of
the waxing or waning strength of divine beings, of gods and
goddesses, who were born and died, who married and begot children,
on the pattern of human life.
Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or
rather supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now
attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding
changes in their deities, they still thought that by performing
certain magical rites they could aid the god who was the principle
of life, in his struggle with the opposing principle of death. They
imagined that they could recruit his failing energies and even
raise him from the dead. The ceremonies which they observed for
this purpose were in substance a dramatic representation of the
natural processes which they wished to facilitate; for it is a
familiar tenet of magic that you can produce any desired effect by
merely imitating it. And as they now explained the fluctuations of
growth and decay, of reproduction and dissolution, by the marriage,
the death, and the rebirth or revival of the gods, their religious
or rather magical dramas turned in great measure on these themes.
They set forth the fruitful union of the powers of fertility, the
sad death of one at least of the divine partners, and his joyful
resurrection. Thus a religious theory was blended with a magical
practice. The combination is familiar in history. Indeed, few
religions have ever succeeded in wholly extricating themselves from
the old trammels of magic. The inconsistency of acting on two
opposite principles, however it may vex the soul of the
philosopher, rarely troubles the common man; indeed he is seldom
even aware of it. His affair is to act, not to analyse the motives
of his action. If mankind had always been logical and wise, history
would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.
Of the changes which the seasons bring with them, the most
striking within the temperate zone are those which affect
vegetation. The influence of the seasons on animals, though great,
is not nearly so manifest. Hence it is natural that in the magical
dramas designed to dispel winter and bring back spring the emphasis
should be laid on vegetation, and that trees and plants should
figure in them more prominently than beasts and birds. Yet the two
sides of life, the vegetable and the animal, were not dissociated
in the minds of those who observed the ceremonies. Indeed they
commonly believed that the tie between the animal and the vegetable
world was even closer than it really is; hence they often combined
the dramatic representation of reviving plants with a real or a
dramatic union of the sexes for the purpose of furthering at the
same time and by the same act the multiplication of fruits, of
animals, and of men. To them the principle of life and fertility,
whether animal or vegetable, was one and indivisible. To live and
to cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the
primary wants of men in the past, and they will be the primary
wants of men in the future so long as the world lasts. Other things
may be added to enrich and beautify human life, but unless these
wants are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist.
These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men
chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for
the regulation of the seasons.
Nowhere, apparently, have these rites been more widely and
solemnly celebrated than in the lands which border the Eastern
Mediterranean. Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and
Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly
decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life, which they
personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the
dead. In name and detail the rites varied from place to place: in
substance they were the same. The supposed death and resurrection
of this oriental deity, a god of many names but of essentially one
nature, is now to be examined. We begin with Tammuz or Adonis.
The worship of Adonis was practised by the Semitic peoples of
Babylonia and Syria, and the Greeks borrowed it from them as early
as the seventh century before Christ. The true name of the deity
was Tammuz: the appellation of Adonis is merely the Semitic
Adon, “lord,” a title of honour by which his
worshippers addressed him. But the Greeks through a
misunderstanding converted the title of honour into a proper name.
In the religious literature of Babylonia Tammuz appears as the
youthful spouse or lover of Ishtar, the great mother goddess, the
embodiment of the reproductive energies of nature. The references
to their connexion with each other in myth and ritual are both
fragmentary and obscure, but we gather from them that every year
Tammuz was believed to die, passing away from the cheerful earth to
the gloomy subterranean world, and that every year his divine
mistress journeyed in quest of him “to the land from which
there is no returning, to the house of darkness, where dust lies on
door and bolt.” During her absence the passion of love ceased
to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their kinds:
all life was threatened with extinction. So intimately bound up
with the goddess were the sexual functions of the whole animal
kingdom that without her presence they could not be discharged. A
messenger of the great god Ea was accordingly despatched to rescue
the goddess on whom so much depended. The stern queen of the
infernal regions, Allatu or Eresh-Kigal by name, reluctantly
allowed Ishtar to be sprinkled with the Water of Life and to
depart, in company probably with her lover Tammuz, that the two
might return together to the upper world, and that with their
return all nature might revive.
Laments for the departed Tammuz are contained in several
Babylonian hymns, which liken him to plants that quickly fade. He
is
“A tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no
water,
Whose crown in the field has brought forth no blossom.
A willow that rejoiced not by the watercourse,
A willow whose roots were torn up.
A herb that in the garden had drunk no
water.”
His death appears to have been annually mourned, to the shrill
music of flutes, by men and women about midsummer in the month
named after him, the month of Tammuz. The dirges were seemingly
chanted over an effigy of the dead god, which was washed with pure
water, anointed with oil, and clad in a red robe, while the fumes
of incense rose into the air, as if to stir his dormant senses by
their pungent fragrance and wake him from the sleep of death. In
one of these dirges, inscribed Lament of the Flutes for
Tammuz, we seem still to hear the voices of the singers
chanting the sad refrain and to catch, like far-away music, the
wailing notes of the flutes:
“At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament,
‘Oh my child!’ at his vanishing away she lifts up a
lament;
‘My Damu!’ at his vanishing away she lifts up a
lament.
‘My enchanter and priest!’ at his vanishing away
she lifts up a lament,
At the shining cedar, rooted in a spacious place,
In Eanna, above and below, she lifts up a lament.
Like the lament that a house lifts up for its master, lifts she
up a lament,
Like the lament that a city lifts up for its lord, lifts she up
a lament.
Her lament is the lament for a herb that grows not in the
bed,
Her lament is the lament for the corn that grows not in the
ear.
Her chamber is a possession that brings not forth a
possession,
A weary woman, a weary child, forspent.
Her lament is for a great river, where no willows
grow,
Her lament is for a field, where corn and herbs grow
not.
Her lament is for a pool, where fishes grow not.
Her lament is for a thickest of reeds, where no reeds
grow.
Her lament is for woods, where tamarisks grow not.
Her lament is for a wilderness where no cypresses (?)
grow.
Her lament is for the depth of a garden of trees, where honey
and wine grow not.
Her lament is for meadows, where no plants grow.
Her lament is for a palace, where length of life grows
not.”
The tragical story and the melancholy rites of Adonis are better
known to us from the descriptions of Greek writers than from the
fragments of Babylonian literature or the brief reference of the
prophet Ezekiel, who saw the women of Jerusalem weeping for Tammuz
at the north gate of the temple. Mirrored in the glass of Greek
mythology, the oriental deity appears as a comely youth beloved by
Aphrodite. In his infancy the goddess hid him in a chest, which she
gave in charge to Persephone, queen of the nether world. But when
Persephone opened the chest and beheld the beauty of the babe, she
refused to give him back to Aphrodite, though the goddess of love
went down herself to hell to ransom her dear one from the power of
the grave. The dispute between the two goddesses of love and death
was settled by Zeus, who decreed that Adonis should abide with
Persephone in the under world for one part of the year, and with
Aphrodite in the upper world for another part. At last the fair
youth was killed in hunting by a wild boar, or by the jealous Ares,
who turned himself into the likeness of a boar in order to compass
the death of his rival. Bitterly did Aphrodite lament her loved and
lost Adonis. In this form of the myth, the contest between
Aphrodite and Persephone for the possession of Adonis clearly
reflects the struggle between Ishtar and Allatu in the land of the
dead, while the decision of Zeus that Adonis is to spend one part
of the year under ground and another part above ground is merely a
Greek version of the annual disappearance and reappearance of
Tammuz.
XXX. Adonis in Syria
THE MYTH of Adonis was localised and his rites celebrated with
much solemnity at two places in Western Asia. One of these was
Byblus on the coast of Syria, the other was Paphos in Cyprus. Both
were great seats of the worship of Aphrodite, or rather of her
Semitic counterpart, Astarte; and of both, if we accept the
legends, Cinyras, the father of Adonis, was king. Of the two cities
Byblus was the more ancient; indeed it claimed to be the oldest
city in Phoenicia, and to have been founded in the early ages of
the world by the great god El, whom Greeks and Romans identified
with Cronus and Saturn respectively. However that may have been, in
historical times it ranked as a holy place, the religious capital
of the country, the Mecca or Jerusalem of the Phoenicians. The city
stood on a height beside the sea, and contained a great sanctuary
of Astarte, where in the midst of a spacious open court, surrounded
by cloisters and approached from below by staircases, rose a tall
cone or obelisk, the holy image of the goddess. In this sanctuary
the rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was
sacred to him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea
a little to the south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name of
Adonis. This was the kingdom of Cinyras. From the earliest to the
latest times the city appears to have been ruled by kings, assisted
perhaps by a senate or council of elders.
The last king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and
was beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses. His
legendary namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a sanctuary of
Aphrodite, that is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount Lebanon,
distant a day’s journey from the capital. The spot was
probably Aphaca, at the source of the river Adonis, half-way
between Byblus and Baalbec; for at Aphaca there was a famous grove
and sanctuary of Astarte which Constantine destroyed on account of
the flagitious character of the worship. The site of the temple has
been discovered by modern travellers near the miserable village
which still bears the name of Afka at the head of the wild,
romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis. The hamlet stands among
groves of noble walnut-trees on the brink of the lyn. A little way
off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot of a mighty
amphitheatre of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of cascades
into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends, the
ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from the
crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over the
roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There is
something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of these
tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain air,
in the vivid green of the vegetation. The temple, of which some
massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark
the site, occupied a terrace facing the source of the river and
commanding a magnificent prospect. Across the foam and the roar of
the waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of the
sublime precipices above. So lofty is the cliff that the goats
which creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like
ants to the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward the view is
especially impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with
golden light, revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded
towers of its mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied
green of the woods which clothe its depths. It was here that,
according to the legend, Adonis met Aphrodite for the first or the
last time, and here his mangled body was buried. A fairer scene
could hardly be imagined for a story of tragic love and death. Yet,
sequestered as the valley is and must always have been, it is not
wholly deserted. A convent or a village may be observed here and
there standing out against the sky on the top of some beetling
crag, or clinging to the face of a nearly perpendicular cliff high
above the foam and the din of the river; and at evening the lights
that twinkle through the gloom betray the presence of human
habitations on slopes which might seem inaccessible to man. In
antiquity the whole of the lovely vale appears to have been
dedicated to Adonis, and to this day it is haunted by his memory;
for the heights which shut it in are crested at various points by
ruined monuments of his worship, some of them overhanging dreadful
abysses, down which it turns the head dizzy to look and see the
eagles wheeling about their nests far below. One such monument
exists at Ghineh. The face of a great rock, above a roughly hewn
recess, is here carved with figures of Adonis and Aphrodite. He is
portrayed with spear in rest, awaiting the attack of a bear, while
she is seated in an attitude of sorrow. Her grief-stricken figure
may well be the mourning Aphrodite of the Lebanon described by
Macrobius, and the recess in the rock is perhaps her lover’s
tomb. Every year, in the belief of his worshippers, Adonis was
wounded to death on the mountains, and every year the face of
nature itself was dyed with his sacred blood. So year by year the
Syrian damsels lamented his untimely fate, while the red anemone,
his flower, bloomed among the cedars of Lebanon, and the river ran
red to the sea, fringing the winding shores of the blue
Mediterranean, whenever the wind set inshore, with a sinuous band
of crimson.
XXXI. Adonis in Cyprus
THE ISLAND of Cyprus lies but one day’s sail from the
coast of Syria. Indeed, on fine summer evenings its mountains may
be descried looming low and dark against the red fires of sunset.
With its rich mines of copper and its forests of firs and stately
cedars, the island naturally attracted a commercial and maritime
people like the Phoenicians; while the abundance of its corn, its
wine, and its oil must have rendered it in their eyes a Land of
Promise by comparison with the niggardly nature of their own rugged
coast, hemmed in between the mountains and the sea. Accordingly
they settled in Cyprus at a very early date and remained there long
after the Greeks had also established themselves on its shores; for
we know from inscriptions and coins that Phoenician kings reigned
at Citium, the Chittim of the Hebrews, down to the time of
Alexander the Great. Naturally the Semitic colonists brought their
gods with them from the mother-land. They worshipped Baal of the
Lebanon, who may well have been Adonis, and at Amathus on the south
coast they instituted the rites of Adonis and Aphrodite, or rather
Astarte. Here, as at Byblus, these rites resembled the Egyptian
worship of Osiris so closely that some people even identified the
Adonis of Amathus with Osiris.
But the great seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Adonis in
Cyprus was Paphos on the south-western side of the island. Among
the petty kingdoms into which Cyprus was divided from the earliest
times until the end of the fourth century before our era Paphos
must have ranked with the best. It is a land of hills and billowy
ridges, diversified by fields and vineyards and intersected by
rivers, which in the course of ages have carved for themselves beds
of such tremendous depth that travelling in the interior is
difficult and tedious. The lofty range of Mount Olympus (the modern
Troodos), capped with snow the greater part of the year, screens
Paphos from the northerly and easterly winds and cuts it off from
the rest of the island. On the slopes of the range the last
pine-woods of Cyprus linger, sheltering here and there monasteries
in scenery not unworthy of the Apennines. The old city of Paphos
occupied the summit of a hill about a mile from the sea; the newer
city sprang up at the harbour some ten miles off. The sanctuary of
Aphrodite at Old Paphos (the modern Kuklia) was one of the most
celebrated shrines in the ancient world. According to Herodotus, it
was founded by Phoenician colonists from Ascalon; but it is
possible that a native goddess of fertility was worshipped on the
spot before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and that the newcomers
identified her with their own Baalath or Astarte, whom she may have
closely resembled. If two deities were thus fused in one, we may
suppose that they were both varieties of that great goddess of
motherhood and fertility whose worship appears to have been spread
all over Western Asia from a very early time. The supposition is
confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image as by the
licentious character of her rites; for both that shape and those
rites were shared by her with other Asiatic deities. Her image was
simply a white cone or pyramid. In like manner, a cone was the
emblem of Astarte at Byblus, of the native goddess whom the Greeks
called Artemis at Perga in Pamphylia, and of the sun-god
Heliogabalus at Emesa in Syria. Conical stones, which apparently
served as idols, have also been found at Golgi in Cyprus, and in
the Phoenician temples of Malta; and cones of sandstone came to
light at the shrine of the “Mistress of Torquoise”
among the barren hills and frowning precipices of Sinai.
In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were
formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at
the sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went by the name of
Aphrodite, Astarte, or what not. Similar customs prevailed in many
parts of Western Asia. Whatever its motive, the practice was
clearly regarded, not as an orgy of lust, but as a solemn religious
duty performed in the service of that great Mother Goddess of
Western Asia whose name varied, while her type remained constant,
from place to place. Thus at Babylon every woman, whether rich or
poor, had once in her life to submit to the embraces of a stranger
at the temple of Mylitta, that is, of Ishtar or Astarte, and to
dedicate to the goddess the wages earned by this sanctified
harlotry. The sacred precinct was crowded with women waiting to
observe the custom. Some of them had to wait there for years. At
Heliopolis or Baalbec in Syria, famous for the imposing grandeur of
its ruined temples, the custom of the country required that every
maiden should prostitute herself to a stranger at the temple of
Astarte, and matrons as well as maids testified their devotion to
the goddess in the same manner. The emperor Constantine abolished
the custom, destroyed the temple, and built a church in its stead.
In Phoenician temples women prostituted themselves for hire in the
service of religion, believing that by this conduct they
propitiated the goddess and won her favour. “It was a law of
the Amorites, that she who was about to marry should sit in
fornication seven days by the gate.” At Byblus the people
shaved their heads in the annual mourning for Adonis. Women who
refused to sacrifice their hair had to give themselves up to
strangers on a certain day of the festival, and the money which
they thus earned was devoted to the goddess. A Greek inscription
found at Tralles in Lydia proves that the practice of religious
prostitution survived in that country as late as the second century
of our era. It records of a certain woman, Aurelia Aemilia by name,
not only that she herself served the god in the capacity of a
harlot at his express command, but that her mother and other female
ancestors had done the same before her; and the publicity of the
record, engraved on a marble column which supported a votive
offering, shows that no stain attached to such a life and such a
parentage. In Armenia the noblest families dedicated their
daughters to the service of the goddess Anaitis in her temple of
Acilisena, where the damsels acted as prostitutes for a long time
before they were given in marriage. Nobody scrupled to take one of
these girls to wife when her period of service was over. Again, the
goddess Ma was served by a multitude of sacred harlots at Comana in
Pontus, and crowds of men and women flocked to her sanctuary from
the neighbouring cities and country to attend the biennial
festivals or to pay their vows to the goddess.
If we survey the whole of the evidence on this subject, some of
which has still to be laid before the reader, we may conclude that
a great Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive
energies of nature, was worshipped under different names but with a
substantial similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of
Western Asia; that associated with her was a lover, or rather
series of lovers, divine yet mortal, with whom she mated year by
year, their commerce being deemed essential to the propagation of
animals and plants, each in their several kind; and further, that
the fabulous union of the divine pair was simulated and, as it
were, multiplied on earth by the real, though temporary, union of
the human sexes at the sanctuary of the goddess for the sake of
thereby ensuring the fruitfulness of the ground and the increase of
man and beast.
At Paphos the custom of religious prostitution is said to have
been instituted by King Cinyras, and to have been practised by his
daughters, the sisters of Adonis, who, having incurred the wrath of
Aphrodite, mated with strangers and ended their days in Egypt. In
this form of the tradition the wrath of Aphrodite is probably a
feature added by a later authority, who could only regard conduct
which shocked his own moral sense as a punishment inflicted by the
goddess instead of as a sacrifice regularly enjoined by her on all
her devotees. At all events the story indicates that the princesses
of Paphos had to conform to the custom as well as women of humble
birth.
Among the stories which were told of Cinyras, the ancestor of
the priestly kings of Paphos and the father of Adonis, there are
some that deserve our attention. In the first place, he is said to
have begotten his son Adonis in incestuous intercourse with his
daughter Myrrha at a festival of the corn-goddess, at which women
robed in white were wont to offer corn-wreaths as first-fruits of
the harvest and to observe strict chastity for nine days. Similar
cases of incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings.
It seems unlikely that such reports are without foundation, and
perhaps equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous
outbursts of unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on
a practice actually observed for a definite reason in certain
special circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was
traced through women only, and where consequently the king held
office merely in virtue of his marriage with an hereditary
princess, who was the real sovereign, it appears to have often
happened that a prince married his own sister, the princess royal,
in order to obtain with her hand the crown which otherwise would
have gone to another man, perhaps to a stranger. May not the same
rule of descent have furnished a motive for incest with a daughter?
For it seems a natural corollary from such a rule that the king was
bound to vacate the throne on the death of his wife, the queen,
since he occupied it only by virtue of his marriage with her. When
that marriage terminated, his right to the throne terminated with
it and passed at once to his daughter’s husband. Hence if the
king desired to reign after his wife’s death, the only way in
which he could legitimately continue to do so was by marrying his
daughter, and thus prolonging through her the title which had
formerly been his through her mother.
Cinyras is said to have been famed for his exquisite beauty and
to have been wooed by Aphrodite herself. Thus it would appear, as
scholars have already observed, that Cinyras was in a sense a
duplicate of his handsome son Adonis, to whom the inflammable
goddess also lost her heart. Further, these stories of the love of
Aphrodite for two members of the royal house of Paphos can hardly
be dissociated from the corresponding legend told of Pygmalion, a
Phoenician king of Cyprus, who is said to have fallen in love with
an image of Aphrodite and taken it to his bed. When we consider
that Pygmalion was the father-in-law of Cinyras, that the son of
Cinyras was Adonis, and that all three, in successive generations,
are said to have been concerned in a love-intrigue with Aphrodite,
we can hardly help concluding that the early Phoenician kings of
Paphos, or their sons, regularly claimed to be not merely the
priests of the goddess but also her lovers, in other words, that in
their official capacity they personated Adonis. At all events
Adonis is said to have reigned in Cyprus, and it appears to be
certain that the title of Adonis was regularly borne by the sons of
all the Phoenician kings of the island. It is true that the title
strictly signified no more than “lord”; yet the legends
which connect these Cyprian princes with the goddess of love make
it probable that they claimed the divine nature as well as the
human dignity of Adonis. The story of Pygmalion points to a
ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the king wedded the image of
Aphrodite, or rather of Astarte. If that was so, the tale was in a
sense true, not of a single man only, but of a whole series of men,
and it would be all the more likely to be told of Pygmalion, if
that was a common name of Semitic kings in general, and of Cyprian
kings in particular. Pygmalion, at all events, is known as the name
of the king of Tyre from whom his sister Dido fled; and a king of
Citium and Idalium in Cyprus, who reigned in the time of Alexander
the Great, was also called Pygmalion, or rather Pumiyathon, the
Phoenician name which the Greeks corrupted into Pygmalion. Further,
it deserves to be noted that the names Pygmalion and Astarte occur
together in a Punic inscription on a gold medallion which was found
in a grave at Carthage; the characters of the inscription are of
the earliest type. As the custom of religious prostitution at
Paphos is said to have been founded by king Cinyras and observed by
his daughters, we may surmise that the kings of Paphos played the
part of the divine bridegroom in a less innocent rite than the form
of marriage with a statue; in fact, that at certain festivals each
of them had to mate with one or more of the sacred harlots of the
temple, who played Astarte to his Adonis. If that was so, there is
more truth than has commonly been supposed in the reproach cast by
the Christian fathers that the Aphrodite worshipped by Cinyras was
a common whore. The fruit of their union would rank as sons and
daughters of the deity, and would in time become the parents of
gods and goddesses, like their fathers and mothers before them. In
this manner Paphos, and perhaps all sanctuaries of the great
Asiatic goddess where sacred prostitution was practised, might be
well stocked with human deities, the offspring of the divine king
by his wives, concubines, and temple harlots. Any one of these
might probably succeed his father on the throne or be sacrificed in
his stead whenever stress of war or other grave junctures called,
as they sometimes did, for the death of a royal victim. Such a tax,
levied occasionally on the king’s numerous progeny for the
good of the country, would neither extinguish the divine stock nor
break the father’s heart, who divided his paternal affection
among so many. At all events, if, as there seems reason to believe,
Semitic kings were often regarded at the same time as hereditary
deities, it is easy to understand the frequency of Semitic personal
names which imply that the bearers of them were the sons or
daughters, the brothers or sisters, the fathers or mothers of a
god, and we need not resort to the shifts employed by some scholars
to evade the plain sense of the words. This interpretation is
confirmed by a parallel Egyptian usage; for in Egypt, where the
kings were worshipped as divine, the queen was called “the
wife of the god” or “the mother of the god,” and
the title “father of the god” was borne not only by the
king’s real father but also by his father-in-law. Similarly,
perhaps, among the Semites any man who sent his daughter to swell
the royal harem may have been allowed to call himself “the
father of the god.”
If we may judge by his name, the Semitic king who bore the name
of Cinyras was, like King David, a harper; for the name of Cinyras
is clearly connected with the Greek cinyra, “a
lyre,” which in its turn comes from the Semitic
kinnor, “a lyre,” the very word applied to the
instrument on which David played before Saul. We shall probably not
err in assuming that at Paphos as at Jerusalem the music of the
lyre or harp was not a mere pastime designed to while away an idle
hour, but formed part of the service of religion, the moving
influence of its melodies being perhaps set down, like the effect
of wine, to the direct inspiration of a deity. Certainly at
Jerusalem the regular clergy of the temple prophesied to the music
of harps, of psalteries, and of cymbals; and it appears that the
irregular clergy also, as we may call the prophets, depended on
some such stimulus for inducing the ecstatic state which they took
for immediate converse with the divinity. Thus we read of a band of
prophets coming down from a high place with a psaltery, a timbrel,
a pipe, and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went.
Again, when the united forces of Judah and Ephraim were traversing
the wilderness of Moab in pursuit of the enemy, they could find no
water for three days, and were like to die of thirst, they and the
beasts of burden. In this emergency the prophet Elisha, who was
with the army, called for a minstrel and bade him play. Under the
influence of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in
the sandy bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the line of
march. They did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the
water that had drained down into them underground from the
desolate, forbidding mountains on either hand. The prophet’s
success in striking water in the wilderness resembles the reported
success of modern dowsers, though his mode of procedure was
different. Incidentally he rendered another service to his
countrymen. For the skulking Moabites from their lairs among the
rocks saw the red sun of the desert reflected in the water, and
taking it for the blood, or perhaps rather for an omen of the
blood, of their enemies, they plucked up heart to attack the camp
and were defeated with great slaughter.
Again, just as the cloud of melancholy which from time to time
darkened the moody mind of Saul was viewed as an evil spirit from
the Lord vexing him, so on the other hand the solemn strains of the
harp, which soothed and composed his troubled thoughts, may well
have seemed to the hag-ridden king the very voice of God or of his
good angel whispering peace. Even in our own day a great religious
writer, himself deeply sensitive to the witchery of music, has said
that musical notes, with all their power to fire the blood and melt
the heart, cannot be mere empty sounds and nothing more; no, they
have escaped from some higher sphere, they are outpourings of
eternal harmony, the voice of angels, the Magnificat of saints. It
is thus that the rude imaginings of primitive man are transfigured
and his feeble lispings echoed with a rolling reverberation in the
musical prose of Newman. Indeed the influence of music on the
development of religion is a subject which would repay a
sympathetic study. For we cannot doubt that this, the most intimate
and affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as
to express the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less
deeply the fabric of belief to which at first sight it seems only
to minister. The musician has done his part as well as the prophet
and the thinker in the making of religion. Every faith has its
appropriate music, and the difference between the creeds might
almost be expressed in musical notation. The interval, for example,
which divides the wild revels of Cybele from the stately ritual of
the Catholic Church is measured by the gulf which severs the
dissonant clash of cymbals and tambourines from the grave harmonies
of Palestrina and Handel. A different spirit breathes in the
difference of the music.
XXXII. The Ritual of Adonis
AT THE FESTIVALS of Adonis, which were held in Western Asia and
in Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned, with a
bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to
resemble corpses, were carried out as to burial and then thrown
into the sea or into springs; and in some places his revival was
celebrated on the following day. But at different places the
ceremonies varied somewhat in the manner and apparently also in the
season of their celebration. At Alexandria images of Aphrodite and
Adonis were displayed on two couches; beside them were set ripe
fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower-pots, and
green bowers twined with anise. The marriage of the lovers was
celebrated one day, and on the morrow women attired as mourners,
with streaming hair and bared breasts, bore the image of the dead
Adonis to the sea-shore and committed it to the waves. Yet they
sorrowed not without hope, for they sang that the lost one would
come back again. The date at which this Alexandrian ceremony was
observed is not expressly stated; but from the mention of the ripe
fruits it has been inferred that it took place in late summer. In
the great Phoenician sanctuary of Astarte at Byblus the death of
Adonis was annually mourned, to the shrill wailing notes of the
flute, with weeping, lamentation, and beating of the breast; but
next day he was believed to come to life again and ascend up to
heaven in the presence of his worshippers. The disconsolate
believers, left behind on earth, shaved their heads as the
Egyptians did on the death of the divine bull Apis; women who could
not bring themselves to sacrifice their beautiful tresses had to
give themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival,
and to dedicate to Astarte the wages of their shame.
This Phoenician festival appears to have been a vernal one, for
its date was determined by the discoloration of the river Adonis,
and this has been observed by modern travellers to occur in spring.
At that season the red earth washed down from the mountains by the
rain tinges the water of the river, and even the sea, for a great
way with a blood-red hue, and the crimson stain was believed to be
the blood of Adonis, annually wounded to death by the boar on Mount
Lebanon. Again, the scarlet anemone is said to have sprung from the
blood of Adonis, or to have been stained by it; and as the anemone
blooms in Syria about Easter, this may be thought to show that the
festival of Adonis, or at least one of his festivals, was held in
spring. The name of the flower is probably derived from Naaman
(“darling”), which seems to have been an epithet of
Adonis. The Arabs still call the anemone “wounds of the
Naaman.” The red rose also was said to owe its hue to the
same sad occasion; for Aphrodite, hastening to her wounded lover,
trod on a bush of white roses; the cruel thorns tore her tender
flesh, and her sacred blood dyed the white roses for ever red. It
would be idle, perhaps, to lay much weight on evidence drawn from
the calendar of flowers, and in particular to press an argument so
fragile as the bloom of the rose. Yet so far as it counts at all,
the tale which links the damask rose with the death of Adonis
points to a summer rather than to a spring celebration of his
passion. In Attica, certainly, the festival fell at the height of
summer. For the fleet which Athens fitted out against Syracuse, and
by the destruction of which her power was permanently crippled,
sailed at midsummer, and by an ominous coincidence the sombre rites
of Adonis were being celebrated at the very time. As the troops
marched down to the harbour to embark, the streets through which
they passed were lined with coffins and corpse-like effigies, and
the air was rent with the noise of women wailing for the dead
Adonis. The circumstance cast a gloom over the sailing of the most
splendid armament that Athens ever sent to sea. Many ages
afterwards, when the Emperor Julian made his first entry into
Antioch, he found in like manner the gay, the luxurious capital of
the East plunged in mimic grief for the annual death of Adonis; and
if he had any presentiment of coming evil, the voices of
lamentation which struck upon his ear must have seemed to sound his
knell.
The resemblance of these ceremonies to the Indian and European
ceremonies which I have described elsewhere is obvious. In
particular, apart from the somewhat doubtful date of its
celebration, the Alexandrian ceremony is almost identical with the
Indian. In both of them the marriage of two divine beings, whose
affinity with vegetation seems indicated by the fresh plants with
which they are surrounded, is celebrated in effigy, and the
effigies are afterwards mourned over and thrown into the water.
From the similarity of these customs to each other and to the
spring and midsummer customs of modern Europe we should naturally
expect that they all admit of a common explanation. Hence, if the
explanation which I have adopted of the latter is correct, the
ceremony of the death and resurrection of Adonis must also have
been a dramatic representation of the decay and revival of plant
life. The inference thus based on the resemblance of the customs is
confirmed by the following features in the legend and ritual of
Adonis. His affinity with vegetation comes out at once in the
common story of his birth. He was said to have been born from a
myrrh-tree, the bark of which bursting, after a ten months’
gestation, allowed the lovely infant to come forth. According to
some, a boar rent the bark with his tusk and so opened a passage
for the babe. A faint rationalistic colour was given to the legend
by saying that his mother was a woman named Myrrh, who had been
turned into a myrrh-tree soon after she had conceived the child.
The use of myrrh as incense at the festival of Adonis may have
given rise to the fable. We have seen that incense was burnt at the
corresponding Babylonian rites, just as it was burnt by the
idolatrous Hebrews in honour of the Queen of Heaven, who was no
other than Astarte. Again, the story that Adonis spent half, or
according to others a third, of the year in the lower world and the
rest of it in the upper world, is explained most simply and
naturally by supposing that he represented vegetation, especially
the corn, which lies buried in the earth half the year and
reappears above ground the other half. Certainly of the annual
phenomena of nature there is none which suggests so obviously the
idea of death and resurrection as the disappearance and
reappearance of vegetation in autumn and spring. Adonis has been
taken for the sun; but there is nothing in the sun’s annual
course within the temperate and tropical zones to suggest that he
is dead for half or a third of the year and alive for the other
half or two-thirds. He might, indeed, be conceived as weakened in
winter, but dead he could not be thought to be; his daily
reappearance contradicts the supposition. Within the Arctic Circle,
where the sun annually disappears for a continuous period which
varies from twenty-four hours to six months according to the
latitude, his yearly death and resurrection would certainly be an
obvious idea; but no one except the unfortunate astronomer Bailly
has maintained that the Adonis worship came from the Arctic
regions. On the other hand, the annual death and revival of
vegetation is a conception which readily presents itself to men in
every stage of savagery and civilisation; and the vastness of the
scale on which this ever-recurring decay and regeneration takes
place, together with man’s intimate dependence on it for
subsistence, combine to render it the most impressive annual
occurrence in nature, at least within the temperate zones. It is no
wonder that a phenomenon so important, so striking, and so
universal should, by suggesting similar ideas, have given rise to
similar rites in many lands. We may, therefore, accept as probable
an explanation of the Adonis worship which accords so well with the
facts of nature and with the analogy of similar rites in other
lands. Moreover, the explanation is countenanced by a considerable
body of opinion amongst the ancients themselves, who again and
again interpreted the dying and reviving god as the reaped and
sprouting grain.
The character of Tammuz or Adonis as a corn-spirit comes out
plainly in an account of his festival given by an Arabic writer of
the tenth century. In describing the rites and sacrifices observed
at the different seasons of the year by the heathen Syrians of
Harran, he says: “Tammuz (July). In the middle of this month
is the festival of el-Bûgât, that is, of the weeping women, and
this is the Tâ-uz festival, which is celebrated in honour of the
god Tâ-uz. The women bewail him, because his lord slew him so
cruelly, ground his bones in a mill, and then scattered them to the
wind. The women (during this festival) eat nothing which has been
ground in a mill, but limit their diet to steeped wheat, sweet
vetches, dates, raisins, and the like.” Tâ-uz, who is no
other than Tammuz, is here like Burns’s John Barleycorn:
“They wasted o’er a scorching flame
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us’d him worst of all—
For he crush’d him between two stones.”
This concentration, so to say, of the nature of Adonis upon the
cereal crops is characteristic of the stage of culture reached by
his worshippers in historical times. They had left the nomadic life
of the wandering hunter and herdsman far behind them; for ages they
had been settled on the land, and had depended for their
subsistence mainly on the products of tillage. The berries and
roots of the wilderness, the grass of the pastures, which had been
matters of vital importance to their ruder forefathers, were now of
little moment to them: more and more their thoughts and energies
were engrossed by the staple of their life, the corn; more and more
accordingly the propitiation of the deities of fertility in general
and of the corn-spirit in particular tended to become the central
feature of their religion. The aim they set before themselves in
celebrating the rites was thoroughly practical. It was no vague
poetical sentiment which prompted them to hail with joy the rebirth
of vegetation and to mourn its decline. Hunger, felt or feared, was
the mainspring of the worship of Adonis.
It has been suggested by Father Lagrange that the mourning for
Adonis was essentially a harvest rite designed to propitiate the
corngod, who was then either perishing under the sickles of the
reapers, or being trodden to death under the hoofs of the oxen on
the threshing-floor. While the men slew him, the women wept
crocodile tears at home to appease his natural indignation by a
show of grief for his death. The theory fits in well with the dates
of the festivals, which fell in spring or summer; for spring and
summer, not autumn, are the seasons of the barley and wheat
harvests in the lands which worshipped Adonis. Further, the
hypothesis is confirmed by the practice of the Egyptian reapers,
who lamented, calling upon Isis, when they cut the first corn; and
it is recommended by the analogous customs of many hunting tribes,
who testify great respect for the animals which they kill and
eat.
Thus interpreted the death of Adonis is not the natural decay of
vegetation in general under the summer heat or the winter cold; it
is the violent destruction of the corn by man, who cuts it down on
the field, stamps it to pieces on the threshing-floor, and grinds
it to powder in the mill. That this was indeed the principal aspect
in which Adonis presented himself in later times to the
agricultural peoples of the Levant, may be admitted; but whether
from the beginning he had been the corn and nothing but the corn,
may be doubted. At an earlier period he may have been to the
herdsman, above all, the tender herbage which sprouts after rain,
offering rich pasture to the lean and hungry cattle. Earlier still
he may have embodied the spirit of the nuts and berries which the
autumn woods yield to the savage hunter and his squaw. And just as
the husband-man must propitiate the spirit of the corn which he
consumes, so the herdsman must appease the spirit of the grass and
leaves which his cattle munch, and the hunter must soothe the
spirit of the roots which he digs, and of the fruits which he
gathers from the bough. In all cases the propitiation of the
injured and angry, sprite would naturally comprise elaborate
excuses and apologies, accompanied by loud lamentations at his
decease whenever, through some deplorable accident or necessity, he
happened to be murdered as well as robbed. Only we must bear in
mind that the savage hunter and herdsman of those early days had
probably not yet attained to the abstract idea of vegetation in
general; and that accordingly, so far as Adonis existed for them at
all, he must have been the Adon or lord of each individual
tree and plant rather than a personification of vegetable life as a
whole. Thus there would be as many Adonises as there were trees and
shrubs, and each of them might expect to receive satisfaction for
any damage done to his person or property. And year by year, when
the trees were deciduous, every Adonis would seem to bleed to death
with the red leaves of autumn and to come to life again with the
fresh green of spring.
There is some reason to think that in early times Adonis was
sometimes personated by a living man who died a violent death in
the character of the god. Further, there is evidence which goes to
show that among the agricultural peoples of the Eastern
Mediterranean, the corn-spirit, by whatever name he was known, was
often represented, year by year, by human victims slain on the
harvest-field. If that was so, it seems likely that the
propitiation of the corn-spirit would tend to fuse to some extent
with the worship of the dead. For the spirits of these victims
might be thought to return to life in the ears which they had
fattened with their blood, and to die a second death at the reaping
of the corn. Now the ghosts of those who have perished by violence
are surly and apt to wreak their vengeance on their slayers
whenever an opportunity offers. Hence the attempt to appease the
souls of the slaughtered victims would naturally blend, at least in
the popular conception, with the attempt to pacify the slain
corn-spirit. And as the dead came back in the sprouting corn, so
they might be thought to return in the spring flowers, waked from
their long sleep by the soft vernal airs. They had been laid to
their rest under the sod. What more natural than to imagine that
the violets and the hyacinths, the roses and the anemones, sprang
from their dust, were empurpled or incarnadined by their blood, and
contained some portion of their spirit?
“I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
“And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean—
Ah, lean upon it lightly, for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen?”
In the summer after the battle of Landen, the most sanguinary
battle of the seventeenth century in Europe, the earth, saturated
with the blood of twenty thousand slain, broke forth into millions
of poppies, and the traveller who passed that vast sheet of scarlet
might well fancy that the earth had indeed given up her dead. At
Athens the great Commemoration of the Dead fell in spring about the
middle of March, when the early flowers are in bloom. Then the dead
were believed to rise from their graves and go about the streets,
vainly endeavouring to enter the temples and dwellings, which were
barred against these perturbed spirits with ropes, buckthorn, and
pitch. The name of the festival, according to the most obvious and
natural interpretation, means the Festival of Flowers, and the
title would fit well with the substance of the ceremonies if at
that season the poor ghosts were indeed thought to creep from the
narrow house with the opening flowers. There may therefore be a
measure of truth in the theory of Renan, who saw in the Adonis
worship a dreamy voluptuous cult of death, conceived not as the
King of Terrors, but as an insidious enchanter who lures his
victims to himself and lulls them into an eternal sleep. The
infinite charm of nature in the Lebanon, he thought, lends itself
to religious emotions of this sensuous, visionary sort, hovering
vaguely between pain and pleasure, between slumber and tears. It
would doubtless be a mistake to attribute to Syrian peasants the
worship of a conception so purely abstract as that of death in
general. Yet it may be true that in their simple minds the thought
of the reviving spirit of vegetation was blent with the very
concrete notion of the ghosts of the dead, who come to life again
in spring days with the early flowers, with the tender green of the
corn and the many-tinted blossoms of the trees. Thus their views of
the death and resurrection of nature would be coloured by their
views of the death and resurrection of man, by their personal
sorrows and hopes and fears. In like manner we cannot doubt that
Renan’s theory of Adonis was itself deeply tinged by
passionate memories, memories of the slumber akin to death which
sealed his own eyes on the slopes of the Lebanon, memories of the
sister who sleeps in the land of Adonis never again to wake with
the anemones and the roses.
XXXIII. The Gardens of Adonis
PERHAPS the best proof that Adonis was a deity of vegetation,
and especially of the corn, is furnished by the gardens of Adonis,
as they were called. These were baskets or pots filled with earth,
in which wheat, barley, lettuces, fennel, and various kinds of
flowers were sown and tended for eight days, chiefly or exclusively
by women. Fostered by the sun’s heat, the plants shot up
rapidly, but having no root they withered as rapidly away, and at
the end of eight days were carried out with the images of the dead
Adonis, and flung with them into the sea or into springs.
These gardens of Adonis are most naturally interpreted as
representatives of Adonis or manifestations of his power; they
represented him, true to his original nature, in vegetable form,
while the images of him, with which they were carried out and cast
into the water, portrayed him in his later human shape. All these
Adonis ceremonies, if I am right, were originally intended as
charms to promote the growth or revival of vegetation; and the
principle by which they were supposed to produce this effect was
homoeopathic or imitative magic. For ignorant people suppose that
by mimicking the effect which they desire to produce they actually
help to produce it; thus by sprinkling water they make rain, by
lighting a fire they make sunshine, and so on. Similarly, by
mimicking the growth of crops they hope to ensure a good harvest.
The rapid growth of the wheat and barley in the gardens of Adonis
was intended to make the corn shoot up; and the throwing of the
gardens and of the images into the water was a charm to secure a
due supply of fertilising rain. The same, I take it, was the object
of throwing the effigies of Death and the Carnival into water in
the corresponding ceremonies of modern Europe. Certainly the custom
of drenching with water a leaf-clad person, who undoubtedly
personifies vegetation, is still resorted to in Europe for the
express purpose of producing rain. Similarly the custom of throwing
water on the last corn cut at harvest, or on the person who brings
it home (a custom observed in Germany and France, and till lately
in England and Scotland), is in some places practised with the
avowed intent to procure rain for the next year’s crops. Thus
in Wallachia and amongst the Roumanians in Transylvania, when a
girl is bringing home a crown made of the last ears of corn cut at
harvest, all who meet her hasten to throw water on her, and two
farm-servants are placed at the door for the purpose; for they
believe that if this were not done, the crops next year would
perish from drought. At the spring ploughing in Prussia, when the
ploughmen and sowers returned in the evening from their work in the
fields, the farmer’s wife and the servants used to splash
water over them. The ploughmen and sowers retorted by seizing every
one, throwing them into the pond, and ducking them under the water.
The farmer’s wife might claim exemption on payment of a
forfeit, but every one else had to be ducked. By observing this
custom they hoped to ensure a due supply of rain for the seed.
The opinion that the gardens of Adonis are essentially charms to
promote the growth of vegetation, especially of the crops, and that
they belong to the same class of customs as those spring and
mid-summer folk-customs of modern Europe which I have described
else-where, does not rest for its evidence merely on the intrinsic
probability of the case. Fortunately we are able to show that
gardens of Adonis (if we may use the expression in a general sense)
are still planted, first, by a primitive race at their sowing
season, and, second, by European peasants at midsummer. Amongst the
Oraons and Mundas of Bengal, when the time comes for planting out
the rice which has been grown in seed-beds, a party of young people
of both sexes go to the forest and cut a young Karma-tree, or the
branch of one. Bearing it in triumph they return dancing, singing,
and beating drums, and plant it in the middle of the village
dancing-ground. A sacrifice is offered to the tree; and next
morning the youth of both sexes, linked arm-in-arm, dance in a
great circle round the Karma-tree, which is decked with strips of
coloured cloth and sham bracelets and necklets of plaited straw. As
a preparation for the festival, the daughters of the headman of the
village cultivate blades of barley in a peculiar way. The seed is
sown in moist, sandy soil, mixed with turmeric, and the blades
sprout and unfold of a pale-yellow or primrose colour. On the day
of the festival the girls take up these blades and carry them in
baskets to the dancing-ground, where, prostrating themselves
reverentially, they place some of the plants before the Karma-tree.
Finally, the Karma-tree is taken away and thrown into a stream or
tank. The meaning of planting these barley blades and then
presenting them to the Karma-tree is hardly open to question. Trees
are supposed to exercise a quickening influence upon the growth of
crops, and amongst the very people in question—the Mundas or
Mundaris— “the grove deities are held responsible for
the crops.” Therefore, when at the season for planting out
the rice the Mundas bring in a tree and treat it with so much
respect, their object can only be to foster thereby the growth of
the rice which is about to be planted out; and the custom of
causing barley blades to sprout rapidly and then presenting them to
the tree must be intended to subserve the same purpose, perhaps by
reminding the tree-spirit of his duty towards the crops, and
stimulating his activity by this visible example of rapid vegetable
growth. The throwing of the Karma-tree into the water is to be
interpreted as a rain-charm. Whether the barley blades are also
thrown into the water is not said; but if my interpretation of the
custom is right, probably they are so. A distinction between this
Bengal custom and the Greek rites of Adonis is that in the former
the tree-spirit appears in his original form as a tree; whereas in
the Adonis worship he appears in human form, represented as a dead
man, though his vegetable nature is indicated by the gardens of
Adonis, which are, so to say, a secondary manifestation of his
original power as a tree-spirit.
Gardens of Adonis are cultivated also by the Hindoos, with the
intention apparently of ensuring the fertility both of the earth
and of mankind. Thus at Oodeypoor in Rajputana a festival is held
in honour of Gouri, or Isani, the goddess of abundance. The rites
begin when the sun enters the sign of the Ram, the opening of the
Hindoo year. An image of the goddess Gouri is made of earth, and a
smaller one of her husband Iswara, and the two are placed together.
A small trench is next dug, barley is sown in it, and the ground
watered and heated artificially till the grain sprouts, when the
women dance round it hand in hand, invoking the blessing of Gouri
on their husbands. After that the young corn is taken up and
distributed by the women to the men, who wear it in their turbans.
In these rites the distribution of the barley shoots to the men,
and the invocation of a blessing on their husbands by the wives,
point clearly to the desire of offspring as one motive for
observing the custom. The same motive probably explains the use of
gardens of Adonis at the marriage of Brahmans in the Madras
Presidency. Seeds of five or nine sorts are mixed and sown in
earthen pots, which are made specially for the purpose and are
filled with earth. Bride and bridegroom water the seeds both
morning and evening for four days; and on the fifth day the
seedlings are thrown, like the real gardens of Adonis, into a tank
or river.
In Sardinia the gardens of Adonis are still planted in connexion
with the great midsummer festival which bears the name of St. John.
At the end of March or on the first of April a young man of the
village presents himself to a girl, and asks her to be his
comare (gossip or sweetheart), offering to be her
compare. The invitation is considered as an honour by the
girl’s family, and is gladly accepted. At the end of May the
girl makes a pot of the bark of the cork-tree, fills it with earth,
and sows a handful of wheat and barley in it. The pot being placed
in the sun and often watered, the corn sprouts rapidly and has a
good head by Midsummer Eve (St. John’s Eve, the twenty-third
of June). The pot is then called Erme or Nenneri.
On St. John’s Day the young man and the girl, dressed in
their best, accompanied by a long retinue and preceded by children
gambolling and frolicking, move in procession to a church outside
the village. Here they break the pot by throwing it against the
door of the church. Then they sit down in a ring on the grass and
eat eggs and herbs to the music of flutes. Wine is mixed in a cup
and passed round, each one drinking as it passes. Then they join
hands and sing “Sweethearts of St. John” (Compare e
comare di San Giovanni) over and over again, the flutes
playing the while. When they tire of singing they stand up and
dance gaily in a ring till evening. This is the general Sardinian
custom. As practised at Ozieri it has some special features. In May
the pots are made of cork-bark and planted with corn, as already
described. Then on the Eve of St. John the window-sills are draped
with rich cloths, on which the pots are placed, adorned with
crimson and blue silk and ribbons of various colours. On each of
the pots they used formerly to place a statuette or cloth doll
dressed as a woman, or a Priapus-like figure made of paste; but
this custom, rigorously forbidden by the Church, has fallen into
disuse. The village swains go about in a troop to look at the pots
and their decorations and to wait for the girls, who assemble on
the public square to celebrate the festival. Here a great bonfire
is kindled, round which they dance and make merry. Those who wish
to be “Sweethearts of St. John” act as follows. The
young man stands on one side of the bonfire and the girl on the
other, and they, in a manner, join hands by each grasping one end
of a long stick, which they pass three times backwards and forwards
across the fire, thus thrusting their hands thrice rapidly into the
flames. This seals their relationship to each other. Dancing and
music go on till late at night. The correspondence of these
Sardinian pots of grain to the gardens of Adonis seems complete,
and the images formerly placed in them answer to the images of
Adonis which accompanied his gardens.
Customs of the same sort are observed at the same season in
Sicily. Pairs of boys and girls become gossips of St. John on St.
John’s Day by drawing each a hair from his or her head and
performing various ceremonies over them. Thus they tie the hairs
together and throw them up in the air, or exchange them over a
potsherd, which they afterwards break in two, preserving each a
fragment with pious care. The tie formed in the latter way is
supposed to last for life. In some parts of Sicily the gossips of
St. John present each other with plates of sprouting corn, lentils,
and canary seed, which have been planted forty days before the
festival. The one who receives the plate pulls a stalk of the young
plants, binds it with a ribbon, and preserves it among his or her
greatest treasures, restoring the platter to the giver. At Catania
the gossips exchange pots of basil and great cucumbers; the girls
tend the basil, and the thicker it grows the more it is prized.
In these midsummer customs of Sardinia and Sicily it is possible
that, as Mr. R. Wünsch supposes, St. John has replaced Adonis. We
have seen that the rites of Tammuz or Adonis were commonly
celebrated about midsummer; according to Jerome, their date was
June.
In Sicily gardens of Adonis are still sown in spring as well as
in summer, from which we may perhaps infer that Sicily as well as
Syria celebrated of old a vernal festival of the dead and risen
god. At the approach of Easter, Sicilian women sow wheat, lentils,
and canaryseed in plates, which they keep in the dark and water
every two days. The plants soon shoot up; the stalks are tied
together with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are
placed on the sepulchres which, with the effigies of the dead
Christ, are made up in Catholic and Greek churches on Good Friday,
just as the gardens of Adonis were placed on the grave of the dead
Adonis. The practice is not confined to Sicily, for it is observed
also at Cosenza in Calabria, and perhaps in other places. The whole
custom—sepulchres as well as plates of sprouting
grain—may be nothing but a continuation, under a different
name, of the worship of Adonis.
Nor are these Sicilian and Calabrian customs the only Easter
ceremonies which resemble the rites of Adonis. “During the
whole of Good Friday a waxen effigy of the dead Christ is exposed
to view in the middle of the Greek churches and is covered with
fervent kisses by the thronging crowd, while the whole church rings
with melancholy, monotonous dirges. Late in the evening, when it
has grown quite dark, this waxen image is carried by the priests
into the street on a bier adorned with lemons, roses, jessamine,
and other flowers, and there begins a grand procession of the
multitude, who move in serried ranks, with slow and solemn step,
through the whole town. Every man carries his taper and breaks out
into doleful lamentation. At all the houses which the procession
passes there are seated women with censers to fumigate the marching
host. Thus the community solemnly buries its Christ as if he had
just died. At last the waxen image is again deposited in the
church, and the same lugubrious chants echo anew. These
lamentations, accompanied by a strict fast, continue till midnight
on Saturday. As the clock strikes twelve, the bishop appears and
announces the glad tidings that ‘Christ is risen,’ to
which the crowd replies, ‘He is risen indeed,’ and at
once the whole city bursts into an uproar of joy, which finds vent
in shrieks and shouts, in the endless discharge of carronades and
muskets, and the explosion of fire-works of every sort. In the very
same hour people plunge from the extremity of the fast into the
enjoyment of the Easter lamb and neat wine.”
In like manner the Catholic Church has been accustomed to bring
before its followers in a visible form the death and resurrection
of the Redeemer. Such sacred dramas are well fitted to impress the
lively imagination and to stir the warm feelings of a susceptible
southern race, to whom the pomp and pageantry of Catholicism are
more congenial than to the colder temperament of the Teutonic
peoples.
When we reflect how often the Church has skilfully contrived to
plant the seeds of the new faith on the old stock of paganism, we
may surmise that the Easter celebration of the dead and risen
Christ was grafted upon a similar celebration of the dead and risen
Adonis, which, as we have seen reason to believe, was celebrated in
Syria at the same season. The type, created by Greek artists, of
the sorrowful goddess with her dying lover in her arms, resembles
and may have been the model of the Pietà of Christian art,
the Virgin with the dead body of her divine Son in her lap, of
which the most celebrated example is the one by Michael Angelo in
St. Peters. That noble group, in which the living sorrow of the
mother contrasts so wonderfully with the languor of death in the
son, is one of the finest compositions in marble. Ancient Greek art
has bequeathed to us few works so beautiful, and none so
pathetic.
In this connexion a well-known statement of Jerome may not be
without significance. He tells us that Bethlehem, the traditionary
birthplace of the Lord, was shaded by a grove of that still older
Syrian Lord, Adonis, and that where the infant Jesus had wept, the
lover of Venus was bewailed. Though he does not expressly say so,
Jerome seems to have thought that the grove of Adonis had been
planted by the heathen after the birth of Christ for the purpose of
defiling the sacred spot. In this he may have been mistaken. If
Adonis was indeed, as I have argued, the spirit of the corn, a more
suitable name for his dwelling-place could hardly be found than
Bethlehem, “the House of Bread,” and he may well have
been worshipped there at his House of Bread long ages before the
birth of Him who said, “I am the bread of life.” Even
on the hypothesis that Adonis followed rather than preceded Christ
at Bethlehem, the choice of his sad figure to divert the allegiance
of Christians from their Lord cannot but strike us as eminently
appropriate when we remember the similarity of the rites which
commemorated the death and resurrection of the two. One of the
earliest seats of the worship of the new god was Antioch, and at
Antioch, as we have seen, the death of the old god was annually
celebrated with great solemnity. A circumstance which attended the
entrance of Julian into the city at the time of the Adonis festival
may perhaps throw some light on the date of its celebration. When
the emperor drew near to the city he was received with public
prayers as if he had been a god, and he marvelled at the voices of
a great multitude who cried that the Star of Salvation had dawned
upon them in the East. This may doubtless have been no more than a
fulsome compliment paid by an obsequious Oriental crowd to the
Roman emperor. But it is also possible that the rising of a bright
star regularly gave the signal for the festival, and that as chance
would have it the star emerged above the rim of the eastern horizon
at the very moment of the emperor’s approach. The
coincidence, if it happened, could hardly fail to strike the
imagination of a superstitious and excited multitude, who might
thereupon hail the great man as the deity whose coming was
announced by the sign in the heavens. Or the emperor may have
mistaken for a greeting to himself the shouts which were addressed
to the star. Now Astarte, the divine mistress of Adonis, was
identified with the planet Venus, and her changes from a morning to
an evening star were carefully noted by the Babylonian astronomers,
who drew omens from her alternate appearance and disappearance.
Hence we may conjecture that the festival of Adonis was regularly
timed to coincide with the appearance of Venus as the Morning or
Evening Star. But the star which the people of Antioch saluted at
the festival was seen in the East; therefore, if it was indeed
Venus, it can only have been the Morning Star. At Aphaca in Syria,
where there was a famous temple of Astarte, the signal for the
celebration of the rites was apparently given by the flashing of a
meteor, which on a certain day fell like a star from the top of
Mount Lebanon into the river Adonis. The meteor was thought to be
Astarte herself, and its flight through the air might naturally be
interpreted as the descent of the amorous goddess to the arms of
her lover. At Antioch and elsewhere the appearance of the Morning
Star on the day of the festival may in like manner have been hailed
as the coming of the goddess of love to wake her dead leman from
his earthy bed. If that were so, we may surmise that it was the
Morning Star which guided the wise men of the East to Bethlehem,
the hallowed spot which heard, in the language of Jerome, the
weeping of the infant Christ and the lament for Adonis.
XXXIV. The Myth and Ritual of Attis
ANOTHER of those gods whose supposed death and resurrection
struck such deep roots into the faith and ritual of Western Asia is
Attis. He was to Phrygia what Adonis was to Syria. Like Adonis, he
appears to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and
resurrection were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival
in spring. The legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike
that the ancients themselves sometimes identified them. Attis was
said to have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by
Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, a great Asiatic goddess of
fertility, who had her chief home in Phrygia. Some held that Attis
was her son. His birth, like that of many other heroes, is said to
have been miraculous. His mother, Nana, was a virgin, who conceived
by putting a ripe almond or a pomegranate in her bosom. Indeed in
the Phrygian cosmogony an almond figured as the father of all
things, perhaps because its delicate lilac blossom is one of the
first heralds of the spring, appearing on the bare boughs before
the leaves have opened. Such tales of virgin mothers are relics of
an age of childish ignorance when men had not yet recognized the
intercourse of the sexes as the true cause of offspring. Two
different accounts of the death of Attis were current. According to
the one he was killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the
other he unmanned himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on
the spot. The latter is said to have been the local story told by
the people of Pessinus, a great seat of the worship of Cybele, and
the whole legend of which the story forms a part is stamped with a
character of rudeness and savagery that speaks strongly for its
antiquity. Both tales might claim the support of custom, or rather
both were probably invented to explain certain customs observed by
the worshippers. The story of the self-mutilation of Attis is
clearly an attempt to account for the self-mutilation of his
priests, who regularly castrated themselves on entering the service
of the goddess. The story of his death by the boar may have been
told to explain why his worshippers, especially the people of
Pessinus, abstained from eating swine. In like manner the
worshippers of Adonis abstained from pork, because a boar had
killed their god. After his death Attis is said to have been
changed into a pine-tree.
The worship of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods was adopted by
the Romans in 204 B.C. towards the close of their long struggle
with Hannibal. For their drooping spirits had been opportunely
cheered by a prophecy, alleged to be drawn from that convenient
farrago of nonsense, the Sibylline Books, that the foreign invader
would be driven from Italy if the great Oriental goddess were
brought to Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her
sacred city Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone which
embodied the mighty divinity was entrusted to them and conveyed to
Rome, where it was received with great respect and installed in the
temple of Victory on the Palatine Hill. It was the middle of April
when the goddess arrived, and she went to work at once. For the
harvest that year was such as had not been seen for many a long
day, and in the very next year Hannibal and his veterans embarked
for Africa. As he looked his last on the coast of Italy, fading
behind him in the distance, he could not foresee that Europe, which
had repelled the arms, would yet yield to the gods, of the Orient.
The vanguard of the conquerors had already encamped in the heart of
Italy before the rearguard of the beaten army fell sullenly back
from its shores.
We may conjecture, though we are not told, that the Mother of
the Gods brought with her the worship of her youthful lover or son
to her new home in the West. Certainly the Romans were familiar
with the Galli, the emasculated priests of Attis, before the close
of the Republic. These unsexed beings, in their Oriental costume,
with little images suspended on their breasts, appear to have been
a familiar sight in the streets of Rome, which they traversed in
procession, carrying the image of the goddess and chanting their
hymns to the music of cymbals and tambourines, flutes and horns,
while the people, impressed by the fantastic show and moved by the
wild strains, flung alms to them in abundance, and buried the image
and its bearers under showers of roses. A further step was taken by
the Emperor Claudius when he incorporated the Phrygian worship of
the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of Attis,
in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival of
Cybele and Attis is best known to us in the form in which it was
celebrated at Rome; but as we are informed that the Roman
ceremonies were also Phrygian, we may assume that they differed
hardly, if at all, from their Asiatic original. The order of the
festival seems to have been as follows.
On the twenty-second day of March, a pine-tree was cut in the
woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was
treated as a great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree
was entrusted to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed
like a corpse with woollen bands and decked with wreaths of
violets, for violets were said to have sprung from the blood of
Attis, as roses and anemones from the blood of Adonis; and the
effigy of a young man, doubtless Attis himself, was tied to the
middle of the stem. On the second day of the festival, the
twenty-third of March, the chief ceremony seems to have been a
blowing of trumpets. The third day, the twenty-fourth of March, was
known as the Day of Blood: the Archigallus or highpriest drew blood
from his arms and presented it as an offering. Nor was he alone in
making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the wild barbaric music of
clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming
flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with
waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a frenzy of
excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with
potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the
altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood. The ghastly
rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and may have
been intended to strengthen him for the resurrection. The
Australian aborigines cut themselves in like manner over the graves
of their friends for the purpose, perhaps, of enabling them to be
born again. Further, we may conjecture, though we are not expressly
told, that it was on the same Day of Blood and for the same purpose
that the novices sacrificed their virility. Wrought up to the
highest pitch of religious excitement they dashed the severed
portions of themselves against the image of the cruel goddess.
These broken instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently
wrapt up and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred
to Cybele, where, like the offering of blood, they may have been
deemed instrumental in recalling Attis to life and hastening the
general resurrection of nature, which was then bursting into leaf
and blossom in the vernal sunshine. Some confirmation of this
conjecture is furnished by the savage story that the mother of
Attis conceived by putting in her bosom a pomegranate sprung from
the severed genitals of a man-monster named Agdestis, a sort of
double of Attis.
If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the
custom, we can readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of
fertility were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These
feminine deities required to receive from their male ministers, who
personated the divine lovers, the means of discharging their
beneficent functions: they had themselves to be impregnated by the
life-giving energy before they could transmit it to the world.
Goddesses thus ministered to by eunuch priests were the great
Artemis of Ephesus and the great Syrian Astarte of Hierapolis,
whose sanctuary, frequented by swarms of pilgrims and enriched by
the offerings of Assyria and Babylonia, of Arabia and Phoenicia,
was perhaps in the days of its glory the most popular in the East.
Now the unsexed priests of this Syrian goddess resembled those of
Cybele so closely that some people took them to be the same. And
the mode in which they dedicated themselves to the religious life
was similar. The greatest festival of the year at Hierapolis fell
at the beginning of spring, when multitudes thronged to the
sanctuary from Syria and the regions round about. While the flutes
played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves
with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave
among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did that which he
little thought to do when he came as a holiday spectator to the
festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music,
his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his
garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of
the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on
the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the bloody pieces
in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses which he
passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured had to
furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments,
which he wore for the rest of his life. When the tumult of emotion
had subsided, and the man had come to himself again, the
irrevocable sacrifice must often have been followed by passionate
sorrow and lifelong regret. This revulsion of natural human feeling
after the frenzies of a fanatical religion is powerfully depicted
by Catullus in a celebrated poem.
The parallel of these Syrian devotees confirms the view that in
the similar worship of Cybele the sacrifice of virility took place
on the Day of Blood at the vernal rites of the goddess, when the
violets, supposed to spring from the red drops of her wounded
lover, were in bloom among the pines. Indeed the story that Attis
unmanned himself under a pine-tree was clearly devised to explain
why his priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree
at his festival. At all events, we can hardly doubt that the Day of
Blood witnessed the mourning for Attis over an effigy of him which
was afterwards buried. The image thus laid in the sepulchre was
probably the same which had hung upon the tree. Throughout the
period of mourning the worshippers fasted from bread, nominally
because Cybele had done so in her grief for the death of Attis, but
really perhaps for the same reason which induced the women of
Harran to abstain from eating anything ground in a mill while they
wept for Tammuz. To partake of bread or flour at such a season
might have been deemed a wanton profanation of the bruised and
broken body of the god. Or the fast may possibly have been a
preparation for a sacramental meal.
But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was
turned to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb
was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest
touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly
whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The
resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise
that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the
grave. On the morrow, the twenty-fifth day of March, which was
reckoned the vernal equinox, the divine resurrection was celebrated
with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the
celebration took the form of a carnival. It was the Festival of Joy
(Hilaria). A universal licence prevailed. Every man might
say and do what he pleased. People went about the streets in
disguise. No dignity was too high or too sacred for the humblest
citizen to assume with impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band of
conspirators thought to take advantage of the masquerade by
dressing in the uniform of the Imperial Guard, and so, mingling
with the crowd of merrymakers, to get within stabbing distance of
the emperor. But the plot miscarried. Even the stern Alexander
Severus used to relax so far on the joyous day as to admit a
pheasant to his frugal board. The next day, the twenty-sixth of
March, was given to repose, which must have been much needed after
the varied excitements and fatigues of the preceding days. Finally,
the Roman festival closed on the twenty-seventh of March with a
procession to the brook Almo. The silver image of the goddess, with
its face of jagged black stone, sat in a waggon drawn by oxen.
Preceded by the nobles walking barefoot, it moved slowly, to the
loud music of pipes and tambourines, out by the Porta Capena, and
so down to the banks of the Almo, which flows into the Tiber just
below the walls of Rome. There the high-priest, robed in purple,
washed the waggon, the image, and the other sacred objects in the
water of the stream. On returning from their bath, the wain and the
oxen were strewn with fresh spring flowers. All was mirth and
gaiety. No one thought of the blood that had flowed so lately. Even
the eunuch priests forgot their wounds.
Such, then, appears to have been the annual solemnisation of the
death and resurrection of Attis in spring. But besides these public
rites, his worship is known to have comprised certain secret or
mystic ceremonies, which probably aimed at bringing the worshipper,
and especially the novice, into closer communication with his god.
Our information as to the nature of these mysteries and the date of
their celebration is unfortunately very scanty, but they seem to
have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood. In the
sacrament the novice became a partaker of the mysteries by eating
out of a drum and drinking out of a cymbal, two instruments of
music which figured prominently in the thrilling orchestra of
Attis. The fast which accompanied the mourning for the dead god may
perhaps have been designed to prepare the body of the communicant
for the reception of the blessed sacrament by purging it of all
that could defile by contact the sacred elements. In the baptism
the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, descended
into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a wooden grating. A
bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering
with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed
to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood poured in
torrents through the apertures, and was received with devout
eagerness by the worshipper on every part of his person and
garments, till he emerged from the pit, drenched, dripping, and
scarlet from head to foot, to receive the homage, nay the
adoration, of his fellows as one who had been born again to eternal
life and had washed away his sins in the blood of the bull. For
some time afterwards the fiction of a new birth was kept up by
dieting him on milk like a new-born babe. The regeneration of the
worshipper took place at the same time as the regeneration of his
god, namely at the vernal equinox. At Rome the new birth and the
remission of sins by the shedding of bull’s blood appear to
have been carried out above all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian
goddess on the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the great
basilica of St. Peter’s now stands; for many inscriptions
relating to the rites were found when the church was being enlarged
in 1608 or 1609. From the Vatican as a centre this barbarous system
of superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman
empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that
provincial sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that of the
Vatican. From the same source we learn that the testicles as well
as the blood of the bull played an important part in the
ceremonies. Probably they were regarded as a powerful charm to
promote fertility and hasten the new birth.
XXXV. Attis as a God of Vegetation
THE ORIGINAL character of Attis as a tree-spirit is brought out
plainly by the part which the pine-tree plays in his legend, his
ritual, and his monuments. The story that he was a human being
transformed into a pine-tree is only one of those transparent
attempts at rationalising old beliefs which meet us so frequently
in mythology. The bringing in of the pine-tree from the woods,
decked with violets and woollen bands, is like bringing in the
May-tree or Summer-tree in modern folk-custom; and the effigy which
was attached to the pine-tree was only a duplicate representative
of the tree-spirit Attis. After being fastened to the tree, the
effigy was kept for a year and then burned. The same thing appears
to have been sometimes done with the May-pole; and in like manner
the effigy of the corn-spirit, made at harvest, is often preserved
till it is replaced by a new effigy at next year’s harvest.
The original intention of such customs was no doubt to maintain the
spirit of vegetation in life throughout the year. Why the Phrygians
should have worshipped the pine above other trees we can only
guess. Perhaps the sight of its changeless, though sombre, green
cresting the ridges of the high hills above the fading splendour of
the autumn woods in the valleys may have seemed to their eyes to
mark it out as the seat of a diviner life, of something exempt from
the sad vicissitudes of the seasons, constant and eternal as the
sky which stooped to meet it. For the same reason, perhaps, ivy was
sacred to Attis; at all events, we read that his eunuch priests
were tattooed with a pattern of ivy leaves. Another reason for the
sanctity of the pine may have been its usefulness. The cones of the
stone-pine contain edible nut-like seeds, which have been used as
food since antiquity, and are still eaten, for example, by the
poorer classes in Rome. Moreover, a wine was brewed from these
seeds, and this may partly account for the orgiastic nature of the
rites of Cybele, which the ancients compared to those of Dionysus.
Further, pine-cones were regarded as symbols or rather instruments
of fertility. Hence at the festival of the Thesmophoria they were
thrown, along with pigs and other agents or emblems of fecundity,
into the sacred vaults of Demeter for the purpose of quickening the
ground and the wombs of women.
Like tree-spirits in general, Attis was apparently thought to
wield power over the fruits of the earth or even to be identical
with the corn. One of his epithets was “very fruitful”:
he was addressed as the “reaped green (or yellow) ear of
corn”; and the story of his sufferings, death, and
resurrection was interpreted as the ripe grain wounded by the
reaper, buried in the granary, and coming to life again when it is
sown in the ground. A statue of him in the Lateran Museum at Rome
clearly indicates his relation to the fruits of the earth, and
particularly to the corn; for it represents him with a bunch of
ears of corn and fruit in his hand, and a wreath of pine-cones,
pomegranates, and other fruits on his head, while from the top of
his Phrygian cap ears of corn are sprouting. On a stone urn, which
contained the ashes of an Archigallus or high-priest of Attis, the
same idea is expressed in a slightly different way. The top of the
urn is adorned with ears of corn carved in relief, and it is
surmounted by the figure of a cock, whose tail consists of ears of
corn. Cybele in like manner was conceived as a goddess of fertility
who could make or mar the fruits of the earth; for the people of
Augustodunum (Autun) in Gaul used to cart her image about in a
waggon for the good of the fields and vineyards, while they danced
and sang before it, and we have seen that in Italy an unusually
fine harvest was attributed to the recent arrival of the Great
Mother. The bathing of the image of the goddess in a river may well
have been a rain-charm to ensure an abundant supply of moisture for
the crops.
XXXVI. Human Representatives of Attis
FROM INSCRIPTIONS it appears that both at Pessinus and Rome the
high-priest of Cybele regularly bore the name of Attis. It is
therefore a reasonable conjecture that he played the part of his
namesake, the legendary Attis, at the annual festival. We have seen
that on the Day of Blood he drew blood from his arms, and this may
have been an imitation of the self-inflicted death of Attis under
the pine-tree. It is not inconsistent with this supposition that
Attis was also represented at these ceremonies by an effigy; for
instances can be shown in which the divine being is first
represented by a living person and afterwards by an effigy, which
is then burned or otherwise destroyed. Perhaps we may go a step
farther and conjecture that this mimic killing of the priest,
accompanied by a real effusion of his blood, was in Phrygia, as it
has been elsewhere, a substitute for a human sacrifice which in
earlier times was actually offered.
A reminiscence of the manner in which these old representatives
of the deity were put to death is perhaps preserved in the famous
story of Marsyas. He was said to be a Phrygian satyr or Silenus,
according to others a shepherd or herdsman, who played sweetly on
the flute. A friend of Cybele, he roamed the country with the
disconsolate goddess to soothe her grief for the death of Attis.
The composition of the Mother’s Air, a tune played on the
flute in honour of the Great Mother Goddess, was attributed to him
by the people of Celaenae in Phrygia. Vain of his skill, he
challenged Apollo to a musical contest, he to play on the flute and
Apollo on the lyre. Being vanquished, Marsyas was tied up to a
pine-tree and flayed or cut limb from limb either by the victorious
Apollo or by a Scythian slave. His skin was shown at Celaenae in
historical times. It hung at the foot of the citadel in a cave from
which the river Marsyas rushed with an impetuous and noisy tide to
join the Maeander. So the Adonis bursts full-born from the
precipices of the Lebanon; so the blue river of Ibreez leaps in a
crystal jet from the red rocks of the Taurus; so the stream, which
now rumbles deep underground, used to gleam for a moment on its
passage from darkness to darkness in the dim light of the Corycian
cave. In all these copious fountains, with their glad promise of
fertility and life, men of old saw the hand of God and worshipped
him beside the rushing river with the music of its tumbling waters
in their ears. At Celaenae, if we can trust tradition, the piper
Marsyas, hanging in his cave, had a soul for harmony even in death;
for it is said that at the sound of his native Phrygian melodies
the skin of the dead satyr used to thrill, but that if the musician
struck up an air in praise of Apollo it remained deaf and
motionless.
In this Phrygian satyr, shepherd, or herdsman who enjoyed the
friendship of Cybele, practised the music so characteristic of her
rites, and died a violent death on her sacred tree, the pine, may
we not detect a close resemblance to Attis, the favourite shepherd
or herdsman of the goddess, who is himself described as a piper, is
said to have perished under a pine-tree, and was annually
represented by an effigy hung, like Marsyas, upon a pine? We may
conjecture that in old days the priest who bore the name and played
the part of Attis at the spring festival of Cybele was regularly
hanged or otherwise slain upon the sacred tree, and that this
barbarous custom was afterwards mitigated into the form in which it
is known to us in later times, when the priest merely drew blood
from his body under the tree and attached an effigy instead of
himself to its trunk. In the holy grove at Upsala men and animals
were sacrificed by being hanged upon the sacred trees. The human
victims dedicated to Odin were regularly put to death by hanging or
by a combination of hanging and stabbing, the man being strung up
to a tree or a gallows and then wounded with a spear. Hence Odin
was called the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he
is represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to
have been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn
from the weird verses of the Havamal, in which the god
describes how he acquired his divine power by learning the magic
runes:
“I know that I hung on the windy tree
For nine whole nights,
Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin,
Myself to myself.”
The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, used
annually to sacrifice human victims for the good of the crops in a
similar way. Early in December, when the constellation Orion
appeared at seven o’clock in the evening, the people knew
that the time had come to clear their fields for sowing and to
sacrifice a slave. The sacrifice was presented to certain powerful
spirits as payment for the good year which the people had enjoyed,
and to ensure the favour of the spirits for the coming season. The
victim was led to a great tree in the forest; there he was tied
with his back to the tree and his arms stretched high above his
head, in the attitude in which ancient artists portrayed Marsyas
hanging on the fatal tree. While he thus hung by the arms, he was
slain by a spear thrust through his body at the level of the
armpits. Afterwards the body was cut clean through the middle at
the waist, and the upper part was apparently allowed to dangle for
a little from the tree, while the under part wallowed in blood on
the ground. The two portions were finally cast into a shallow
trench beside the tree. Before this was done, anybody who wished
might cut off a piece of flesh or a lock of hair from the corpse
and carry it to the grave of some relation whose body was being
consumed by a ghoul. Attracted by the fresh corpse, the ghoul would
leave the mouldering old body in peace. These sacrifices have been
offered by men now living.
In Greece the great goddess Artemis herself appears to have been
annually hanged in effigy in her sacred grove of Condylea among the
Arcadian hills, and there accordingly she went by the name of the
Hanged One. Indeed a trace of a similar rite may perhaps be
detected even at Ephesus, the most famous of her sanctuaries, in
the legend of a woman who hanged herself and was thereupon dressed
by the compassionate goddess in her own divine garb and called by
the name of Hecate. Similarly, at Melite in Phthia, a story was
told of a girl named Aspalis who hanged herself, but who appears to
have been merely a form of Artemis. For after her death her body
could not be found, but an image of her was discovered standing
beside the image of Artemis, and the people bestowed on it the
title of Hecaerge or Far-shooter, one of the regular epithets of
the goddess. Every year the virgins sacrificed a young goat to the
image by hanging it, because Aspalis was said to have hanged
herself. The sacrifice may have been a substitute for hanging an
image or a human representative of Artemis. Again, in Rhodes the
fair Helen was worshipped under the title of Helen of the Tree,
because the queen of the island had caused her handmaids, disguised
as Furies, to string her up to a bough. That the Asiatic Greeks
sacrificed animals in this fashion is proved by coins of Ilium,
which represent an ox or cow hanging on a tree and stabbed with a
knife by a man, who sits among the branches or on the
animal’s back. At Hierapolis also the victims were hung on
trees before they were burnt. With these Greek and Scandinavian
parallels before us we can hardly dismiss as wholly improbable the
conjecture that in Phrygia a man-god may have hung year by year on
the sacred but fatal tree.
XXXVII. Oriental Religions in the West
THE WORSHIP of the Great Mother of the Gods and her lover or son
was very popular under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions prove that
the two received divine honours, separately or conjointly, not only
in Italy, and especially at Rome, but also in the provinces,
particularly in Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and
Bulgaria. Their worship survived the establishment of Christianity
by Constantine; for Symmachus records the recurrence of the
festival of the Great Mother, and in the days of Augustine her
effeminate priests still paraded the streets and squares of
Carthage with whitened faces, scented hair, and mincing gait,
while, like the mendicant friars of the Middle Ages, they begged
alms from the passers-by. In Greece, on the other hand, the bloody
orgies of the Asiatic goddess and her consort appear to have found
little favour. The barbarous and cruel character of the worship,
with its frantic excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good
taste and humanity of the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the
kindred but gentler rites of Adonis. Yet the same features which
shocked and repelled the Greeks may have positively attracted the
less refined Romans and barbarians of the West. The ecstatic
frenzies, which were mistaken for divine inspiration, the mangling
of the body, the theory of a new birth and the remission of sins
through the shedding of blood, have all their origin in savagery,
and they naturally appealed to peoples in whom the savage instincts
were still strong. Their true character was indeed often disguised
under a decent veil of allegorical or philosophical interpretation,
which probably sufficed to impose upon the rapt and enthusiastic
worshippers, reconciling even the more cultivated of them to things
which otherwise must have filled them with horror and disgust.
The religion of the Great Mother, with its curious blending of
crude savagery with spiritual aspirations, was only one of a
multitude of similar Oriental faiths which in the later days of
paganism spread over the Roman Empire, and by saturating the
European peoples with alien ideals of life gradually undermined the
whole fabric of ancient civilisation. Greek and Roman society was
built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to
the community, of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of
the commonwealth, as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety
of the individual whether in this world or in the world to come.
Trained from infancy in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted
their lives to the public service and were ready to lay them down
for the common good; or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice,
it never occurred to them that they acted otherwise than basely in
preferring their personal existence to the interests of their
country. All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions
which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal
salvation as the only objects worth living for, objects in
comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the
state sank into insignificance. The inevitable result of this
selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and
more from the public service, to concentrate his thoughts on his
own spiritual emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the
present life which he regarded merely as a probation for a better
and an eternal. The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and
rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion
the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the
patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die
for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and
contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the
clouds of heaven. Thus the centre of gravity, so to say, was
shifted from the present to a future life, and however much the
other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this
one lost heavily by the change. A general disintegration of the
body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were
loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into
its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism; for
civilisation is only possible through the active co-operation of
the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private
interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country
and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own
souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the
material world, which they identified with the principle of evil,
to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years.
The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of
ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked
the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to
saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the march of
civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had turned at
last. It is ebbing still.
Among the gods of eastern origin who in the decline of the
ancient world competed against each other for the allegiance of the
West was the old Persian deity Mithra. The immense popularity of
his worship is attested by the monuments illustrative of it which
have been found scattered in profusion all over the Roman Empire.
In respect both of doctrines and of rites the cult of Mithra
appears to have presented many points of resemblance not only to
the religion of the Mother of the Gods but also to Christianity.
The similarity struck the Christian doctors themselves and was
explained by them as a work of the devil, who sought to seduce the
souls of men from the true faith by a false and insidious imitation
of it. So to the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru many of the
native heathen rites appeared to be diabolical counterfeits of the
Christian sacraments. With more probability the modern student of
comparative religion traces such resemblances to the similar and
independent workings of the mind of man in his sincere, if crude,
attempts to fathom the secret of the universe, and to adjust his
little life to its awful mysteries. However that may be, there can
be no doubt that the Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to
Christianity, combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations
after moral purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of
the conflict between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung
in the balance. An instructive relic of the long struggle is
preserved in our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to
have borrowed directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian
calendar the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter
solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because
the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase
from that turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as
it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was
remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from
which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, “The Virgin
has brought forth! The light is waxing!” The Egyptians even
represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on his
birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to
his worshippers. No doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a
son on the twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess
whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly
Goddess; in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was
regularly identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the
Unconquered Sun, as they called him; hence his nativity also fell
on the twenty-fifth of December. The Gospels say nothing as to the
day of Christ’s birth, and accordingly the early Church did
not celebrate it. In time, however, the Christians of Egypt came to
regard the sixth of January as the date of the Nativity, and the
custom of commemorating the birth of the Saviour on that day
gradually spread until by the fourth century it was universally
established in the East. But at the end of the third or the
beginning of the fourth century the Western Church, which had never
recognised the sixth of January as the day of the Nativity, adopted
the twenty-fifth of December as the true date, and in time its
decision was accepted also by the Eastern Church. At Antioch the
change was not introduced till about the year 375 A.D.
What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to
institute the festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation
are stated with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a
Christian. “The reason,” he tells us, “why the
fathers transferred the celebration of the sixth of January to the
twenty-fifth of December was this. It was a custom of the heathen
to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of
the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In
these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part.
Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the
Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and
resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day
and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January.
Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has prevailed of
kindling fires till the sixth.” The heathen origin of
Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by
Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate
that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on
account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great
rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because
of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of
the nativity of Christ.
Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the
birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order to
transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was
called the Sun of Righteousness. If that was so, there can be no
intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that motives of the same
sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the
Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the
festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which
fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in
Greece, Sicily, and Southern Italy bear in some respects a striking
resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the
Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen
predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ. But this
adaptation probably took place in the Greek-speaking rather than in
the Latin-speaking parts of the ancient world; for the worship of
Adonis, while it flourished among the Greeks, appears to have made
little impression on Rome and the West. Certainly it never formed
part of the official Roman religion. The place which it might have
taken in the affections of the vulgar was already occupied by the
similar but more barbarous worship of Attis and the Great Mother.
Now the death and resurrection of Attis were officially celebrated
at Rome on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of March, the latter
being regarded as the spring equinox, and therefore as the most
appropriate day for the revival of a god of vegetation who had been
dead or sleeping throughout the winter. But according to an ancient
and widespread tradition Christ suffered on the twenty-fifth of
March, and accordingly some Christians regularly celebrated the
Crucifixion on that day without any regard to the state of the
moon. This custom was certainly observed in Phrygia, Cappadocia,
and Gaul, and there seem to be grounds for thinking that at one
time it was followed also in Rome. Thus the tradition which placed
the death of Christ on the twenty-fifth of March was ancient and
deeply rooted. It is all the more remarkable because astronomical
considerations prove that it can have had no historical foundation.
The inference appears to be inevitable that the passion of Christ
must have been arbitrarily referred to that date in order to
harmonise with an older festival of the spring equinox. This is the
view of the learned ecclesiastical historian Mgr. Duchesne, who
points out that the death of the Saviour was thus made to fall upon
the very day on which, according to a widespread belief, the world
had been created. But the resurrection of Attis, who combined in
himself the characters of the divine Father and the divine Son, was
officially celebrated at Rome on the same day. When we remember
that the festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient
pagan festival of the Parilia; that the festival of St. John the
Baptist in June has succeeded to a heathen midsummer festival of
water: that the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August
has ousted the festival of Diana; that the feast of All Souls in
November is a continuation of an old heathen feast of the dead; and
that the Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to the winter
solstice in December because that day was deemed the Nativity of
the Sun; we can hardly be thought rash or unreasonable in
conjecturing that the other cardinal festival of the Christian
church—the solemnisation of Easter—may have been in
like manner, and from like motives of edification, adapted to a
similar celebration of the Phrygian god Attis at the vernal
equinox.
At least it is a remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more,
that the Christian and the heathen festivals of the divine death
and resurrection should have been solemnised at the same season and
in the same places. For the places which celebrated the death of
Christ at the spring equinox were Phrygia, Gaul, and apparently
Rome, that is, the very regions in which the worship of Attis
either originated or struck deepest root. It is difficult to regard
the coincidence as purely accidental. If the vernal equinox, the
season at which in the temperate regions the whole face of nature
testifies to a fresh outburst of vital energy, had been viewed from
of old as the time when the world was annually created afresh in
the resurrection of a god, nothing could be more natural than to
place the resurrection of the new deity at the same cardinal point
of the year. Only it is to be observed that if the death of Christ
was dated on the twenty-fifth of March, his resurrection, according
to Christian tradition, must have happened on the twenty-seventh of
March, which is just two days later than the vernal equinox of the
Julian calendar and the resurrection of Attis. A similar
displacement of two days in the adjustment of Christian to heathen
celebrations occurs in the festivals of St. George and the
Assumption of the Virgin. However, another Christian tradition,
followed by Lactantius and perhaps by the practice of the Church in
Gaul, placed the death of Christ on the twenty-third and his
resurrection on the twenty-fifth of March. If that was so, his
resurrection coincided exactly with the resurrection of Attis.
In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous
Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that
Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable
coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective
deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter
controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the
pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious
imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians
asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a
diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these
unseemly bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer
might seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older
and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since
as a general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble
argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed,
that in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they
triumphantly demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the
subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed
himself by inverting the usual order of nature.
Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the
heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental.
They mark the compromise which the Church in the hour of its
triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still
dangerous rivals. The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive
missionaries, with their fiery denunciations of heathendom, had
been exchanged for the supple policy, the easy tolerance, the
comprehensive charity of shrewd ecclesiastics, who clearly
perceived that if Christianity was to conquer the world it could do
so only by relaxing the too rigid principles of its Founder, by
widening a little the narrow gate which leads to salvation. In this
respect an instructive parallel might be drawn between the history
of Christianity and the history of Buddhism. Both systems were in
their origin essentially ethical reforms born of the generous
ardour, the lofty aspirations, the tender compassion of their noble
Founders, two of those beautiful spirits who appear at rare
intervals on earth like beings come from a better world to support
and guide our weak and erring nature. Both preached moral virtue as
the means of accomplishing what they regarded as the supreme object
of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a
curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful
eternity, the other in a final release from suffering, in
annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which they
inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties but to
the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in
practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently
renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work out
their own salvation in the still seclusion of the cloister. If such
faiths were to be nominally accepted by whole nations or even by
the world, it was essential that they should first be modified or
transformed so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices,
the passions, the superstitions of the vulgar. This process of
accommodation was carried out in after ages by followers who, made
of less ethereal stuff than their masters, were for that reason the
better fitted to mediate between them and the common herd. Thus as
time went on, the two religions, in exact proportion to their
growing popularity, absorbed more and more of those baser elements
which they had been instituted for the very purpose of suppressing.
Such spiritual decadences are inevitable. The world cannot live at
the level of its great men. Yet it would be unfair to the
generality of our kind to ascribe wholly to their intellectual and
moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity
from their primitive patterns. For it should never be forgotten
that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these
religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society
but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the
folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a
chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing
the species.
XXXVIII. The Myth of Osiris
IN ANCIENT EGYPT the god whose death and resurrection were
annually celebrated with alternate sorrow and joy was Osiris, the
most popular of all Egyptian deities; and there are good grounds
for classing him in one of his aspects with Adonis and Attis as a
personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature,
especially of the corn. But the immense vogue which he enjoyed for
many ages induced his devoted worshippers to heap upon him the
attributes and powers of many other gods; so that it is not always
easy to strip him, so to say, of his borrowed plumes and to restore
them to their proper owners.
The story of Osiris is told in a connected form only by
Plutarch, whose narrative has been confirmed and to some extent
amplified in modern times by the evidence of the monuments.
Osiris was the offspring of an intrigue between the earth-god
Seb (Keb or Geb, as the name is sometimes transliterated) and the
sky-goddess Nut. The Greeks identified his parents with their own
deities Cronus and Rhea. When the sun-god Ra perceived that his
wife Nut had been unfaithful to him, he declared with a curse that
she should be delivered of the child in no month and no year. But
the goddess had another lover, the god Thoth or Hermes, as the
Greeks called him, and he playing at draughts with the moon won
from her a seventy-second part of every day, and having compounded
five whole days out of these parts he added them to the Egyptian
year of three hundred and sixty days. This was the mythical origin
of the five supplementary days which the Egyptians annually
inserted at the end of every year in order to establish a harmony
between lunar and solar time. On these five days, regarded as
outside the year of twelve months, the curse of the sun-god did not
rest, and accordingly Osiris was born on the first of them. At his
nativity a voice rang out proclaiming that the Lord of All had come
into the world. Some say that a certain Pamyles heard a voice from
the temple at Thebes bidding him announce with a shout that a great
king, the beneficent Osiris, was born. But Osiris was not the only
child of his mother. On the second of the supplementary days she
gave birth to the elder Horus, on the third to the god Set, whom
the Greeks called Typhon, on the fourth to the goddess Isis, and on
the fifth to the goddess Nephthys. Afterwards Set married his
sister Nephthys, and Osiris married his sister Isis.
Reigning as a king on earth, Osiris reclaimed the Egyptians from
savagery, gave them laws, and taught them to worship the gods.
Before his time the Egyptians had been cannibals. But Isis, the
sister and wife of Osiris, discovered wheat and barley growing
wild, and Osiris introduced the cultivation of these grains amongst
his people, who forthwith abandoned cannibalism and took kindly to
a corn diet. Moreover, Osiris is said to have been the first to
gather fruit from trees, to train the vine to poles, and to tread
the grapes. Eager to communicate these beneficent discoveries to
all mankind, he committed the whole government of Egypt to his wife
Isis, and travelled over the world, diffusing the blessings of
civilisation and agriculture wherever he went. In countries where a
harsh climate or niggardly soil forbade the cultivation of the
vine, he taught the inhabitants to console themselves for the want
of wine by brewing beer from barley. Loaded with the wealth that
had been showered upon him by grateful nations, he returned to
Egypt, and on account of the benefits he had conferred on mankind
he was unanimously hailed and worshipped as a deity. But his
brother Set (whom the Greeks called Typhon) with seventy-two others
plotted against him. Having taken the measure of his good
brother’s body by stealth, the bad brother Typhon fashioned
and highly decorated a coffer of the same size, and once when they
were all drinking and making merry he brought in the coffer and
jestingly promised to give it to the one whom it should fit
exactly. Well, they all tried one after the other, but it fitted
none of them. Last of all Osiris stepped into it and lay down. On
that the conspirators ran and slammed the lid down on him, nailed
it fast, soldered it with molten lead, and flung the coffer into
the Nile. This happened on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,
when the sun is in the sign of the Scorpion, and in the
eight-and-twentieth year of the reign or the life of Osiris. When
Isis heard of it she sheared off a lock of her hair, put on a
mourning attire, and wandered disconsolately up and down, seeking
the body.
By the advice of the god of wisdom she took refuge in the
papyrus swamps of the Delta. Seven scorpions accompanied her in her
flight. One evening when she was weary she came to the house of a
woman, who, alarmed at the sight of the scorpions, shut the door in
her face. Then one of the scorpions crept under the door and stung
the child of the woman that he died. But when Isis heard the
mother’s lamentation, her heart was touched, and she laid her
hands on the child and uttered her powerful spells; so the poison
was driven out of the child and he lived. Afterwards Isis herself
gave birth to a son in the swamps. She had conceived him while she
fluttered in the form of a hawk over the corpse of her dead
husband. The infant was the younger Horus, who in his youth bore
the name of Harpocrates, that is, the child Horus. Him Buto, the
goddess of the north, hid from the wrath of his wicked uncle Set.
Yet she could not guard him from all mishap; for one day when Isis
came to her little son’s hiding-place she found him stretched
lifeless and rigid on the ground: a scorpion had stung him. Then
Isis prayed to the sun-god Ra for help. The god hearkened to her
and staid his bark in the sky, and sent down Thoth to teach her the
spell by which she might restore her son to life. She uttered the
words of power, and straightway the poison flowed from the body of
Horus, air passed into him, and he lived. Then Thoth ascended up
into the sky and took his place once more in the bark of the sun,
and the bright pomp passed onward jubilant.
Meantime the coffer containing the body of Osiris had floated
down the river and away out to sea, till at last it drifted ashore
at Byblus, on the coast of Syria. Here a fine erica-tree
shot up suddenly and enclosed the chest in its trunk. The king of
the country, admiring the growth of the tree, had it cut down and
made into a pillar of his house; but he did not know that the
coffer with the dead Osiris was in it. Word of this came to Isis
and she journeyed to Byblus, and sat down by the well, in humble
guise, her face wet with tears. To none would she speak till the
king’s handmaidens came, and them she greeted kindly, and
braided their hair, and breathed on them from her own divine body a
wondrous perfume. But when the queen beheld the braids of her
handmaidens’ hair and smelt the sweet smell that emanated
from them, she sent for the stranger woman and took her into her
house and made her the nurse of her child. But Isis gave the babe
her finger instead of her breast to suck, and at night she began to
burn all that was mortal of him away, while she herself in the
likeness of a swallow fluttered round the pillar that contained her
dead brother, twittering mournfully. But the queen spied what she
was doing and shrieked out when she saw her child in flames, and
thereby she hindered him from becoming immortal. Then the goddess
revealed herself and begged for the pillar of the roof, and they
gave it her, and she cut the coffer out of it, and fell upon it and
embraced it and lamented so loud that the younger of the
king’s children died of fright on the spot. But the trunk of
the tree she wrapped in fine linen, and poured ointment on it, and
gave it to the king and queen, and the wood stands in a temple of
Isis and is worshipped by the people of Byblus to this day. And
Isis put the coffer in a boat and took the eldest of the
king’s children with her and sailed away. As soon as they
were alone, she opened the chest, and laying her face on the face
of her brother she kissed him and wept. But the child came behind
her softly and saw what she was about, and she turned and looked at
him in anger, and the child could not bear her look and died; but
some say that it was not so, but that he fell into the sea and was
drowned. It is he whom the Egyptians sing of at their banquets
under the name of Maneros.
But Isis put the coffer by and went to see her son Horus at the
city of Buto, and Typhon found the coffer as he was hunting a boar
one night by the light of a full moon. And he knew the body, and
rent it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them abroad. But Isis
sailed up and down the marshes in a shallop made of papyrus,
looking for the pieces; and that is why when people sail in
shallops made of papyrus, the crocodiles do not hurt them, for they
fear or respect the goddess. And that is the reason, too, why there
are many graves of Osiris in Egypt, for she buried each limb as she
found it. But others will have it that she buried an image of him
in every city, pretending it was his body, in order that Osiris
might be worshipped in many places, and that if Typhon searched for
the real grave he might not be able to find it. However, the
genital member of Osiris had been eaten by the fishes, so Isis made
an image of it instead, and the image is used by the Egyptians at
their festivals to this day. “Isis,” writes the
historian Diodorus Siculus, “recovered all the parts of the
body except the genitals; and because she wished that her
husband’s grave should be unknown and honoured by all who
dwell in the land of Egypt, she resorted to the following device.
She moulded human images out of wax and spices, corresponding to
the stature of Osiris, round each one of the parts of his body.
Then she called in the priests according to their families and took
an oath of them all that they would reveal to no man the trust she
was about to repose in them. So to each of them privately she said
that to them alone she entrusted the burial of the body, and
reminding them of the benefits they had received she exhorted them
to bury the body in their own land and to honour Osiris as a god.
She also besought them to dedicate one of the animals of their
country, whichever they chose, and to honour it in life as they had
formerly honoured Osiris, and when it died to grant it obsequies
like his. And because she would encourage the priests in their own
interest to bestow the aforesaid honours, she gave them a third
part of the land to be used by them in the service and worship of
the gods. Accordingly it is said that the priests, mindful of the
benefits of Osiris, desirous of gratifying the queen, and moved by
the prospect of gain, carried out all the injunctions of Isis.
Wherefore to this day each of the priests imagines that Osiris is
buried in his country, and they honour the beasts that were
consecrated in the beginning, and when the animals die the priests
renew at their burial the mourning for Osiris. But the sacred
bulls, the one called Apis and the other Mnevis, were dedicated to
Osiris, and it was ordained that they should be worshipped as gods
in common by all the Egyptians, since these animals above all
others had helped the discoverers of corn in sowing the seed and
procuring the universal benefits of agriculture.”
Such is the myth or legend of Osiris, as told by Greek writers
and eked out by more or less fragmentary notices or allusions in
native Egyptian literature. A long inscription in the temple at
Denderah has preserved a list of the god’s graves, and other
texts mention the parts of his body which were treasured as holy
relics in each of the sanctuaries. Thus his heart was at Athribis,
his backbone at Busiris, his neck at Letopolis, and his head at
Memphis. As often happens in such cases, some of his divine limbs
were miraculously multiplied. His head, for example, was at Abydos
as well as at Memphis, and his legs, which were remarkably
numerous, would have sufficed for several ordinary mortals. In this
respect, however, Osiris was nothing to St. Denys, of whom no less
than seven heads, all equally genuine, are extant.
According to native Egyptian accounts, which supplement that of
Plutarch, when Isis had found the corpse of her husband Osiris, she
and her sister Nephthys sat down beside it and uttered a lament
which in after ages became the type of all Egyptian lamentations
for the dead. “Come to thy house,” they wailed.
“Come to thy house. O god On! come to thy house, thou who
hast no foes. O fair youth, come to thy house, that thou mayest see
me. I am thy sister, whom thou lovest; thou shalt not part from me.
O fair boy, come to thy house… . I see thee not, yet doth my
heart yearn after thee and mine eyes desire thee. Come to her who
loves thee, who loves thee, Unnefer, thou blessed one! Come to thy
sister, come to thy wife, to thy wife, thou whose heart stands
still. Come to thy housewife. I am thy sister by the same mother,
thou shalt not be far from me. Gods and men have turned their faces
towards thee and weep for thee together… . I call after thee
and weep, so that my cry is heard to heaven, but thou hearest not
my voice; yet am I thy sister, whom thou didst love on earth; thou
didst love none but me, my brother! my brother!” This lament
for the fair youth cut off in his prime reminds us of the laments
for Adonis. The title of Unnefer or “the Good Being”
bestowed on him marks the beneficence which tradition universally
ascribed to Osiris; it was at once his commonest title and one of
his names as king.
The lamentations of the two sad sisters were not in vain. In
pity for her sorrow the sun-god Ra sent down from heaven the
jackal-headed god Anubis, who, with the aid of Isis and Nephthys,
of Thoth and Horus, pieced together the broken body of the murdered
god, swathed it in linen bandages, and observed all the other rites
which the Egyptians were wont to perform over the bodies of the
departed. Then Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings: Osiris
revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other
world. There he bore the titles of Lord of the Underworld, Lord of
Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. There, too, in the great Hall of the
Two Truths, assisted by forty-two assessors, one from each of the
principal districts of Egypt, he presided as judge at the trial of
the souls of the departed, who made their solemn confession before
him, and, their heart having been weighed in the balance of
justice, received the reward of virtue in a life eternal or the
appropriate punishment of their sins.
In the resurrection of Osiris the Egyptians saw the pledge of a
life everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They believed
that every man would live eternally in the other world if only his
surviving friends did for his body what the gods had done for the
body of Osiris. Hence the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over
the human dead were an exact copy of those which Anubis, Horus, and
the rest had performed over the dead god. “At every burial
there was enacted a representation of the divine mystery which had
been performed of old over Osiris, when his son, his sisters, his
friends were gathered round his mangled remains and succeeded by
their spells and manipulations in converting his broken body into
the first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and furnished
with the means of entering on a new individual life beyond the
grave. The mummy of the deceased was Osiris; the professional
female mourners were his two sisters Isis and Nephthys; Anubis,
Horus, all the gods of the Osirian legend gathered about the
corpse.” In this way every dead Egyptian was identified with
Osiris and bore his name. From the Middle Kingdom onwards it was
the regular practice to address the deceased as “Osiris
So-and-So,” as if he were the god himself, and to add the
standing epithet “true of speech,” because true speech
was characteristic of Osiris. The thousands of inscribed and
pictured tombs that have been opened in the valley of the Nile
prove that the mystery of the resurrection was performed for the
benefit of every dead Egyptian; as Osiris died and rose again from
the dead, so all men hoped to arise like him from death to life
eternal.
Thus according to what seems to have been the general native
tradition Osiris was a good and beloved king of Egypt, who suffered
a violent death but rose from the dead and was henceforth
worshipped as a deity. In harmony with this tradition he was
regularly represented by sculptors and painters in human and regal
form as a dead king, swathed in the wrappings of a mummy, but
wearing on his head a kingly crown and grasping in one of his
hands, which were left free from the bandages, a kingly sceptre.
Two cities above all others were associated with his myth or
memory. One of them was Busiris in Lower Egypt, which claimed to
possess his backbone; the other was Abydos in Upper Egypt, which
gloried in the possession of his head. Encircled by the nimbus of
the dead yet living god, Abydos, originally an obscure place,
became from the end of the Old Kingdom the holiest spot in Egypt;
his tomb there would seem to have been to the Egyptians what the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem is to Christians. It was
the wish of every pious man that his dead body should rest in
hallowed earth near the grave of the glorified Osiris. Few indeed
were rich enough to enjoy this inestimable privilege; for, apart
from the cost of a tomb in the sacred city, the mere transport of
mummies from great distances was both difficult and expensive. Yet
so eager were many to absorb in death the blessed influence which
radiated from the holy sepulchre that they caused their surviving
friends to convey their mortal remains to Abydos, there to tarry
for a short time, and then to be brought back by river and interred
in the tombs which had been made ready for them in their native
land. Others had cenotaphs built or memorial tablets erected for
themselves near the tomb of their dead and risen Lord, that they
might share with him the bliss of a joyful resurrection.
XXXIX. The Ritual of Osiris
1. The Popular Rites
A USEFUL clue to the original nature of a god or goddess is
often furnished by the season at which his or her festival is
celebrated. Thus, if the festival falls at the new or the full
moon, there is a certain presumption that the deity thus honoured
either is the moon or at least has lunar affinities. If the
festival is held at the winter or summer solstice, we naturally
surmise that the god is the sun, or at all events that he stands in
some close relation to that luminary. Again, if the festival
coincides with the time of sowing or harvest, we are inclined to
infer that the divinity is an embodiment of the earth or of the
corn. These presumptions or inferences, taken by themselves, are by
no means conclusive; but if they happen to be confirmed by other
indications, the evidence may be regarded as fairly strong.
Unfortunately, in dealing with the Egyptian gods we are in a
great measure precluded from making use of this clue. The reason is
not that the dates of the festivals are always unknown, but that
they shifted from year to year, until after a long interval they
had revolved through the whole course of the seasons. This gradual
revolution of the festal Egyptian cycle resulted from the
employment of a calendar year which neither corresponded exactly to
the solar year nor was periodically corrected by intercalation.
If the Egyptian farmer of the olden time could get no help,
except at the rarest intervals, from the official or sacerdotal
calendar, he must have been compelled to observe for himself those
natural signals which marked the times for the various operations
of husbandry. In all ages of which we possess any records the
Egyptians have been an agricultural people, dependent for their
subsistence on the growth of the corn. The cereals which they
cultivated were wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum (Holcus
sorghum, Linnaeus), the doora of the modern
fellaheen. Then as now the whole country, with the exception of a
fringe on the coast of the Mediterranean, was almost rainless, and
owed its immense fertility entirely to the annual inundation of the
Nile, which, regulated by an elaborate system of dams and canals,
was distributed over the fields, renewing the soil year by year
with a fresh deposit of mud washed down from the great equatorial
lakes and the mountains of Abyssinia. Hence the rise of the river
has always been watched by the inhabitants with the utmost anxiety;
for if it either falls short of or exceeds a certain height, dearth
and famine are the inevitable consequences. The water begins to
rise early in June, but it is not until the latter half of July
that it swells to a mighty tide. By the end of September the
inundation is at its greatest height. The country is now submerged,
and presents the appearance of a sea of turbid water, from which
the towns and villages, built on higher ground, rise like islands.
For about a month the flood remains nearly stationary, then sinks
more and more rapidly, till by December or January the river has
returned to its ordinary bed. With the approach of summer the level
of the water continues to fall. In the early days of June the Nile
is reduced to half its ordinary breadth; and Egypt, scorched by the
sun, blasted by the wind that has blown from the Sahara for many
days, seems a mere continuation of the desert. The trees are choked
with a thick layer of grey dust. A few meagre patches of
vegetables, watered with difficulty, struggle painfully for
existence in the immediate neighbourhood of the villages. Some
appearance of verdure lingers beside the canals and in the hollows
from which the moisture has not wholly evaporated. The plain
appears to pant in the pitiless sunshine, bare, dusty,
ash-coloured, cracked and seamed as far as the eye can see with a
network of fissures. From the middle of April till the middle of
June the land of Egypt is but half alive, waiting for the new
Nile.
For countless ages this cycle of natural events has determined
the annual labours of the Egyptian husbandman. The first work of
the agricultural year is the cutting of the dams which have
hitherto prevented the swollen river from flooding the canals and
the fields. This is done, and the pent-up waters released on their
beneficent mission, in the first half of August. In November, when
the inundation has subsided, wheat, barley, and sorghum are sown.
The time of harvest varies with the district, falling about a month
later in the north than in the south. In Upper or Southern Egypt
barley is reaped at the beginning of March, wheat at the beginning
of April, and sorghum about the end of that month.
It is natural to suppose that the various events of the
agricultural year were celebrated by the Egyptian farmer with some
simple religious rites designed to secure the blessing of the gods
upon his labours. These rustic ceremonies he would continue to
perform year after year at the same season, while the solemn
festivals of the priests continued to shift, with the shifting
calendar, from summer through spring to winter, and so backward
through autumn to summer. The rites of the husbandman were stable
because they rested on direct observation of nature: the rites of
the priest were unstable because they were based on a false
calculation. Yet many of the priestly festivals may have been
nothing but the old rural festivals disguised in the course of ages
by the pomp of sacerdotalism and severed, by the error of the
calendar, from their roots in the natural cycle of the seasons.
These conjectures are confirmed by the little we know both of
the popular and of the official Egyptian religion. Thus we are told
that the Egyptians held a festival of Isis at the time when the
Nile began to rise. They believed that the goddess was then
mourning for the lost Osiris, and that the tears which dropped from
her eyes swelled the impetuous tide of the river. Now if Osiris was
in one of his aspects a god of the corn, nothing could be more
natural than that he should be mourned at midsummer. For by that
time the harvest was past, the fields were bare, the river ran low,
life seemed to be suspended, the corn-god was dead. At such a
moment people who saw the handiwork of divine beings in all the
operations of nature might well trace the swelling of the sacred
stream to the tears shed by the goddess at the death of the
beneficent corn-god her husband.
And the sign of the rising waters on earth was accompanied by a
sign in heaven. For in the early days of Egyptian history, some
three or four thousand years before the beginning of our era, the
splendid star of Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars,
appeared at dawn in the east just before sunrise about the time of
the summer solstice, when the Nile begins to rise. The Egyptians
called it Sothis, and regarded it as the star of Isis, just as the
Babylonians deemed the planet Venus the star of Astarte. To both
peoples apparently the brilliant luminary in the morning sky seemed
the goddess of life and love come to mourn her departed lover or
spouse and to wake him from the dead. Hence the rising of Sirius
marked the beginning of the sacred Egyptian year, and was regularly
celebrated by a festival which did not shift with the shifting
official year.
The cutting of the dams and the admission of the water into the
canals and fields is a great event in the Egyptian year. At Cairo
the operation generally takes place between the sixth and the
sixteenth of August, and till lately was attended by ceremonies
which deserve to be noticed, because they were probably handed down
from antiquity. An ancient canal, known by the name of the Khalíj,
formerly passed through the native town of Cairo. Near its entrance
the canal was crossed by a dam of earth, very broad at the bottom
and diminishing in breadth upwards, which used to be constructed
before or soon after the Nile began to rise. In front of the dam,
on the side of the river, was reared a truncated cone of earth
called the ’arooseh or “bride,” on the
top of which a little maize or millet was generally sown. This
“bride” was commonly washed down by the rising tide a
week or a fortnight before the cutting of the dam. Tradition runs
that the old custom was to deck a young virgin in gay apparel and
throw her into the river as a sacrifice to obtain a plentiful
inundation. Whether that was so or not, the intention of the
practice appears to have been to marry the river, conceived as a
male power, to his bride the cornland, which was so soon to be
fertilised by his water. The ceremony was therefore a charm to
ensure the growth of the crops. In modern times money used to be
thrown into the canal on this occasion, and the populace dived into
the water after it. This practice also would seem to have been
ancient, for Seneca tells us that at a place called the Veins of
the Nile, not far from Philae, the priests used to cast money and
offerings of gold into the river at a festival which apparently
took place at the rising of the water.
The next great operation of the agricultural year in Egypt is
the sowing of the seed in November, when the water of the
inundation has retreated from the fields. With the Egyptians, as
with many peoples of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the
earth assumed the character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this
subject I will let Plutarch speak for himself. “What,”
he asks, “are we to make of the gloomy, joyless, and mournful
sacrifices, if it is wrong either to omit the established rites or
to confuse and disturb our conceptions of the gods by absurd
suspicions? For the Greeks also perform many rites which resemble
those of the Egyptians and are observed about the same time. Thus
at the festival of the Thesmophoria in Athens women sit on the
ground and fast. And the Boeotians open the vaults of the Sorrowful
One, naming that festival sorrowful because Demeter is sorrowing
for the descent of the Maiden. The month is the month of sowing
about the setting of the Pleiades. The Egyptians call it Athyr, the
Athenians Pyanepsion, the Boeotians the month of Demeter… .
For it was that time of year when they saw some of the fruits
vanishing and failing from the trees, while they sowed others
grudgingly and with difficulty, scraping the earth with their hands
and huddling it up again, on the uncertain chance that what they
deposited in the ground would ever ripen and come to maturity. Thus
they did in many respects like those who bury and mourn their
dead.”
The Egyptian harvest, as we have seen, falls not in autumn but
in spring, in the months of March, April, and May. To the
husbandman the time of harvest, at least in a good year, must
necessarily be a season of joy: in bringing home his sheaves he is
requited for his long and anxious labours. Yet if the old Egyptian
farmer felt a secret joy at reaping and garnering the grain, it was
essential that he should conceal the natural emotion under an air
of profound dejection. For was he not severing the body of the
corn-god with his sickle and trampling it to pieces under the hoofs
of his cattle on the threshing-floor? Accordingly we are told that
it was an ancient custom of the Egyptian corn-reapers to beat their
breasts and lament over the first sheaf cut, while at the same time
they called upon Isis. The invocation seems to have taken the form
of a melancholy chant, to which the Greeks gave the name of
Maneros. Similar plaintive strains were chanted by corn-reapers in
Phoenicia and other parts of Western Asia. Probably all these
doleful ditties were lamentations for the corn-god killed by the
sickles of the reapers. In Egypt the slain deity was Osiris, and
the name Maneros, applied to the dirge, appears to be
derived from certain words meaning “Come to thy house,”
which often occur in the lamentations for the dead god.
Ceremonies of the same sort have been observed by other peoples,
probably for the same purpose. Thus we are told that among all
vegetables corn, by which is apparently meant maize, holds the
first place in the household economy and the ceremonial observance
of the Cherokee Indians, who invoke it under the name of “the
Old Woman” in allusion to a myth that it sprang from the
blood of an old woman killed by her disobedient sons. After the
last working of the crop a priest and his assistant went into the
field and sang songs of invocation to the spirit of the corn. After
that a loud rustling would be heard, which was thought to be caused
by the Old Woman bringing the corn into the field. A clean trail
was always kept from the field to the house, “so that the
corn might be encouraged to stay at home and not go wandering
elsewhere.” “Another curious ceremony, of which even
the memory is now almost forgotten, was enacted after the first
working of the corn, when the owner or priest stood in succession
at each of the four corners of the field and wept and wailed
loudly. Even the priests are now unable to give a reason for this
performance, which may have been a lament for the bloody death of
Selu,” the Old Woman of the Corn. In these Cherokee practices
the lamentations and the invocations of the Old Woman of the Corn
resemble the ancient Egyptian customs of lamenting over the first
corn cut and calling upon Isis, herself probably in one of her
aspects an Old Woman of the Corn. Further, the Cherokee precaution
of leaving a clear path from the field to the house resembles the
Egyptian invitation to Osiris, “Come to thy house.” So
in the East Indies to this day people observe elaborate ceremonies
for the purpose of bringing back the Soul of the Rice from the
fields to the barn. The Nandi of East Africa perform a ceremony in
September when the eleusine grain is ripening. Every woman who owns
a plantation goes out with her daughters into the cornfields and
makes a bonfire of the branches and leaves of certain trees. After
that they pluck some of the eleusine, and each of them puts one
grain in her necklace, chews another and rubs it on her forehead,
throat, and breast. “No joy is shown by the womenfolk on this
occasion, and they sorrowfully cut a basketful of the corn which
they take home with them and place in the loft to dry.”
The conception of the corn-spirit as old and dead at harvest is
very clearly embodied in a custom observed by the Arabs of Moab.
When the harvesters have nearly finished their task and only a
small corner of the field remains to be reaped, the owner takes a
handful of wheat tied up in a sheaf. A hole is dug in the form of a
grave, and two stones are set upright, one at the head and the
other at the foot, just as in an ordinary burial. Then the sheaf of
wheat is laid at the bottom of the grave, and the sheikh pronounces
these words, “The old man is dead.” Earth is afterwards
thrown in to cover the sheaf, with a prayer, “May Allah bring
us back the wheat of the dead.”
2. The Official Rites
SUCH, then, were the principal events of the farmer’s
calendar in ancient Egypt, and such the simple religious rites by
which he celebrated them. But we have still to consider the Osirian
festivals of the official calendar, so far as these are described
by Greek writers or recorded on the monuments. In examining them it
is necessary to bear in mind that on account of the movable year of
the old Egyptian calendar the true or astronomical dates of the
official festivals must have varied from year to year, at least
until the adoption of the fixed Alexandrian year in 30 B.C. From
that time onward, apparently, the dates of the festivals were
determined by the new calendar, and so ceased to rotate throughout
the length of the solar year. At all events Plutarch, writing about
the end of the first century, implies that they were then fixed,
not movable; for though he does not mention the Alexandrian
calendar, he clearly dates the festivals by it. Moreover, the long
festal calendar of Esne, an important document of the Imperial age,
is obviously based on the fixed Alexandrian year; for it assigns
the mark for New Year’s Day to the day which corresponds to
the twenty-ninth of August, which was the first day of the
Alexandrian year, and its references to the rising of the Nile, the
position of the sun, and the operations of agriculture are all in
harmony with this supposition. Thus we may take it as fairly
certain that from 30 B.C. onwards the Egyptian festivals were
stationary in the solar year.
Herodotus tells us that the grave of Osiris was at Sais in Lower
Egypt, and that there was a lake there upon which the sufferings of
the god were displayed as a mystery by night. This commemoration of
the divine passion was held once a year: the people mourned and
beat their breasts at it to testify their sorrow for the death of
the god; and an image of a cow, made of gilt wood with a golden sun
between its horns, was carried out of the chamber in which it stood
the rest of the year. The cow no doubt represented Isis herself,
for cows were sacred to her, and she was regularly depicted with
the horns of a cow on her head, or even as a woman with the head of
a cow. It is probable that the carrying out of her cow-shaped image
symbolised the goddess searching for the dead body of Osiris; for
this was the native Egyptian interpretation of a similar ceremony
observed in Plutarch’s time about the winter solstice, when
the gilt cow was carried seven times round the temple. A great
feature of the festival was the nocturnal illumination. People
fastened rows of oil-lamps to the outside of their houses, and the
lamps burned all night long. The custom was not confined to Sais,
but was observed throughout the whole of Egypt.
This universal illumination of the houses on one night of the
year suggests that the festival may have been a commemoration not
merely of the dead Osiris but of the dead in general, in other
words, that it may have been a night of All Souls. For it is a
widespread belief that the souls of the dead revisit their old
homes on one night of the year; and on that solemn occasion people
prepare for the reception of the ghosts by laying out food for them
to eat, and lighting lamps to guide them on their dark road from
and to the grave. Herodotus, who briefly describes the festival,
omits to mention its date, but we can determine it with some
probability from other sources. Thus Plutarch tells us that Osiris
was murdered on the seventeenth of the month Athyr, and that the
Egyptians accordingly observed mournful rites for four days from
the seventeenth of Athyr. Now in the Alexandrian calendar, which
Plutarch used, these four days corresponded to the thirteenth,
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth of November, and this date
answers exactly to the other indications given by Plutarch, who
says that at the time of the festival the Nile was sinking, the
north winds dying away, the nights lengthening, and the leaves
falling from the trees. During these four days a gilt cow swathed
in a black pall was exhibited as an image of Isis. This, no doubt,
was the image mentioned by Herodotus in his account of the
festival. On the nineteenth day of the month the people went down
to the sea, the priests carrying a shrine which contained a golden
casket. Into this casket they poured fresh water, and thereupon the
spectators raised a shout that Osiris was found. After that they
took some vegetable mould, moistened it with water, mixed it with
precious spices and incense, and moulded the paste into a small
moon-shaped image, which was then robed and ornamented. Thus it
appears that the purpose of the ceremonies described by Plutarch
was to represent dramatically, first, the search for the dead body
of Osiris, and, second, its joyful discovery, followed by the
resurrection of the dead god who came to life again in the new
image of vegetable mould and spices. Lactantius tells us how on
these occasions the priests, with their shaven bodies, beat their
breasts and lamented, imitating the sorrowful search of Isis for
her lost son Osiris, and how afterwards their sorrow was turned to
joy when the jackal-headed god Anubis, or rather a mummer in his
stead, produced a small boy, the living representative of the god
who was lost and was found. Thus Lactantius regarded Osiris as the
son instead of the husband of Isis, and he makes no mention of the
image of vegetable mould. It is probable that the boy who figured
in the sacred drama played the part, not of Osiris, but of his son
Horus; but as the death and resurrection of the god were celebrated
in many cities of Egypt, it is also possible that in some places
the part of the god come to life was played by a living actor
instead of by an image. Another Christian writer describes how the
Egyptians, with shorn heads, annually lamented over a buried idol
of Osiris, smiting their breasts, slashing their shoulders, ripping
open their old wounds, until, after several days of mourning, they
professed to find the mangled remains of the god, at which they
rejoiced. However the details of the ceremony may have varied in
different places, the pretence of finding the god’s body, and
probably of restoring it to life, was a great event in the festal
year of the Egyptians. The shouts of joy which greeted it are
described or alluded to by many ancient writers.
The funeral rites of Osiris, as they were observed at his great
festival in the sixteen provinces of Egypt, are described in a long
inscription of the Ptolemaic period, which is engraved on the walls
of the god’s temple at Denderah, the Tentyra of the Greeks, a
town of Upper Egypt situated on the western bank of the Nile about
forty miles north of Thebes. Unfortunately, while the information
thus furnished is remarkably full and minute on many points, the
arrangement adopted in the inscription is so confused and the
expression often so obscure that a clear and consistent account of
the ceremonies as a whole can hardly be extracted from it.
Moreover, we learn from the document that the ceremonies varied
somewhat in the several cities, the ritual of Abydos, for example,
differing from that of Busiris. Without attempting to trace all the
particularities of local usage I shall briefly indicate what seem
to have been the leading features of the festival, so far as these
can be ascertained with tolerable certainty.
The rites lasted eighteen days, from the twelfth to the
thirtieth of the month Khoiak, and set forth the nature of Osiris
in his triple aspect as dead, dismembered, and finally
reconstituted by the union of his scattered limbs. In the first of
these aspects he was called Chent-Ament (Khenti-Amenti), in the
second Osiris-Sep, and in the third Sokari (Seker). Small images of
the god were moulded of sand or vegetable earth and corn, to which
incense was sometimes added; his face was painted yellow and his
cheek-bones green. These images were cast in a mould of pure gold,
which represented the god in the form of a mummy, with the white
crown of Egypt on his head. The festival opened on the twelfth day
of Khoiak with a ceremony of ploughing and sowing. Two black cows
were yoked to the plough, which was made of tamarisk wood, while
the share was of black copper. A boy scattered the seed. One end of
the field was sown with barley, the other with spelt, and the
middle with flax. During the operation the chief celebrant recited
the ritual chapter of “the sowing of the fields.” At
Busiris on the twentieth of Khoiak sand and barley were put in the
god’s “garden,” which appears to have been a sort
of large flower-pot. This was done in the presence of the
cow-goddess Shenty, represented seemingly by the image of a cow
made of gilt sycamore wood with a headless human image in its
inside. “Then fresh inundation water was poured out of a
golden vase over both the goddess and the ‘garden,’ and
the barley was allowed to grow as the emblem of the resurrection of
the god after his burial in the earth, ‘for the growth of the
garden is the growth of the divine substance.’” On the
twenty-second of Khoiak, at the eighth hour, the images of Osiris,
attended by thirty-four images of deities, performed a mysterious
voyage in thirty-four tiny boats made of papyrus, which were
illuminated by three hundred and sixty-five lights. On the
twenty-fourth of Khoiak, after sunset, the effigy of Osiris in a
coffin of mulberry wood was laid in the grave, and at the ninth
hour of the night the effigy which had been made and deposited the
year before was removed and placed upon boughs of sycamore. Lastly,
on the thirtieth day of Khoiak they repaired to the holy sepulchre,
a subterranean chamber over which appears to have grown a clump of
Persea-trees. Entering the vault by the western door, they laid the
coffined effigy of the dead god reverently on a bed of sand in the
chamber. So they left him to his rest, and departed from the
sepulchre by the eastern door. Thus ended the ceremonies in the
month of Khoiak.
In the foregoing account of the festival, drawn from the great
inscription of Denderah, the burial of Osiris figures prominently,
while his resurrection is implied rather than expressed. This
defect of the document, however, is amply compensated by a
remarkable series of bas-reliefs which accompany and illustrate the
inscription. These exhibit in a series of scenes the dead god lying
swathed as a mummy on his bier, then gradually raising himself up
higher and higher, until at last he has entirely quitted the bier
and is seen erect between the guardian wings of the faithful Isis,
who stands behind him, while a male figure holds up before his eyes
the crux ansata, the Egyptian symbol of life. The
resurrection of the god could hardly be portrayed more graphically.
Even more instructive, however, is another representation of the
same event in a chamber dedicated to Osiris in the great temple of
Isis at Philae. Here we see the dead body of Osiris with stalks of
corn springing from it, while a priest waters the stalks from a
pitcher which he holds in his hand. The accompanying inscription
sets forth that “this is the form of him whom one may not
name, Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returning
waters.” Taken together, the picture and the words seem to
leave no doubt that Osiris was here conceived and represented as a
personification of the corn which springs from the fields after
they have been fertilised by the inundation. This, according to the
inscription, was the kernel of the mysteries, the innermost secret
revealed to the initiated. So in the rites of Demeter at Eleusis a
reaped ear of corn was exhibited to the worshippers as the central
mystery of their religion. We can now fully understand why at the
great festival of sowing in the month of Khoiak the priests used to
bury effigies of Osiris made of earth and corn. When these effigies
were taken up again at the end of a year or of a shorter interval,
the corn would be found to have sprouted from the body of Osiris,
and this sprouting of the grain would be hailed as an omen, or
rather as the cause, of the growth of the crops. The corn-god
produced the corn from himself: he gave his own body to feed the
people: he died that they might live.
And from the death and resurrection of their great god the
Egyptians drew not only their support and sustenance in this life,
but also their hope of a life eternal beyond the grave. This hope
is indicated in the clearest manner by the very remarkable effigies
of Osiris which have come to light in Egyptian cemeteries. Thus in
the Valley of the Kings at Thebes there was found the tomb of a
royal fan-bearer who lived about 1500 B.C. Among the rich contents
of the tomb there was a bier on which rested a mattress of reeds
covered with three layers of linen. On the upper side of the linen
was painted a life-size figure of Osiris; and the interior of the
figure, which was waterproof, contained a mixture of vegetable
mould, barley, and a sticky fluid. The barley had sprouted and sent
out shoots two or three inches long. Again, in the cemetery at
Cynopolis “were numerous burials of Osiris figures. These
were made of grain wrapped up in cloth and roughly shaped like an
Osiris, and placed inside a bricked-up recess at the side of the
tomb, sometimes in small pottery coffins, sometimes in wooden
coffins in the form of a hawkmummy, sometimes without any coffins
at all.” These corn-stuffed figures were bandaged like
mummies with patches of gilding here and there, as if in imitation
of the golden mould in which the similar figures of Osiris were
cast at the festival of sowing. Again, effigies of Osiris, with
faces of green wax and their interior full of grain, were found
buried near the necropolis of Thebes. Finally, we are told by
Professor Erman that between the legs of mummies “there
sometimes lies a figure of Osiris made of slime; it is filled with
grains of corn, the sprouting of which is intended to signify the
resurrection of the god.” We cannot doubt that, just as the
burial of corn-stuffed images of Osiris in the earth at the
festival of sowing was designed to quicken the seed, so the burial
of similar images in the grave was meant to quicken the dead, in
other words, to ensure their spiritual immortality.
XL. The Nature of Osiris
1. Osiris a Corn-god
THE FOREGOING survey of the myth and ritual of Osiris may
suffice to prove that in one of his aspects the god was a
personification of the corn, which may be said to die and come to
life again every year. Through all the pomp and glamour with which
in later times the priests had invested his worship, the conception
of him as the corn-god comes clearly out in the festival of his
death and resurrection, which was celebrated in the month of Khoiak
and at a later period in the month of Athyr. That festival appears
to have been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell
at the time when the husbandman actually committed the seed to the
earth. On that occasion an effigy of the corn-god, moulded of earth
and corn, was buried with funeral rites in the ground in order
that, dying there, he might come to life again with the new crops.
The ceremony was, in fact, a charm to ensure the growth of the corn
by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was
practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields
long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the
stately ritual of the temple. In the modern, but doubtless ancient,
Arab custom of burying “the Old Man,” namely, a sheaf
of wheat, in the harvest-field and praying that he may return from
the dead, we see the germ out of which the worship of the corn-god
Osiris was probably developed.
The details of his myth fit in well with this interpretation of
the god. He was said to be the offspring of Sky and Earth. What
more appropriate parentage could be invented for the corn which
springs from the ground that has been fertilised by the water of
heaven? It is true that the land of Egypt owed its fertility
directly to the Nile and not to showers; but the inhabitants must
have known or guessed that the great river in its turn was fed by
the rains which fell in the far interior. Again, the legend that
Osiris was the first to teach men the use of corn would be most
naturally told of the corn-god himself. Further, the story that his
mangled remains were scattered up and down the land and buried in
different places may be a mythical way of expressing either the
sowing or the winnowing of the grain. The latter interpretation is
supported by the tale that Isis placed the severed limbs of Osiris
on a corn-sieve. Or more probably the legend may be a reminiscence
of a custom of slaying a human victim, perhaps a representative of
the corn-spirit, and distributing his flesh or scattering his ashes
over the fields to fertilise them. In modern Europe the figure of
Death is sometimes torn in pieces, and the fragments are then
buried in the ground to make the crops grow well, and in other
parts of the world human victims are treated in the same way. With
regard to the ancient Egyptians we have it on the authority of
Manetho that they used to burn red-haired men and scatter their
ashes with winnowing fans, and it is highly significant that this
barbarous sacrifice was offered by the kings at the grave of
Osiris. We may conjecture that the victims represented Osiris
himself, who was annually slain, dismembered, and buried in their
persons that he might quicken the seed in the earth.
Possibly in prehistoric times the kings themselves played the
part of the god and were slain and dismembered in that character.
Set as well as Osiris is said to have been torn in pieces after a
reign of eighteen days, which was commemorated by an annual
festival of the same length. According to one story Romulus, the
first king of Rome, was cut in pieces by the senators, who buried
the fragments of him in the ground; and the traditional day of his
death, the seventh of July, was celebrated with certain curious
rites, which were apparently connected with the artificial
fertilisation of the fig. Again, Greek legend told how Pentheus,
king of Thebes, and Lycurgus, king of the Thracian Edonians,
opposed the vine-god Dionysus, and how the impious monarchs were
rent in pieces, the one by the frenzied Bacchanals, the other by
horses. The Greek traditions may well be distorted reminiscences of
a custom of sacrificing human beings, and especially divine kings,
in the character of Dionysus, a god who resembled Osiris in many
points and was said like him to have been torn limb from limb. We
are told that in Chios men were rent in pieces as a sacrifice to
Dionysus; and since they died the same death as their god, it is
reasonable to suppose that they personated him. The story that the
Thracian Orpheus was similarly torn limb from limb by the
Bacchanals seems to indicate that he too perished in the character
of the god whose death he died. It is significant that the Thracian
Lycurgus, king of the Edonians, is said to have been put to death
in order that the ground, which had ceased to be fruitful, might
regain its fertility.
Further, we read of a Norwegian king, Halfdan the Black, whose
body was cut up and buried in different parts of his kingdom for
the sake of ensuring the fruitfulness of the earth. He is said to
have been drowned at the age of forty through the breaking of the
ice in spring. What followed his death is thus related by the old
Norse historian Snorri Sturluson: “He had been the most
prosperous (literally, blessed with abundance) of all kings. So
greatly did men value him that when the news came that he was dead
and his body removed to Hringariki and intended for burial there,
the chief men from Raumariki and Westfold and Heithmörk came and
all requested that they might take his body with them and bury it
in their various provinces; they thought that it would bring
abundance to those who obtained it. Eventually it was settled that
the body was distributed in four places. The head was laid in a
barrow at Steinn in Hringariki, and each party took away their own
share and buried it. All these barrows are called Halfdan’s
barrows.” It should be remembered that this Halfdan belonged
to the family of the Ynglings, who traced their descent from Frey,
the great Scandinavian god of fertility.
The natives of Kiwai, an island lying off the mouth of the Fly
River in British New Guinea, tell of a certain magician named
Segera, who had sago for his totem. When Segera was old and ill, he
told the people that he would soon die, but that, nevertheless, he
would cause their gardens to thrive. Accordingly, he instructed
them that when he was dead they should cut him up and place pieces
of his flesh in their gardens, but his head was to be buried in his
own garden. Of him it is said that he outlived the ordinary age,
and that no man knew his father, but that he made the sago good and
no one was hungry any more. Old men who were alive some years ago
affirmed that they had known Segera in their youth, and the general
opinion of the Kiwai people seems to be that Segera died not more
than two generations ago.
Taken all together, these legends point to a widespread practice
of dismembering the body of a king or magician and burying the
pieces in different parts of the country in order to ensure the
fertility of the ground and probably also the fecundity of man and
beast.
To return to the human victims whose ashes the Egyptians
scattered with winnowing-fans, the red hair of these unfortunates
was probably significant. For in Egypt the oxen which were
sacrificed had also to be red; a single black or white hair found
on the beast would have disqualified it for the sacrifice. If, as I
conjecture, these human sacrifices were intended to promote the
growth of the crops—and the winnowing of their ashes seems to
support this view—redhaired victims were perhaps selected as
best fitted to personate the spirit of the ruddy grain. For when a
god is represented by a living person, it is natural that the human
representative should be chosen on the ground of his supposed
resemblance to the divine original. Hence the ancient Mexicans,
conceiving the maize as a personal being who went through the whole
course of life between seed-time and harvest, sacrificed new-born
babes when the maize was sown, older children when it had sprouted,
and so on till it was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men. A
name for Osiris was the “crop” or
“harvest”; and the ancients sometimes explained him as
a personification of the corn.
2. Osiris a Tree-spirit
BUT Osiris was more than a spirit of the corn; he was also a
tree-spirit, and this may perhaps have been his primitive
character, since the worship of trees is naturally older in the
history of religion than the worship of the cereals. The character
of Osiris as a tree-spirit was represented very graphically in a
ceremony described by Firmicus Maternus. A pine-tree having been
cut down, the centre was hollowed out, and with the wood thus
excavated an image of Osiris was made, which was then buried like a
corpse in the hollow of the tree. It is hard to imagine how the
conception of a tree as tenanted by a personal being could be more
plainly expressed. The image of Osiris thus made was kept for a
year and then burned, exactly as was done with the image of Attis
which was attached to the pine-tree. The ceremony of cutting the
tree, as described by Firmicus Maternus, appears to be alluded to
by Plutarch. It was probably the ritual counterpart of the mythical
discovery of the body of Osiris enclosed in the
erica-tree. In the hall of Osiris at Denderah the coffin
containing the hawk-headed mummy of the god is clearly depicted as
enclosed within a tree, apparently a conifer, the trunk and
branches of which are seen above and below the coffin. The scene
thus corresponds closely both to the myth and to the ceremony
described by Firmicus Maternus.
It accords with the character of Osiris as a tree-spirit that
his worshippers were forbidden to injure fruit-trees, and with his
character as a god of vegetation in general that they were not
allowed to stop up wells of water, which are so important for the
irrigation of hot southern lands. According to one legend, he
taught men to train the vine to poles, to prune its superfluous
foliage, and to extract the juice of the grape. In the papyrus of
Nebseni, written about 1550 B.C., Osiris is depicted sitting in a
shrine, from the roof of which hang clusters of grapes; and in the
papyrus of the royal scribe Nekht we see the god enthroned in front
of a pool, from the banks of which a luxuriant vine, with many
bunches of grapes, grows towards the green face of the seated
deity. The ivy was sacred to him, and was called his plant because
it is always green.
3. Osiris a God of Fertility
AS A GOD of vegetation Osiris was naturally conceived as a god
of creative energy in general, since men at a certain stage of
evolution fail to distinguish between the reproductive powers of
animals and of plants. Hence a striking feature in his worship was
the coarse but expressive symbolism by which this aspect of his
nature was presented to the eye not merely of the initiated but of
the multitude. At his festival women used to go about the villages
singing songs in his praise and carrying obscene images of him
which they set in motion by means of strings. The custom was
probably a charm to ensure the growth of the crops. A similar image
of him, decked with all the fruits of the earth, is said to have
stood in a temple before a figure of Isis, and in the chambers
dedicated to him at Philae the dead god is portrayed lying on his
bier in an attitude which indicates in the plainest way that even
in death his generative virtue was not extinct but only suspended,
ready to prove a source of life and fertility to the world when the
opportunity should offer. Hymns addressed to Osiris contain
allusions to this important side of his nature. In one of them it
is said that the world waxes green in triumph through him; and
another declares, “Thou art the father and mother of mankind,
they live on thy breath, they subsist on the flesh of thy
body.” We may conjecture that in this paternal aspect he was
supposed, like other gods of fertility, to bless men and women with
offspring, and that the processions at his festival were intended
to promote this object as well as to quicken the seed in the
ground. It would be to misjudge ancient religion to denounce as
lewd and profligate the emblems and the ceremonies which the
Egyptians employed for the purpose of giving effect to this
conception of the divine power. The ends which they proposed to
themselves in these rites were natural and laudable; only the means
they adopted to compass them were mistaken. A similar fallacy
induced the Greeks to adopt a like symbolism in their Dionysiac
festivals, and the superficial but striking resemblance thus
produced between the two religions has perhaps more than anything
else misled enquirers, both ancient and modern, into identifying
worships which, though certainly akin in nature, are perfectly
distinct and independent in origin.
4. Osiris a God of the Dead
WE have seen that in one of his aspects Osiris was the ruler and
judge of the dead. To a people like the Egyptians, who not only
believed in a life beyond the grave but actually spent much of
their time, labour, and money in preparing for it, this office of
the god must have appeared hardly, if at all, less important than
his function of making the earth to bring forth its fruits in due
season. We may assume that in the faith of his worshippers the two
provinces of the god were intimately connected. In laying their
dead in the grave they committed them to his keeping who could
raise them from the dust to life eternal, even as he caused the
seed to spring from the ground. Of that faith the corn-stuffed
effigies of Osiris found in Egyptian tombs furnish an eloquent and
un-equivocal testimony. They were at once an emblem and an
instrument of resurrection. Thus from the sprouting of the grain
the ancient Egyptians drew an augury of human immortality. They are
not the only people who have built the same lofty hopes on the same
slender foundation.
A god who thus fed his people with his own broken body in this
life, and who held out to them a promise of a blissful eternity in
a better world hereafter, naturally reigned supreme in their
affections. We need not wonder, therefore, that in Egypt the
worship of the other gods was overshadowed by that of Osiris, and
that while they were revered each in his own district, he and his
divine partner Isis were adored in all.
XLI. Isis
THE ORIGINAL meaning of the goddess Isis is still more difficult
to determine than that of her brother and husband Osiris. Her
attributes and epithets were so numerous that in the hieroglyphics
she is called “the many-named,” “the
thousand-named,” and in Greek inscriptions “the
myriad-named.” Yet in her complex nature it is perhaps still
possible to detect the original nucleus round which by a slow
process of accretion the other elements gathered. For if her
brother and husband Osiris was in one of his aspects the corn-god,
as we have seen reason to believe, she must surely have been the
corn-goddess. There are at least some grounds for thinking so. For
if we may trust Diodorus Siculus, whose authority appears to have
been the Egyptian historian Manetho, the discovery of wheat and
barley was attributed to Isis, and at her festivals stalks of these
grains were carried in procession to commemorate the boon she had
conferred on men. A further detail is added by Augustine. He says
that Isis made the discovery of barley at the moment when she was
sacrificing to the common ancestors of her husband and herself, all
of whom had been kings, and that she showed the newly discovered
ears of barley to Osiris and his councillor Thoth or Mercury, as
Roman writers called him. That is why, adds Augustine, they
identify Isis with Ceres. Further, at harvest-time, when the
Egyptian reapers had cut the first stalks, they laid them down and
beat their breasts, wailing and calling upon Isis. The custom has
been already explained as a lamen for the corn-spirit slain under
the sickle. Amongst the epithets by which Isis is designated in the
inscriptions are “Creatress of green things,”
“Green goddess, whose green colour is like unto the greenness
of the earth,” “Lady of Bread,” “Lady of
Beer,” “Lady of Abundance.” According to Brugsch
she is “not only the creatress of the fresh verdure of
vegetation which covers the earth, but is actually the green
corn-field itself, which is personified as a goddess.” This
is confirmed by her epithet Sochit or Sochet,
meaning “a corn-field,” a sense which the word still
retains in Coptic. The Greeks conceived of Isis as a corn-goddess,
for they identified her with Demeter. In a Greek epigram she is
described as “she who has given birth to the fruits of the
earth,” and “the mother of the ears of corn”; and
in a hymn composed in her honour she speaks of herself as
“queen of the wheat-field,” and is described as
“charged with the care of the fruitful furrow’s
wheat-rich path.” Accordingly, Greek or Roman artists often
represented her with ears of corn on her head or in her hand.
Such, we may suppose, was Isis in the olden time, a rustic
Corn-Mother adored with uncouth rites by Egyptian swains. But the
homely features of the clownish goddess could hardly be traced in
the refined, the saintly form which, spiritualised by ages of
religious evolution, she presented to her worshippers of after days
as the true wife, the tender mother, the beneficent queen of
nature, encircled with the nimbus of moral purity, of immemorial
and mysterious sanctity. Thus chastened and transfigured she won
many hearts far beyond the boundaries of her native land. In that
welter of religions which accompanied the decline of national life
in antiquity her worship was one of the most popular at Rome and
throughout the empire. Some of the Roman emperors themselves were
openly addicted to it. And however the religion of Isis may, like
any other, have been often worn as a cloak by men and women of
loose life, her rites appear on the whole to have been honourably
distinguished by a dignity and composure, a solemnity and decorum,
well fitted to soothe the troubled mind, to ease the burdened
heart. They appealed therefore to gentle spirits, and above all to
women, whom the bloody and licentious rites of other Oriental
goddesses only shocked and repelled. We need not wonder, then, that
in a period of decadence, when traditional faiths were shaken, when
systems clashed, when men’s minds were disquieted, when the
fabric of empire itself, once deemed eternal, began to show ominous
rents and fissures, the serene figure of Isis with her spiritual
calm, her gracious promise of immortality, should have appeared to
many like a star in a stormy sky, and should have roused in their
breasts a rapture of devotion not unlike that which was paid in the
Middle Ages to the Virgin Mary. Indeed her stately ritual, with its
shaven and tonsured priests, its matins and vespers, its tinkling
music, its baptism and aspersions of holy water, its solemn
processions, its jewelled images of the Mother of God, presented
many points of similarity to the pomps and ceremonies of
Catholicism. The resemblance need not be purely accidental. Ancient
Egypt may have contributed its share to the gorgeous symbolism of
the Catholic Church as well as to the pale abstractions of her
theology. Certainly in art the figure of Isis suckling the infant
Horus is so like that of the Madonna and child that it has
sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians. And to
Isis in her later character of patroness of mariners the Virgin
Mary perhaps owes her beautiful epithet of Stella Maris,
“Star of the Sea,” under which she is adored by
tempest-tossed sailors. The attributes of a marine deity may have
been bestowed on Isis by the sea-faring Greeks of Alexandria. They
are quite foreign to her original character and to the habits of
the Egyptians, who had no love of the sea. On this hypothesis
Sirius, the bright star of Isis, which on July mornings rises from
the glassy waves of the eastern Mediterranean, a harbinger of
halcyon weather to mariners, was the true Stella Maris,
“the Star of the Sea.”
XLII. Osiris and the Sun
OSIRIS has been sometimes interpreted as the sun-god, and in
modern times this view has been held by so many distinguished
writers that it deserves a brief examination. If we enquire on what
evidence Osiris has been identified with the sun or the sun-god, it
will be found on analysis to be minute in quantity and dubious,
where it is not absolutely worthless, in quality. The diligent
Jablonski, the first modern scholar to collect and sift the
testimony of classical writers on Egyptian religion, says that it
can be shown in many ways that Osiris is the sun, and that he could
produce a cloud of witnesses to prove it, but that it is needless
to do so, since no learned man is ignorant of the fact. Of the
ancient writers whom he condescends to quote, the only two who
expressly identify Osiris with the sun are Diodorus and Macrobius.
But little weight can be attached to their evidence; for the
statement of Diodorus is vague and rhetorical, and the reasons
which Macrobius, one of the fathers of solar mythology, assigns for
the identification are exceedingly slight.
The ground upon which some modern writers seem chiefly to rely
for the identification of Osiris with the sun is that the story of
his death fits better with the solar phenomena than with any other
in nature. It may readily be admitted that the daily appearance and
disappearance of the sun might very naturally be expressed by a
myth of his death and resurrection; and writers who regard Osiris
as the sun are careful to indicate that it is the diurnal, and not
the annual, course of the sun to which they understand the myth to
apply. Thus Renouf, who identified Osiris with the sun, admitted
that the Egyptian sun could not with any show of reason be
described as dead in winter. But if his daily death was the theme
of the legend, why was it celebrated by an annual ceremony? This
fact alone seems fatal to the interpretation of the myth as
descriptive of sunset and sunrise. Again, though the sun may be
said to die daily, in what sense can he be said to be torn in
pieces?
In the course of our enquiry it has, I trust, been made clear
that there is another natural phenomenon to which the conception of
death and resurrection is as applicable as to sunset and sunrise,
and which, as a matter of fact, has been so conceived and
represented in folk-custom. That phenomenon is the annual growth
and decay of vegetation. A strong reason for interpreting the death
of Osiris as the decay of vegetation rather than as the sunset is
to be found in the general, though not unanimous, voice of
antiquity, which classed together the worship and myths of Osiris,
Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Demeter, as religions of essentially
the same type. The consensus of ancient opinion on this subject
seems too great to be rejected as a mere fancy. So closely did the
rites of Osiris resemble those of Adonis at Byblus that some of the
people of Byblus themselves maintained that it was Osiris and not
Adonis whose death was mourned by them. Such a view could certainly
not have been held if the rituals of the two gods had not been so
alike as to be almost indistinguishable. Herodotus found the
similarity between the rites of Osiris and Dionysus so great, that
he thought it impossible the latter could have arisen
independently; they must, he supposed, have been recently borrowed,
with slight alterations, by the Greeks from the Egyptians. Again,
Plutarch, a very keen student of comparative religion, insists upon
the detailed resemblance of the rites of Osiris to those of
Dionysus. We cannot reject the evidence of such intelligent and
trustworthy witnesses on plain matters of fact which fell under
their own cognizance. Their explanations of the worships it is
indeed possible to reject, for the meaning of religious cults is
often open to question; but resemblances of ritual are matters of
observation. Therefore, those who explain Osiris as the sun are
driven to the alternative of either dismissing as mistaken the
testimony of antiquity to the similarity of the rites of Osiris,
Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Demeter, or of interpreting all these
rites as sun-worship. No modern scholar has fairly faced and
accepted either side of this alternative. To accept the former
would be to affirm that we know the rites of these deities better
than the men who practised, or at least who witnessed them. To
accept the latter would involve a wrenching, clipping, mangling,
and distorting of myth and ritual from which even Macrobius shrank.
On the other hand, the view that the essence of all these rites was
the mimic death and revival of vegetation, explains them separately
and collectively in an easy and natural way, and harmonises with
the general testimony borne by the ancients to their substantial
similarity.
XLIII. Dionysus
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that in antiquity the civilised
nations of Western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the
changes of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and
decay of vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose
mournful death and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic
rites of alternate lamentation and rejoicing. But if the
celebration was in form dramatic, it was in substance magical; that
is to say, it was intended, on the principles of sympathetic magic,
to ensure the vernal regeneration of plants and the multiplication
of animals, which had seemed to be menaced by the inroads of
winter. In the ancient world, however, such ideas and such rites
were by no means confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon and
Syria, of Phrygia and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to
the religious mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the
races of livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who
inhabited the shores and islands of the Aegean. We need not, with
some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that these
Western peoples borrowed from the older civilisation of the Orient
the conception of the Dying and Reviving God, together with the
solemn ritual, in which that conception was dramatically set forth
before the eyes of the worshippers. More probably the resemblance
which may be traced in this respect between the religions of the
East and West is no more than what we commonly, though incorrectly,
call a fortuitous coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting
alike on the similar constitution of the human mind in different
countries and under different skies. The Greek had no need to
journey into far countries to learn the vicissitudes of the
seasons, to mark the fleeting beauty of the damask rose, the
transient glory of the golden corn, the passing splendour of the
purple grapes. Year by year in his own beautiful land he beheld,
with natural regret, the bright pomp of summer fading into the
gloom and stagnation of winter, and year by year he hailed with
natural delight the outburst of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to
personify the forces of nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with
the warm hues of imagination, to clothe her naked realities with
the gorgeous drapery of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a
train of gods and goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the
shifting panorama of the seasons, and followed the annual
fluctuations of their fortunes with alternate emotions of
cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and sorrow, which found
their natural expression in alternate rites of rejoicing and
lamentation, of revelry and mourning. A consideration of some of
the Greek divinities who thus died and rose again from the dead may
furnish us with a series of companion pictures to set side by side
with the sad figures of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. We begin with
Dionysus.
The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a
personification of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the
juice of the grape. His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild
dances, thrilling music, and tipsy excess, appears to have
originated among the rude tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously
addicted to drunkenness. Its mystic doctrines and extravagant rites
were essentially foreign to the clear intelligence and sober
temperament of the Greek race. Yet appealing as it did to that love
of mystery and that proneness to revert to savagery which seem to
be innate in most men, the religion spread like wildfire through
Greece until the god whom Homer hardly deigned to notice had become
the most popular figure of the pantheon. The resemblance which his
story and his ceremonies present to those of Osiris have led some
enquirers both in ancient and modern times to hold that Dionysus
was merely a disguised Osiris, imported directly from Egypt into
Greece. But the great preponderance of evidence points to his
Thracian origin, and the similarity of the two worships is
sufficiently explained by the similarity of the ideas and customs
on which they were founded.
While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic
manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general.
Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to
“Dionysus of the tree.” In Boeotia one of his titles
was “Dionysus in the tree.” His image was often merely
an upright post, without arms, but draped in a mantle, with a
bearded mask to represent the head, and with leafy boughs
projecting from the head or body to show the nature of the deity.
On a vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing out of a low tree
or bush. At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of Dionysus is said
to have been found in a plane-tree, which had been broken by the
wind. He was the patron of cultivated trees: prayers were offered
to him that he would make the trees grow; and he was especially
honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up an image
of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their orchards. He
was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst which apples
and figs are particularly mentioned; and he was referred to as
“well-fruited,” “he of the green fruit,”
and “making the fruit to grow.” One of his titles was
“teeming” or “bursting” (as of sap or
blossoms); and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae
in Achaia. The Athenians sacrificed to him for the prosperity of
the fruits of the land. Amongst the trees particularly sacred to
him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree. The Delphic oracle
commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree
“equally with the god,” so they made two images of
Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies. In art a wand,
tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his
worshippers. Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially
associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a
Dionysus Ivy; at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos,
where figs were called meilicha, there was a Dionysus
Meilichios, the face of whose image was made of fig-wood.
Further, there are indications, few but significant, that
Dionysus was conceived as a deity of agriculture and the corn. He
is spoken of as himself doing the work of a husbandman: he is
reported to have been the first to yoke oxen to the plough, which
before had been dragged by hand alone; and some people found in
this tradition the clue to the bovine shape in which, as we shall
see, the god was often supposed to present himself to his
worshippers. Thus guiding the ploughshare and scattering the seed
as he went, Dionysus is said to have eased the labour of the
husbandman. Further, we are told that in the land of the Bisaltae,
a Thracian tribe, there was a great and fair sanctuary of Dionysus,
where at his festival a bright light shone forth at night as a
token of an abundant harvest vouchsafed by the diety; but if the
crops were to fail that year, the mystic light was not seen,
darkness brooded over the sanctuary as at other times. Moreover,
among the emblems of Dionysus was the winnowing-fan, that is the
large open shovel-shaped basket, which down to modern times has
been used by farmers to separate the grain from the chaff by
tossing the corn in the air. This simple agricultural instrument
figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus; indeed the god is
traditionally said to have been placed at birth in a winnowing-fan
as in a cradle: in art he is represented as an infant so cradled;
and from these traditions and representations he derived the
epithet of Liknites, that is, “He of the
Winnowing-fan.”
Like other gods of vegetation Dionysus was believed to have died
a violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his
sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred
rites. His tragic story is thus told by the poet Nonnus. Zeus in
the form of a serpent visited Persephone, and she bore him Zagreus,
that is, Dionysus, a horned infant. Scarcely was he born, when the
babe mounted the throne of his father Zeus and mimicked the great
god by brandishing the lightning in his tiny hand. But he did not
occupy the throne long; for the treacherous Titans, their faces
whitened with chalk, attacked him with knives while he was looking
at himself in a mirror. For a time he evaded their assaults by
turning himself into various shapes, assuming the likeness
successively of Zeus and Cronus, of a young man, of a lion, a
horse, and a serpent. Finally, in the form of a bull, he was cut to
pieces by the murderous knives of his enemies. His Cretan myth, as
related by Firmicus Maternus, ran thus. He was said to have been
the bastard son of Jupiter, a Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter
transferred the throne and sceptre to the youthful Dionysus, but,
knowing that his wife Juno cherished a jealous dislike of the
child, he entrusted Dionysus to the care of guards upon whose
fidelity he believed he could rely. Juno, however, bribed the
guards, and amusing the child with rattles and a cunningly-wrought
looking glass lured him into an ambush, where her satellites, the
Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled his body
with various herbs, and ate it. But his sister Minerva, who had
shared in the deed, kept his heart and gave it to Jupiter on his
return, revealing to him the whole history of the crime. In his
rage, Jupiter put the Titans to death by torture, and, to soothe
his grief for the loss of his son, made an image in which he
enclosed the child’s heart, and then built a temple in his
honour. In this version a Euhemeristic turn has been given to the
myth by representing Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera) as a king and
queen of Crete. The guards referred to are the mythical Curetes who
danced a war-dance round the infant Dionysus, as they are said to
have done round the infant Zeus. Very noteworthy is the legend,
recorded both by Nonnus and Firmicus, that in his infancy Dionysus
occupied for a short time the throne of his father Zeus. So Proclus
tells us that “Dionysus was the last king of the gods
appointed by Zeus. For his father set him on the kingly throne, and
placed in his hand the sceptre, and made him king of all the gods
of the world.” Such traditions point to a custom of
temporarily investing the king’s son with the royal dignity
as a preliminary to sacrificing him instead of his father.
Pomegranates were supposed to have sprung from the blood of
Dionysus, as anemones from the blood of Adonis and violets from the
blood of Attis: hence women refrained from eating seeds of
pomegranates at the festival of the Thesmophoria. According to
some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the
command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus. The grave
of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue
of Apollo. However, according to another account, the grave of
Dionysus was at Thebes, where he is said to have been torn in
pieces. Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not
mentioned, but in other versions of the myth it is variously
related. According to one version, which represented Dionysus as a
son of Zeus and Demeter, his mother pieced together his mangled
limbs and made him young again. In others it is simply said that
shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to
heaven; or that Zeus raised him up as he lay mortally wounded; or
that Zeus swallowed the heart of Dionysus and then begat him afresh
by Semele, who in the common legend figures as mother of Dionysus.
Or, again, the heart was pounded up and given in a potion to
Semele, who thereby conceived him.
Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans
celebrated a biennial festival at which the passion of Dionysus was
represented in every detail. All that he had done or suffered in
his last moments was enacted before the eyes of his worshippers,
who tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth and roamed the
woods with frantic shouts. In front of them was carried a casket
supposed to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild
music of flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the
infant god had been lured to his doom. Where the resurrection
formed part of the myth, it also was acted at the rites, and it
even appears that a general doctrine of resurrection, or at least
of immortality, was inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch,
writing to console his wife on the death of their infant daughter,
comforts her with the thought of the immortality of the soul as
taught by tradition and revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus. A
different form of the myth of the death and resurrection of
Dionysus is that he descended into Hades to bring up his mother
Semele from the dead. The local Argive tradition was that he went
down through the Alcyonian lake; and his return from the lower
world, in other words his resurrection, was annually celebrated on
the spot by the Argives, who summoned him from the water by trumpet
blasts, while they threw a lamb into the lake as an offering to the
warder of the dead. Whether this was a spring festival does not
appear, but the Lydians certainly celebrated the advent of Dionysus
in spring; the god was supposed to bring the season with him.
Deities of vegetation, who are believed to pass a certain portion
of each year underground, naturally come to be regarded as gods of
the lower world or of the dead. Both Dionysus and Osiris were so
conceived.
A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first
sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of
vegetation, is that he was often conceived and represented in
animal shape, especially in the form, or at least with the horns,
of a bull. Thus he is spoken of as “cow-born,”
“bull,” “bull-shaped,”
“bull-faced,” “bull-browed,”
“bull-horned,” “horn-bearing,”
“two-horned,” “horned.” He was believed to
appear, at least occasionally, as a bull. His images were often, as
at Cyzicus, made in bull shape, or with bull horns; and he was
painted with horns. Types of the horned Dionysus are found amongst
the surviving monuments of antiquity. On one statuette he appears
clad in a bull’s hide, the head, horns, and hoofs hanging
down behind. Again, he is represented as a child with clusters of
grapes round his brow, and a calf’s head, with sprouting
horns, attached to the back of his head. On a red-figured vase the
god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated on a woman’s
lap. The people of Cynaetha held a festival of Dionysus in winter,
when men, who had greased their bodies with oil for the occasion,
used to pick out a bull from the herd and carry it to the sanctuary
of the god. Dionysus was supposed to inspire their choice of the
particular bull, which probably represented the deity himself; for
at his festivals he was believed to appear in bull form. The women
of Elis hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his
bull’s foot. They sang, “Come hither, Dionysus, to thy
holy temple by the sea; come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing
with thy bull’s foot, O goodly bull, O goodly bull!”
The Bacchanals of Thrace wore horns in imitation of their god.
According to the myth, it was in the shape of a bull that he was
torn to pieces by the Titans; and the Cretans, when they acted the
sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live bull to pieces with
their teeth. Indeed, the rending and devouring of live bulls and
calves appear to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac
rites. When we consider the practice of portraying the god as a
bull or with some of the features of the animal, the belief that he
appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred rites, and
the legend that in bull form he had been torn in pieces, we cannot
doubt that in rending and devouring a live bull at his festival the
worshippers of Dionysus believed themselves to be killing the god,
eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.
Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of
his names was “Kid.” At Athens and at Hermion he was
worshipped under the title of “the one of the Black
Goatskin,” and a legend ran that on a certain occasion he had
appeared clad in the skin from which he took the title. In the
wine-growing district of Phlius, where in autumn the plain is still
thickly mantled with the red and golden foliage of the fading
vines, there stood of old a bronze image of a goat, which the
husbandmen plastered with gold-leaf as a means of protecting their
vines against blight. The image probably represented the vine-god
himself. To save him from the wrath of Hera, his father Zeus
changed the youthful Dionysus into a kid; and when the gods fled to
Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a
goat. Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a live goat and
devoured it raw, they must have believed that they were eating the
body and blood of the god. The custom of tearing in pieces the
bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw has been
practised as a religious rite by savages in modern times. We need
not therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of antiquity to the
observance of similar rites among the frenzied worshippers of
Bacchus.
The custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall
examine more in detail further on, belongs to a very early stage of
human culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The
advance of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of
their bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human
attributes (which are always the kernel of the conception) as the
final and sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend
to become purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or
nearly so, the animals and plants which were at first the deities
themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood connexion with
the anthropomorphic gods who have developed out of them. The origin
of the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant
having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it.
These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they
are based on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the
sacred animal or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared,
and only exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be
devised to explain either why it was spared or why it was killed.
Devised for the former purpose, the myth would tell of some service
rendered to the deity by the animal; devised for the latter
purpose, the myth would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal
on the god. The reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus
exemplifies a myth of the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him,
it was said, because they injured the vine. Now the goat, as we
have seen, was originally an embodiment of the god himself. But
when the god had divested himself of his animal character and had
become essentially anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his
worship came to be regarded no longer as a slaying of the deity
himself, but as a sacrifice offered to him; and since some reason
had to be assigned why the goat in particular should be sacrificed,
it was alleged that this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for
injuring the vine, the object of the god’s especial care.
Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself
on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as the deity is
supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that,
when the victim is the god’s old self, the god eats of his
own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is represented as eating raw
goat’s blood; and the bull-god Dionysus is called
“eater of bulls.” On the analogy of these instances we
may conjecture that wherever a deity is described as the eater of a
particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing
but the deity himself. Later on we shall find that some savages
propitiate dead bears and whales by offering them portions of their
own bodies.
All this, however, does not explain why a deity of vegetation
should appear in animal form. But the consideration of that point
had better be deferred till we have discussed the character and
attributes of Demeter. Meantime it remains to mention that in some
places, instead of an animal, a human being was torn in pieces at
the rites of Dionysus. This was the practice in Chios and Tenedos;
and at Potniae in Boeotia the tradition ran that it had been
formerly the custom to sacrifice to the goat-smiting Dionysus a
child, for whom a goat was afterwards substituted. At Orchomenus,
as we have seen, the human victim was taken from the women of an
old royal family. As the slain bull or goat represented the slain
god, so, we may suppose, the human victim also represented him.
The legends of the deaths of Pentheus and Lycurgus, two kings
who are said to have been torn to pieces, the one by Bacchanals,
the other by horses, for their opposition to the rites of Dionysus,
may be, as I have already suggested, distorted reminiscences of a
custom of sacrificing divine kings in the character of Dionysus and
of dispersing the fragments of their broken bodies over the fields
for the purpose of fertilising them. It is probably no mere
coincidence that Dionysus himself is said to have been torn in
pieces at Thebes, the very place where according to legend the same
fate befell king Pentheus at the hands of the frenzied votaries of
the vine-god.
However, a tradition of human sacrifice may sometimes have been
a mere misinterpretation of a sacrificial ritual in which an animal
victim was treated as a human being. For example, at Tenedos the
new-born calf sacrificed to Dionysus was shod in buskins, and the
mother cow was tended like a woman in child-bed. At Rome a shegoat
was sacrificed to Vedijovis as if it were a human victim. Yet on
the other hand it is equally possible, and perhaps more probable,
that these curious rites were themselves mitigations of an older
and ruder custom of sacrificing human beings, and that the later
pretence of treating the sacrificial victims as if they were human
beings was merely part of a pious and merciful fraud, which palmed
off on the deity less precious victims than living men and women.
This interpretation is supported by many undoubted cases in which
animals have been substituted for human victims.
XLIV. Demeter and Persephone
DIONYSUS was not the only Greek deity whose tragic story and
ritual appear to reflect the decay and revival of vegetation. In
another form and with a different application the old tale
reappears in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Substantially
their myth is identical with the Syrian one of Aphrodite (Astarte)
and Adonis, the Phrygian one of Cybele and Attis, and the Egyptian
one of Isis and Osiris. In the Greek fable, as in its Asiatic and
Egyptian counterparts, a goddess mourns the loss of a loved one,
who personifies the vegetation, more especially the corn, which
dies in winter to revive in spring; only whereas the Oriental
imagination figured the loved and lost one as a dead lover or a
dead husband lamented by his leman or his wife, Greek fancy
embodied the same idea in the tenderer and purer form of a dead
daughter bewailed by her sorrowing mother.
The oldest literary document which narrates the myth of Demeter
and Persephone is the beautiful Homeric Hymn to Demeter,
which critics assign to the seventh century before our era. The
object of the poem is to explain the origin of the Eleusinian
mysteries, and the complete silence of the poet as to Athens and
the Athenians, who in after ages took conspicuous part in the
festival, renders it probable that the hymn was composed in the far
off time when Eleusis was still a petty independent state, and
before the stately procession of the Mysteries had begun to defile,
in bright September days, over the low chain of barren rocky hills
which divides the flat Eleusinian cornland from the more spacious
olive-clad expanse of the Athenian plain. Be that as it may, the
hymn reveals to us the conception which the writer entertained of
the character and functions of the two goddesses; their natural
shapes stand out sharply enough under the thin veil of poetical
imagery. The youthful Persephone, so runs the tale, was gathering
roses and lilies, crocuses and violets, hyacinths and narcissuses
in a lush meadow, when the earth gaped and Pluto, lord of the Dead,
issuing from the abyss carried her off on his golden car to be his
bride and queen in the gloomy subterranean world. Her sorrowing
mother Demeter, with her yellow tresses veiled in a dark mourning
mantle, sought her over land and sea, and learning from the Sun her
daughter’s fate she withdrew in high dudgeon from the gods
and took up her abode at Eleusis, where she presented herself to
the king’s daughters in the guise of an old woman, sitting
sadly under the shadow of an olive tree beside the Maiden’s
Well, to which the damsels had come to draw water in bronze
pitchers for their father’s house. In her wrath at her
bereavement the goddess suffered not the seed to grow in the earth
but kept it hidden under ground, and she vowed that never would she
set foot on Olympus and never would she let the corn sprout till
her lost daughter should be restored to her. Vainly the oxen
dragged the ploughs to and fro in the fields; vainly the sower
dropped the barley seed in the brown furrows; nothing came up from
the parched and crumbling soil. Even the Rarian plain near Eleusis,
which was wont to wave with yellow harvests, lay bare and fallow.
Mankind would have perished of hunger and the gods would have been
robbed of the sacrifices which were their due, if Zeus in alarm had
not commanded Pluto to disgorge his prey, to restore his bride
Persephone to her mother Demeter. The grim lord of the Dead smiled
and obeyed, but before he sent back his queen to the upper air on a
golden car, he gave her the seed of a pomegranate to eat, which
ensured that she would return to him. But Zeus stipulated that
henceforth Persephone should spend two thirds of every year with
her mother and the gods in the upper world and one third of the
year with her husband in the nether world, from which she was to
return year by year when the earth was gay with spring flowers.
Gladly the daughter then returned to the sunshine, gladly her
mother received her and fell upon her neck; and in her joy at
recovering the lost one Demeter made the corn to sprout from the
clods of the ploughed fields and all the broad earth to be heavy
with leaves and blossoms. And straightway she went and showed this
happy sight to the princes of Eleusis, to Triptolemus, Eumolpus,
Diocles, and to the king Celeus himself, and moreover she revealed
to them her sacred rites and mysteries. Blessed, says the poet, is
the mortal man who has seen these things, but he who has had no
share of them in life will never be happy in death when he has
descended into the darkness of the grave. So the two goddesses
departed to dwell in bliss with the gods on Olympus; and the bard
ends the hymn with a pious prayer to Demeter and Persephone that
they would be pleased to grant him a livelihood in return for his
song.
It has been generally recognised, and indeed it seems scarcely
open to doubt, that the main theme which the poet set before
himself in composing this hymn was to describe the traditional
foundation of the Eleusinian mysteries by the goddess Demeter. The
whole poem leads up to the transformation scene in which the bare
leafless expanse of the Eleusinian plain is suddenly turned, at the
will of the goddess, into a vast sheet of ruddy corn; the
beneficent deity takes the princes of Eleusis, shows them what she
has done, teaches them her mystic rites, and vanishes with her
daughter to heaven. The revelation of the mysteries is the
triumphal close of the piece. This conclusion is confirmed by a
more minute examination of the poem, which proves that the poet has
given, not merely a general account of the foundation of the
mysteries, but also in more or less veiled language mythical
explanations of the origin of particular rites which we have good
reason to believe formed essential features of the festival.
Amongst the rites as to which the poet thus drops significant hints
are the preliminary fast of the candidates for initiation, the
torchlight procession, the all-night vigil, the sitting of the
candidates, veiled and in silence, on stools covered with
sheepskins, the use of scurrilous language, the breaking of ribald
jests, and the solemn communion with the divinity by participation
in a draught of barley-water from a holy chalice.
But there is yet another and a deeper secret of the mysteries
which the author of the poem appears to have divulged under cover
of his narrative. He tells us how, as soon as she had transformed
the barren brown expanse of the Eleusinian plain into a field of
golden grain, she gladdened the eyes of Triptolemus and the other
Eleusinian princes by showing them the growing or standing corn.
When we compare this part of the story with the statement of a
Christian writer of the second century, Hippolytus, that the very
heart of the mysteries consisted in showing to the initiated a
reaped ear of corn, we can hardly doubt that the poet of the hymn
was well acquainted with this solemn rite, and that he deliberately
intended to explain its origin in precisely the same way as he
explained other rites of the mysteries, namely by representing
Demeter as having set the example of performing the ceremony in her
own person. Thus myth and ritual mutually explain and confirm each
other. The poet of the seventh century before our era gives us the
myth—he could not without sacrilege have revealed the ritual:
the Christian father reveals the ritual, and his revelation accords
perfectly with the veiled hint of the old poet. On the whole, then,
we may, with many modern scholars, confidently accept the statement
of the learned Christian father Clement of Alexandria, that the
myth of Demeter and Persephone was acted as a sacred drama in the
mysteries of Eleusis.
But if the myth was acted as a part, perhaps as the principal
part, of the most famous and solemn religious rites of ancient
Greece, we have still to enquire, What was, after all, stripped of
later accretions, the original kernel of the myth which appears to
later ages surrounded and transfigured by an aureole of awe and
mystery, lit up by some of the most brilliant rays of Grecian
literature and art? If we follow the indications given by our
oldest literary authority on the subject, the author of the Homeric
hymn to Demeter, the riddle is not hard to read; the figures of the
two goddesses, the mother and the daughter, resolve themselves into
personifications of the corn. At least this appears to be fairly
certain for the daughter Persephone. The goddess who spends three
or, according to another version of the myth, six months of every
year with the dead under ground and the remainder of the year with
the living above ground; in whose absence the barley seed is hidden
in the earth and the fields lie bare and fallow; on whose return in
spring to the upper world the corn shoots up from the clods and the
earth is heavy with leaves and blossoms—this goddess can
surely be nothing else than a mythical embodiment of the
vegetation, and particularly of the corn, which is buried under the
soil for some months of every winter and comes to life again, as
from the grave, in the sprouting cornstalks and the opening flowers
and foliage of every spring. No other reasonable and probable
explanation of Persephone seems possible. And if the daughter
goddess was a personification of the young corn of the present
year, may not the mother goddess be a personification of the old
corn of last year, which has given birth to the new crops? The only
alternative to this view of Demeter would seem to be to suppose
that she is a personification of the earth, from whose broad bosom
the corn and all other plants spring up, and of which accordingly
they may appropriately enough be regarded as the daughters. This
view of the original nature of Demeter has indeed been taken by
some writers, both ancient and modern, and it is one which can be
reasonably maintained. But it appears to have been rejected by the
author of the Homeric hymn to Demeter, for he not only
distinguishes Demeter from the personified Earth but places the two
in the sharpest opposition to each other. He tells us that it was
Earth who, in accordance with the will of Zeus and to please Pluto,
lured Persephone to her doom by causing the narcissuses to grow
which tempted the young goddess to stray far beyond the reach of
help in the lush meadow. Thus Demeter of the hymn, far from being
identical with the Earth-goddess, must have regarded that divinity
as her worst enemy, since it was to her insidious wiles that she
owed the loss of her daughter. But if the Demeter of the hymn
cannot have been a personification of the earth, the only
alternative apparently is to conclude that she was a
personification of the corn.
The conclusion is confirmed by the monuments; for in ancient art
Demeter and Persephone are alike characterised as goddesses of the
corn by the crowns of corn which they wear on their heads and by
the stalks of corn which they hold in their hands. Again, it was
Demeter who first revealed to the Athenians the secret of the corn
and diffused the beneficent discovery far and wide through the
agency of Triptolemus, whom she sent forth as an itinerant
missionary to communicate the boon to all mankind. On monuments of
art, especially in vase-paintings, he is constantly represented
along with Demeter in this capacity, holding corn-stalks in his
hand and sitting in his car, which is sometimes winged and
sometimes drawn by dragons, and from which he is said to have sowed
the seed down on the whole world as he sped through the air. In
gratitude for the priceless boon many Greek cities long continued
to send the first-fruits of their barley and wheat harvests as
thank-offerings to the Two Goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, at
Eleusis, where subterranean granaries were built to store the
overflowing contributions. Theocritus tells how in the island of
Cos, in the sweet-scented summer time, the farmer brought the
first-fruits of the harvest to Demeter who had filled his
threshingfloor with barley, and whose rustic image held sheaves and
poppies in her hands. Many of the epithets bestowed by the ancients
on Demeter mark her intimate association with the corn in the
clearest manner.
How deeply implanted in the mind of the ancient Greeks was this
faith in Demeter as goddess of the corn may be judged by the
circumstance that the faith actually persisted among their
Christian descendants at her old sanctuary of Eleusis down to the
beginning of the nineteenth century. For when the English traveller
Dodwell revisited Eleusis, the inhabitants lamented to him the loss
of a colossal image of Demeter, which was carried off by Clarke in
1802 and presented to the University of Cambridge, where it still
remains. “In my first journey to Greece,” says Dodwell,
“this protecting deity was in its full glory, situated in the
centre of a threshing-floor, amongst the ruins of her temple. The
villagers were impressed with a persuasion that their rich harvests
were the effect of her bounty, and since her removal, their
abundance, as they assured me, has disappeared.” Thus we see
the Corn Goddess Demeter standing on the threshing-floor of Eleusis
and dispensing corn to her worshippers in the nineteenth century of
the Christian era, precisely as her image stood and dispensed corn
to her worshippers on the threshing-floor of Cos in the days of
Theocritus. And just as the people of Eleusis in the nineteenth
century attributed the diminution of their harvests to the loss of
the image of Demeter, so in antiquity the Sicilians, a corn-growing
people devoted to the worship of the two Corn Goddesses, lamented
that the crops of many towns had perished because the unscrupulous
Roman governor Verres had impiously carried off the image of
Demeter from her famous temple at Henna. Could we ask for a clearer
proof that Demeter was indeed the goddess of the corn than this
belief, held by the Greeks down to modern times, that the
corn-crops depended on her presence and bounty and perished when
her image was removed?
On the whole, then, if, ignoring theories, we adhere to the
evidence of the ancients themselves in regard to the rites of
Eleusis, we shall probably incline to agree with the most learned
of ancient antiquaries, the Roman Varro, who, to quote
Augustine’s report of his opinion, “interpreted the
whole of the Eleusinian mysteries as relating to the corn which
Ceres (Demeter) had discovered, and to Proserpine (Persephone),
whom Pluto had carried off from her. And Proserpine herself he
said, signifies the fecundity of the seeds, the failure of which at
a certain time had caused the earth to mourn for barrenness, and
therefore had given rise to the opinion that the daughter of Ceres,
that is, fecundity itself, had been ravished by Pluto and detained
in the nether world; and when the dearth had been publicly mourned
and fecundity had returned once more, there was gladness at the
return of Proserpine and solemn rites were instituted accordingly.
After that he says,” continues Augustine, reporting Varro,
“that many things were taught in her mysteries which had no
reference but to the discovery of the corn.”
Thus far I have for the most part assumed an identity of nature
between Demeter and Persephone, the divine mother and daughter
personifying the corn in its double aspect of the seed-corn of last
year and the ripe ears of this, and this view of the substantial
unity of mother and daughter is borne out by their portraits in
Greek art, which are often so alike as to be indistinguishable.
Such a close resemblance between the artistic types of Demeter and
Persephone militates decidedly against the view that the two
goddesses are mythical embodiments of two things so different and
so easily distinguishable from each other as the earth and the
vegetation which springs from it. Had Greek artists accepted that
view of Demeter and Persephone, they could surely have devised
types of them which would have brought out the deep distinction
between the goddesses. And if Demeter did not personify the earth,
can there be any reasonable doubt that, like her daughter, she
personified the corn which was so commonly called by her name from
the time of Homer downwards? The essential identity of mother and
daughter is suggested, not only by the close resemblance of their
artistic types, but also by the official title of “the Two
Goddesses” which was regularly applied to them in the great
sanctuary at Eleusis without any specification of their individual
attributes and titles, as if their separate individualities had
almost merged in a single divine substance.
Surveying the evidence as a whole, we are fairly entitled to
conclude that in the mind of the ordinary Greek the two goddesses
were essentially personifications of the corn, and that in this
germ the whole efflorescence of their religion finds implicitly its
explanation. But to maintain this is not to deny that in the long
course of religious evolution high moral and spiritual conceptions
were grafted on this simple original stock and blossomed out into
fairer flowers than the bloom of the barley and the wheat. Above
all, the thought of the seed buried in the earth in order to spring
up to new and higher life readily suggested a comparison with human
destiny, and strengthened the hope that for man too the grave may
be but the beginning of a better and happier existence in some
brighter world unknown. This simple and natural reflection seems
perfectly sufficient to explain the association of the Corn Goddess
at Eleusis with the mystery of death and the hope of a blissful
immortality. For that the ancients regarded initiation in the
Eleusinian mysteries as a key to unlock the gates of Paradise
appears to be proved by the allusions which well-informed writers
among them drop to the happiness in store for the initiated
hereafter. No doubt it is easy for us to discern the flimsiness of
the logical foundation on which such high hopes were built. But
drowning men clutch at straws, and we need not wonder that the
Greeks, like ourselves, with death before them and a great love of
life in their hearts, should not have stopped to weigh with too
nice a hand the arguments that told for and against the prospect of
human immortality. The reasoning that satisfied Saint Paul and has
brought comfort to untold thousands of sorrowing Christians,
standing by the deathbed or the open grave of their loved ones, was
good enough to pass muster with ancient pagans, when they too bowed
their heads under the burden of grief, and, with the taper of life
burning low in the socket, looked forward into the darkness of the
unknown. Therefore we do no indignity to the myth of Demeter and
Persephone—one of the few myths in which the sunshine and
clarity of the Greek genius are crossed by the shadow and mystery
of death—when we trace its origin to some of the most
familiar, yet eternally affecting aspects of nature, to the
melancholy gloom and decay of autumn and to the freshness, the
brightness, and the verdure of spring.
XLV. The Corn-Mother and the Corn-Maiden in Northern
Europe
IT has been argued by W. Mannhardt that the first part of
Demeter’s name is derived from an alleged Cretan word
deai, “barley,” and that accordingly Demeter
means neither more nor less than “Barley-mother” or
“Corn-mother”; for the root of the word seems to have
been applied to different kinds of grain by different branches of
the Aryans. As Crete appears to have been one of the most ancient
seats of the worship of Demeter, it would not be surprising if her
name were of Cretan origin. But the etymology is open to serious
objections, and it is safer therefore to lay no stress on it. Be
that as it may, we have found independent reasons for identifying
Demeter as the Corn-mother, and of the two species of corn
associated with her in Greek religion, namely barley and wheat, the
barley has perhaps the better claim to be her original element; for
not only would it seem to have been the staple food of the Greeks
in the Homeric age, but there are grounds for believing that it is
one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, cereal cultivated by the
Aryan race. Certainly the use of barley in the religious ritual of
the ancient Hindoos as well as of the ancient Greeks furnishes a
strong argument in favour of the great antiquity of its
cultivation, which is known to have been practised by the
lake-dwellers of the Stone Age in Europe.
Analogies to the Corn-mother or Barley-mother of ancient Greece
have been collected in great abundance by W. Mannhardt from the
folk-lore of modern Europe. The following may serve as
specimens.
In Germany the corn is very commonly personified under the name
of the Corn-mother. Thus in spring, when the corn waves in the
wind, the peasants say, “There comes the Corn-mother,”
or “The Corn-mother is running over the field,” or
“The Corn-mother is going through the corn.” When
children wish to go into the fields to pull the blue corn-flowers
or the red poppies, they are told not to do so, because the
Corn-mother is sitting in the corn and will catch them. Or again
she is called, according to the crop, the Rye-mother or the
Pea-mother, and children are warned against straying in the rye or
among the peas by threats of the Rye-mother or the Pea-mother.
Again the Corn-mother is believed to make the crop grow. Thus in
the neighbourhood of Magdeburg it is sometimes said, “It will
be a good year for flax; the Flax-mother has been seen.” In a
village of Styria it is said that the Corn-mother, in the shape of
a female puppet made out of the last sheaf of corn and dressed in
white, may be seen at mid-night in the corn-fields, which she
fertilises by passing through them; but if she is angry with a
farmer, she withers up all his corn.
Further, the Corn-mother plays an important part in harvest
customs. She is believed to be present in the handful of corn which
is left standing last on the field; and with the cutting of this
last handful she is caught, or driven away, or killed. In the first
of these cases, the last sheaf is carried joyfully home and
honoured as a divine being. It is placed in the barn, and at
threshing the corn-spirit appears again. In the Hanoverian district
of Hadeln the reapers stand round the last sheaf and beat it with
sticks in order to drive the Corn-mother out of it. They call to
each other, “There she is! hit her! Take care she
doesn’t catch you!” The beating goes on till the grain
is completely threshed out; then the Corn-mother is believed to be
driven away. In the neighbourhood of Danzig the person who cuts the
last ears of corn makes them into a doll, which is called the
Corn-mother or the Old Woman and is brought home on the last
waggon. In some parts of Holstein the last sheaf is dressed in
woman’s clothes and called the Corn-mother. It is carried
home on the last waggon, and then thoroughly drenched with water.
The drenching with water is doubtless a rain-charm. In the district
of Bruck in Styria the last sheaf, called the Corn-mother, is made
up into the shape of a woman by the oldest married woman in the
village, of an age from fifty to fifty-five years. The finest ears
are plucked out of it and made into a wreath, which, twined with
flowers, is carried on her head by the prettiest girl of the
village to the farmer or squire, while the Corn-mother is laid down
in the barn to keep off the mice. In other villages of the same
district the Corn-mother, at the close of harvest, is carried by
two lads at the top of a pole. They march behind the girl who wears
the wreath to the squire’s house, and while he receives the
wreath and hangs it up in the hall, the Corn-mother is placed on
the top of a pile of wood, where she is the centre of the harvest
supper and dance. Afterwards she is hung up in the barn and remains
there till the threshing is over. The man who gives the last stroke
at threshing is called the son of the Corn-mother; he is tied up in
the Corn-mother, beaten, and carried through the village. The
wreath is dedicated in church on the following Sunday; and on
Easter Eve the grain is rubbed out of it by a seven-year-old girl
and scattered amongst the young corn. At Christmas the straw of the
wreath is placed in the manger to make the cattle thrive. Here the
fertilising power of the Corn-mother is plainly brought out by
scattering the seed taken from her body (for the wreath is made out
of the Corn-mother) among the new corn; and her influence over
animal life is indicated by placing the straw in the manger.
Amongst the Slavs also the last sheaf is known as the Rye-mother,
the Wheat-mother, the Oats-mother, the Barley-mother, and so on,
according to the crop. In the district of Tarnow, Galicia, the
wreath made out of the last stalks is called the Wheat-mother,
Rye-mother, or Pea-mother. It is placed on a girl’s head and
kept till spring, when some of the grain is mixed with the
seed-corn. Here again the fertilising power of the Corn-mother is
indicated. In France, also, in the neighbourhood of Auxerre, the
last sheaf goes by the name of the Mother of the Wheat, Mother of
the Barley, Mother of the Rye, or Mother of the Oats. They leave it
standing in the field till the last waggon is about to wend
homewards. Then they make a puppet out of it, dress it with clothes
belonging to the farmer, and adorn it with a crown and a blue or
white scarf. A branch of a tree is stuck in the breast of the
puppet, which is now called the Ceres. At the dance in the evening
the Ceres is set in the middle of the floor, and the reaper who
reaped fastest dances round it with the prettiest girl for his
partner. After the dance a pyre is made. All the girls, each
wearing a wreath, strip the puppet, pull it to pieces, and place it
on the pyre, along with the flowers with which it was adorned. Then
the girl who was the first to finish reaping sets fire to the pile,
and all pray that Ceres may give a fruitful year. Here, as
Mannhardt observes, the old custom has remained intact, though the
name Ceres is a bit of schoolmaster’s learning. In Upper
Brittany the last sheaf is always made into human shape; but if the
farmer is a married man, it is made double and consists of a little
corn-puppet placed inside of a large one. This is called the
Mother-sheaf. It is delivered to the farmer’s wife, who
unties it and gives drink-money in return.
Sometimes the last sheaf is called, not the Corn-mother, but the
Harvest-mother or the Great Mother. In the province of Osnabrück,
Hanover, it is called the Harvest-mother; it is made up in female
form, and then the reapers dance about with it. In some parts of
Westphalia the last sheaf at the rye-harvest is made especially
heavy by fastening stones in it. They bring it home on the last
waggon and call it the Great Mother, though they do not fashion it
into any special shape. In the district of Erfurt a very heavy
sheaf, not necessarily the last, is called the Great Mother, and is
carried on the last waggon to the barn, where all hands lift it
down amid a fire of jokes.
Sometimes again the last sheaf is called the Grandmother, and is
adorned with flowers, ribbons, and a woman’s apron. In East
Prussia, at the rye or wheat harvest, the reapers call out to the
woman who binds the last sheaf, “You are getting the Old
Grandmother.” In the neighbourhood of Magdeburg the men and
women servants strive who shall get the last sheaf, called the
Grandmother. Whoever gets it will be married in the next year, but
his or her spouse will be old; if a girl gets it, she will marry a
widower; if a man gets it, he will marry an old crone. In Silesia
the Grandmother—a huge bundle made up of three or four
sheaves by the person who tied the last sheaf—was formerly
fashioned into a rude likeness of the human form. In the
neighbourhood of Belfast the last sheaf sometimes goes by the name
of the Granny. It is not cut in the usual way, but all the reapers
throw their sickles at it and try to bring it down. It is plaited
and kept till the (next?) autumn. Whoever gets it will marry in the
course of the year.
Often the last sheaf is called the Old Woman or the Old Man. In
Germany it is frequently shaped and dressed as a woman, and the
person who cuts it or binds it is said to “get the Old
Woman.” At Altisheim, in Swabia, when all the corn of a farm
has been cut except a single strip, all the reapers stand in a row
before the strip; each cuts his share rapidly, and he who gives the
last cut “has the Old Woman.” When the sheaves are
being set up in heaps, the person who gets hold of the Old Woman,
which is the largest and thickest of all the sheaves, is jeered at
by the rest, who call out to him, “He has the Old Woman and
must keep her.” The woman who binds the last sheaf is
sometimes herself called the Old Woman, and it is said that she
will be married in the next year. In Neusaass, West Prussia, both
the last sheaf—which is dressed up in jacket, hat, and
ribbons—and the woman who binds it are called the Old Woman.
Together they are brought home on the last waggon and are drenched
with water. In various parts of North Germany the last sheaf at
harvest is made up into a human effigy and called “the Old
Man”; and the woman who bound it is said “to have the
Old Man.”
In West Prussia, when the last rye is being raked together, the
women and girls hurry with the work, for none of them likes to be
the last and to get “the Old Man,” that is, a puppet
made out of the last sheaf, which must be carried before the other
reapers by the person who was the last to finish. In Silesia the
last sheaf is called the Old Woman or the Old Man and is the theme
of many jests; it is made unusually large and is sometimes weighted
with a stone. Among the Wends the man or woman who binds the last
sheaf at wheat harvest is said to “have the Old Man.” A
puppet is made out of the wheaten straw and ears in the likeness of
a man and decked with flowers. The person who bound the last sheaf
must carry the Old Man home, while the rest laugh and jeer at him.
The puppet is hung up in the farmhouse and remains till a new Old
Man is made at the next harvest.
In some of these customs, as Mannhardt has remarked, the person
who is called by the same name as the last sheaf and sits beside it
on the last waggon is obviously identified with it; he or she
represents the corn-spirit which has been caught in the last sheaf;
in other words, the corn-spirit is represented in duplicate, by a
human being and by a sheaf. The identification of the person with
the sheaf is made still clearer by the custom of wrapping up in the
last sheaf the person who cuts or binds it. Thus at Hermsdorf in
Silesia it used to be the regular practice to tie up in the last
sheaf the woman who had bound it. At Weiden, in Bavaria, it is the
cutter, not the binder, of the last sheaf who is tied up in it.
Here the person wrapt up in the corn represents the corn-spirit,
exactly as a person wrapt in branches or leaves represents the
tree-spirit.
The last sheaf, designated as the Old Woman, is often
distinguished from the other sheaves by its size and weight. Thus
in some villages of West Prussia the Old Woman is made twice as
long and thick as a common sheaf, and a stone is fastened in the
middle of it. Sometimes it is made so heavy that a man can barely
lift it. At Alt-Pillau, in Samland, eight or nine sheaves are often
tied together to make the Old Woman, and the man who sets it up
grumbles at its weight. At Itzgrund, in Saxe-Coburg, the last
sheaf, called the Old Woman, is made large with the express
intention of thereby securing a good crop next year. Thus the
custom of making the last sheaf unusually large or heavy is a
charm, working by sympathetic magic, to ensure a large and heavy
crop at the following harvest.
In Scotland, when the last corn was cut after Hallowmas, the
female figure made out of it was sometimes called the Carlin or
Carline, that is, the Old Woman. But if cut before Hallowmas, it
was called the Maiden; if cut after sunset, it was called the
Witch, being supposed to bring bad luck. Among the Highlanders of
Scotland the last corn cut at harvest is known either as the Old
Wife (Cailleach) or as the Maiden; on the whole the former
name seems to prevail in the western and the latter in the central
and eastern districts. Of the Maiden we shall speak presently; here
we are dealing with the Old Wife. The following general account of
the custom is given by a careful and well-informed enquirer, the
Rev. J. G. Campbell, minister of the remote Hebridean island of
Tiree: “The Harvest Old Wife (a Cailleach).—In
harvest, there was a struggle to escape from being the last done
with the shearing, and when tillage in common existed, instances
were known of a ridge being left unshorn (no person would claim it)
because of it being behind the rest. The fear entertained was that
of having the ‘famine of the farm’ (gort a
bhaile), in the shape of an imaginary old woman
(cailleach), to feed till next harvest. Much emulation and
amusement arose from the fear of this old woman… . . The
first done made a doll of some blades of corn, which was called the
‘old wife,’ and sent it to his nearest neighbour. He in
turn, when ready, passed it to another still less expeditious, and
the person it last remained with had ‘the old woman’ to
keep for that year.”
In the island of Islay the last corn cut goes by the name of the
Old Wife (Cailleach), and when she has done her duty at
harvest she is hung up on the wall and stays there till the time
comes to plough the fields for the next year’s crop. Then she
is taken down, and on the first day when the men go to plough she
is divided among them by the mistress of the house. They take her
in their pockets and give her to the horses to eat when they reach
the field. This is supposed to secure good luck for the next
harvest, and is understood to be the proper end of the Old
Wife.
Usages of the same sort are reported from Wales. Thus in North
Pembrokeshire a tuft of the last corn cut, from six to twelve
inches long, is plaited and goes by the name of the Hag
(wrach); and quaint old customs used to be practised with
it within the memory of many persons still alive. Great was the
excitement among the reapers when the last patch of standing corn
was reached. All in turn threw their sickles at it, and the one who
succeeded in cutting it received a jug of home-brewed ale. The Hag
(wrach) was then hurriedly made and taken to a
neighbouring farm, where the reapers were still busy at their work.
This was generally done by the ploughman; but he had to be very
careful not to be observed by his neighbours, for if they saw him
coming and had the least suspicion of his errand they would soon
make him retrace his steps. Creeping stealthily up behind a fence
he waited till the foreman of his neighbour’s reapers was
just opposite him and within easy reach. Then he suddenly threw the
Hag over the fence and, if possible, upon the foreman’s
sickle. On that he took to his heels and made off as fast as he
could run, and he was a lucky man if he escaped without being
caught or cut by the flying sickles which the infuriated reapers
hurled after him. In other cases the Hag was brought home to the
farmhouse by one of the reapers. He did his best to bring it home
dry and without being observed; but he was apt to be roughly
handled by the people of the house, if they suspected his errand.
Sometimes they stripped him of most of his clothes, sometimes they
would drench him with water which had been carefully stored in
buckets and pans for the purpose. If, however, he succeeded in
bringing the Hag in dry and unobserved, the master of the house had
to pay him a small fine; or sometimes a jug of beer “from the
cask next to the wall,” which seems to have commonly held the
best beer, would be demanded by the bearer. The Hag was then
carefully hung on a nail in the hall or elsewhere and kept there
all the year. The custom of bringing in the Hag (wrach)
into the house and hanging it up still exists in some farms of
North Pembrokeshire, but the ancient ceremonies which have just
been described are now discontinued.
In County Antrim, down to some years ago, when the sickle was
finally expelled by the reaping machine, the few stalks of corn
left standing last on the field were plaited together; then the
reapers, blindfolded, threw their sickles at the plaited corn, and
whoever happened to cut it through took it home with him and put it
over his door. This bunch of corn was called the
Carley—probably the same word as Carlin.
Similar customs are observed by Slavonic peoples. Thus in Poland
the last sheaf is commonly called the Baba, that is, the Old Woman.
“In the last sheaf,” it is said, “sits the
Baba.” The sheaf itself is also called the Baba, and is
sometimes composed of twelve smaller sheaves lashed together. In
some parts of Bohemia the Baba, made out of the last sheaf, has the
figure of a woman with a great straw hat. It is carried home on the
last harvest-waggon and delivered, along with a garland, to the
farmer by two girls. In binding the sheaves the women strive not to
be last, for she who binds the last sheaf will have a child next
year. Sometimes the harvesters call out to the woman who binds the
last sheaf, “She has the Baba,” or “She is the
Baba.” In the district of Cracow, when a man binds the last
sheaf, they say, “The Grandfather is sitting in it”;
when a woman binds it, they say, “The Baba is sitting in
it,” and the woman herself is wrapt up in the sheaf, so that
only her head projects out of it. Thus encased in the sheaf, she is
carried on the last harvest-waggon to the house, where she is
drenched with water by the whole family. She remains in the sheaf
till the dance is over, and for a year she retains the name of
Baba.
In Lithuania the name for the last sheaf is Boba (Old Woman),
answering to the Polish name Baba. The Boba is said to sit in the
corn which is left standing last. The person who binds the last
sheaf or digs the last potato is the subject of much banter, and
receives and long retains the name of the Old Rye-woman or the Old
Potato-woman. The last sheaf—the Boba—is made into the
form of a woman, carried solemnly through the village on the last
harvest-waggon, and drenched with water at the farmer’s
house; then every one dances with it.
In Russia also the last sheaf is often shaped and dressed as a
woman, and carried with dance and song to the farmhouse. Out of the
last sheaf the Bulgarians make a doll which they call the
Corn-queen or Corn-mother; it is dressed in a woman’s shirt,
carried round the village, and then thrown into the river in order
to secure plenty of rain and dew for the next year’s crop. Or
it is burned and the ashes strew on the fields, doubtless to
fertilise them. The name Queen, as applied to the last sheaf, has
its analogies in Central and Northern Europe. Thus, in the Salzburg
district of Austria, at the end of the harvest a great procession
takes place, in which a Queen of the Corn-ears
(Ährenkönigin) is drawn along in a little carriage by
young fellows. The custom of the Harvest Queen appears to have been
common in England. Milton must have been familiar with it, for in
Paradise Lost he says:
“Adam the while
Waiting desirous her return, had wove
Of choicest flow’rs a garland to adorn
Her tresses, and her rural labours crown,
As reapers oft are wont their harvest-queen.”
Often customs of this sort are practised, not on the
harvest-field but on the threshing-floor. The spirit of the corn,
fleeing before the reapers as they cut down the ripe grain, quits
the reaped corn and takes refuge in the barn, where it appears in
the last sheaf threshed, either to perish under the blows of the
flail or to flee thence to the still unthreshed corn of a
neighbouring farm. Thus the last corn to be threshed is called the
Mother-Corn or the Old Woman. Sometimes the person who gives the
last stroke with the flail is called the Old Woman, and is wrapt in
the straw of the last sheaf, or has a bundle of straw fastened on
his back. Whether wrapt in the straw or carrying it on his back, he
is carted through the village amid general laughter. In some
districts of Bavaria, Thüringen, and elsewhere, the man who
threshes the last sheaf is said to have the Old Woman or the Old
Corn-woman; he is tied up in straw, carried or carted about the
village, and set down at last on the dunghill, or taken to the
threshing-floor of a neighbouring farmer who has not finished his
threshing. In Poland the man who gives the last stroke at threshing
is called Baba (Old Woman); he is wrapt in corn and wheeled through
the village. Sometimes in Lithuania the last sheaf is not threshed,
but is fashioned into female shape and carried to the barn of a
neighbour who has not finished his threshing.
In some parts of Sweden, when a stranger woman appears on the
threshing-floor, a flail is put round her body, stalks of corn are
wound round her neck, a crown of ears is placed on her head, and
the threshers call out, “Behold the Corn-woman.” Here
the stranger woman, thus suddenly appearing, is taken to be the
corn-spirit who has just been expelled by the flails from the
corn-stalks. In other cases the farmer’s wife represents the
corn-spirit. Thus in the Commune of Saligné (Vendée), the
farmer’s wife, along with the last sheaf, is tied up in a
sheet, placed on a litter, and carried to the threshing machine,
under which she is shoved. Then the woman is drawn out and the
sheaf is threshed by itself, but the woman is tossed in the sheet,
as if she were being winnowed. It would be impossible to express
more clearly the identification of the woman with the corn than by
this graphic imitation of threshing and winnowing her.
In these customs the spirit of the ripe corn is regarded as old,
or at least as of mature age. Hence the names of Mother,
Grandmother, Old Woman, and so forth. But in other cases the
corn-spirit is conceived as young. Thus at Saldern, near
Wolfenbuttel, when the rye has been reaped, three sheaves are tied
together with a rope so as to make a puppet with the corn ears for
a head. This puppet is called the Maiden or the Corn-maiden.
Sometimes the corn-spirit is conceived as a child who is separated
from its mother by the stroke of the sickle. This last view appears
in the Polish custom of calling out to the man who cuts the last
handful of corn, “You have cut the navel-string.” In
some districts of West Prussia the figure made out of the last
sheaf is called the Bastard, and a boy is wrapt up in it. The woman
who binds the last sheaf and represents the Corn-mother is told
that she is about to be brought to bed; she cries like a woman in
travail, and an old woman in the character of grandmother acts as
midwife. At last a cry is raised that the child is born; whereupon
the boy who is tied up in the sheaf whimpers and squalls like an
infant. The grandmother wraps a sack, in imitation of swaddling
bands, round the pretended baby, who is carried joyfully to the
barn, lest he should catch cold in the open air. In other parts of
North Germany the last sheaf, or the puppet made out of it, is
called the Child, the Harvest-Child, and so on, and they call out
to the woman who binds the last sheaf, “you are getting the
child.”
In some parts of Scotland, as well as in the north of England,
the last handful of corn cut on the harvest-field was called the
kirn, and the person who carried it off was said “to
win the kirn.” It was then dressed up like a child’s
doll and went by the name of the kirn-baby, the kirn-doll, or the
Maiden. In Berwickshire down to about the middle of the nineteenth
century there was an eager competition among the reapers to cut the
last bunch of standing corn. They gathered round it at a little
distance and threw their sickles in turn at it, and the man who
succeeded in cutting it through gave it to the girl he preferred.
She made the corn so cut into a kirn-dolly and dressed it, and the
doll was then taken to the farmhouse and hung up there till the
next harvest, when its place was taken by the new kirn-dolly. At
Spottiswoode in Berwickshire the reaping of the last corn at
harvest was called “cutting the Queen” almost as often
as “cutting the kirn.” The mode of cutting it was not
by throwing sickles. One of the reapers consented to be
blindfolded, and having been given a sickle in his hand and turned
twice or thrice about by his fellows, he was bidden to go and cut
the kirn. His groping about and making wild strokes in the air with
his sickle excited much hilarity. When he had tired himself out in
vain and given up the task as hopeless, another reaper was
blindfolded and pursued the quest, and so on, one after the other,
till at last the kirn was cut. The successful reaper was tossed up
in the air with three cheers by his brother harvesters. To decorate
the room in which the kirn-supper was held at Spottiswoode as well
as the granary, where the dancing took place, two women made
kirn-dollies or Queens every year; and many of these rustic
effigies of the corn-spirit might be seen hanging up together.
In some parts of the Highlands of Scotland the last handful of
corn that is cut by the reapers on any particular farm is called
the Maiden, or in Gaelic Maidhdeanbuain, literally,
“the shorn Maiden.” Superstitions attach to the winning
of the Maiden. If it is got by a young person, they think it an
omen that he or she will be married before another harvest. For
that or other reasons there is a strife between the reapers as to
who shall get the Maiden, and they resort to various stratagems for
the purpose of securing it. One of them, for example, will often
leave a handful of corn uncut and cover it up with earth to hide it
from the other reapers, till all the rest of the corn on the field
is cut down. Several may try to play the same trick, and the one
who is coolest and holds out longest obtains the coveted
distinction. When it has been cut, the Maiden is dressed with
ribbons into a sort of doll and affixed to a wall of the farmhouse.
In the north of Scotland the Maiden is carefully preserved till
Yule morning, when it is divided among the cattle “to make
them thrive all the year round.” In the neighbourhood of
Balquhidder, Perthshire, the last handful of corn is cut by the
youngest girl on the field, and is made into the rude form of a
female doll, clad in a paper dress, and decked with ribbons. It is
called the Maiden, and is kept in the farmhouse, generally above
the chimney, for a good while, sometimes till the Maiden of the
next year is brought in. The writer of this book witnessed the
ceremony of cutting the Maiden at Balquhidder in September 1888. A
lady friend informed me that as a young girl she cut the Maiden
several times at the request of the reapers in the neighbourhood of
Perth. The name of the Maiden was given to the last handful of
standing corn; a reaper held the top of the bunch while she cut it.
Afterwards the bunch was plaited, decked with ribbons, and hung up
in a conspicuous place on the wall of the kitchen till the next
Maiden was brought in. The harvest-supper in this neighbourhood was
also called the Maiden; the reapers danced at it.
On some farms on the Gareloch, in Dumbartonshire, about the year
1830, the last handful of standing corn was called the Maiden. It
was divided in two, plaited, and then cut with the sickle by a
girl, who, it was thought, would be lucky and would soon be
married. When it was cut the reapers gathered together and threw
their sickles in the air. The Maiden was dressed with ribbons and
hung in the kitchen near the roof, where it was kept for several
years with the date attached. Sometimes five or six Maidens might
be seen hanging at once on hooks. The harvest-supper was called the
Kirn. In other farms on the Gareloch the last handful of corn was
called the Maidenhead or the Head; it was neatly plaited, sometimes
decked with ribbons, and hung in the kitchen for a year, when the
grain was given to the poultry.
In Aberdeenshire “the last sheaf cut, or
‘Maiden,’ is carried home in merry procession by the
harvesters. It is then presented to the mistress of the house, who
dresses it up to be preserved till the first mare foals. The Maiden
is then taken down and presented to the mare as its first food. The
neglect of this would have untoward effects upon the foal, and
disastrous consequences upon farm operations generally for the
season.” In the north-east of Aberdeenshire the last sheaf is
commonly called the clyack sheaf. It used to be cut by the
youngest girl present and was dressed as a woman. Being brought
home in triumph, it was kept till Christmas morning, and then given
to a mare in foal, if there was one on the farm, or, if there was
not, to the oldest cow in calf. Elsewhere the sheaf was divided
between all the cows and their calves or between all the horses and
the cattle of the farm. In Fifeshire the last handful of corn,
known as the Maiden, is cut by a young girl and made into the rude
figure of a doll, tied with ribbons, by which it is hung on the
wall of the farm-kitchen till the next spring. The custom of
cutting the Maiden at harvest was also observed in Inverness-shire
and Sutherlandshire.
A somewhat maturer but still youthful age is assigned to the
corn-spirit by the appellations of Bride, Oats-bride, and
Wheat-bride, which in Germany are sometimes bestowed both on the
last sheaf and on the woman who binds it. At wheat-harvest near
Müglitz, in Moravia, a small portion of the wheat is left standing
after all the rest has been reaped. This remnant is then cut, amid
the rejoicing of the reapers, by a young girl who wears a wreath of
wheaten ears on her head and goes by the name of the Wheat-bride.
It is supposed that she will be a real bride that same year. Near
Roslin and Stonehaven, in Scotland, the last handful of corn cut
“got the name of ‘the bride,’ and she was placed
over the bress or chimney-piece; she had a ribbon tied
below her numerous ears, and another round her
waist.”
Sometimes the idea implied by the name of Bride is worked out
more fully by representing the productive powers of vegetation as
bride and bridegroom. Thus in the Vorharz an Oats-man and an
Oats-woman, swathed in straw, dance at the harvest feast. In South
Saxony an Oats-bridegroom and an Oats-bride figure together at the
harvest celebration. The Oats-bridegroom is a man completely wrapt
in oats-straw; the Oats-bride is a man dressed in woman’s
clothes, but not wrapt in straw. They are drawn in a waggon to the
ale-house, where the dance takes place. At the beginning of the
dance the dancers pluck the bunches of oats one by one from the
Oats-bridegroom, while he struggles to keep them, till at last he
is completely stript of them and stands bare, exposed to the
laughter and jests of the company. In Austrian Silesia the ceremony
of “the Wheat-bride” is celebrated by the young people
at the end of the harvest. The woman who bound the last sheaf plays
the part of the Wheat-bride, wearing the harvest-crown of wheat
ears and flowers on her head. Thus adorned, standing beside her
Bridegroom in a waggon and attended by bridesmaids, she is drawn by
a pair of oxen, in full imitation of a marriage procession, to the
tavern, where the dancing is kept up till morning. Somewhat later
in the season the wedding of the Oats-bride is celebrated with the
like rustic pomp. About Neisse, in Silesia, an Oats-king and an
Oats-queen, dressed up quaintly as a bridal pair, are seated on a
harrow and drawn by oxen into the village.
In these last instances the corn-spirit is personified in double
form as male and female. But sometimes the spirit appears in a
double female form as both old and young, corresponding exactly to
the Greek Demeter and Persephone, if my interpretation of these
goddesses is right. We have seen that in Scotland, especially among
the Gaelic-speaking population, the last corn cut is sometimes
called the Old Wife and sometimes the Maiden. Now there are parts
of Scotland in which both an Old Wife (Cailleach) and a
Maiden are cut at harvest. The accounts of this custom are not
quite clear and consistent, but the general rule seems to be that,
where both a Maiden and an Old Wife (Cailleach) are
fashioned out of the reaped corn at harvest, the Maiden is made out
of the last stalks left standing, and is kept by the farmer on
whose land it was cut; while the Old Wife is made out of other
stalks, sometimes out of the first stalks cut, and is regularly
passed on to a laggard farmer who happens to be still reaping after
his brisker neighbour has cut all his corn. Thus while each farmer
keeps his own Maiden, as the embodiment of the young and fruitful
spirit of the corn, he passes on the Old Wife as soon as he can to
a neighbour, and so the old lady may make the round of all the
farms in the district before she finds a place in which to lay her
venerable head. The farmer with whom she finally takes up her abode
is of course the one who has been the last of all the countryside
to finish reaping his crops, and thus the distinction of
entertaining her is rather an invidious one. He is thought to be
doomed to poverty or to be under the obligation of “providing
for the dearth of the township” in the ensuing season.
Similarly we saw that in Pembrokeshire, where the last corn cut is
called, not the Maiden, but the Hag, she is passed on hastily to a
neighbour who is still at work in his fields and who receives his
aged visitor with anything but a transport of joy. If the Old Wife
represents the corn-spirit of the past year, as she probably does
wherever she is contrasted with and opposed to a Maiden, it is
natural enough that her faded charms should have less attractions
for the husbandman than the buxom form of her daughter, who may be
expected to become in her turn the mother of the golden grain when
the revolving year has brought round another autumn. The same
desire to get rid of the effete Mother of the Corn by palming her
off on other people comes out clearly in some of the customs
observed at the close of threshing, particularly in the practice of
passing on a hideous straw puppet to a neighbour farmer who is
still threshing his corn.
The harvest customs just described are strikingly analogous to
the spring customs which we reviewed in an earlier part of this
work. (1) As in the spring customs the tree-spirit is represented
both by a tree and by a person, so in the harvest customs the
corn-spirit is represented both by the last sheaf and by the person
who cuts or binds or threshes it. The equivalence of the person to
the sheaf is shown by giving him or her the same name as the sheaf;
by wrapping him or her in it; and by the rule observed in some
places, that when the sheaf is called the Mother, it must be made
up into human shape by the oldest married woman, but that when it
is called the Maiden, it must be cut by the youngest girl. Here the
age of the personal representative of the corn-spirit corresponds
with that of the supposed age of the corn-spirit, just as the human
victims offered by the Mexicans to promote the growth of the maize
varied with the age of the maize. For in the Mexican, as in the
European, custom the human beings were probably representatives of
the corn-spirit rather than victims offered to it. (2) Again the
same fertilising influence which the tree-spirit is supposed to
exert over vegetation, cattle, and even women is ascribed to the
corn-spirit. Thus, its supposed influence on vegetation is shown by
the practice of taking some of the grain of the last sheaf (in
which the corn-spirit is regularly supposed to be present), and
scattering it among the young corn in spring or mixing it with the
seed-corn. Its influence on animals is shown by giving the last
sheaf to a mare in foal, to a cow in calf, and to horses at the
first ploughing. Lastly, its influence on women is indicated by the
custom of delivering the Mother-sheaf, made into the likeness of a
pregnant woman, to the farmer’s wife; by the belief that the
woman who binds the last sheaf will have a child next year;
perhaps, too, by the idea that the person who gets it will soon be
married.
Plainly, therefore, these spring and harvest customs are based
on the same ancient modes of thought, and form parts of the same
primitive heathendom, which was doubtless practised by our
forefathers long before the dawn of history. Amongst the marks of a
primitive ritual we may note the following:
1. No special class of persons is set apart for the performance
of the rites; in other words, there are no priests. The rites may
be performed by any one, as occasion demands.
2. No special places are set apart for the performance of the
rites; in other words, there are no temples. The rites may be
performed anywhere, as occasion demands.
3. Spirits, not gods, are recognised. (a) As
distinguished from gods, spirits are restricted in their operations
to definite departments of nature. Their names are general, not
proper. Their attributes are generic, rather than individual; in
other words, there is an indefinite number of spirits of each
class, and the individuals of a class are all much alike; they have
no definitely marked individuality; no accepted traditions are
current as to their origin, life, adventures, and character.
(b) On the other hand gods, as distinguished from spirits,
are not restricted to definite departments of nature. It is true
that there is generally some one department over which they preside
as their special province; but they are not rigorously confined to
it; they can exert their power for good or evil in many other
spheres of nature and life. Again, they bear individual or proper
names, such as Demeter, Persephone, Dionysus; and their individual
characters and histories are fixed by current myths and the
representations of art.
4. The rites are magical rather than propitiatory. In other
words, the desired objects are attained, not by propitiating the
favour of divine beings through sacrifice, prayer, and praise, but
by ceremonies which, as I have already explained, are believed to
influence the course of nature directly through a physical sympathy
or resemblance between the rite and the effect which it is the
intention of the rite to produce.
Judged by these tests, the spring and harvest customs of our
European peasantry deserve to rank as primitive. For no special
class of persons and no special places are set exclusively apart
for their performance; they may be performed by any one, master or
man, mistress or maid, boy or girl; they are practised, not in
temples or churches, but in the woods and meadows, beside brooks,
in barns, on harvest fields and cottage floors. The supernatural
beings whose existence is taken for granted in them are spirits
rather than deities: their functions are limited to certain
well-defined departments of nature: their names are general like
the Barley-mother, the Old Woman, the Maiden, not proper names like
Demeter, Persephone, Dionysus. Their generic attributes are known,
but their individual histories and characters are not the subject
of myths. For they exist in classes rather than as individuals, and
the members of each class are indistinguishable. For example, every
farm has its Corn-mother, or its Old Woman, or its Maiden; but
every Corn-mother is much like every other Corn-mother, and so with
the Old Women and Maidens. Lastly, in these harvests, as in the
spring customs, the ritual is magical rather than propitiatory.
This is shown by throwing the Corn-mother into the river in order
to secure rain and dew for the crops; by making the Old Woman heavy
in order to get a heavy crop next year; by strewing grain from the
last sheaf amongst the young crops in spring; and by giving the
last sheaf to the cattle to make them thrive.
XLVI. The Corn-Mother in Many Lands
1. The Corn-mother in America
EUROPEAN peoples, ancient and modern, have not been singular in
personifying the corn as a mother goddess. The same simple idea has
suggested itself to other agricultural races in distant parts of
the world, and has been applied by them to other indigenous cereals
than barley and wheat. If Europe has its Wheat-mother and its
Barley-mother, America has its Maize-mother and the East Indies
their Rice-mother. These personifications I will now illustrate,
beginning with the American personification of the maize.
We have seen that among European peoples it is a common custom
to keep the plaited corn-stalks of the last sheaf, or the puppet
which is formed out of them, in the farm-house from harvest to
harvest. The intention no doubt is, or rather originally was, by
preserving the representative of the corn-spirit to maintain the
spirit itself in life and activity throughout the year, in order
that the corn may grow and the crops be good. This interpretation
of the custom is at all events rendered highly probable by a
similar custom observed by the ancient Peruvians, and thus
described by the old Spanish historian Acosta: “They take a
certain portion of the most fruitful of the maize that grows in
their farms, the which they put in a certain granary which they do
call Pirua, with certain ceremonies, watching three
nights; they put this maize in the richest garments they have, and
being thus wrapped and dressed, they worship this Pirua,
and hold it in great veneration, saying it is the mother of the
maize of their inheritances, and that by this means the maize
augments and is preserved. In this month [the sixth month,
answering to May] they make a particular sacrifice, and the witches
demand of this Pirua if it hath strength sufficient to
continue until the next year; and if it answers no, then they carry
this maize to the farm to burn, whence they brought it, according
to every man’s power; then they make another Pirua,
with the same ceremonies, saying that they renew it, to the end the
seed of maize may not perish, and if it answers that it hath force
sufficient to last longer, they leave it until the next year. This
foolish vanity continueth to this day, and it is very common
amongst the Indians to have these Piruas.”
In this description of the custom there seems to be some error.
Probably it was the dressed-up bunch of maize, not the granary
(Pirua), which was worshipped by the Peruvians and
regarded as the Mother of the Maize. This is confirmed by what we
know of the Peruvian custom from another source. The Peruvians, we
are told, believed all useful plants to be animated by a divine
being who causes their growth. According to the particular plant,
these divine beings were called the Maize-mother
(Zara-mama), the Quinoa-mother (Quinoa-mama), the
Coca-mother (Coca-mama), and the Potato-mother
(Axo-mama). Figures of these divine mothers were made
respectively of ears of maize and leaves of the quinoa and coca
plants; they were dressed in women’s clothes and worshipped.
Thus the Maize-mother was represented by a puppet made of stalks of
maize dressed in full female attire; and the Indians believed that
“as mother, it had the power of producing and giving birth to
much maize.” Probably, therefore, Acosta misunderstood his
informant, and the Mother of the Maize which he describes was not
the granary (Pirua), but the bunch of maize dressed in
rich vestments. The Peruvian Mother of the Maize, like the
harvest-Maiden at Balquhidder, was kept for a year in order that by
her means the corn might grow and multiply. But lest her strength
might not suffice to last till the next harvest, she was asked in
the course of the year how she felt, and if she answered that she
felt weak, she was burned and a fresh Mother of the Maize made,
“to the end the seed of maize may not perish.” Here, it
may be observed, we have a strong confirmation of the explanation
already given of the custom of killing the god, both periodically
and occasionally. The Mother of the maize was allowed, as a rule,
to live through a year, that being the period during which her
strength might reasonably be supposed to last unimpaired; but on
any symptom of her strength failing she was put to death, and a
fresh and vigorous Mother of the Maize took her place, lest the
maize which depended on her for its existence should languish and
decay.
2. The Rice-mother in the East Indies
IF THE READER still feels any doubts as to the meaning of the
harvest customs which have been practised within living memory by
European peasants, these doubts may perhaps be dispelled by
comparing the customs observed at the rice-harvest by the Malays
and Dyaks of the East Indies. For these Eastern peoples have not,
like our peasantry, advanced beyond the intellectual stage at which
the customs originated; their theory and their practice are still
in unison; for them the quaint rites which in Europe have long
dwindled into mere fossils, the pastime of clowns and the puzzle of
the learned, are still living realities of which they can render an
intelligible and truthful account. Hence a study of their beliefs
and usages concerning the rice may throw some light on the true
meaning of the ritual of the corn in ancient Greece and modern
Europe.
Now the whole of the ritual which the Malays and Dyaks observe
in connexion with the rice is founded on the simple conception of
the rice as animated by a soul like that which these people
attribute to mankind. They explain the phenomena of reproduction,
growth, decay, and death in the rice on the same principles on
which they explain the corresponding phenomena in human beings.
They imagine that in the fibres of the plant, as in the body of a
man, there is a certain vital element, which is so far independent
of the plant that it may for a time be completely separated from it
without fatal effects, though if its absence be prolonged beyond
certain limits the plant will wither and die. This vital yet
separable element is what, for the want of a better word, we must
call the soul of a plant, just as a similar vital and separable
element is commonly supposed to constitute the soul of man; and on
this theory or myth of the plant-soul is built the whole worship of
the cereals, just as on the theory or myth of the human soul is
built the whole worship of the dead,—a towering
superstructure reared on a slender and precarious foundation.
Believing the rice to be animated by a soul like that of a man,
the Indonesians naturally treat it with the deference and the
consideration which they show to their fellows. Thus they behave
towards the rice in bloom as they behave towards a pregnant woman;
they abstain from firing guns or making loud noises in the field,
lest they should so frighten the soul of the rice that it would
miscarry and bear no grain; and for the same reason they will not
talk of corpses or demons in the rice-fields. Moreover, they feed
the blooming rice with foods of various kinds which are believed to
be wholesome for women with child; but when the rice-ears are just
beginning to form, they are looked upon as infants, and women go
through the fields feeding them with rice-pap as if they were human
babes. In such natural and obvious comparisons of the breeding
plant to a breeding woman, and of the young grain to a young child,
is to be sought the origin of the kindred Greek conception of the
Corn-mother and the Corn-daughter, Demeter and Persephone. But if
the timorous feminine soul of the rice can be frightened into a
miscarriage even by loud noises, it is easy to imagine what her
feelings must be at harvest, when people are under the sad
necessity of cutting down the rice with the knife. At so critical a
season every precaution must be used to render the necessary
surgical operation of reaping as inconspicuous and as painless as
possible. For that reason the reaping of the seed-rice is done with
knives of a peculiar pattern, such that the blades are hidden in
the reapers’ hands and do not frighten the rice-spirit till
the very last moment, when her head is swept off almost before she
is aware; and from a like delicate motive the reapers at work in
the fields employ a special form of speech, which the rice-spirit
cannot be expected to understand, so that she has no warning or
inkling of what is going forward till the heads of rice are safely
deposited in the basket.
Among the Indonesian peoples who thus personify the rice we may
take the Kayans or Bahaus of Central Borneo as typical. In order to
secure and detain the volatile soul of the rice the Kayans resort
to a number of devices. Among the instruments employed for this
purpose are a miniature ladder, a spatula, and a basket containing
hooks, thorns, and cords. With the spatula the priestess strokes
the soul of the rice down the little ladder into the basket, where
it is naturally held fast by the hooks, the thorn, and the cord;
and having thus captured and imprisoned the soul she conveys it
into the rice-granary. Sometimes a bamboo box and a net are used
for the same purpose. And in order to ensure a good harvest for the
following year it is necessary not only to detain the soul of all
the grains of rice which are safely stored in the granary, but also
to attract and recover the soul of all the rice that has been lost
through falling to the earth or being eaten by deer, apes, and
pigs. For this purpose instruments of various sorts have been
invented by the priests. One, for example, is a bamboo vessel
provided with four hooks made from the wood of a fruit-tree, by
means of which the absent rice-soul may be hooked and drawn back
into the vessel, which is then hung up in the house. Sometimes two
hands carved out of the wood of a fruit-tree are used for the same
purpose. And every time that a Kayan housewife fetches rice from
the granary for the use of her household, she must propitiate the
souls of the rice in the granary, lest they should be angry at
being robbed of their substance.
The same need of securing the soul of the rice, if the crop is
to thrive, is keenly felt by the Karens of Burma. When a rice-field
does not flourish, they suppose that the soul (kelah) of
the rice is in some way detained from the rice. If the soul cannot
be called back, the crop will fail. The following formula is used
in recalling the kelah (soul) of the rice: “O come,
rice-kelah, come! Come to the field. Come to the rice.
With seed of each gender, come. Come from the river Kho, come from
the river Kaw; from the place where they meet, come. Come from the
West, come from the East. From the throat of the bird, from the maw
of the ape, from the throat of the elephant. Come from the sources
of rivers and their mouths. Come from the country of the Shan and
Burman. From the distant kingdoms come. From all granaries come. O
rice-kelah, come to the rice.”
The Corn-mother of our European peasants has her match in the
Rice-mother of the Minangkabauers of Sumatra. The Minangkabauers
definitely attribute a soul to rice, and will sometimes assert that
rice pounded in the usual way tastes better than rice ground in a
mill, because in the mill the body of the rice was so bruised and
battered that the soul has fled from it. Like the Javanese they
think that the rice is under the special guardianship of a female
spirit called Saning Sari, who is conceived as so closely knit up
with the plant that the rice often goes by her name, as with the
Romans the corn might be called Ceres. In particular Saning Sari is
represented by certain stalks or grains called indoea
padi, that is, literally, “Mother of Rice,” a name
that is often given to the guardian spirit herself. This so-called
Mother of Rice is the occasion of a number of ceremonies observed
at the planting and harvesting of the rice as well as during its
preservation in the barn. When the seed of the rice is about to be
sown in the nursery or bedding-out ground, where under the wet
system of cultivation it is regularly allowed to sprout before
being transplanted to the fields, the best grains are picked out to
form the Rice-mother. These are then sown in the middle of the bed,
and the common seed is planted round about them. The state of the
Rice-mother is supposed to exert the greatest influence on the
growth of the rice; if she droops or pines away, the harvest will
be bad in consequence. The woman who sows the Rice-mother in the
nursery lets her hair hang loose and afterwards bathes, as a means
of ensuring an abundant harvest. When the time comes to transplant
the rice from the nursery to the field, the Rice-mother receives a
special place either in the middle or in a corner of the field, and
a prayer or charm is uttered as follows: “Saning Sari, may a
measure of rice come from a stalk of rice and a basketful from a
root; may you be frightened neither by lightning nor by passers-by!
Sunshine make you glad; with the storm may you be at peace; and may
rain serve to wash your face!” While the rice is growing, the
particular plant which was thus treated as the Rice-mother is lost
sight of; but before harvest another Rice-mother is found. When the
crop is ripe for cutting, the oldest woman of the family or a
sorcerer goes out to look for her. The first stalks seen to bend
under a passing breeze are the Rice-mother, and they are tied
together but not cut until the first-fruits of the field have been
carried home to serve as a festal meal for the family and their
friends, nay even for the domestic animals; since it is Saning
Sari’s pleasure that the beasts also should partake of her
good gifts. After the meal has been eaten, the Rice-mother is
fetched home by persons in gay attire, who carry her very carefully
under an umbrella in a neatly worked bag to the barn, where a place
in the middle is assigned to her. Every one believes that she takes
care of the rice in the barn and even multiplies it not
uncommonly.
When the Tomori of Central Celebes are about to plant the rice,
they bury in the field some betel as an offering to the spirits who
cause the rice to grow. The rice that is planted round this spot is
the last to be reaped at harvest. At the commencement of the
reaping the stalks of this patch of rice are tied together into a
sheaf, which is called “the Mother of the Rice”
(ineno pae), and offerings in the shape of rice,
fowl’s liver, eggs, and other things are laid down before it.
When all the rest of the rice in the field has been reaped,
“the Mother of the Rice” is cut down and carried with
due honour to the rice-barn, where it is laid on the floor, and all
the other sheaves are piled upon it. The Tomori, we are told,
regard the Mother of the Rice as a special offering made to the
rice-spirit Omonga, who dwells in the moon. If that spirit is not
treated with proper respect, for example if the people who fetch
rice from the barn are not decently clad, he is angry and punishes
the offenders by eating up twice as much rice in the barn as they
have taken out of it; some people have heard him smacking his lips
in the barn, as he devoured the rice. On the other hand the
Toradjas of Central Celebes, who also practice the custom of the
Rice-mother at harvest, regard her as the actual mother of the
whole harvest, and therefore keep her carefully, lest in her
absence the garnered store of rice should all melt away and
disappear.
Again, just as in Scotland the old and the young spirit of the
corn are represented as an Old Wife (Cailleach) and a
Maiden respectively, so in the Malay Peninsula we find both the
Rice-mother and her child represented by different sheaves or
bundles of ears on the harvest-field. The ceremony of cutting and
bringing home the Soul of the Rice was witnessed by Mr. W. W. Skeat
at Chodoi in Selangor on the twenty-eighth of January 1897. The
particular bunch or sheaf which was to serve as the Mother of the
Rice-soul had previously been sought and identified by means of the
markings or shape of the ears. From this sheaf an aged sorceress,
with much solemnity, cut a little bundle of seven ears, anointed
them with oil, tied them round with parti-coloured thread,
fumigated them with incense, and having wrapt them in a white cloth
deposited them in a little oval-shaped basket. These seven ears
were the infant Soul of the Rice and the little basket was its
cradle. It was carried home to the farmer’s house by another
woman, who held up an umbrella to screen the tender infant from the
hot rays of the sun. Arrived at the house the Rice-child was
welcomed by the women of the family, and laid, cradle and all, on a
new sleepingmat with pillows at the head. After that the
farmer’s wife was instructed to observe certain rules of
taboo for three days, the rules being in many respects identical
with those which have to be observed for three days after the birth
of a real child. Something of the same tender care which is thus
bestowed on the newly-born Rice-child is naturally extended also to
its parent, the sheaf from whose body it was taken. This sheaf,
which remains standing in the field after the Rice-soul has been
carried home and put to bed, is treated as a newly-made mother;
that is to say, young shoots of trees are pounded together and
scattered broadcast every evening for three successive days, and
when the three days are up you take the pulp of a coco-nut and what
are called “goat-flowers,” mix them up, eat them with a
little sugar, and spit some of the mixture out among the rice. So
after a real birth the young shoots of the jack-fruit, the
rose-apple, certain kinds of banana, and the thin pulp of young
coco-nuts are mixed with dried fish, salt, acid, prawn-condiment,
and the like dainties to form a sort of salad, which is
administered to mother and child for three successive days. The
last sheaf is reaped by the farmer’s wife, who carries it
back to the house, where it is threshed and mixed with the
Rice-soul. The farmer then takes the Rice-soul and its basket and
deposits it, together with the product of the last sheaf, in the
big circular rice-bin used by the Malays. Some grains from the
Rice-soul are mixed with the seed which is to be sown in the
following year. In this Rice-mother and Rice-child of the Malay
Peninsula we may see the counterpart and in a sense the prototype
of the Demeter and Persephone of ancient Greece.
Once more, the European custom of representing the corn-spirit
in the double form of bride and bridegroom has its parallel in a
ceremony observed at the rice-harvest in Java. Before the reapers
begin to cut the rice, the priest or sorcerer picks out a number of
ears of rice, which are tied together, smeared with ointment, and
adorned with flowers. Thus decked out, the ears are called the
padi-peĕngantèn, that is, the Rice-bride and the
Rice-bridegroom; their wedding feast is celebrated, and the cutting
of the rice begins immediately afterwards. Later on, when the rice
is being got in, a bridal chamber is partitioned off in the barn,
and furnished with a new mat, a lamp, and all kinds of toilet
articles. Sheaves of rice, to represent the wedding guests, are
placed beside the Rice-bride and the Rice-bridegroom. Not till this
has been done may the whole harvest be housed in the barn. And for
the first forty days after the rice has been housed, no one may
enter the barn, for fear of disturbing the newly-wedded pair.
In the islands of Bali and Lombok, when the time of harvest has
come, the owner of the field himself makes a beginning by cutting
“the principal rice” with his own hands and binding it
into two sheaves, each composed of one hundred and eight stalks
with their leaves attached to them. One of the sheaves represents a
man and the other a woman, and they are called “husband and
wife.” The male sheaf is wound about with thread so that none
of the leaves are visible, whereas the female sheaf has its leaves
bent over and tied so as to resemble the roll of a woman’s
hair. Sometimes, for further distinction, a necklace of rice-straw
is tied round the female sheaf. When the rice is brought home from
the field, the two sheaves representing the husband and wife are
carried by a woman on her head, and are the last of all to be
deposited in the barn. There they are laid to rest on a small
erection or on a cushion of rice-straw. The whole arrangement, we
are informed, has for its object to induce the rice to increase and
multiply in the granary, so that the owner may get more out of it
than he put in. Hence when the people of Bali bring the two
sheaves, the husband and wife, into the barn, they say,
“Increase ye and multiply without ceasing.” When all
the rice in the barn has been used up, the two sheaves representing
the husband and wife remain in the empty building till they have
gradually disappeared or been devoured by mice. The pinch of hunger
sometimes drives individuals to eat up the rice of these two
sheaves, but the wretches who do so are viewed with disgust by
their fellows and branded as pigs and dogs. Nobody would ever sell
these holy sheaves with the rest of their profane brethren.
The same notion of the propagation of the rice by a male and
female power finds expression amongst the Szis of Upper Burma. When
the paddy, that is, the rice with the husks still on it, has been
dried and piled in a heap for threshing, all the friends of the
household are invited to the threshing-floor, and food and drink
are brought out. The heap of paddy is divided and one half spread
out for threshing, while the other half is left piled up. On the
pile food and spirits are set, and one of the elders, addressing
“the father and mother of the paddy-plant,” prays for
plenteous harvests in future, and begs that the seed may bear many
fold. Then the whole party eat, drink, and make merry. This
ceremony at the threshing-floor is the only occasion when these
people invoke “the father and mother of the paddy.”
3. The Spirit of the Corn embodied in Human Beings
THUS the theory which recognises in the European Corn-mother,
Corn-maiden, and so forth, the embodiment in vegetable form of the
animating spirit of the crops is amply confirmed by the evidence of
peoples in other parts of the world, who, because they have lagged
behind the European races in mental development, retain for that
very reason a keener sense of the original motives for observing
those rustic rites which among ourselves have sunk to the level of
meaningless survivals. The reader may, however, remember that
according to Mannhardt, whose theory I am expounding, the spirit of
the corn manifests itself not merely in vegetable but also in human
form; the person who cuts the last sheaf or gives the last stroke
at threshing passes for a temporary embodiment of the corn-spirit,
just as much as the bunch of corn which he reaps or threshes. Now
in the parallels which have been hitherto adduced from the customs
of peoples outside Europe the spirit of the crops appears only in
vegetable form. It remains, therefore, to prove that other races
besides our European peasantry have conceived the spirit of the
crops as incorporate in or represented by living men and women.
Such a proof, I may remind the reader, is germane to the theme of
this book; for the more instances we discover of human beings
representing in themselves the life or animating spirit of plants,
the less difficulty will be felt at classing amongst them the King
of the Wood at Nemi.
The Mandans and Minnitarees of North America used to hold a
festival in spring which they called the corn-medicine festival of
the women. They thought that a certain Old Woman who Never Dies
made the crops to grow, and that, living somewhere in the south,
she sent the migratory waterfowl in spring as her tokens and
representatives. Each sort of bird represented a special kind of
crop cultivated by the Indians: the wild goose stood for the maize,
the wild swan for the gourds, and the wild duck for the beans. So
when the feathered messengers of the Old Woman began to arrive in
spring the Indians celebrated the corn-medicine festival of the
women. Scaffolds were set up, on which the people hung dried meat
and other things by way of offerings to the Old Woman; and on a
certain day the old women of the tribe, as representatives of the
Old Woman who Never Dies, assembled at the scaffolds each bearing
in her hand an ear of maize fastened to a stick. They first planted
these sticks in the ground, then danced round the scaffolds, and
finally took up the sticks again in their arms. Meanwhile old men
beat drums and shook rattles as a musical accompaniment to the
performance of the old women. Further, young women came and put
dried flesh into the mouths of the old women, for which they
received in return a grain of the consecrated maize to eat. Three
or four grains of the holy corn were also placed in the dishes of
the young women, to be afterwards carefully mixed with the
seed-corn, which they were supposed to fertilise. The dried flesh
hung on the scaffold belonged to the old women, because they
represented the Old Woman who Never Dies. A similar corn-medicine
festival was held in autumn for the purpose of attracting the herds
of buffaloes and securing a supply of meat. At that time every
woman carried in her arms an uprooted plant of maize. They gave the
name of the Old Woman who Never Dies both to the maize and to those
birds which they regarded as symbols of the fruits of the earth,
and they prayed to them in autumn saying, “Mother, have pity
on us! send us not the bitter cold too soon, lest we have not meat
enough! let not all the game depart, that we may have something for
the winter!” In autumn, when the birds were flying south, the
Indians thought that they were going home to the Old Woman and
taking to her the offerings that had been hung up on the scaffolds,
especially the dried meat, which she ate. Here then we have the
spirit or divinity of the corn conceived as an Old Woman and
represented in bodily form by old women, who in their capacity of
representatives receive some at least of the offerings which are
intended for her.
In some parts of India the harvest-goddess Gauri is represented
at once by an unmarried girl and by a bundle of wild balsam plants,
which is made up into the figure of a woman and dressed as such
with mask, garments, and ornaments. Both the human and the
vegetable representative of the goddess are worshipped, and the
intention of the whole ceremony appears to be to ensure a good crop
of rice.
4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and
Daughter
COMPARED with the Corn-mother of Germany and the Harvest-maiden
of Scotland, the Demeter and Persephone of Greece are late products
of religious growth. Yet as members of the Aryan family the Greeks
must at one time or another have observed harvest customs like
those which are still practised by Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, and
which, far beyond the limits of the Aryan world, have been
practised by the Indians of Peru and many peoples of the East
Indies—a sufficient proof that the ideas on which these
customs rest are not confined to any one race, but naturally
suggest themselves to all untutored peoples engaged in agriculture.
It is probable, therefore, that Demeter and Persephone, those
stately and beautiful figures of Greek mythology, grew out of the
same simple beliefs and practices which still prevail among our
modern peasantry, and that they were represented by rude dolls made
out of the yellow sheaves on many a harvest-field long before their
breathing images were wrought in bronze and marble by the master
hands of Phidias and Praxiteles. A reminiscence of that olden
time—a scent, so to say, of the harvest-field—lingered
to the last in the title of the Maiden (Kore) by which
Persephone was commonly known. Thus if the prototype of Demeter is
the Corn-mother of Germany, the prototype of Persephone is the
Harvest-maiden which, autumn after autumn, is still made from the
last sheaf on the Braes of Balquhidder. Indeed, if we knew more
about the peasant-farmers of ancient Greece, we should probably
find that even in classical times they continued annually to
fashion their Corn-mothers (Demeters) and Maidens (Persephones) out
of the ripe corn on the harvest-fields. But unfortunately the
Demeter and Persephone whom we know were the denizens of towns, the
majestic inhabitants of lordly temples; it was for such divinities
alone that the refined writers of antiquity had eyes; the uncouth
rites performed by rustics amongst the corn were beneath their
notice. Even if they noticed them, they probably never dreamed of
any connexion between the puppet of corn-stalks on the sunny
stubble-field and the marble divinity in the shady coolness of the
temple. Still the writings even of these town-bred and cultured
persons afford us an occasional glimpse of a Demeter as rude as the
rudest that a remote German village can show. Thus the story that
Iasion begat a child Plutus ( “wealth,”
“abundance”) by Demeter on a thrice-ploughed field, may
be compared with the West Prussian custom of the mock birth of a
child on the harvest-field. In this Prussian custom the pretended
mother represents the Corn-mother
(Žytniamatka); the pretended child represents
the Corn-baby, and the whole ceremony is a charm to ensure a crop
next year. The custom and the legend alike point to an older
practice of performing, among the sprouting crops in spring or the
stubble in autumn, one of those real or mimic acts of procreation
by which, as we have seen, primitive man often seeks to infuse his
own vigorous life into the languid or decaying energies of nature.
Another glimpse of the savage under the civilised Demeter will be
afforded farther on, when we come to deal with another aspect of
those agricultural divinities.
The reader may have observed that in modern folk-customs the
corn-spirit is generally represented either by a Corn-mother (Old
Woman, etc.) or by a Maiden (Harvest-child, etc.), not both by a
Corn-mother and by a Maiden. Why then did the Greeks represent the
corn both as a mother and a daughter?
In the Breton custom the mother-sheaf—a large figure made
out of the last sheaf with a small corn-doll inside of
it—clearly represents both the Corn-mother and the
Corn-daughter, the latter still unborn. Again, in the Prussian
custom just referred to, the woman who plays the part of
Corn-mother represents the ripe grain; the child appears to
represent next year’s corn, which may be regarded, naturally
enough, as the child of this year’s corn, since it is from
the seed of this year’s harvest that next year’s crop
will spring. Further, we have seen that among the Malays of the
Peninsula and sometimes among the Highlanders of Scotland the
spirit of the grain is represented in double female form, both as
old and young, by means of ears taken alike from the ripe crop: in
Scotland the old spirit of the corn appears as the Carline or
Cailleach, the young spirit as the Maiden; while among the
Malays of the Peninsula the two spirits of the rice are definitely
related to each other as mother and child. Judged by these
analogies Demeter would be the ripe crop of this year; Persephone
would be the seed-corn taken from it and sown in autumn, to
reappear in spring. The descent of Persephone into the lower world
would thus be a mythical expression for the sowing of the seed; her
reappearance in spring would signify the sprouting of the young
corn. In this way the Persephone of one year becomes the Demeter of
the next, and this may very well have been the original form of the
myth. But when with the advance of religious thought the corn came
to be personified no longer as a being that went through the whole
cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, and death within a year, but
as an immortal goddess, consistency required that one of the two
personifications, the mother or the daughter, should be sacrificed.
However, the double conception of the corn as mother and daughter
may have been too old and too deeply rooted in the popular mind to
be eradicated by logic, and so room had to be found in the reformed
myth both for mother and daughter. This was done by assigning to
Persephone the character of the corn sown in autumn and sprouting
in spring, while Demeter was left to play the somewhat vague part
of the heavy mother of the corn, who laments its annual
disappearance underground, and rejoices over its reappearance in
spring. Thus instead of a regular succession of divine beings, each
living a year and then giving birth to her successor, the reformed
myth exhibits the conception of two divine and immortal beings, one
of whom annually disappears into and reappears from the ground,
while the other has little to do but to weep and rejoice at the
appropriate seasons.
This theory of the double personification of the corn in Greek
myth assumes that both personifications (Demeter and Persephone)
are original. But if we suppose that the Greek myth started with a
single personification, the aftergrowth of a second personification
may perhaps be explained as follows. On looking over the harvest
customs which have been passed under review, it may be noticed that
they involve two distinct conceptions of the corn-spirit. For
whereas in some of the customs the corn-spirit is treated as
immanent in the corn, in others it is regarded as external to it.
Thus when a particular sheaf is called by the name of the
corn-spirit, and is dressed in clothes and handled with reverence,
the spirit is clearly regarded as immanent in the corn. But when
the spirit is said to make the crops grow by passing through them,
or to blight the grain of those against whom she has a grudge, she
is apparently conceived as distinct from, though exercising power
over, the corn. Conceived in the latter mode the corn-spirit is in
a fair way to become a deity of the corn, if she has not become so
already. Of these two conceptions, that of the cornspirit as
immanent in the corn is doubtless the older, since the view of
nature as animated by indwelling spirits appears to have generally
preceded the view of it as controlled by external deities; to put
it shortly, animism precedes deism. In the harvest customs of our
European peasantry the corn-spirit seems to be conceived now as
immanent in the corn and now as external to it. In Greek mythology,
on the other hand, Demeter is viewed rather as the deity of the
corn than as the spirit immanent in it. The process of thought
which leads to the change from the one mode of conception to the
other is anthropomorphism, or the gradual investment of the
immanent spirits with more and more of the attributes of humanity.
As men emerge from savagery the tendency to humanise their
divinities gains strength; and the more human these become the
wider is the breach which severs them from the natural objects of
which they were at first merely the animating spirits or souls. But
in the progress upwards from savagery men of the same generation do
not march abreast; and though the new anthropomorphic gods may
satisfy the religious wants of the more developed intelligences,
the backward members of the community will cling by preference to
the old animistic notions. Now when the spirit of any natural
object such as the corn has been invested with human qualities,
detached from the object, and converted into a deity controlling
it, the object itself is, by the withdrawal of its spirit, left
inanimate; it becomes, so to say, a spiritual vacuum. But the
popular fancy, intolerant of such a vacuum, in other words, unable
to conceive anything as inanimate, immediately creates a fresh
mythical being, with which it peoples the vacant object. Thus the
same natural object comes to be represented in mythology by two
distinct beings: first by the old spirit now separated from it and
raised to the rank of a deity; second, by the new spirit, freshly
created by the popular fancy to supply the place vacated by the old
spirit on its elevation to a higher sphere. In such cases the
problem for mythology is, having got two distinct personifications
of the same object, what to do with them? How are their relations
to each other to be adjusted, and room found for both in the
mythological system? When the old spirit or new deity is conceived
as creating or producing the object in question, the problem is
easily solved. Since the object is believed to be produced by the
old spirit, and animated by the new one, the latter, as the soul of
the object, must also owe its existence to the former; thus the old
spirit will stand to the new one as producer to produced, that is,
in mythology, as parent to child, and if both spirits are conceived
as female, their relation will be that of mother and daughter. In
this way, starting from a single personification of the corn as
female, mythic fancy might in time reach a double personification
of it as mother and daughter. It would be very rash to affirm that
this was the way in which the myth of Demeter and Persephone
actually took shape; but it seems a legitimate conjecture that the
reduplication of deities, of which Demeter and Persephone furnish
an example, may sometimes have arisen in the way indicated. For
example, among the pairs of deities dealt with in a former part of
this work, it has been shown that there are grounds for regarding
both Isis and her companion god Osiris as personifications of the
corn. On the hypothesis just suggested, Isis would be the old
corn-spirit, and Osiris would be the newer one, whose relationship
to the old spirit was variously explained as that of brother,
husband, and son; for of course mythology would always be free to
account for the coexistence of the two divinities in more ways than
one. It must not, however, be forgotten that this proposed
explanation of such pairs of deities as Demeter and Persephone or
Isis and Osiris is purely conjectural, and is only given for what
it is worth.
XLVII. Lityerses
1. Songs of the Corn Reapers
IN THE PRECEDING pages an attempt has been made to show that in
the Corn-mother and Harvest-maiden of Northern Europe we have the
prototypes of Demeter and Persephone. But an essential feature is
still wanting to complete the resemblance. A leading incident in
the Greek myth is the death and resurrection of Persephone; it is
this incident which, coupled with the nature of the goddess as a
deity of vegetation, links the myth with the cults of Adonis,
Attis, Osiris, and Dionysus; and it is in virtue of this incident
that the myth finds a place in our discussion of the Dying God. It
remains, therefore, to see whether the conception of the annual
death and resurrection of a god, which figures so prominently in
these great Greek and Oriental worships, has not also its origin or
its analogy in the rustic rites observed by reapers and
vine-dressers amongst the corn-shocks and the vines.
Our general ignorance of the popular superstitions and customs
of the ancients has already been confessed. But the obscurity which
thus hangs over the first beginnings of ancient religion is
fortunately dissipated to some extent in the present case. The
worships of Osiris, Adonis, and Attis had their respective seats,
as we have seen, in Egypt, Syria, and Phrygia; and in each of these
countries certain harvest and vintage customs are known to have
been observed, the resemblance of which to each other and to the
national rites struck the ancients themselves, and, compared with
the harvest customs of modern peasants and barbarians, seems to
throw some light on the origin of the rites in question.
It has been already mentioned, on the authority of Diodorus,
that in ancient Egypt the reapers were wont to lament over the
first sheaf cut, invoking Isis as the goddess to whom they owed the
discovery of corn. To the plaintive song or cry sung or uttered by
Egyptian reapers the Greeks gave the name of Maneros, and explained
the name by a story that Maneros, the only son of the first
Egyptian king, invented agriculture, and, dying an untimely death,
was thus lamented by the people. It appears, however, that the name
Maneros is due to a misunderstanding of the formula
maa-ne-hra, “Come to the house,” which has
been discovered in various Egyptian writings, for example in the
dirge of Isis in the Book of the Dead. Hence we may suppose that
the cry maa-ne-hra was chanted by the reapers over the cut
corn as a dirge for the death of the corn-spirit (Isis or Osiris)
and a prayer for its return. As the cry was raised over the first
ears reaped, it would seem that the corn-spirit was believed by the
Egyptians to be present in the first corn cut and to die under the
sickle. We have seen that in the Malay Peninsula and Java the first
ears of rice are taken to represent either the Soul of the Rice or
the Rice-bride and the Rice-bridegroom. In parts of Russia the
first sheaf is treated much in the same way that the last sheaf is
treated elsewhere. It is reaped by the mistress herself, taken home
and set in the place of honour near the holy pictures; afterwards
it is threshed separately, and some of its grain is mixed with the
next year’s seed-corn. In Aberdeenshire, while the last corn
cut was generally used to make the clyack sheaf, it was
sometimes, though rarely, the first corn cut that was dressed up as
a woman and carried home with ceremony.
In Phoenicia and Western Asia a plaintive song, like that
chanted by the Egyptian corn-reapers, was sung at the vintage and
probably (to judge by analogy) also at harvest. This Phoenician
song was called by the Greeks Linus or Ailinus and explained, like
Maneros, as a lament for the death of a youth named Linus.
According to one story Linus was brought up by a shepherd, but torn
to pieces by his dogs. But, like Maneros, the name Linus or Ailinus
appears to have originated in a verbal misunderstanding, and to be
nothing more than the cry ai lanu, that is “Woe to
us,” which the Phoenicians probably uttered in mourning for
Adonis; at least Sappho seems to have regarded Adonis and Linus as
equivalent.
In Bithynia a like mournful ditty, called Bormus or Borimus, was
chanted by Mariandynian reapers. Bormus was said to have been a
handsome youth, the son of King Upias or of a wealthy and
distinguished man. One summer day, watching the reapers at work in
his fields, he went to fetch them a drink of water and was never
heard of more. So the reapers sought for him, calling him in
plaintive strains, which they continued to chant at harvest ever
afterwards.
2. Killing the Corn-spirit
IN PHRYGIA the corresponding song, sung by harvesters both at
reaping and at threshing, was called Lityerses. According to one
story, Lityerses was a bastard son of Midas, King of Phrygia, and
dwelt at Celaenae. He used to reap the corn, and had an enormous
appetite. When a stranger happened to enter the corn-field or to
pass by it, Lityerses gave him plenty to eat and drink, then took
him to the corn-fields on the banks of the Maeander and compelled
him to reap along with him. Lastly, it was his custom to wrap the
stranger in a sheaf, cut off his head with a sickle, and carry away
his body, swathed in the corn-stalks. But at last Hercules
undertook to reap with him, cut off his head with the sickle, and
threw his body into the river. As Hercules is reported to have
slain Lityerses in the same way that Lityerses slew others, we may
infer that Lityerses used to throw the bodies of his victims into
the river. According to another version of the story, Lityerses, a
son of Midas, was wont to challenge people to a reaping match with
him, and if he vanquished them he used to thrash them; but one day
he met with a stronger reaper, who slew him.
There are some grounds for supposing that in these stories of
Lityerses we have the description of a Phrygian harvest custom in
accordance with which certain persons, especially strangers passing
the harvest field, were regularly regarded as embodiments of the
corn-spirit, and as such were seized by the reapers, wrapt in
sheaves, and beheaded, their bodies, bound up in the corn-stalks,
being after-wards thrown into water as a rain-charm. The grounds
for this supposition are, first, the resemblance of the Lityerses
story to the harvest customs of European peasantry, and, second,
the frequency of human sacrifices offered by savage races to
promote the fertility of the fields. We will examine these grounds
successively, beginning with the former.
In comparing the story with the harvest customs of Europe, three
points deserve special attention, namely: I. the reaping match and
the binding of persons in the sheaves; II. the killing of the
corn-spirit or his representatives; III. the treatment of visitors
to the harvest field or of strangers passing it.
I. In regard to the first head, we have seen that in modern
Europe the person who cuts or binds or threshes the last sheaf is
often exposed to rough treatment at the hands of his
fellow-labourers. For example, he is bound up in the last sheaf,
and, thus encased, is carried or carted about, beaten, drenched
with water, thrown on a dunghill, and so forth. Or, if he is spared
this horse-play, he is at least the subject of ridicule or is
thought to be destined to suffer some misfortune in the course of
the year. Hence the harvesters are naturally reluctant to give the
last cut at reaping or the last stroke at threshing or to bind the
last sheaf, and towards the close of the work this reluctance
produces an emulation among the labourers, each striving to finish
his task as fast as possible, in order that he may escape the
invidious distinction of being last. For example, in the Mittelmark
district of Prussia, when the rye has been reaped, and the last
sheaves are about to be tied up, the binders stand in two rows
facing each other, every woman with her sheaf and her straw rope
before her. At a given signal they all tie up their sheaves, and
the one who is the last to finish is ridiculed by the rest. Not
only so, but her sheaf is made up into human shape and called the
Old Man, and she must carry it home to the farmyard, where the
harvesters dance in a circle round her and it. Then they take the
Old Man to the farmer and deliver it to him with the words,
“We bring the Old Man to the Master. He may keep him till he
gets a new one.” After that the Old Man is set up against a
tree, where he remains for a long time, the butt of many jests. At
Aschbach in Bavaria, when the reaping is nearly finished, the
reapers say, “Now, we will drive out the Old Man.” Each
of them sets himself to reap a patch of corn as fast as he can; he
who cuts the last handful or the last stalk is greeted by the rest
with an exulting cry, “You have the Old Man.” Sometimes
a black mask is fastened on the reaper’s face and he is
dressed in woman’s clothes; or if the reaper is a woman, she
is dressed in man’s clothes. A dance follows. At the supper
the Old Man gets twice as large a portion of the food as the
others. The proceedings are similar at threshing; the person who
gives the last stroke is said to have the Old Man. At the supper
given to the threshers he has to eat out of the cream-ladle and to
drink a great deal. Moreover, he is quizzed and teased in all sorts
of ways till he frees himself from further annoyance by treating
the others to brandy or beer.
These examples illustrate the contests in reaping, threshing,
and binding which take place amongst the harvesters, from their
unwillingness to suffer the ridicule and discomfort incurred by the
one who happens to finish his work last. It will be remembered that
the person who is last at reaping, binding, or threshing, is
regarded as the representative of the corn-spirit, and this idea is
more fully expressed by binding him or her in corn-stalks. The
latter custom has been already illustrated, but a few more
instances may be added. At Kloxin, near Stettin, the harvesters
call out to the woman who binds the last sheaf, “You have the
Old Man, and must keep him.” As late as the first half of the
nineteenth century the custom was to tie up the woman herself in
pease-straw, and bring her with music to the farmhouse, where the
harvesters danced with her till the pease-straw fell off. In other
villages round Stettin, when the last harvest-waggon is being
loaded, there is a regular race amongst the women, each striving
not to be last. For she who places the last sheaf on the waggon is
called the Old Man, and is completely swathed in corn-stalks; she
is also decked with flowers, and flowers and a helmet of straw are
placed on her head. In solemn procession she carries the
harvest-crown to the squire, over whose head she holds it while she
utters a string of good wishes. At the dance which follows, the Old
Man has the right to choose his, or rather her, partner; it is an
honour to dance with him. At Gommern, near Magdeburg, the reaper
who cuts the last ears of corn is often wrapt up in corn-stalks so
completely that it is hard to see whether there is a man in the
bundle or not. Thus wrapt up he is taken by another stalwart reaper
on his back, and carried round the field amidst the joyous cries of
the harvesters. At Neuhausen, near Merseburg, the person who binds
the last sheaf is wrapt in ears of oats and saluted as the Oatsman,
whereupon the others dance round him. At Brie, Isle de France, the
farmer himself is tied up in the first sheaf. At
Dingelstedt, in the district of Erfurt, down to the first half of
the nineteenth century it was the custom to tie up a man in the
last sheaf. He was called the Old Man, and was brought home on the
last waggon, amid huzzas and music. On reaching the farmyard he was
rolled round the barn and drenched with water. At Nördlingen in
Bavaria the man who gives the last stroke at threshing is wrapt in
straw and rolled on the threshing-floor. In some parts of
Oberpfalz, Bavaria, he is said to “get the Old Man,” is
wrapt in straw, and carried to a neighbour who has not yet finished
his threshing. In Silesia the woman who binds the last sheaf has to
submit to a good deal of horse-play. She is pushed, knocked down,
and tied up in the sheaf, after which she is called the corn-puppet
(Kornpopel).
“In all these cases the idea is that the spirit of the
corn—the Old Man of vegetation—is driven out of the
corn last cut or last threshed, and lives in the barn during the
winter. At sowing-time he goes out again to the fields to resume
his activity as animating force among the sprouting
corn.”
II. Passing to the second point of comparison between the
Lityerses story and European harvest customs, we have now to see
that in the latter the corn-spirit is often believed to be killed
at reaping or threshing. In the Romsdal and other parts of Norway,
when the haymaking is over, the people say that “the Old
Hay-man has been killed.” In some parts of Bavaria the man
who gives the last stroke at threshing is said to have killed the
Corn-man, the Oats-man, or the Wheat-man, according to the crop. In
the Canton of Tillot, in Lorraine, at threshing the last corn the
men keep time with their flails, calling out as they thresh,
“We are killing the Old Woman! We are killing the Old
Woman!” If there is an old woman in the house she is warned
to save herself, or she will be struck dead. Near Ragnit, in
Lithuania, the last handful of corn is left standing by itself,
with the words, “The Old Woman (Boba) is sitting in
there.” Then a young reaper whets his scythe and, with a
strong sweep, cuts down the handful. It is now said of him that
“he has cut off the Boba’s head”; and he receives
a gratuity from the farmer and a jugful of water over his head from
the farmer’s wife. According to another account, every
Lithuanian reaper makes haste to finish his task; for the Old
Rye-woman lives in the last stalks, and whoever cuts the last
stalks kills the Old Rye-woman, and by killing her he brings
trouble on himself. In Wilkischken, in the district of Tilsit, the
man who cuts the last corn goes by the name of “the killer of
the Rye-woman.” In Lithuania, again, the corn-spirit is
believed to be killed at threshing as well as at reaping. When only
a single pile of corn remains to be threshed, all the threshers
suddenly step back a few paces, as if at the word of command. Then
they fall to work, plying their flails with the utmost rapidity and
vehemence, till they come to the last bundle. Upon this they fling
themselves with almost frantic fury, straining every nerve, and
raining blows on it till the word “Halt!” rings out
sharply from the leader. The man whose flail is the last to fall
after the command to stop has been given is immediately surrounded
by all the rest, crying out that “he has struck the Old
Rye-woman dead.” He has to expiate the deed by treating them
to brandy; and, like the man who cuts the last corn, he is known as
“the killer of the Old Rye-woman.” Sometimes in
Lithuania the slain corn-spirit was represented by a puppet. Thus a
female figure was made out of corn-stalks, dressed in clothes, and
placed on the threshing-floor, under the heap of corn which was to
be threshed last. Whoever thereafter gave the last stroke at
threshing “struck the Old Woman dead.” We have already
met with examples of burning the figure which represents the
corn-spirit. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a custom called
“burning the Old Witch” is observed on the last day of
harvest. A small sheaf of corn is burnt on the field in a fire of
stubble; peas are parched at the fire and eaten with a liberal
allowance of ale; and the lads and lasses romp about the flames and
amuse themselves by blackening each other’s faces. Sometimes,
again, the corn-spirit is represented by a man, who lies down under
the last corn; it is threshed upon his body, and the people say
that “the Old Man is being beaten to death.” We saw
that sometimes the farmer’s wife is thrust, together with the
last sheaf, under the threshing-machine, as if to thresh her, and
that afterwards a pretence is made of winnowing her. At Volders, in
the Tyrol, husks of corn are stuck behind the neck of the man who
gives the last stroke at threshing, and he is throttled with a
straw garland. If he is tall, it is believed that the corn will be
tall next year. Then he is tied on a bundle and flung into the
river. In Carinthia, the thresher who gave the last stroke, and the
person who untied the last sheaf on the threshing-floor, are bound
hand and foot with straw bands, and crowns of straw are placed on
their heads. Then they are tied, face to face, on a sledge, dragged
through the village, and flung into a brook. The custom of throwing
the representative of the corn-spirit into a stream, like that of
drenching him with water, is, as usual, a rain-charm.
III. Thus far the representatives of the corn-spirit have
generally been the man or woman who cuts, binds, or threshes the
last corn. We now come to the cases in which the corn-spirit is
represented either by a stranger passing the harvest-field (as in
the Lityerses tale), or by a visitor entering it for the first
time. All over Germany it is customary for the reapers or threshers
to lay hold of passing strangers and bind them with a rope made of
corn-stalks, till they pay a forfeit; and when the farmer himself
or one of his guests enters the field or the threshing-floor for
the first time, he is treated in the same way. Sometimes the rope
is only tied round his arm or his feet or his neck. But sometimes
he is regularly swathed in corn. Thus at Solör in Norway, whoever
enters the field, be he the master or a stranger, is tied up in a
sheaf and must pay a ransom. In the neighbourhood of Soest, when
the farmer visits the flax-pullers for the first time, he is
completely enveloped in flax. Passers-by are also surrounded by the
women, tied up in flax, and compelled to stand brandy. At
Nördlingen strangers are caught with straw ropes and tied up in a
sheaf till they pay a forfeit. Among the Germans of Haselberg, in
West Bohemia, as soon as a farmer had given the last corn to be
threshed on the threshing-floor, he was swathed in it and had to
redeem himself by a present of cakes. In the canton of Putanges, in
Normandy, a pretence of tying up the owner of the land in the last
sheaf of wheat is still practised, or at least was still practised
some quarter of a century ago. The task falls to the women alone.
They throw themselves on the proprietor, seize him by the arms, the
legs, and the body, throw him to the ground, and stretch him on the
last sheaf. Then a show is made of binding him, and the conditions
to be observed at the harvest-supper are dictated to him. When he
has accepted them, he is released and allowed to get up. At Brie,
Isle de France, when any one who does not belong to the farm passes
by the harvest-field, the reapers give chase. If they catch him,
they bind him in a sheaf an dbite him, one after the other, in the
forehead, crying, “You shall carry the key of the
field.” “To have the key” is an expression used
by harvesters elsewhere in the sense of to cut or bind or thresh
the last sheaf; hence, it is equivalent to the phrases “You
have the Old Man,” “You are the Old Man,” which
are addressed to the cutter, binder, or thresher of the last sheaf.
Therefore, when a stranger, as at Brie, is tied up in a sheaf and
told that he will “carry the key of the field,” it is
as much as to say that he is the Old Man, that is, an embodiment of
the corn-spirit. In hop-picking, if a well-dressed stranger passes
the hop-yard, he is seized by the women, tumbled into the bin,
covered with leaves, and not released till he has paid a fine.
Thus, like the ancient Lityerses, modern European reapers have
been wont to lay hold of a passing stranger and tie him up in a
sheaf. It is not to be expected that they should complete the
parallel by cutting off his head; but if they do not take such a
strong step, their language and gestures are at least indicative of
a desire to do so. For instance, in Mecklenburg on the first day of
reaping, if the master or mistress or a stranger enters the field,
or merely passes by it, all the mowers face towards him and sharpen
their scythes, clashing their whet-stones against them in unison,
as if they were making ready to mow. Then the woman who leads the
mowers steps up to him and ties a band round his left arm. He must
ransom himself by payment of a forfeit. Near Ratzeburg, when the
master or other person of mark enters the field or passes by it,
all the harvesters stop work and march towards him in a body, the
men with their scythes in front. On meeting him they form up in
line, men and women. The men stick the poles of their scythes in
the ground, as they do in whetting them; then they take off their
caps and hang them on the scythes, while their leader stands
forward and makes a speech. When he has done, they all whet their
scythes in measured time very loudly, after which they put on their
caps. Two of the women binders then come forward; one of them ties
the master or stranger (as the case may be) with corn-ears or with
a silken band; the other delivers a rhyming address. The following
are specimens of the speeches made by the reaper on these
occasions. In some parts of Pomerania every passer-by is stopped,
his way being barred with a corn-rope. The reapers form a circle
round him and sharpen their scythes, while their leader says:
“The men are ready,
The scythes are bent,
The corn is great and small,
The gentleman must be mowed.”
Then the process of whetting the scythes is repeated. At Ramin,
in the district of Stettin, the stranger, standing encircled by the
reapers, is thus addressed:
“We’ll stroke the gentleman
With our naked sword,
Wherewith we shear meadows and fields.
We shear princes and lords.
Labourers are often athirst;
If the gentleman will stand beer and brandy
The joke will soon be over.
But, if our prayer he does not like,
The sword has a right to strike.”
On the threshing-floor strangers are also regarded as
embodiments of the corn-spirit, and are treated accordingly. At
Wiedingharde in Schleswig when a stranger comes to the
threshing-floor he is asked, “Shall I teach you the
flail-dance?” If he says yes, they put the arms of the
threshing-flail round his neck as if he were a sheaf of corn, and
press them together so tight that he is nearly choked. In some
parishes of Wermland (Sweden), when a stranger enters the
threshing-floor where the threshers are at work, they say that
“they will teach him the threshing-song.” Then they put
a flail round his neck and a straw rope about his body. Also, as we
have seen, if a stranger woman enters the threshing-floor, the
threshers put a flail round her body and a wreath of corn-stalks
round her neck, and call out, “See the Corn-woman! See! that
is how the Corn-maiden looks!”
Thus in these harvest-customs of modern Europe the person who
cuts, binds, or threshes the last corn is treated as an embodiment
of the corn-spirit by being wrapt up in sheaves, killed in mimicry
by agricultural implements, and thrown into the water. These
coincidences with the Lityerses story seem to prove that the latter
is a genuine description of an old Phrygian harvest-custom. But
since in the modern parallels the killing of the personal
representative of the corn-spirit is necessarily omitted or at most
enacted only in mimicry, it is desirable to show that in rude
society human beings have been commonly killed as an agricultural
ceremony to promote the fertility of the fields. The following
examples will make this plain.
3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops
THE INDIANS of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, used to sacrifice human
blood and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields. The
people of Cañar (now Cuenca in Ecuador) used to sacrifice a hundred
children annually at harvest. The kings of Quito, the Incas of
Peru, and for a long time the Spaniards were unable to suppress the
bloody rite. At a Mexican harvest-festival, when the first-fruits
of the season were offered to the sun, a criminal was placed
between two immense stones, balanced opposite each other, and was
crushed by them as they fell together. His remains were buried, and
a feast and dance followed. This sacrifice was known as “the
meeting of the stones.” We have seen that the ancient
Mexicans also sacrificed human beings at all the various stages in
the growth of the maize, the age of the victims corresponding to
the age of the corn; for they sacrificed new-born babes at sowing,
older children when the grain had sprouted, and so on till it was
fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men. No doubt the
correspondence between the ages of the victims and the state of the
corn was supposed to enhance the efficacy of the sacrifice.
The Pawnees annually sacrificed a human victim in spring when
they sowed their fields. The sacrifice was believed to have been
enjoined on them by the Morning Star, or by a certain bird which
the Morning Star had sent to them as its messenger. The bird was
stuffed and preserved as a powerful talisman. They thought that an
omission of this sacrifice would be followed by the total failure
of the crops of maize, beans, and pumpkins. The victim was a
captive of either sex. He was clad in the gayest and most costly
attire, was fattened on the choicest food, and carefully kept in
ignorance of his doom. When he was fat enough, they bound him to a
cross in the presence of the multitude, danced a solemn dance, then
cleft his head with a tomahawk and shot him with arrows. According
to one trader, the squaws then cut pieces of flesh from the
victim’s body, with which they greased their hoes; but this
was denied by another trader who had been present at the ceremony.
Immediately after the sacrifice the people proceeded to plant their
fields. A particular account has been preserved of the sacrifice of
a Sioux girl by the Pawnees in April 1837 or 1838. The girl was
fourteen or fifteen years old and had been kept for six months and
well treated. Two days before the sacrifice she was led from wigwam
to wigwam, accompanied by the whole council of chiefs and warriors.
At each lodge she received a small billet of wood and a little
paint, which she handed to the warrior next to her. In this way she
called at every wigwam, receiving at each the same present of wood
and paint. On the twenty-second of April she was taken out to be
sacrificed, attended by the warriors, each of whom carried two
pieces of wood which he had received from her hands. Her body
having been painted half red and half black, she was attached to a
sort of gibbet and roasted for some time over a slow fire, then
shot to death with arrows. The chief sacrificer next tore out her
heart and devoured it. While her flesh was still warm it was cut in
small pieces from the bones, put in little baskets, and taken to a
neighbouring corn-field. There the head chief took a piece of the
flesh from a basket and squeezed a drop of blood upon the
newly-deposited grains of corn. His example was followed by the
rest, till all the seed had been sprinkled with the blood; it was
then covered up with earth. According to one account the body of
the victim was reduced to a kind of paste, which was rubbed or
sprinkled not only on the maize but also on the potatoes, the
beans, and other seeds to fertilise them. By this sacrifice they
hoped to obtain plentiful crops.
A West African queen used to sacrifice a man and woman in the
month of March. They were killed with spades and hoes, and their
bodies buried in the middle of a field which had just been tilled.
At Lagos in Guinea it was the custom annually to impale a young
girl alive soon after the spring equinox in order to secure good
crops. Along with her were sacrificed sheep and goats, which, with
yams, heads of maize, and plantains, were hung on stakes on each
side of her. The victims were bred up for the purpose in the
king’s seraglio, and their minds had been so powerfully
wrought upon by the fetish men that they went cheerfully to their
fate. A similar sacrifice used to be annually offered at Benin, in
Guinea. The Marimos, a Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a human being for
the crops. The victim chosen is generally a short, stout man. He is
seized by violence or intoxicated and taken to the fields, where he
is killed amongst the wheat to serve as “seed” (so they
phrase it). After his blood has coagulated in the sun, it is burned
along with the frontal bone, the flesh attached to it, and the
brain; the ashes are then scattered over the ground to fertilise
it. The rest of the body is eaten.
The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, offer a
human sacrifice before they sow their rice. The victim is a slave,
who is hewn to pieces in the forest. The natives of Bontoc in the
interior of Luzon, one of the Philippine Islands, are passionate
head-hunters. Their principal seasons for head-hunting are the
times of planting and reaping the rice. In order that the crop may
turn out well, every farm must get at least one human head at
planting and one at sowing. The head-hunters go out in twos or
threes, lie in wait for the victim, whether man or woman, cut off
his or her head, hands, and feet, and bring them back in haste to
the village, where they are received with great rejoicings. The
skulls are at first exposed on the branches of two or three dead
trees which stand in an open space of every village surrounded by
large stones which serve as seats. The people then dance round them
and feast and get drunk. When the flesh has decayed from the head,
the man who cut it off takes it home and preserves it as a relic,
while his companions do the same with the hands and the feet.
Similar customs are observed by the Apoyaos, another tribe in the
interior of Luzon.
Among the Lhota Naga, one of the many savage tribes who inhabit
the deep rugged labyrinthine glens which wind into the mountains
from the rich valley of Brahmapootra, it used to be a common custom
to chop off the heads, hands, and feet of people they met with, and
then to stick up the severed extremities in their fields to ensure
a good crop of grain. They bore no ill-will whatever to the persons
upon whom they operated in this unceremonious fashion. Once they
flayed a boy alive, carved him in pieces, and distributed the flesh
among all the villagers, who put it into their corn-bins to avert
bad luck and ensure plentiful crops of grain. The Gonds of India, a
Dravidian race, kidnapped Brahman boys, and kept them as victims to
be sacrificed on various occasions. At sowing and reaping, after a
triumphal procession, one of the lads was slain by being punctured
with a poisoned arrow. His blood was then sprinkled over the
ploughed field or the ripe crop, and his flesh was devoured. The
Oraons or Uraons of Chota Nagpur worship a goddess called Anna
Kuari, who can give good crops and make a man rich, but to induce
her to do so it is necessary to offer human sacrifices. In spite of
the vigilance of the British Government these sacrifices are said
to be still secretly perpetrated. The victims are poor waifs and
strays whose disappearance attracts no notice. April and May are
the months when the catchpoles are out on the prowl. At that time
strangers will not go about the country alone, and parents will not
let their children enter the jungle or herd the cattle. When a
catchpole has found a victim, he cuts his throat and carries away
the upper part of the ring finger and the nose. The goddess takes
up her abode in the house of any man who has offered her a
sacrifice, and from that time his fields yield a double harvest.
The form she assumes in the house is that of a small child. When
the householder brings in his unhusked rice, he takes the goddess
and rolls her over the heap to double its size. But she soon grows
restless and can only be pacified with the blood of fresh human
victims.
But the best known case of human sacrifices, systematically
offered to ensure good crops, is supplied by the Khonds or Kandhs,
another Dravidian race in Bengal. Our knowledge of them is derived
from the accounts written by British officers who, about the middle
of the nineteenth century, were engaged in putting them down. The
sacrifices were offered to the Earth Goddess. Tari Pennu or Bera
Pennu, and were believed to ensure good crops and immunity from all
disease and accidents. In particular, they were considered
necessary in the cultivation of turmeric, the Khonds arguing that
the turmeric could not have a deep red colour without the shedding
of blood. The victim or Meriah, as he was called, was acceptable to
the goddess only if he had been purchased, or had been born a
victim—that is, the son of a victim father, or had been
devoted as a child by his father or guardian. Khonds in distress
often sold their children for victims, “considering the
beatification of their souls certain, and their death, for the
benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible.” A man of
the Panua tribe was once seen to load a Khond with curses, and
finally to spit in his face, because the Khond had sold for a
victim his own child, whom the Panua had wished to marry. A party
of Khonds, who saw this, immediately pressed forward to comfort the
seller of his child, saying, “Your child has died that all
the world may live, and the Earth Goddess herself will wipe that
spittle from your face.” The victims were often kept for
years before they were sacrificed. Being regarded as consecrated
beings, they were treated with extreme affection, mingled with
deference, and were welcomed wherever they went. A Meriah youth, on
attaining maturity, was generally given a wife, who was herself
usually a Meriah or victim; and with her he received a portion of
land and farm-stock. Their offspring were also victims. Human
sacrifices were offered to the Earth Goddess by tribes, branches of
tribes, or villages, both at periodical festivals and on
extraordinary occasions. The periodical sacrifices were generally
so arranged by tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a
family was enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of
flesh for his fields, generally about the time when his chief crop
was laid down.
The mode of performing these tribal sacrifices was as follows.
Ten or twelve days before the sacrifice, the victim was devoted by
cutting off his hair, which, until then, had been kept unshorn.
Crowds of men and women assembled to witness the sacrifice; none
might be excluded, since the sacrifice was declared to be for all
mankind. It was preceded by several days of wild revelry and gross
debauchery. On the day before the sacrifice the victim, dressed in
a new garment, was led forth from the village in solemn procession,
with music and dancing, to the Meriah grove, a clump of high forest
trees standing a little way from the village and untouched by the
axe. There they tied him to a post, which was sometimes placed
between two plants of the sankissar shrub. He was then anointed
with oil, ghee, and turmeric, and adorned with flowers; and
“a species of reverence, which it is not easy to distinguish
from adoration,” was paid to him throughout the day. A great
struggle now arose to obtain the smallest relic from his person; a
particle of the turmeric paste with which he was smeared, or a drop
of his spittle, was esteemed of sovereign virtue, especially by the
women. The crowd danced round the post to music, and addressing the
earth, said, “O God, we offer this sacrifice to you; give us
good crops, seasons, and health”; then speaking to the victim
they said, “We bought you with a price, and did not seize
you; now we sacrifice you according to custom, and no sin rests
with us.”
On the last morning the orgies, which had been scarcely
interrupted during the night, were resumed, and continued till
noon, when they ceased, and the assembly proceeded to consummate
the sacrifice. The victim was again anointed with oil, and each
person touched the anointed part, and wiped the oil on his own
head. In some places they took the victim in procession round the
village, from door to door, where some plucked hair from his head,
and others begged for a drop of his spittle, with which they
anointed their heads. As the victim might not be bound nor make any
show of resistance, the bones of his arms and, if necessary, his
legs were broken; but often this precaution was rendered
unnecessary by stupefying him with opium. The mode of putting him
to death varied in different places. One of the commonest modes
seems to have been strangulation, or squeezing to death. The branch
of a green tree was cleft several feet down the middle; the
victim’s neck (in other places, his chest) was inserted in
the cleft, which the priest, aided by his assistants, strove with
all his force to close. Then he wounded the victim slightly with
his axe, whereupon the crowd rushed at the wretch and hewed the
flesh from the bones, leaving the head and bowels untouched.
Sometimes he was cut up alive. In Chinna Kimedy he was dragged
along the fields, surrounded by the crowd, who, avoiding his head
and intestines, hacked the flesh from his body with their knives
till he died. Another very common mode of sacrifice in the same
district was to fasten the victim to the proboscis of a wooden
elephant, which revolved on a stout post, and, as it whirled round,
the crowd cut the flesh from the victim while life remained. In
some villages Major Campbell found as many as fourteen of these
wooden elephants, which had been used at sacrifices. In one
district the victim was put to death slowly by fire. A low stage
was formed, sloping on either side like a roof; upon it they laid
the victim, his limbs wound round with cords to confine his
struggles. Fires were then lighted and hot brands applied, to make
him roll up and down the slopes of the stage as long as possible;
for the more tears he shed the more abundant would be the supply of
rain. Next day the body was cut to pieces.
The flesh cut from the victim was instantly taken home by the
persons who had been deputed by each village to bring it. To secure
its rapid arrival, it was sometimes forwarded by relays of men, and
conveyed with postal fleetness fifty or sixty miles. In each
village all who stayed at home fasted rigidly until the flesh
arrived. The bearer deposited it in the place of public assembly,
where it was received by the priest and the heads of families. The
priest divided it into two portions, one of which he offered to the
Earth Goddess by burying it in a hole in the ground with his back
turned, and without looking. Then each man added a little earth to
bury it, and the priest poured water on the spot from a hill gourd.
The other portion of flesh he divided into as many shares as there
were heads of houses present. Each head of a house rolled his shred
of flesh in leaves, and buried it in his favourite field, placing
it in the earth behind his back without looking. In some places
each man carried his portion of flesh to the stream which watered
his fields, and there hung it on a pole. For three days thereafter
no house was swept; and, in one district, strict silence was
observed, no fire might be given out, no wood cut, and no strangers
received. The remains of the human victim (namely, the head,
bowels, and bones) were watched by strong parties the night after
the sacrifice; and next morning they were burned, along with a
whole sheep, on a funeral pile. The ashes were scattered over the
fields, laid as paste over the houses and granaries, or mixed with
the new corn to preserve it from insects. Sometimes, however, the
head and bones were buried, not burnt. After the suppression of the
human sacrifices, inferior victims were substituted in some places;
for instance, in the capital of Chinna Kimedy a goat took the place
of the human victim. Others sacrifice a buffalo. They tie it to a
wooden post in a sacred grove, dance wildly round it with
brandished knives, then, falling on the living animal, hack it to
shreds and tatters in a few minutes, fighting and struggling with
each other for every particle of flesh. As soon as a man has
secured a piece he makes off with it at full speed to bury it in
his fields, according to ancient custom, before the sun has set,
and as some of them have far to go they must run very fast. All the
women throw clods of earth at the rapidly retreating figures of the
men, some of them taking very good aim. Soon the sacred grove, so
lately a scene of tumult, is silent and deserted except for a few
people who remain to guard all that is left of the buffalo, to wit,
the head, the bones, and the stomach, which are burned with
ceremony at the foot of the stake.
In these Khond sacrifices the Meriahs are represented by our
authorities as victims offered to propitiate the Earth Goddess. But
from the treatment of the victims both before and after death it
appears that the custom cannot be explained as merely a
propitiatory sacrifice. A part of the flesh certainly was offered
to the Earth Goddess, but the rest was buried by each householder
in his fields, and the ashes of the other parts of the body were
scattered over the fields, laid as paste on the granaries, or mixed
with the new corn. These latter customs imply that to the body of
the Meriah there was ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of making
the crops to grow, quite independent of the indirect efficacy which
it might have as an offering to secure the good-will of the deity.
In other words, the flesh and ashes of the victim were believed to
be endowed with a magical or physical power of fertilising the
land. The same intrinsic power was ascribed to the blood and tears
of the Meriah, his blood causing the redness of the turmeric and
his tears producing rain; for it can hardly be doubted that,
originally at least, the tears were supposed to bring down the
rain, not merely to prognosticate it. Similarly the custom of
pouring water on the buried flesh of the Meriah was no doubt a
rain-charm. Again, magical power as an attribute of the Meriah
appears in the sovereign virtue believed to reside in anything that
came from his person, as his hair or spittle. The ascription of
such power to the Meriah indicates that he was much more than a
mere man sacrificed to propitiate a deity. Once more, the extreme
reverence paid him points to the same conclusion. Major Campbell
speaks of the Meriah as “being regarded as something more
than mortal,” and Major Macpherson says, “A species of
reverence, which it is not easy to distinguish from adoration, is
paid to him.” In short, the Meriah seems to have been
regarded as divine. As such, he may originally have represented the
Earth Goddess or, perhaps, a deity of vegetation; though in later
times he came to be regarded rather as a victim offered to a deity
than as himself an incarnate god. This later view of the Meriah as
a victim rather than a divinity may perhaps have received undue
emphasis from the European writers who have described the Khond
religion. Habituated to the later idea of sacrifice as an offering
made to a god for the purpose of conciliating his favour, European
observers are apt to interpret all religious slaughter in this
sense, and to suppose that wherever such slaughter takes place,
there must necessarily be a deity to whom the carnage is believed
by the slayers to be acceptable. Thus their preconceived ideas may
unconsciously colour and warp their descriptions of savage
rites.
The same custom of killing the representative of a god, of which
strong traces appear in the Khond sacrifices, may perhaps be
detected in some of the other human sacrifices described above.
Thus the ashes of the slaughtered Marimo were scattered over the
fields; the blood of the Brahman lad was put on the crop and field;
the flesh of the slain Naga was stowed in the corn-bin; and the
blood of the Sioux girl was allowed to trickle on the seed. Again,
the identification of the victim with the corn, in other words, the
view that he is an embodiment or spirit of the corn, is brought out
in the pains which seem to be taken to secure a physical
correspondence between him and the natural object which he embodies
or represents. Thus the Mexicans killed young victims for the young
corn and old ones for the ripe corn; the Marimos sacrifice, as
“seed,” a short, fat man, the shortness of his stature
corresponding to that of the young corn, his fatness to the
condition which it is desired that the crops may attain; and the
Pawnees fattened their victims probably with the same view. Again,
the identification of the victim with the corn comes out in the
African custom of killing him with spades and hoes, and the Mexican
custom of grinding him, like corn, between two stones.
One more point in these savage customs deserves to be noted. The
Pawnee chief devoured the heart of the Sioux girl, and the Marimos
and Gonds ate the victim’s flesh. If, as we suppose, the
victim was regarded as divine, it follows that in eating his flesh
his worshippers believed themselves to be partaking of the body of
their god.
4. The Corn-spirit slain in his Human Representatives
THE BARBAROUS rites just described offer analogies to the
harvest customs of Europe. Thus the fertilising virtue ascribed to
the corn-spirit is shown equally in the savage custom of mixing the
victim’s blood or ashes with the seed-corn and the European
custom of mixing the grain from the last sheaf with the young corn
in spring. Again, the identification of the person with the corn
appears alike in the savage custom of adapting the age and stature
of the victim to the age and stature, whether actual or expected,
of the crop; in the Scotch and Styrian rules that when the
corn-spirit is conceived as the Maiden the last corn shall be cut
by a young maiden, but when it is conceived as the Corn-mother it
shall be cut by an old woman; in the warning given to old women in
Lorraine to save themselves when the Old Woman is being killed,
that is, when the last corn is being threshed; and in the Tyrolese
expectation that if the man who gives the last stroke at threshing
is tall, the next year’s corn will be tall also. Further, the
same identification is implied in the savage custom of killing the
representative of the corn-spirit with hoes or spades or by
grinding him between stones, and in the European custom of
pretending to kill him with the scythe or the flail. Once more the
Khond custom of pouring water on the buried flesh of the victim is
parallel to the European customs of pouring water on the personal
representative of the corn-spirit or plunging him into a stream.
Both the Khond and the European customs are rain-charms.
To return now to the Lityerses story. It has been shown that in
rude society human beings have been commonly killed to promote the
growth of the crops. There is therefore no improbability in the
supposition that they may once have been killed for a like purpose
in Phrygia and Europe; and when Phrygian legend and European
folk-custom, closely agreeing with each other, point to the
conclusion that men were so slain, we are bound, provisionally at
least, to accept the conclusion. Further, both the Lityerses story
and European harvest-customs agree in indicating that the victim
was put to death as a representative of the corn-spirit, and this
indication is in harmony with the view which some savages appear to
take of the victim slain to make the crops flourish. On the whole,
then, we may fairly suppose that both in Phrygia and in Europe the
representative of the corn-spirit was annually killed upon the
harvest-field. Grounds have been already shown for believing that
similarly in Europe the representative of the tree-spirit was
annually slain. The proofs of these two remarkable and closely
analogous customs are entirely independent of each other. Their
coincidence seems to furnish fresh presumption in favour of
both.
To the question, How was the representative of the corn-spirit
chosen? one answer has been already given. Both the Lityerses story
and European folk-custom show that passing strangers were regarded
as manifestations of the corn-spirit escaping from the cut or
threshed corn, and as such were seized and slain. But this is not
the only answer which the evidence suggests. According to the
Phrygian legend the victims of Lityerses were not simply passing
strangers, but persons whom he had vanquished in a reaping contest
and afterwards wrapt up in corn-sheaves and beheaded. This suggests
that the representative of the corn-spirit may have been selected
by means of a competition on the harvest-field, in which the
vanquished competitor was compelled to accept the fatal honour. The
supposition is countenanced by European harvest-customs. We have
seen that in Europe there is sometimes a contest amongst the
reapers to avoid being last, and that the person who is vanquished
in this competition, that is, who cuts the last corn, is often
roughly handled. It is true we have not found that a pretence is
made of killing him; but on the other hand we have found that a
pretence is made of killing the man who gives the last stroke at
threshing, that is, who is vanquished in the threshing contest.
Now, since it is in the character of representative of the
corn-spirit that the thresher of the last corn is slain in mimicry,
and since the same representative character attaches (as we have
seen) to the cutter and binder as well as to the thresher of the
last corn, and since the same repugnance is evinced by harvesters
to be last in any one of these labours, we may conjecture that a
pretence has been commonly made of killing the reaper and binder as
well as the thresher of the last corn, and that in ancient times
this killing was actually carried out. This conjecture is
corroborated by the common superstition that whoever cuts the last
corn must die soon. Sometimes it is thought that the person who
binds the last sheaf on the field will die in the course of next
year. The reason for fixing on the reaper, binder, or thresher of
the last corn as the representative of the corn-spirit may be this.
The corn-spirit is supposed to lurk as long as he can in the corn,
retreating before the reapers, the binders, and the threshers at
their work. But when he is forcibly expelled from his refuge in the
last corn cut or the last sheaf bound or the last grain threshed,
he necessarily assumes some other form than that of the
corn-stalks, which had hitherto been his garment or body. And what
form can the expelled corn-spirit assume more naturally than that
of the person who stands nearest to the corn from which he (the
corn-spirit) has just been expelled? But the person in question is
necessarily the reaper, binder, or thresher of the last corn. He or
she, therefore, is seized and treated as the corn-spirit
himself.
Thus the person who was killed on the harvest-field as the
representative of the corn-spirit may have been either a passing
stranger or the harvester who was last at reaping, binding, or
threshing. But there is a third possibility, to which ancient
legend and modern folk-custom alike point. Lityerses not only put
strangers to death; he was himself slain, and apparently in the
same way as he had slain others, namely, by being wrapt in a
corn-sheaf, beheaded, and cast into the river; and it is implied
that this happened to Lityerses on his own land. Similarly in
modern harvest-customs the pretence of killing appears to be
carried out quite as often on the person of the master (farmer or
squire) as on that of strangers. Now when we remember that
Lityerses was said to have been a son of the King of Phrygia, and
that in one account he is himself called a king, and when we
combine with this the tradition that he was put to death,
apparently as a representative of the corn-spirit, we are led to
conjecture that we have here another trace of the custom of
annually slaying one of those divine or priestly kings who are
known to have held ghostly sway in many parts of Western Asia and
particularly in Phrygia. The custom appears, as we have seen, to
have been so far modified in places that the king’s son was
slain in the king’s stead. Of the custom thus modified the
story of Lityerses would be, in one version at least, a
reminiscence.
Turning now to the relation of the Phrygian Lityerses to the
Phrygian Attis, it may be remembered that at Pessinus—the
seat of a priestly kingship—the high-priest appears to have
been annually slain in the character of Attis, a god of vegetation,
and that Attis was described by an ancient authority as “a
reaped ear of corn.” Thus Attis, as an embodiment of the
corn-spirit, annually slain in the person of his representative,
might be thought to be ultimately identical with Lityerses, the
latter being simply the rustic prototype out of which the state
religion of Attis was developed. It may have been so; but, on the
other hand, the analogy of European folk-custom warns us that
amongst the same people two distinct deities of vegetation may have
their separate personal representatives, both of whom are slain in
the character of gods at different times of the year. For in
Europe, as we have seen, it appears that one man was commonly slain
in the character of the tree-spirit in spring, and another in the
character of the corn-spirit in autumn. It may have been so in
Phrygia also. Attis was especially a tree-god, and his connexion
with corn may have been only such an extension of the power of a
tree-spirit as is indicated in customs like the Harvest-May. Again,
the representative of Attis appears to have been slain in spring;
whereas Lityerses must have been slain in summer or autumn,
according to the time of the harvest in Phrygia. On the whole,
then, while we are not justified in regarding Lityerses as the
prototype of Attis, the two may be regarded as parallel products of
the same religious idea, and may have stood to each other as in
Europe the Old Man of harvest stands to the Wild Man, the Leaf Man,
and so forth, of spring. Both were spirits or deities of
vegetation, and the personal representatives of both were annually
slain. But whereas the Attis worship became elevated into the
dignity of a state religion and spread to Italy, the rites of
Lityerses seem never to have passed the limits of their native
Phrygia, and always retained their character of rustic ceremonies
performed by peasants on the harvest-field. At most a few villages
may have clubbed together, as amongst the Khonds, to procure a
human victim to be slain as representative of the corn-spirit for
their common benefit. Such victims may have been drawn from the
families of priestly kings or kinglets, which would account for the
legendary character of Lityerses as the son of a Phrygian king or
as himself a king. When villages did not so club together, each
village or farm may have procured its own representative of the
corn-spirit by dooming to death either a passing stranger or the
harvester who cut, bound, or threshed the last sheaf. Perhaps in
the olden time the practice of head-hunting as a means of promoting
the growth of the corn may have been as common among the rude
inhabitants of Europe and Western Asia as it still is, or was till
lately, among the primitive agricultural tribes of Assam, Burma,
the Philippine Islands, and the Indian Archipelago. It is hardly
necessary to add that in Phrygia, as in Europe, the old barbarous
custom of killing a man on the harvest-field or the threshing-floor
had doubtless passed into a mere pretence long before the classical
era, and was probably regarded by the reapers and threshers
themselves as no more than a rough jest which the license of a
harvest-home permitted them to play off on a passing stranger, a
comrade, or even on their master himself.
I have dwelt on the Lityerses song at length because it affords
so many points of comparison with European and savage folk-custom.
The other harvest songs of Western Asia and Egypt, to which
attention has been called above, may now be dismissed much more
briefly. The similarity of the Bithynian Bormus to the Phrygian
Lityerses helps to bear out the interpretation which has been given
of the latter. Bormus, whose death or rather disappearance was
annually mourned by the reapers in a plaintive song, was, like
Lityerses, a king’s son or at least the son of a wealthy and
distinguished man. The reapers whom he watched were at work on his
own fields, and he disappeared in going to fetch water for them;
according to one version of the story he was carried off by the
nymphs, doubtless the nymphs of the spring or pool or river whither
he went to draw water. Viewed in the light of the Lityerses story
and of European folk-custom, this disappearance of Bormus may be a
reminiscence of the custom of binding the farmer himself in a
corn-sheaf and throwing him into the water. The mournful strain
which the reapers sang was probably a lamentation over the death of
the corn-spirit, slain either in the cut corn or in the person of a
human representative; and the call which they addressed to him may
have been a prayer that he might return in fresh vigour next
year.
The Phoenician Linus song was sung at the vintage, at least in
the west of Asia Minor, as we learn from Homer; and this, combined
with the legend of Syleus, suggests that in ancient times passing
strangers were handled by vintagers and vine-diggers in much the
same way as they are said to have been handled by the reaper
Lityerses. The Lydian Syleus, so ran the legend, compelled
passers-by to dig for him in his vineyard, till Hercules came and
killed him and dug up his vines by the roots. This seems to be the
outline of a legend like that of Lityerses; but neither ancient
writers nor modern folk-custom enable us to fill in the details.
But, further, the Linus song was probably sung also by Phoenician
reapers, for Herodotus compares it to the Maneros song, which, as
we have seen, was a lament raised by Egyptian reapers over the cut
corn. Further, Linus was identified with Adonis, and Adonis has
some claims to be regarded as especially a corn-deity. Thus the
Linus lament, as sung at harvest, would be identical with the
Adonis lament; each would be the lamentation raised by reapers over
the dead spirit of the corn. But whereas Adonis, like Attis, grew
into a stately figure of mythology, adored and mourned in splendid
cities far beyond the limits of his Phoenician home, Linus appears
to have remained a simple ditty sung by reapers and vintagers among
the corn-sheaves and the vines. The analogy of Lityerses and of
folk-custom, both European and savage, suggests that in Phoenicia
the slain corn-spirit—the dead Adonis—may formerly have
been represented by a human victim; and this suggestion is possibly
supported by the Harran legend that Tammuz (Adonis) was slain by
his cruel lord, who ground his bones in a mill and scattered them
to the wind. For in Mexico, as we have seen, the human victim at
harvest was crushed between two stones; and both in Africa and
India the ashes or other remains of the victim were scattered over
the fields. But the Harran legend may be only a mythical way of
expressing the grinding of corn in the mill and the scattering of
the seed. It seems worth suggesting that the mock king who was
annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacaea on the
sixteenth day of the month Lous may have represented Tammuz
himself. For the historian Berosus, who records the festival and
its date, probably used the Macedonian calendar, since he dedicated
his history to Antiochus Soter; and in his day the Macedonian month
Lous appears to have corresponded to the Babylonian month Tammuz.
If this conjecture is right, the view that the mock king at the
Sacaea was slain in the character of a god would be
established.
There is a good deal more evidence that in Egypt the slain
corn-spirit—the dead Osiris—was represented by a human
victim, whom the reapers slew on the harvest-field, mourning his
death in a dirge, to which the Greeks, through a verbal
misunderstanding, gave the name of Maneros. For the legend of
Busiris seems to preserve a reminiscence of human sacrifices once
offered by the Egyptians in connexion with the worship of Osiris.
Busiris was said to have been an Egyptian king who sacrificed all
strangers on the altar of Zeus. The origin of the custom was traced
to a dearth which afflicted the land of Egypt for nine years. A
Cyprian seer informed Busiris that the dearth would cease if a man
were annually sacrificed to Zeus. So Busiris instituted the
sacrifice. But when Hercules came to Egypt, and was being dragged
to the altar to be sacrificed, he burst his bonds and slew Busiris
and his son. Here then is a legend that in Egypt a human victim was
annually sacrificed to prevent the failure of the crops, and a
belief is implied that an omission of the sacrifice would have
entailed a recurrence of that infertility which it was the object
of the sacrifice to prevent. So the Pawnees, as we have seen,
believed that an omission of the human sacrifice at planting would
have been followed by a total failure of their crops. The name
Busiris was in reality the name of a city, pe-Asar,
“the house of Osiris,” the city being so called because
it contained the grave of Osiris. Indeed some high modern
authorities believe that Busiris was the original home of Osiris,
from which his worship spread to other parts of Egypt. The human
sacrifice were said to have been offered at his grave, and the
victims were red-haired men, whose ashes were scattered abroad by
means of winnowing-fans. This tradition of human sacrifices offered
at the tomb of Osiris is confirmed by the evidence of the
monuments.
In the light of the foregoing discussion the Egyptian tradition
of Busiris admits of a consistent and fairly probable explanation.
Osiris, the corn-spirit, was annually represented at harvest by a
stranger, whose red hair made him a suitable representative of the
ripe corn. This man, in his representative character, was slain on
the harvest-field, and mourned by the reapers, who prayed at the
same time that the corn-spirit might revive and return
(mââ-ne-rha, Maneros) with renewed vigour in the following
year. Finally, the victim, or some part of him, was burned, and the
ashes scattered by winnowing-fans over the fields to fertilise
them. Here the choice of the victim on the ground of his
resemblance to the corn which he was to represent agrees with the
Mexican and African customs already described. Similarly the woman
who died in the character of the Corn-mother at the Mexican
midsummer sacrifice had her face painted red and yellow in token of
the colours of the corn, and she wore a pasteboard mitre surmounted
by waving plumes in imitation of the tassel of the maize. On the
other hand, at the festival of the Goddess of the White Maize the
Mexicans sacrificed lepers. The Romans sacrificed red-haired
puppies in spring to avert the supposed blighting influence of the
Dog-star, believing that the crops would thus grow ripe and ruddy.
The heathen of Harran offered to the sun, moon, and planets human
victims who were chosen on the ground of their supposed resemblance
to the heavenly bodies to which they were sacrificed; for example,
the priests, clothed in red and smeared with blood, offered a
red-haired, red-cheeked man to “the red planet Mars” in
a temple which was painted red and draped with red hangings. These
and the like cases of assimilating the victim to the god, or to the
natural phenomenon which he represents, are based ultimately on the
principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, the notion being that
the object aimed at will be most readily attained by means of a
sacrifice which resembles the effect that it is designed to bring
about.
The story that the fragments of Osiris’s body were
scattered up and down the land, and buried by Isis on the spots
where they lay, may very well be a reminiscence of a custom, like
that observed by the Khonds, of dividing the human victim in pieces
and burying the pieces, often at intervals of many miles from each
other, in the fields.
Thus, if I am right, the key to the mysteries of Osiris is
furnished by the melancholy cry of the Egyptian reapers, which down
to Roman times could be heard year after year sounding across the
fields, announcing the death of the corn-spirit, the rustic
prototype of Osiris. Similar cries, as we have seen, were also
heard on all the harvest-fields of Western Asia. By the ancients
they are spoken of as songs; but to judge from the analysis of the
names Linus and Maneros, they probably consisted only of a few
words uttered in a prolonged musical note which could be heard at a
great distance. Such sonorous and long-drawn cries, raised by a
number of strong voices in concert, must have had a striking
effect, and could hardly fail to arrest the attention of any
wayfarer who happened to be within hearing. The sounds, repeated
again and again, could probably be distinguished with tolerable
ease even at a distance; but to a Greek traveller in Asia or Egypt
the foreign words would commonly convey no meaning, and he might
take them, not unnaturally, for the name of some one (Maneros,
Linus, Lityerses, Bormus) upon whom the reapers were calling. And
if his journey led him through more countries than one, as Bithynia
and Phrygia, or Phoenicia and Egypt, while the corn was being
reaped, he would have an opportunity of comparing the various
harvest cries of the different peoples. Thus we can readily
understand why these harvest cries were so often noted and compared
with each other by the Greeks. Whereas, if they had been regular
songs, they could not have been heard at such distances, and
therefore could not have attracted the attention of so many
travellers; and, moreover, even if the wayfarer were within hearing
of them, he could not so easily have picked out the words.
Down to recent times Devonshire reapers uttered cries of the
same sort, and performed on the field a ceremony exactly analogous
to that in which, if I am not mistaken, the rites of Osiris
originated. The cry and the ceremony are thus described by an
observer who wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century.
“After the wheat is all cut, on most farms in the north of
Devon, the harvest people have a custom of ‘crying the
neck.’ I believe that this practice is seldom omitted on any
large farm in that part of the country. It is done in this way. An
old man, or some one else well acquainted with the ceremonies used
on the occasion (when the labourers are reaping the last field of
wheat), goes round to the shocks and sheaves, and picks out a
little bundle of all the best ears he can find; this bundle he ties
up very neat and trim, and plats and arranges the straws very
tastefully. This is called ‘the neck’ of wheat, or
wheaten-ears. After the field is cut out, and the pitcher once more
circulated, the reapers, binders, and the women stand round in a
circle. The person with ‘the neck’ stands in the
centre, grasping it with both hands. He first stoops and holds it
near the ground, and all the men forming the ring take off their
hats, stooping and holding them with both hands towards the ground.
They then all begin at once in a very prolonged and harmonious tone
to cry ‘The neck!’ at the same time slowly raising
themselves upright, and elevating their arms and hats above their
heads; the person with ‘the neck’ also raising it on
high. This is done three times. They then change their cry to
‘Wee yen!’—‘Way yen!’—which
they sound in the same prolonged and slow manner as before, with
singular harmony and effect, three times. This last cry is
accompanied by the same movements of the body and arms as in crying
‘the neck.’ … After having thus repeated
‘the neck’ three times, and ‘wee yen,’ or
‘way yen’ as often, they all burst out into a kind of
loud and joyous laugh, flinging up their hats and caps into the
air, capering about and perhaps kissing the girls. One of them then
gets ‘the neck’ and runs as hard as he can down to the
farmhouse, where the dairymaid, or one of the young female
domestics, stands at the door prepared with a pail of water. If he
who holds ‘the neck’ can manage to get into the house,
in any way unseen, or openly, by any other way than the door at
which the girl stands with the pail of water, then he may lawfully
kiss her; but, if otherwise, he is regularly soused with the
contents of the bucket. On a fine still autumn evening the
‘crying of the neck’ has a wonderful effect at a
distance, far finer than that of the Turkish muezzin, which Lord
Byron eulogises so much, and which he says is preferable to all the
bells of Christendom. I have once or twice heard upwards of twenty
men cry it, and sometimes joined by an equal number of female
voices. About three years back, on some high grounds, where our
people were harvesting, I heard six or seven ‘necks’
cried in one night, although I know that some of them were four
miles off. They are heard through the quiet evening air at a
considerable distance sometimes.” Again, Mrs. Bray tells how,
travelling in Devonshire, “she saw a party of reapers
standing in a circle on a rising ground, holding their sickles
aloft. One in the middle held up some ears of corn tied together
with flowers, and the party shouted three times (what she writes
as) ‘Arnack, arnack, arnack, we haven, we
haven, we haven.’ They went home,
accompanied by women and children carrying boughs of flowers,
shouting and singing. The manservant who attended Mrs. Bray said
‘it was only the people making their games, as they always
did, to the spirit of harvest.’” Here, as Miss
Burne remarks, “‘arnack, we haven!’ is obviously
in the Devon dialect, ‘a neck (or nack)! we have
un!’”
Another account of this old custom, written at Truro in 1839,
runs thus: “Now, when all the corn was cut at Heligan, the
farming men and maidens come in front of the house, and bring with
them a small sheaf of corn, the last that has been cut, and this is
adorned with ribbons and flowers, and one part is tied quite tight,
so as to look like a neck. Then they cry out ‘Our (my) side,
my side,’ as loud as they can; then the dairymaid gives the
neck to the head farming-man. He takes it, and says, very loudly
three times, ‘I have him, I have him, I have him.’ Then
another farming-man shouts very loudly, ‘What have ye? what
have ye? what have ye?’ Then the first says, ‘A neck, a
neck, a neck.’ And when he has said this, all the people make
a very great shouting. This they do three times, and after one
famous shout go away and eat supper, and dance, and sing
songs.” According to another account, “all went out to
the field when the last corn was cut, the ‘neck’ was
tied with ribbons and plaited, and they danced round it, and
carried it to the great kitchen, where by-and-by the supper was.
The words were as given in the previous account, and ‘Hip,
hip, hack, heck, I have ’ee, I have ’ee, I have
‘ee.’ It was hung up in the hall.” Another
account relates that one of the men rushed from the field with the
last sheaf, while the rest pursued him with vessels of water, which
they tried to throw over the sheaf before it could be brought into
the barn.
In the foregoing customs a particular bunch of ears, generally
the last left standing, is conceived as the neck of the
corn-spirit, who is consequently beheaded when the bunch is cut
down. Similarly in Shropshire the name “neck,” or
“the gander’s neck,” used to be commonly given to
the last handful of ears left standing in the middle of the field
when all the rest of the corn was cut. It was plaited together, and
the reapers, standing ten or twenty paces off, threw their sickles
at it. Whoever cut it through was said to have cut off the
gander’s neck. The “neck” was taken to the
farmer’s wife, who was supposed to keep it in the house for
good luck till the next harvest came round. Near Trèves, the man
who reaps the last standing corn “cuts the goat’s neck
off.” At Faslane, on the Gareloch (Dumbartonshire), the last
handful of standing corn was sometimes called the
“head.” At Aurich, in East Friesland, the man who reaps
the last corn “cuts the hare’s tail off.” In
mowing down the last corner of a field French reapers sometimes
call out, “We have the cat by the tail.” In Bresse
(Bourgogne) the last sheaf represented the fox. Beside it a score
of ears were left standing to form the tail, and each reaper, going
back some paces, threw his sickle at it. He who succeeded in
severing it “cut off the fox’s tail,” and a cry
of “You cou cou!” was raised in his honour.
These examples leave no room to doubt the meaning of the Devonshire
and Cornish expression “the neck,” as applied to the
last sheaf. The corn-spirit is conceived in human or animal form,
and the last standing corn is part of its body—its neck, its
head, or its tail. Sometimes, as we have seen, the last corn is
regarded as the navel-string. Lastly, the Devonshire custom of
drenching with water the person who brings in “the
neck” is a raincharm, such as we have had many examples of.
Its parallel in the mysteries of Osiris was the custom of pouring
water on the image of Osiris or on the person who represented
him.
XLVIII. The Corn-Spirit as an Animal
1. Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit
IN SOME of the examples which I have cited to establish the
meaning of the term “neck” as applied to the last
sheaf, the corn-spirit appears in animal form as a gander, a goat,
a hare, a cat, and a fox. This introduces us to a new aspect of the
corn-spirit, which we must now examine. By doing so we shall not
only have fresh examples of killing the god, but may hope also to
clear up some points which remain obscure in the myths and worship
of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Demeter, and Virbius.
Amongst the many animals whose forms the corn-spirit is supposed
to take are the wolf, dog, hare, fox, cock, goose, quail, cat,
goat, cow (ox, bull), pig, and horse. In one or other of these
shapes the corn-spirit is often believed to be present in the corn,
and to be caught or killed in the last sheaf. As the corn is being
cut the animal flees before the reapers, and if a reaper is taken
ill on the field, he is supposed to have stumbled unwittingly on
the corn-spirit, who has thus punished the profane intruder. It is
said “the Rye-wolf has got hold of him,” “the
Harvest-goat has given him a push.” The person who cuts the
last corn or binds the last sheaf gets the name of the animal, as
the Rye-wolf, the Rye-sow, the Oats-goat, and so forth, and retains
the name sometimes for a year. Also the animal is frequently
represented by a puppet made out of the last sheaf or of wood,
flowers, and so on, which is carried home amid rejoicings on the
last harvest-waggon. Even where the last sheaf is not made up in
animal shape, it is often called the Rye-wolf, the Hare, Goat, and
so forth. Generally each kind of crop is supposed to have its
special animal, which is caught in the last sheaf, and called the
Rye-wolf, the Barley-wolf, the Oats-wolf, the Pea-wolf, or the
Potato-wolf, according to the crop; but sometimes the figure of the
animal is only made up once for all at getting in the last crop of
the whole harvest. Sometimes the creature is believed to be killed
by the last stroke of the sickle or scythe. But oftener it is
thought to live so long as there is corn still unthreshed, and to
be caught in the last sheaf threshed. Hence the man who gives the
last stroke with the flail is told that he has got the Corn-sow,
the Threshing-dog, or the like. When the threshing is finished, a
puppet is made in the form of the animal, and this is carried by
the thresher of the last sheaf to a neighbouring farm, where the
threshing is still going on. This again shows that the corn-spirit
is believed to live wherever the corn is still being threshed.
Sometimes the thresher of the last sheaf himself represents the
animal; and if the people of the next farm, who are still
threshing, catch him, they treat him like the animal he represents,
by shutting him up in the pig-sty, calling him with the cries
commonly addressed to pigs, and so forth. These general statements
will now be illustrated by examples.
2. The Corn-spirit as a Wolf or a Dog
WE begin with the corn-spirit conceived as a wolf or a dog. This
conception is common in France, Germany, and Slavonic countries.
Thus, when the wind sets the corn in wave-like motion the peasants
often say, “The Wolf is going over, or through, the
corn,” “the Rye-wolf is rushing over the field,”
“the Wolf is in the corn,” “the mad Dog is in the
corn,” “the big Dog is there.” When children wish
to go into the corn-fields to pluck ears or gather the blue
corn-flowers, they are warned not to do so, for “the big Dog
sits in the corn,” or “the Wolf sits in the corn, and
will tear you in pieces,” “the Wolf will eat
you.” The wolf against whom the children are warned is not a
common wolf, for he is often spoken of as the Corn-wolf, Rye-wolf,
or the like; thus they say, “The Rye-wolf will come and eat
you up, children,” “the Rye-wolf will carry you
off,” and so forth. Still he has all the outward appearance
of a wolf. For in the neighbourhood of Feilenhof (East Prussia),
when a wolf was seen running through a field, the peasants used to
watch whether he carried his tail in the air or dragged it on the
ground. If he dragged it on the ground, they went after him, and
thanked him for bringing them a blessing, and even set tit-bits
before him. But if he carried his tail high, they cursed him and
tried to kill him. Here the wolf is the corn-spirit whose
fertilising power is in his tail.
Both dog and wolf appear as embodiments of the corn-spirit in
harvest-customs. Thus in some parts of Silesia the person who cuts
or binds the last sheaf is called the Wheat-dog or the Peas-pug.
But it is in the harvest-customs of the north-east of France that
the idea of the Corn-dog comes out most clearly. Thus when a
harvester, through sickness, weariness, or laziness, cannot or will
not keep up with the reaper in front of him, they say, “The
White Dog passed near him,” “he has the White
Bitch,” or “the White Bitch has bitten him. In the
Vosges the Harvest-May is called the “Dog of the
harvest,” and the person who cuts the last handful of hay or
wheat is said to “kill the Dog.” About
Lons-le-Saulnier, in the Jura, the last sheaf is called the Bitch.
In the neighbourhood of Verdun the regular expression for finishing
the reaping is, “They are going to kill the Dog”; and
at Epinal they say, according to the crop, “We will kill the
Wheat-dog, or the Rye-dog, or the Potato-dog.” In Lorraine it
is said of the man who cuts the last corn, “He is killing the
Dog of the harvest.” At Dux, in the Tyrol, the man who gives
the last stroke at threshing is said to “strike down the
Dog”; and at Ahnebergen, near Stade, he is called, according
to the crop, Corn-pug, Rye-pug, Wheat-pug.
So with the wolf. In Silesia, when the reapers gather round the
last patch of standing corn to reap it they are said to be about
“to catch the Wolf.” In various parts of Mecklenburg,
where the belief in the Corn-wolf is particularly prevalent, every
one fears to cut the last corn, because they say that the Wolf is
sitting in it; hence every reaper exerts himself to the utmost in
order not to be the last, and every woman similarly fears to bind
the last sheaf because “the Wolf is in it.” So both
among the reapers and the binders there is a competition not to be
the last to finish. And in Germany generally it appears to be a
common saying that “the Wolf sits in the last sheaf.”
In some places they call out to the reaper, “Beware of the
Wolf”; or they say, “He is chasing the Wolf out of the
corn.” In Mecklenburg the last bunch of standing corn is
itself commonly called the Wolf, and the man who reaps it
“has the Wolf,” the animal being described as the
Rye-wolf, the Wheat-wolf, the Barley-wolf, and so on according to
the particular crop. The reaper of the last corn is himself called
Wolf or the Rye-wolf, if the crop is rye, and in many parts of
Mecklenburg he has to support the character by pretending to bite
the other harvesters or by howling like a wolf. The last sheaf of
corn is also called the Wolf or the Rye-wolf or the Oats-wolf
according to the crop, and of the woman who binds it they say,
“The Wolf is biting her,” “She has the
Wolf,” “She must fetch the Wolf” (out of the
corn). Moreover, she herself is called Wolf; they cry out to her,
“Thou art the Wolf,” and she has to bear the name for a
whole year; sometimes, according to the crop, she is called the
Rye-wolf or the Potato-wolf. In the island of Rügen not only is the
woman who binds the last sheaf called Wolf, but when she comes home
she bites the lady of the house and the stewardess, for which she
receives a large piece of meat. Yet nobody likes to be the Wolf.
The same woman may be Rye-wolf, Wheat-wolf, and Oats-wolf, if she
happens to bind the last sheaf of rye, wheat, and oats. At Buir, in
the district of Cologne, it was formerly the custom to give to the
last sheaf the shape of a wolf. It was kept in the barn till all
the corn was threshed. Then it was brought to the farmer and he had
to sprinkle it with beer or brandy. At Brunshaupten in Mecklenburg
the young woman who bound the last sheaf of wheat used to take a
handful of stalks out of it and make “the Wheat-wolf”
with them; it was the figure of a wolf about two feet long and half
a foot high, the legs of the animal being represented by stiff
stalks and its tail and mane by wheat-ears. This Wheat-wolf she
carried back at the head of the harvesters to the village, where it
was set up on a high place in the parlour of the farm and remained
there for a long time. In many places the sheaf called the Wolf is
made up in human form and dressed in clothes. This indicates a
confusion of ideas between the corn-spirit conceived in human and
in animal form. Generally the Wolf is brought home on the last
waggon with joyful cries. Hence the last waggon-load itself
receives the name of the Wolf.
Again, the Wolf is supposed to hide himself amongst the cut corn
in the granary, until he is driven out of the last bundle by the
strokes of the flail. Hence at Wanzleben, near Magdeburg, after the
threshing the peasants go in procession, leading by a chain a man
who is enveloped in the threshed-out straw and is called the Wolf.
He represents the corn-spirit who has been caught escaping from the
threshed corn. In the district of Treves it is believed that the
Corn-wolf is killed at threshing. The men thresh the last sheaf
till it is reduced to chopped straw. In this way they think that
the Corn-wolf, who was lurking in the last sheaf, has been
certainly killed.
In France also the Corn-wolf appears at harvest. Thus they call
out to the reaper of the last corn, “You will catch the
Wolf.” Near Chambéry they form a ring round the last standing
corn, and cry, “The Wolf is in there.” In Finisterre,
when the reaping draws near an end, the harvesters cry,
“There is the Wolf; we will catch him.” Each takes a
swath to reap, and he who finishes first calls out,
“I’ve caught the Wolf.” In Guyenne, when the last
corn has been reaped, they lead a wether all round the field. It is
called “the Wolf of the field.” Its horns are decked
with a wreath of flowers and corn-ears, and its neck and body are
also encircled with garlands and ribbons. All the reapers march,
singing, behind it. Then it is killed on the field. In this part of
France the last sheaf is called the coujoulage, which, in
the patois, means a wether. Hence the killing of the wether
represents the death of the corn-spirit, considered as present in
the last sheaf; but two different conceptions of the
corn-spirit—as a wolf and as a wether—are mixed up
together.
Sometimes it appears to be thought that the Wolf, caught in the
last corn, lives during the winter in the farmhouse, ready to renew
his activity as corn-spirit in the spring. Hence at midwinter, when
the lengthening days begin to herald the approach of spring, the
Wolf makes his appearance once more. In Poland a man, with a
wolf’s skin thrown over his head, is led about at Christmas;
or a stuffed wolf is carried about by persons who collect money.
There are facts which point to an old custom of leading about a man
enveloped in leaves and called the Wolf, while his conductors
collected money.
3. The Corn-spirit as a Cock
ANOTHER form which the corn-spirit often assumes is that of a
cock. In Austria children are warned against straying in the
corn-fields, because the Corn-cock sits there, and will peck their
eyes out. In North Germany they say that “the Cock sits in
the last sheaf”; and at cutting the last corn the reapers
cry, “Now we will chase out the Cock.” When it is cut
they say, “We have caught the Cock.” At Braller, in
Transylvania, when the reapers come to the last patch of corn, they
cry, “Here we shall catch the Cock.” At Fürstenwalde,
when the last sheaf is about to be bound, the master releases a
cock, which he has brought in a basket, and lets it run over the
field. All the harvesters chase it till they catch it. Elsewhere
the harvesters all try to seize the last corn cut; he who succeeds
in grasping it must crow, and is called Cock. Among the Wends it is
or used to be customary for the farmer to hide a live cock under
the last sheaf as it lay on the field; and when the corn was being
gathered up, the harvester who lighted upon this sheaf had a right
to keep the cock, provided he could catch it. This formed the close
of the harvest-festival and was known as “the
Cock-catching,” and the beer which was served out to the
reapers at this time went by the name of “Cock-beer.”
The last sheaf is called Cock, Cock-sheaf, Harvest-cock,
Harvest-hen, Autumn-hen. A distinction is made between a
Wheat-cock, Bean-cock, and so on, according to the crop. At
Wünschensuhl, in Thüringen, the last sheaf is made into the shape
of a cock, and called the Harvest-cock. A figure of a cock, made of
wood, pasteboard, ears of corn, or flowers, is borne in front of
the harvest-waggon, especially in Westphalia, where the cock
carries in his beak fruits of the earth of all kinds. Sometimes the
image of the cock is fastened to the top of a May-tree on the last
harvest-waggon. Elsewhere a live cock, or a figure of one, is
attached to a harvest-crown and carried on a pole. In Galicia and
elsewhere this live cock is fastened to the garland of corn-ears or
flowers, which the leader of the women-reapers carries on her head
as she marches in front of the harvest procession. In Silesia a
live cock is presented to the master on a plate. The harvest-supper
is called Harvest-cock, Stubble-cock, etc., and a chief dish at it,
at least in some places, is a cock. If a waggoner upsets a
harvest-waggon, it is said that “he has spilt the
Harvest-cock,” and he loses the cock, that is, the
harvest-supper. The harvest-waggon, with the figure of the cock on
it, is driven round the farmhouse before it is taken to the barn.
Then the cock is nailed over or at the side of the house-door, or
on the gable, and remains there till next harvest. In East
Friesland the person who gives the last stroke at threshing is
called the Clucking-hen, and grain is strewed before him as if he
were a hen.
Again, the corn-spirit is killed in the form of a cock. In parts
of Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Picardy the reapers place a live
cock in the corn which is to be cut last, and chase it over the
field, or bury it up to the neck in the ground; afterwards they
strike off its head with a sickle or scythe. In many parts of
Westphalia, when the harvesters bring the wooden cock to the
farmer, he gives them a live cock, which they kill with whips or
sticks, or behead with an old sword, or throw into the barn to the
girls, or give to the mistress to cook. It the Harvest-cock has not
been spilt—that is, if no waggon has been upset—the
harvesters have the right to kill the farmyard cock by throwing
stones at it or beheading it. Where this custom has fallen into
disuse, it is still common for the farmer’s wife to make
cockie-leekie for the harvesters, and to show them the head of the
cock which has been killed for the soup. In the neighbourhood of
Klausenburg, Transylvania, a cock is buried on the harvest-field in
the earth, so that only its head appears. A young man then takes a
scythe and cuts off the cock’s head at a single sweep. If he
fails to do this, he is called the Red Cock for a whole year, and
people fear that next year’s crop will be bad. Near
Udvarhely, in Transylvania, a live cock is bound up in the last
sheaf and killed with a spit. It is then skinned. The flesh is
thrown away, but the skin and feathers are kept till next year; and
in spring the grain from the last sheaf is mixed with the feathers
of the cock and scattered on the field which is to be tilled.
Nothing could set in a clearer light the identification of the cock
with the spirit of the corn. By being tied up in the last sheaf and
killed, the cock is identified with the corn, and its death with
the cutting of the corn. By keeping its feathers till spring, then
mixing them with the seed-corn taken from the very sheaf in which
the bird had been bound, and scattering the feathers together with
the seed over the field, the identity of the bird with the corn is
again emphasised, and its quickening and fertilising power, as an
embodiment of the corn-spirit, is intimated in the plainest manner.
Thus the corn-spirit, in the form of a cock, is killed at harvest,
but rises to fresh life and activity in spring. Again, the
equivalence of the cock to the corn is expressed, hardly less
plainly, in the custom of burying the bird in the ground, and
cutting off its head (like the ears of corn) with the scythe.
4. The Corn-spirit as a Hare
ANOTHER common embodiment of the corn-spirit is the hare. In
Galloway the reaping of the last standing corn is called
“cutting the Hare.” The mode of cutting it is as
follows. When the rest of the corn has been reaped, a handful is
left standing to form the Hare. It is divided into three parts and
plaited, and the ears are tied in a knot. The reapers then retire a
few yards and each throws his or her sickle in turn at the Hare to
cut it down. It must be cut below the knot, and the reapers
continue to throw their sickles at it, one after the other, until
one of them succeeds in severing the stalks below the knot. The
Hare is then carried home and given to a maidservant in the
kitchen, who places it over the kitchen-door on the inside.
Sometimes the Hare used to be thus kept till the next harvest. In
the parish of Minnigaff, when the Hare was cut, the unmarried
reapers ran home with all speed, and the one who arrived first was
the first to be married. In Germany also one of the names for the
last sheaf is the Hare. Thus in some parts of Anhalt, when the corn
has been reaped and only a few stalks are left standing, they say,
“The Hare will soon come,” or the reapers cry to each
other, “Look how the Hare comes jumping out.” In East
Prussia they say that the Hare sits in the last patch of standing
corn, and must be chased out by the last reaper. The reapers hurry
with their work, each being anxious not to have “to chase out
the Hare”; for the man who does so, that is, who cuts the
last corn, is much laughed at. At Aurich, as we have seen, an
expression for cutting the last corn is “to cut off the
Hare’s tail.” “He is killing the Hare” is
commonly said of the man who cuts the last corn in Germany, Sweden,
Holland, France, and Italy. In Norway the man who is thus said to
“kill the Hare” must give “hare’s
blood,” in the form of brandy, to his fellows to drink. In
Lesbos, when the reapers are at work in two neighbouring fields,
each party tries to finish first in order to drive the Hare into
their neighbour’s field; the reapers who succeed in doing so
believe that next year the crop will be better. A small sheaf of
corn is made up and kept beside the holy picture till next
harvest.
5. The Corn-spirit as a Cat
AGAIN, the corn-spirit sometimes takes the form of a cat. Near
Kiel children are warned not to go into the corn-fields because
“the Cat sits there.” In the Eisenach Oberland they are
told “the Corn-cat will come and fetch you,” “the
Corn-cat goes in the corn.” In some parts of Silesia at
mowing the last corn they say, “The Cat is caught”; and
at threshing, the man who gives the last stroke is called the Cat.
In the neighbourhood of Lyons the last sheaf and the harvest-supper
are both called the Cat. About Vesoul when they cut the last corn
they say, “We have the Cat by the tail.” At Briançon,
in Dauphiné, at the beginning of reaping, a cat is decked out with
ribbons, flowers, and ears of corn. It is called the Cat of the
ball-skin (le chat de peau de balle). If a reaper is
wounded at his work, they make the cat lick the wound. At the close
of the reaping the cat is again decked out with ribbons and ears of
corn; then they dance and make merry. When the dance is over the
girls solemnly strip the cat of its finery. At Grüneberg, in
Silesia, the reaper who cuts the last corn goes by the name of the
Tom-cat. He is enveloped in rye-stalks and green withes, and is
furnished with a long plaited tail. Sometimes as a companion he has
a man similarly dressed, who is called the (female) Cat. Their duty
is to run after people whom they see and to beat them with a long
stick. Near Amiens the expression for finishing the harvest is,
“They are going to kill the Cat”; and when the last
corn is cut they kill a cat in the farmyard. At threshing, in some
parts of France, a live cat is placed under the last bundle of corn
to be threshed, and is struck dead with the flails. Then on Sunday
it is roasted and eaten as a holiday dish. In the Vosges Mountains
the close of haymaking or harvest is called “catching the
cat,” “killing the dog,” or more rarely
“catching the hare.” The cat, the dog, or the hare is
said to be fat or lean according as the crop is good or bad. The
man who cuts the last handful of hay or of wheat is said to catch
the cat or the hare or to kill the dog.
6. The Corn-spirit as a Goat
FURTHER, the corn-spirit often appears in the form of a goat. In
some parts of Prussia, when the corn bends before the wind, they
say, “The Goats are chasing each other,” “the
wind is driving the Goats through the corn,” “the Goats
are browsing there,” and they expect a very good harvest.
Again they say, “The Oats-goat is sitting in the
oats-field,” “the Corn-goat is sitting in the
rye-field.” Children are warned not to go into the
corn-fields to pluck the blue corn-flowers, or amongst the beans to
pluck pods, because the Rye-goat, the Corn-goat, the Oats-goat, or
the Bean-goat is sitting or lying there, and will carry them away
or kill them. When a harvester is taken sick or lags behind his
fellows at their work, they call out, “The Harvest-goat has
pushed him,” “he has been pushed by the
Corn-goat.” In the neighbourhood of Braunsberg (East Prussia)
at binding the oats every harvester makes haste “lest the
Corn-goat push him.” At Oefoten, in Norway, each reaper has
his allotted patch to reap. When a reaper in the middle has not
finished reaping his piece after his neighbours have finished
theirs, they say of him, “He remains on the island.”
And if the laggard is a man, they imitate the cry with which they
call a he-goat; if a woman, the cry with which they call a
she-goat. Near Straubing, in Lower Bavaria, it is said of the man
who cuts the last corn that “he has the Corn-goat, or the
Wheat-goat, or the Oats-goat,” according to the crop.
Moreover, two horns are set up on the last heap of corn, and it is
called “the horned Goat.” At Kreutzburg, East Prussia,
they call out to the woman who is binding the last sheaf,
“The Goat is sitting in the sheaf.” At Gablingen, in
Swabia, when the last field of oats upon a farm is being reaped,
the reapers carve a goat out of wood. Ears of oats are inserted in
its nostrils and mouth, and it is adorned with garlands of flowers.
It is set up on the field and called the Oats-goat. When the
reaping approaches an end, each reaper hastens to finish his piece
first; he who is the last to finish gets the Oats-goat. Again, the
last sheaf is itself called the Goat. Thus, in the valley of the
Wiesent, Bavaria, the last sheaf bound on the field is called the
Goat, and they have a proverb, “The field must bear a
goat.” At Spachbrücken, in Hesse, the last handful of corn
which is cut is called the Goat, and the man who cuts it is much
ridiculed. At Dürrenbüchig and about Mosbach in Baden the last
sheaf is also called the Goat. Sometimes the last sheaf is made up
in the form of a goat, and they say, “The Goat is sitting in
it.” Again, the person who cuts or binds the last sheaf is
called the Goat. Thus, in parts of Mecklenburg they call out to the
woman who binds the last sheaf, “You are the
Harvest-goat.” Near Uelzen, in Hanover, the harvest festival
begins with “the bringing of the Harvest-goat”; that
is, the woman who bound the last sheaf is wrapt in straw, crowned
with a harvest-wreath, and brought in a wheel-barrow to the
village, where a round dance takes place. About Luneburg, also, the
woman who binds the last corn is decked with a crown of corn-ears
and is called the Corn-goat. At Münzesheim in Baden the reaper who
cuts the last handful of corn or oats is called the Corn-goat or
the Oats-goat. In the Canton St. Gall, Switzerland, the person who
cuts the last handful of corn on the field, or drives the last
harvest-waggon to the barn, is called the Corn-goat or the
Rye-goat, or simply the Goat. In the Canton Thurgau he is called
Corn-goat; like a goat he has a bell hung round his neck, is led in
triumph, and drenched with liquor. In parts of Styria, also, the
man who cuts the last corn is called Corn-goat, Oats-goat, or the
like. As a rule, the man who thus gets the name of Corn-goat has to
bear it a whole year till the next harvest.
According to one view, the corn-spirit, who has been caught in
the form of a goat or otherwise, lives in the farmhouse or barn
over winter. Thus, each farm has its own embodiment of the
corn-spirit. But, according to another view, the corn-spirit is the
genius or deity, not of the corn of one farm only, but of all the
corn. Hence when the corn on one farm is all cut, he flees to
another where there is still corn left standing. This idea is
brought out in a harvest-custom which was formerly observed in
Skye. The farmer who first finished reaping sent a man or woman
with a sheaf to a neighbouring farmer who had not finished; the
latter in his turn, when he had finished, sent on the sheaf to his
neighbour who was still reaping; and so the sheaf made the round of
the farms till all the corn was cut. The sheaf was called the
goabbir bhacagh, that is, the Cripple Goat. The custom
appears not to be extinct at the present day, for it was reported
from Skye not very many years ago. The corn-spirit was probably
thus represented as lame because he had been crippled by the
cutting of the corn. Sometimes the old woman who brings home the
last sheaf must limp on one foot.
But sometimes the corn-spirit, in the form of a goat, is
believed to be slain on the harvest-field by the sickle or scythe.
Thus, in the neighbourhood of Bernkastel, on the Moselle, the
reapers determine by lot the order in which they shall follow each
other. The first is called the fore-reaper, the last the
tail-bearer. If a reaper overtakes the man in front he reaps past
him, bending round so as to leave the slower reaper in a patch by
himself. This patch is called the Goat; and the man for whom
“the Goat is cut” in this way, is laughed and jeered at
by his fellows for the rest of the day. When the tail-bearer cuts
the last ears of corn, it is said, “He is cutting the
Goat’s neck off.” In the neighbourhood of Grenoble,
before the end of the reaping, a live goat is adorned with flowers
and ribbons and allowed to run about the field. The reapers chase
it and try to catch it. When it is caught, the farmer’s wife
holds it fast while the farmer cuts off its head. The goat’s
flesh serves to furnish the harvest-supper. A piece of the flesh is
pickled and kept till the next harvest, when another goat is
killed. Then all the harvesters eat of the flesh. On the same day
the skin of the goat is made into a cloak, which the farmer, who
works with his men, must always wear at harvest-time if rain or bad
weather sets in. But if a reaper gets pains in his back, the farmer
gives him the goat-skin to wear. The reason for this seems to be
that the pains in the back, being inflicted by the corn-spirit, can
also be healed by it. Similarly, we saw that elsewhere, when a
reaper is wounded at reaping, a cat, as the representative of the
corn-spirit, is made to lick the wound. Esthonian reapers of the
island of Mon think that the man who cuts the first ears of corn at
harvest will get pains in his back, probably because the
corn-spirit is believed to resent especially the first wound; and,
in order to escape pains in the back, Saxon reapers in Transylvania
gird their loins with the first handful of ears which they cut.
Here, again, the corn-spirit is applied to for healing or
protection, but in his original vegetable form, not in the form of
a goat or a cat.
Further, the corn-spirit under the form of a goat is sometimes
conceived as lurking among the cut corn in the barn, till he is
driven from it by the threshing-flail. Thus in Baden the last sheaf
to be threshed is called the Corn-goat, the Spelt-goat, or the
Oats-goat according to the kind of grain. Again, near Marktl, in
Upper Bavaria, the sheaves are called Straw-goats or simply Goats.
They are laid in a great heap on the open field and threshed by two
rows of men standing opposite each other, who, as they ply their
flails, sing a song in which they say that they see the Straw-goat
amongst the corn-stalks. The last Goat, that is, the last sheaf, is
adorned with a wreath of violets and other flowers and with cakes
strung together. It is placed right in the middle of the heap. Some
of the threshers rush at it and tear the best of it out; others lay
on with their flails so recklessly that heads are sometimes broken.
At Oberinntal, in the Tyrol, the last thresher is called Goat. So
at Haselberg, in West Bohemia, the man who gives the last stroke at
threshing oats is called the Oats-goat. At Tettnang, in Würtemburg,
the thresher who gives the last stroke to the last bundle of corn
before it is turned goes by the name of the He-goat, and it is
said, “He has driven the He-goat away.” The person who,
after the bundle has been turned, gives the last stroke of all, is
called the She-goat. In this custom it is implied that the corn is
inhabited by a pair of corn-spirits, male and female.
Further, the corn-spirit, captured in the form of a goat at
threshing, is passed on to a neighbour whose threshing is not yet
finished. In Franche Comté, as soon as the threshing is over, the
young people set up a straw figure of a goat on the farmyard of a
neighbour who is still threshing. He must give them wine or money
in return. At Ellwangen, in Würtemburg, the effigy of a goat is
made out of the last bundle of corn at threshing; four sticks form
its legs, and two its horns. The man who gives the last stroke with
the flail must carry the Goat to the barn of a neighbour who is
still threshing and throw it down on the floor; if he is caught in
the act, they tie the Goat on his back. A similar custom is
observed at Indersdorf, in Upper Bavaria; the man who throws the
straw Goat into the neighbour’s barn imitates the bleating of
a goat; if they catch him, they blacken his face and tie the Goat
on his back. At Saverne, in Alsace, when a farmer is a week or more
behind his neighbours with his threshing, they set a real stuffed
goat or fox before his door.
Sometimes the spirit of the corn in goat form is believed to be
killed at threshing. In the district of Traunstein, Upper Bavaria,
they think that the Oats-goat is in the last sheaf of oats. He is
represented by an old rake set up on end, with an old pot for a
head. The children are then told to kill the Oats-goat.
7. The Corn-spirit as a Bull, Cow, or Ox
ANOTHER form which the corn-spirit often assumes is that of a
bull, cow, or ox. When the wind sweeps over the corn they say at
Conitz, in West Prussia, “The Steer is running in the
corn”; when the corn is thick and strong in one spot, they
say in some parts of East Prussia, “The Bull is lying in the
corn.” When a harvester has overstrained and lamed himself,
they say in the Graudenz district of West Prussia, “The Bull
pushed him”; in Lorraine they say, “He has the
Bull.” The meaning of both expressions is that he has
unwittingly lighted upon the divine corn-spirit, who has punished
the profane intruder with lameness. So near Chambéry when a reaper
wounds himself with his sickle, it is said that he has “the
wound of the Ox.” In the district of Bunzlau (Silesia) the
last sheaf is sometimes made into the shape of a horned ox, stuffed
with tow and wrapt in corn-ears. This figure is called the Old Man.
In some parts of Bohemia the last sheaf is made up in human form
and called the Buffalo-bull. These cases show a confusion of the
human with the animal shape of the corn-spirit. The confusion is
like that of killing a wether under the name of a wolf. All over
Swabia the last bundle of corn on the field is called the Cow; the
man who cuts the last ears “has the Cow,” and is
himself called Cow or Barley-cow or Oats-cow, according to the
crop; at the harvest-supper he gets a nosegay of flowers and
corn-ears and a more liberal allowance of drink than the rest. But
he is teased and laughed at; so no one likes to be the Cow. The Cow
was sometimes represented by the figure of a woman made out of ears
of corn and corn-flowers. It was carried to the farmhouse by the
man who had cut the last handful of corn. The children ran after
him and the neighbours turned out to laugh at him, till the farmer
took the Cow from him. Here again the confusion between the human
and the animal form of the corn-spirit is apparent. In various
parts of Switzerland the reaper who cuts the last ears of corn is
called Wheat-cow, Corn-cow, Oats-cow, or Corn-steer, and is the
butt of many a joke. On the other hand, in the district of
Rosenheim, Upper Bavaria, when a farmer is later of getting in his
harvest than his neighbours, they set up on his land a Straw-bull,
as it is called. This is a gigantic figure of a bull made of
stubble on a framework of wood and adorned with flowers and leaves.
Attached to it is a label on which are scrawled doggerel verses in
ridicule of the man on whose land the Straw-bull is set up.
Again, the corn-spirit in the form of a bull or ox is killed on
the harvest-field at the close of the reaping. At Pouilly, near
Dijon, when the last ears of corn are about to be cut, an ox
adorned with ribbons, flowers, and ears of corn is led all round
the field, followed by the whole troop of reapers dancing. Then a
man disguised as the Devil cuts the last ears of corn and
immediately slaughters the ox. Part of the flesh of the animal is
eaten at the harvest-supper; part is pickled and kept till the
first day of sowing in spring. At Pont à Mousson and elsewhere on
the evening of the last day of reaping, a calf adorned with flowers
and ears of corn is led thrice round the farmyard, being allured by
a bait or driven by men with sticks, or conducted by the
farmer’s wife with a rope. The calf chosen for this ceremony
is the calf which was born first on the farm in the spring of the
year. It is followed by all the reapers with their tools. Then it
is allowed to run free; the reapers chase it, and whoever catches
it is called King of the Calf. Lastly, it is solemnly killed; at
Lunéville the man who acts as butcher is the Jewish merchant of the
village.
Sometimes again the corn-spirit hides himself amongst the cut
corn in the barn to reappear in bull or cow form at threshing. Thus
at Wurmlingen, in Thüringen, the man who gives the last stroke at
threshing is called the Cow, or rather the Barley-cow, Oats-cow,
Peas-cow, or the like, according to the crop. He is entirely
enveloped in straw; his head is surmounted by sticks in imitation
of horns, and two lads lead him by ropes to the well to drink. On
the way thither he must low like a cow, and for a long time
afterwards he goes by the name of the Cow. At Obermedlingen, in
Swabia, when the threshing draws near an end, each man is careful
to avoid giving the last stroke. He who does give it “gets
the Cow,” which is a straw figure dressed in an old ragged
petticoat, hood, and stockings. It is tied on his back with a
straw-rope; his face is blackened, and being bound with straw-ropes
to a wheelbarrow he is wheeled round the village. Here, again, we
meet with that confusion between the human and animal shape of the
corn-spirit which we have noted in other customs. In Canton
Schaffhausen the man who threshes the last corn is called the Cow;
in Canton Thurgau, the Corn-bull; in Canton Zurich, the
Thresher-cow. In the last-mentioned district he is wrapt in straw
and bound to one of the trees in the orchard. At Arad, in Hungary,
the man who gives the last stroke at threshing is enveloped in
straw and a cow’s hide with the horns attached to it. At
Pessnitz, in the district of Dresden, the man who gives the last
stroke with the flail is called Bull. He must make a straw-man and
set it up before a neighbour’s window. Here, apparently, as
in so many cases, the corn-spirit is passed on to a neighbour who
has not finished threshing. So at Herbrechtingen, in Thüringen, the
effigy of a ragged old woman is flung into the barn of the farmer
who is last with his threshing. The man who throws it in cries,
“There is the Cow for you.” If the threshers catch him
they detain him over night and punish him by keeping him from the
harvest-supper. In these latter customs the confusion between the
human and the animal shape of the corn-spirit meets us again.
Further, the corn-spirit in bull form is sometimes believed to
be killed at threshing. At Auxerre, in threshing the last bundle of
corn, they call out twelve times, “We are killing the
Bull.” In the neighbourhood of Bordeaux, where a butcher
kills an ox on the field immediately after the close of the
reaping, it is said of the man who gives the last stroke at
threshing that “he has killed the Bull.” At Chambéry
the last sheaf is called the sheaf of the Young Ox, and a race
takes place to it in which all the reapers join. When the last
stroke is given at threshing they say that “the Ox is
killed”; and immediately thereupon a real ox is slaughtered
by the reaper who cut the last corn. The flesh of the ox is eaten
by the threshers at supper.
We have seen that sometimes the young corn-spirit, whose task it
is to quicken the corn of the coming year, is believed to be born
as a Corn-baby on the harvest-field. Similarly in Berry the young
corn-spirit is sometimes supposed to be born on the field in calf
form; for when a binder has not rope enough to bind all the corn in
sheaves, he puts aside the wheat that remains over and imitates the
lowing of a cow. The meaning is that “the sheaf has given
birth to a calf.” In Puy-de-Dôme when a binder cannot keep up
with the reaper whom he or she follows, they say “He (or she)
is giving birth to the Calf.” In some parts of Prussia, in
similar circumstances, they call out to the woman, “The Bull
is coming,” and imitate the bellowing of a bull. In these
cases the woman is conceived as the Corn-cow or old corn-spirit,
while the supposed calf is the Corn-calf or young corn-spirit. In
some parts of Austria a mythical calf (Muhkälbchen) is
believed to be seen amongst the sprouting corn in spring and to
push the children; when the corn waves in the wind they say,
“The Calf is going about.” Clearly, as Mannhardt
observes, this calf of the spring-time is the same animal which is
afterwards believed to be killed at reaping.
8. The Corn-spirit as a Horse or Mare
SOMETIMES the corn-spirit appears in the shape of a horse or
mare. Between Kalw and Stuttgart, when the corn bends before the
wind, they say, “There runs the Horse.” At Bohlingen,
near Radolfzell in Baden, the last sheaf of oats is called the
Oats-stallion. In Hertfordshire, at the end of the reaping, there
is or used to be observed a ceremony called “crying the
Mare.” The last blades of corn left standing on the field are
tied together and called the Mare. The reapers stand at a distance
and throw their sickles at it; he who cuts it through “has
the prize, with acclamations and good cheer.” After it is cut
the reapers cry thrice with a loud voice, “I have her!”
Others answer thrice, “What have you?”— “A
Mare! a Mare! a Mare!”— “Whose is she?” is
next asked thrice. “A. B.’s,” naming the owner
thrice. “Whither will you send her?”— “To
C. D.,” naming some neighbour who has not reaped all his
corn. In this custom the corn-spirit in the form of a mare is
passed on from a farm where the corn is all cut to another farm
where it is still standing, and where therefore the corn-spirit may
be supposed naturally to take refuge. In Shropshire the custom is
similar. The farmer who finishes his harvest last, and who
therefore cannot send the Mare to any one else, is said “to
keep her all winter.” The mocking offer of the Mare to a
laggard neighbour was sometimes responded to by a mocking
acceptance of her help. Thus an old man told an inquirer,
“While we wun at supper, a mon cumm’d wi’ a autar
[halter] to fatch her away.” At one place a real mare used to
be sent, but the man who rode her was subjected to some rough
treatment at the farmhouse to which he paid his unwelcome
visit.
In the neighbourhood of Lille the idea of the corn-spirit in
horse form in clearly preserved. When a harvester grows weary at
his work, it is said, “He has the fatigue of the
Horse.” The first sheaf, called the “Cross of the
Horse,” is placed on a cross of boxwood in the barn, and the
youngest horse on the farm must tread on it. The reapers dance
round the last blades of corn, crying, “See the remains of
the Horse.” The sheaf made out of these last blades is given
to the youngest horse of the parish (commune) to eat. This
youngest horse of the parish clearly represents, as Mannhardt says,
the corn-spirit of the following year, the Corn-foal, which absorbs
the spirit of the old Corn-horse by eating the last corn cut; for,
as usual, the old corn-spirit takes his final refuge in the last
sheaf. The thresher of the last sheaf is said to “beat the
Horse.”
9. The Corn-spirit as a Pig (Boar or Sow)
THE LAST animal embodiment of the corn-spirit which we shall
notice is the pig (boar or sow). In Thüringen, when the wind sets
the young corn in motion, they sometimes say, “The Boar is
rushing through the corn.” Amongst the Esthonians of the
island of Oesel the last sheaf is called the Ryeboar, and the man
who gets it is saluted with a cry of “You have the Rye-boar
on your back!” In reply he strikes up a song, in which he
prays for plenty. At Kohlerwinkel, near Augsburg, at the close of
the harvest, the last bunch of standing corn is cut down, stalk by
stalk, by all the reapers in turn. He who cuts the last stalk
“gets the Sow,” and is laughed at. In other Swabian
villages also the man who cuts the last corn “has the
Sow,” or “has the Rye-sow.” At Bohlingen, near
Radolfzell in Baden, the last sheaf is called the Rye-sow or the
Wheat-sow, according to the crop; and at Röhrenbach in Baden the
person who brings the last armful for the last sheaf is called the
Corn-sow or the Oats-sow. At Friedingen, in Swabia, the thresher
who gives the last stroke is called Sow—Barley-sow, Corn-sow,
or the like, according to the crop. At Onstmettingen the man who
gives the last stroke at threshing “has the Sow”; he is
often bound up in a sheaf and dragged by a rope along the ground.
And, generally, in Swabia the man who gives the last stroke with
the flail is called Sow. He may, however, rid himself of this
invidious distinction by passing on to a neighbour the straw-rope,
which is the badge of his position as Sow. So he goes to a house
and throws the straw-rope into it, crying, “There, I bring
you the Sow.” All the inmates give chase; and if they catch
him they beat him, shut him up for several hours in the pig-sty,
and oblige him to take the “Sow” away again. In various
parts of Upper Bavaria the man who gives the last stroke at
threshing must “carry the Pig”—that is, either a
straw effigy of a pig or merely a bundle of straw-ropes. This he
carries to a neighbouring farm where the threshing is not finished,
and throws it into the barn. If the threshers catch him they handle
him roughly, beating him, blackening or dirtying his face, throwing
him into filth, binding the Sow on his back, and so on; if the
bearer of the Sow is a woman they cut off her hair. At the harvest
supper or dinner the man who “carried the Pig” gets one
or more dumplings made in the form of pigs. When the dumplings are
served up by the maidservant, all the people at table cry
“Süz, süz, süz !” that being the cry used in calling
pigs. Sometimes after dinner the man who “carried the
Pig” has his face blackened, and is set on a cart and drawn
round the village by his fellows, followed by a crowd crying
“Süz, süz, süz !” as if they were calling swine.
Sometimes, after being wheeled round the village, he is flung on
the dunghill.
Again, the corn-spirit in the form of a pig plays his part at
sowing-time as well as at harvest. At Neuautz, in Courland, when
barley is sown for the first time in the year, the farmer’s
wife boils the chine of a pig along with the tail, and brings it to
the sower on the field. He eats of it, but cuts off the tail and
sticks it in the field; it is believed that the ears of corn will
then grow as long as the tail. Here the pig is the corn-spirit,
whose fertilising power is sometimes supposed to lie especially in
his tail. As a pig he is put in the ground at sowing-time, and as a
pig he reappears amongst the ripe corn at harvest. For amongst the
neighbouring Esthonians, as we have seen, the last sheaf is called
the Rye-boar. Somewhat similar customs are observed in Germany. In
the Salza district, near Meiningen, a certain bone in the pig is
called “the Jew on the winnowing-fan.” The flesh of
this bone is boiled on Shrove Tuesday, but the bone is put amongst
the ashes which the neighbours exchange as presents on St.
Peter’s Day (the twenty-second of February), and then mix
with the seedcorn. In the whole of Hesse, Meiningen, and other
districts, people eat pea-soup with dried pig-ribs on Ash Wednesday
or Candlemas. The ribs are then collected and hung in the room till
sowing-time, when they are inserted in the sown field or in the
seed-bag amongst the flax seed. This is thought to be an infallible
specific against earth-fleas and moles, and to cause the flax to
grow well and tall.
But the idea of the corn-spirit as embodied in pig form is
nowhere more clearly expressed than in the Scandinavian custom of
the Yule Boar. In Sweden and Denmark at Yule (Christmas) it is the
custom to bake a loaf in the form of a boar-pig. This is called the
Yule Boar. The corn of the last sheaf is often used to make it. All
through Yule the Yule Boar stands on the table. Often it is kept
till the sowing-time in spring, when part of it is mixed with the
seed-corn and part given to the ploughman and plough-horses or
ploughoxen to eat, in the expectation of a good harvest. In this
custom the corn-spirit, immanent in the last sheaf, appears at
midwinter in the form of a boar made from the corn of the last
sheaf; and his quickening influence on the corn is shown by mixing
part of the Yule Boar with the seed-corn, and giving part of it to
the ploughman and his cattle to eat. Similarly we saw that the
Corn-wolf makes his appearance at mid-winter, the time when the
year begins to verge towards spring. Formerly a real boar was
sacrificed at Christmas, and apparently also a man in the character
of the Yule Boar. This, at least, may perhaps be inferred from a
Christmas custom still observed in Sweden. A man is wrapt up in a
skin, and carries a wisp of straw in his mouth, so that the
projecting straws look like the bristles of a boar. A knife is
brought, and an old woman, with her face blackened, pretends to
sacrifice him.
On Christmas Eve in some parts of the Esthonian island of Oesel
they bake a long cake with the two ends turned up. It is called the
Christmas Boar, and stands on the table till the morning of New
Year’s Day, when it is distributed among the cattle. In other
parts of the island the Christmas Boar is not a cake but a little
pig born in March, which the housewife fattens secretly, often
without the knowledge of the other members of the family. On
Christmas Eve the little pig is secretly killed, then roasted in
the oven, and set on the table standing on all fours, where it
remains in this posture for several days. In other parts of the
island, again, though the Christmas cake has neither the name nor
the shape of a boar, it is kept till the New Year, when half of it
is divided among all the members and all the quadrupeds of the
family. The other half of the cake is kept till sowing-time comes
round, when it is similarly distributed in the morning among human
beings and beasts. In other parts of Esthonia, again, the Christmas
Boar, as it is called, is baked of the first rye cut at harvest; it
has a conical shape and a cross is impressed on it with a
pig’s bone or a key, or three dints are made in it with a
buckle or a piece of charcoal. It stands with a light beside it on
the table all through the festal season. On New Year’s Day
and Epiphany, before sunrise, a little of the cake is crumbled with
salt and given to the cattle. The rest is kept till the day when
the cattle are driven out to pasture for the first time in spring.
It is then put in the herdsman’s bag, and at evening is
divided among the cattle to guard them from magic and harm. In some
places the Christmas Boar is partaken of by farm-servants and
cattle at the time of the barley sowing, for the purpose of thereby
producing a heavier crop.
10. On the Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit
SO much for the animal embodiments of the corn-spirit as they
are presented to us in the folk-customs of Northern Europe. These
customs bring out clearly the sacramental character of the
harvest-supper. The corn-spirit is conceived as embodied in an
animal; this divine animal is slain, and its flesh and blood are
partaken of by the harvesters. Thus the cock, the hare, the cat,
the goat, and the OX are eaten sacramentally by the harvester, and
the pig is eaten sacramentally by ploughmen in spring. Again, as a
substitute for the real flesh of the divine being, bread or
dumplings are made in his image and eaten sacramentally; thus,
pig-shaped dumplings are eaten by the harvesters, and loaves made
in boar-shape (the Yule Boar) are eaten in spring by the ploughman
and his cattle.
The reader has probably remarked the complete parallelism
between the conceptions of the corn-spirit in human and in animal
form. The parallel may be here briefly resumed. When the corn waves
in the wind it is said either that the Corn-mother or that the
Corn-wolf, etc., is passing through the corn. Children are warned
against straying in corn-fields either because the Corn-mother or
because the Corn-wolf, etc., is there. In the last corn cut or the
last sheaf threshed either the Corn-mother or the Corn-wolf, etc.,
is supposed to be present. The last sheaf is itself called either
the Corn-mother or the Corn-wolf, etc., and is made up in the shape
either of a woman or of a wolf, etc. The person who cuts, binds, or
threshes the last sheaf is called either the Old Woman or the Wolf,
etc., according to the name bestowed on the sheaf itself. As in
some places a sheaf made in human form and called the Maiden, the
Mother of the Maize, etc., is kept from one harvest to the next in
order to secure a continuance of the corn-spirit’s blessing,
so in some places the Harvest-cock and in others the flesh of the
goat is kept for a similar purpose from one harvest to the next. As
in some places the grain taken from the Corn-mother is mixed with
the seed-corn in spring to make the crop abundant, so in some
places the feathers of the cock, and in Sweden the Yule Boar, are
kept till spring and mixed with the seed-corn for a like purpose.
As part of the Corn-mother or Maiden is given to the cattle at
Christmas or to the horses at the first ploughing, so part of the
Yule Boar is given to the ploughing horses or oxen in spring.
Lastly, the death of the corn-spirit is represented by killing or
pretending to kill either his human or his animal representative;
and the worshippers partake sacramentally either of the actual body
and blood of the representative of the divinity, or of bread made
in his likeness.
Other animal forms assumed by the corn-spirit are the fox, stag,
roe, sheep, bear, ass, mouse, quail, stork, swan, and kite. If it
is asked why the corn-spirit should be thought to appear in the
form of an animal and of so many different animals, we may reply
that to primitive man the simple appearance of an animal or bird
among the corn is probably enough to suggest a mysterious link
between the creature and the corn; and when we remember that in the
old days, before fields were fenced in, all kinds of animals must
have been free to roam over them, we need not wonder that the
corn-spirit should have been identified even with large animals
like the horse and cow, which nowadays could not, except by a rare
accident, be found straying in an English corn-field. This
explanation applies with peculiar force to the very common case in
which the animal embodiment of the corn-spirit is believed to lurk
in the last standing corn. For at harvest a number of wild animals,
such as hares, rabbits, and partridges, are commonly driven by the
progress of the reaping into the last patch of standing corn, and
make their escape from it as it is being cut down. So regularly
does this happen that reapers and others often stand round the last
patch of corn armed with sticks or guns, with which they kill the
animals as they dart out of their last refuge among the stalks.
Now, primitive man, to whom magical changes of shape seem perfectly
credible, finds it most natural that the spirit of the corn, driven
from his home in the ripe grain, should make his escape in the form
of the animal which is seen to rush out of the last patch of corn
as it falls under the scythe of the reaper. Thus the identification
of the corn-spirit with an animal is analogous to the
identification of him with a passing stranger. As the sudden
appearance of a stranger near the harvest-field or threshing-floor
is, to the primitive mind, enough to identify him as the spirit of
the corn escaping from the cut or threshed corn, so the sudden
appearance of an animal issuing from the cut corn is enough to
identify it with the corn-spirit escaping from his ruined home. The
two identifications are so analogous that they can hardly be
dissociated in any attempt to explain them. Those who look to some
other principle than the one here suggested for the explanation of
the latter identification are bound to show that their theory
covers the former identification also.
XLIX. Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals
1. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull
HOWEVER we may explain it, the fact remains that in peasant
folk-lore the corn-spirit is very commonly conceived and
represented in animal form. May not this fact explain the relation
in which certain animals stood to the ancient deities of
vegetation, Dionysus, Demeter, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris?
To begin with Dionysus. We have seen that he was represented
sometimes as a goat and sometimes as a bull. As a goat he can
hardly be separated from the minor divinities, the Pans, Satyrs,
and Silenuses, all of whom are closely associated with him and are
represented more or less completely in the form of goats. Thus, Pan
was regularly portrayed in sculpture and painting with the face and
legs of a goat. The Satyrs were depicted with pointed goat-ears,
and sometimes with sprouting horns and short tails. They were
sometimes spoken of simply as goats; and in the drama their parts
were played by men dressed in goatskins. Silenus is represented in
art clad in a goatskin. Further, the Fauns, the Italian counterpart
of the Greek Pans and Satyrs, are described as being half goats,
with goat-feet and goat-horns. Again, all these minor goat-formed
divinities partake more or less clearly of the character of
woodland deities. Thus, Pan was called by the Arcadians the Lord of
the Wood. The Silenuses kept company with the tree-nymphs. The
Fauns are expressly designated as woodland deities; and their
character as such is still further brought out by their
association, or even identification, with Silvanus and the
Silvanuses, who, as their name of itself indicates, are spirits of
the woods. Lastly, the association of the Satyrs with the
Silenuses, Fauns, and Silvanuses, proves that the Satyrs also were
woodland deities. These goat-formed spirits of the woods have their
counterparts in the folk-lore of Northern Europe. Thus, the Russian
wood-spirits, called Ljeschie (from ljes,
“wood”), are believed to appear partly in human shape,
but with the horns, ears, and legs of goats. The Ljeschi
can alter his stature at pleasure; when he walks in the wood he is
as tall as the trees; when he walks in the meadows he is no higher
than the grass. Some of the Ljeschie are spirits of the
corn as well as of the wood; before harvest they are as tall as the
corn-stalks, but after it they shrink to the height of the stubble.
This brings out—what we have remarked before—the close
connexion between tree-spirits and corn-spirits, and shows how
easily the former may melt into the latter. Similarly the Fauns,
though wood-spirits, were believed to foster the growth of the
crops. We have already seen how often the corn-spirit is
represented in folk-custom as a goat. On the whole, then, as
Mannhardt argues, the Pans, Satyrs, and Fauns perhaps belong to a
widely diffused class of wood-spirits conceived in goat-form. The
fondness of goats for straying in woods and nibbling the bark of
trees, to which indeed they are most destructive, is an obvious and
perhaps sufficient reason why wood-spirits should so often be
supposed to take the form of goats. The inconsistency of a god of
vegetation subsisting upon the vegetation which he personifies is
not one to strike the primitive mind. Such inconsistencies arise
when the deity, ceasing to be immanent in the vegetation, comes to
be regarded as its owner or lord; for the idea of owning the
vegetation naturally leads to that of subsisting on it. Sometimes
the corn-spirit, originally conceived as immanent in the corn,
afterwards comes to be regarded as its owner, who lives on it and
is reduced to poverty and want by being deprived of it. Hence he is
often known as “the Poor Man” or “the Poor
Woman.” Occasionally the last sheaf is left standing on the
field for “the Poor Old Woman” or for “the Old
Rye-woman.”
Thus the representation of wood-spirits in the form of goats
appears to be both widespread and, to the primitive mind, natural.
Therefore when we find, as we have done, that Dionysus—a
tree-god—is sometimes represented in goat-form, we can hardly
avoid concluding that this representation is simply a part of his
proper character as a tree-god and is not to be explained by the
fusion of two distinct and independent worships, in one of which he
originally appeared as a tree-god and in the other as a goat.
Dionysus was also figured, as we have seen, in the shape of a
bull. After what has gone before we are naturally led to expect
that his bull form must have been only another expression for his
character as a deity of vegetation, especially as the bull is a
common embodiment of the corn-spirit in Northern Europe; and the
close association of Dionysus with Demeter and Persephone in the
mysteries of Eleusis shows that he had at least strong agricultural
affinities.
The probability of this view will be somewhat increased if it
can be shown that in other rites than those of Dionysus the
ancients slew an OX as a representative of the spirit of
vegetation. This they appear to have done in the Athenian sacrifice
known as “the murder of the OX” (bouphonia).
It took place about the end of June or beginning of July, that is,
about the time when the threshing is nearly over in Attica.
According to tradition the sacrifice was instituted to procure a
cessation of drought and dearth which had afflicted the land. The
ritual was as follows. Barley mixed with wheat, or cakes made of
them, were laid upon the bronze altar of Zeus Polieus on the
Acropolis. Oxen were driven round the altar, and the OX which went
up to the altar and ate the offering on it was sacrificed. The axe
and knife with which the beast was slain had been previously wetted
with water brought by maidens called “water-carriers.”
The weapons were then sharpened and handed to the butchers, one of
whom felled the OX with the axe and another cut its throat with the
knife. As soon as he had felled the OX, the former threw the axe
from him and fled; and the man who cut the beast’s throat
apparently imitated his example. Meantime the OX was skinned and
all present partook of its flesh. Then the hide was stuffed with
straw and sewed up; next the stuffed animal was set on its feet and
yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then took place
in an ancient law-court presided over by the King (as he was
called) to determine who had murdered the OX. The maidens who had
brought the water accused the men who had sharpened the axe and
knife; the men who had sharpened the axe and knife blamed the men
who had handed these implements to the butchers; the men who had
handed the implements to the butchers blamed the butchers; and the
butchers laid the blame on the axe and knife, which were
accordingly found guilty, condemned, and cast into the sea.
The name of this sacrifice,— “the murder of
the OX,”—the pains taken by each person who had a hand
in the slaughter to lay the blame on some one else, together with
the formal trial and punishment of the axe or knife or both, prove
that the OX was here regarded not merely as a victim offered to a
god, but as itself a sacred creature, the slaughter of which was
sacrilege or murder. This is borne out by a statement of Varro that
to kill an OX was formerly a capital crime in Attica. The mode of
selecting the victim suggests that the OX which tasted the corn was
viewed as the corn-deity taking possession of his own. This
interpretation is supported by the following custom. In Beauce, in
the district of Orleans, on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of
April they make a straw man called “the great
mondard.” For they say that the old mondard
is now dead and it is necessary to make a new one. The straw man is
carried in solemn procession up and down the village and at last is
placed upon the oldest apple-tree. There he remains till the apples
are gathered, when he is taken down and thrown into the water, or
he is burned and his ashes cast into water. But the person who
plucks the first fruit from the tree succeeds to the title of
“the great mondard.” Here the straw figure,
called “the great mondard” and placed on the
oldest apple-tree in spring, represents the spirit of the tree,
who, dead in winter, revives when the apple-blossoms appear on the
boughs. Thus the person who plucks the first fruit from the tree
and thereby receives the name of “the great
mondard” must be regarded as a representative of the
tree-spirit. Primitive peoples are usually reluctant to taste the
annual first-fruits of any crop, until some ceremony has been
performed which makes it safe and pious for them to do so. The
reason of this reluctance appears to be a belief that the
first-fruits either belong to or actually contain a divinity.
Therefore when a man or animal is seen boldly to appropriate the
sacred first-fruits, he or it is naturally regarded as the divinity
himself in human or animal form taking possession of his own. The
time of the Athenian sacrifice, which fell about the close of the
threshing, suggests that the wheat and barley laid upon the altar
were a harvest offering; and the sacramental character of the
subsequent repast—all partaking of the flesh of the divine
animal—would make it parallel to the harvest-suppers of
modern Europe, in which, as we have seen, the flesh of the animal
which stands for the corn-spirit is eaten by the harvesters. Again,
the tradition that the sacrifice was instituted in order to put an
end to drought and famine is in favour of taking it as a harvest
festival. The resurrection of the corn-spirit, enacted by setting
up the stuffed OX and yoking it to the plough, may be compared with
the resurrection of the tree-spirit in the person of his
representative, the Wild Man.
The OX appears as a representative of the corn-spirit in other
parts of the world. At Great Bassam, in Guinea, two oxen are slain
annually to procure a good harvest. If the sacrifice is to be
effectual, it is necessary that the oxen should weep. So all the
women of the village sit in front of the beasts, chanting,
“The OX will weep; yes, he will weep!” From time to
time one of the women walks round the beasts, throwing manioc meal
or palm wine upon them, especially into their eyes. When tears roll
down from the eyes of the oxen, the people dance, singing,
“The OX weeps! the OX weeps!” Then two men seize the
tails of the beasts and cut them off at one blow. It is believed
that a great misfortune will happen in the course of the year if
the tails are not severed at one blow. The oxen are afterwards
killed, and their flesh is eaten by the chiefs. Here the tears of
the oxen, like those of the human victims amongst the Khonds and
the Aztecs, are probably a rain-charm. We have already seen that
the virtue of the corn-spirit, embodied in animal form, is
sometimes supposed to reside in the tail, and that the last handful
of corn is sometimes conceived as the tail of the corn-spirit. In
the Mithraic religion this conception is graphically set forth in
some of the numerous sculptures which represent Mithras kneeling on
the back of a bull and plunging a knife into its flank; for on
certain of these monuments the tail of the bull ends in three
stalks of corn, and in one of them corn-stalks instead of blood are
seen issuing from the wound inflicted by the knife. Such
representations certainly suggest that the bull, whose sacrifice
appears to have formed a leading feature in the Mithraic ritual,
was conceived, in one at least of its aspects, as an incarnation of
the corn-spirit.
Still more clearly does the ox appear as a personification of
the corn-spirit in a ceremony which is observed in all the
provinces and districts of China to welcome the approach of spring.
On the first day of spring, usually on the third or fourth of
February, which is also the beginning of the Chinese New Year, the
governor or prefect of the city goes in procession to the east gate
of the city, and sacrifices to the Divine Husbandman, who is
represented with a bull’s head on the body of a man. A large
effigy of an ox, cow, or buffalo has been prepared for the
occasion, and stands outside of the east gate, with agricultural
implements beside it. The figure is made of differently-coloured
pieces of paper pasted on a framework either by a blind man or
according to the directions of a necromancer. The colours of the
paper prognosticate the character of the coming year; if red
prevails, there will be many fires; if white, there will be floods
and rain; and so with the other colours. The mandarins walk slowly
round the ox, beating it severely at each step with rods of various
hues. It is filled with five kinds of grain, which pour forth when
the effigy is broken by the blows of the rods. The paper fragments
are then set on fire, and a scramble takes place for the burning
fragments, because the people believe that whoever gets one of them
is sure to be fortunate throughout the year. A live buffalo is next
killed, and its flesh is divided among the mandarins. According to
one account, the effigy of the ox is made of clay, and, after being
beaten by the governor, is stoned by the people till they break it
in pieces, “from which they expect an abundant year.”
Here the corn-spirit appears to be plainly represented by the
corn-filled ox, whose fragments may therefore be supposed to bring
fertility with them.
On the whole we may perhaps conclude that both as a goat and as
a bull Dionysus was essentially a god of vegetation. The Chinese
and European customs which I have cited may perhaps shed light on
the custom of rending a live bull or goat at the rites of Dionysus.
The animal was torn in fragments, as the Khond victim was cut in
pieces, in order that the worshippers might each secure a portion
of the life-giving and fertilising influence of the god. The flesh
was eaten raw as a sacrament, and we may conjecture that some of it
was taken home to be buried in the fields, or otherwise employed so
as to convey to the fruits of the earth the quickening influence of
the god of vegetation. The resurrection of Dionysus, related in his
myth, may have been enacted in his rites by stuffing and setting up
the slain ox, as was done at the Athenian bouphonia.
2. Demeter, the Pig and the Horse
PASSING next to the corn-goddess Demeter, and remembering that
in European folk-lore the pig is a common embodiment of the
corn-spirit, we may now ask whether the pig, which was so closely
associated with Demeter, may not have been originally the goddess
herself in animal form. The pig was sacred to her; in art she was
portrayed carrying or accompanied by a pig; and the pig was
regularly sacrificed in her mysteries, the reason assigned being
that the pig injures the corn and is therefore an enemy of the
goddess. But after an animal has been conceived as a god, or a god
as an animal, it sometimes happens, as we have seen, that the god
sloughs off his animal form and becomes purely anthropomorphic; and
that then the animal, which at first had been slain in the
character of the god, comes to be viewed as a victim offered to the
god on the ground of its hostility to the deity; in short, the god
is sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy.
This happened to Dionysus, and it may have happened to Demeter
also. And in fact the rites of one of her festivals, the
Thesmophoria, bear out the view that originally the pig was an
embodiment of the corn-goddess herself, either Demeter or her
daughter and double Persephone. The Attic Thesmophoria was an
autumn festival, celebrated by women alone in October, and appears
to have represented with mourning rites the descent of Persephone
(or Demeter) into the lower world, and with joy her return from the
dead. Hence the name Descent or Ascent variously applied to the
first, and the name Kalligeneia (fair-born) applied to the
third day of the festival. Now it was customary at the Thesmophoria
to throw pigs, cakes of dough, and branches of pine-trees into
“the chasms of Demeter and Persephone,” which appear to
have been sacred caverns or vaults. In these caverns or vaults
there were said to be serpents, which guarded the caverns and
consumed most of the flesh of the pigs and dough-cakes which were
thrown in. Afterwards—apparently at the next annual
festival—the decayed remains of the pigs, the cakes, and the
pine-branches were fetched by women called “drawers,”
who, after observing rules of ceremonial purity for three days,
descended into the caverns, and, frightening away the serpents by
clapping their hands, brought up the remains and placed them on the
altar. Whoever got a piece of the decayed flesh and cakes, and
sowed it with the seed-corn in his field, was believed to be sure
of a good crop.
To explain the rude and ancient ritual of the Thesmophoria the
following legend was told. At the moment when Pluto carried off
Persephone, a swineherd called Eubuleus chanced to be herding his
swine on the spot, and his herd was engulfed in the chasm down
which Pluto vanished with Persephone. Accordingly at the
Thesmophoria pigs were annually thrown into caverns to commemorate
the disappearance of the swine of Eubuleus. It follows from this
that the casting of the pigs into the vaults at the Thesmophoria
formed part of the dramatic representation of Persephone’s
descent into the lower world; and as no image of Persephone appears
to have been thrown in, we may infer that the descent of the pigs
was not so much an accompaniment of her descent as the descent
itself, in short, that the pigs were Persephone. Afterwards when
Persephone or Demeter (for the two are equivalent) took on human
form, a reason had to be found for the custom of throwing pigs into
caverns at her festival; and this was done by saying that when
Pluto carried off Persephone there happened to be some swine
browsing near, which were swallowed up along with her. The story is
obviously a forced and awkward attempt to bridge over the gulf
between the old conception of the corn-spirit as a pig and the new
conception of her as an anthropomorphic goddess. A trace of the
older conception survived in the legend that when the sad mother
was searching for traces of the vanished Persephone, the footprints
of the lost one were obliterated by the footprints of a pig;
originally, we may conjecture, the footprints of the pig were the
footprints of Persephone and of Demeter herself. A consciousness of
the intimate connexion of the pig with the corn lurks in the legend
that the swineherd Eubuleus was a brother of Triptolemus, to whom
Demeter first imparted the secret of the corn. Indeed, according to
one version of the story, Eubuleus himself received, jointly with
his brother Triptolemus, the gift of the corn from Demeter as a
reward for revealing to her the fate of Persephone. Further, it is
to be noted that at the Thesmophoria the women appear to have eaten
swine’s flesh. The meal, if I am right, must have been a
solemn sacrament or communion, the worshippers partaking of the
body of the god.
As thus explained, the Thesmophoria has its analogies in the
folk-customs of Northern Europe which have been already described.
Just as at the Thesmophoria—an autumn festival in honour of
the corn-goddess—swine’s flesh was partly eaten, partly
kept in caverns till the following year, when it was taken up to be
sown with the seed-corn in the fields for the purpose of securing a
good crop; so in the neighbourhood of Grenoble the goat killed on
the harvest-field is partly eaten at the harvest-supper, partly
pickled and kept till the next harvest; so at Pouilly the ox killed
on the harvest-field is partly eaten by the harvesters, partly
pickled and kept till the first day of sowing in spring, probably
to be then mixed with the seed, or eaten by the ploughmen, or both;
so at Udvarhely the feathers of the cock which is killed in the
last sheaf at harvest are kept till spring, and then sown with the
seed on the field; so in Hesse and Meiningen the flesh of pigs is
eaten on Ash Wednesday or Candlemas, and the bones are kept till
sowing-time, when they are put into the field sown or mixed with
the seed in the bag; so, lastly, the corn from the last sheaf is
kept till Christmas, made into the Yule Boar, and afterwards broken
and mixed with the seed-corn at sowing in spring. Thus, to put it
generally, the corn-spirit is killed in animal form in autumn; part
of his flesh is eaten as a sacrament by his worshippers; and part
of it is kept till next sowing-time or harvest as a pledge and
security for the continuance or renewal of the corn-spirit’s
energies.
If persons of fastidious taste should object that the Greeks
never could have conceived Demeter and Persephone to be embodied in
the form of pigs, it may be answered that in the cave of Phigalia
in Arcadia the Black Demeter was portrayed with the head and mane
of a horse on the body of a woman. Between the portraits of a
goddess as a pig, and the portrait of her as a woman with a
horse’s head, there is little to choose in respect of
barbarism. The legend told of the Phigalian Demeter indicates that
the horse was one of the animal forms assumed in ancient Greece, as
in modern Europe, by the cornspirit. It was said that in her search
for her daughter, Demeter assumed the form of a mare to escape the
addresses of Poseidon, and that, offended at his importunity, she
withdrew in dudgeon to a cave not far from Phigalia in the
highlands of Western Arcadia. There, robed in black, she tarried so
long that the fruits of the earth were perishing, and mankind would
have died of famine if Pan had not soothed the angry goddess and
persuaded her to quit the cave. In memory of this event, the
Phigalians set up an image of the Black Demeter in the cave; it
represented a woman dressed in a long robe, with the head and mane
of a horse. The Black Demeter, in whose absence the fruits of the
earth perish, is plainly a mythical expression for the bare wintry
earth stripped of its summer mantle of green.
3. Attis, Adonis, and the Pig
PASSING now to Attis and Adonis, we may note a few facts which
seem to show that these deities of vegetation had also, like other
deities of the same class, their animal embodiments. The
worshippers of Attis abstained from eating the flesh of swine. This
appears to indicate that the pig was regarded as an embodiment of
Attis. And the legend that Attis was killed by a boar points in the
same direction. For after the examples of the goat Dionysus and the
pig Demeter it may almost be laid down as a rule that an animal
which is said to have injured a god was originally the god himself.
Perhaps the cry of “Hyes Attes! Hyes Attes!” which was
raised by the worshippers of Attis, may be neither more nor less
than “Pig Attis! Pig Attis!”—hyes being
possibly a Phrygian form of the Greek hy¯s, “a
pig.”
In regard to Adonis, his connexion with the boar was not always
explained by the story that he had been killed by the animal.
According to another story, a boar rent with his tusk the bark of
the tree in which the infant Adonis was born. According to yet
another story, he perished at the hands of Hephaestus on Mount
Lebanon while he was hunting wild boars. These variations in the
legend serve to show that, while the connexion of the boar with
Adonis was certain, the reason of the connexion was not understood,
and that consequently different stories were devised to explain it.
Certainly the pig ranked as a sacred animal among the Syrians. At
the great religious metropolis of Hierapolis on the Euphrates pigs
were neither sacrificed nor eaten, and if a man touched a pig he
was unclean for the rest of the day. Some people said this was
because the pigs were unclean; others said it was because the pigs
were sacred. This difference of opinion points to a hazy state of
religious thought in which the ideas of sanctity and uncleanness
are not yet sharply distinguished, both being blent in a sort of
vaporous solution to which we give the name of taboo. It is quite
consistent with this that the pig should have been held to be an
embodiment of the divine Adonis, and the analogies of Dionysus and
Demeter make it probable that the story of the hostility of the
animal to the god was only a late misapprehension of the old view
of the god as embodied in a pig. The rule that pigs were not
sacrificed or eaten by worshippers of Attis and presumably of
Adonis, does not exclude the possibility that in these rituals the
pig was slain on solemn occasions as a representative of the god
and consumed sacramentally by the worshippers. Indeed, the
sacramental killing and eating of an animal implies that the animal
is sacred, and that, as a general rule, it is spared.
The attitude of the Jews to the pig was as ambiguous as that of
the heathen Syrians towards the same animal. The Greeks could not
decide whether the Jews worshipped swine or abominated them. On the
one hand they might not eat swine; but on the other hand they might
not kill them. And if the former rule speaks for the uncleanness,
the latter speaks still more strongly for the sanctity of the
animal. For whereas both rules may, and one rule must, be explained
on the supposition that the pig was sacred; neither rule must, and
one rule cannot, be explained on the supposition that the pig was
unclean. If, therefore, we prefer the former supposition, we must
conclude that, originally at least, the pig was revered rather than
abhorred by the Israelites. We are confirmed in this opinion by
observing that down to the time of Isaiah some of the Jews used to
meet secretly in gardens to eat the flesh of swine and mice as a
religious rite. Doubtless this was a very ancient ceremony, dating
from a time when both the pig and the mouse were venerated as
divine, and when their flesh was partaken of sacramentally on rare
and solemn occasions as the body and blood of gods. And in general
it may perhaps be said that all so-called unclean animals were
originally sacred; the reason for not eating them was that they
were divine.
4. Osiris, the Pig and the Bull
IN ANCIENT Egypt, within historical times, the pig occupied the
same dubious position as in Syria and Palestine, though at first
sight its uncleanness is more prominent than its sanctity. The
Egyptians are generally said by Greek writers to have abhorred the
pig as a foul and loathsome animal. If a man so much as touched a
pig in passing, he stepped into the river with all his clothes on,
to wash off the taint. To drink pig’s milk was believed to
cause leprosy to the drinker. Swineherds, though natives of Egypt,
were forbidden to enter any temple, and they were the only men who
were thus excluded. No one would give his daughter in marriage to a
swineherd, or marry a swineherd’s daughter; the swineherds
married among themselves. Yet once a year the Egyptians sacrificed
pigs to the moon and to Osiris, and not only sacrificed them, but
ate of their flesh, though on any other day of the year they would
neither sacrifice them nor taste of their flesh. Those who were too
poor to offer a pig on this day baked cakes of dough, and offered
them instead. This can hardly be explained except by the
supposition that the pig was a sacred animal which was eaten
sacramentally by his worshippers once a year.
The view that in Egypt the pig was sacred is borne out by the
very facts which, to moderns, might seem to prove the contrary.
Thus the Egyptians thought, as we have seen, that to drink
pig’s milk produced leprosy. But exactly analogous views are
held by savages about the animals and plants which they deem most
sacred. Thus in the island of Wetar (between New Guinea and
Celebes) people believe themselves to be variously descended from
wild pigs, serpents, crocodiles, turtles, dogs, and eels; a man may
not eat an animal of the kind from which he is descended; if he
does so, he will become a leper, and go mad. Amongst the Omaha
Indians of North America men whose totem is the elk, believe that
if they ate the flesh of the male elk they would break out in boils
and white spots in different parts of their bodies. In the same
tribe men whose totem is the red maize, think that if they ate red
maize they would have running sores all round their mouths. The
Bush negroes of Surinam, who practise totemism, believe that if
they ate the capiaï (an animal like a pig) it would give
them leprosy; perhaps the capiaï is one of their totems.
The Syrians, in antiquity, who esteemed fish sacred, thought that
if they ate fish their bodies would break out in ulcers, and their
feet and stomach would swell up. The Chasas of Orissa believe that
if they were to injure their totemic animal they would be attacked
by leprosy and their line would die out. These examples prove that
the eating of a sacred animal is often believed to produce leprosy
or other skin-diseases; so far, therefore, they support the view
that the pig must have been sacred in Egypt, since the effect of
drinking its milk was believed to be leprosy.
Again, the rule that, after touching a pig, a man had to wash
himself and his clothes, also favours the view of the sanctity of
the pig. For it is a common belief that the effect of contact with
a sacred object must be removed, by washing or otherwise, before a
man is free to mingle with his fellows. Thus the Jews wash their
hands after reading the sacred scriptures. Before coming forth from
the tabernacle after the sin-offering, the high priest had to wash
himself, and put off the garments which he had worn in the holy
place. It was a rule of Greek ritual that, in offering an expiatory
sacrifice, the sacrificer should not touch the sacrifice, and that,
after the offering was made, he must wash his body and his clothes
in a river or spring before he could enter a city or his own house.
The Polynesians felt strongly the need of ridding themselves of the
sacred contagion, if it may be so called, which they caught by
touching sacred objects. Various ceremonies were performed for the
purpose of removing this contagion. We have seen, for example, how
in Tonga a man who happened to touch a sacred chief, or anything
personally belonging to him, had to perform a certain ceremony
before he could feed himself with his hands; otherwise it was
believed that he would swell up and die, or at least be afflicted
with scrofula or some other disease. We have seen, too, what fatal
effects are supposed to follow, and do actually follow, from
contact with a sacred object in New Zealand. In short, primitive
man believes that what is sacred is dangerous; it is pervaded by a
sort of electrical sanctity which communicates a shock to, even if
it does not kill, whatever comes in contact with it. Hence the
savage is unwilling to touch or even to see that which he deems
peculiarly holy. Thus Bechuanas, of the Crocodile clan, think it
“hateful and unlucky” to meet or see a crocodile; the
sight is thought to cause inflammation of the eyes. Yet the
crocodile is their most sacred object; they call it their father,
swear by it, and celebrate it in their festivals. The goat is the
sacred animal of the Madenassana Bushmen; yet “to look upon
it would be to render the man for the time impure, as well as to
cause him undefined uneasiness.” The Elk clan, among the
Omaha Indians, believe that even to touch the male elk would be
followed by an eruption of boils and white spots on the body.
Members of the Reptile clan in the same tribe think that if one of
them touches or smells a snake, it will make his hair white. In
Samoa people whose god was a butterfly believed that if they caught
a butterfly it would strike them dead. Again, in Samoa the
reddish-seared leaves of the banana-tree were commonly used as
plates for handing food; but if any member of the Wild Pigeon
family had used banana leaves for this purpose, it was supposed
that he would suffer from rheumatic swellings or an eruption all
over the body like chicken-pox. The Mori clan of the Bhils in
Central India worship the peacock as their totem and make offerings
of grain to it; yet members of the clan believe that were they even
to set foot on the tracks of a peacock they would afterwards suffer
from some disease, and if a woman sees a peacock she must veil her
face and look away. Thus the primitive mind seems to conceive of
holiness as a sort of dangerous virus, which a prudent man will
shun as far as possible, and of which, if he should chance to be
infected by it, he will carefully disinfect himself by some form of
ceremonial purification.
In the light of these parallels the beliefs and customs of the
Egyptians touching the pig are probably to be explained as based
upon an opinion of the extreme sanctity rather than of the extreme
uncleanness of the animal; or rather, to put it more correctly,
they imply that the animal was looked on, not simply as a filthy
and disgusting creature, but as a being endowed with high
supernatural powers, and that as such it was regarded with that
primitive sentiment of religious awe and fear in which the feelings
of reverence and abhorrence are almost equally blended. The
ancients themselves seem to have been aware that there was another
side to the horror with which swine seemed to inspire the
Egyptians. For the Greek astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus, who
resided fourteen months in Egypt and conversed with the priests,
was of opinion that the Egyptians spared the pig, not out of
abhorrence, but from a regard to its utility in agriculture; for,
according to him, when the Nile had subsided, herds of swine were
turned loose over the fields to tread the seed down into the moist
earth. But when a being is thus the object of mixed and implicitly
contradictory feelings, he may be said to occupy a position of
unstable equilibrium. In course of time one of the contradictory
feelings is likely to prevail over the other, and according as the
feeling which finally predominates is that of reverence or
abhorrence, the being who is the object of it will rise into a god
or sink into a devil. The latter, on the whole, was the fate of the
pig in Egypt. For in historical times the fear and horror of the
pig seem certainly to have outweighed the reverence and worship of
which he may once have been the object, and of which, even in his
fallen state, he never quite lost trace. He came to be looked on as
an embodiment of Set or Typhon, the Egyptian devil and enemy of
Osiris. For it was in the shape of a black pig that Typhon injured
the eye of the god Horus, who burned him and instituted the
sacrifice of the pig, the sun-god Ra having declared the beast
abominable. Again, the story that Typhon was hunting a boar when he
discovered and mangled the body of Osiris, and that this was the
reason why pigs were sacrificed once a year, is clearly a
modernised version of an older story that Osiris, like Adonis and
Attis, was slain or mangled by a boar, or by Typhon in the form of
a boar. Thus, the annual sacrifice of a pig to Osiris might
naturally be interpreted as vengeance inflicted on the hostile
animal that had slain or mangled the god. But, in the first place,
when an animal is thus killed as a solemn sacrifice once and once
only in the year, it generally or always means that the animal is
divine, that he is spared and respected the rest of the year as a
god and slain, when he is slain, also in the character of a god. In
the second place, the examples of Dionysus and Demeter, if not of
Attis and Adonis, have taught us that the animal which is
sacrificed to a god on the ground that he is the god’s enemy
may have been, and probably was, originally the god himself.
Therefore, the annual sacrifice of a pig to Osiris, coupled with
the alleged hostility of the animal to the god, tends to show,
first, that originally the pig was a god, and, second, that he was
Osiris. At a later age, when Osiris became anthropomorphic and his
original relation to the pig had been forgotten, the animal was
first distinguished from him, and afterwards opposed as an enemy to
him by mythologists who could think of no reason for killing a
beast in connexion with the worship of a god except that the beast
was the god’s enemy; or, as Plutarch puts it, not that which
is dear to the gods, but that which is the contrary, is fit to be
sacrificed. At this later stage the havoc which a wild boar
notoriously makes amongst the corn would supply a plausible reason
for regarding him as the foe of the corn-spirit, though originally,
if I am right, the very freedom with which the boar ranged at will
through the corn led people to identify him with the corn-spirit,
to whom he was afterwards opposed as an enemy.
The view which identifies the pig with Osiris derives not a
little support from the sacrifice of pigs to him on the very day on
which, according to tradition, Osiris himself was killed; for thus
the killing of the pig was the annual representation of the killing
of Osiris, just as the throwing of the pigs into the caverns at the
Thesmophoria was an annual representation of the descent of
Persephone into the lower world; and both customs are parallel to
the European practice of killing a goat, cock, and so forth, at
harvest as a representative of the corn-spirit.
Again, the theory that the pig, originally Osiris himself,
afterwards came to be regarded as an embodiment of his enemy
Typhon, is supported by the similar relation of red-haired men and
red oxen to Typhon. For in regard to the red-haired men who were
burned and whose ashes were scattered with winnowing-fans, we have
seen fair grounds for believing that originally, like the
red-haired puppies killed at Rome in spring, they were
representatives of the corn-spirit himself that is, of Osiris, and
were slain for the express purpose of making the corn turn red or
golden. Yet at a later time these men were explained to be
representatives, not of Osiris, but of his enemy Typhon, and the
killing of them was regarded as an act of vengeance inflicted on
the enemy of the god. Similarly, the red oxen sacrificed by the
Egyptians were said to be offered on the ground of their
resemblance to Typhon; though it is more likely that originally
they were slain on the ground of their resemblance to the
corn-spirit Osiris. We have seen that the ox is a common
representative of the corn-spirit and is slain as such on the
harvest-field.
Osiris was regularly identified with the bull Apis of Memphis
and the bull Mnevis of Heliopolis. But it is hard to say whether
these bulls were embodiments of him as the corn-spirit, as the red
oxen appear to have been, or whether they were not in origin
entirely distinct deities who came to be fused with Osiris at a
later time. The universality of the worship of these two bulls
seems to put them on a different footing from the ordinary sacred
animals whose worships were purely local. But whatever the original
relation of Apis to Osiris may have been, there is one fact about
the former which ought not to be passed over in a disquisition on
the custom of killing a god. Although the bull Apis was worshipped
as a god with much pomp and profound reverence, he was not suffered
to live beyond a certain length of time which was prescribed by the
sacred books, and on the expiry of which he was drowned in a holy
spring. The limit, according to Plutarch, was twenty-five years;
but it cannot always have been enforced, for the tombs of the Apis
bulls have been discovered in modern times, and from the
inscriptions on them it appears that in the twenty-second dynasty
two of the holy steers lived more than twenty-six years.
5. Virbius and the Horse
WE are now in a position to hazard a conjecture as to the
meaning of the tradition that Virbius, the first of the divine
Kings of the Wood at Aricia, had been killed in the character of
Hippolytus by horses. Having found, first, that spirits of the corn
are not infrequently represented in the form of horses; and,
second, that the animal which in later legends is said to have
injured the god was sometimes originally the god himself, we may
conjecture that the horses by which Virbius or Hippolytus was said
to have been slain were really embodiments of him as a deity of
vegetation. The myth that he had been killed by horses was probably
invented to explain certain features in his worship, amongst others
the custom of excluding horses from his sacred grove. For myth
changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what
their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their
fathers acted have been long forgotten. The history of religion is
a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a
sound theory for an absurd practice. In the case before us we may
be sure that the myth is more modern than the custom and by no
means represents the original reason for excluding horses from the
grove. From their exclusion it might be inferred that horses could
not be the sacred animals or embodiments of the god of the grove.
But the inference would be rash. The goat was at one time a sacred
animal or embodiment of Athena, as may be inferred from the
practice of representing the goddess clad in a goat-skin
(aegis). Yet the goat was neither sacrificed to her as a
rule, nor allowed to enter her great sanctuary, the Acropolis at
Athens. The reason alleged for this was that the goat injured the
olive, the sacred tree of Athena. So far, therefore, the relation
of the goat to Athena is parallel to the relation of the horse to
Virbius, both animals being excluded from the sanctuary on the
ground of injury done by them to the god. But from Varro we learn
that there was an exception to the rule which excluded the goat
from the Acropolis. Once a year, he says, the goat was driven on to
the Acropolis for a necessary sacrifice. Now, as has been remarked
before, when an animal is sacrificed once and once only in the
year, it is probably slain, not as a victim offered to the god, but
as a representative of the god himself. Therefore we may infer that
if a goat was sacrificed on the Acropolis once a year, it was
sacrificed in the character of Athena herself; and it may be
conjectured that the skin of the sacrificed animal was placed on
the statue of the goddess and formed the aegis, which
would thus be renewed annually. Similarly at Thebes in Egypt rams
were sacred and were not sacrificed. But on one day in the year a
ram was killed, and its skin was placed on the statue of the god
Ammon. Now, if we knew the ritual of the Arician grove better, we
might find that the rule of excluding horses from it, like the rule
of excluding goats from the Acropolis at Athens, was subject to an
annual exception, a horse being once a year taken into the grove
and sacrificed as an embodiment of the god Virbius. By the usual
misunderstanding the horse thus killed would come in time to be
regarded as an enemy offered up in sacrifice to the god whom he had
injured, like the pig which was sacrificed to Demeter and Osiris or
the goat which was sacrificed to Dionysus, and possibly to Athena.
It is so easy for a writer to record a rule without noticing an
exception that we need not wonder at finding the rule of the
Arician grove recorded without any mention of an exception such as
I suppose. If we had had only the statements of Athenaeus and
Pliny, we should have known only the rule which forbade the
sacrifice of goats to Athena and excluded them from the Acropolis,
without being aware of the important exception which the fortunate
preservation of Varro’s work has revealed to us.
The conjecture that once a year a horse may have been sacrificed
in the Arician grove as a representative of the deity of the grove
derives some support from the similar sacrifice of a horse which
took place once a year at Rome. On the fifteenth of October in each
year a chariot-race was run on the Field of Mars. Stabbed with a
spear, the right-hand horse of the victorious team was then
sacrificed to Mars for the purpose of ensuring good crops, and its
head was cut off and adorned with a string of loaves. Thereupon the
inhabitants of two wards—the Sacred Way and the
Subura—contended with each other who should get the head. If
the people of the Sacred Way got it, they fastened it to a wall of
the king’s house; if the people of the Subura got it, they
fastened it to the Mamilian tower. The horse’s tail was cut
off and carried to the king’s house with such speed that the
blood dripped on the hearth of the house. Further, it appears that
the blood of the horse was caught and preserved till the
twenty-first of April, when the Vestal Virgins mixed it with the
blood of the unborn calves which had been sacrificed six days
before. The mixture was then distributed to shepherds, and used by
them for fumigating their flocks.
In this ceremony the decoration of the horse’s head with a
string of loaves, and the alleged object of the sacrifice, namely,
to procure a good harvest, seem to indicate that the horse was
killed as one of those animal representatives of the corn-spirit of
which we have found so many examples. The custom of cutting off the
horse’s tail is like the African custom of cutting off the
tails of the oxen and sacrificing them to obtain a good crop. In
both the Roman and the African custom the animal apparently stands
for the corn-spirit, and its fructifying power is supposed to
reside especially in its tail. The latter idea occurs, as we have
seen, in European folk-lore. Again, the practice of fumigating the
cattle in spring with the blood of the horse may be compared with
the practice of giving the Old Wife, the Maiden, or the
clyack sheaf as fodder to the horses in spring or the
cattle at Christmas, and giving the Yule Boar to the ploughing oxen
or horses to eat in spring. All these usages aim at ensuring the
blessing of the corn-spirit on the homestead and its inmates and
storing it up for another year.
The Roman sacrifice of the October horse, as it was called,
carries us back to the early days when the Subura, afterwards a low
and squalid quarter of the great metropolis, was still a separate
village, whose inhabitants engaged in a friendly contest on the
harvest-field with their neighbours of Rome, then a little rural
town. The Field of Mars on which the ceremony took place lay beside
the Tiber, and formed part of the king’s domain down to the
abolition of the monarchy. For tradition ran that at the time when
the last of the kings was driven from Rome, the corn stood ripe for
the sickle on the crown lands beside the river; but no one would
eat the accursed grain and it was flung into the river in such
heaps that, the water being low with the summer heat, it formed the
nucleus of an island. The horse sacrifice was thus an old autumn
custom observed upon the king’s corn-fields at the end of the
harvest. The tail and blood of the horse, as the chief parts of the
corn-spirit’s representative, were taken to the king’s
house and kept there; just as in Germany the harvest-cock is nailed
on the gable or over the door of the farmhouse; and as the last
sheaf, in the form of the Maiden, is carried home and kept over the
fireplace in the Highlands of Scotland. Thus the blessing of the
corn-spirit was brought to the king’s house and hearth and,
through them, to the community of which he was the head. Similarly
in the spring and autumn customs of Northern Europe the May-pole is
sometimes set up in front of the house of the mayor or burgomaster,
and the last sheaf at harvest is brought to him as the head of the
village. But while the tail and blood fell to the king, the
neighbouring village of the Subura, which no doubt once had a
similar ceremony of its own, was gratified by being allowed to
compete for the prize of the horse’s head. The Mamilian
tower, to which the Suburans nailed the horse’s head when
they succeeded in carrying it off, appears to have been a
peel-tower or keep of the old Mamilian family, the magnates of the
village. The ceremony thus performed on the king’s fields and
at his house on behalf of the whole town and of the neighbouring
village presupposes a time when each township performed a similar
ceremony on its own fields. In the rural districts of Latium the
villages may have continued to observe the custom, each on its own
land, long after the Roman hamlets had merged their separate
harvest-homes in the common celebration on the king’s lands.
There is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the
sacred grove of Aricia, like the Field of Mars at Rome, may have
been the scene of a common harvest celebration, at which a horse
was sacrificed with the same rude rites on behalf of the
neighbouring villages. The horse would represent the fructifying
spirit both of the tree and of the corn, for the two ideas melt
into each other, as we see in customs like the Harvest-May.
L. Eating the God
1. The Sacrament of First-Fruits
WE have now seen that the corn-spirit is represented sometimes
in human, sometimes in animal form, and that in both cases he is
killed in the person of his representative and eaten sacramentally.
To find examples of actually killing the human representative of
the corn-spirit we had naturally to go to savage races; but the
harvest-suppers of our European peasants have furnished
unmistakable examples of the sacramental eating of animals as
representatives of the corn-spirit. But further, as might have been
anticipated, the new corn is itself eaten sacramentally, that is,
as the body of the corn-spirit. In Wermland, Sweden, the
farmer’s wife uses the grain of the last sheaf to bake a loaf
in the shape of a little girl; this loaf is divided amongst the
whole household and eaten by them. Here the loaf represents the
corn-spirit conceived as a maiden; just as in Scotland the
corn-spirit is similarly conceived and represented by the last
sheaf made up in the form of a woman and bearing the name of the
Maiden. As usual, the corn-spirit is believed to reside in the last
sheaf; and to eat a loaf made from the last sheaf is, therefore, to
eat the corn-spirit itself. Similarly at La Palisse, in France, a
man made of dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is carried on the
last harvest-waggon. The tree and the dough-man are taken to the
mayor’s house and kept there till the vintage is over. Then
the close of the harvest is celebrated by a feast at which the
mayor breaks the dough-man in pieces and gives the pieces to the
people to eat.
In these examples the corn-spirit is represented and eaten in
human shape. In other cases, though the new corn is not baked in
loaves of human shape, still the solemn ceremonies with which it is
eaten suffice to indicate that it is partaken of sacramentally,
that is, as the body of the corn-spirit. For example, the following
ceremonies used to be observed by Lithuanian peasants at eating the
new corn. About the time of the autumn sowing, when all the corn
had been got in and the threshing had begun, each farmer held a
festival called Sabarios, that is, “the mixing or throwing
together.” He took nine good handfuls of each kind of
crop—wheat, barley, oats, flax, beans, lentils, and the rest;
and each handful he divided into three parts. The twentyseven
portions of each grain were then thrown on a heap and all mixed up
together. The grain used had to be that which was first threshed
and winnowed and which had been set aside and kept for this
purpose. A part of the grain thus mixed was employed to bake little
loaves, one for each of the household; the rest was mixed with more
barley or oats and made into beer. The first beer brewed from this
mixture was for the drinking of the farmer, his wife, and children;
the second brew was for the servants. The beer being ready, the
farmer chose an evening when no stranger was expected. Then he
knelt down before the barrel of beer, drew a jugful of the liquor
and poured it on the bung of the barrel, saying, “O fruitful
earth, make rye and barley and all kinds of corn to
flourish.” Next he took the jug to the parlour, where his
wife and children awaited him. On the floor of the parlour lay
bound a black or white or speckled (not a red) cock and a hen of
the same colour and of the same brood, which must have been hatched
within the year. Then the farmer knelt down, with the jug in his
hand, and thanked God for the harvest and prayed for a good crop
next year. Next all lifted up their hands and said, “O God,
and thou, O earth, we give you this cock and hen as a free-will
offering.” With that the farmer killed the fowls with the
blows of a wooden spoon, for he might not cut their heads off.
After the first prayer and after killing each of the birds he
poured out a third of the beer. Then his wife boiled the fowls in a
new pot which had never been used before. After that, a bushel was
set, bottom upwards, on the floor, and on it were placed the little
loaves mentioned above and the boiled fowls. Next the new beer was
fetched, together with a ladle and three mugs, none of which was
used except on this occasion. When the farmer had ladled the beer
into the mugs, the family knelt down round the bushel. The father
then uttered a prayer and drank off the three mugs of beer. The
rest followed his example. Then the loaves and the flesh of the
fowls were eaten, after which the beer went round again, till every
one had emptied each of the three mugs nine times. None of the food
should remain over; but if anything did happen to be left, it was
consumed next morning with the same ceremonies. The bones were
given to the dog to eat; if he did not eat them all up, the remains
were buried under the dung in the cattle-stall. This ceremony was
observed at the beginning of December. On the day on which it took
place no bad word might be spoken.
Such was the custom about two hundred years or more ago. At the
present day in Lithuania, when new potatoes or loaves made from the
new corn are being eaten, all the people at table pull each
other’s hair. The meaning of this last custom is obscure, but
a similar custom was certainly observed by the heathen Lithuanians
at their solemn sacrifices. Many of the Esthonians of the island of
Oesel will not eat bread baked of the new corn till they have first
taken a bite at a piece of iron. The iron is here plainly a charm,
intended to render harmless the spirit that is in the corn. In
Sutherlandshire at the present day, when the new potatoes are dug
all the family must taste them, otherwise “the spirits in
them [the potatoes] take offence, and the potatoes would not
keep.” In one part of Yorkshire it is still customary for the
clergyman to cut the first corn; and my informant believes that the
corn so cut is used to make the communion bread. If the latter part
of the custom is correctly reported (and analogy is all in its
favour), it shows how the Christian communion has absorbed within
itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than
Christianity.
The Aino or Ainu of Japan are said to distinguish various kinds
of millet as male and female respectively, and these kinds, taken
together, are called “the divine husband and wife
cereal” (Umurek haru kamui). “Therefore before
millet is pounded and made into cakes for general eating, the old
men have a few made for themselves first to worship. When they are
ready they pray to them very earnestly and say: ‘O thou
cereal deity, we worship thee. Thou hast grown very well this year,
and thy flavour will be sweet. Thou art good. The goddess of fire
will be glad, and we also shall rejoice greatly. O thou god, O thou
divine cereal, do thou nourish the people. I now partake of thee. I
worship thee and give thee thanks.’ After having thus prayed,
they, the worshippers, take a cake and eat it, and from this time
the people may all partake of the new millet. And so with many
gestures of homage and words of prayer this kind of food is
dedicated to the well-being of the Ainu. No doubt the cereal
offering is regarded as a tribute paid to a god, but that god is no
other than the seed itself; and it is only a god in so far as it is
beneficial to the human body.”
At the close of the rice harvest in the East Indian island of
Buru, each clan meets at a common sacramental meal, to which every
member of the clan is bound to contribute a little of the new rice.
This meal is called “eating the soul of the rice,” a
name which clearly indicates the sacramental character of the
repast. Some of the rice is also set apart and offered to the
spirits. Amongst the Alfoors of Minahassa, in Celebes, the priest
sows the first rice-seed and plucks the first ripe rice in each
field. This rice he roasts and grinds into meal, and gives some of
it to each of the household. Shortly before the rice-harvest in
Boland Mongondo, another district of Celebes, an offering is made
of a small pig or a fowl. Then the priest plucks a little rice,
first on his own field and next on those of his neighbours. All the
rice thus plucked by him he dries along with his own, and then
gives it back to the respective owners, who have it ground and
boiled. When it is boiled the women take it back, with an egg, to
the priest, who offers the egg in sacrifice and returns the rice to
the women. Of this rice every member of the family, down to the
youngest child, must partake. After this ceremony every one is free
to get in his rice.
Amongst the Burghers or Badagas, a tribe of the Neilgherry Hills
in Southern India, the first handful of seed is sown and the first
sheaf reaped by a Curumbar, a man of a different tribe, the members
of which the Burghers regard as sorcerers. The grain contained in
the first sheaf “is that day reduced to meal, made into
cakes, and, being offered as a first-fruit oblation, is, together
with the remainder of the sacrificed animal, partaken of by the
Burgher and the whole of his family, as the meat of a federal
offering and sacrifice.” Among the Hindoos of Southern India
the eating of the new rice is the occasion of a family festival
called Pongol. The new rice is boiled in a new pot on a fire which
is kindled at noon on the day when, according to Hindoo
astrologers, the sun enters the tropic of Capricorn. The boiling of
the pot is watched with great anxiety by the whole family, for as
the milk boils, so will the coming year be. If the milk boils
rapidly, the year will be prosperous; but it will be the reverse if
the milk boils slowly. Some of the new boiled rice is offered to
the image of Ganesa; then every one partakes of it. In some parts
of Northern India the festival of the new crop is known as
Navan, that is, “new grain.” When the crop is
ripe, the owner takes the omens, goes to the field, plucks five or
six ears of barley in the spring crop and one of the millets in the
autumn harvest. This is brought home, parched, and mixed with
coarse sugar, butter, and curds. Some of it is thrown on the fire
in the name of the village gods and deceased ancestors; the rest is
eaten by the family.
The ceremony of eating the new yams at Onitsha, on the Niger, is
thus described: “Each headman brought out six yams, and cut
down young branches of palm-leaves and placed them before his gate,
roasted three of the yams, and got some kola-nuts and fish. After
the yam is roasted, the Libia, or country doctor, takes
the yam, scrapes it into a sort of meal, and divides it into
halves; he then takes one piece, and places it on the lips of the
person who is going to eat the new yam. The eater then blows up the
steam from the hot yam, and afterwards pokes the whole into his
mouth, and says, ‘I thank God for being permitted to eat the
new yam’; he then begins to chew it heartily, with fish
likewise.”
Among the Nandi of British East Africa, when the eleusine grain
is ripening in autumn, every woman who owns a corn-field goes out
into it with her daughters, and they all pluck some of the ripe
grain. Each of the women then fixes one grain in her necklace and
chews another, which she rubs on her forehead, throat, and breast.
No mark of joy escapes them; sorrowfully they cut a basketful of
the new corn, and carrying it home place it in the loft to dry. As
the ceiling is of wickerwork, a good deal of the grain drops
through the crevices and falls into the fire, where it explodes
with a crackling noise. The people make no attempt to prevent this
waste; for they regard the crackling of the grain in the fire as a
sign that the souls of the dead are partaking of it. A few days
later porridge is made from the new grain and served up with milk
at the evening meal. All the members of the family take some of the
porridge and dab it on the walls and roofs of the huts; also they
put a little in their mouths and spit it out towards the east and
on the outside of the huts. Then, holding up some of the grain in
his hand, the head of the family prays to God for health and
strength, and likewise for milk, and everybody present repeats the
words of the prayer after him.
Amongst the Caffres of Natal and Zululand, no one may eat of the
new fruits till after a festival which marks the beginning of the
Caffre year and falls at the end of December or the beginning of
January. All the people assemble at the king’s kraal, where
they feast and dance. Before they separate the “dedication of
the people” takes place. Various fruits of the earth, as
corn, mealies, and pumpkins, mixed with the flesh of a sacrificed
animal and with “medicine,” are boiled in great pots,
and a little of this food is placed in each man’s mouth by
the king himself. After thus partaking of the sanctified fruits, a
man is himself sanctified for the whole year, and may immediately
get in his crops. It is believed that if any man were to partake of
the new fruits before the festival, he would die; if he were
detected, he would be put to death, or at least all his cattle
would be taken from him. The holiness of the new fruits is well
marked by the rule that they must be cooked in a special pot which
is used only for this purpose, and on a new fire kindled by a
magician through the friction of two sticks which are called
“husband and wife.”
Among the Bechuanas it is a rule that before they partake of the
new crops they must purify themselves. The purification takes place
at the commencement of the new year on a day in January which is
fixed by the chief. It begins in the great kraal of the tribe,
where all the adult males assemble. Each of them takes in his hand
leaves of a gourd called by the natives lerotse (described
as something between a pumpkin and a vegetable marrow); and having
crushed the leaves he anoints with the expressed juice his big toes
and his navel; many people indeed apply the juice to all the joints
of their body, but the better-informed say that this is a vulgar
departure from ancient custom. After this ceremony in the great
kraal every man goes home to his own kraal, assembles all the
members of his family, men, women, and children, and smears them
all with the juice of the lerotse leaves. Some of the
leaves are also pounded, mixed with milk in a large wooden dish,
and given to the dogs to lap up. Then the porridge plate of each
member of the family is rubbed with the lerotse leaves.
When this purification has been completed, but not before, the
people are free to eat of the new crops.
The Bororo Indians of Brazil think that it would be certain
death to eat the new maize before it has been blessed by the
medicine-man. The ceremony of blessing it is as follows. The
half-ripe husk is washed and placed before the medicine-man, who by
dancing and singing for several hours, and by incessant smoking,
works himself up into a state of ecstasy, whereupon he bites into
the husk, trembling in every limb and uttering shrieks from time to
time. A similar ceremony is performed whenever a large animal or a
large fish is killed. The Bororo are firmly persuaded that were any
man to touch unconsecrated maize or meat, before the ceremony had
been completed, he and his whole tribe would perish.
Amongst the Creek Indians of North America, the busk or
festival of first-fruits was the chief ceremony of the year. It was
held in July or August, when the corn was ripe, and marked the end
of the old year and the beginning of the new one. Before it took
place, none of the Indians would eat or even handle any part of the
new harvest. Sometimes each town had its own busk; sometimes
several towns united to hold one in common. Before celebrating the
busk, the people provided themselves with new clothes and new
household utensils and furniture; they collected their old clothes
and rubbish, together with all the remaining grain and other old
provisions, cast them together in one common heap, and consumed
them with fire. As a preparation for the ceremony, all the fires in
the village were extinguished, and the ashes swept clean away. In
particular, the hearth or altar of the temple was dug up and the
ashes carried out. Then the chief priest put some roots of the
button-snake plant, with some green tobacco leaves and a little of
the new fruits, at the bottom of the fireplace, which he afterwards
commanded to be covered up with white clay, and wetted over with
clean water. A thick arbour of green branches of young trees was
then made over the altar. Meanwhile the women at home were cleaning
out their houses, renewing the old hearths, and scouring all the
cooking vessels that they might be ready to receive the new fire
and the new fruits. The public or sacred square was carefully swept
of even the smallest crumbs of previous feasts, “for fear of
polluting the first-fruit offerings.” Also every vessel that
had contained or had been used about any food during the expiring
year was removed from the temple before sunset. Then all the men
who were not known to have violated the law of the first-fruit
offering and that of marriage during the year were summoned by a
crier to enter the holy square and observe a solemn fast. But the
women (except six old ones), the children, and all who had not
attained the rank of warriors were forbidden to enter the square.
Sentinels were also posted at the corners of the square to keep out
all persons deemed impure and all animals. A strict fast was then
observed for two nights and a day, the devotees drinking a bitter
decoction of button-snake root “in order to vomit and purge
their sinful bodies.” That the people outside the square
might also be purified, one of the old men laid down a quantity of
green tobacco at a corner of the square; this was carried off by an
old woman and distributed to the people without, who chewed and
swallowed it “in order to afflict their souls.” During
this general fast, the women, children, and men of weak
constitution were allowed to eat after mid-day, but not before. On
the morning when the fast ended, the women brought a quantity of
the old year’s food to the outside of the sacred square.
These provisions were then fetched in and set before the famished
multitude, but all traces of them had to be removed before noon.
When the sun was declining from the meridian, all the people were
commanded by the voice of a crier to stay within doors, to do no
bad act, and to be sure to extinguish and throw away every spark of
the old fire. Universal silence now reigned. Then the high priest
made the new fire by the friction of two pieces of wood, and placed
it on the altar under the green arbour. This new fire was believed
to atone for all past crimes except murder. Next a basket of new
fruits was brought; the high priest took out a little of each sort
of fruit, rubbed it with bear’s oil, and offered it, together
with some flesh, “to the bountiful holy spirit of fire, as a
first-fruit offering, and an annual oblation for sin.” He
also consecrated the sacred emetics (the button-snake root and the
cassina or black-drink) by pouring a little of them into the fire.
The persons who had remained outside now approached, without
entering, the sacred square; and the chief priest thereupon made a
speech, exhorting the people to observe their old rites and
customs, announcing that the new divine fire had purged away the
sins of the past year, and earnestly warning the women that, if any
of them had not extinguished the old fire, or had contracted any
impurity, they must forthwith depart, “lest the divine fire
should spoil both them and the people.” Some of the new fire
was then set down outside the holy square; the women carried it
home joyfully, and laid it on their unpolluted hearths. When
several towns had united to celebrate the festival, the new fire
might thus be carried for several miles. The new fruits were then
dressed on the new fires and eaten with bear’s oil, which was
deemed indispensable. At one point of the festival the men rubbed
the new corn between their hands, then on their faces and breasts.
During the festival which followed, the warriors, dressed in their
wild martial array, their heads covered with white down and
carrying white feathers in their hands, danced round the sacred
arbour, under which burned the new fire. The ceremonies lasted
eight days, during which the strictest continence was practised.
Towards the conclusion of the festival the warriors fought a mock
battle; then the men and women together, in three circles, danced
round the sacred fire. Lastly, all the people smeared themselves
with white clay and bathed in running water. They came out of the
water believing that no evil could now befall them for what they
had done amiss in the past. So they departed in joy and peace.
To this day, also, the remnant of the Seminole Indians of
Florida, a people of the same stock as the Creeks, hold an annual
purification and festival called the Green Corn Dance, at which the
new corn is eaten. On the evening of the first day of the festival
they quaff a nauseous “Black Drink,” as it is called,
which acts both as an emetic and a purgative; they believe that he
who does not drink of this liquor cannot safely eat the new green
corn, and besides that he will be sick at some time in the year.
While the liquor is being drunk, the dancing begins, and the
medicine-men join in it. Next day they eat of the green corn; the
following day they fast, probably from fear of polluting the sacred
food in their stomachs by contact with common food; but the third
day they hold a great feast.
Even tribes which do not till the ground sometimes observe
analogous ceremonies when they gather the first wild fruits or dig
the first roots of the season. Thus among the Salish and Tinneh
Indians of North-West America, “before the young people eat
the first berries or roots of the season, they always addressed the
fruit or plant, and begged for its favour and aid. In some tribes
regular First-fruit ceremonies were annually held at the time of
picking the wild fruit or gathering the roots, and also among the
salmon-eating tribes when the run of the ‘sockeye’
salmon began. These ceremonies were not so much thanksgivings, as
performances to ensure a plentiful crop or supply of the particular
object desired, for if they were not properly and reverently
carried out there was danger of giving offence to the
‘spirits’ of the objects, and being deprived of
them.” For example, these Indians are fond of the young
shoots or suckers of the wild raspberry, and they observe a solemn
ceremony at eating the first of them in season. The shoots are
cooked in a new pot: the people assemble and stand in a great
circle with closed eyes, while the presiding chief or medicine-man
invokes the spirit of the plant, begging that it will be propitious
to them and grant them a good supply of suckers. After this part of
the ceremony is over the cooked suckers are handed to the presiding
officer in a newly carved dish, and a small portion is given to
each person present, who reverently and decorously eats it.
The Thompson Indians of British Columbia cook and eat the
sunflower root (Balsamorrhiza sagittata, Nutt.), but they
used to regard it as a mysterious being, and observed a number of
taboos in connexion with it; for example, women who were engaged in
digging or cooking the root must practice continence, and no man
might come near the oven where the women were baking the root. When
young people ate the first berries, roots, or other products of the
season, they addressed a prayer to the Sunflower-Root as follows:
“I inform thee that I intend to eat thee. Mayest thou always
help me to ascend, so that I may always be able to reach the tops
of mountains, and may I never be clumsy! I ask this from thee,
Sunflower-Root. Thou art the greatest of all in mystery.” To
omit this prayer would make the eater lazy and cause him to sleep
long in the morning.
These customs of the Thompson and other Indian tribes of
North-West America are instructive, because they clearly indicate
the motive, or at least one of the motives, which underlies the
ceremonies observed at eating the first fruits of the season. That
motive in the case of these Indians is simply a belief that the
plant itself is animated by a conscious and more or less powerful
spirit, who must be propitiated before the people can safely
partake of the fruits or roots which are supposed to be part of his
body. Now if this is true of wild fruits and roots, we may infer
with some probability that it is also true of cultivated fruits and
roots, such as yams, and in particular that it holds good of the
cereals, such as wheat, barley, oats, rice, and maize. In all cases
it seems reasonable to infer that the scruples which savages
manifest at eating the first fruits of any crop, and the ceremonies
which they observe before they overcome their scruples, are due at
least in large measure to a notion that the plant or tree is
animated by a spirit or even a deity, whose leave must be obtained,
or whose favour must be sought, before it is possible to partake
with safety of the new crop. This indeed is plainly affirmed of the
Aino: they call the millet “the divine cereal,”
“the cereal deity,” and they pray to and worship him
before they will eat of the cakes made from the new millet. And
even where the indwelling divinity of the first fruits is not
expressly affirmed, it appears to be implied both by the solemn
preparations made for eating them and by the danger supposed to be
incurred by persons who venture to partake of them without
observing the prescribed ritual. In all such cases, accordingly, we
may not improperly describe the eating of the new fruits as a
sacrament or communion with a deity, or at all events with a
powerful spirit.
Among the usages which point to this conclusion are the custom
of employing either new or specially reserved vessels to hold the
new fruits, and the practice of purifying the persons of the
communicants before it is lawful to engage in the solemn act of
communion with the divinity. Of all the modes of purification
adopted on these occasions none perhaps brings out the sacramental
virtue of the rite so clearly as the Creek and Seminole practice of
taking a purgative before swallowing the new corn. The intention is
thereby to prevent the sacred food from being polluted by contact
with common food in the stomach of the eater. For the same reason
Catholics partake of the Eucharist fasting; and among the pastoral
Masai of Eastern Africa the young warriors, who live on meat and
milk exclusively, are obliged to eat nothing but milk for so many
days and then nothing but meat for so many more, and before they
pass from the one food to the other they must make sure that none
of the old food remains in their stomachs; this they do by
swallowing a very powerful purgative and emetic.
In some of the festivals which we have examined, the sacrament
of first-fruits is combined with a sacrifice or presentation of
them to gods or spirits, and in course of time the sacrifice of
first-fruits tends to throw the sacrament into the shade, if not to
supersede it. The mere fact of offering the first-fruits to the
gods or spirits comes now to be thought a sufficient preparation
for eating the new corn; the higher powers having received their
share, man is free to enjoy the rest. This mode of viewing the new
fruits implies that they are regarded no longer as themselves
instinct with divine life, but merely as a gift bestowed by the
gods upon man, who is bound to express his gratitude and homage to
his divine benefactors by returning to them a portion of their
bounty.
2. Eating the God among the Aztecs
THE CUSTOM of eating bread sacramentally as the body of a god
was practised by the Aztecs before the discovery and conquest of
Mexico by the Spaniards. Twice a year, in May and December, an
image of the great Mexican god Huitzilopochtli or Vitzilipuztli was
made of dough, then broken in pieces, and solemnly eaten by his
worshippers. The May ceremony is thus described by the historian
Acosta: “The Mexicans in the month of May made their
principal feast to their god Vitzilipuztli, and two days before
this feast, the virgins whereof I have spoken (the which were shut
up and secluded in the same temple and were as it were religious
women) did mingle a quantity of the seed of beets with roasted
maize, and then they did mould it with honey, making an idol of
that paste in bigness like to that of wood, putting instead of eyes
grains of green glass, of blue or white; and for teeth grains of
maize set forth with all the ornament and furniture that I have
said. This being finished, all the noblemen came and brought it an
exquisite and rich garment, like unto that of the idol, wherewith
they did attire it. Being thus clad and deckt, they did set it in
an azured chair and in a litter to carry it on their shoulders. The
morning of this feast being come, an hour before day all the
maidens came forth attired in white, with new ornaments, the which
that day were called the Sisters of their god Vitzilipuztli, they
came crowned with garlands of maize roasted and parched, being like
unto azahar or the flower of orange; and about their necks they had
great chains of the same, which went bauldrick-wise under their
left arm. Their cheeks were dyed with vermilion, their arms from
the elbow to the wrist were covered with red parrots’
feathers.” Young men, dressed in red robes and crowned like
the virgins with maize, then carried the idol in its litter to the
foot of the great pyramid-shaped temple, up the steep and narrow
steps of which it was drawn to the music of flutes, trumpets,
cornets, and drums. “While they mounted up the idol all the
people stood in the court with much reverence and fear. Being
mounted to the top, and that they had placed it in a little lodge
of roses which they held ready, presently came the young men, which
strewed many flowers of sundry kinds, wherewith they filled the
temple both within and without. This done, all the virgins came out
of their convent, bringing pieces of paste compounded of beets and
roasted maize, which was of the same paste whereof their idol was
made and compounded, and they were of the fashion of great bones.
They delivered them to the young men, who carried them up and laid
them at the idol’s feet, wherewith they filled the whole
place that it could receive no more. They called these morsels of
paste the flesh and bones of Vitzilipuztli. Having laid abroad
these bones, presently came all the ancients of the temple,
priests, Levites, and all the rest of the ministers, according to
their dignities and antiquities (for herein there was a strict
order amongst them) one after another, with their veils of diverse
colours and works, every one according to his dignity and office,
having garlands upon their heads and chains of flowers about their
necks; after them came their gods and goddesses whom they
worshipped, of diverse figures, attired in the same livery; then
putting themselves in order about those morsels and pieces of
paste, they used certain ceremonies with singing and dancing. By
means whereof they were blessed and consecrated for the flesh and
bones of this idol. This ceremony and blessing (whereby they were
taken for the flesh and bones of the idol) being ended, they
honoured those pieces in the same sort as their god. … All
the city came to this goodly spectacle, and there was a commandment
very strictly observed throughout all the land, that the day of the
feast of the idol of Vitzilipuztli they should eat no other meat
but this paste, with honey, whereof the idol was made. And this
should be eaten at the point of day, and they should drink no water
nor any other thing till after noon: they held it for an ill sign,
yea, for sacrilege to do the contrary: but after the ceremonies
ended, it was lawful for them to eat anything. During the time of
this ceremony they hid the water from their little children,
admonishing all such as had the use of reason not to drink any
water; which, if they did, the anger of God would come upon them,
and they should die, which they did observe very carefully and
strictly. The ceremonies, dancing, and sacrifice ended, the went to
unclothe themselves, and the priests and superiors of the temple
took the idol of paste, which they spoiled of all the ornaments it
had, and made many pieces, as well of the idol itself as of the
truncheons which they consecrated, and then they gave them to the
people in manner of a communion, beginning with the greater, and
continuing unto the rest, both men, women, and little children, who
received it with such tears, fear, and reverence as it was an
admirable thing, saying that they did eat the flesh and bones of
God, where-with they were grieved. Such as had any sick folks
demanded thereof for them, and carried it with great reverence and
veneration.”
From this interesting passage we learn that the ancient
Mexicans, even before the arrival of Christian missionaries, were
fully acquainted with the doctrine of transubstantiation and acted
upon it in the solemn rites of their religion. They believed that
by consecrating bread their priests could turn it into the very
body of their god, so that all who thereupon partook of the
consecrated bread entered into a mystic communion with the deity by
receiving a portion of his divine substance into themselves. The
doctrine of transubstantiation, or the magical conversion of bread
into flesh, was also familiar to the Aryans of ancient India long
before the spread and even the rise of Christianity. The Brahmans
taught that the rice-cakes offered in sacrifice were substitutes
for human beings, and that they were actually converted into the
real bodies of men by the manipulation of the priest. We read that
“when it (the rice-cake) still consists of rice-meal, it is
the hair. When he pours water on it, it becomes skin. When he mixes
it, it becomes flesh: for then it becomes consistent; and
consistent also is the flesh. When it is baked, it becomes bone:
for then it becomes somewhat hard; and hard is the bone. And when
he is about to take it off (the fire) and sprinkles it with butter,
he changes it into marrow. This is the completeness which they call
the fivefold animal sacrifice.”
Now, too, we can perfectly understand why on the day of their
solemn communion with the deity the Mexicans refused to eat any
other food than the consecrated bread which they revered as the
very flesh and bones of their God, and why up till noon they might
drink nothing at all, not even water. They feared no doubt to
defile the portion of God in their stomachs by contact with common
things. A similar pious fear led the Creek and Seminole Indians, as
we saw, to adopt the more thoroughgoing expedient of rinsing out
their bodies by a strong purgative before they dared to partake of
the sacrament of first-fruits.
At the festival of the winter solstice in December the Aztecs
killed their god Huitzilopochtli in effigy first and ate him
afterwards. As a preparation for this solemn ceremony an image of
the deity in the likeness of a man was fashioned out of seeds of
various sorts, which were kneaded into a dough with the blood of
children. The bones of the god were represented by pieces of acacia
wood. This image was placed on the chief altar of the temple, and
on the day of the festival the king offered incense to it. Early
next day it was taken down and set on its feet in a great hall.
Then a priest, who bore the name and acted the part of the god
Quetzalcoatl, took a flint-tipped dart and hurled it into the
breast of the dough-image, piercing it through and through. This
was called “killing the god Huitzilopochtli so that his body
might be eaten.” One of the priests cut out the heart of the
image and gave it to the king to eat. The rest of the image was
divided into minute pieces, of which every man great and small,
down to the male children in the cradle, receive one to eat. But no
woman might taste a morsel. The ceremony was called
teoqualo, that is, “god is eaten.”
At another festival the Mexicans made little images like men,
which stood for the cloud-capped mountains. These images were
moulded of a paste of various seeds and were dressed in paper
ornaments. Some people fashioned five, others ten, others as many
as fifteen of them. Having been made, they were placed in the
oratory of each house and worshipped. Four times in the course of
the night offerings of food were brought to them in tiny vessels;
and people sang and played the flute before them through all the
hours of darkness. At break of day the priests stabbed the images
with a weaver’s instrument, cut off their heads, and tore out
their hearts, which they presented to the master of the house on a
green saucer. The bodies of the images were then eaten by all the
family, especially by the servants, “in order that by eating
them they might be preserved from certain distempers, to which
those persons who were negligent of worship to those deities
conceived themselves to be subject.”
3. Many Manii at Aricia
WE are now able to suggest an explanation of the proverb
“There are many Manii at Aricia.” Certain loaves made
in the shape of men were called by the Romans maniae, and
it appears that this kind of loaf was especially made at Aricia.
Now, Mania, the name of one of these loaves, was also the name of
the Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts, to whom woollen effigies of
men and women were dedicated at the festival of the Compitalia.
These effigies were hung at the doors of all the houses in Rome;
one effigy was hung up for every free person in the house, and one
effigy, of a different kind, for every slave. The reason was that
on this day the ghosts of the dead were believed to be going about,
and it was hoped that, either out of good nature or through simple
inadvertence, they would carry off the effigies at the door instead
of the living people in the house. According to tradition, these
woollen figures were substitutes for a former custom of sacrificing
human beings. Upon data so fragmentary and uncertain, it is
impossible to build with confidence; but it seems worth suggesting
that the loaves in human form, which appear to have been baked at
Aricia, were sacramental bread, and that in the old days, when the
divine King of the Wood was annually slain, loaves were made in his
image, like the paste figures of the gods in Mexico, and were eaten
sacramentally by his worshippers. The Mexican sacraments in honour
of Huitzilopochtli were also accompanied by the sacrifice of human
victims. The tradition that the founder of the sacred grove at
Aricia was a man named Manius, from whom many Manii were descended,
would thus be an etymological myth invented to explain the name
maniae as applied to these sacramental loaves. A dim
recollection of the original connexion of the loaves with human
sacrifices may perhaps be traced in the story that the effigies
dedicated to Mania at the Compitalia were substitutes for human
victims. The story itself, however, is probably devoid of
foundation, since the practice of putting up dummies to divert the
attention of ghosts or demons from living people is not
uncommon.
For example, the Tibetans stand in fear of innumerable
earth-demons, all of whom are under the authority of Old Mother
Khön-ma. This goddess, who may be compared to the Roman Mania, the
Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts, is dressed in golden-yellow robes,
holds a golden noose in her hand, and rides on a ram. In order to
bar the dwelling-house against the foul fiends, of whom Old Mother
Khön-ma is mistress, an elaborate structure somewhat resembling a
chandelier is fixed above the door on the outside of the house. It
contains a ram’s skull, a variety of precious objects such as
gold-leaf, silver, and turquoise, also some dry food, such as rice,
wheat, and pulse, and finally images or pictures of a man, a woman,
and a house. “The object of these figures of a man, wife, and
house is to deceive the demons should they still come in spite of
this offering, and to mislead them into the belief that the
foregoing pictures are the inmates of the house, so that they may
wreak their wrath on these bits of wood and to save the real human
occupants.” When all is ready, a priest prays to Old Mother
Khön-ma that she would be pleased to accept these dainty offerings
and to close the open doors of the earth, in order that the demons
may not come forth to infest and injure the household.
Again, effigies are often employed as a means of preventing or
curing sickness; the demons of disease either mistake the effigies
for living people or are persuaded or compelled to enter them,
leaving the real men and women well and whole. Thus the Alfoors of
Minahassa, in Celebes, will sometimes transport a sick man to
another house, while they leave on his bed a dummy made up of a
pillow and clothes. This dummy the demon is supposed to mistake for
the sick man, who consequently recovers. Cure or prevention of this
sort seems to find especial favour with the natives of Borneo.
Thus, when an epidemic is raging among them, the Dyaks of the
Katoengouw River set up wooden images at their doors in the hope
that the demons of the plague may be deluded into carrying off the
effigies instead of the people. Among the Oloh Ngadju of Borneo,
when a sick man is supposed to be suffering from the assaults of a
ghost, puppets of dough or rice-meal are made and thrown under the
house as substitutes for the patient, who thus rids himself of the
ghost. In certain of the western districts of Borneo if a man is
taken suddenly and violently sick, the physician, who in this part
of the world is generally an old woman, fashions a wooden image and
brings it seven times into contact with the sufferer’s head,
while she says: “This image serves to take the place of the
sick man; sickness, pass over into the image.” Then, with
some rice, salt, and tobacco in a little basket, the substitute is
carried to the spot where the evil spirit is supposed to have
entered into the man. There it is set upright on the ground, after
the physician has invoked the spirit as follows: “O devil,
here is an image which stands instead of the sick man. Release the
soul of the sick man and plague the image, for it is indeed
prettier and better than he.” Batak magicians can conjure the
demon of disease out of the patient’s body into an image made
out of a banana-tree with a human face and wrapt up in magic herbs;
the image is then hurriedly removed and thrown away or buried
beyond the boundaries of the village. Sometimes the image, dressed
as a man or a woman according to the sex of the patient, is
deposited at a cross-road or other thoroughfare, in the hope that
some passer-by, seeing it, may start and cry out, “Ah!
So-and-So is dead”; for such an exclamation is supposed to
delude the demon of disease into a belief that he has accomplished
his fell purpose, so he takes himself off and leaves the sufferer
to get well. The Mai Darat, a Sakai tribe of the Malay Peninsula,
attribute all kinds of diseases to the agency of spirits which they
call nyani; fortunately, however, the magician can induce
these maleficent beings to come out of the sick person and take up
their abode in rude figures of grass, which are hung up outside the
houses in little bell-shaped shrines decorated with peeled sticks.
During an epidemic of small-pox the Ewe negroes will sometimes
clear a space outside of the town, where they erect a number of low
mounds and cover them with as many little clay figures as there are
people in the place. Pots of food and water are also set out for
the refreshment of the spirit of small-pox who, it is hoped, will
take the clay figures and spare the living folk; and to make
assurance doubly sure the road into the town is barricaded against
him.
With these examples before us we may surmise that the woollen
effigies, which at the festival of the Compitalia might be seen
hanging at the doors of all the houses in ancient Rome, were not
substitutes for human victims who had formerly been sacrificed at
this season, but rather vicarious offerings presented to the Mother
or Grandmother of Ghosts, in the hope that on her rounds through
the city she would accept or mistake the effigies for the inmates
of the house and so spare the living for another year. It is
possible that the puppets made of rushes, which in the month of May
the pontiffs and Vestal Virgins annually threw into the Tiber from
the old Sublician bridge at Rome, had originally the same
significance; that is, they may have been designed to purge the
city from demoniac influence by diverting the attention of the
demons from human beings to the puppets and then toppling the whole
uncanny crew, neck and crop, into the river, which would soon sweep
them far out to sea. In precisely the same way the natives of Old
Calabar used periodically to rid their town of the devils which
infested it by luring the unwary demons into a number of lamentable
scarecrows, which they afterwards flung into the river. This
interpretation of the Roman custom is supported to some extent by
the evidence of Plutarch, who speaks of the ceremony as “the
greatest of purifications.”
LI. Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet
THE PRACTICE of killing a god has now been traced amongst
peoples who have reached the agricultural stage of society. We have
seen that the spirit of the corn, or of other cultivated plants, is
commonly represented either in human or in animal form, and that in
some places a custom has prevailed of killing annually either the
human or the animal representative of the god. One reason for thus
killing the corn-spirit in the person of his representative has
been given implicitly in an earlier part of this work: we may
suppose that the intention was to guard him or her (for the
corn-spirit is often feminine) from the enfeeblement of old age by
transferring the spirit, while still hale and hearty, to the person
of a youthful and vigorous successor. Apart from the desirability
of renewing his divine energies, the death of the corn-spirit may
have been deemed inevitable under the sickles or the knives of the
reapers, and his worshippers may accordingly have felt bound to
acquiesce in the sad necessity. But, further, we have found a
widespread custom of eating the god sacramentally, either in the
shape of the man or animal who represents the god, or in the shape
of bread made in human or animal form. The reasons for thus
partaking of the body of the god are, from the primitive
standpoint, simple enough. The savage commonly believes that by
eating the flesh of an animal or man he acquires not only the
physical, but even the moral and intellectual qualities which were
characteristic of that animal or man; so when the creature is
deemed divine, our simple savage naturally expects to absorb a
portion of its divinity along with its material substance. It may
be well to illustrate by instances this common faith in the
acquisition of virtues or vices of many kinds through the medium of
animal food, even when there is no pretence that the viands consist
of the body or blood of a god. The doctrine forms part of the
widely ramified system of sympathetic or homoeopathic magic.
Thus, for example, the Creeks, Cherokee, and kindred tribes of
North American Indians “believe that nature is possest of
such a property as to transfuse into men and animals the qualities,
either of the food they use, or of those objects that are presented
to their senses; he who feeds on venison is, according to their
physical system, swifter and more sagacious than the man who lives
on the flesh of the clumsy bear, or helpless dunghill fowls, the
slow-footed tame cattle, or the heavy wallowing swine. This is the
reason that several of their old men recommend, and say, that
formerly their greatest chieftains observed a constant rule in
their diet, and seldom ate of any animal of a gross quality, or
heavy motion of body, fancying it conveyed a dullness through the
whole system, and disabled them from exerting themselves with
proper vigour in their martial, civil, and religious duties.”
The Zaparo Indians of Ecuador “will, unless from necessity,
in most cases not eat any heavy meats, such as tapir and peccary,
but confine themselves to birds, monkeys, deer, fish, etc.,
principally because they argue that the heavier meats make them
unwieldy, like the animals who supply the flesh, impeding their
agility, and unfitting them for the chase.” Similarly some of
the Brazilian Indians would eat no beast, bird, or fish that ran,
flew, or swam slowly, lest by partaking of its flesh they should
lose their ability and be unable to escape from their enemies. The
Caribs abstained from the flesh of pigs lest it should cause them
to have small eyes like pigs; and they refused to partake of
tortoises from a fear that if they did so they would become heavy
and stupid like the animal. Among the Fans of West Africa men in
the prime of life never eat tortoises for a similar reason; they
imagine that if they did so, their vigour and fleetness of foot
would be gone. But old men may eat tortoises freely, because having
already lost the power of running they can take no harm from the
flesh of the slow-footed creature.
While many savages thus fear to eat the flesh of slow-footed
animals lest they should themselves become slow-footed, the Bushmen
of South Africa purposely ate the flesh of such creatures, and the
reason which they gave for doing so exhibits a curious refinement
of savage philosophy. They imagined that the game which they
pursued would be influenced sympathetically by the food in the body
of the hunter, so that if he had eaten of swift-footed animals, the
quarry would be swift-footed also and would escape him; whereas if
he had eaten of slow-footed animals, the quarry would also be
slow-footed, and he would be able to overtake and kill it. For that
reason hunters of gemsbok particularly avoided eating the flesh of
the swift and agile springbok; indeed they would not even touch it
with their hands, because they believed the springbok to be a very
lively creature which did not go to sleep at night, and they
thought that if they ate springbok, the gemsbok which they hunted
would likewise not be willing to go to sleep, even at night. How,
then, could they catch it?
The Namaquas abstain from eating the flesh of hares, because
they think it would make them faint-hearted as a hare. But they eat
the flesh of the lion, or drink the blood of the leopard or lion,
to get the courage and strength of these beasts. The Bushmen will
not give their children a jackal’s heart to eat, lest it
should make them timid like the jackal; but they give them a
leopard’s heart to eat to make them brave like the leopard.
When a Wagogo man of East Africa kills a lion, he eats the heart in
order to become brave like a lion; but he thinks that to eat the
heart of a hen would make him timid. When a serious disease has
attacked a Zulu kraal, the medicine-man takes the bone of a very
old dog, or the bone of an old cow, bull, or other very old animal,
and administers it to the healthy as well as to the sick people, in
order that they may live to be as old as the animal of whose bone
they have partaken. So to restore the aged Aeson to youth, the
witch Medea infused into his veins a decoction of the liver of the
long-lived deer and the head of a crow that had outlived nine
generations of men.
Among the Dyaks of North-West Borneo young men and warriors may
not eat venison, because it would make them as timid as deer; but
the women and very old men are free to eat it. However, among the
Kayans of the same region, who share the same view as to the ill
effect of eating venison, men will partake of the dangerous viand
provided it is cooked in the open air, for then the timid spirit of
the animal is supposed to escape at once into the jungle and not to
enter into the eater. The Aino believe that the heart of the
water-ousel is exceedingly wise, and that in speech the bird is
most eloquent. Therefore whenever he is killed, he should be at
once torn open and his heart wrenched out and swallowed before it
has time to grow cold or suffer damage of any kind. If a man
swallows it thus, he will become very fluent and wise, and will be
able to argue down all his adversaries. In Northern India people
fancy that if you eat the eyeballs of an owl you will be able like
an owl to see in the dark.
When the Kansas Indians were going to war, a feast used to be
held in the chief’s hut, and the principal dish was
dog’s flesh, because, said the Indians, the animal who is so
brave that he will let himself be cut in pieces in defence of his
master, must needs inspire valour. Men of the Buru and Aru Islands,
East Indies, eat the flesh of dogs in order to be bold and nimble
in war. Amongst the Papuans of the Port Moresby and Motumotu
districts, New Guinea, young lads eat strong pig, wallaby, and
large fish, in order to acquire the strength of the animal or fish.
Some of the natives of Northern Australia fancy that by eating the
flesh of the kangaroo or emu they are enabled to jump or run faster
than before. The Miris of Assam prize tiger’s flesh as food
for men; it gives them strength and courage. But “it is not
suited for women; it would make them too strong-minded.” In
Corea the bones of tigers fetch a higher price than those of
leopards as a means of inspiring courage. A Chinaman in Seoul
bought and ate a whole tiger to make himself brave and fierce. In
Norse legend, Ingiald, son of King Aunund, was timid in his youth,
but after eating the heart of a wolf he became very bold; Hialto
gained strength and courage by eating the heart of a bear and
drinking its blood.
In Morocco lethargic patients are given ants to swallow, and to
eat lion’s flesh will make a coward brave; but people abstain
from eating the hearts of fowls, lest thereby they should be
rendered timid. When a child is late in learning to speak, the
Turks of Central Asia will give it the tongues of certain birds to
eat. A North American Indian thought that brandy must be a
decoction of hearts and tongues, “because,” said he,
“after drinking it I fear nothing, and I talk
wonderfully.” In Java there is a tiny earthworm which now and
then utters a shrill sound like that of the alarum of a small
clock. Hence when a public dancing girl has screamed herself hoarse
in the exercise of her calling, the leader of the troop makes her
eat some of these worms, in the belief that thus she will regain
her voice and will, after swallowing them, be able to scream as
shrilly as ever. The people of Darfur, in Central Africa, think
that the liver is the seat of the soul, and that a man may enlarge
his soul by eating the liver of an animal. “Whenever an
animal is killed its liver is taken out and eaten, but the people
are most careful not to touch it with their hands, as it is
considered sacred; it is cut up in small pieces and eaten raw, the
bits being conveyed to the mouth on the point of a knife, or the
sharp point of a stick. Any one who may accidentally touch the
liver is strictly forbidden to partake of it, which prohibition is
regarded as a great misfortune for him.” Women are not
allowed to eat liver, because they have no soul.
Again, the flesh and blood of dead men are commonly eaten and
drunk to inspire bravery, wisdom, or other qualities for which the
men themselves were remarkable, or which are supposed to have their
special seat in the particular part eaten. Thus among the mountain
tribes of South-Eastern Africa there are ceremonies by which the
youths are formed into guilds or lodges, and among the rites of
initiation there is one which is intended to infuse courage,
intelligence, and other qualities into the novices. Whenever an
enemy who has behaved with conspicuous bravery is killed, his
liver, which is considered the seat of valour; his ears, which are
supposed to be the seat of intelligence; the skin of his forehead,
which is regarded as the seat of perseverance; his testicles, which
are held to be the seat of strength; and other members, which are
viewed as the seat of other virtues, are cut from his body and
baked to cinders. The ashes are carefully kept in the horn of a
bull, and, during the ceremonies observed at circumcision, are
mixed with other ingredients into a kind of paste, which is
administered by the tribal priest to the youths. By this means the
strength, valour, intelligence, and other virtues of the slain are
believed to be imparted to the eaters. When Basutos of the
mountains have killed a very brave foe, they immediately cut out
his heart and eat it, because this is supposed to give them his
courage and strength in battle. When Sir Charles M’Carthy was
killed by the Ashantees in 1824, it is said that his heart was
devoured by the chiefs of the Ashantee army, who hoped by this
means to imbibe his courage. His flesh was dried and parcelled out
among the lower officers for the same purpose, and his bones were
long kept at Coomassie as national fetishes. The Nauras Indians of
New Granada ate the hearts of Spaniards when they had the
opportunity, hoping thereby to make themselves as dauntless as the
dreaded Castilian chivalry. The Sioux Indians used to reduce to
powder the heart of a valiant enemy and swallow the powder, hoping
thus to appropriate the dead man’s valour.
But while the human heart is thus commonly eaten for the sake of
imbuing the eater with the qualities of its original owner, it is
not, as we have already seen, the only part of the body which is
consumed for this purpose. Thus warriors of the Theddora and
Ngarigo tribes of South-Eastern Australia used to eat the hands and
feet of their slain enemies, believing that in this way they
acquired some of the qualities and courage of the dead. The
Kamilaroi of New South Wales ate the liver as well as the heart of
a brave man to get his courage. In Tonquin also there is a popular
superstition that the liver of a brave man makes brave any who
partake of it. With a like intent the Chinese swallow the bile of
notorious bandits who have been executed. The Dyaks of Sarawak used
to eat the palms of the hands and the flesh of the knees of the
slain in order to steady their own hands and strengthen their own
knees. The Tolalaki, notorious head-hunters of Central Celebes,
drink the blood and eat the brains of their victims that they may
become brave. The Italones of the Philippine Islands drink the
blood of their slain enemies, and eat part of the back of their
heads and of their entrails raw to acquire their courage. For the
same reason the Efugaos, another tribe of the Philippines, suck the
brains of their foes. In like manner the Kai of German New Guinea
eat the brains of the enemies they kill in order to acquire their
strength. Among the Kimbunda of Western Africa, when a new king
succeeds to the throne, a brave prisoner of war is killed in order
that the king and nobles may eat his flesh, and so acquire his
strength and courage. The notorious Zulu chief Matuana drank the
gall of thirty chiefs, whose people he had destroyed, in the belief
that it would make him strong. It is a Zulu fancy that by eating
the centre of the forehead and the eyebrow of an enemy they acquire
the power of looking steadfastly at a foe. Before every warlike
expedition the people of Minahassa in Celebes used to take the
locks of hair of a slain foe and dabble them in boiling water to
extract the courage; this infusion of bravery was then drunk by the
warriors. In New Zealand “the chief was an atua
[god], but there were powerful and powerless gods; each naturally
sought to make himself one of the former; the plan therefore
adopted was to incorporate the spirits of others with their own;
thus, when a warrior slew a chief, he immediately gouged out his
eyes and swallowed them, the atua tonga, or divinity,
being supposed to reside in that organ; thus he not only killed the
body, but also possessed himself of the soul of his enemy, and
consequently the more chiefs he slew the greater did his divinity
become.”
It is now easy to understand why a savage should desire to
partake of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine.
By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s
attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is
his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is
his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the
worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the
drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an
act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament. Yet a time comes when
reasonable men find it hard to understand how any one in his senses
can suppose that by eating bread or drinking wine he consumes the
body or blood of a deity. “When we call corn Ceres and wine
Bacchus,” says Cicero, “we use a common figure of
speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe
that the thing he feeds upon is a god?”
LII. Killing the Divine Animal
1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that many communities which
have progressed so far as to subsist mainly by agriculture have
been in the habit of killing and eating their farinaceous deities
either in their proper form of corn, rice, and so forth, or in the
borrowed shapes of animals and men. It remains to show that hunting
and pastoral tribes, as well as agricultural peoples, have been in
the habit of killing the beings whom they worship. Among the
worshipful beings or gods, if indeed they deserve to be dignified
by that name, whom hunters and shepherds adore and kill are animals
pure and simple, not animals regarded as embodiments of other
supernatural beings. Our first example is drawn from the Indians of
California, who living in a fertile country under a serene and
temperate sky, nevertheless rank near the bottom of the savage
scale. The Acagchemem tribe adored the great buzzard, and once a
year they celebrated a great festival called Panes or
bird-feast in its honour. The day selected for the festival was
made known to the public on the evening before its celebration and
preparations were at once made for the erection of a special temple
(vanquech), which seems to have been a circular or oval
enclosure of stakes with the stuffed skin of a coyote or
prairie-wolf set up on a hurdle to represent the god Chinigchinich.
When the temple was ready, the bird was carried into it in solemn
procession and laid on an altar erected for the purpose. Then all
the young women, whether married or single, began to run to and
fro, as if distracted, some in one direction and some in another,
while the elders of both sexes remained silent spectators of the
scene, and the captains, tricked out in paint and feathers, danced
round their adored bird. These ceremonies being concluded, they
seized upon the bird and carried it to the principal temple, all
the assembly uniting in the grand display, and the captains dancing
and singing at the head of the procession. Arrived at the temple,
they killed the bird without losing a drop of its blood. The skin
was removed entire and preserved with the feathers as a relic or
for the purpose of making the festal garment or paelt. The
carcase was buried in a hole in the temple, and the old women
gathered round the grave weeping and moaning bitterly, while they
threw various kinds of seeds or pieces of food on it, crying out,
“Why did you run away? Would you not have been better with
us? you would have made pinole (a kind of gruel) as we do,
and if you had not run away, you would not have become a
Panes,” and so on. When this ceremony was concluded,
the dancing was resumed and kept up for three days and nights. They
said that the Panes was a woman who had run off to the
mountains and there been changed into a bird by the god
Chinigchinich. They believed that though they sacrificed the bird
annually, she came to life again and returned to her home in the
mountains. Moreover, they thought that “as often as the bird
was killed, it became multiplied; because every year all the
different Capitanes celebrated the same feast of Panes,
and were firm in the opinion that the birds sacrificed were but one
and the same female.”
The unity in multiplicity thus postulated by the Californians is
very noticeable and helps to explain their motive for killing the
divine bird. The notion of the life of a species as distinct from
that of an individual, easy and obvious as it seems to us, appears
to be one which the Californian savage cannot grasp. He is unable
to conceive the life of the species otherwise than as an individual
life, and therefore as exposed to the same dangers and calamities
which menace and finally destroy the life of the individual.
Apparently he imagines that a species left to itself will grow old
and die like an individual, and that therefore some step must be
taken to save from extinction the particular species which he
regards as divine. The only means he can think of to avert the
catastrophe is to kill a member of the species in whose veins the
tide of life is still running strong and has not yet stagnated
among the fens of old age. The life thus diverted from one channel
will flow, he fancies, more freshly and freely in a new one; in
other words, the slain animal will revive and enter on a new term
of life with all the spring and energy of youth. To us this
reasoning is transparently absurd, but so too is the custom. A
similar confusion, it may be noted, between the individual life and
the life of the species was made by the Samoans. Each family had
for its god a particular species of animal; yet the death of one of
these animals, for example an owl, was not the death of the god,
“he was supposed to be yet alive, and incarnate in all the
owls in existence.”
2. Killing the Sacred Ram
THE RUDE Californian rite which we have just considered has a
close parallel in the religion of ancient Egypt. The Thebans and
all other Egyptians who worshipped the Theban god Ammon held rams
to be sacred, and would not sacrifice them. But once a year at the
festival of Ammon they killed a ram, skinned it, and clothed the
image of the god in the skin. Then they mourned over the ram and
buried it in a sacred tomb. The custom was explained by a story
that Zeus had once exhibited himself to Hercules clad in the fleece
and wearing the head of a ram. Of course the ram in this case was
simply the beast-god of Thebes, as the wolf was the beast-god of
Lycopolis, and the goat was the beast-god of Mendes. In other
words, the ram was Ammon himself. On the monuments, it is true,
Ammon appears in semi-human form with the body of a man and the
head of a ram. But this only shows that he was in the usual
chrysalis state through which beast-gods regularly pass before they
emerge as full-blown anthropomorphic gods. The ram, therefore, was
killed, not as a sacrifice to Ammon, but as the god himself, whose
identity with the beast is plainly shown by the custom of clothing
his image in the skin of the slain ram. The reason for thus killing
the ram-god annually may have been that which I have assigned for
the general custom of killing a god and for the special Californian
custom of killing the divine buzzard. As applied to Egypt, this
explanation is supported by the analogy of the bull-god Apis, who
was not suffered to outlive a certain term of years. The intention
of thus putting a limit to the life of the human god was, as I have
argued, to secure him from the weakness and frailty of age. The
same reasoning would explain the custom—probably an older
one—of putting the beast-god to death annually, as was done
with the ram of Thebes.
One point in the Theban ritual—the application of the skin
to the image of the god—deserves particular attention. If the
god was at first the living ram, his representation by an image
must have originated later. But how did it originate? One answer to
this question is perhaps furnished by the practice of preserving
the skin of the animal which is slain as divine. The Californians,
as we have seen, preserved the skin of the buzzard; and the skin of
the goat, which is killed on the harvest-field as a representative
of the corn-spirit, is kept for various superstitious purposes. The
skin in fact was kept as a token or memorial of the god, or rather
as containing in it a part of the divine life, and it had only to
be stuffed or stretched upon a frame to become a regular image of
him. At first an image of this kind would be renewed annually, the
new image being provided by the skin of the slain animal. But from
annual images to permanent images the transition is easy. We have
seen that the older custom of cutting a new May-tree every year was
superseded by the practice of maintaining a permanent May-pole,
which was, however, annually decked with fresh leaves and flowers,
and even surmounted each year by a fresh young tree. Similarly when
the stuffed skin, as a representative of the god, was replaced by a
permanent image of him in wood, stone, or metal, the permanent
image was annually clad in the fresh skin of the slain animal. When
this stage had been reached, the custom of killing the ram came
naturally to be interpreted as a sacrifice offered to the image,
and was explained by a story like that of Ammon and Hercules.
3. Killing the Sacred Serpent
WEST AFRICA appears to furnish another example of the annual
killing of a sacred animal and the preservation of its skin. The
negroes of Issapoo, in the island of Fernando Po, regard the
cobra-capella as their guardian deity, who can do them good or ill,
bestow riches or inflict disease and death. The skin of one of
these reptiles is hung tail downwards from a branch of the highest
tree in the public square, and the placing of it on the tree is an
annual ceremony. As soon as the ceremony is over, all children born
within the past year are carried out and their hands made to touch
the tail of the serpent’s skin. The latter custom is clearly
a way of placing the infants under the protection of the tribal
god. Similarly in Senegambia a python is expected to visit every
child of the Python clan within eight days after birth; and the
Psylli, a Snake clan of ancient Africa, used to expose their
infants to snakes in the belief that the snakes would not harm
true-born children of the clan.
4. Killing the Sacred Turtles
IN THE CALIFORNIAN, Egyptian, and Fernando Po customs the
worship of the animal seems to have no relation to agriculture, and
may therefore be presumed to date from the hunting or pastoral
stage of society. The same may be said of the following custom,
though the Zuni Indians of New Mexico, who practise it, are now
settled in walled villages or towns of a peculiar type, and
practise agriculture and the arts of pottery and weaving. But the
Zuni custom is marked by certain features which appear to place it
in a somewhat different class from the preceding cases. It may be
well therefore to describe it at full length in the words of an
eye-witness.
“With midsummer the heat became intense. My brother
[i.e. adopted Indian brother] and I sat, day after day, in
the cool under-rooms of our house,—the latter [sic]
busy with his quaint forge and crude appliances, working Mexican
coins over into bangles, girdles, ear-rings, buttons, and what not,
for savage ornament. Though his tools were wonderfully rude, the
work he turned out by dint of combined patience and ingenuity was
remarkably beautiful. One day as I sat watching him, a procession
of fifty men went hastily down the hill, and off westward over the
plain. They were solemnly led by a painted and shell-bedecked
priest, and followed by the torch-bearing Shu-lu-wit-si or God of
Fire. After they had vanished, I asked old brother what it all
meant.
“‘They are going,’ said he, ‘to the city
of Ka-ka and the home of our others.’
“Four days after, towards sunset, costumed and masked in
the beautiful paraphernalia of the Ka-k’ok-shi, or
‘Good Dance,’ they returned in file up the same
pathway, each bearing in his arms a basket filled with living,
squirming turtles, which he regarded and carried as tenderly as a
mother would her infant. Some of the wretched reptiles were
carefully wrapped in soft blankets, their heads and forefeet
protruding,—and, mounted on the backs of the plume-bedecked
pilgrims, made ludicrous but solemn caricatures of little children
in the same position. While I was at supper upstairs that evening,
the governor’s brother-in-law came in. He was welcomed by the
family as if a messenger from heaven. He bore in his tremulous
fingers one of the much abused and rebellious turtles. Paint still
adhered to his hands and bare feet, which led me to infer that he
had formed one of the sacred embassy.
“‘So you went to Ka-thlu-el-lon, did you?’ I
asked.
“‘E’e,’ replied the weary man, in a
voice husky with long chanting, as he sank, almost exhausted, on a
roll of skins which had been placed for him, and tenderly laid the
turtle on the floor. No sooner did the creature find itself at
liberty than it made off as fast as its lame legs would take it. Of
one accord, the family forsook dish, spoon, and drinking-cup, and
grabbing from a sacred meal-bowl whole handfuls of the contents,
hurriedly followed the turtle about the room, into dark corners,
around water-jars, behind the grinding-troughs, and out into the
middle of the floor again, praying and scattering meal on its back
as they went. At last, strange to say, it approached the foot-sore
man who had brought it.
“‘Ha!’ he exclaimed with emotion; ‘see
it comes to me again; ah, what great favours the fathers of all
grant me this day,’ and, passing his hand gently over the
sprawling animal, he inhaled from his palm deeply and long, at the
same time invoking the favour of the gods. Then he leaned his chin
upon his hand, and with large, wistful eyes regarded his ugly
captive as it sprawled about, blinking its meal-bedimmed eyes, and
clawing the smooth floor in memory of its native element. At this
juncture I ventured a question:
“‘Why do you not let him go, or give him some
water?’
“Slowly the man turned his eyes toward me, an odd mixture
of pain, indignation, and pity on his face, while the worshipful
family stared at me with holy horror.
“‘Poor younger brother!’ he said at last,
‘know you not how precious it is? It die? It will
not die; I tell you, it cannot die.’
“‘But it will die if you don’t feed it and
give it water.’
“‘I tell you it cannot die; it will only
change houses to-morrow, and go back to the home of its brothers.
Ah, well! How should you know?’ he mused. Turning to
the blinded turtle again: ‘Ah! my poor dear lost child or
parent, my sister or brother to have been! Who knows which? Maybe
my own great-grandfather or mother!’ And with this he fell to
weeping most pathetically, and, tremulous with sobs, which were
echoed by the women and children, he buried his face in his hands.
Filled with sympathy for his grief, however mistaken, I raised the
turtle to my lips and kissed its cold shell; then depositing it on
the floor, hastily left the grief-stricken family to their sorrows.
Next day, with prayers and tender beseechings, plumes, and
offerings, the poor turtle was killed, and its flesh and bones were
removed and deposited in the little river, that it might
‘return once more to eternal life among its comrades in the
dark waters of the lake of the dead.’ The shell, carefully
scraped and dried, was made into a dance-rattle, and, covered by a
piece of buckskin, it still hangs from the smoke-stained rafters of
my brother’s house. Once a Navajo tried to buy it for a
ladle; loaded with indignant reproaches, he was turned cut of the
house. Were any one to venture the suggestion that the turtle no
longer lived, his remark would cause a flood of tears, and he would
be reminded that it had only ‘changed houses and gone to live
for ever in the home of “our lost
others.”’”
In this custom we find expressed in the clearest way a belief in
the transmigration of human souls into the bodies of turtles. The
theory of transmigration is held by the Moqui Indians, who belong
to the same race as the Zunis. The Moquis are divided into totem
clans—the Bear clan, Deer clan, Wolf clan, Hare clan, and so
on; they believe that the ancestors of the clans were bears, deer,
wolves, hares, and so forth; and that at death the members of each
clan become bears, deer, and so on according to the particular clan
to which they belonged. The Zuni are also divided into clans, the
totems of which agree closely with those of the Moquis, and one of
their totems is the turtle. Thus their belief in transmigration
into the turtle is probably one of the regular articles of their
totem faith. What then is the meaning of killing a turtle in which
the soul of a kinsman is believed to be present? Apparently the
object is to keep up a communication with the other world in which
the souls of the departed are believed to be assembled in the form
of turtles. It is a common belief that the spirits of the dead
return occasionally to their old homes; and accordingly the unseen
visitors are welcomed and feasted by the living, and then sent upon
their way. In the Zuni ceremony the dead are fetched home in the
form of turtles, and the killing of the turtles is the way of
sending back the souls to the spirit-land. Thus the general
explanation given above of the custom of killing a god seems
inapplicable to the Zuni custom, the true meaning of which is
somewhat obscure. Nor is the obscurity which hangs over the subject
entirely dissipated by a later and fuller account which we possess
of the ceremony. From it we learn that the ceremony forms part of
the elaborate ritual which these Indians observe at the midsummer
solstice for the purpose of ensuring an abundant supply of rain for
the crops. Envoys are despatched to bring “their otherselves,
the tortoises,” from the sacred lake Kothluwalawa, to which
the souls of the dead are believed to repair. When the creatures
have thus been solemnly brought to Zuni, they are placed in a bowl
of water and dances are performed beside them by men in costume,
who personate gods and goddesses. “After the ceremonial the
tortoises are taken home by those who caught them and are hung by
their necks to the rafters till morning, when they are thrown into
pots of boiling water. The eggs are considered a great delicacy.
The meat is seldom touched except as a medicine, which is curative
for cutaneous diseases. Part of the meat is deposited in the river
with kóhakwa (white shell beads) and turquoise beads as
offerings to Council of the Gods.” This account at all events
confirms the inference that the tortoises are supposed to be
reincarnations of the human dead, for they are called the
“otherselves” of the Zuni; indeed, what else should
they be than the souls of the dead in the bodies of tortoises
seeing that they come from the haunted lake? As the principal
object of the prayers uttered and of the dances performed at these
midsummer ceremonies appears to be to procure rain for the crops,
it may be that the intention of bringing the tortoises to Zuni and
dancing before them is to intercede with the ancestral spirit,
incarnate in the animals, that they may be pleased to exert their
power over the waters of heaven for the benefit of their living
descendants.
5. Killing the Sacred Bear
DOUBT also hangs at first sight over the meaning of the
bear-sacrifice offered by the Aino or Ainu, a primitive people who
are found in the Japanese island of Yezo or Yesso, as well as in
Saghalien and the southern of the Kurile Islands. It is not quite
easy to define the attitude of the Aino towards the bear. On the
one hand they give it the name of kamui or
“god”; but as they apply the same word to strangers, it
may mean no more than a being supposed to be endowed with
superhuman, or at all events extraordinary, powers. Again, it is
said that “the bear is their chief divinity”; “in
the religion of the Aino the bear plays a chief part”;
“amongst the animals it is especially the bear which receives
an idolatrous veneration”; “they worship it after their
fashion”; “there is no doubt that this wild beast
inspires more of the feeling which prompts worship than the
inanimate forces of nature, and the Aino may be distinguished as
bear-worshippers.” Yet, on the other hand, they kill the bear
whenever they can; “in bygone years the Ainu considered
bear-hunting the most manly and useful way in which a person could
possibly spend his time”; “the men spend the autumn,
winter, and spring in hunting deer and bears. Part of their tribute
or taxes is paid in skins, and they subsist on the dried
meat”; bear’s flesh is indeed one of their staple
foods; they eat it both fresh and salted; and the skins of bears
furnish them with clothing. In fact, the worship of which writers
on this subject speak appears to be paid chiefly to the dead
animal. Thus, although they kill a bear whenever they can,
“in the process of dissecting the carcass they endeavor to
conciliate the deity, whose representative they have slain, by
making elaborate obeisances and deprecatory salutations”;
“when a bear has been killed the Ainu sit down and admire it,
make their salaams to it, worship it, and offer presents of
inao”; “when a bear is trapped or wounded by
an arrow, the hunters go through an apologetic or propitiatory
ceremony.” The skulls of slain bears receive a place of
honour in their huts, or are set up on sacred posts outside the
huts, and are treated with much respect: libations of millet beer,
and of sake, an intoxicating liquor, are offered to them;
and they are addressed as “divine preservers” or
“precious divinities.” The skulls of foxes are also
fastened to the sacred posts outside the huts; they are regarded as
charms against evil spirits, and are consulted as oracles. Yet it
is expressly said, “The live fox is revered just as little as
the bear; rather they avoid it as much as possible, considering it
a wily animal.” The bear can hardly, therefore, be described
as a sacred animal of the Aino, nor yet as a totem; for they do not
call themselves bears, and they kill and eat the animal freely.
However, they have a legend of a woman who had a son by a bear; and
many of them who dwell in the mountains pride themselves on being
descended from a bear. Such people are called “Descendants of
the bear” (Kimun Kamui sanikiri), and in the pride
of their heart they will say, “As for me, I am a child of the
god of the mountains; I am descended from the divine one who rules
in the mountains,” meaning by “the god of the
mountains” no other than the bear. It is therefore possible
that, as our principal authority, the Rev. J. Batchelor, believes,
the bear may have been the totem of an Aino clan; but even if that
were so it would not explain the respect shown for the animal by
the whole Aino people.
But it is the bear-festival of the Aino which concerns us here.
Towards the end of winter a bear cub is caught and brought into the
village. If it is very small, it is suckled by an Aino woman, but
should there be no woman able to suckle it, the little animal is
fed from the hand or the mouth. During the day it plays about in
the hut with the children and is treated with great affection. But
when the cub grows big enough to pain people by hugging or
scratching them, he is shut up in a strong wooden cage, where he
stays generally for two or three years, fed on fish and millet
porridge, till it is time for him to be killed and eaten. But
“it is a peculiarly striking fact that the young bear is not
kept merely to furnish a good meal; rather he is regarded and
honoured as a fetish, or even as a sort of higher being.” In
Yezo the festival is generally celebrated in September or October.
Before it takes place the Aino apologise to their gods, alleging
that they have treated the bear kindly as long as they could, now
they can feed him no longer, and are obliged to kill him. A man who
gives a bear-feast invites his relations and friends; in a small
village nearly the whole community takes part in the feast; indeed,
guests from distant villages are invited and generally come,
allured by the prospect of getting drunk for nothing. The form of
invitation runs somewhat as follows: “I, so and so, am about
to sacrifice the dear little divine thing who resides among the
mountains. My friends and masters, come ye to the feast; we will
then unite in the great pleasure of sending the god away.
Come.” When all the people are assembled in front of the
cage, an orator chosen for the purpose addresses the bear and tells
it that they are about to send it forth to its ancestors. He craves
pardon for what they are about to do to it, hopes it will not be
angry, and comforts it by assuring the animal that many of the
sacred whittled sticks (inao) and plenty of cakes and wine
will be sent with it on the long journey. One speech of this sort
which Mr. Batchelor heard ran as follows: “O thou divine one,
thou wast sent into the world for us to hunt. O thou precious
little divinity, we worship thee; pray hear our prayer. We have
nourished thee and brought thee up with a deal of pains and
trouble, all because we love thee so. Now, as thou hast grown big,
we are about to send thee to thy father and mother. When thou
comest to them please speak well of us, and tell them how kind we
have been; please come to us again and we will sacrifice
thee.” Having been secured with ropes, the bear is then let
out of the cage and assailed with a shower of blunt arrows in order
to arouse it to fury. When it has spent itself in vain struggles,
it is tied up to a stake, gagged and strangled, its neck being
placed between two poles, which are then violently compressed, all
the people eagerly helping to squeeze the animal to death. An arrow
is also discharged into the beast’s heart by a good marksman,
but so as not to shed blood, for they think that it would be very
unlucky if any of the blood were to drip on the ground. However,
the men sometimes drink the warm blood of the bear “that the
courage and other virtues it possesses may pass into them”;
and sometimes they besmear themselves and their clothes with the
blood in order to ensure success in hunting. When the animal has
been strangled to death, it is skinned and its head is cut off and
set in the east window of the house, where a piece of its own flesh
is placed under its snout, together with a cup of its own meat
boiled, some millet dumplings, and dried fish. Prayers are then
addressed to the dead animal; amongst other things it is sometimes
invited, after going away to its father and mother, to return into
the world in order that it may again be reared for sacrifice. When
the bear is supposed to have finished eating its own flesh, the man
who presides at the feast takes the cup containing the boiled meat,
salutes it, and divides the contents between all the company
present: every person, young and old alike, must taste a little.
The cup is called “the cup of offering” because it has
just been offered to the dead bear. When the rest of the flesh has
been cooked, it is shared out in like manner among all the people,
everybody partaking of at least a morsel; not to partake of the
feast would be equivalent to excommunication, it would be to place
the recreant outside the pale of Aino fellowship. Formerly every
particle of the bear, except the bones, had to be eaten up at the
banquet, but this rule is now relaxed. The head, on being detached
from the skin, is set up on a long pole beside the sacred wands
(inao) outside of the house, where it remains till nothing
but the bare white skull is left. Skulls so set up are worshipped
not only at the time of the festival, but very often as long as
they last. The Aino assured Mr. Batchelor that they really do
believe the spirits of the worshipful animals to reside in the
skulls; that is why they address them as “divine
preservers” and “precious divinities.”
The ceremony of killing the bear was witnessed by Dr. B. Scheube
on the tenth of August at Kunnui, which is a village on Volcano Bay
in the island of Yezo or Yesso. As his description of the rite
contains some interesting particulars not mentioned in the
foregoing account, it may be worth while to summarize it.
On entering the hut he found about thirty Aino present, men,
women, and children, all dressed in their best. The master of the
house first offered a libation on the fireplace to the god of the
fire, and the guests followed his example. Then a libation was
offered to the house-god in his sacred corner of the hut. Meanwhile
the housewife, who had nursed the bear, sat by herself, silent and
sad, bursting now and then into tears. Her grief was obviously
unaffected, and it deepened as the festival went on. Next, the
master of the house and some of the guests went out of the hut and
offered libations before the bear’s cage. A few drops were
presented to the bear in a saucer, which he at once upset. Then the
women and girls danced round the cage, their faces turned towards
it, their knees slightly bent, rising and hopping on their toes. As
they danced they clapped their hands and sang a monotonous song.
The housewife and a few old women, who might have nursed many
bears, danced tearfully, stretching out their arms to the bear, and
addressing it in terms of endearment. The young folks were less
affected; they laughed as well as sang. Disturbed by the noise, the
bear began to rush about his cage and howl lamentably. Next
libations were offered at the inao (inabos) or
sacred wands which stand outside of an Aino hut. These wands are
about a couple of feet high, and are whittled at the top into
spiral shavings. Five new wands with bamboo leaves attached to them
had been set up for the festival. This is regularly done when a
bear is killed; the leaves mean that the animal may come to life
again. Then the bear was let out of his cage, a rope was thrown
round his neck, and he was led about in the neighbourhood of the
hut. While this was being done the men, headed by a chief, shot at
the beast with arrows tipped with wooden buttons. Dr. Scheube had
to do so also. Then the bear was taken before the sacred wands, a
stick was put in his mouth, nine men knelt on him and pressed his
neck against a beam. In five minutes the animal had expired without
uttering a sound. Meantime the women and girls had taken post
behind the men, where they danced, lamenting, and beating the men
who were killing the bear. The bear’s carcase was next placed
on the mat before the sacred wands; and a sword and quiver, taken
from the wands, were hung round the beast’s neck. Being a
she-bear, it was also adorned with a necklace and ear-rings. Then
food and drink were offered to it, in the shape of millet-broth,
millet-cakes, and a pot of sake. The men now sat down on
mats before the dead bear, offered libations to it, and drank deep.
Meanwhile the women and girls had laid aside all marks of sorrow,
and danced merrily, none more merrily than the old women. When the
mirth was at its height two young Aino, who had let the bear out of
his cage, mounted the roof of the hut and threw cakes of millet
among the company, who all scrambled for them without distinction
of age or sex. The bear was next skinned and disembowelled, and the
trunk severed from the head, to which the skin was left hanging.
The blood, caught in cups, was eagerly swallowed by the men. None
of the women or children appeared to drink the blood, though custom
did not forbid them to do so. The liver was cut in small pieces and
eaten raw, with salt, the women and children getting their share.
The flesh and the rest of the vitals were taken into the house to
be kept till the next day but one, and then to be divided among the
persons who had been present at the feast. Blood and liver were
offered to Dr. Scheube. While the bear was being disembowelled, the
women and girls danced the same dance which they had danced at the
beginning—not, however, round the cage, but in front of the
sacred wands. At this dance the old women, who had been merry a
moment before, again shed tears freely. After the brain had been
extracted from the bear’s head and swallowed with salt, the
skull, detached from the skin, was hung on a pole beside the sacred
wands. The stick with which the bear had been gagged was also
fastened to the pole, and so were the sword and quiver which had
been hung on the carcase. The latter were removed in about an hour,
but the rest remained standing. The whole company, men and women,
danced noisily before the pole; and another drinking-bout, in which
the women joined, closed the festival.
Perhaps the first published account of the bear-feast of the
Aino is one which was given to the world by a Japanese writer in
1652. It has been translated into French and runs thus: “When
they find a young bear, they bring it home, and the wife suckles
it. When it is grown they feed it with fish and fowl and kill it in
winter for the sake of the liver, which they esteem an antidote to
poison, the worms, colic, and disorders of the stomach. It is of a
very bitter taste, and is good for nothing if the bear has been
killed in summer. This butchery begins in the first Japanese month.
For this purpose they put the animal’s head between two long
poles, which are squeezed together by fifty or sixty people, both
men and women. When the bear is dead they eat his flesh, keep the
liver as a medicine, and sell the skin, which is black and commonly
six feet long, but the longest measure twelve feet. As soon as he
is skinned, the persons who nourished the beast begin to bewail
him; afterwards they make little cakes to regale those who helped
them.”
The Aino of Saghalien rear bear cubs and kill them with similar
ceremonies. We are told that they do not look upon the bear as a
god but only as a messenger whom they despatch with various
commissions to the god of the forest. The animal is kept for about
two years in a cage, and then killed at a festival, which always
takes place in winter and at night. The day before the sacrifice is
devoted to lamentation, old women relieving each other in the duty
of weeping and groaning in front of the bear’s cage. Then
about the middle of the night or very early in the morning an
orator makes a long speech to the beast, reminding him how they
have taken care of him, and fed him well, and bathed him in the
river, and made him warm and comfortable. “Now,” he
proceeds, “we are holding a great festival in your honour. Be
not afraid. We will not hurt you. We will only kill you and send
you to the god of the forest who loves you. We are about to offer
you a good dinner, the best you have ever eaten among us, and we
will all weep for you together. The Aino who will kill you is the
best shot among us. There he is, he weeps and asks your
forgiveness; you will feel almost nothing, it will be done so
quickly. We cannot feed you always, as you will understand. We have
done enough for you; it is now your turn to sacrifice yourself for
us. You will ask God to send us, for the winter, plenty of otters
and sables, and for the summer, seals and fish in abundance. Do not
forget our messages, we love you much, and our children will never
forget you.” When the bear has partaken of his last meal amid
the general emotion of the spectators, the old women weeping afresh
and the men uttering stifled cries, he is strapped, not without
difficulty and danger, and being let out of the cage is led on
leash or dragged, according to the state of his temper, thrice
round his cage, then round his master’s house, and lastly
round the house of the orator. Thereupon he is tied up to a tree,
which is decked with sacred whittled sticks (inao) of the
usual sort; and the orator again addresses him in a long harangue,
which sometimes lasts till the day is beginning to break.
“Remember,” he cries, “remember! I remind you of
your whole life and of the services we have rendered you. It is now
for you to do your duty. Do not forget what I have asked of you.
You will tell the gods to give us riches, that our hunters may
return from the forest laden with rare furs and animals good to
eat; that our fishers may find troops of seals on the shore and in
the sea, and that their nets may crack under the weight of the
fish. We have no hope but in you. The evil spirits laugh at us, and
too often they are unfavourable and malignant to us, but they will
bow before you. We have given you food and joy and health; now we
kill you in order that you may in return send riches to us and to
our children.” To this discourse the bear, more and more
surly and agitated, listens without conviction; round and round the
tree he paces and howls lamentably, till, just as the first beams
of the rising sun light up the scene, an archer speeds an arrow to
his heart. No sooner has he done so, than the marksman throws away
his bow and flings himself on the ground, and the old men and women
do the same, weeping and sobbing. Then they offer the dead beast a
repast of rice and wild potatoes, and having spoken to him in terms
of pity and thanked him for what he has done and suffered, they cut
off his head and paws and keep them as sacred things. A banquet on
the flesh and blood of the bear follows. Women were formerly
excluded from it, but now they share with the men. The blood is
drunk warm by all present; the flesh is boiled, custom forbids it
to be roasted. And as the relics of the bear may not enter the
house by the door, and Aino houses in Saghalien have no windows, a
man gets up on the roof and lets the flesh, the head, and the skin
down through the smoke-hole. Rice and wild potatoes are then
offered to the head, and a pipe, tobacco, and matches are
considerately placed beside it. Custom requires that the guests
should eat up the whole animal before they depart; the use of salt
and pepper at the meal is forbidden; and no morsel of the flesh may
be given to the dogs. When the banquet is over, the head is carried
away into the depth of the forest and deposited on a heap of
bears’ skulls, the bleached and mouldering relics of similar
festivals in the past.
The Gilyaks, a Tunguzian people of Eastern Siberia, hold a
bear-festival of the same sort once a year in January. “The
bear is the object of the most refined solicitude of an entire
village and plays the chief part in their religious
ceremonies.” An old she-bear is shot and her cub is reared,
but not suckled, in the village. When the bear is big enough he is
taken from his cage and dragged through the village. But first they
lead him to the bank of the river, for this is believed to ensure
abundance of fish to each family. He is then taken into every house
in the village, where fish, brandy, and so forth are offered to
him. Some people prostrate themselves before the beast. His
entrance into a house is supposed to bring a blessing; and if he
snuffs at the food offered to him, this also is a blessing.
Nevertheless they tease and worry, poke and tickle the animal
continually, so that he is surly and snappish. After being thus
taken to every house, he is tied to a peg and shot dead with
arrows. His head is then cut off, decked with shavings, and placed
on the table where the feast is set out. Here they beg pardon of
the beast and worship him. Then his flesh is roasted and eaten in
special vessels of wood finely carved. They do not eat the flesh
raw nor drink the blood, as the Aino do. The brain and entrails are
eaten last; and the skull, still decked with shavings, is placed on
a tree near the house. Then the people sing and both sexes dance in
ranks, as bears.
One of these bear-festivals was witnessed by the Russian
traveller L. von Schrenck and his companions at the Gilyak village
of Tebach in January 1856. From his detailed report of the ceremony
we may gather some particulars which are not noticed in the briefer
accounts which I have just summarised. The bear, he tells us, plays
a great part in the life of all the peoples inhabiting the region
of the Amoor and Siberia as far as Kamtchatka, but among none of
them is his importance greater than among the Gilyaks. The immense
size which the animal attains in the valley of the Amoor, his
ferocity whetted by hunger, and the frequency of his appearance,
all combine to make him the most dreaded beast of prey in the
country. No wonder, therefore, that the fancy of the Gilyaks is
busied with him and surrounds him, both in life and in death, with
a sort of halo of superstitious fear. Thus, for example, it is
thought that if a Gilyak falls in combat with a bear, his soul
transmigrates into the body of the beast. Nevertheless his flesh
has an irresistible attraction for the Gilyak palate, especially
when the animal has been kept in captivity for some time and
fattened on fish, which gives the flesh, in the opinion of the
Gilyaks, a peculiarly delicious flavour. But in order to enjoy this
dainty with impunity they deem it needful to perform a long series
of ceremonies, of which the intention is to delude the living bear
by a show of respect, and to appease the anger of the dead animal
by the homage paid to his departed spirit. The marks of respect
begin as soon as the beast is captured. He is brought home in
triumph and kept in a cage, where all the villagers take it in
turns to feed him. For although he may have been captured or
purchased by one man, he belongs in a manner to the whole village.
His flesh will furnish a common feast, and hence all must
contribute to support him in his life. The length of time he is
kept in captivity depends on his age. Old bears are kept only a few
months; cubs are kept till they are full-grown. A thick layer of
fat on the captive bear gives the signal for the festival, which is
always held in winter, generally in December but sometimes in
January or February. At the festival witnessed by the Russian
travellers, which lasted a good many days, three bears were killed
and eaten. More than once the animals were led about in procession
and compelled to enter every house in the village, where they were
fed as a mark of honour, and to show that they were welcome guests.
But before the beasts set out on this round of visits, the Gilyaks
played at skipping-rope in presence, and perhaps, as L. von
Schrenck inclined to believe, in honour of the animals. The night
before they were killed, the three bears were led by moonlight a
long way on the ice of the frozen river. That night no one in the
village might sleep. Next day, after the animals had been again led
down the steep bank to the river, and conducted thrice round the
hole in the ice from which the women of the village drew their
water, they were taken to an appointed place not far from the
village, and shot to death with arrows. The place of sacrifice or
execution was marked as holy by being surrounded with whittled
sticks, from the tops of which shavings hung in curls. Such sticks
are with the Gilyaks, as with the Aino, the regular symbols that
accompany all religious ceremonies.
When the house has been arranged and decorated for their
reception, the skins of the bears, with their heads attached to
them, are brought into it, not, however, by the door, but through a
window, and then hung on a sort of scaffold opposite the hearth on
which the flesh is to be cooked. The boiling of the bears’
flesh among the Gilyaks is done only by the oldest men, whose high
privilege it is; women and children, young men and boys have no
part in it. The task is performed slowly and deliberately, with a
certain solemnity. On the occasion described by the Russian
travellers the kettle was first of all surrounded with a thick
wreath of shavings, and then filled with snow, for the use of water
to cook bear’s flesh is forbidden. Meanwhile a large wooden
trough, richly adorned with arabesques and carvings of all sorts,
was hung immediately under the snouts of the bears; on one side of
the trough was carved in relief a bear, on the other side a toad.
When the carcases were being cut up, each leg was laid on the
ground in front of the bears, as if to ask their leave, before
being placed in the kettle; and the boiled flesh was fished out of
the kettle with an iron hook, and set in the trough before the
bears, in order that they might be the first to taste of their own
flesh. As fast, too, as the fat was cut in strips it was hung up in
front of the bears, and afterwards laid in a small wooden trough on
the ground before them. Last of all the inner organs of the beasts
were cut up and placed in small vessels. At the same time the women
made bandages out of parti-coloured rags, and after sunset these
bandages were tied round the bears’ snouts just below the
eyes “in order to dry the tears that flowed from
them.”
As soon as the ceremony of wiping away poor bruin’s tears
had been performed, the assembled Gilyaks set to work in earnest to
devour his flesh. The broth obtained by boiling the meat had
already been partaken of. The wooden bowls, platters, and spoons
out of which the Gilyaks eat the broth and flesh of the bears on
these occasions are always made specially for the purpose at the
festival and only then; they are elaborately ornamented with carved
figures of bears and other devices that refer to the animal or the
festival, and the people have a strong superstitious scruple
against parting with them. After the bones had been picked clean
they were put back in the kettle in which the flesh had been
boiled. And when the festal meal was over, an old man took his
stand at the door of the house with a branch of fir in his hand,
with which, as the people passed out, he gave a light blow to every
one who had eaten of the bear’s flesh or fat, perhaps as a
punishment for their treatment of the worshipful animal. In the
afternoon the women performed a strange dance. Only one woman
danced at a time, throwing the upper part of her body into the
oddest postures, while she held in her hands a branch of fir or a
kind of wooden castanets. The other women meanwhile played an
accompaniment by drumming on the beams of the house with clubs. Von
Schrenk believed that after the flesh of the bear has been eaten
the bones and the skull are solemnly carried out by the oldest
people to a place in the forest not far from the village. There all
the bones except the skull are buried. After that a young tree is
felled a few inches above the ground, its stump cleft, and the
skull wedged into the cleft. When the grass grows over the spot,
the skull disappears from view, and that is the end of the
bear.
Another description of the bear-festivals of the Gilyaks has
been given us by Mr. Leo Sternberg. It agrees substantially with
the foregoing accounts, but a few particulars in it may be noted.
According to Mr. Sternberg, the festival is usually held in honour
of a deceased relation: the next of kin either buys or catches a
bear cub and nurtures it for two or three years till it is ready
for the sacrifice. Only certain distinguished guests
(Narch-en) are privileged to partake of the bear’s
flesh, but the host and members of his clan eat a broth made from
the flesh; great quantities of this broth are prepared and consumed
on the occasion. The guests of honour (Narch-en) must
belong to the clan into which the host’s daughters and the
other women of his clan are married: one of these guests, usually
the host’s son-in-law, is entrusted with the duty of shooting
the bear dead with an arrow. The skin, head, and flesh of the slain
bear are brought into the house not through the door but through
the smoke-hole; a quiver full of arrows is laid under the head and
beside it are deposited tobacco, sugar, and other food. The soul of
the bear is supposed to carry off the souls of these things with it
on the far journey. A special vessel is used for cooking the
bear’s flesh, and the fire must be kindled by a sacred
apparatus of flint and steel, which belongs to the clan and is
handed down from generation to generation, but which is never used
to light fires except on these solemn occasions. Of all the many
viands cooked for the consumption of the assembled people a portion
is placed in a special vessel and set before the bear’s head:
this is called “feeding the head.” After the bear has
been killed, dogs are sacrificed in couples of male and female.
Before being throttled, they are fed and invited to go to their
lord on the highest mountain, to change their skins, and to return
next year in the form of bears. The soul of the dead bear departs
to the same lord, who is also lord of the primaeval forest; it goes
away laden with the offerings that have been made to it, and
attended by the souls of the dogs and also by the souls of the
sacred whittled sticks, which figure prominently at the
festival.
The Goldi, neighbours of the Gilyaks, treat the bear in much the
same way. They hunt and kill it; but sometimes they capture a live
bear and keep him in a cage, feeding him well and calling him their
son and brother. Then at a great festival he is taken from his
cage, paraded about with marked consideration, and afterwards
killed and eaten. “The skull, jaw-bones, and ears are then
suspended on a tree, as an antidote against evil spirits; but the
flesh is eaten and much relished, for they believe that all who
partake of it acquire a zest for the chase, and become
courageous.”
The Orotchis, another Tunguzian people of the region of the
Amoor, hold bear-festivals of the same general character. Any one
who catches a bear cub considers it his bounden duty to rear it in
a cage for about three years, in order at the end of that time to
kill it publicly and eat the flesh with his friends. The feasts
being public, though organised by individuals, the people try to
have one in each Orotchi village every year in turn. When the bear
is taken out of his cage, he is led about by means of ropes to all
the huts, accompanied by people armed with lances, bows, and
arrows. At each hut the bear and bear-leaders are treated to
something good to eat and drink. This goes on for several days
until all the huts, not only in that village but also in the next,
have been visited. The days are given up to sport and noisy
jollity. Then the bear is tied to a tree or wooden pillar and shot
to death by the arrows of the crowd, after which its flesh is
roasted and eaten. Among the Orotchis of the Tundja River women
take part in the bear-feasts, while among the Orotchis of the River
Vi the women will not even touch bear’s flesh.
In the treatment of the captive bear by these tribes there are
features which can hardly be distinguished from worship. Such, for
example, are the prayers offered to it both alive and dead; the
offerings of food, including portions of its own flesh, laid before
the animal’s skull; and the Gilyak custom of leading the
living beast to the river in order to ensure a supply of fish, and
of conducting him from house to house in order that every family
may receive his blessing, just as in Europe a May-tree or a
personal representative of the tree-spirit used to be taken from
door to door in spring for the sake of diffusing among all and
sundry the fresh energies of reviving nature. Again, the solemn
participation in his flesh and blood, and particularly the Aino
custom of sharing the contents of the cup which had been
consecrated by being set before the dead beast, are strongly
suggestive of a sacrament, and the suggestion is confirmed by the
Gilyak practice of reserving special vessels to hold the flesh and
cooking it on a fire kindled by a sacred apparatus which is never
employed except on these religious occasions. Indeed our principal
authority on Aino religion, the Rev. John Batchelor, frankly
describes as worship the ceremonious respect which the Aino pay to
the bear, and he affirms that the animal is undoubtedly one of
their gods. Certainly the Aino appear to apply their name for god
(kamui) freely to the bear; but, as Mr. Batchelor himself
points out, that word is used with many different shades of meaning
and is applied to a great variety of objects, so that from its
application to the bear we cannot safely argue that the animal is
actually regarded as a deity. Indeed we are expressly told that the
Aino of Saghalien do not consider the bear to be a god but only a
messenger to the gods, and the message with which they charge the
animal at its death bears out the statement. Apparently the Gilyaks
also look on the bear in the light of an envoy despatched with
presents to the Lord of the Mountain, on whom the welfare of the
people depends. At the same time they treat the animal as a being
of a higher order than man, in fact as a minor deity, whose
presence in the village, so long as he is kept and fed, diffuses
blessings, especially by keeping at bay the swarms of evil spirits
who are constantly lying in wait for people, stealing their goods
and destroying their bodies by sickness and disease. Moreover, by
partaking of the flesh, blood, or broth of the bear, the Gilyaks,
the Aino, and the Goldi are all of opinion that they acquire some
portion of the animal’s mighty powers, particularly his
courage and strength. No wonder, therefore, that they should treat
so great a benefactor with marks of the highest respect and
affection.
Some light may be thrown on the ambiguous attitude of the Aino
to bears by comparing the similar treatment which they accord to
other creatures. For example, they regard the eagle-owl as a good
deity who by his hooting warns men of threatened evil and defends
them against it; hence he is loved, trusted, and devoutly
worshipped as a divine mediator between men and the Creator. The
various names applied to him are significant both of his divinity
and of his mediatorship. Whenever an opportunity offers, one of
these divine birds is captured and kept in a cage, where he is
greeted with the endearing titles of “Beloved god” and
“Dear little divinity.” Nevertheless the time comes
when the dear little divinity is throttled and sent away in his
capacity of mediator to take a message to the superior gods or to
the Creator himself. The following is the form of prayer addressed
to the eagle-owl when it is about to be sacrificed: “Beloved
deity, we have brought you up because we loved you, and now we are
about to send you to your father. We herewith offer you food,
inao, wine, and cakes; take them to your parent, and he
will be very pleased. When you come to him say, ‘I have lived
a long time among the Ainu, where an Ainu father and an Ainu mother
reared me. I now come to thee. I have brought a variety of good
things. I saw while living in Ainuland a great deal of distress. I
observed that some of the people were possessed by demons, some
were wounded by wild animals, some were hurt by landslides, others
suffered shipwreck, and many were attacked by disease. The people
are in great straits. My father, hear me, and hasten to look upon
the Ainu and help them.’ If you do this, your father will
help us.”
Again, the Aino keep eagles in cages, worship them as
divinities, and ask them to defend the people from evil. Yet they
offer the bird in sacrifice, and when they are about to do so they
pray to him, saying: “O precious divinity, O thou divine
bird, pray listen to my words. Thou dost not belong to this world,
for thy home is with the Creator and his golden eagles. This being
so, I present thee with these inao and cakes and other
precious things. Do thou ride upon the inao and ascend to
thy home in the glorious heavens. When thou arrivest, assemble the
deities of thy own kind together and thank them for us for having
governed the world. Do thou come again, I beseech thee, and rule
over us. O my precious one, go thou quietly.” Once more, the
Aino revere hawks, keep them in cages, and offer them in sacrifice.
At the time of killing one of them the following prayer should be
addressed to the bird: “O divine hawk, thou art an expert
hunter, please cause thy cleverness to descend on me.” If a
hawk is well treated in captivity and prayed to after this fashion
when he is about to be killed, he will surely send help to the
hunter.
Thus the Aino hopes to profit in various ways by slaughtering
the creatures, which, nevertheless, he treats as divine. He expects
them to carry messages for him to their kindred or to the gods in
the upper world; he hopes to partake of their virtues by swallowing
parts of their bodies or in other ways; and apparently he looks
forward to their bodily resurrection in this world, which will
enable him again to catch and kill them, and again to reap all the
benefits which he has already derived from their slaughter. For in
the prayers addressed to the worshipful bear and the worshipful
eagle before they are knocked on the head the creatures are invited
to come again, which seems clearly to point to a faith in their
future resurrection. If any doubt could exist on this head, it
would be dispelled by the evidence of Mr. Batchelor, who tells us
that the Aino “are firmly convinced that the spirits of birds
and animals killed in hunting or offered in sacrifice come and live
again upon the earth clothed with a body; and they believe,
further, that they appear here for the special benefit of men,
particularly Ainu hunters.” The Aino, Mr. Batchelor tells us,
“confessedly slays and eats the beast that another may come
in its place and be treated in like manner”; and at the time
of sacrificing the creatures “prayers are said to them which
form a request that they will come again and furnish viands for
another feast, as if it were an honour to them to be thus killed
and eaten, and a pleasure as well. Indeed such is the
people’s idea.” These last observations, as the context
shows, refer especially to the sacrifice of bears.
Thus among the benefits which the Aino anticipates from the
slaughter of the worshipful animals not the least substantial is
that of gorging himself on their flesh and blood, both on the
present and on many a similar occasion hereafter; and that pleasing
prospect again is derived from his firm faith in the spiritual
immortality and bodily resurrection of the dead animals. A like
faith is shared by many savage hunters in many parts of the world
and has given rise to a variety of quaint customs, some of which
will be described presently. Meantime it is not unimportant to
observe that the solemn festivals at which the Aino, the Gilyaks,
and other tribes slaughter the tame caged bears with demonstrations
of respect and sorrow, are probably nothing but an extension or
glorification of similar rites which the hunter performs over any
wild bear which he chances to kill in the forest. Indeed with
regard to the Gilyaks we are expressly informed that this is the
case. If we would understand the meaning of the Gilyak ritual, says
Mr. Sternberg, “we must above all remember that the
bear-festivals are not, as is usually but falsely assumed,
celebrated only at the killing of a house-bear but are held on
every occasion when a Gilyak succeeds in slaughtering a bear in the
chase. It is true that in such cases the festival assumes less
imposing dimensions, but in its essence it remains the same. When
the head and skin of a bear killed in the forest are brought into
the village, they are accorded a triumphal reception with music and
solemn ceremonial. The head is laid on a consecrated scaffold, fed,
and treated with offerings, just as at the killing of a house-bear;
and the guests of honour (Narch-en) are also assembled.
So, too, dogs are sacrificed, and the bones of the bear are
preserved in the same place and with the same marks of respect as
the bones of a house-bear. Hence the great winter festival is only
an extension of the rite which is observed at the slaughter of
every bear.”
Thus the apparent contradiction in the practice of these tribes,
who venerate and almost deify the animals which they habitually
hunt, kill, and eat, is not so flagrant as at first sight it
appears to us: the people have reasons, and some very practical
reasons, for acting as they do. For the savage is by no means so
illogical and unpractical as to superficial observers he is apt to
seem; he has thought deeply on the questions which immediately
concern him, he reasons about them, and though his conclusions
often diverge very widely from ours, we ought not to deny him the
credit of patient and prolonged meditation on some fundamental
problems of human existence. In the present case, if he treats
bears in general as creatures wholly subservient to human needs and
yet singles out certain individuals of the species for homage which
almost amounts to deification, we must not hastily set him down as
irrational and inconsistent, but must endeavour to place ourselves
at his point of view, to see things as he sees them, and to divest
ourselves of the prepossessions which tinge so deeply our own views
of the world. If we do so, we shall probably discover that, however
absurd his conduct may appear to us, the savage nevertheless
generally acts on a train of reasoning which seems to him in
harmony with the facts of his limited experience. This I propose to
illustrate in the following chapter, where I shall attempt to show
that the solemn ceremonial of the bear-festival among the Ainos and
other tribes of North-eastern Asia is only a particularly striking
example of the respect which on the principles of his rude
philosophy the savage habitually pays to the animals which he kills
and eats.
LIII. The Propitiation of Wild Animals By Hunters
THE EXPLANATION of life by the theory of an indwelling and
practically immortal soul is one which the savage does not confine
to human beings but extends to the animate creation in general. In
so doing he is more liberal and perhaps more logical than the
civilised man, who commonly denies to animals that privilege of
immortality which he claims for himself. The savage is not so
proud; he commonly believes that animals are endowed with feelings
and intelligence like those of men, and that, like men, they
possess souls which survive the death of their bodies either to
wander about as disembodied spirits or to be born again in animal
form.
Thus to the savage, who regards all living creatures as
practically on a footing of equality with man, the act of killing
and eating an animal must wear a very different aspect from that
which the same act presents to us, who regard the intelligence of
animals as far inferior to our own and deny them the possession of
immortal souls. Hence on the principles of his rude philosophy the
primitive hunter who slays an animal believes himself exposed to
the vengeance either of its disembodied spirit or of all the other
animals of the same species, whom he considers as knit together,
like men, by the ties of kin and the obligations of the blood feud,
and therefore as bound to resent the injury done to one of their
number. Accordingly the savage makes it a rule to spare the life of
those animals which he has no pressing motive for killing, at least
such fierce and dangerous animals as are likely to exact a bloody
vengeance for the slaughter of one of their kind. Crocodiles are
animals of this sort. They are only found in hot countries, where,
as a rule, food is abundant and primitive man has therefore little
reason to kill them for the sake of their tough and unpalatable
flesh. Hence it is a custom with some savages to spare crocodiles,
or rather only to kill them in obedience to the law of blood feud,
that is, as a retaliation for the slaughter of men by crocodiles.
For example, the Dyaks of Borneo will not kill a crocodile unless a
crocodile has first killed a man. “For why, say they, should
they commit an act of aggression, when he and his kindred can so
easily repay them? But should the alligator take a human life,
revenge becomes a sacred duty of the living relatives, who will
trap the man-eater in the spirit of an officer of justice pursuing
a criminal. Others, even then, hang back, reluctant to embroil
themselves in a quarrel which does not concern them. The man-eating
alligator is supposed to be pursued by a righteous Nemesis; and
whenever one is caught they have a profound conviction that it must
be the guilty one, or his accomplice.”
Like the Dyaks, the natives of Madagascar never kill a crocodile
“except in retaliation for one of their friends who has been
destroyed by a crocodile. They believe that the wanton destruction
of one of these reptiles will be followed by the loss of human
life, in accordance with the principle of lex
talionis.” The people who live near the lake Itasy in
Madagascar make a yearly proclamation to the crocodiles, announcing
that they will revenge the death of some of their friends by
killing as many crocodiles in return, and warning all well-disposed
crocodiles to keep out of the way, as they have no quarrel with
them, but only with their evil-minded relations who have taken
human life. Various tribes of Madagascar believe themselves to be
descended from crocodiles, and accordingly they view the scaly
reptile as, to all intents and purposes, a man and a brother. If
one of the animals should so far forget himself as to devour one of
his human kinsfolk, the chief of the tribe, or in his absence an
old man familiar with the tribal customs, repairs at the head of
the people to the edge of the water, and summons the family of the
culprit to deliver him up to the arm of justice. A hook is then
baited and cast into the river or lake. Next day the guilty
brother, or one of his family, is dragged ashore, and after his
crime has been clearly brought home to him by a strict
interrogation, he is sentenced to death and executed. The claims of
justice being thus satisfied and the majesty of the law fully
vindicated, the deceased crocodile is lamented and buried like a
kinsman; a mound is raised over his relics and a stone marks the
place of his head.
Again, the tiger is another of those dangerous beasts whom the
savage prefers to leave alone, lest by killing one of the species
he should excite the hostility of the rest. No consideration will
induce a Sumatran to catch or wound a tiger except in self-defence
or immediately after a tiger has destroyed a friend or relation.
When a European has set traps for tigers, the people of the
neighbourhood have been known to go by night to the place and
explain to the animals that the traps are not set by them nor with
their consent. The inhabitants of the hills near Rajamahall, in
Bengal, are very averse to killing a tiger, unless one of their
kinsfolk has been carried off by one of the beasts. In that case
they go out for the purpose of hunting and slaying a tiger; and
when they have succeeded they lay their bows and arrows on the
carcase and invoke God, declaring that they slew the animal in
retaliation for the loss of a kinsman. Vengeance having been thus
taken, they swear not to attack another tiger except under similar
provocation.
The Indians of Carolina would not molest snakes when they came
upon them, but would pass by on the other side of the path,
believing that if they were to kill a serpent, the reptile’s
kindred would destroy some of their brethren, friends, or relations
in return. So the Seminole Indians spared the rattlesnake, because
they feared that the soul of the dead rattlesnake would incite its
kinsfolk to take vengeance. The Cherokee regard the rattlesnake as
the chief of the snake tribe and fear and respect him accordingly.
Few Cherokee will venture to kill a rattlesnake, unless they cannot
help it, and even then they must atone for the crime by craving
pardon of the snake’s ghost either in their own person or
through the mediation of a priest, according to a set formula. If
these precautions are neglected, the kinsfolk of the dead snake
will send one of their number as an avenger of blood, who will
track down the murderer and sting him to death. No ordinary
Cherokee dares to kill a wolf, if he can possibly help it; for he
believes that the kindred of the slain beast would surely avenge
its death, and that the weapon with which the deed had been done
would be quite useless for the future, unless it were cleaned and
exorcised by a medicine-man. However, certain persons who know the
proper rites of atonement for such a crime can kill wolves with
impunity, and they are sometimes hired to do so by people who have
suffered from the raids of the wolves on their cattle or
fish-traps. In Jebel-Nuba, a district of the Eastern Sudan, it is
forbidden to touch the nests or remove the young of a species of
black birds, resembling our blackbirds, because the people believe
that the parent birds would avenge the wrong by causing a stormy
wind to blow, which would destroy the harvest.
But the savage clearly cannot afford to spare all animals. He
must either eat some of them or starve, and when the question thus
comes to be whether he or the animal must perish, he is forced to
overcome his superstitious scruples and take the life of the beast.
At the same time he does all he can to appease his victims and
their kinsfolk. Even in the act of killing them he testifies his
respect for them, endeavours to excuse or even conceal his share in
procuring their death, and promises that their remains will be
honourably treated. By thus robbing death of its terrors, he hopes
to reconcile his victims to their fate and to induce their fellows
to come and be killed also. For example, it was a principle with
the Kamtchatkans never to kill a land or sea animal without first
making excuses to it and begging that the animal would not take it
ill. Also they offered it cedarnuts and so forth, to make it think
that it was not a victim but a guest at a feast. They believed that
this hindered other animals of the same species from growing shy.
For instance, after they had killed a bear and feasted on its
flesh, the host would bring the bear’s head before the
company, wrap it in grass, and present it with a variety of
trifles. Then he would lay the blame of the bear’s death on
the Russians, and bid the beast wreak his wrath upon them. Also he
would ask the bear to inform the other bears how well he had been
treated, that they too might come without fear. Seals, sea-lions,
and other animals were treated by the Kamtchatkans with the same
ceremonious respect. Moreover, they used to insert sprigs of a
plant resembling bear’s wort in the mouths of the animals
they killed; after which they would exhort the grinning skulls to
have no fear but to go and tell it to their fellows, that they also
might come and be caught and so partake of this splendid
hospitality. When the Ostiaks have hunted and killed a bear, they
cut off its head and hang it on a tree. Then they gather round in a
circle and pay it divine honours. Next they run towards the carcase
uttering lamentations and saying, “Who killed you? It was the
Russians. Who cut off your head? It was a Russian axe. Who skinned
you? It was a knife made by a Russian.” They explain, too,
that the feathers which sped the arrow on its flight came from the
wing of a strange bird, and that they did nothing but let the arrow
go. They do all this because they believe that the wandering ghost
of the slain bear would attack them on the first opportunity, if
they did not thus appease it. Or they stuff the skin of the slain
bear with hay; and after celebrating their victory with songs of
mockery and insult, after spitting on and kicking it, they set it
up on its hind legs, “and then, for a considerable time, they
bestow on it all the veneration due to a guardian god.” When
a party of Koryak have killed a bear or a wolf, they skin the beast
and dress one of themselves in the skin. Then they dance round the
skin-clad man, saying that it was not they who killed the animal,
but some one else, generally a Russian. When they kill a fox they
skin it, wrap the body in grass, and bid him go tell his companions
how hospitably he has been received, and how he has received a new
cloak instead of his old one. A fuller account of the Koryak
ceremonies is given by a more recent writer. He tells us that when
a dead bear is brought to the house, the women come out to meet it,
dancing with firebrands. The bear-skin is taken off along with the
head; and one of the women puts on the skin, dances in it, and
entreats the bear not to be angry, but to be kind to the people. At
the same time they offer meat on a wooden platter to the dead
beast, saying, “Eat, friend.” Afterwards a ceremony is
performed for the purpose of sending the dead bear, or rather his
spirit, away back to his home. He is provided with provisions for
the journey in the shape of puddings or reindeer-flesh packed in a
grass bag. His skin is stuffed with grass and carried round the
house, after which he is supposed to depart towards the rising sun.
The intention of the ceremonies is to protect the people from the
wrath of the slain bear and his kinsfolk, and so to ensure success
in future bear-hunts. The Finns used to try to persuade a slain
bear that he had not been killed by them, but had fallen from a
tree, or met his death in some other way; moreover, they held a
funeral festival in his honour, at the close of which bards
expatiated on the homage that had been paid to him, urging him to
report to the other bears the high consideration with which he had
been treated, in order that they also, following his example, might
come and be slain. When the Lapps had succeeded in killing a bear
with impunity, they thanked him for not hurting them and for not
breaking the clubs and spears which had given him his death wounds;
and they prayed that he would not visit his death upon them by
sending storms or in any other way. His flesh then furnished a
feast.
The reverence of hunters for the bear whom they regularly kill
and eat may thus be traced all along the northern region of the Old
World from Bering’s Straits to Lappland. It reappears in
similar forms in North America. With the American Indians a bear
hunt was an important event for which they prepared by long fasts
and purgations. Before setting out they offered expiatory
sacrifices to the souls of bears slain in previous hunts, and
besought them to be favourable to the hunters. When a bear was
killed the hunter lit his pipe, and putting the mouth of it between
the bear’s lips, blew into the bowl, filling the
beast’s mouth with smoke. Then he begged the bear not to be
angry at having been killed, and not to thwart him afterwards in
the chase. The carcase was roasted whole and eaten; not a morsel of
the flesh might be left over. The head, painted red and blue, was
hung on a post and addressed by orators, who heaped praise on the
dead beast. When men of the Bear clan in the Ottawa tribe killed a
bear, they made him a feast of his own flesh, and addressed him
thus: “Cherish us no grudge because we have killed you. You
have sense; you see that our children are hungry. They love you and
wish to take you into their bodies. Is it not glorious to be eaten
by the children of a chief?” Amongst the Nootka Indians of
British Columbia, when a bear had been killed, it was brought in
and seated before the head chief in an upright posture, with a
chief’s bonnet, wrought in figures, on its head, and its fur
powdered over with white down. A tray of provisions was then set
before it, and it was invited by words and gestures to eat. After
that the animal was skinned, boiled, and eaten.
A like respect is testified for other dangerous creatures by the
hunters who regularly trap and kill them. When Caffre hunters are
in the act of showering spears on an elephant, they call out,
“Don’t kill us, great captain; don’t strike or
tread upon us, mighty chief.” When he is dead they make their
excuses to him, pretending that his death was a pure accident. As a
mark of respect they bury his trunk with much solemn ceremony; for
they say that “the elephant is a great lord; his trunk is his
hand.” Before the Amaxosa Caffres attack an elephant they
shout to the animal and beg him to pardon them for the slaughter
they are about to perpetrate, professing great submission to his
person and explaining clearly the need they have of his tusks to
enable them to procure beads and supply their wants. When they have
killed him they bury in the ground, along with the end of his
trunk, a few of the articles they have obtained for the ivory, thus
hoping to avert some mishap that would otherwise befall them.
Amongst some tribes of Eastern Africa, when a lion is killed, the
carcase is brought before the king, who does homage to it by
prostrating himself on the ground and rubbing his face on the
muzzle of the beast. In some parts of Western Africa if a negro
kills a leopard he is bound fast and brought before the chiefs for
having killed one of their peers. The man defends himself on the
plea that the leopard is chief of the forest and therefore a
stranger. He is then set at liberty and rewarded. But the dead
leopard, adorned with a chief’s bonnet, is set up in the
village, where nightly dances are held in its honour. The Baganda
greatly fear the ghosts of buffaloes which they have killed, and
they always appease these dangerous spirits. On no account will
they bring the head of a slain buffalo into a village or into a
garden of plantains: they always eat the flesh of the head in the
open country. Afterwards they place the skull in a small hut built
for the purpose, where they pour out beer as an offering and pray
to the ghost to stay where he is and not to harm them.
Another formidable beast whose life the savage hunter takes with
joy, yet with fear and trembling, is the whale. After the slaughter
of a whale the maritime Koryak of North-eastern Siberia hold a
communal festival, the essential part of which “is based on
the conception that the whale killed has come on a visit to the
village; that it is staying for some time, during which it is
treated with great respect; that it then returns to the sea to
repeat its visit the following year; that it will induce its
relatives to come along, telling them of the hospitable reception
that has been accorded to it. According to the Koryak ideas, the
whales, like all other animals, constitute one tribe, or rather
family, of related individuals, who live in villages like the
Koryak. They avenge the murder of one of their number, and are
grateful for kindnesses that they may have received.” When
the inhabitants of the Isle of St. Mary, to the north of
Madagascar, go a-whaling, they single out the young whales for
attack and “humbly beg the mother’s pardon, stating the
necessity that drives them to kill her progeny, and requesting that
she will be pleased to go below while the deed is doing, that her
maternal feelings may not be outraged by witnessing what must cause
her so much uneasiness.” An Ajumba hunter having killed a
female hippopotamus on Lake Azyingo in West Africa, the animal was
decapitated and its quarters and bowels removed. Then the hunter,
naked, stepped into the hollow of the ribs, and kneeling down in
the bloody pool washed his whole body with the blood and excretions
of the animal, while he prayed to the soul of the hippopotamus not
to bear him a grudge for having killed her and so blighted her
hopes of future maternity; and he further entreated the ghost not
to stir up other hippopotamuses to avenge her death by butting at
and capsizing his canoe.
The ounce, a leopard-like creature, is dreaded for its
depredations by the Indians of Brazil. When they have caught one of
these animals in a snare, they kill it and carry the body home to
the village. There the women deck the carcase with feathers of many
colours, put bracelets on its legs, and weep over it, saying,
“I pray thee not to take vengeance on our little ones for
having been caught and killed through thine own ignorance. For it
was not we who deceived thee, it was thyself. Our husbands only set
the trap to catch animals that are good to eat; they never thought
to take thee in it. Therefore, let not thy soul counsel thy fellows
to avenge thy death on our little ones!” When a Blackfoot
Indian has caught eagles in a trap and killed them, he takes them
home to a special lodge, called the eagles’ lodge, which has
been prepared for their reception outside of the camp. Here he sets
the birds in a row on the ground, and propping up their heads on a
stick, puts a piece of dried meat in each of their mouths in order
that the spirits of the dead eagles may go and tell the other
eagles how well they are being treated by the Indians. So when
Indian hunters of the Orinoco region have killed an animal, they
open its mouth and pour into it a few drops of the liquor they
generally carry with them, in order that the soul of the dead beast
may inform its fellows of the welcome it has met with, and that
they too, cheered by the prospect of the same kind reception, may
come with alacrity to be killed. When a Teton Indian is on a
journey, and he meets a grey spider or a spider with yellow legs,
he kills it, because some evil would befall him if he did not. But
he is very careful not to let the spider know that he kills it, for
if the spider knew, his soul would go and tell the other spiders,
and one of them would be sure to avenge the death of his relation.
So in crushing the insect, the Indian says, “O Grandfather
Spider, the Thunder-beings kill you.” And the spider is
crushed at once and believes what is told him. His soul probably
runs and tells the other spiders that the Thunder-beings have
killed him; but no harm comes of that. For what can grey or
yellow-legged spiders do to the Thunder-beings?
But it is not merely dangerous creatures with whom the savage
desires to keep on good terms. It is true that the respect which he
pays to wild beasts is in some measure proportioned to their
strength and ferocity. Thus the savage Stiens of Cambodia,
believing that all animals have souls which roam about after their
death, beg an animal’s pardon when they kill it, lest its
soul should come and torment them. Also they offer it sacrifices,
but these sacrifices are proportioned to the size and strength of
the animal. The ceremonies which they observe at the death of an
elephant are conducted with much pomp and last seven days. Similar
distinctions are drawn by North American Indians. “The bear,
the buffalo, and the beaver are manidos [divinities] which furnish
food. The bear is formidable, and good to eat. They render
ceremonies to him, begging him to allow himself to be eaten,
although they know he has no fancy for it. We kill you, but you are
not annihilated. His head and paws are objects of homage… .
Other animals are treated similarly from similar reasons… .
Many of the animal manidos, not being dangerous, are often treated
with contempt—the terrapin, the weasel, polecat, etc.”
The distinction is instructive. Animals which are feared, or are
good to eat, or both, are treated with ceremonious respect; those
which are neither formidable nor good to eat are despised. We have
had examples of reverence paid to animals which are both feared and
eaten. It remains to prove that similar respect is shown to animals
which, without being feared, are either eaten or valued for their
skins.
When Siberian sable-hunters have caught a sable, no one is
allowed to see it, and they think that if good or evil be spoken of
the captured sable no more sables will be caught. A hunter has been
known to express his belief that the sables could hear what was
said of them as far off as Moscow. He said that the chief reason
why the sable hunt was now so unproductive was that some live
sables had been sent to Moscow. There they had been viewed with
astonishment as strange animals, and the sables cannot abide that.
Another, though minor, cause of the diminished take of sables was,
he alleged, that the world is now much worse than it used to be, so
that nowadays a hunter will sometimes hide the sable which he has
got instead of putting it into the common stock. This also, said
he, the sables cannot abide. Alaskan hunters preserve the bones of
sables and beavers out of reach of the dogs for a year and then
bury them carefully, “lest the spirits who look after the
beavers and sables should consider that they are regarded with
contempt, and hence no more should be killed or trapped.” The
Canadian Indians were equally particular not to let their dogs gnaw
the bones, or at least certain of the bones, of beavers. They took
the greatest pains to collect and preserve these bones, and, when
the beaver had been caught in a net, they threw them into the
river. To a Jesuit who argued that the beavers could not possibly
know what became of their bones, the Indians replied, “You
know nothing about catching beavers and yet you will be prating
about it. Before the beaver is stone dead, his soul takes a turn in
the hut of the man who is killing him and makes a careful note of
what is done with his bones. If the bones are given to the dogs,
the other beavers would get word of it and would not let themselves
be caught. Whereas, if their bones are thrown into the fire or a
river, they are quite satisfied; and it is particularly gratifying
to the net which caught them.” Before hunting the beaver they
offered a solemn prayer to the Great Beaver, and presented him with
tobacco; and when the chase was over, an orator pronounced a
funeral oration over the dead beavers. He praised their spirit and
wisdom. “You will hear no more,” said he, “the
voice of the chieftains who commanded you and whom you chose from
among all the warrior beavers to give you laws. Your language,
which the medicine-men understand perfectly, will be heard no more
at the bottom of the lake. You will fight no more battles with the
otters, your cruel foes. No, beavers! But your skins shall serve to
buy arms; we will carry your smoked hams to our children; we will
keep the dogs from eating your bones, which are so hard.”
The elan, deer, and elk were treated by the American Indians
with the same punctilious respect, and for the same reason. Their
bones might not be given to the dogs nor thrown into the fire, nor
might their fat be dropped upon the fire, because the souls of the
dead animals were believed to see what was done to their bodies and
to tell it to the other beasts, living and dead. Hence, if their
bodies were illused, the animals of that species would not allow
themselves to be taken, neither in this world nor in the world to
come. Among the Chiquites of Paraguay a sick man would be asked by
the medicine-man whether he had not thrown away some of the flesh
of the deer or turtle, and if he answered yes, the medicine-man
would say, “That is what is killing you. The soul of the deer
or turtle has entered into your body to avenge the wrong you did
it.” The Canadian Indians would not eat the embryos of the
elk, unless at the close of the hunting season; otherwise the
mother-elks would be shy and refuse to be caught.
In the Timor-laut islands of the Indian Archipelago the skulls
of all the turtles which a fisherman has caught are hung up under
his house. Before he goes out to catch another, he addresses
himself to the skull of the last turtle that he killed, and having
inserted betel between its jaws, he prays the spirit of the dead
animal to entice its kinsfolk in the sea to come and be caught. In
the Poso district of Central Celebes hunters keep the jawbones of
deer and wild pigs which they have killed and hang them up in their
houses near the fire. Then they say to the jawbones, “Ye cry
after your comrades, that your grandfathers, or nephews, or
children may not go away.” Their notion is that the souls of
the dead deer and pigs tarry near their jawbones and attract the
souls of living deer and pigs, which are thus drawn into the toils
of the hunter. Thus the wily savage employs dead animals as decoys
to lure living animals to their doom.
The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco love to hunt the ostrich,
but when they have killed one of these birds and are bringing home
the carcase to the village, they take steps to outwit the resentful
ghost of their victim. They think that when the first natural shock
of death is passed, the ghost of the ostrich pulls himself together
and makes after his body. Acting on this sage calculation, the
Indians pluck feathers from the breast of the bird and strew them
at intervals along the track. At every bunch of feathers the ghost
stops to consider, “Is this the whole of my body or only a
part of it?” The doubt gives him pause, and when at last he
has made up his mind fully at all the bunches, and has further
wasted valuable time by the zigzag course which he invariably
pursues in going from one to another, the hunters are safe at home,
and the bilked ghost may stalk in vain round about the village,
which he is too timid to enter.
The Esquimaux about Bering Strait believe that the souls of dead
sea-beasts, such as seals, walrus, and whales, remain attached to
their bladders, and that by returning the bladders to the sea they
can cause the souls to be reincarnated in fresh bodies and so
multiply the game which the hunters pursue and kill. Acting on this
belief every hunter carefully removes and preserves the bladders of
all the sea-beasts that he kills; and at a solemn festival held
once a year in winter these bladders, containing the souls of all
the sea-beasts that have been killed throughout the year, are
honoured with dances and offerings of food in the public
assembly-room, after which they are taken out on the ice and thrust
through holes into the water; for the simple Esquimaux imagine that
the souls of the animals, in high good humour at the kind treatment
they have experienced, will thereafter be born again as seals,
walrus, and whales, and in that form will flock willingly to be
again speared, harpooned, or otherwise done to death by the
hunters.
For like reasons, a tribe which depends for its subsistence,
chiefly or in part, upon fishing is careful to treat the fish with
every mark of honour and respect. The Indians of Peru “adored
the fish that they caught in greatest abundance; for they said that
the first fish that was made in the world above (for so they named
Heaven) gave birth to all other fish of that species, and took care
to send them plenty of its children to sustain their tribe. For
this reason they worshipped sardines in one region, where they
killed more of them than of any other fish; in others, the skate;
in others, the dogfish; in others, the golden fish for its beauty;
in others, the crawfish; in others, for want of larger gods, the
crabs, where they had no other fish, or where they knew not how to
catch and kill them. In short, they had whatever fish was most
serviceable to them as their gods.” The Kwakiutl Indians of
British Columbia think that when a salmon is killed its soul
returns to the salmon country. Hence they take care to throw the
bones and offal into the sea, in order that the soul may reanimate
them at the resurrection of the salmon. Whereas if they burned the
bones the soul would be lost, and so it would be quite impossible
for that salmon to rise from the dead. In like manner the Ottawa
Indians of Canada, believing that the souls of dead fish passed
into other bodies of fish, never burned fish bones, for fear of
displeasing the souls of the fish, who would come no more to the
nets. The Hurons also refrained from throwing fish bones into the
fire, lest the souls of the fish should go and warn the other fish
not to let themselves be caught, since the Hurons would burn their
bones. Moreover, they had men who preached to the fish and
persuaded them to come and be caught. A good preacher was much
sought after, for they thought that the exhortations of a clever
man had a great effect in drawing the fish to the nets. In the
Huron fishing village where the French missionary Sagard stayed,
the preacher to the fish prided himself very much on his eloquence,
which was of a florid order. Every evening after supper, having
seen that all the people were in their places and that a strict
silence was observed, he preached to the fish. His text was that
the Hurons did not burn fish bones. “Then enlarging on this
theme with extraordinary unction, he exhorted and conjured and
invited and implored the fish to come and be caught and to be of
good courage and to fear nothing, for it was all to serve their
friends who honoured them and did not burn their bones.” The
natives of the Duke of York Island annually decorate a canoe with
flowers and ferns, lade it, or are supposed to lade it, with
shell-money, and set it adrift to compensate the fish for their
fellows who have been caught and eaten. It is especially necessary
to treat the first fish caught with consideration in order to
conciliate the rest of the fish, whose conduct may be supposed to
be influenced by the reception given to those of their kind which
were the first to be taken. Accordingly the Maoris always put back
into the sea the first fish caught, “with a prayer that it
may tempt other fish to come and be caught.”
Still more stringent are the precautions taken when the fish are
the first of the season. On salmon rivers, when the fish begin to
run up the stream in spring, they are received with much deference
by tribes who, like the Indians of the Pacific Coast of North
America, subsist largely upon a fish diet. In British Columbia the
Indians used to go out to meet the first fish as they came up the
river: “They paid court to them, and would address them thus:
‘You fish, you fish; you are all chiefs, you are; you are all
chiefs.’” Amongst the Tlingit of Alaska the first
halibut of the season is carefully handled and addressed as a
chief, and a festival is given in his honour, after which the
fishing goes on. In spring, when the winds blow soft from the south
and the salmon begin to run up the Klamath river, the Karoks of
California dance for salmon, to ensure a good catch. One of the
Indians, called the Kareya or God-man, retires to the mountains and
fasts for ten days. On his return the people flee, while he goes to
the river, takes the first salmon of the catch, eats some of it,
and with the rest kindles the sacred fire in the sweating house.
“No Indian may take a salmon before this dance is held, nor
for ten days after it, even if his family are starving.” The
Karoks also believe that a fisherman will take no salmon if the
poles of which his spearing-booth is made were gathered on the
river-side, where the salmon might have seen them. The poles must
be brought from the top of the highest mountain. The fisherman will
also labour in vain if he uses the same poles a second year in
booths or weirs, “because the old salmon will have told the
young ones about them. There is a favourite fish of the Aino which
appears in their rivers about May and June. They prepare for the
fishing by observing rules of ceremonial purity, and when they have
gone out to fish, the women at home must keep strict silence or the
fish would hear them and disappear. When the first fish is caught
he is brought home and passed through a small opening at the end of
the hut, but not through the door; for if he were passed through
the door, “the other fish would certainly see him and
disappear.” This may partly explain the custom observed by
other savages of bringing game in certain cases into their huts,
not by the door, but by the window, the smoke-hole, or by a special
opening at the back of the hut.
With some savages a special reason for respecting the bones of
game, and generally of the animals which they eat, is a belief
that, if the bones are preserved, they will in course of time be
reclothed with flesh, and thus the animal will come to life again.
It is, therefore, clearly for the interest of the hunter to leave
the bones intact since to destroy them would be to diminish the
future supply of game. Many of the Minnetaree Indians
“believe that the bones of those bisons which they have slain
and divested of flesh rise again clothed with renewed flesh, and
quickened with life, and become fat, and fit for slaughter the
succeeding June.” Hence on the western prairies of America,
the skulls of buffaloes may be seen arranged in circles and
symmetrical piles, awaiting the resurrection. After feasting on a
dog, the Dacotas carefully collect the bones, scrape, wash, and
bury them, “partly, as it is said, to testify to the
dog-species, that in feasting upon one of their number no
disrespect was meant to the species itself, and partly also from a
belief that the bones of the animal will rise and reproduce
another.” In sacrificing an animal the Lapps regularly put
aside the bones, eyes, ears, heart, lungs, sexual parts (if the
animal was a male), and a morsel of flesh from each limb. Then,
after eating the remainder of the flesh, they laid the bones and
the rest in anatomical order in a coffin and buried them with the
usual rites, believing that the god to whom the animal was
sacrificed would reclothe the bones with flesh and restore the
animal to life in Jabme-Aimo, the subterranean world of the dead.
Sometimes, as after feasting on a bear, they seem to have contented
themselves with thus burying the bones. Thus the Lapps expected the
resurrection of the slain animal to take place in another world,
resembling in this respect the Kamtchatkans, who believed that
every creature, down to the smallest fly, would rise from the dead
and live underground. On the other hand, the North American Indians
looked for the resurrection of the animals in the present world.
The habit, observed especially by Mongolian peoples, of stuffing
the skin of a sacrificed animal, or stretching it on a framework,
points rather to a belief in a resurrection of the latter sort. The
objection commonly entertained by primitive peoples to break the
bones of the animals which they have eaten or sacrificed may be
based either on a belief in the resurrection of the animals, or on
a fear of intimidating other creatures of the same species and
offending the ghosts of the slain animals. The reluctance of North
American Indians and Esquimaux to let dogs gnaw the bones of
animals is perhaps only a precaution to prevent the bones from
being broken.
But after all the resurrection of dead game may have its
inconveniences, and accordingly some hunters take steps to prevent
it by hamstringing the animal so as to prevent it or its ghost from
getting up and running away. This is the motive alleged for the
practice by Koui hunters in Laos; they think that the spells which
they utter in the chase may lose their magical virtue, and that the
slaughtered animal may consequently come to life again and escape.
To prevent that catastrophe they therefore hamstring the beast as
soon as they have butchered it. When an Esquimau of Alaska has
killed a fox, he carefully cuts the tendons of all the
animal’s legs in order to prevent the ghost from reanimating
the body and walking about. But hamstringing the carcase is not the
only measure which the prudent savage adopts for the sake of
disabling the ghost of his victim. In old days, when the Aino went
out hunting and killed a fox first, they took care to tie its mouth
up tightly in order to prevent the ghost of the animal from
sallying forth and warning its fellows against the approach of the
hunter. The Gilyaks of the Amoor River put out the eyes of the
seals they have killed, lest the ghosts of the slain animals should
know their slayers and avenge their death by spoiling the
seal-hunt.
Besides the animals which primitive man dreads for their
strength and ferocity, and those which he reveres on account of the
benefits which he expects from them, there is another class of
creatures which he sometimes deems it necessary to conciliate by
worship and sacrifice. These are the vermin that infest his crops
and his cattle. To rid himself of these deadly foes the farmer has
recourse to many superstitious devices, of which, though some are
meant to destroy or intimidate the vermin, others aim at
propitiating them and persuading them by fair means to spare the
fruits of the earth and the herds. Thus Esthonian peasants, in the
island of Oesel, stand in great awe of the weevil, an insect which
is exceedingly destructive to the grain. They give it a fine name,
and if a child is about to kill a weevil they say,
“Don’t do it; the more we hurt him, the more he hurts
us.” If they find a weevil they bury it in the earth instead
of killing it. Some even put the weevil under a stone in the field
and offer corn to it. They think that thus it is appeased and does
less harm. Amongst the Saxons of Transylvania, in order to keep
sparrows from the corn, the sower begins by throwing the first
handful of seed backwards over his head, saying, “That is for
you, sparrows.” To guard the corn against the attacks of
leaf-flies he shuts his eyes and scatters three handfuls of oats in
different directions. Having made this offering to the leaf-flies
he feels sure that they will spare the corn. A Transylvanian way of
securing the crops against all birds, beasts, and insects, is this:
after he has finished sowing, the sower goes once more from end to
end of the field imitating the gesture of sowing, but with an empty
hand. As he does so he says, “I sow this for the animals; I
sow it for every thing that flies and creeps, that walks and
stands, that sings and springs, in the name of God the Father,
etc.” The following is a German way of freeing a garden from
caterpillars. After sunset or at midnight the mistress of the
house, or another female member of the family, walks all round the
garden dragging a broom after her. She may not look behind her, and
must keep murmuring, “Good evening, Mother Caterpillar, you
shall come with your husband to church.” The garden gate is
left open till the following morning.
Sometimes in dealing with vermin the farmer aims at hitting a
happy mean between excessive rigour on the one hand and weak
indulgence on the other; kind but firm, he tempers severity with
mercy. An ancient Greek treatise on farming advises the husbandman
who would rid his lands of mice to act thus: “Take a sheet of
paper and write on it as follows: ‘I adjure you, ye mice here
present, that ye neither injure me nor suffer another mouse to do
so. I give you yonder field’ (here you specify the field);
‘but if ever I catch you here again, by the Mother of the
Gods I will rend you in seven pieces.’ Write this, and stick
the paper on an unhewn stone in the field before sunrise, taking
care to keep the written side up.” In the Ardennes they say
that to get rid of rats you should repeat the following words:
“Erat verbum, apud Deum vestrum. Male rats and
female rats, I conjure you, by the great God, to go out of my
house, out of all my habitations, and to betake yourselves to such
and such a place, there to end your days. Decretis, reversis et
desembarassis virgo potens, clemens, justitiae.” Then
write the same words on pieces of paper, fold them up, and place
one of them under the door by which the rats are to go forth, and
the other on the road which they are to take. This exorcism should
be performed at sunrise. Some years ago an American farmer was
reported to have written a civil letter to the rats, telling them
that his crops were short, that he could not afford to keep them
through the winter, that he had been very kind to them, and that
for their own good he thought they had better leave him and go to
some of his neighbours who had more grain. This document he pinned
to a post in his barn for the rats to read.
Sometimes the desired object is supposed to be attained by
treating with high distinction one or two chosen individuals of the
obnoxious species, while the rest are pursued with relentless
rigour. In the East Indian island of Bali, the mice which ravage
the rice-fields are caught in great numbers, and burned in the same
way that corpses are burned. But two of the captured mice are
allowed to live, and receive a little packet of white linen. Then
the people bow down before them, as before gods, and let them go.
When the farms of the Sea Dyaks or Ibans of Sarawak are much
pestered by birds and insects, they catch a specimen of each kind
of vermin (one sparrow, one grasshopper, and so on), put them in a
tiny boat of bark well-stocked with provisions, and then allow the
little vessel with its obnoxious passengers to float down the
river. If that does not drive the pests away, the Dyaks resort to
what they deem a more effectual mode of accomplishing the same
purpose. They make a clay crocodile as large as life and set it up
in the fields, where they offer it food, rice-spirit, and cloth,
and sacrifice a fowl and a pig before it. Mollified by these
attentions, the ferocious animal very soon gobbles up all the
creatures that devour the crops. In Albania, if the fields or
vineyards are ravaged by locusts or beetles, some of the women will
assemble with dishevelled hair, catch a few of the insects, and
march with them in a funeral procession to a spring or stream, in
which they drown the creatures. Then one of the women sings,
“O locusts and beetles who have left us bereaved,” and
the dirge is taken up and repeated by all the women in chorus. Thus
by celebrating the obsequies of a few locusts and beetles, they
hope to bring about the death of them all. When caterpillars
invaded a vineyard or field in Syria, the virgins were gathered,
and one of the caterpillars was taken and a girl made its mother.
Then they bewailed and buried it. Thereafter they conducted the
“mother” to the place where the caterpillars were,
consoling her, in order that all the caterpillars might leave the
garden.
LIV. Types of Animal Sacrament
1. The Egyptian and the Aino Types of Sacrament
WE are now perhaps in a position to understand the ambiguous
behaviour of the Aino and Gilyaks towards the bear. It has been
shown that the sharp line of demarcation which we draw between
mankind and the lower animals does not exist for the savage. To him
many of the other animals appear as his equals or even his
superiors, not merely in brute force but in intelligence; and if
choice or necessity leads him to take their lives, he feels bound,
out of regard to his own safety, to do it in a way which will be as
inoffensive as possible not merely to the living animal, but to its
departed spirit and to all the other animals of the same species,
which would resent an affront put upon one of their kind much as a
tribe of savages would revenge an injury or insult offered to a
tribesman. We have seen that among the many devices by which the
savage seeks to atone for the wrong done by him to his animal
victims one is to show marked deference to a few chosen individuals
of the species, for such behaviour is apparently regarded as
entitling him to exterminate with impunity all the rest of the
species upon which he can lay hands. This principle perhaps
explains the attitude, at first sight puzzling and contradictory,
of the Aino towards the bear. The flesh and skin of the bear
regularly afford them food and clothing; but since the bear is an
intelligent and powerful animal, it is necessary to offer some
satisfaction or atonement to the bear species for the loss which it
sustains in the death of so many of its members. This satisfaction
or atonement is made by rearing young bears, treating them, so long
as they live, with respect, and killing them with extraordinary
marks of sorrow and devotion. So the other bears are appeased, and
do not resent the slaughter of their kind by attacking the slayers
or deserting the country, which would deprive the Aino of one of
their means of subsistence.
Thus the primitive worship of animals conforms to two types,
which are in some respects the converse of each other. On the one
hand, animals are worshipped, and are therefore neither killed nor
eaten. On the other hand, animals are worshipped because they are
habitually killed and eaten. In both types of worship the animal is
revered on account of some benefit, positive or negative, which the
savage hopes to receive from it. In the former worship the benefit
comes either in the positive shape of protection, advice, and help
which the animal affords the man, or in the negative shape of
abstinence from injuries which it is in the power of the animal to
inflict. In the latter worship the benefit takes the material form
of the animal’s flesh and skin. The two types of worship are
in some measure antithetical: in the one, the animal is not eaten
because it is revered; in the other, it is revered because it is
eaten. But both may be practised by the same people, as we see in
the case of the North American Indians, who, while they apparently
revere and spare their totem animals, also revere the animals and
fish upon which they subsist. The aborigines of Australia have
totemism in the most primitive form known to us; but there is no
clear evidence that they attempt, like the North American Indians,
to conciliate the animals which they kill and eat. The means which
the Australians adopt to secure a plentiful supply of game appear
to be primarily based, not on conciliation, but on sympathetic
magic, a principle to which the North American Indians also resort
for the same purpose. Hence, as the Australians undoubtedly
represent a ruder and earlier stage of human progress than the
American Indians, it would seem that before hunters think of
worshipping the game as a means of ensuring an abundant supply of
it, they seek to attain the same end by sympathetic magic. This,
again, would show—what there is good reason for
believing—that sympathetic magic is one of the earliest means
by which man endeavours to adapt the agencies of nature to his
needs.
Corresponding to the two distinct types of animal worship, there
are two distinct types of the custom of killing the animal god. On
the one hand, when the revered animal is habitually spared, it is
nevertheless killed—and sometimes eaten—on rare and
solemn occasions. Examples of this custom have been already given
and an explanation of them offered. On the other hand, when the
revered animal is habitually killed, the slaughter of any one of
the species involves the killing of the god, and is atoned for on
the spot by apologies and sacrifices, especially when the animal is
a powerful and dangerous one; and, in addition to this ordinary and
everyday atonement, there is a special annual atonement, at which a
select individual of the species is slain with extraordinary marks
of respect and devotion. Clearly the two types of sacramental
killing—the Egyptian and the Aino types, as we may call them
for distinction—are liable to be confounded by an observer;
and, before we can say to which type any particular example
belongs, it is necessary to ascertain whether the animal
sacramentally slain belongs to a species which is habitually
spared, or to one which is habitually killed by the tribe. In the
former case the example belongs to the Egyptian type of sacrament,
in the latter to the Aino type.
The practice of pastoral tribes appears to furnish examples of
both types of sacrament. “Pastoral tribes,” says Adolf
Bastian, “being sometimes obliged to sell their herds to
strangers who may handle the bones disrespectfully, seek to avert
the danger which such a sacrilege would entail by consecrating one
of the herd as an object of worship, eating it sacramentally in the
family circle with closed doors, and afterwards treating the bones
with all the ceremonious respect which, strictly speaking, should
be accorded to every head of cattle, but which, being punctually
paid to the representative animal, is deemed to be paid to all.
Such family meals are found among various peoples, especially those
of the Caucasus. When amongst the Abchases the shepherds in spring
eat their common meal with their loins girt and their staves in
their hands, this may be looked upon both as a sacrament and as an
oath of mutual help and support. For the strongest of all oaths is
that which is accompanied with the eating of a sacred substance,
since the perjured person cannot possibly escape the avenging god
whom he has taken into his body and assimilated.” This kind
of sacrament is of the Aino or expiatory type, since it is meant to
atone to the species for the possible ill-usage of individuals. An
expiation, similar in principle but different in details, is
offered by the Kalmucks to the sheep, whose flesh is one of their
staple foods. Rich Kalmucks are in the habit of consecrating a
white ram under the title of “the ram of heaven” or
“the ram of the spirit.” The animal is never shorn and
never sold; but when it grows old and its owner wishes to
consecrate a new one, the old ram must be killed and eaten at a
feast to which the neighbours are invited. On a lucky day,
generally in autumn when the sheep are fat, a sorcerer kills the
old ram, after sprinkling it with milk. Its flesh is eaten; the
skeleton, with a portion of the fat, is burned on a turf altar; and
the skin, with the head and feet, is hung up.
An example of a sacrament of the Egyptian type is furnished by
the Todas, a pastoral people of Southern India, who subsist largely
upon the milk of their buffaloes. Amongst them “the buffalo
is to a certain degree held sacred” and “is treated
with great kindness, even with a degree of adoration, by the
people.” They never eat the flesh of the cow buffalo, and as
a rule abstain from the flesh of the male. But to the latter rule
there is a single exception. Once a year all the adult males of the
village join in the ceremony of killing and eating a very young
male calf—seemingly under a month old. They take the animal
into the dark recesses of the village wood, where it is killed with
a club made from the sacred tree of the Todas (the
Millingtonia). A sacred fire having been made by the
rubbing of sticks, the flesh of the calf is roasted on the embers
of certain trees, and is eaten by the men alone, women being
excluded from the assembly. This is the only occasion on which the
Todas eat buffalo flesh. The Madi or Moru tribe of Central Africa,
whose chief wealth is their cattle, though they also practise
agriculture, appear to kill a lamb sacramentally on certain solemn
occasions. The custom is thus described by Dr. Felkin: “A
remarkable custom is observed at stated times—once a year, I
am led to believe. I have not been able to ascertain what exact
meaning is attached to it. It appears, however, to relieve the
people’s minds, for beforehand they evince much sadness, and
seem very joyful when the ceremony is duly accomplished. The
following is what takes place: A large concourse of people of all
ages assemble, and sit down round a circle of stones, which is
erected by the side of a road (really a narrow path). A very choice
lamb is then fetched by a boy, who leads it four times round the
assembled people. As it passes they pluck off little bits of its
fleece and place them in their hair, or on to some other part of
their body. The lamb is then led up to the stones, and there killed
by a man belonging to a kind of priestly order, who takes some of
the blood and sprinkles it four times over the people. He then
applies it individually. On the children he makes a small ring of
blood over the lower end of the breast bone, on women and girls he
makes a mark above the breasts, and the men he touches on each
shoulder. He then proceeds to explain the ceremony, and to exhort
the people to show kindness… . When this discourse, which is
at times of great length, is over, the people rise, each places a
leaf on or by the circle of stones, and then they depart with signs
of great joy. The lamb’s skull is hung on a tree near the
stones, and its flesh is eaten by the poor. This ceremony is
observed on a small scale at other times. If a family is in any
great trouble, through illness or bereavement, their friends and
neighbours come together and a lamb is killed; this is thought to
avert further evil. The same custom prevails at the grave of
departed friends, and also on joyful occasions, such as the return
of a son home after a very prolonged absence.” The sorrow
thus manifested by the people at the annual slaughter of the lamb
seems to show that the lamb slain is a sacred or divine animal,
whose death is mourned by his worshippers, just as the death of the
sacred buzzard was mourned by the Californians and the death of the
Theban ram by the Egyptians. The smearing each of the worshippers
with the blood of the lamb is a form of communion with the
divinity; the vehicle of the divine life is applied externally
instead of being taken internally, as when the blood is drunk or
the flesh eaten.
2. Processions with Sacred Animals
THE FORM of communion in which the sacred animal is taken from
house to house, that all may enjoy a share of its divine influence,
has been exemplified by the Gilyak custom of promenading the bear
through the village before it is slain. A similar form of communion
with the sacred snake is observed by a Snake tribe in the Punjaub.
Once a year in the month of September the snake is worshipped by
all castes and religions for nine days only. At the end of August
the Mirasans, especially those of the Snake tribe, make a snake of
dough which they paint black and red, and place on a winnowing
basket. This basket they carry round the village, and on entering
any house they say: “God be with you all! May every ill be
far! May our patron’s (Gugga’s) word thrive!”
Then they present the basket with the snake, saying: “A small
cake of flour: a little bit of butter: if you obey the snake, you
and yours shall thrive!” Strictly speaking, a cake and butter
should be given, but it is seldom done. Every one, however, gives
something, generally a handful of dough or some corn. In houses
where there is a new bride or whence a bride has gone, or where a
son has been born, it is usual to give a rupee and a quarter, or
some cloth. Sometimes the bearers of the snake also sing:
“Give the snake a piece of cloth, and he will send a
lively bride!”
When every house has been thus visited, the dough snake is
buried and a small grave is erected over it. Thither during the
nine days of September the women come to worship. They bring a
basin of curds, a small portion of which they offer at the
snake’s grave, kneeling on the ground and touching the earth
with their foreheads. Then they go home and divide the rest of the
curds among the children. Here the dough snake is clearly a
substitute for a real snake. Indeed, in districts where snakes
abound the worship is offered, not at the grave of the dough snake,
but in the jungles where snakes are known to be. Besides this
yearly worship, performed by all the people, the members of the
Snake tribe worship in the same way every morning after a new moon.
The Snake tribe is not uncommon in the Punjaub. Members of it will
not kill a snake, and they say that its bite does not hurt them. If
they find a dead snake, they put clothes on it and give it a
regular funeral.
Ceremonies closely analogous to this Indian worship of the snake
have survived in Europe into recent times, and doubtless date from
a very primitive paganism. The best-known example is the
“hunting of the wren.” By many European
peoples—the ancient Greeks and Romans, the modern Italians,
Spaniards, French, Germans, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, English, and
Welsh—the wren has been designated the king, the little king,
the king of birds, the hedge king, and so forth, and has been
reckoned amongst those birds which it is extremely unlucky to kill.
In England it is supposed that if any one kills a wren or harries
its nest, he will infallibly break a bone or meet with some
dreadful misfortune within the year; sometimes it is thought that
the cows will give bloody milk. In Scotland the wren is called
“the Lady of Heaven’s hen,” and boys say:
“Malisons, malisons, mair than ten,
That harry the Ladye of Heaven’s hen!”
At Saint Donan, in Brittany, people believe that if children
touch the young wrens in the nest, they will suffer from the fire
of St. Lawrence, that is, from pimples on the face, legs, and so
on. In other parts of France it is thought that if a person kills a
wren or harries its nest, his house will be struck by lightning, or
that the fingers with which he did the deed will shrivel up and
drop off, or at least be maimed, or that his cattle will suffer in
their feet.
Notwithstanding such beliefs, the custom of annually killing the
wren has prevailed widely both in this country and in France. In
the Isle of Man down to the eighteenth century the custom was
observed on Christmas Eve, or rather Christmas morning. On the
twenty-fourth of December, towards evening, all the servants got a
holiday; they did not go to bed all night, but rambled about till
the bells rang in all the churches at midnight. When prayers were
over, they went to hunt the wren, and having found one of these
birds they killed it and fastened it to the top of a long pole with
its wings extended. Thus they carried it in procession to every
house chanting the following rhyme:
“We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for Jack of the Can,
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for every one.”
When they had gone from house to house and collected all the
money they could, they laid the wren on a bier and carried it in
procession to the parish churchyard, where they made a grave and
buried it “with the utmost solemnity, singing dirges over her
in the Manks language, which they call her knell; after which
Christmas begins.” The burial over, the company outside the
churchyard formed a circle and danced to music.
A writer of the eighteenth century says that in Ireland the wren
“is still hunted and killed by the peasants on Christmas Day,
and on the following (St. Stephen’s Day) he is carried about,
hung by the leg, in the centre of two hoops, crossing each other at
right angles, and a procession made in every village, of men,
women, and children, singing an Irish catch, importing him to be
the king of all birds.” Down to the present time the
“hunting of the wren” still takes place in parts of
Leinster and Connaught. On Christmas Day or St. Stephen’s Day
the boys hunt and kill the wren, fasten it in the middle of a mass
of holly and ivy on the top of a broomstick, and on St.
Stephen’s Day go about with it from house to house,
singing:
“The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze;
Although he is little, his family’s great,
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.”
Money or food (bread, butter, eggs, etc.) were given them, upon
which they feasted in the evening.
In the first half of the nineteenth century similar customs were
still observed in various parts of the south of France. Thus at
Carcassone, every year on the first Sunday of December the young
people of the street Saint Jean used to go out of the town armed
with sticks, with which they beat the bushes, looking for wrens.
The first to strike down one of these birds was proclaimed King.
Then they returned to the town in procession, headed by the King,
who carried the wren on a pole. On the evening of the last day of
the year the King and all who had hunted the wren marched through
the streets of the town to the light of torches, with drums beating
and fifes playing in front of them. At the door of every house they
stopped, and one of them wrote with chalk on the door vive le
roi! with the number of the year which was about to begin. On
the morning of Twelfth Day the King again marched in procession
with great pomp, wearing a crown and a blue mantle and carrying a
sceptre. In front of him was borne the wren fastened to the top of
a pole, which was adorned with a verdant wreath of olive, of oak,
and sometimes of mistletoe grown on an oak. After hearing high mass
in the parish church of St. Vincent, surrounded by his officers and
guards, the King visited the bishop, the mayor, the magistrates,
and the chief inhabitants, collecting money to defray the expenses
of the royal banquet which took place in the evening and wound up
with a dance.
The parallelism between this custom of “hunting the
wren” and some of those which we have considered, especially
the Gilyak procession with the bear, and the Indian one with the
snake, seems too close to allow us to doubt that they all belong to
the same circle of ideas. The worshipful animal is killed with
special solemnity once a year; and before or immediately after
death he is promenaded from door to door, that each of his
worshippers may receive a portion of the divine virtues that are
supposed to emanate from the dead or dying god. Religious
processions of this sort must have had a great place in the ritual
of European peoples in prehistoric times, if we may judge from the
numerous traces of them which have survived in folk-custom. For
example, on the last day of the year, or Hogmanay as it was called,
it used to be customary in the Highlands of Scotland for a man to
dress himself up in a cow’s hide and thus attired to go from
house to house, attended by young fellows, each of them armed with
a staff, to which a bit of raw hide was tied. Round every house the
hide-clad man used to run thrice deiseal, that is,
according to the course of the sun, so as to keep the house on his
right hand; while the others pursued him, beating the hide with
their staves and thereby making a loud noise like the beating of a
drum. In this disorderly procession they also struck the walls of
the house. On being admitted, one of the party, standing within the
threshold, pronounced a blessing on the family in these words:
“May God bless the house and all that belongs to it, cattle,
stones, and timber! In plenty of meat, of bed and body clothes, and
health of men may it ever abound!” Then each of the party
singed in the fire a little bit of the hide which was tied to his
staff; and having done so he applied the singed hide to the nose of
every person and of every domestic animal belonging to the house.
This was imagined to secure them from diseases and other
misfortunes, particularly from witchcraft, throughout the ensuing
year. The whole ceremony was called calluinn because of
the great noise made in beating the hide. It was observed in the
Hebrides, including St. Kilda, down to the second half of the
eighteenth century at least, and it seems to have survived well
into the nineteenth century.
LV. The Transference of Evil
1. The Transference to Inanimate Objects
WE have now traced the practice of killing a god among peoples
in the hunting, pastoral, and agricultural stages of society; and I
have attempted to explain the motives which led men to adopt so
curious a custom. One aspect of the custom still remains to be
noticed. The accumulated misfortunes and sins of the whole people
are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to bear them
away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy. The notion
that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being
who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises
from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental,
between the material and the immaterial. Because it is possible to
shift a load of wood, stones, or what not, from our own back to the
back of another, the savage fancies that it is equally possible to
shift the burden of his pains and sorrows to another, who will
suffer them in his stead. Upon this idea he acts, and the result is
an endless number of very unamiable devices for palming off upon
some one else the trouble which a man shrinks from bearing himself.
In short, the principle of vicarious suffering is commonly
understood and practised by races who stand on a low level of
social and intellectual culture. In the following pages I shall
illustrate the theory and the practice as they are found among
savages in all their naked simplicity, undisguised by the
refinements of metaphysics and the subtleties of theology.
The devices to which the cunning and selfish savage resorts for
the sake of easing himself at the expense of his neighbour are
manifold; only a few typical examples out of a multitude can be
cited. At the outset it is to be observed that the evil of which a
man seeks to rid himself need not be transferred to a person; it
may equally well be transferred to an animal or a thing, though in
the last case the thing is often only a vehicle to convey the
trouble to the first person who touches it. In some of the East
Indian islands they think that epilepsy can be cured by striking
the patient on the face with the leaves of certain trees and then
throwing them away. The disease is believed to have passed into the
leaves, and to have been thrown away with them. To cure toothache
some of the Australian blacks apply a heated spear-thrower to the
cheek. The spear-thrower is then cast away, and the toothache goes
with it in the shape of a black stone called karriitch.
Stones of this kind are found in old mounds and sandhills. They are
carefully collected and thrown in the direction of enemies in order
to give them toothache. The Bahima, a pastoral people of Uganda,
often suffer from deep-seated abscesses: “their cure for this
is to transfer the disease to some other person by obtaining herbs
from the medicine-man, rubbing them over the place where the
swelling is, and burying them in the road where people continually
pass; the first person who steps over these buried herbs contracts
the disease, and the original patient recovers.”
Sometimes in case of sickness the malady is transferred to an
effigy as a preliminary to passing it on to a human being. Thus
among the Baganda the medicine-man would sometimes make a model of
his patient in clay; then a relative of the sick man would rub the
image over the sufferer’s body and either bury it in the road
\??\ it in the grass by the wayside. The first person who stepped
over the image or passed by it would catch the disease. Sometimes
the effigy was made out of a plantain-flower tied up so as to look
like a person; it was used in the same way as the clay figure. But
the use of images for this maleficent purpose was a capital crime;
any person caught in the act of burying one of them in the public
road would surely have been put to death.
In the western district of the island of Timor, when men or
women are making long and tiring journeys, they fan themselves with
leafy branches, which they afterwards throw away on particular
spots where their forefathers did the same before them. The fatigue
which they felt is thus supposed to have passed into the leaves and
to be left behind. Others use stones instead of leaves. Similarly
in the Babar Archipelago tired people will strike themselves with
stones, believing that they thus transfer to the stones the
weariness which they felt in their own bodies. They then throw away
the stones in places which are specially set apart for the purpose.
A like belief and practice in many distant parts of the world have
given rise to those cairns or heaps of sticks and leaves which
travellers often observe beside the path, and to which every
passing native adds his contribution in the shape of a stone, or
stick, or leaf. Thus in the Solomon and Banks’ Islands the
natives are wont to throw sticks, stones, or leaves upon a heap at
a place of steep descent, or where a difficult path begins, saying,
“There goes my fatigue.” The act is not a religious
rite, for the thing thrown on the heap is not an offering to
spiritual powers, and the words which accompany the act are not a
prayer. It is nothing but a magical ceremony for getting rid of
fatigue, which the simple savage fancies he can embody in a stick,
leaf, or stone, and so cast it from him.
2. The Transference to Animals
ANIMALS are often employed as a vehicle for carrying away or
transferring the evil. When a Moor has a headache he will sometimes
take a lamb or a goat and beat it till it falls down, believing
that the headache will thus be transferred to the animal. In
Morocco most wealthy Moors keep a wild boar in their stables, in
order that the jinn and evil spirits may be diverted from the
horses and enter into the boar. Amongst the Caffres of South
Africa, when other remedies have failed, “natives sometimes
adopt the custom of taking a goat into the presence of a sick man,
and confess the sins of the kraal over the animal. Sometimes a few
drops of blood from the sick man are allowed to fall on the head of
the goat, which is turned out into an uninhabited part of the
veldt. The sickness is supposed to be transferred to the animal,
and to become lost in the desert.” In Arabia, when the plague
is raging, the people will sometimes lead a camel through all the
quarters of the town in order that the animal may take the
pestilence on itself. Then they strangle it in a sacred place and
imagine that they have rid themselves of the camel and of the
plague at one blow. It is said that when smallpox is raging the
savages of Formosa will drive the demon of disease into a sow, then
cut off the animal’s ears and burn them or it, believing that
in this way they rid themselves of the plague.
Amongst the Malagasy the vehicle for carrying away evils is
called a faditra. “The faditra is anything selected
by the sikidy [divining board] for the purpose of taking away any
hurtful evils or diseases that might prove injurious to an
individual’s happiness, peace, or prosperity. The faditra may
be either ashes, cut money, a sheep, a pumpkin, or anything else
the sikidy may choose to direct. After the particular article is
appointed, the priest counts upon it all the evils that may prove
injurious to the person for whom it is made, and which he then
charges the faditra to take away for ever. If the faditra be ashes,
it is blown, to be carried away by the wind. If it be cut money, it
is thrown to the bottom of deep water, or where it can never be
found. If it be a sheep, it is carried away to a distance on the
shoulders of a man, who runs with all his might, mumbling as he
goes, as if in the greatest rage against the faditra, for the evils
it is bearing away. If it be a pumpkin, it is carried on the
shoulders to a little distance, and there dashed upon the ground
with every appearance of fury and indignation.” A Malagasy
was informed by a diviner that he was doomed to a bloody death, but
that possibly he might avert his fate by performing a certain rite.
Carrying a small vessel full of blood upon his head, he was to
mount upon the back of a bullock; while thus mounted, he was to
spill the blood upon the bullock’s head, and then send the
animal away into the wilderness, whence it might never return.
The Bataks of Sumatra have a ceremony which they call
“making the curse to fly away.” When a woman is
childless, a sacrifice is offered to the gods of three
grasshoppers, representing a head of cattle, a buffalo, and a
horse. Then a swallow is set free, with a prayer that the curse may
fall upon the bird and fly away with it. “The entrance into a
house of an animal which does not generally seek to share the abode
of man is regarded by the Malays as ominous of misfortune. If a
wild bird flies into a house, it must be carefully caught and
smeared with oil, and must then be released in the open air, a
formula being recited in which it is bidden to fly away with all
the ill-luck and misfortunes of the occupier.” In antiquity
Greek women seem to have done the same with swallows which they
caught in the house: they poured oil on them and let them fly away,
apparently for the purpose of removing ill-luck from the household.
The Huzuls of the Carpathians imagine that they can transfer
freckles to the first swallow they see in spring by washing their
face in flowing water and saying, “Swallow, swallow, take my
freckles, and give me rosy cheeks.”
Among the Badagas of the Neilgherry Hills in Southern India,
when a death has taken place, the sins of the deceased are laid
upon a buffalo calf. For this purpose the people gather round the
corpse and carry it outside of the village. There an elder of the
tribe, standing at the head of the corpse, recites or chants a long
list of sins such as any Badaga may commit, and the people repeat
the last word of each line after him. The confession of sins is
thrice repeated. “By a conventional mode of expression, the
sum total of sins a man may do is said to be thirteen hundred.
Admitting that the deceased has committed them all, the performer
cries aloud, ‘Stay not their flight to God’s pure
feet.’ As he closes, the whole assembly chants aloud
‘Stay not their flight.’ Again the performer enters
into details, and cries, ‘He killed the crawling snake. It is
a sin.’ In a moment the last word is caught up, and all the
people cry ‘It is a sin.’ As they shout, the performer
lays his hand upon the calf. The sin is transferred to the calf.
Thus the whole catalogue is gone through in this impressive way.
But this is not enough. As the last shout ‘Let all be
well’ dies away, the performer gives place to another, and
again confession is made, and all the people shout ‘It is a
sin.’ A third time it is done. Then, still in solemn silence,
the calf is let loose. Like the Jewish scapegoat, it may never be
used for secular work.” At a Badaga funeral witnessed by the
Rev. A. C. Clayton the buffalo calf was led thrice round the bier,
and the dead man’s hand was laid on its head. “By this
act, the calf was supposed to receive all the sins of the deceased.
It was then driven away to a great distance, that it might
contaminate no one, and it was said that it would never be sold,
but looked on as a dedicated sacred animal.” The idea of this
ceremony is, that the sins of the deceased enter the calf, or that
the task of his absolution is laid on it. They say that the calf
very soon disappears, and that it is never heard of.”
3. The Transference to Men
AGAIN, men sometimes play the part of scapegoat by diverting to
themselves the evils that threaten others. When a Cingalese is
dangerously ill, and the physicians can do nothing, a devil-dancer
is called in, who by making offerings to the devils, and dancing in
the masks appropriate to them, conjures these demons of disease,
one after the other, out of the sick man’s body and into his
own. Having thus successfully extracted the cause of the malady,
the artful dancer lies down on a bier, and shamming death is
carried to an open place outside the village. Here, being left to
himself, he soon comes to life again, and hastens back to claim his
reward. In 1590 a Scotch which of the name of Agnes Sampson was
convicted of curing a certain Robert Kers of a disease “laid
upon him by a westland warlock when he was at Dumfries, whilk
sickness she took upon herself, and kept the same with great
groaning and torment till the morn, at whilk time there was a great
din heard in the house.” The noise was made by the witch in
her efforts to shift the disease, by means of clothes, from herself
to a cat or dog. Unfortunately the attempt partly miscarried. The
disease missed the animal and hit Alexander Douglas of Dalkeith,
who dwined and died of it, while the original patient, Robert Kers,
was made whole.
“In one part of New Zealand an expiation for sin was felt
to be necessary; a service was performed over an individual, by
which all the sins of the tribe were supposed to be transferred to
him, a fern stalk was previously tied to his person, with which he
jumped into the river, and there unbinding, allowed it to float
away to the sea, bearing their sins with it.” In great
emergencies the sins of the Rajah of Manipur used to be transferred
to somebody else, usually to a criminal, who earned his pardon by
his vicarious sufferings. To effect the transference the Rajah and
his wife, clad in fine robes, bathed on a scaffold erected in the
bazaar, while the criminal crouched beneath it. With the water
which dripped from them on him their sins also were washed away and
fell on the human scapegoat. To complete the transference the Rajah
and his wife made over their fine robes to their substitute, while
they themselves, clad in new raiment, mixed with the people till
evening. In Travancore, when a Rajah is near his end, they seek out
a holy Brahman, who consents to take upon himself the sins of the
dying man in consideration of the sum of ten thousand rupees. Thus
prepared to immolate himself on the altar of duty, the saint is
introduced into the chamber of death, and closely embraces the
dying Rajah, saying to him, “O King, I undertake to bear all
your sins and diseases. May your Highness live long and reign
happily.” Having thus taken to himself the sins of the
sufferer, he is sent away from the country and never more allowed
to return. At Utch Kurgan in Turkestan Mr. Schuyler saw an old man
who was said to get his living by taking on himself the sins of the
dead, and thenceforth devoting his life to prayer for their
souls.
In Uganda, when an army had returned from war, and the gods
warned the king by their oracles that some evil had attached itself
to the soldiers, it was customary to pick out a woman slave from
the captives, together with a cow, a goat, a fowl, and a dog from
the booty, and to send them back under a strong guard to the
borders of the country from which they had come. There their limbs
were broken and they were left to die; for they were too crippled
to crawl back to Uganda. In order to ensure the transference of the
evil to these substitutes, bunches of grass were rubbed over the
people and cattle and then tied to the victims. After that the army
was pronounced clean and was allowed to return to the capital. So
on his accession a new king of Uganda used to wound a man and send
him away as a scapegoat to Bunyoro to carry away any uncleanliness
that might attach to the king or queen.
4. The Transference of Evil in Europe
THE EXAMPLES of the transference of evil hitherto adduced have
been mostly drawn from the customs of savage or barbarous peoples.
But similar attempts to shift the burden of disease, misfortune,
and sin from one’s self to another person, or to an animal or
thing, have been common also among the civilised nations of Europe,
both in ancient and modern times. A Roman cure for fever was to
pare the patient’s nails, and stick the parings with wax on a
neighbour’s door before sunrise; the fever then passed from
the sick man to his neighbour. Similar devices must have been
resorted to by the Greeks; for in laying down laws for his ideal
state, Plato thinks it too much to expect that men should not be
alarmed at finding certain wax figures adhering to their doors or
to the tombstones of their parents, or lying at cross-roads. In the
fourth century of our era Marcellus of Bordeaux prescribed a cure
for warts, which has still a great vogue among the superstitious in
various parts of Europe. You are to touch your warts with as many
little stones as you have warts; then wrap the stones in an ivy
leaf, and throw them away in a thoroughfare. Whoever picks them up
will get the warts, and you will be rid of them. People in the
Orkney Islands will sometimes wash a sick man, and then throw the
water down at a gateway, in the belief that the sickness will leave
the patient and be transferred to the first person who passes
through the gate. A Bavarian cure for fever is to write upon a
piece of paper, “Fever, stay away, I am not at home,”
and to put the paper in somebody’s pocket. The latter then
catches the fever, and the patient is rid of it. A Bohemian
prescription for the same malady is this. Take an empty pot, go
with it to a cross-road, throw it down, and run away. The first
person who kicks against the pot will catch your fever, and you
will be cured.
Often in Europe, as among savages, an attempt is made to
transfer a pain or malady from a man to an animal. Grave writers of
antiquity recommended that, if a man be stung by a scorpion, he
should sit upon an ass with his face to the tail, or whisper in the
animal’s ear, “A scorpion has stung me”; in
either case, they thought, the pain would be transferred from the
man to the ass. Many cures of this sort are recorded by Marcellus.
For example, he tells us that the following is a remedy for
toothache. Standing booted under the open sky on the ground, you
catch a frog by the head, spit into its mouth, ask it to carry away
the ache, and then let it go. But the ceremony must be performed on
a lucky day and at a lucky hour. In Cheshire the ailment known as
aphtha or thrush, which affects the mouth or throat of infants, is
not uncommonly treated in much the same manner. A young frog is
held for a few moments with its head inside the mouth of the
sufferer, whom it is supposed to relieve by taking the malady to
itself. “I assure you,” said an old woman who had often
superintended such a cure, “we used to hear the poor frog
whooping and coughing, mortal bad, for days after; it would have
made your heart ache to hear the poor creature coughing as it did
about the garden.” A Northamptonshire, Devonshire, and Welsh
cure for a cough is to put a hair of the patient’s head
between two slices of buttered bread and give the sandwich to a
dog. The animal will thereupon catch the cough and the patient will
lose it. Sometimes an ailment is transferred to an animal by
sharing food with it. Thus in Oldenburg, if you are sick of a fever
you set a bowl of sweet milk before a dog and say, “Good
luck, you hound! may you be sick and I be sound!” Then when
the dog has lapped some of the milk, you take a swig at the bowl;
and then the dog must lap again, and then you must swig again; and
when you and the dog have done it the third time, he will have the
fever and you will be quit of it.
A Bohemian cure for fever is to go out into the forest before
the sun is up and look for a snipe’s nest. When you have
found it, take out one of the young birds and keep it beside you
for three days. Then go back into the wood and set the snipe free.
The fever will leave you at once. The snipe has taken it away. So
in Vedic times the Hindoos of old sent consumption away with a blue
jay. They said, “O consumption, fly away, fly away with the
blue jay! With the wild rush of the storm and the whirlwind, oh,
vanish away!” In the village of Llandegla in Wales there is a
church dedicated to the virgin martyr St. Tecla, where the falling
sickness is, or used to be, cured by being transferred to a fowl.
The patient first washed his limbs in a sacred well hard by,
dropped fourpence into it as an offering, walked thrice round the
well, and thrice repeated the Lord’s prayer. Then the fowl,
which was a cock or a hen according as the patient was a man or a
woman, was put into a basket and carried round first the well and
afterwards the church. Next the sufferer entered the church and lay
down under the communion table till break of day. After that he
offered sixpence and departed, leaving the fowl in the church. If
the bird died, the sickness was supposed to have been transferred
to it from the man or woman, who was now rid of the disorder. As
late as 1855 the old parish clerk of the village remembered quite
well to have seen the birds staggering about from the effects of
the fits which had been transferred to them.
Often the sufferer seeks to shift his burden of sickness or
ill-luck to some inanimate object. In Athens there is a little
chapel of St. John the Baptist built against an ancient column.
Fever patients resort thither, and by attaching a waxed thread to
the inner side of the column believe that they transfer the fever
from themselves to the pillar. In the Mark of Brandenburg they say
that if you suffer from giddiness you should strip yourself naked
and run thrice round a flax-field after sunset; in that way the
flax will get the giddiness and you will be rid of it.
But perhaps the thing most commonly employed in Europe as a
receptacle for sickness and trouble of all sorts is a tree or bush.
A Bulgarian cure for fever is to run thrice around a willow-tree at
sunrise, crying, “The fever shall shake thee, and the sun
shall warm me.” In the Greek island of Karpathos the priest
ties a red thread round the neck of a sick person. Next morning the
friends of the patient remove the thread and go out to the
hillside, where they tie the thread to a tree, thinking that they
thus transfer the sickness to the tree. Italians attempt to cure
fever in like manner by tethering it to a tree The sufferer ties a
thread round his left wrist at night, and hangs the thread on a
tree next morning. The fever is thus believed to be tied up to the
tree, and the patient to be rid of it; but he must be careful not
to pass by that tree again, otherwise the fever would break loose
from its bonds and attack him afresh. A Flemish cure for the ague
is to go early in the morning to an old willow, tie three knots in
one of its branches, say, “Good-morrow, Old One, I give thee
the cold; good-morrow, Old One,” then turn and run away
without looking round. In Sonnenberg, if you would rid yourself of
gout you should go to a young fir-tree and tie a knot in one of its
twigs, saying, “God greet thee, noble fir. I bring thee my
gout. Here will I tie a knot and bind my gout into it. In the
name,” etc.
Another way of transferring gout from a man to a tree is this.
Pare the nails of the sufferer’s fingers and clip some hairs
from his legs. Bore a hole in an oak, stuff the nails and hair in
the hole, stop up the hole again, and smear it with cow’s
dung. If, for three months thereafter, the patient is free of gout,
you may be sure the oak has it in his stead. In Cheshire if you
would be rid of warts, you have only to rub them with a piece of
bacon, cut a slit in the bark of an ash-tree, and slip the bacon
under the bark. Soon the warts will disappear from your hand, only
however to reappear in the shape of rough excrescences or knobs on
the bark of the tree. At Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, there
used to be certain oak-trees which were long celebrated for the
cure of ague. The transference of the malady to the tree was simple
but painful. A lock of the sufferer’s hair was pegged into an
oak; then by a sudden wrench he left his hair and his ague behind
him in the tree.
LVI. The Public Expulsion of Evils
1. The Omnipresence of Demons
IN THE FOREGOING chapter the primitive principle of the
transference of ills to another person, animal, or thing was
explained and illustrated. But similar means have been adopted to
free a whole community from diverse evils that afflict it. Such
attempts to dismiss at once the accumulated sorrows of a people are
by no means rare or exceptional; on the contrary they have been
made in many lands, and from being occasional they tend to become
periodic and annual.
It needs some effort on our part to realise the frame of mind
which prompts these attempts. Bred in a philosophy which strips
nature of personality and reduces it to the unknown cause of an
orderly series of impressions on our senses, we find it hard to put
ourselves in the place of the savage, to whom the same impressions
appear in the guise of spirits or the handiwork of spirits. For
ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther
and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from
hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted
glade and lonely mere, from the riven murky cloud that belches
forth the lightning, and from those fairer clouds that pillow the
silvery moon or fret with flakes of burning red the golden eve. The
spirits are gone even from their last stronghold in the sky, whose
blue arch no longer passes, except with children, for the screen
that hides from mortal eyes the glories of the celestial world.
Only in poets’ dreams or impassioned flights of oratory is it
given to catch a glimpse of the last flutter of the standards of
the retreating host, to hear the beat of their invisible wings, the
sound of their mocking laughter, or the swell of angel music dying
away in the distance. Far otherwise is it with the savage. To his
imagination the world still teems with those motley beings whom a
more sober philosophy has discarded. Fairies and goblins, ghosts
and demons, still hover about him both waking and sleeping. They
dog his footsteps, dazzle his senses, enter into him, harass and
deceive and torment him in a thousand freakish and mischievous
ways. The mishaps that befall him, the losses he sustains, the
pains he has to endure, he commonly sets down, if not to the magic
of his enemies, to the spite or anger or caprice of the spirits.
Their constant presence wearies him, their sleepless malignity
exasperates him; he longs with an unspeakable longing to be rid of
them altogether, and from time to time, driven to bay, his patience
utterly exhausted, he turns fiercely on his persecutors and makes a
desperate effort to chase the whole pack of them from the land, to
clear the air of their swarming multitudes, that he may breathe
more freely and go on his way unmolested, at least for a time. Thus
it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a
clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a
grand hunting out and expulsion of devils or ghosts. They think
that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors,
they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales
of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.
2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils
WE can therefore understand why those general clearances of
evil, to which from time to time the savage resorts, should
commonly take the form of a forcible expulsion of devils. In these
evil spirits primitive man sees the cause of many if not of most of
his troubles, and he fancies that if he can only deliver himself
from them, things will go better with him. The public attempts to
expel the accumulated ills of a whole community may be divided into
two classes, according as the expelled evils are immaterial and
invisible or are embodied in a material vehicle or scape-goat. The
former may be called the direct or immediate expulsion of evils;
the latter the indirect or mediate expulsion, or the expulsion by
scapegoat. We begin with examples of the former.
In the island of Rook, between New Guinea and New Britain, when
any misfortune has happened, all the people run together, scream,
curse, howl, and beat the air with sticks to drive away the devil,
who is supposed to be the author of the mishap. From the spot where
the mishap took place they drive him step by step to the sea, and
on reaching the shore they redouble their shouts and blows in order
to expel him from the island. He generally retires to the sea or to
the island of Lottin. The natives of New Britain ascribe sickness,
drought, the failure of crops, and in short all misfortunes, to the
influence of wicked spirits. So at times when many people sicken
and die, as at the beginning of the rainy season, all the
inhabitants of a district, armed with branches and clubs, go out by
moonlight to the fields, where they beat and stamp on the ground
with wild howls till morning, believing that this drives away the
devils; and for the same purpose they rush through the village with
burning torches. The natives of New Caledonia are said to believe
that all evils are caused by a powerful and malignant spirit; hence
in order to rid themselves of him they will from time to time dig a
great pit, round which the whole tribe gathers. After cursing the
demon, they fill up the pit with earth, and trample on the top with
loud shouts. This they call burying the evil spirit. Among the
Dieri tribe of Central Australia, when a serious illness occurs,
the medicine-men expel Cootchie or the devil by beating the ground
in and outside of the camp with the stuffed tail of a kangaroo,
until they have chased the demon away to some distance from the
camp.
When a village has been visited by a series of disasters or a
severe epidemic, the inhabitants of Minahassa in Celebes lay the
blame upon the devils who are infesting the village and who must be
expelled from it. Accordingly, early one morning all the people,
men, women, and children, quit their homes, carrying their
household goods with them, and take up their quarters in temporary
huts which have been erected outside the village. Here they spend
several days, offering sacrifices and preparing for the final
ceremony. At last the men, some wearing masks, others with their
faces blackened, and so on, but all armed with swords, guns, pikes,
or brooms, steal cautiously and silently back to the deserted
village. Then, at a signal from the priest, they rush furiously up
and down the streets and into and under the houses (which are
raised on piles above the ground), yelling and striking on walls,
doors, and windows, to drive away the devils. Next, the priests and
the rest of the people come with the holy fire and march nine times
round each house and thrice round the ladder that leads up to it,
carrying the fire with them. Then they take the fire into the
kitchen, where it must burn for three days continuously. The devils
are now driven away, and great and general is the joy.
The Alfoors of Halmahera attribute epidemics to the devil who
comes from other villages to carry them off. So, in order to rid
the village of the disease, the sorcerer drives away the devil.
From all the villagers he receives a costly garment and places it
on four vessels, which he takes to the forest and leaves at the
spot where the devil is supposed to be. Then with mocking words he
bids the demon abandon the place. In the Kei Islands to the
south-west of New Guinea, the evil spirits, who are quite distinct
from the souls of the dead, form a mighty host. Almost every tree
and every cave is the lodging-place of one of these fiends, who are
moreover extremely irascible and apt to fly out on the smallest
provocation. They manifest their displeasure by sending sickness
and other calamities. Hence in times of public misfortune, as when
an epidemic is raging, and all other remedies have failed, the
whole population go forth with the priest at their head to a place
at some distance from the village. Here at sunset they erect a
couple of poles with a cross-bar between them, to which they attach
bags of rice, wooden models of pivot-guns, gongs, bracelets, and so
on. Then, when everybody has taken his place at the poles and a
death-like silence reigns, the priest lifts up his voice and
addresses the spirits in their own language as follows: “Ho!
ho! ho! ye evil spirits who dwell in the trees, ye evil spirits who
live in the grottoes, ye evil spirits who lodge in the earth, we
give you these pivot-guns, these gongs, etc. Let the sickness cease
and not so many people die of it.” Then everybody runs home
as fast as their legs can carry them.
In the island of Nias, when a man is seriously ill and other
remedies have been tried in vain, the sorcerer proceeds to exorcise
the devil who is causing the illness. A pole is set up in front of
the house, and from the top of the pole a rope of palm-leaves is
stretched to the roof of the house. Then the sorcerer mounts the
roof with a pig, which he kills and allows to roll from the roof to
the ground. The devil, anxious to get the pig, lets himself down
hastily from the roof by the rope of palm-leaves, and a good
spirit, invoked by the sorcerer, prevents him from climbing up
again. If this remedy fails, it is believed that other devils must
still be lurking in the house. So a general hunt is made after
them. All the doors and windows in the house are closed, except a
single dormer-window in the roof. The men, shut up in the house,
hew and slash with their swords right and left to the clash of
gongs and the rub-a-dub of drums. Terrified at this onslaught, the
devils escape by the dormer-window, and sliding down the rope of
palm-leaves take themselves off. As all the doors and windows,
except the one in the roof, are shut, the devils cannot get into
the house again. In the case of an epidemic, the proceedings are
similar. All the gates of the village, except one, are closed;
every voice is raised, every gong and drum beaten, every sword
brandished. Thus the devils are driven out and the last gate is
shut behind them. For eight days thereafter the village is in a
state of siege, no one being allowed to enter it.
When cholera has broken out in a Burmese village the able-bodied
men scramble on the roofs and lay about them with bamboos and
billets of wood, while all the rest of the population, old and
young, stand below and thump drums, blow trumpets, yell, scream,
beat floors, walls, tin pans, everything to make a din. This
uproar, repeated on three successive nights, is thought to be very
effective in driving away the cholera demons. When smallpox first
appeared amongst the Kumis of South-Eastern India, they thought it
was a devil come from Aracan. The villages were placed in a state
of siege, no one being allowed to leave or enter them. A monkey was
killed by being dashed on the ground, and its body was hung at the
village gate. Its blood, mixed with small river pebbles, was
sprinkled on the houses, the threshold of every house was swept
with the monkey’s tail, and the fiend was adjured to
depart.
When an epidemic is raging on the Gold Coast of West Africa, the
people will sometimes turn out, armed with clubs and torches, to
drive the evil spirits away. At a given signal the whole population
begin with frightful yells to beat in every corner of the houses,
then rush like mad into the streets waving torches and striking
frantically in the empty air. The uproar goes on till somebody
reports that the cowed and daunted demons have made good their
escape by a gate of the town or village; the people stream out
after them, pursue them for some distance into the forest, and warn
them never to return. The expulsion of the devils is followed by a
general massacre of all the cocks in the village or town, lest by
their unseasonable crowing they should betray to the banished
demons the direction they must take to return to their old homes.
When sickness was prevalent in a Huron village, and all other
remedies had been tried in vain, the Indians had recourse to the
ceremony called Lonouyroya, “which is the principal
invention and most proper means, so they say, to expel from the
town or village the devils and evil spirits which cause, induce,
and import all the maladies and infirmities which they suffer in
body and mind.” Accordingly, one evening the men would begin
to rush like madmen about the village, breaking and upsetting
whatever they came across in the wigwams. They threw fire and
burning brands about the streets, and all night long they ran
howling and singing without cessation. Then they all dreamed of
something, a knife, dog, skin, or whatever it might be, and when
morning came they went from wigwam to wigwam asking for presents.
These they received silently, till the particular thing was given
them which they had dreamed about. On receiving it they uttered a
cry of joy and rushed from the hut, amid the congratulations of all
present. The health of those who received what they had dreamed of
was believed to be assured; whereas those who did not get what they
had set their hearts upon regarded their fate as sealed.
Sometimes, instead of chasing the demon of disease from their
homes, savages prefer to leave him in peaceable possession, while
they themselves take to flight and attempt to prevent him from
following in their tracks. Thus when the Patagonians were attacked
by small-pox, which they attributed to the machinations of an evil
spirit, they used to abandon their sick and flee, slashing the air
with their weapons and throwing water about in order to keep off
the dreadful pursuer; and when after several days’ march they
reached a place where they hoped to be beyond his reach, they used
by way of precaution to plant all their cutting weapons with the
sharp edges turned towards the quarter from which they had come, as
if they were repelling a charge of cavalry. Similarly, when the
Lules or Tonocotes Indians of the Gran Chaco were attacked by an
epidemic, they regularly sought to evade it by flight, but in so
doing they always followed a sinuous, not a straight, course;
because they said that when the disease made after them he would be
so exhausted by the turnings and windings of the route that he
would never be able to come up with them. When the Indians of New
Mexico were decimated by smallpox or other infectious disease, they
used to shift their quarters every day, retreating into the most
sequestered parts of the mountains and choosing the thorniest
thickets they could find, in the hope that the smallpox would be
too afraid of scratching himself on the thorns to follow them. When
some Chins on a visit to Rangoon were attacked by cholera, they
went about with drawn swords to scare away the demon, and they
spent the day hiding under bushes so that he might not be able to
find them.
3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils
THE EXPULSION of evils, from being occasional, tends to become
periodic. It comes to be thought desirable to have a general
riddance of evil spirits at fixed times, usually once a year, in
order that the people may make a fresh start in life, freed from
all the malignant influences which have been long accumulating
about them. Some of the Australian blacks annually expelled the
ghosts of the dead from their territory. The ceremony was witnessed
by the Rev. W. Ridley on the banks of the River Barwan. “A
chorus of twenty, old and young, were singing and beating time with
boomerangs… . Suddenly, from under a sheet of bark darted a
man with his body whitened by pipeclay, his head and face coloured
with lines of red and yellow, and a tuft of feathers fixed by means
of a stick two feet above the crown of his head. He stood twenty
minutes perfectly still, gazing upwards. An aboriginal who stood by
told me he was looking for the ghosts of dead men. At last he began
to move very slowly, and soon rushed to and fro at full speed,
flourishing a branch as if to drive away some foes invisible to us.
When I thought this pantomime must be almost over, ten more,
similarly adorned, suddenly appeared from behind the trees, and the
whole party joined in a brisk conflict with their mysterious
assailants. … At last, after some rapid evolutions in which
they put forth all their strength, they rested from the exciting
toil which they had kept up all night and for some hours after
sunrise; they seemed satisfied that the ghosts were driven away for
twelve months. They were performing the same ceremony at every
station along the river, and I am told it is an annual
custom.”
Certain seasons of the year mark themselves naturally out as
appropriate moments for a general expulsion of devils. Such a
moment occurs towards the close of an Arctic winter, when the sun
reappears on the horizon after an absence of weeks or months.
Accordingly, at Point Barrow, the most northerly extremity of
Alaska, and nearly of America, the Esquimaux choose the moment of
the sun’s reappearance to hunt the mischievous spirit Tuña
from every house. The ceremony was witnessed by the members of the
United States Polar Expedition, who wintered at Point Barrow. A
fire was built in front of the council-house, and an old woman was
posted at the entrance to every house. The men gathered round the
council-house while the young women and girls drove the spirit out
of every house with their knives, stabbing viciously under the bunk
and deer-skins, and calling upon Tuña to be gone. When they thought
he had been driven out of every hole and corner, they thrust him
down through the hole in the floor and chased him into the open air
with loud cries and frantic gestures. Meanwhile the old woman at
the entrance of the house made passes with a long knife in the air
to keep him from returning. Each party drove the spirit towards the
fire and invited him to go into it. All were by this time drawn up
in a semicircle round the fire, when several of the leading men
made specific charges against the spirit; and each after his speech
brushed his clothes violently, calling on the spirit to leave him
and go into the fire. Two men now stepped forward with rifles
loaded with blank cartridges, while a third brought a vessel of
urine and flung it on the flames. At the same time one of the men
fired a shot into the fire; and as the cloud of steam rose it
received the other shot, which was supposed to finish Tunña for the
time being.
In late autumn, when storms rage over the land and break the icy
fetters by which the frozen sea is as yet but slightly bound, when
the loosened floes are driven against each other and break with
loud crashes, and when the cakes of ice are piled in wild disorder
one upon another, the Esquimaux of Baffin Land fancy they hear the
voices of the spirits who people the mischief-laden air. Then the
ghosts of the dead knock wildly at the huts, which they cannot
enter, and woe to the hapless wight whom they catch; he soon
sickens and dies. Then the phantom of a huge hairless dog pursues
the real dogs, which expire in convulsions and cramps at sight of
him. All the countless spirits of evil are abroad striving to bring
sickness and death, foul weather and failure in hunting on the
Esquimaux. Most dreaded of all these spectral visitants are Sedna,
mistress of the nether world, and her father, to whose share dead
Esquimaux fall. While the other spirits fill the air and the water,
she rises from under ground. It is then a busy season for the
wizards. In every house you may hear them singing and praying,
while they conjure the spirits, seated in a mystic gloom at the
back of the hut, which is dimly lit by a lamp burning low. The
hardest task of all is to drive away Sedna, and this is reserved
for the most powerful enchanter. A rope is coiled on the floor of a
large hut in such a way as to leave a small opening at the top,
which represents the breathing hole of a seal. Two enchanters stand
beside it, one of them grasping a spear as if he were watching a
seal-hole in winter, the other holding the harpoon-line. A third
sorcerer sits at the back of the hut chanting a magic song to lure
Sedna to the spot. Now she is heard approaching under the floor of
the hut, breathing heavily; now she emerges at the hole; now she is
harpooned and sinks away in angry haste, dragging the harpoon with
her, while the two men hold on to the line with all their might.
The struggle is severe, but at last by a desperate wrench she tears
herself away and returns to her dwelling in Adlivun. When the
harpoon is drawn up out of the hole it is found to be splashed with
blood, which the enchanters proudly exhibit as a proof of their
prowess. Thus Sedna and the other evil spirits are at last driven
away, and next day a great festival is celebrated by old and young
in honour of the event. But they must still be cautious, for the
wounded Sedna is furious and will seize any one she may find
outside of his hut; so they all wear amulets on the top of their
hoods to protect themselves against her. These amulets consist of
pieces of the first garments that they wore after birth.
The Iroquois inaugurated the new year in January, February, or
March (the time varied) with a “festival of dreams”
like that which the Hurons observed on special occasions. The whole
ceremonies lasted several days, or even weeks, and formed a kind of
saturnalia. Men and women, variously disguised, went from wigwam to
wigwam smashing and throwing down whatever they came across. It was
a time of general license; the people were supposed to be out of
their senses, and therefore not to be responsible for what they
did. Accordingly, many seized the opportunity of paying off old
scores by belabouring obnoxious persons, drenching them with
ice-cold water, and covering them with filth or hot ashes. Others
seized burning brands or coals and flung them at the heads of the
first persons they met. The only way of escaping from these
persecutors was to guess what they had dreamed of. On one day of
the festival the ceremony of driving away evil spirits from the
village took place. Men clothed in the skins of wild beasts, their
faces covered with hideous masks, and their hands with the shell of
the tortoise, went from hut to hut making frightful noises; in
every hut they took the fuel from the fire and scattered the embers
and ashes about the floor with their hands. The general confession
of sins which preceded the festival was probably a preparation for
the public expulsion of evil influences; it was a way of stripping
the people of their moral burdens, that these might be collected
and cast out.
In September the Incas of Peru celebrated a festival called
Situa, the object of which was to banish from the capital and its
vicinity all disease and trouble. The festival fell in September
because the rains begin about this time, and with the first rains
there was generally much sickness. As a preparation for the
festival the people fasted on the first day of the moon after the
autumnal equinox. Having fasted during the day, and the night being
come, they baked a coarse paste of maize. This paste was made of
two sorts. One was kneaded with the blood of children aged from
five to ten years, the blood being obtained by bleeding the
children between the eyebrows. These two kinds of paste were baked
separately, because they were for different uses. Each family
assembled at the house of the eldest brother to celebrate the
feast; and those who had no elder brother went to the house of
their next relation of greater age. On the same night all who had
fasted during the day washed their bodies, and taking a little of
the blood-kneaded paste, rubbed it over their head, face, breast,
shoulders, arms and legs. They did this in order that the paste
might take away all their infirmities. After this the head of the
family anointed the threshold with the same paste, and left it
there as a token that the inmates of the house had performed their
ablutions and cleansed their bodies. Meantime the High Priest
performed the same ceremonies in the temple of the Sun. As soon as
the Sun rose, all the people worshipped and besought him to drive
all evils out of the city, and then they broke their fast with the
paste that had been kneaded without blood. When they had paid their
worship and broken their fast, which they did at a stated hour, in
order that all might adore the Sun as one man, an Inca of the blood
royal came forth from the fortress, as a messenger of the Sun,
richly dressed, with his mantle girded round his body, and a lance
in his hand. The lance was decked with feathers of many hues,
extending from the blade to the socket, and fastened with rings of
gold. He ran down the hill from the fortress brandishing his lance,
till he reached the centre of the great square, where stood the
golden urn, like a fountain, that was used for the sacrifice of the
fermented juice of the maize. Here four other Incas of the blood
royal awaited him, each with a lance in his hand, and his mantle
girded up to run. The messenger touched their four lances with his
lance, and told them that the Sun bade them, as his messengers,
drive the evils out of the city. The four Incas then separated and
ran down the four royal roads which led out of the city to the four
quarters of the world. While they ran, all the people, great and
small, came to the doors of their houses, and with great shouts of
joy and gladness shook their clothes, as if they were shaking off
dust, while they cried, “Let the evils be gone. How greatly
desired has this festival been by us. O Creator of all things,
permit us to reach another year, that we may see another feast like
this.” After they had shaken their clothes, they passed their
hands over their heads, faces, arms, and legs, as if in the act of
washing. All this was done to drive the evils out of their houses,
that the messengers of the Sun might banish them from the city; and
it was done not only in the streets through which the Incas ran,
but generally in all quarters of the city. Moreover, they all
danced, the Inca himself amongst them, and bathed in the rivers and
fountains, saying that their maladies would come out of them. Then
they took great torches of straw, bound round with cords. These
they lighted, and passed from one to the other, striking each other
with them, and saying, “Let all harm go away.”
Meanwhile the runners ran with their lances for a quarter of a
league outside the city, where they found four other Incas ready,
who received the lances from their hands and ran with them. Thus
the lances were carried by relays of runners for a distance of five
or six leagues, at the end of which the runners washed themselves
and their weapons in rivers, and set up the lances, in sign of a
boundary within which the banished evils might not return.
The negroes of Guinea annually banish the devil from all their
towns with much ceremony at a time set apart for the purpose. At
Axim, on the Gold Coast, this annual expulsion is preceded by a
feast of eight days, during which mirth and jollity, skipping,
dancing, and singing prevail, and “a perfect lampooning
liberty is allowed, and scandal so highly exalted, that they may
freely sing of all the faults, villanies, and frauds of their
superiors as well as inferiors, without punishment, or so much as
the least interruption.” On the eighth day they hunt out the
devil with a dismal cry, running after him and pelting him with
sticks, stones, and whatever comes to hand. When they have driven
him far enough out of the town, they all return. In this way he is
expelled from more than a hundred towns at the same time. To make
sure that he does not return to their houses, the women wash and
scour all their wooden and earthen vessels, “to free them
from all uncleanness and the devil.”
At Cape Coast Castle, on the Gold Coast, the ceremony was
witnessed on the ninth of October, 1844, by an Englishman, who has
described it as follows: “To-night the annual custom of
driving the evil spirit, Abonsam, out of the town has taken place.
As soon as the eight o’clock gun fired in the fort the people
began firing muskets in their houses, turning all their furniture
out of doors, beating about in every corner of the rooms with
sticks, etc., and screaming as loudly as possible, in order to
frighten the devil. Being driven out of the houses, as they
imagine, they sallied forth into the streets, throwing lighted
torches about, shouting, screaming, beating sticks together,
rattling old pans, making the most horrid noise, in order to drive
him out of the town into the sea. The custom is preceded by four
weeks’ dead silence; no gun is allowed to be fired, no drum
to be beaten, no palaver to be made between man and man. If, during
these weeks, two natives should disagree and make a noise in the
town, they are immediately taken before the king and fined heavily.
If a dog or pig, sheep or goat be found at large in the street, it
may be killed, or taken by anyone, the former owner not being
allowed to demand any compensation. This silence is designed to
deceive Abonsam, that, being off his guard, he may be taken by
surprise, and frightened out of the place. If anyone die during the
silence, his relatives are not allowed to weep until the four weeks
have been completed.”
Sometimes the date of the annual expulsion of devils is fixed
with reference to the agricultural seasons. Thus among the Hos of
Togoland, in West Africa, the expulsion is performed annually
before the people partake of the new yams. The chiefs summon the
priests and magicians and tell them that the people are now to eat
the new yams and be merry, therefore they must cleanse the town and
remove the evils. Accordingly the evil spirits, witches, and all
the ills that infest the people are conjured into bundles of leaves
and creepers, fastened to poles, which are carried away and set up
in the earth on various roads outside the town. During the
following night no fire may be lit and no food eaten. Next morning
the women sweep out their hearths and houses, and deposit the
sweepings on broken wooden plates. Then the people pray, saying,
“All ye sicknesses that are in our body and plague us, we are
come to-day to throw you out.” Thereupon they run as fast as
they can in the direction of Mount Adaklu, smiting their mouths and
screaming, “Out to-day! Out to-day! That which kills anybody,
out to-day! Ye evil spirits, out to-day! and all that causes our
heads to ache, out to-day! Anlo and Adaklu are the places whither
all ill shall betake itself!” When they have come to a
certain tree on Mount Adaklu, they throw everything away and return
home.
At Kiriwina, in South-Eastern New Guinea, when the new yams had
been harvested, the people feasted and danced for many days, and a
great deal of property, such as armlets, native money, and so
forth, was displayed conspicuously on a platform erected for the
purpose. When the festivities were over, all the people gathered
together and expelled the spirits from the village by shouting,
beating the posts of the houses, and overturning everything under
which a wily spirit might be supposed to lurk. The explanation
which the people gave to a missionary was that they had entertained
and feasted the spirits and provided them with riches, and it was
now time for them to take their departure. Had they not seen the
dances, and heard the songs, and gorged themselves on the souls of
the yams, and appropriated the souls of the money and all the other
fine things set out on the platform? What more could the spirits
want? So out they must go.
Among the Hos of North-Eastern India the great festival of the
year is the harvest home, held in January, when the granaries are
full of grain, and the people, to use their own expression, are
full of devilry. “They have a strange notion that at this
period, men and women are so overcharged with vicious propensities,
that it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the person to let
off steam by allowing for a time full vent to the passions.”
The ceremonies open with a sacrifice to the village god of three
fowls, a cock and two hens, one of which must be black. Along with
them are offered flowers of the palas tree (Butea
frondosa), bread made from rice-flour, and sesamum seeds.
These offerings are presented by the village priest, who prays that
during the year about to begin they and their children may be
preserved from all misfortune and sickness, and that they may have
seasonable rain and good crops. Prayer is also made in some places
for the souls of the dead. At this time an evil spirit is supposed
to infest the place, and to get rid of it men, women, and children
go in procession round and through every part of the village with
sticks in their hands, as if beating for game, singing a wild
chant, and shouting vociferously, till they feel assured that the
evil spirit must have fled. Then they give themselves up to
feasting and drinking rice-beer, till they are in a fit state for
the wild debauch which follows. The festival now “becomes a
saturnale, during which servants forget their duty to their
masters, children their reverence for parents, men their respect
for women, and women all notions of modesty, delicacy, and
gentleness; they become raging bacchantes.” Usually the Hos
are quiet and reserved in manner, decorous and gentle to women. But
during this festival “their natures appear to undergo a
temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross
language, and parents their children; men and women become almost
like animals in the indulgence of their amorous
propensities.” The Mundaris, kinsmen and neighbours of the
Hos, keep the festival in much the same manner. “The
resemblance to a Saturnale is very complete, as at this festival
the farm labourers are feasted by their masters, and allowed the
utmost freedom of speech in addressing them. It is the festival of
the harvest home; the termination of one year’s toil, and a
slight respite from it before they commence again.”
Amongst some of the Hindoo Koosh tribes, as among the Hos and
Mundaris, the expulsion of devils takes place after harvest. When
the last crop of autumn has been got in, it is thought necessary to
drive away evil spirits from the granaries. A kind of porridge is
eaten, and the head of the family takes his matchlock and fires it
into the floor. Then, going outside, he sets to work loading and
firing till his powder-horn is exhausted, while all his neighbours
are similarly employed. The next day is spent in rejoicings. In
Chitral this festival is called “devil-driving.” On the
other hand the Khonds of India expel the devils at seed-time
instead of at harvest. At this time they worship Pitteri Pennu, the
god of increase and of gain in every shape. On the first day of the
festival a rude car is made of a basket set upon a few sticks, tied
upon the bamboo rollers for wheels. The priest takes this car first
to the house of the lineal head of the tribe, to whom precedence is
given in all ceremonies connected with agriculture. Here he
receives a little of each kind of seed and some feathers. He then
takes the car to all the other houses in the village, each of which
contributes the same things. Lastly, the car is conducted to a
field without the village, attended by all the young men, who beat
each other and strike the air violently with long sticks. The seed
thus carried out is called the share of the “evil spirits,
spoilers of the seed.” “These are considered to be
driven out with the car; and when it and its contents are abandoned
to them, they are held to have no excuse for interfering with the
rest of the seed-corn.”
The people of Bali, an island to the east of Java, have
periodical expulsions of devils upon a great scale. Generally the
time chosen for the expulsion is the day of the “dark
moon” in the ninth month. When the demons have been long
unmolested the country is said to be “warm,” and the
priest issues orders to expel them by force, lest the whole of Bali
should be rendered uninhabitable. On the day appointed the people
of the village or district assemble at the principal temple. Here
at a cross-road offerings are set out for the devils. After prayers
have been recited by the priests, the blast of a horn summons the
devils to partake of the meal which has been prepared for them. At
the same time a number of men step forward and light their torches
at the holy lamp which burns before the chief priest. Immediately
afterwards, followed by the bystanders, they spread in all
directions and march through the streets and lanes crying,
“Depart! go away!” Wherever they pass, the people who
have stayed at home hasten, by a deafening clatter on doors, beams,
rice-blocks, and so forth, to take their share in the expulsion of
devils. Thus chased from the houses, the fiends flee to the banquet
which has been set out for them; but here the priest receives them
with curses which finally drive them from the district. When the
last devil has taken his departure, the uproar is succeeded by a
dead silence, which lasts during the next day also. The devils, it
is thought, are anxious to return to their old homes, and in order
to make them think that Bali is not Bali but some desert island, no
one may stir from his own abode for twenty-four hours. Even
ordinary household work, including cooking, is discontinued. Only
the watchmen may show themselves in the streets. Wreaths of thorns
and leaves are hung at all the entrances to warn strangers from
entering. Not till the third day is this state of siege raised, and
even then it is forbidden to work at the rice-fields or to buy and
sell in the market. Most people still stay at home, whiling away
the time with cards and dice.
In Tonquin a theckydaw or general expulsion of
maleyolent spirits commonly took place once a year, especially if
there was a great mortality amongst men, the elephants or horses of
the general’s stable, or the cattle of the country,
“the cause of which they attribute to the malicious spirits
of such men as have been put to death for treason, rebellion, and
conspiring the death of the king, general, or princes, and that in
revenge of the punishment they have suffered, they are bent to
destroy everything and commit horrible violence. To prevent which
their superstition has suggested to them the institution of this
theckydaw, as a proper means to drive the devil away, and
purge the country of evil spirits.” The day appointed for the
ceremony was generally the twenty-fifth of February, one month
after the beginning of the new year, which fell on the twenty-fifth
of January. The intermediate month was a season of feasting,
merry-making of all kinds, and general licence. During the whole
month the great seal was kept shut up in a box, face downwards, and
the law was, as it were, laid asleep. All courts of justice were
closed; debtors could not be seized; small crimes, such as petty
larceny, fighting, and assault, escaped with impunity; only treason
and murder were taken account of and the malefactors detained till
the great seal should come into operation again. At the close of
the saturnalia the wicked spirits were driven away. Great masses of
troops and artillery having been drawn up with flying colours and
all the pomp of war, “the general beginneth then to offer
meat offerings to the criminal devils and malevolent spirits (for
it is usual and customary likewise amongst them to feast the
condemned before their execution), inviting them to eat and drink,
when presently he accuses them in a strange language, by characters
and figures, etc., of many offences and crimes committed by them,
as to their having disquieted the land, killed his elephants and
horses, etc., for all which they justly deserve to be chastised and
banished the country. Whereupon three great guns are fired as the
last signal; upon which all the artillery and musquets are
discharged, that, by their most terrible noise the devils may be
driven away; and they are so blind as to believe for certain, that
they really and effectually put them to flight.”
In Cambodia the expulsion of evil spirits took place in March.
Bits of broken statues and stones, considered as the abode of the
demons, were collected and brought to the capital. Here as many
elephants were collected as could be got together. On the evening
of the full moon volleys of musketry were fired and the elephants
charged furiously to put the devils to flight. The ceremony was
performed on three successive days. In Siam the banishment of
demons is annually carried into effect on the last day of the old
year. A signal gun is fired from the palace; it is answered from
the next station, and so on from station to station, till the
firing has reached the outer gate of the city. Thus the demons are
driven out step by step. As soon as this is done a consecrated rope
is fastened round the circuit of the city walls to prevent the
banished demons from returning. The rope is made of tough
couch-grass and is painted in alternate stripes of red, yellow, and
blue.
Annual expulsions of demons, witches, or evil influences appear
to have been common among the heathen of Europe, if we may judge
from the relics of such customs among their descendants at the
present day. Thus among the heathen Wotyaks, a Finnish people of
Eastern Russia, all the young girls of the village assemble on the
last day of the year or on New Year’s Day, armed with sticks,
the ends of which are split in nine places. With these they beat
every corner of the house and yard, saying, “We are driving
Satan out of the village.” Afterwards the sticks are thrown
into the river below the village, and as they float down stream
Satan goes with them to the next village, from which he must be
driven out in turn. In some villages the expulsion is managed
otherwise. The unmarried men receive from every house in the
village groats, flesh, and brandy. These they take to the fields,
light a fire under a fir-tree, boil the groats, and eat of the food
they have brought with them, after pronouncing the words, “Go
away into the wilderness, come not into the house.” Then they
return to the village and enter every house where there are young
women. They take hold of the young women and throw them into the
snow, saying, “May the spirits of disease leave you.”
The remains of the groats and the other food are then distributed
among all the houses in proportion to the amount that each
contributed, and each family consumes its share. According to a
Wotyak of the Malmyz district the young men throw into the snow
whomever they find in the houses, and this is called “driving
out Satan”; moreover, some of the boiled groats are cast into
the fire with the words, “O god, afflict us not with sickness
and pestilence, give us not up as a prey to the spirits of the
wood.” But the most antique form of the ceremony is that
observed by the Wotyaks of the Kasan Government. First of all a
sacrifice is offered to the Devil at noon. Then all the men
assemble on horseback in the centre of the village, and decide with
which house they shall begin. When this question, which often gives
rise to hot disputes, is settled, they tether their horses to the
paling, and arm themselves with whips, clubs of lime-wood and
bundles of lighted twigs. The lighted twigs are believed to have
the greatest terrors for Satan. Thus armed, they proceed with
frightful cries to beat every corner of the house and yard, then
shut the door, and spit at the ejected fiend. So they go from house
to house, till the Devil has been driven from every one. Then they
mount their horses and ride out of the village, yelling wildly and
brandishing their clubs in every direction. Outside of the village
they fling away the clubs and spit once more at the Devil. The
Cheremiss, another Finnish people of Eastern Russia, chase Satan
from their dwellings by beating the walls with cudgels of
lime-wood. For the same purpose they fire guns, stab the ground
with knives, and insert burning chips of wood in the crevices. Also
they leap over bonfires, shaking out their garments as they do so;
and in some districts they blow on long trumpets of lime-tree bark
to frighten him away. When he has fled to the wood, they pelt the
trees with some of the cheese-cakes and eggs which furnished the
feast.
In Christian Europe the old heathen custom of expelling the
powers of evil at certain times of the year has survived to modern
times. Thus in some villages of Calabria the month of March is
inaugurated with the expulsion of the witches. It takes place at
night to the sound of the church bells, the people running about
the streets and crying, “March is come.” They say that
the witches roam about in March, and the ceremony is repeated every
Friday evening during the month. Often, as might have been
anticipated, the ancient pagan rite has attached itself to church
festivals. In Albania on Easter Eve the young people light torches
of resinous wood and march in procession, swinging them, through
the village. At last they throw the torches into the river, crying,
“Ha, Kore! we throw you into the river, like these torches,
that you may never return.” Silesian peasants believe that on
Good Friday the witches go their rounds and have great power for
mischief. Hence about Oels, near Strehlitz, the people on that day
arm themselves with old brooms and drive the witches from house and
home, from farmyard and cattle-stall, making a great uproar and
clatter as they do so.
In Central Europe the favourite time for expelling the witches
is, or was, Walpurgis Night, the Eve of May Day, when the baleful
powers of these mischievous beings were supposed to be at their
height. In the Tyrol, for example, as in other places, the
expulsion of the powers of evil at this season goes by the name of
“Burning out the Witches.” It takes place on May Day,
but people have been busy with their preparations for days before.
On a Thursday at midnight bundles are made up of resinous
splinters, black and red spotted hemlock, caperspurge, rosemary,
and twigs of the sloe. These are kept and burned on May Day by men
who must first have received plenary absolution from the Church. On
the last three days of April all the houses are cleansed and
fumigated with juniper berries and rue. On May Day, when the
evening bell has rung and the twilight is falling, the ceremony of
“Burning out the Witches” begins. Men and boys make a
racket with whips, bells, pots, and pans; the women carry censers;
the dogs are unchained and run barking and yelping about. As soon
as the church bells begin to ring, the bundles of twigs, fastened
on poles, are set on fire and the incense is ignited. Then all the
house-bells and dinner-bells are rung, pots and pans are clashed,
dogs bark, every one must make a noise. And amid this hubbub all
scream at the pitch of their voices:
“Witch flee, flee from here, or it will go ill with
thee.”
Then they run seven times round the houses, the yards, and the
village. So the witches are smoked out of their lurking-places and
driven away. The custom of expelling the witches on Walpurgis Night
is still, or was down to recent years, observed in many parts of
Bavaria and among the Germans of Bohemia. Thus in the Böhmer-wald
Mountains all the young fellows of the village assemble after
sunset on some height, especially at a cross-road, and crack whips
for a while in unison with all their strength. This drives away the
witches; for so far as the sound of the whips is heard, these
maleficent beings can do no harm. In some places, while the young
men are cracking their whips, the herdsmen wind their horns, and
the long-drawn notes, heard far off in the silence of night, are
very effectual for banning the witches.
Another witching time is the period of twelve days between
Christmas and Epiphany. Hence in some parts of Silesia the people
burn pine-resin all night long between Christmas and the New Year
in order that the pungent smoke may drive witches and evil spirits
far away from house and homestead; and on Christmas Eve and New
Year’s Eve they fire shots over fields and meadows, into
shrubs and trees, and wrap straw round the fruit-trees, to prevent
the spirits from doing them harm. On New Year’s Eve, which is
Saint Sylvester’s Day, Bohemian lads, armed with guns, form
themselves into circles and fire thrice into the air. This is
called “Shooting the Witches” and is supposed to
frighten the witches away. The last of the mystic twelve days is
Epiphany or Twelfth Night, and it has been selected as a proper
season for the expulsion of the powers of evil in various parts of
Europe. Thus at Brunnen, on the Lake of Lucerne, boys go about in
procession on Twelfth Night carrying torches and making a great
noise with horns, bells, whips, and so forth to frighten away two
female spirits of the wood, Strudeli and Strätteli. The people
think that if they do not make enough noise, there will be little
fruit that year. Again, in Labruguière, a canton of Southern
France, on the eve of Twelfth Day the people run through the
streets, jangling bells, clattering kettles, and doing everything
to make a discordant noise. Then by the light of torches and
blazing faggots they set up a prodigious hue and cry, an
ear-splitting uproar, hoping thereby to chase all the wandering
ghosts and devils from the town.
LVII. Public Scapegoats
1. The Expulsion of Embodied Evils
THUS far we have dealt with that class of the general expulsion
of evils which I have called direct or immediate. In this class the
evils are invisible, at least to common eyes, and the mode of
deliverance consists for the most part in beating the empty air and
raising such a hubbub as may scare the mischievous spirits and put
them to flight. It remains to illustrate the second class of
expulsions, in which the evil influences are embodied in a visible
form or are at least supposed to be loaded upon a material medium,
which acts as a vehicle to draw them off from the people, village,
or town.
The Pomos of California celebrate an expulsion of devils every
seven years, at which the devils are represented by disguised men.
“Twenty or thirty men array themselves in harlequin rig and
barbaric paint, and put vessels of pitch on their heads; then they
secretly go out into the surrounding mountains. These are to
personify the devils. A herald goes up to the top of the
assembly-house, and makes a speech to the multitude. At a signal
agreed upon in the evening the masqueraders come in from the
mountains, with the vessels of pitch flaming on their heads, and
with all the frightful accessories of noise, motion, and costume
which the savage mind can devise in representation of demons. The
terrified women and children flee for life, the men huddle them
inside a circle, and, on the principle of fighting the devil with
fire, they swing blazing firebrands in the air, yell, whoop, and
make frantic dashes at the marauding and bloodthirsty devils, so
creating a terrific spectacle, and striking great fear into the
hearts of the assembled hundreds of women, who are screaming and
fainting and clinging to their valorous protectors. Finally the
devils succeed in getting into the assembly-house, and the bravest
of the men enter and hold a parley with them. As a conclusion of
the whole farce, the men summon courage, the devils are expelled
from the assembly-house, and with a prodigious row and racket of
sham fighting are chased away into the mountains.” In spring,
as soon as the willow-leaves were full grown on the banks of the
river, the Mandan Indians celebrated their great annual festival,
one of the features of which was the expulsion of the devil. A man,
painted black to represent the devil, entered the village from the
prairie, chased and frightened the women, and acted the part of a
buffalo bull in the buffalo dance, the object of which was to
ensure a plentiful supply of buffaloes during the ensuing year.
Finally he was chased from the village, the women pursuing him with
hisses and gibes, beating him with sticks, and pelting him with
dirt.
Some of the native tribes of Central Queensland believe in a
noxious being called Molonga, who prowls unseen and would kill men
and violate women if certain ceremonies were not performed. These
ceremonies last for five nights and consist of dances, in which
only men, fantastically painted and adorned, take part. On the
fifth night Molonga himself, personified by a man tricked out with
red ochre and feathers and carrying a long feather-tipped spear,
rushes forth from the darkness at the spectators and makes as if he
would run them through. Great is the excitement, loud are the
shrieks and shouts, but after another feigned attack the demon
vanishes in the gloom. On the last night of the year the palace of
the Kings of Cambodia is purged of devils. Men painted as fiends
are chased by elephants about the palace courts. When they have
been expelled, a consecrated thread of cotton is stretched round
the palace to keep them out. In Munzerabad, a district of Mysore in
Southern India, when cholera or smallpox has broken out in a
parish, the inhabitants assemble and conjure the demon of the
disease into a wooden image, which they carry, generally at
midnight, into the next parish. The inhabitants of that parish in
like manner pass the image on to their neighbours, and thus the
demon is expelled from one village after another, until he comes to
the bank of a river into which he is finally thrown.
Oftener, however, the expelled demons are not represented at
all, but are understood to be present invisibly in the material and
visible vehicle which conveys them away. Here, again, it will be
convenient to distinguish between occasional and periodical
expulsions. We begin with the former.
2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils in a Material
Vehicle
THE VEHICLE which conveys away the demons may be of various
kinds. A common one is a little ship or boat. Thus, in the southern
district of the island of Ceram, when a whole village suffers from
sickness, a small ship is made and filled with rice, tobacco, eggs,
and so forth, which have been contributed by all the people. A
little sail is hoisted on the ship. When all is ready, a man calls
out in a very loud voice, “O all ye sicknesses, ye
smallpoxes, agues, measles, etc., who have visited us so long and
wasted us so sorely, but who now cease to plague us, we have made
ready this ship for you, and we have furnished you with provender
sufficient for the voyage. Ye shall have no lack of food nor of
betel-leaves nor of areca nuts nor of tobacco. Depart, and sail
away from us directly; never come near us again; but go to a land
which is far from here. Let all the tides and winds waft you
speedily thither, and so convey you thither that for the time to
come we may live sound and well, and that we may never see the sun
rise on you again.” Then ten or twelve men carry the vessel
to the shore, and let it drift away with the land-breeze, feeling
convinced that they are free from sickness for ever, or at least
till the next time. If sickness attacks them again, they are sure
it is not the same sickness, but a different one, which in due time
they dismiss in the same manner. When the demon-laden bark is lost
to sight, the bearers return to the village, whereupon a man cries
out, “The sicknesses are now gone, vanished, expelled, and
sailed away.” At this all the people come running out of
their houses, passing the word from one to the other with great
joy, beating on gongs and on tinkling instruments.
Similar ceremonies are commonly resorted to in other East Indian
islands. Thus in Timor-laut, to mislead the demons who are causing
sickness, a small proa, containing the image of a man and
provisioned for a long voyage, is allowed to drift away with wind
and tide. As it is being launched, the people cry, “O
sickness, go from here; turn back; what do you here in this poor
land?” Three days after this ceremony a pig is killed, and
part of the flesh is offered to Dudilaa, who lives in the sun. One
of the oldest men says, “Old sir, I beseech you make well the
grand-children, children, women, and men, that we may be able to
eat pork and rice and to drink palmwine. I will keep my promise.
Eat your share, and make all the people in the village well.”
If the proa is stranded at any inhabited spot, the sickness will
break out there. Hence a stranded proa excites much alarm amongst
the coast population, and they immediately burn it, because demons
fly from fire. In the island of Buru the proa which carries away
the demons of disease is about twenty feet long, rigged out with
sails, oars, anchor, and so on, and well stocked with provisions.
For a day and a night the people beat gongs and drums, and rush
about to frighten the demons. Next morning ten stalwart young men
strike the people with branches, which have been previously dipped
in an earthen pot of water. As soon as they have done so, they run
down to the beach, put the branches on board the proa, launch
another boat in great haste, and tow the disease-burdened bark far
out to sea. There they cast it off, and one of them calls out,
“Grandfather Smallpox, go away—go willingly
away—go visit another land; we have made you food ready for
the voyage, we have now nothing more to give.” When they have
landed, all the people bathe together in the sea. In this ceremony
the reason for striking the people with the branches is clearly to
rid them of the disease-demons, which are then supposed to be
transferred to the branches. Hence the haste with which the
branches are deposited in the proa and towed away to sea. So in the
inland districts of Ceram, when smallpox or other sickness is
raging, the priest strikes all the houses with consecrated
branches, which are then thrown into the river, to be carried down
to the sea; exactly as amongst the Wotyaks of Russia the sticks
which have been used for expelling the devils from the village are
thrown into the river, that the current may sweep the baleful
burden away. The plan of putting puppets in the boat to represent
sick persons, in order to lure the demons after them, is not
uncommon. For example, most of the pagan tribes on the coast of
Borneo seek to drive away epidemic disease as follows. They carve
one or more rough human images from the pith of the sago palm and
place them on a small raft or boat or full-rigged Malay ship
together with rice and other food. The boat is decked with blossoms
of the areca palm and with ribbons made from its leaves, and thus
adorned the little craft is allowed to float out to sea with the
ebb-tide, bearing, as the people fondly think or hope, the sickness
away with it.
Often the vehicle which carries away the collected demons or
ills of a whole community is an animal or scapegoat. In the Central
Provinces of India, when cholera breaks out in a village, every one
retires after sunset to his house. The priests then parade the
streets, taking from the roof of each house a straw, which is burnt
with an offering of rice, ghee, and turmeric, at some shrine to the
east of the village. Chickens daubed with vermilion are driven away
in the direction of the smoke, and are believed to carry the
disease with them. If they fail, goats are tried, and last of all
pigs. When cholera rages among the Bhars, Mallans, and Kurmis of
India, they take a goat or a buffalo—in either case the
animal must be a female, and as black as possible—then having
tied some grain, cloves, and red lead in a yellow cloth on its back
they turn it out of the village. The animal is conducted beyond the
boundary and not allowed to return. Sometimes the buffalo is marked
with a red pigment and driven to the next village, where he carries
the plague with him.
Amongst the Dinkas, a pastoral people of the White Nile, each
family possesses a sacred cow. When the country is threatened with
war, famine, or any other public calamity, the chiefs of the
village require a particular family to surrender their sacred cow
to serve as a scapegoat. The animal is driven by the women to the
brink of the river and across it to the other bank, there to wander
in the wilderness and fall a prey to ravening beasts. Then the
women return in silence and without looking behind them; were they
to cast a backward glance, they imagine that the ceremony would
have no effect. In 1857, when the Aymara Indians of Bolivia and
Peru were suffering from a plague, they loaded a black llama with
the clothes of the plague-stricken people, sprinkled brandy on the
clothes, and then turned the animal loose on the mountains, hoping
that it would carry the pest away with it.
Occasionally the scapegoat is a man. For example, from time to
time the gods used to warn the King of Uganda that his foes the
Banyoro were working magic against him and his people to make them
die of disease. To avert such a catastrophe the king would send a
scapegoat to the frontier of Bunyoro, the land of the enemy. The
scapegoat consisted of either a man and a boy or a woman and her
child, chosen because of some mark or bodily defect, which the gods
had noted and by which the victims were to be recognised. With the
human victims were sent a cow, a goat, a fowl, and a dog; and a
strong guard escorted them to the land which the god had indicated.
There the limbs of the victims were broken and they were left to
die a lingering death in the enemy’s country, being too
crippled to crawl back to Uganda. The disease or plague was thought
to have been thus transferred to the victims and to have been
conveyed back in their persons to the land from which it came.
Some of the aboriginal tribes of China, as a protection against
pestilence, select a man of great muscular strength to act the part
of scapegoat. Having besmeared his face with paint, he performs
many antics with the view of enticing all pestilential and noxious
influences to attach themselves to him only. He is assisted by a
priest. Finally the scapegoat, hotly pursued by men and women
beating gongs and tom-toms, is driven with great haste out of the
town or village. In the Punjaub a cure for the murrain is to hire a
man of the Chamar caste, turn his face away from the village, brand
him with a red-hot sickle, and let him go out into the jungle
taking the murrain with him. He must not look back.
3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material
Vehicle
THE MEDIATE expulsion of evils by means of a scapegoat or other
material vehicle, like the immediate expulsion of them in invisible
form, tends to become periodic, and for a like reason. Thus every
year, generally in March, the people of Leti, Moa, and Lakor,
islands of the Indian Archipelago, send away all their diseases to
sea. They make a proa about six feet long, rig it with sails, oars,
rudder, and other gear, and every family deposits in its some rice,
fruit, a fowl, two eggs, insects that ravage the fields, and so on.
Then they let it drift away to sea, saying, “Take away from
here all kinds of sickness, take them to other islands, to other
lands, distribute them in places that lie eastward, where the sun
rises.” The Biajas of Borneo annually send to sea a little
bark laden with the sins and misfortunes of the people. The crew of
any ship that falls in with the ill-omened bark at sea will suffer
all the sorrows with which it is laden. A like custom is annually
observed by the Dusuns of the Tuaran district in British North
Borneo. The ceremony is the most important of the whole year. Its
aim is to bring good luck to the village during the ensuing year by
solemnly expelling all the evil spirits that may have collected in
or about the houses throughout the last twelve months. The task of
routing out the demons and banishing them devolves chiefly on
women. Dressed in their finest array, they go in procession through
the village. One of them carries a small sucking pig in a basket on
her back; and all of them bear wands, with which they belabour the
little pig at the appropriate moment; its squeals help to attract
the vagrant spirits. At every house the women dance and sing,
clashing castanets or cymbals of brass and jingling bunches of
little brass bells in both hands. When the performance has been
repeated at every house in the village, the procession defiles down
to the river, and all the evil spirits, which the performers have
chased from the houses, follow them to the edge of the water. There
a raft has been made ready and moored to the bank. It contains
offerings of food, cloth, cooking-pots, and swords; and the deck is
crowded with figures of men, women, animals, and birds, all made
out of the leaves of the sago palm. The evil spirits now embark on
the raft, and when they are all aboard, it is pushed off and
allowed to float down with the current, carrying the demons with
it. Should the raft run aground near the village, it is shoved off
with all speed, lest the invisible passengers should seize the
opportunity of landing and returning to the village. Finally, the
sufferings of the little pig, whose squeals served to decoy the
demons from their lurking-places, are terminated by death, for it
is killed and its carcase thrown away.
Every year, at the beginning of the dry season, the Nicobar
Islanders carry the model of a ship through their villages. The
devils are chased out of the huts, and driven on board the little
ship, which is then launched and suffered to sail away with the
wind. The ceremony has been described by a catechist, who witnessed
it at Car Nicobar in July 1897. For three days the people were busy
preparing two very large floating cars, shaped like canoes, fitted
with sails, and loaded with certain leaves, which possessed the
valuable property of expelling devils. While the young people were
thus engaged, the exorcists and the elders sat in a house singing
songs by turns; but often they would come forth, pace the beach
armed with rods, and forbid the devil to enter the village. The
fourth day of the solemnity bore a name which means
“Expelling the Devil by Sails.” In the evening all the
villagers assembled, the women bringing baskets of ashes and
bunches of devil-expelling leaves. These leaves were then
distributed to everybody, old and young. When all was ready, a band
of robust men, attended by a guard of exorcists, carried one of the
cars down to the sea on the right side of the village graveyard,
and set it floating in the water. As soon as they had returned,
another band of men carried the other car to the beach and floated
it similarly in the sea to the left of the graveyard. The
demon-laden barks being now launched, the women threw ashes from
the shore, and the whole crowd shouted, saying, “Fly away,
devil, fly away, never come again!” The wind and the tide
being favourable, the canoes sailed quickly away; and that night
all the people feasted together with great joy, because the devil
had departed in the direction of Chowra. A similar expulsion of
devils takes place once a year in other Nicobar villages; but the
ceremonies are held at different times in different places.
Amongst many of the aboriginal tribes of China, a great festival
is celebrated in the third month of every year. It is held by way
of a general rejoicing over what the people believe to be a total
annihilation of the ills of the past twelve months. The destruction
is supposed to be effected in the following way. A large
earthenware jar filled with gunpowder, stones, and bits of iron is
buried in the earth. A train of gunpowder, communicating with the
jar, is then laid; and a match being applied, the jar and its
contents are blown up. The stones and bits of iron represent the
ills and disasters of the past year, and the dispersion of them by
the explosion is believed to remove the ills and disasters
themselves. The festival is attended with much revelling and
drunkenness.
At Old Calabar on the coast of Guinea, the devils and ghosts
are, or used to be, publicly expelled once in two years. Among the
spirits thus driven from their haunts are the souls of all the
people who died since the last lustration of the town. About three
weeks or a month before the expulsion, which according to one
account takes place in the month of November, rude effigies
representing men and animals, such as crocodiles, leopards,
elephants, bullocks, and birds, are made of wicker-work or wood,
and being hung with strips of cloth and bedizened with gew-gaws,
are set before the door of every house. About three o’clock
in the morning of the day appointed for the ceremony the whole
population turns out into the streets, and proceeds with a
deafening uproar and in a state of the wildest excitement to drive
all lurking devils and ghosts into the effigies, in order that they
may be banished with them from the abodes of men. For this purpose
bands of people roam through the streets knocking on doors, firing
guns, beating drums, blowing on horns, ringing bells, clattering
pots and pans, shouting and hallooing with might and main, in short
making all the noise it is possible for them to raise. The hubbub
goes on till the approach of dawn, when it gradually subsides and
ceases altogether at sunrise. By this time the houses have been
thoroughly swept, and all the frightened spirits are supposed to
have huddled into the effigies or their fluttering drapery. In
these wicker figures are also deposited the sweepings of the houses
and the ashes of yesterday’s fires. Then the demon-laden
images are hastily snatched up, carried in tumultuous procession
down to the brink of the river, and thrown into the water to the
tuck of drums. The ebb-tide bears them away seaward, and thus the
town is swept clean of ghosts and devils for another two years.
Similar annual expulsions of embodied evils are not unknown in
Europe. On the evening of Easter Sunday the gypsies of Southern
Europe take a wooden vessel like a band-box, which rests
cradle-wise on two cross pieces of wood. In this they place herbs
and simples, together with the dried carcase of a snake, or lizard,
which every person present must first have touched with his
fingers. The vessel is then wrapt in white and red wool, carried by
the oldest man from tent to tent, and finally thrown into running
water, not, however, before every member of the band has spat into
it once, and the sorceress has uttered some spells over it. They
believe that by performing this ceremony they dispel all the
illnesses that would otherwise have afflicted them in the course of
the year; and that if any one finds the vessel and opens it out of
curiosity, he and his will be visited by all the maladies which the
others have escaped.
The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole
year are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example,
among the Garos of Assam, “besides the sacrifices for
individual cases of illness, there are certain ceremonies which are
observed once a year by a whole community or village, and are
intended to safeguard its members from dangers of the forest, and
from sickness and mishap during the coming twelve months. The
principal of these is the Asongtata ceremony. Close to the
outskirts of every big village a number of stones may be noticed
stuck into the ground, apparently without order or method. These
are known by the name of asong, and on them is offered the
sacrifice which the Asongtata demands. The sacrifice of a goat
takes place, and a month later, that of a langur
(Entellus monkey) or a bamboo-rat is considered necessary.
The animal chosen has a rope fastened round its neck and is led by
two men, one on each side of it, to every house in the village. It
is taken inside each house in turn, the assembled villagers,
meanwhile, beating the walls from the outside, to frighten and
drive out any evil spirits which may have taken up their residence
within. The round of the village having been made in this manner,
the monkey or rat is led to the outskirts of the village, killed by
a blow of a dao, which disembowels it, and then crucified
on bamboos set up in the ground. Round the crucified animal long,
sharp bamboo stakes are placed, which form chevaux de
frise round about it. These commemorate the days when such
defences surrounded the villages on all sides to keep off human
enemies, and they are now a symbol to ward off sickness and dangers
to life from the wild animals of the forest. The langur
required for the purpose is hunted down some days before, but
should it be found impossible to catch one, a brown monkey may take
its place; a hulock may not be used.” Here the crucified ape
or rat is the public scapegoat, which by its vicarious sufferings
and death relieves the people from all sickness and mishap in the
coming year.
Again, on one day of the year the Bhotiyas of Juhar, in the
Western Himalayas, take a dog, intoxicate him with spirits and
bhang or hemp, and having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round
the village and let him loose. They then chase and kill him with
sticks and stones, and believe that, when they have done so, no
disease or misfortune will visit the village during the year. In
some parts of Breadalbane it was formerly the custom on New
Year’s Day to take a dog to the door, give him a bit of
bread, and drive him out, saying, “Get away, you dog!
Whatever death of men or loss of cattle would happen in this house
to the end of the present year, may it all light on your
head!” On the Day of Atonement, which was the tenth day of
the seventh month, the Jewish high-priest laid both his hands on
the head of a live goat, confessed over it all the iniquities of
the Children of Israel, and, having thereby transferred the sins of
the people to the beast, sent it away into the wilderness.
The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically
laid, may also be a human being. At Onitsha, on the Niger, two
human beings used to be annually sacrificed to take away the sins
of the land. The victims were purchased by public subscription. All
persons who, during the past year, had fallen into gross sins, such
as incendiarism, theft, adultery, witchcraft, and so forth, were
expected to contribute 28 ngugas, or a little over £2. The
money thus collected was taken into the interior of the country and
expended in the purchase of two sickly persons “to be offered
as a sacrifice for all these abominable crimes—one for the
land and one for the river.” A man from a neighbouring town
was hired to put them to death. On the twenty-seventh of February
1858 the Rev. J. C. Taylor witnessed the sacrifice of one of these
victims. The sufferer was a woman, about nineteen or twenty years
of age. They dragged her alive along the ground, face downwards,
from the king’s house to the river, a distance of two miles,
the crowds who accompanied her crying, “Wickedness!
wickedness!” The intention was “to take away the
iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a merciless
manner, as if the weight of all their wickedness was thus carried
away.” Similar customs are said to be still secretly
practised every year by many tribes in the delta of the Niger in
spite of the vigilance of the British Government. Among the Yoruba
negroes of West Africa “the human victim chosen for
sacrifice, and who may be either a freeborn or a slave, a person of
noble or wealthy parentage, or one of humble birth, is, after he
has been chosen and marked out for the purpose, called an
Oluwo. He is always well fed and nourished and supplied
with whatever he should desire during the period of his
confinement. When the occasion arrives for him to be sacrificed and
offered up, he is commonly led about and paraded through the
streets of the town or city of the Sovereign who would sacrifice
him for the well-being of his government and of every family and
individual under it, in order that he might carry off the sin,
guilt, misfortune and death of all without exception. Ashes and
chalk would be employed to hide his identity by the one being
freely thrown over his head, and his face painted with the latter,
whilst individuals would often rush out of their houses to lay
their hands upon him that they might thus transfer to him their
sin, guilt, trouble, and death.” This parade over, he is
taken to an inner sanctuary and beheaded. His last words or dying
groans are the signal for an outburst of joy among the people
assembled outside, who believe that the sacrifice has been accepted
and the divine wrath appeased.
In Siam it used to be the custom on one day of the year to
single out a woman broken down by debauchery, and carry her on a
litter through all the streets to the music of drums and hautboys.
The mob insulted her and pelted her with dirt; and after having
carried her through the whole city, they threw her on a dunghill or
a hedge of thorns outside the ramparts, forbidding her ever to
enter the walls again. They believed that the woman thus drew upon
herself all the malign influences of the air and of evil spirits.
The Bataks of Sumatra offer either a red horse or a buffalo as a
public sacrifice to purify the land and obtain the favour of the
gods. Formerly, it is said, a man was bound to the same stake as
the buffalo, and when they killed the animal, the man was driven
away; no one might receive him, converse with him, or give him
food. Doubtless he was supposed to carry away the sins and
misfortunes of the people.
Sometimes the scapegoat is a divine animal. The people of
Malabar share the Hindoo reverence for the cow, to kill and eat
which “they esteem to be a crime as heinous as homicide or
wilful murder.” Nevertheless the “Bramans transfer the
sins of the people into one or more Cows, which are then
carry’d away, both the Cows and the Sins wherewith these
Beasts are charged, to what place the Braman shall appoint.”
When the ancient Egyptians sacrificed a bull, they invoked upon its
head all the evils that might otherwise befall themselves and the
land of Egypt, and thereupon they either sold the bull’s head
to the Greeks or cast it into the river. Now, it cannot be said
that in the times known to us the Egyptians worshipped bulls in
general, for they seem to have commonly killed and eaten them. But
a good many circumstances point to the conclusion that originally
all cattle, bulls as well as cows, were held sacred by the
Egyptians. For not only were all cows esteemed holy by them and
never sacrificed, but even bulls might not be sacrificed unless
they had certain natural marks; a priest examined every bull before
it was sacrificed; if it had the proper marks, he put his seal on
the animal in token that it might be sacrificed; and if a man
sacrificed a bull which had not been sealed, he was put to death.
Moreover, the worship of the black bulls Apis and Mnevis,
especially the former, played an important part in Egyptian
religion; all bulls that died a natural death were carefully buried
in the suburbs of the cities, and their bones were afterwards
collected from all parts of Egypt and interred in a single spot;
and at the sacrifice of a bull in the great rites of Isis all the
worshippers beat their breasts and mourned. On the whole, then, we
are perhaps entitled to infer that bulls were originally, as cows
were always, esteemed sacred by the Egyptians, and that the slain
bull upon whose head they laid the misfortunes of the people was
once a divine scapegoat. It seems not improbable that the lamb
annually slain by the Madis of Central Africa is a divine
scapegoat, and the same supposition may partly explain the Zuni
sacrifice of the turtle.
Lastly, the scapegoat may be a divine man. Thus, in November the
Gonds of India worship Ghansyam Deo, the protector of the crops,
and at the festival the god himself is said to descend on the head
of one of the worshippers, who is suddenly seized with a kind of
fit and, after staggering about, rushes off into the jungle, where
it is believed that, if left to himself, he would die mad. However,
they bring him back, but he does not recover his senses for one or
two days. The people think that one man is thus singled out as a
scapegoat for the sins of the rest of the village. In the temple of
the Moon the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus kept a number of
sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one
of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or
insanity, and wandered solitary up and down the woods, like the
Gond in the jungle, the high priest had him bound with a sacred
chain and maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the
year he was anointed with unguents and led forth to be sacrificed.
A man whose business it was to slay these human victims and to whom
practice had given dexterity, advanced from the crowd and thrust a
sacred spear into the victim’s side, piercing his heart. From
the manner in which the slain man fell, omens were drawn as to the
welfare of the commonwealth. Then the body was carried to a certain
spot where all the people stood upon it as a purificatory ceremony.
This last circumstance clearly indicates that the sins of the
people were transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest
transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his
hands on the animal’s head; and since the man was believed to
be possessed by the divine spirit, we have here an undoubted
example of a man-god slain to take away the sins and misfortunes of
the people.
In Tibet the ceremony of the scapegoat presents some remarkable
features. The Tibetan new year begins with the new moon which
appears about the fifteenth of February. For twenty-three days
afterwards the government of Lhasa, the capital, is taken out of
the hands of the ordinary rulers and entrusted to the monk of the
Debang monastery who offers to pay the highest sum for the
privilege. The successful bidder is called the Jalno, and he
announces his accession to power in person, going through the
streets of Lhasa with a silver stick in his hand. Monks from all
the neighbouring monasteries and temples assemble to pay him
homage. The Jalno exercises his authority in the most arbitrary
manner for his own benefit, as all the fines which he exacts are
his by purchase. The profit he makes is about ten times the amount
of the purchase money. His men go about the streets in order to
discover any conduct on the part of the inhabitants that can be
found fault with. Every house in Lhasa is taxed at this time, and
the slightest offence is punished with unsparing rigour by fines.
This severity of the Jalno drives all working classes out of the
city till the twenty-three days are over. But if the laity go out,
the clergy come in. All the Buddhist monasteries of the country for
miles round about open their gates and disgorge their inmates. All
the roads that lead down into Lhasa from the neighbouring mountains
are full of monks hurrying to the capital, some on foot, some on
horseback, some riding asses or lowing oxen, all carrying their
prayer-books and culinary utensils. In such multitudes do they come
that the streets and squares of the city are encumbered with their
swarms, and incarnadined with their red cloaks. The disorder and
confusion are indescribable. Bands of the holy men traverse the
streets chanting prayers, or uttering wild cries. They meet, they
jostle, they quarrel, they fight; bloody noses, black eyes, and
broken heads are freely given and received. All day long, too, from
before the peep of dawn till after darkness has fallen, these
red-cloaked monks hold services in the dim incense-laden air of the
great Machindranath temple, the cathedral of Lhasa; and thither
they crowd thrice a day to receive their doles of tea and soup and
money. The cathedral is a vast building, standing in the centre of
the city, and surrounded by bazaars and shops. The idols in it are
richly inlaid with gold and precious stones.
Twenty-four days after the Jalno has ceased to have authority,
he assumes it again, and for ten days acts in the same arbitrary
manner as before. On the first of the ten days the priests again
assemble at the cathedral, pray to the gods to prevent sickness and
other evils among the people, “and, as a peace-offering,
sacrifice one man. The man is not killed purposely, but the
ceremony he undergoes often proves fatal. Grain is thrown against
his head, and his face is painted half white, half black.”
Thus grotesquely disguised, and carrying a coat of skin on his arm,
he is called the King of the Years, and sits daily in the
market-place, where he helps himself to whatever he likes and goes
about shaking a black yak’s tail over the people, who thus
transfer their bad luck to him. On the tenth day, all the troops in
Lhasa march to the great temple and form in line before it. The
King of the Years is brought forth from the temple and receives
small donations from the assembled multitude. He then ridicules the
Jalno, saying to him, “What we perceive through the five
senses is no illusion. All you teach is untrue,” and the
like. The Jalno, who represents the Grand Lama for the time being,
contests these heretical opinions; the dispute waxes warm, and at
last both agree to decide the questions at issue by a cast of the
dice, the Jalno offering to change places with the scapegoat should
the throw be against him. If the King of the Years wins, much evil
is prognosticated; but if the Jalno wins, there is great rejoicing,
for it proves that his adversary has been accepted by the gods as a
victim to bear all the sins of the people of Lhasa. Fortune,
however, always favours the Jalno, who throws sixes with unvarying
success, while his opponent turns up only ones. Nor is this so
extraordinary as at first sight it might appear; for the
Jalno’s dice are marked with nothing but sixes and his
adversary’s with nothing but ones. When he sees the finger of
Providence thus plainly pointed against him, the King of the Years
is terrified and flees away upon a white horse, with a white dog, a
white bird, salt, and so forth, which have all been provided for
him by the government. His face is still painted half white and
half black, and he still wears his leathern coat. The whole
populace pursues him, hooting, yelling, and firing blank shots in
volleys after him. Thus driven out of the city, he is detained for
seven days in the great chamber of horrors at the Samyas monastery,
surrounded by monstrous and terrific images of devils and skins of
huge serpents and wild beasts. Thence he goes away into the
mountains of Chetang, where he has to remain an outcast for several
months or a year in a narrow den. If he dies before the time is
out, the people say it is an auspicious omen; but if he survives,
he may return to Lhasa and play the part of scapegoat over again
the following year.
This quaint ceremonial, still annually observed in the secluded
capital of Buddhism—the Rome of Asia—is interesting
because it exhibits, in a clearly marked religious stratification,
a series of divine redeemers themselves redeemed, of vicarious
sacrifices vicariously atoned for, of gods undergoing a process of
fossilisation, who, while they retain the privileges, have
disburdened themselves of the pains and penalties of divinity. In
the Jalno we may without undue straining discern a successor of
those temporary kings, those mortal gods, who purchase a short
lease of power and glory at the price of their lives. That he is
the temporary substitute of the Grand Lama is certain; that he is,
or was once, liable to act as scapegoat for the people is made
nearly certain by his offer to change places with the real
scapegoat—the King of the Years—if the arbitrament of
the dice should go against him. It is true that the conditions
under which the question is now put to the hazard have reduced the
offer to an idle form. But such forms are no mere mushroom growths,
springing up of themselves in a night. If they are now lifeless
formalities, empty husks devoid of significance, we may be sure
that they once had a life and a meaning; if at the present day they
are blind alleys leading nowhere, we may be certain that in former
days they were paths that led somewhere, if only to death. That
death was the goal to which of old the Tibetan scapegoat passed
after his brief period of licence in the market-place, is a
conjecture that has much to commend it. Analogy suggests it; the
blank shots fired after him, the statement that the ceremony often
proves fatal, the belief that his death is a happy omen, all
confirm it. We need not wonder then that the Jalno, after paying so
dear to act as deputy-deity for a few weeks, should have preferred
to die by deputy rather than in his own person when his time was
up. The painful but necessary duty was accordingly laid on some
poor devil, some social outcast, some wretch with whom the world
had gone hard, who readily agreed to throw away his life at the end
of a few days if only he might have his fling in the meantime. For
observe that while the time allowed to the original
deputy—the Jalno—was measured by weeks, the time
allowed to the deputy’s deputy was cut down to days, ten days
according to one authority, seven days according to another. So
short a rope was doubtless thought a long enough tether for so
black or sickly a sheep; so few sands in the hour-glass, slipping
so fast away, sufficed for one who had wasted so many precious
years. Hence in the jack-pudding who now masquerades with motley
countenance in the market-place of Lhasa, sweeping up misfortune
with a black yak’s tail, we may fairly see the substitute of
a substitute, the vicar of a vicar, the proxy on whose back the
heavy burden was laid when it had been lifted from nobler
shoulders. But the clue, if we have followed it aright, does not
stop at the Jalno; it leads straight back to the pope of Lhasa
himself, the Grand Lama, of whom the Jalno is merely the temporary
vicar. The analogy of many customs in many lands points to the
conclusion that, if this human divinity stoops to resign his
ghostly power for a time into the hands of a substitute, it is, or
rather was once, for no other reason than that the substitute might
die in his stead. Thus through the mist of ages unillumined by the
lamp of history, the tragic figure of the pope of
Buddhism—God’s vicar on earth for Asia—looms dim
and sad as the man-god who bore his people’s sorrows, the
Good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep.
4. On Scapegoats in General
THE FOREGOING survey of the custom of publicly expelling the
accumulated evils of a village or town or country suggests a few
general observations.
In the first place, it will not be disputed that what I have
called the immediate and the mediate expulsions of evil are
identical in intention; in other words, that whether the evils are
conceived of as invisible or as embodied in a material form, is a
circumstance entirely subordinate to the main object of the
ceremony, which is simply to effect a total clearance of all the
ills that have been infesting a people. If any link were wanting to
connect the two kinds of expulsion, it would be furnished by such a
practice as that of sending the evils away in a litter or a boat.
For here, on the one hand, the evils are invisible and intangible;
and, on the other hand, there is a visible and tangible vehicle to
convey them away. And a scapegoat is nothing more than such a
vehicle.
In the second place, when a general clearance of evils is
resorted to periodically, the interval between the celebrations of
the ceremony is commonly a year, and the time of year when the
ceremony takes place usually coincides with some well-marked change
of season, such as the beginning or end of winter in the arctic and
temperate zones, and the beginning or end of the rainy season in
the tropics. The increased mortality which such climatic changes
are apt to produce, especially amongst ill-fed, ill-clothed, and
ill-housed savages, is set down by primitive man to the agency of
demons, who must accordingly be expelled. Hence, in the tropical
regions of New Britain and Peru, the devils are or were driven out
at the beginning of the rainy season; hence, on the dreary coasts
of Baffin Land, they are banished at the approach of the bitter
Arctic winter. When a tribe has taken to husbandry, the time for
the general expulsion of devils is naturally made to agree with one
of the great epochs of the agricultural year, as sowing, or
harvest; but, as these epochs themselves naturally coincide with
changes of season, it does not follow that the transition from the
hunting or pastoral to the agricultural life involves any
alteration in the time of celebrating this great annual rite. Some
of the agricultural communities of India and the Hindoo Koosh, as
we have seen, hold their general clearance of demons at harvest,
others at sowing-time. But, at whatever season of the year it is
held, the general expulsion of devils commonly marks the beginning
of the new year. For, before entering on a new year, people are
anxious to rid themselves of the troubles that have harassed them
in the past; hence it comes about that in so many communities the
beginning of the new year is inaugurated with a solemn and public
banishment of evil spirits.
In the third place, it is to be observed that this public and
periodic expulsion of devils is commonly preceded or followed by a
period of general license, during which the ordinary restraints of
society are thrown aside, and all offences, short of the gravest,
are allowed to pass unpunished. In Guinea and Tonquin the period of
license precedes the public expulsion of demons; and the suspension
of the ordinary government in Lhasa previous to the expulsion of
the scapegoat is perhaps a relic of a similar period of universal
license. Amongst the Hos of India the period of license follows the
expulsion of the devil. Amongst the Iroquois it hardly appears
whether it preceded or followed the banishment of evils. In any
case, the extraordinary relaxation of all ordinary rules of conduct
on such occasions is doubtless to be explained by the general
clearance of evils which precedes or follows it. On the one hand,
when a general riddance of evil and absolution from all sin is in
immediate prospect, men are encouraged to give the rein to their
passions, trusting that the coming ceremony will wipe out the score
which they are running up so fast. On the other hand, when the
ceremony has just taken place, men’s minds are freed from the
oppressive sense, under which they generally labour, of an
atmosphere surcharged with devils; and in the first revulsion of
joy they overleap the limits commonly imposed by custom and
morality. When the ceremony takes place at harvest-time, the
elation of feeling which it excites is further stimulated by the
state of physical wellbeing produced by an abundant supply of
food.
Fourthly, the employment of a divine man or animal as a
scapegoat is especially to be noted; indeed, we are here directly
concerned with the custom of banishing evils only in so far as
these evils are believed to be transferred to a god who is
afterwards slain. It may be suspected that the custom of employing
a divine man or animal as a public scapegoat is much more widely
diffused than appears from the examples cited. For, as has already
been pointed out, the custom of killing a god dates from so early a
period of human history that in later ages, even when the custom
continues to be practised, it is liable to be misinterpreted. The
divine character of the animal or man is forgotten, and he comes to
be regarded merely as an ordinary victim. This is especially likely
to be the case when it is a divine man who is killed. For when a
nation becomes civilised, if it does not drop human sacrifices
altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as
would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may
sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a
criminal.
If we ask why a dying god should be chosen to take upon himself
and carry away the sins and sorrows of the people, it may be
suggested that in the practice of using the divinity as a scapegoat
we have a combination of two customs which were at one time
distinct and independent. On the one hand we have seen that it has
been customary to kill the human or animal god in order to save his
divine life from being weakened by the inroads of age. On the other
hand we have seen that it has been customary to have a general
expulsion of evils and sins once a year. Now, if it occurred to
people to combine these two customs, the result would be the
employment of the dying god as a scapegoat. He was killed, not
originally to take away sin, but to save the divine life from the
degeneracy of old age; but, since he had to be killed at any rate,
people may have thought that they might as well seize the
opportunity to lay upon him the burden of their sufferings and
sins, in order that he might bear it away with him to the unknown
world beyond the grave.
The use of the divinity as a scapegoat clears up the ambiguity
which, as we saw, appears to hang about the European folk-custom of
“carrying out Death.” Grounds have been shown for
believing that in this ceremony the so-called Death was originally
the spirit of vegetation, who was annually slain in spring, in
order that he might come to life again with all the vigour of
youth. But, as I pointed out, there are certain features in the
ceremony which are not explicable on this hypothesis alone. Such
are the marks of joy with which the effigy of Death is carried out
to be buried or burnt, and the fear and abhorrence of it manifested
by the bearers. But these features become at once intelligible if
we suppose that the Death was not merely the dying god of
vegetation, but also a public scapegoat, upon whom were laid all
the evils that had afflicted the people during the past year. Joy
on such an occasion is natural and appropriate; and if the dying
god appears to be the object of that fear and abhorrence which are
properly due not to himself, but to the sins and misfortunes with
which he is laden, this arises merely from the difficulty of
distinguishing, or at least of marking the distinction, between the
bearer and the burden. When the burden is of a baleful character,
the bearer of it will be feared and shunned just as much as if he
were himself instinct with those dangerous properties of which, as
it happens, he is only the vehicle. Similarly we have seen that
disease-laden and sin-laden boats are dreaded and shunned by East
Indian peoples. Again, the view that in these popular customs the
Death is a scapegoat as well as a representative of the divine
spirit of vegetation derives some support from the circumstance
that its expulsion is always celebrated in spring and chiefly by
Slavonic peoples. For the Slavonic year began in spring; and thus,
in one of its aspects, the ceremony of “carrying out
Death” would be an example of the widespread custom of
expelling the accumulated evils of the old year before entering on
a new one.
LVIII. Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity
1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome
WE are now prepared to notice the use of the human scapegoat in
classical antiquity. Every year on the fourteenth of March a man
clad in skins was led in procession through the streets of Rome,
beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. He was
called Mamurius Veturius, that is, “the old Mars,” and
as the ceremony took place on the day preceding the first full moon
of the old Roman year (which began on the first of March), the
skin-clad man must have represented the Mars of the past year, who
was driven out at the beginning of a new one. Now Mars was
originally not a god of war but of vegetation. For it was to Mars
that the Roman husbandman prayed for the prosperity of his corn and
his vines, his fruit-trees and his copses; it was to Mars that the
priestly college of the Arval Brothers, whose business it was to
sacrifice for the growth of the crops, addressed their petitions
almost exclusively; and it was to Mars, as we saw, that a horse was
sacrificed in October to secure an abundant harvest. Moreover, it
was to Mars, under his title of “Mars of the woods”
(Mars Silvanus), that farmers offered sacrifice for the
welfare of their cattle. We have already seen that cattle are
commonly supposed to be under the special patronage of tree-gods.
Once more, the consecration of the vernal month of March to Mars
seems to point him out as the deity of the sprouting vegetation.
Thus the Roman custom of expelling the old Mars at the beginning of
the new year in spring is identical with the Slavonic custom of
“carrying out Death,” if the view here taken of the
latter custom is correct. The similarity of the Roman and Slavonic
customs has been already remarked by scholars, who appear, however,
to have taken Mamurius Veturius and the corresponding figures in
the Slavonic ceremonies to be representatives of the old year
rather than of the old god of vegetation. It is possible that
ceremonies of this kind may have come to be thus interpreted in
later times even by the people who practised them. But the
personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be
primitive. However, in the Roman, as in the Slavonic, ceremony, the
representative of the god appears to have been treated not only as
a deity of vegetation but also as a scapegoat. His expulsion
implies this; for there is no reason why the god of vegetation, as
such, should be expelled the city. But it is otherwise if he is
also a scapegoat; it then becomes necessary to drive him beyond the
boundaries, that he may carry his sorrowful burden away to other
lands. And, in fact, Mamurius Veturius appears to have been driven
away to the land of the Oscans, the enemies of Rome.
2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece
THE ANCIENT Greeks were also familiar with the use of a human
scapegoat. In Plutarch’s native town of Chaeronea a ceremony
of this kind was performed by the chief magistrate at the Town
Hall, and by each householder at his own home. It was called the
“expulsion of hunger.” A slave was beaten with rods of
the agnus castus, and turned out of doors with the words,
“Out with hunger, and in with wealth and health.” When
Plutarch held the office of chief magistrate of his native town he
performed this ceremony at the Town Hall, and he has recorded the
discussion to which the custom afterwards gave rise.
But in civilised Greece the custom of the scapegoat took darker
forms than the innocent rite over which the amiable and pious
Plutarch presided. Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most
brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the
poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole
year he was maintained at the public expense, being fed on choice
and pure food. At the expiry of the year he was dressed in sacred
garments, decked with holy branches, and led through the whole
city, while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people
might fall on his head. He was then cast out of the city or stoned
to death by the people outside of the walls. The Athenians
regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the
public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or
famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast
scapegoats. One of the victims was sacrificed for the men and the
other for the women. The former wore round his neck a string of
black, the latter a string of white figs. Sometimes, it seems, the
victim slain on behalf of the women was a woman. They were led
about the city and then sacrificed, apparently by being stoned to
death outside the city. But such sacrifices were not confined to
extraordinary occasions of public calamity; it appears that every
year, at the festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for
the men and one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to
death. The city of Abdera in Thrace was publicly purified once a
year, and one of the burghers, set apart for the purpose, was
stoned to death as a scapegoat or vicarious sacrifice for the life
of all the others; six days before his execution he was
excommunicated, “in order that he alone might bear the sins
of all the people.”
From the Lover’s Leap, a white bluff at the southern end
of their island, the Leucadians used annually to hurl a criminal
into the sea as a scapegoat. But to lighten his fall they fastened
live birds and feathers to him, and a flotilla of small boats
waited below to catch him and convey him beyond the boundary.
Probably these humane precautions were a mitigation of an earlier
custom of flinging the scapegoat into the sea to drown. The
Leucadian ceremony took place at the time of a sacrifice to Apollo,
who had a temple or sanctuary on the spot. Elsewhere it was
customary to cast a young man every year into the sea, with the
prayer, “Be thou our offscouring.” This ceremony was
supposed to rid the people of the evils by which they were beset,
or according to a somewhat different interpretation it redeemed
them by paying the debt they owed to the sea-god. As practised by
the Greeks of Asia Minor in the sixth century before our era, the
custom of the scapegoat was as follows. When a city suffered from
plague, famine, or other public calamity, an ugly or deformed
person was chosen to take upon himself all the evils which
afflicted the community. He was brought to a suitable place, where
dried figs, a barley loaf, and cheese were put into his hand. These
he ate. Then he was beaten seven times upon his genital organs with
squills and branches of the wild fig and other wild trees, while
the flutes played a particular tune. Afterwards he was burned on a
pyre built of the wood of forest trees; and his ashes were cast
into the sea. A similar custom appears to have been annually
celebrated by the Asiatic Greeks at the harvest festival of the
Thargelia.
In the ritual just described the scourging of the victim with
squills, branches of the wild fig, and so forth, cannot have been
intended to aggravate his sufferings, otherwise any stick would
have been good enough to beat him with. The true meaning of this
part of the ceremony has been explained by W. Mannhardt. He points
out that the ancients attributed to squills a magical power of
averting evil influences, and that accordingly they hung them up at
the doors of their houses and made use of them in purificatory
rites. Hence the Arcadian custom of whipping the image of Pan with
squills at a festival, or whenever the hunters returned
empty-handed, must have been meant, not to punish the god, but to
purify him from the harmful influences which were impeding him in
the exercise of his divine functions as a god who should supply the
hunter with game. Similarly the object of beating the human
scapegoat on the genital organs with squills and so on, must have
been to release his reproductive energies from any restraint or
spell under which they might be laid by demoniacal or other
malignant agency; and as the Thargelia at which he was annually
sacrificed was an early harvest festival celebrated in May, we must
recognise in him a representative of the creative and fertilising
god of vegetation. The representative of the god was annually slain
for the purpose I have indicated, that of maintaining the divine
life in perpetual vigour, untainted by the weakness of age; and
before he was put to death it was not unnatural to stimulate his
reproductive powers in order that these might be transmitted in
full activity to his successor, the new god or new embodiment of
the old god, who was doubtless supposed immediately to take the
place of the one slain. Similar reasoning would lead to a similar
treatment of the scapegoat on special occasions, such as drought or
famine. If the crops did not answer to the expectation of the
husbandman, this would be attributed to some failure in the
generative powers of the god whose function it was to produce the
fruits of the earth. It might be thought that he was under a spell
or was growing old and feeble. Accordingly he was slain in the
person of his representative, with all the ceremonies already
described, in order that, born young again, he might infuse his own
youthful vigour into the stagnant energies of nature. On the same
principle we can understand why Mamurius Veturius was beaten with
rods, why the slave at the Chaeronean ceremony was beaten with the
agnus castus (a tree to which magical properties were
ascribed), why the effigy of Death in some parts of Europe is
assailed with sticks and stones, and why at Babylon the criminal
who played the god scourged before he was crucified. The purpose of
the scourging was not to intensify the agony of the divine
sufferer, but on the contrary to dispel any malignant influences by
which at the supreme moment he might conceivably be beset.
Thus far I have assumed that the human victims at the Thargelia
represented the spirits of vegetation in general, but it has been
well remarked by Mr. W. R. Paton that these poor wretches seem to
have masqueraded as the spirits of fig-trees in particular. He
points out that the process of caprification, as it is called, that
is, the artificial fertilisation of the cultivated fig-trees by
hanging strings of wild figs among the boughs, takes place in
Greece and Asia Minor in June about a month after the date of the
Thargelia, and he suggests that the hanging of the black and white
figs round the necks of the two human victims, one of whom
represented the men and the other the women, may have been a direct
imitation of the process of caprification designed, on the
principle of imitative magic, to assist the fertilisation of the
fig-trees. And since caprification is in fact a marriage of the
male fig-tree with the female fig-tree, Mr. Paton further supposes
that the loves of the trees may, on the same principle of imitative
magic, have been simulated by a mock or even a real marriage
between the two human victims, one of whom appears sometimes to
have been a woman. On this view the practice of beating the human
victims on their genitals with branches of wild fig-trees and with
squills was a charm intended to stimulate the generative powers of
the man and woman who for the time being personated the male and
the female fig-trees respectively, and who by their union in
marriage, whether real or pretended, were believed to help the
trees to bear fruit.
The interpretation which I have adopted of the custom of beating
the human scapegoat with certain plants is supported by many
analogies. Thus among the Kai of German New Guinea, when a man
wishes to make his banana shoots bear fruit quickly, he beats them
with a stick cut from a banana-tree which has already borne fruit.
Here it is obvious that fruitfulness is believed to inhere in a
stick cut from a fruitful tree and to be imparted by contact to the
young banana plants. Similarly in New Caledonia a man will beat his
taro plants lightly with a branch, saying as he does so, “I
beat this taro that it may grow,” after which he plants the
branch in the ground at the end of the field. Among the Indians of
Brazil at the mouth of the Amazon, when a man wishes to increase
the size of his generative organ, he strikes it with the fruit of a
white aquatic plant called aninga, which grows luxuriantly
on the banks of the river. The fruit, which is inedible, resembles
a banana, and is clearly chosen for this purpose on account of its
shape. The ceremony should be performed three days before or after
the new moon. In the county of Bekes, in Hungary, barren women are
fertilised by being struck with a stick which has first been used
to separate pairing dogs. Here a fertilising virtue is clearly
supposed to be inherent in the stick and to be conveyed by contact
to the women. The Toradjas of Central Celebes think that the plant
Dracaena terminalis has a strong soul, because when it is
lopped, it soon grows up again. Hence when a man is ill, his
friends will sometimes beat him on the crown of the head with
Dracaena leaves in order to strengthen his weak soul with
the strong soul of the plant.
These analogies, accordingly, support the interpretation which,
following my predecessors W. Mannhardt and Mr. W. R. Paton, I have
given of the beating inflicted on the human victims at the Greek
harvest festival of the Thargelia. That beating, being administered
to the generative organs of the victims by fresh green plants and
branches, is most naturally explained as a charm to increase the
reproductive energies of the men or women either by communicating
to them the fruitfulness of the plants and branches, or by ridding
them of the maleficent influences; and this interpretation is
confirmed by the observation that the two victims represented the
two sexes, one of them standing for the men in general and the
other for the women. The season of the year when the ceremony was
performed, namely the time of the corn harvest, tallies well with
the theory that the rite had an agricultural significance. Further,
that it was above all intended to fertilise the fig-trees is
strongly suggested by the strings of black and white figs which
were hung round the necks of the victims, as well as by the blows
which were given their genital organs with the branches of a wild
fig-tree; since this procedure closely resembles the procedure
which ancient and modern husbandmen in Greek lands have regularly
resorted to for the purpose of actually fertilising their
fig-trees. When we remember what an important part the artificial
fertilisation of the date palm-tree appears to have played of old
not only in the husbandry but in the religion of Mesopotamia, there
seems no reason to doubt that the artificial fertilisation of the
fig-tree may in like manner have vindicated for itself a place in
the solemn ritual of Greek religion.
If these considerations are just, we must apparently conclude
that while the human victims at the Thargelia certainly appear in
later classical times to have figured chiefly as public scapegoats,
who carried away with them the sins, misfortunes, and sorrows of
the whole people, at an earlier time they may have been looked on
as embodiments of vegetation, perhaps of the corn but particularly
of the fig-trees; and that the beating which they received and the
death which they died were intended primarily to brace and refresh
the powers of vegetation then beginning to droop and languish under
the torrid heat of the Greek summer.
The view here taken of the Greek scapegoat, if it is correct,
obviates an objection which might otherwise be brought against the
main argument of this book. To the theory that the priest of Aricia
was slain as a representative of the spirit of the grove, it might
have been objected that such a custom has no analogy in classical
antiquity. But reasons have now been given for believing that the
human being periodically and occasionally slain by the Asiatic
Greeks was regularly treated as an embodiment of a divinity of
vegetation. Probably the persons whom the Athenians kept to be
sacrificed were similarly treated as divine. That they were social
outcasts did not matter. On the primitive view a man is not chosen
to be the mouth-piece or embodiment of a god on account of his high
moral qualities or social rank. The divine afflatus descends
equally on the good and the bad, the lofty and the lowly. If then
the civilised Greeks of Asia and Athens habitually sacrificed men
whom they regarded as incarnate gods, there can be no inherent
improbability in the supposition that at the dawn of history a
similar custom was observed by the semibarbarous Latins in the
Arician Grove.
But to clinch the argument, it is clearly desirable to prove
that the custom of putting to death a human representative of a god
was known and practised in ancient Italy elsewhere than in the
Arician Grove. This proof I now propose to adduce.
3. The Roman Saturnalia
WE have seen that many peoples have been used to observe an
annual period of license, when the customary restraints of law and
morality are thrown aside, when the whole population give
themselves up to extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker
passions find a vent which would never be allowed them in the more
staid and sober course of ordinary life. Such outbursts of the
pent-up forces of human nature, too often degenerating into wild
orgies of lust and crime, occur most commonly at the end of the
year, and are frequently associated, as I have had occasion to
point out, with one or other of the agricultural seasons,
especially with the time of sowing or of harvest. Now, of all these
periods of license the one which is best known and which in modern
language has given its name to the rest, is the Saturnalia. This
famous festival fell in December, the last month of the Roman year,
and was popularly supposed to commemorate the merry reign of
Saturn, the god of sowing and of husbandry, who lived on earth long
ago as a righteous and beneficent king of Italy, drew the rude and
scattered dwellers on the mountains together, taught them to till
the ground, gave them laws, and ruled in peace. His reign was the
fabled Golden Age: the earth brought forth abundantly: no sound of
war or discord troubled the happy world: no baleful love of lucre
worked like poison in the blood of the industrious and contented
peasantry. Slavery and private property were alike unknown: all men
had all things in common. At last the good god, the kindly king,
vanished suddenly; but his memory was cherished to distant ages,
shrines were reared in his honour, and many hills and high places
in Italy bore his name. Yet the bright tradition of his reign was
crossed by a dark shadow: his altars are said to have been stained
with the blood of human victims, for whom a more merciful age
afterwards substituted effigies. Of this gloomy side of the
god’s religion there is little or no trace in the
descriptions which ancient writers have left us of the Saturnalia.
Feasting and revelry and all the mad pursuit of pleasure are the
features that seem to have especially marked this carnival of
antiquity, as it went on for seven days in the streets and public
squares and houses of ancient Rome from the seventeenth to the
twenty-third of December.
But no feature of the festival is more remarkable, nothing in it
seems to have struck the ancients themselves more than the license
granted to slaves at this time. The distinction between the free
and the servile classes was temporarily abolished. The slave might
rail at his master, intoxicate himself like his betters, sit down
at table with them, and not even a word of reproof would be
administered to him for conduct which at any other season might
have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death. Nay, more,
masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited on
them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking
was the board cleared and dinner set for his master. So far was
this inversion of ranks carried, that each household became for a
time a mimic republic in which the high offices of state were
discharged by the slaves, who gave their orders and laid down the
law as if they were indeed invested with all the dignity of the
consulship, the praetorship, and the bench. Like the pale
reflection of power thus accorded to bondsmen at the Saturnalia was
the mock kingship for which freemen cast lots at the same season.
The person on whom the lot fell enjoyed the title of king, and
issued commands of a playful and ludicrous nature to his temporary
subjects. One of them he might order to mix the wine, another to
drink, another to sing, another to dance, another to speak in his
own dispraise, another to carry a flute-girl on his back round the
house.
Now, when we remember that the liberty allowed to slaves at this
festive season was supposed to be an imitation of the state of
society in Saturn’s time, and that in general the Saturnalia
passed for nothing more or less than a temporary revival or
restoration of the reign of that merry monarch, we are tempted to
surmise that the mock king who presided over the revels may have
originally represented Saturn himself. The conjecture is strongly
confirmed, if not established, by a very curious and interesting
account of the way in which the Saturnalia was celebrated by the
Roman soldiers stationed on the Danube in the reign of Maximian and
Diocletian. The account is preserved in a narrative of the
martyrdom of St. Dasius, which was unearthed from a Greek
manuscript in the Paris library, and published by Professor Franz
Cumont of Ghent. Two briefer descriptions of the event and of the
custom are contained in manuscripts at Milan and Berlin; one of
them had already seen the light in an obscure volume printed at
Urbino in 1727, but its importance for the history of the Roman
religion, both ancient and modern, appears to have been overlooked
until Professor Cumont drew the attention of scholars to all three
narratives by publishing them together some years ago. According to
these narratives, which have all the appearance of being authentic,
and of which the longest is probably based on official documents,
the Roman soldiers at Durostorum in Lower Moesia celebrated the
Saturnalia year by year in the following manner. Thirty days before
the festival they chose by lot from amongst themselves a young and
handsome man, who was then clothed in royal attire to resemble
Saturn. Thus arrayed and attended by a multitude of soldiers he
went about in public with full license to indulge his passions and
to taste of every pleasure, however base and shameful. But if his
reign was merry, it was short and ended tragically; for when the
thirty days were up and the festival of Saturn had come, he cut his
own throat on the altar of the god whom he personated. In the year
A.D. 303 the lot fell upon the Christian soldier Dasius, but he
refused to play the part of the heathen god and soil his last days
by debauchery. The threats and arguments of his commanding officer
Bassus failed to shake his constancy, and accordingly he was
beheaded, as the Christian martyrologist records with minute
accuracy, at Durostorum by the soldier John on Friday the twentieth
day of November, being the twenty-fourth day of the moon, at the
fourth hour.
Since this narrative was published by Professor Cumont, its
historical character, which had been doubted or denied, has
received strong confirmation from an interesting discovery. In the
crypt of the cathedral which crowns the promontory of Ancona there
is preserved, among other remarkable antiquities, a white marble
sarcophagus bearing a Greek inscription, in characters of the age
of Justinian, to the following effect: “Here lies the holy
martyr Dasius, brought from Durostorum.” The sarcophagus was
transferred to the crypt of the cathedral in 1848 from the church
of San Pellegrino, under the high altar of which, as we learn from
a Latin inscription let into the masonry, the martyr’s bones
still repose with those of two other saints. How long the
sarcophagus was deposited in the church of San Pellegrino, we do
not know; but it is recorded to have been there in the year 1650.
We may suppose that the saint’s relics were transferred for
safety to Ancona at some time in the troubled centuries which
followed his martyrdom, when Moesia was occupied and ravaged by
successive hordes of barbarian invaders. At all events it appears
certain from the independent and mutually confirmatory evidence of
the martyrology and the monuments that Dasius was no mythical
saint, but a real man, who suffered death for his faith at
Durostorum in one of the early centuries of the Christian era.
Finding the narrative of the nameless martyrologist thus
established as to the principal fact recorded, namely, the
martyrdom of St. Dasius, we may reasonably accept his testimony as
to the manner and cause of the martyrdom, all the more because his
narrative is precise, circumstantial, and entirely free from the
miraculous element. Accordingly I conclude that the account which
he gives of the celebration of the Saturnalia among the Roman
soldiers is trustworthy.
This account sets in a new and lurid light the office of the
King of the Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided
over the winter revels at Rome in the time of Horace and Tacitus.
It seems to prove that his business had not always been that of a
mere harlequin or merry-andrew whose only care was that the revelry
should run high and the fun grow fast and furious, while the fire
blazed and crackled on the hearth, while the streets swarmed with
festive crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far away to the
north, Soracte showed his coronal of snow. When we compare this
comic monarch of the gay, the civilised metropolis with his grim
counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and when we remember
the long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic, who in
other ages and in other lands, wearing mock crowns and wrapped in
sceptred palls, have played their little pranks for a few brief
hours or days, then passed before their time to a violent death, we
can hardly doubt that in the King of the Saturnalia at Rome, as he
is depicted by classical writers, we see only a feeble emasculated
copy of that original, whose strong features have been fortunately
preserved for us by the obscure author of the Martyrdom of St.
Dasius. In other words, the martyrologist’s account of
the Saturnalia agrees so closely with the accounts of similar rites
elsewhere which could not possibly have been known to him, that the
substantial accuracy of his description may be regarded as
established; and further, since the custom of putting a mock king
to death as a representative of a god cannot have grown out of a
practice of appointing him to preside over a holiday revel, whereas
the reverse may very well have happened, we are justified in
assuming that in an earlier and more barbarous age it was the
universal practice in ancient Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn
prevailed, to choose a man who played the part and enjoyed all the
traditionary privileges of Saturn for a season, and then died,
whether by his own or another’s hand, whether by the knife or
the fire or on the gallows-tree, in the character of the good god
who gave his life for the world. In Rome itself and other great
towns the growth of civilisation had probably mitigated this cruel
custom long before the Augustan age, and transformed it into the
innocent shape it wears in the writings of the few classical
writers who bestow a passing notice on the holiday King of the
Saturnalia. But in remoter districts the older and sterner practice
may long have survived; and even if after the unification of Italy
the barbarous usage was suppressed by the Roman government, the
memory of it would be handed down by the peasants and would tend
from time to time, as still happens with the lowest forms of
superstition among ourselves, to lead to a recrudescence of the
practice, especially among the rude soldiery on the outskirts of
the empire over whom the once iron hand of Rome was beginning to
relax its grasp.
The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and the
Carnival of modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light
of all the facts that have come before us, we may well ask whether
the resemblance does not amount to identity. We have seen that in
Italy, Spain, and France, that is, in the countries where the
influence of Rome has been deepest and most lasting, a conspicuous
feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure personifying the
festive season, which after a short career of glory and dissipation
is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned
grief or genuine delight of the populace. If the view here
suggested of the Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is
no other than a direct successor of the old King of the Saturnalia,
the master of the revels, the real man who personated Saturn and,
when the revels were over, suffered a real death in his assumed
character. The King of the Bean on Twelfth Night and the mediaeval
Bishop of Fools, Abbot of Unreason, or Lord of Misrule are figures
of the same sort and may perhaps have had a similar origin. Whether
that was so or not, we may conclude with a fair degree of
probability that if the King of the Wood at Aricia lived and died
as an incarnation of a sylvan deity, he had of old a parallel at
Rome in the men who, year by year, were slain in the character of
King Saturn, the god of the sown and sprouting seed.
LIX. Killing the God in Mexico
BY NO PEOPLE does the custom of sacrificing the human
representative of a god appear to have been observed so commonly
and with so much solemnity as by the Aztecs of ancient Mexico. With
the ritual of these remarkable sacrifices we are well acquainted,
for it has been fully described by the Spaniards who conquered
Mexico in the sixteenth century, and whose curiosity was naturally
excited by the discovery in this distant region of a barbarous and
cruel religion which presented many curious points of analogy to
the doctrine and ritual of their own church. “They took a
captive,” says the Jesuit Acosta, “such as they thought
good; and afore they did sacrifice him unto their idols, they gave
him the name of the idol, to whom he should be sacrificed, and
apparelled him with the same ornaments like their idol, saying,
that he did represent the same idol. And during the time that this
representation lasted, which was for a year in some feasts, in
others six months, and in others less, they reverenced and
worshipped him in the same manner as the proper idol; and in the
meantime he did eat, drink, and was merry. When he went through the
streets, the people came forth to worship him, and every one
brought him an alms, with children and sick folks, that he might
cure them, and bless them, suffering him to do all things at his
pleasure, only he was accompanied with ten or twelve men lest he
should fly. And he (to the end he might be reverenced as he passed)
sometimes sounded upon a small flute, that the people might prepare
to worship him. The feast being come, and he grown fat, they killed
him, opened him, and ate him, making a solemn sacrifice of
him.”
This general description of the custom may now be illustrated by
particular examples. Thus at the festival called Toxcatl, the
greatest festival of the Mexican year, a young man was annually
sacrificed in the character of Tezcatlipoca, “the god of
gods,” after having been maintained and worshipped as that
great deity in person for a whole year. According to the old
Franciscan monk Sahagun, our best authority on the Aztec religion,
the sacrifice of the human god fell at Easter or a few days later,
so that, if he is right, it would correspond in date as well as in
character to the Christian festival of the death and resurrection
of the Redeemer. More exactly he tells us that the sacrifice took
place on the first day of the fifth Aztec month, which according to
him began on the twenty-third or twenty-seventh day of April.
At this festival the great god died in the person of one human
representative and came to life again in the person of another, who
was destined to enjoy the fatal honour of divinity for a year and
to perish, like all his predecessors, at the end of it. The young
man singled out for this high dignity was carefully chosen from
among the captives on the ground of his personal beauty. He had to
be of unblemished body, slim as a reed and straight as a pillar,
neither too tall nor too short. If through high living he grew too
fat, he was obliged to reduce himself by drinking salt water. And
in order that he might behave in his lofty station with becoming
grace and dignity he was carefully trained to comport himself like
a gentleman of the first quality, to speak correctly and elegantly,
to play the flute, to smoke cigars and to snuff at flowers with a
dandified air. He was honourably lodged in the temple, where the
nobles waited on him and paid him homage, bringing him meat and
serving him like a prince. The king himself saw to it that he was
apparelled in gorgeous attire, “for already he esteemed him
as a god.” Eagle down was gummed to his head and white
cock’s feathers were stuck in his hair, which drooped to his
girdle. A wreath of flowers like roasted maize crowned his brows,
and a garland of the same flowers passed over his shoulders and
under his armpits. Golden ornaments hung from his nose, golden
armlets adorned his arms, golden bells jingled on his legs at every
step he took; earrings of turquoise dangled from his ears,
bracelets of turquoise bedecked his wrists; necklaces of shells
encircled his neck and depended on his breast; he wore a mantle of
network, and round his middle a rich waistcloth. When this
bejewelled exquisite lounged through the streets playing on his
flute, puffing at a cigar, and smelling at a nosegay, the people
whom he met threw themselves on the earth before him and prayed to
him with sighs and tears, taking up the dust in their hands and
putting it in their mouths in token of the deepest humiliation and
subjection. Women came forth with children in their arms and
presented them to him, saluting him as a god. For “he passed
for our Lord God; the people acknowledged him as the Lord.”
All who thus worshipped him on his passage he saluted gravely and
courteously. Lest he should flee, he was everywhere attended by a
guard of eight pages in the royal livery, four of them with shaven
crowns like the palace-slaves, and four of them with the flowing
locks of warriors; and if he contrived to escape, the captain of
the guard had to take his place as the representative of the god
and to die in his stead. Twenty days before he was to die, his
costume was changed, and four damsels delicately nurtured and
bearing the names of four goddesses—the Goddess of Flowers,
the Goddess of the Young Maize, the Goddess “Our Mother among
the Water,” and the Goddess of Salt—were given him to
be his brides, and with them he consorted. During the last five
days divine honours were showered on the destined victim. The king
remained in his palace while the whole court went after the human
god. Solemn banquets and dances followed each other in regular
succession and at appointed places. On the last day the young man,
attended by his wives and pages, embarked in a canoe covered with a
royal canopy and was ferried across the lake to a spot where a
little hill rose from the edge of the water. It was called the
Mountain of Parting, because there his wives bade him a last
farewell. Then, accompanied only by his pages, he repaired to a
small and lonely temple by the wayside. Like the Mexican temples in
general, it was built in the form of a pyramid; and as the young
man ascended the stairs he broke at every step one of the flutes on
which he had played in the days of his glory. On reaching the
summit he was seized and held down by the priests on his back upon
a block of stone, while one of them cut open his breast, thrust his
hand into the wound, and wrenching out his heart held it up in
sacrifice to the sun. The body of the dead god was not, like the
bodies of common victims, sent rolling down the steps of the
temple, but was carried down to the foot, where the head was cut
off and spitted on a pike. Such was the regular end of the man who
personated the greatest god of the Mexican pantheon.
The honour of living for a short time in the character of a god
and dying a violent death in the same capacity was not restricted
to men in Mexico; women were allowed, or rather compelled, to enjoy
the glory and to share the doom as representatives of goddesses.
Thus at a great festival in September, which was preceded by a
strict fast of seven days, they sanctified a young slave girl of
twelve or thirteen years, the prettiest they could find, to
represent the Maize Goddess Chicomecohuatl. They invested her with
the ornaments of the goddess, putting a mitre on her head and
maize-cobs round her neck and in her hands, and fastening a green
feather upright on the crown of her head to imitate an ear of
maize. This they did, we are told, in order to signify that the
maize was almost ripe at the time of the festival, but because it
was still tender they chose a girl of tender years to play the part
of the Maize Goddess. The whole long day they led the poor child in
all her finery, with the green plume nodding on her head, from
house to house dancing merrily to cheer people after the dulness
and privations of the fast.
In the evening all the people assembled at the temple, the
courts of which they lit up by a multitude of lanterns and candles.
There they passed the night without sleeping, and at midnight,
while the trumpets, flutes, and horns discoursed solemn music, a
portable framework or palanquin was brought forth, bedecked with
festoons of maize-cobs and peppers and filled with seeds of all
sorts. This the bearers set down at the door of the chamber in
which the wooden image of the goddess stood. Now the chamber was
adorned and wreathed, both outside and inside, with wreaths of
maize-cobs, peppers, pumpkins, roses, and seeds of every kind, a
wonder to behold; the whole floor was covered deep with these
verdant offerings of the pious. When the music ceased, a solemn
procession came forth of priests and dignitaries, with flaring
lights and smoking censers, leading in their midst the girl who
played the part of the goddess. Then they made her mount the
framework, where she stood upright on the maize and peppers and
pumpkins with which it was strewed, her hands resting on two
bannisters to keep her from falling. Then the priests swung the
smoking censers round her; the music struck up again, and while it
played, a great dignitary of the temple suddenly stepped up to her
with a razor in his hand and adroitly shore off the green feather
she wore on her head, together with the hair in which it was
fastened, snipping the lock off by the root. The feather and the
hair he then presented to the wooden image of the goddess with
great solemnity and elaborate ceremonies, weeping and giving her
thanks for the fruits of the earth and the abundant crops which she
had bestowed on the people that year; and as he wept and prayed,
all the people, standing in the courts of the temple, wept and
prayed with him. When that ceremony was over, the girl descended
from the framework and was escorted to the place where she was to
spend the rest of the night. But all the people kept watch in the
courts of the temple by the light of torches till break of day.
The morning being come, and the courts of the temple being still
crowded by the multitude, who would have deemed it sacrilege to
quit the precincts, the priests again brought forth the damsel
attired in the costume of the goddess, with the mitre on her head
and the cobs of maize about her neck. Again she mounted the
portable framework or palanquin and stood on it, supporting herself
by her hands on the bannisters. Then the elders of the temple
lifted it on their shoulders, and while some swung burning censers
and others played on instruments or sang, they carried it in
procession through the great courtyard to the hall of the god
Huitzilopochtli and then back to the chamber, where stood the
wooden image of the Maize Goddess, whom the girl personated. There
they caused the damsel to descend from the palanquin and to stand
on the heaps of corn and vegetables that had been spread in
profusion on the floor of the sacred chamber. While she stood there
all the elders and nobles came in a line, one behind the other,
carrying saucers full of dry and clotted blood which they had drawn
from their ears by way of penance during the seven days’
fast. One by one they squatted on their haunches before her, which
was the equivalent of falling on their knees with us, and scraping
the crust of blood from the saucer cast it down before her as an
offering in return for the benefits which she, as the embodiment of
the Maize Goddess, had conferred upon them. When the men had thus
humbly offered their blood to the human representative of the
goddess, the women, forming a long line, did so likewise, each of
them dropping on her hams before the girl and scraping her blood
from the saucer. The ceremony lasted a long time, for great and
small, young and old, all without exception had to pass before the
incarnate deity and make their offering. When it was over, the
people returned home with glad hearts to feast on flesh and viands
of every sort as merrily, we are told, as good Christians at Easter
partake of meat and other carnal mercies after the long abstinence
of Lent. And when they had eaten and drunk their fill and rested
after the night watch, they returned quite refreshed to the temple
to see the end of the festival. And the end of the festival was
this. The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed
the girl who personated the goddess; then they threw her on her
back on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the
gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image
of the goddess, the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of
corn, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which cumbered the
floor. After that they flayed the headless trunk, and one of the
priests made shift to squeeze himself into the bloody skin. Having
done so they clad him in all the robes which the girl had worn;
they put the mitre on his head, the necklace of golden maize-cobs
about his neck, the maize-cobs of feathers and gold in his hands;
and thus arrayed they led him forth in public, all of them dancing
to the tuck of drum, while he acted as fugleman, skipping and
posturing at the head of the procession as briskly as he could be
expected to do, incommoded as he was by the tight and clammy skin
of the girl and by her clothes, which must have been much too small
for a grown man.
In the foregoing custom the identification of the young girl
with the Maize Goddess appears to be complete. The golden
maize-cobs which she wore round her neck, the artificial maize-cobs
which she carried in her hands, the green feather which was stuck
in her hair in imitation (we are told) of a green ear of maize, all
set her forth as a personification of the corn-spirit; and we are
expressly informed that she was specially chosen as a young girl to
represent the young maize, which at the time of the festival had
not yet fully ripened. Further, her identification with the corn
and the corn-goddess was clearly announced by making her stand on
the heaps of maize and there receive the homage and blood-offerings
of the whole people, who thereby returned her thanks for the
benefits which in her character of a divinity she was supposed to
have conferred upon them. Once more, the practice of beheading her
on a heap of corn and seeds and sprinkling her blood, not only on
the image of the Maize Goddess, but on the piles of maize, peppers,
pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables, can seemingly have had no other
object but to quicken and strengthen the crops of corn and the
fruits of the earth in general by infusing into their
representatives the blood of the Corn Goddess herself. The analogy
of this Mexican sacrifice, the meaning of which appears to be
indisputable, may be allowed to strengthen the interpretation which
I have given of other human sacrifices offered for the crops. If
the Mexican girl, whose blood was sprinkled on the maize, indeed
personated the Maize Goddess, it becomes more than ever probable
that the girl whose blood the Pawnees similarly sprinkled on the
seed corn personated in like manner the female Spirit of the Corn;
and so with the other human beings whom other races have
slaughtered for the sake of promoting the growth of the crops.
Lastly, the concluding act of the sacred drama, in which the
body of the dead Maize Goddess was flayed and her skin worn,
together with all her sacred insignia, by a man who danced before
the people in this grim attire, seems to be best explained on the
hypothesis that it was intended to ensure that the divine death
should be immediately followed by the divine resurrection. If that
was so, we may infer with some degree of probability that the
practice of killing a human representative of a deity has commonly,
perhaps always, been regarded merely as a means of perpetuating the
divine energies in the fulness of youthful vigour, untainted by the
weakness and frailty of age, from which they must have suffered if
the deity had been allowed to die a natural death.
These Mexican rites suffice to prove that human sacrifices of
the sort I suppose to have prevailed at Aricia were, as a matter of
fact, regularly offered by a people whose level of culture was
probably not inferior, if indeed it was not distinctly superior, to
that occupied by the Italian races at the early period to which the
origin of the Arician priesthood must be referred. The positive and
indubitable evidence of the prevalence of such sacrifices in one
part of the world may reasonably be allowed to strengthen the
probability of their prevalence in places for which the evidence is
less full and trustworthy. Taken all together, the facts which we
have passed in review seem to show that the custom of killing men
whom their worshippers regard as divine has prevailed in many parts
of the world.
LX. Between Heaven and Earth
1. Not to touch the Earth
AT THE OUTSET of this book two questions were proposed for
answer: Why had the priest of Aricia to slay his predecessor? And
why, before doing so, had he to pluck the Golden Bough? Of these
two questions the first has now been answered. The priest of
Aricia, if I am right, was one of those sacred kings or human
divinities on whose life the welfare of the community and even the
course of nature in general are believed to be intimately
dependent. It does not appear that the subjects or worshippers of
such a spiritual potentate form to themselves any very clear notion
of the exact relationship in which they stand to him; probably
their ideas on the point are vague and fluctuating, and we should
err if we attempted to define the relationship with logical
precision. All that the people know, or rather imagine, is that
somehow they themselves, their cattle, and their crops are
mysteriously bound up with their divine king, so that according as
he is well or ill the community is healthy or sickly, the flocks
and herds thrive or languish with disease, and the fields yield an
abundant or a scanty harvest. The worst evil which they can
conceive of is the natural death of their ruler, whether he succumb
to sickness or old age, for in the opinion of his followers such a
death would entail the most disastrous consequences on themselves
and their possessions; fatal epidemics would sweep away man and
beast, the earth would refuse her increase, nay, the very frame of
nature itself might be dissolved. To guard against these
catastrophes it is necessary to put the king to death while he is
still in the full bloom of his divine manhood, in order that his
sacred life, transmitted in unabated force to his successor, may
renew its youth, and thus by successive transmissions through a
perpetual line of vigorous incarnations may remain eternally fresh
and young, a pledge and security that men and animals shall in like
manner renew their youth by a perpetual succession of generations,
and that seedtime and harvest, and summer and winter, and rain and
sunshine shall never fail. That, if my conjecture is right, was why
the priest of Aricia, the King of the Wood at Nemi, had regularly
to perish by the sword of his successor.
But we have still to ask, What was the Golden Bough? and why had
each candidate for the Arician priesthood to pluck it before he
could slay the priest? These questions I will now try to
answer.
It will be well to begin by noticing two of those rules or
taboos by which, as we have seen, the life of divine kings or
priests is regulated. The first of the rules to which I would call
the reader’s attention is that the divine personage may not
touch the ground with his foot. This rule was observed by the
supreme pontiff of the Zapotecs in Mexico; he profaned his sanctity
if he so much as touched the ground with his foot. Montezuma,
emperor of Mexico, never set foot on the ground; he was always
carried on the shoulders of noblemen, and if he lighted anywhere
they laid rich tapestry for him to walk upon. For the Mikado of
Japan to touch the ground with his foot was a shameful degradation;
indeed, in the sixteenth century, it was enough to deprive him of
his office. Outside his palace he was carried on men’s
shoulders; within it he walked on exquisitely wrought mats. The
king and queen of Tahiti might not touch the ground anywhere but
within their hereditary domains; for the ground on which they trod
became sacred. In travelling from place to place they were carried
on the shoulders of sacred men. They were always accompanied by
several pairs of these sanctified attendants; and when it became
necessary to change their bearers, the king and queen vaulted on to
the shoulders of their new bearers without letting their feet touch
the ground. It was an evil omen if the king of Dosuma touched the
ground, and he had to perform an expiatory ceremony. Within his
palace the king of Persia walked on carpets on which no one else
might tread; outside of it he was never seen on foot but only in a
chariot or on horseback. In old days the king of Siam never set
foot upon the earth, but was carried on a throne of gold from place
to place. Formerly neither the kings of Uganda, nor their mothers,
nor their queens might walk on foot outside of the spacious
enclosures in which they lived. Whenever they went forth they were
carried on the shoulders of men of the Buffalo clan, several of
whom accompanied any of these royal personages on a journey and
took it in turn to bear the burden. The king sat astride the
bearer’s neck with a leg over each shoulder and his feet
tucked under the bearer’s arms. When one of these royal
carriers grew tired he shot the king onto the shoulders of a second
man without allowing the royal feet to touch the ground. In this
way they went at a great pace and travelled long distances in a
day, when the king was on a journey. The bearers had a special hut
in the king’s enclosure in order to be at hand the moment
they were wanted. Among the Bakuba, or rather Bushongo, a nation in
the southern region of the Congo, down to a few years ago persons
of the royal blood were forbidden to touch the ground; they must
sit on a hide, a chair, or the back of a slave, who crouched on
hands and feet; their feet rested on the feet of others. When they
travelled they were carried on the backs of men; but the king
journeyed in a litter supported on shafts. Among the Ibo people
about Awka, in Southern Nigeria, the priest of the Earth has to
observe many taboos; for example, he may not see a corpse, and if
he meets one on the road he must hide his eyes with his wristlet.
He must abstain from many foods, such as eggs, birds of all sorts,
mutton, dog, bush-buck, and so forth. He may neither wear nor touch
a mask, and no masked man may enter his house. If a dog enters his
house, it is killed and thrown out. As priest of the Earth he may
not sit on the bare ground, nor eat things that have fallen on the
ground, nor may earth be thrown at him. According to ancient
Brahmanic ritual a king at his inauguration trod on a tiger’s
skin and a golden plate; he was shod with shoes of boar’s
skin, and so long as he lived thereafter he might not stand on the
earth with his bare feet.
But besides persons who are permanently sacred or tabooed and
are therefore permanently forbidden to touch the ground with their
feet, there are others who enjoy the character of sanctity or taboo
only on certain occasions, and to whom accordingly the prohibition
in question only applies at the definite seasons during which they
exhale the odour of sanctity. Thus among the Kayans or Bahaus of
Central Borneo, while the priestesses are engaged in the
performance of certain rites they may not step on the ground, and
boards are laid for them to tread on. Warriors, again, on the
war-path are surrounded, so to say, by an atmosphere of taboo;
hence some Indians of North America might not sit on the bare
ground the whole time they were out on a warlike expedition. In
Laos the hunting of elephants gives rise to many taboos; one of
them is that the chief hunter may not touch the earth with his
foot. Accordingly, when he alights from his elephant, the others
spread a carpet of leaves for him to step upon.
Apparently holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may
call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or
tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a
physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged
just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as
the electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good
conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be
discharged and drained away by contact with the earth, which on
this theory serves as an excellent conductor for the magical fluid.
Hence in order to preserve the charge from running to waste, the
sacred or tabooed personage must be carefully prevented from
touching the ground; in electrical language he must be insulated,
if he is not to be emptied of the precious substance or fluid with
which he, as a vial, is filled to the brim. And in many cases
apparently the insulation of the tabooed person is recommended as a
precaution not merely for his own sake but for the sake of others;
for since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful
explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in
the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds,
lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it
comes into contact with.
2. Not to see the Sun
THE SECOND rule to be here noted is that the sun may not shine
upon the divine person. This rule was observed both by the Mikado
and by the pontiff of the Zapotecs. The latter “was looked
upon as a god whom the earth was not worthy to hold, nor the sun to
shine upon.” The Japanese would not allow that the Mikado
should expose his sacred person to the open air, and the sun was
not thought worthy to shine on his head. The Indians of Granada, in
South America, “kept those who were to be rulers or
commanders, whether men or women, locked up for several years when
they were children, some of them seven years, and this so close
that they were not to see the sun, for if they should happen to see
it they forfeited their lordship, eating certain sorts of food
appointed; and those who were their keepers at certain times went
into their retreat or prison and scourged them severely.”
Thus, for example, the heir to the throne of Bogota, who was not
the son but the sister’s son of the king, had to undergo a
rigorous training from his infancy; he lived in complete retirement
in a temple, where he might not see the sun nor eat salt nor
converse with a woman; he was surrounded by guards who observed his
conduct and noted all his actions; if he broke a single one of the
rules laid down for him, he was deemed infamous and forfeited all
his rights to the throne. So, too, the heir to the kingdom of
Sogamoso, before succeeding to the crown, had to fast for seven
years in the temple, being shut up in the dark and not allowed to
see the sun or light. The prince who was to become Inca of Peru had
to fast for a month without seeing light.
3. The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
NOW it is remarkable that the foregoing two rules—not to
touch the ground and not to see the sun—are observed either
separately or conjointly by girls at puberty in many parts of the
world. Thus amongst the negroes of Loango girls at puberty are
confined in separate huts, and they may not touch the ground with
any part of their bare body. Among the Zulus and kindred tribes of
South Africa, when the first signs of puberty show themselves
“while a girl is walking, gathering wood, or working in the
field, she runs to the river and hides herself among the reeds for
the day, so as not to be seen by men. She covers her head carefully
with her blanket that the sun may not shine on it and shrivel her
up into a withered skeleton, as would result from exposure to the
sun’s beams. After dark she returns to her home and is
secluded” in a hut for some time. With the Awa-nkonde, a
tribe at the northern end of Lake Nyassa, it is a rule that after
her first menstruation a girl must be kept apart, with a few
companions of her own sex, in a darkened house. The floor is
covered with dry banana leaves, but no fire may be lit in the
house, which is called “the house of the Awasungu,”
that is, “of maidens who have no hearts.”
In New Ireland girls are confined for four or five years in
small cages, being kept in the dark and not allowed to set foot on
the ground. The custom has been thus described by an eye-witness.
“I heard from a teacher about some strange custom connected
with some of the young girls here, so I asked the chief to take me
to the house where they were. The house was about twenty-five feet
in length, and stood in a reed and bamboo enclosure, across the
entrance to which a bundle of dried grass was suspended to show
that it was strictly ‘tabu.’ Inside the house
were three conical structures about seven or eight feet in height,
and about ten or twelve feet in circumference at the bottom, and
for about four feet from the ground, at which point they tapered
off to a point at the top. These cages were made of the broad
leaves of the pandanus-tree, sewn quite close together so that no
light and little or no air could enter. On one side of each is an
opening which is closed by a double door of plaited cocoa-nut tree
and pandanus-tree leaves. About three feet from the ground there is
a stage of bamboos which forms the floor. In each of these cages we
were told there was a young woman confined, each of whom had to
remain for at least four or five years, without ever being allowed
to go outside the house. I could scarcely credit the story when I
heard it; the whole thing seemed too horrible to be true. I spoke
to the chief, and told him that I wished to see the inside of the
cages, and also to see the girls that I might make them a present
of a few beads. He told me that it was ‘tabu,’
forbidden for any men but their own relations to look at them; but
I suppose the promised beads acted as an inducement, and so he sent
away for some old lady who had charge, and who alone is allowed to
open the doors. While we were waiting we could hear the girls
talking to the chief in a querulous way as if objecting to
something or expressing their fears. The old woman came at length
and certainly she did not seem a very pleasant jailor or guardian;
nor did she seem to favour the request of the chief to allow us to
see the girls, as she regarded us with anything but pleasant looks.
However, she had to undo the door when the chief told her to do so,
and then the girls peeped out at us, and, when told to do so, they
held out their hands for the beads. I, however, purposely sat at
some distance away and merely held out the beads to them, as I
wished to draw them quite outside, that I might inspect the inside
of the cages. This desire of mine gave rise to another difficulty,
as these girls were not allowed to put their feet to the ground all
the time they were confined in these places. However, they wished
to get the beads, and so the old lady had to go outside and collect
a lot of pieces of wood and bamboo, which she placed on the ground,
and then going to one of the girls, she helped her down and held
her hand as she stepped from one piece of wood to another until she
came near enough to get the beads I held out to her. I then went to
inspect the inside of the cage out of which she had come, but could
scarely put my head inside of it, the atmosphere was so hot and
stifling. It was clean and contained nothing but a few short
lengths of bamboo for holding water. There was only room for the
girl to sit or lie down in a crouched position on the bamboo
platform, and when the doors are shut it must be nearly or quite
dark inside. The girls are never allowed to come out except once a
day to bathe in a dish or wooden bowl placed close to each cage.
They say that they perspire profusely. They are placed in these
stifling cages when quite young, and must remain there until they
are young women, when they are taken out and have each a great
marriage feast provided for them. One of them was about fourteen or
fifteen years old, and the chief told us that she had been there
for five years, but would soon be taken out now. The other two were
about eight and ten years old, and they have to stay there for
several years longer.”
In Kabadi, a district of British New Guinea, “daughters of
chiefs, when they are about twelve or thirteen years of age, are
kept indoors for two or three years, never being allowed, under any
pretence, to descend from the house, and the house is so shaded
that the sun cannot shine on them.” Among the Yabim and
Bukaua, two neighbouring and kindred tribes on the coast of
Northern New Guinea, a girl at puberty is secluded for some five or
six weeks in an inner part of the house; but she may not sit on the
floor, lest her uncleanliness should cleave to it, so a log of wood
is placed for her to squat on. Moreover, she may not touch the
ground with her feet; hence if she is obliged to quit the house for
a short time, she is muffled up in mats and walks on two halves of
a coco-nut shell, which are fastened like sandals to her feet by
creeping plants. Among the Ot Danoms of Borneo girls at the age of
eight or ten years are shut up in a little room or cell of the
house, and cut off from all intercourse with the world for a long
time. The cell, like the rest of the house, is raised on piles
above the ground, and is lit by a single small window opening on a
lonely place, so that the girl is in almost total darkness. She may
not leave the room on any pretext whatever, not even for the most
necessary purposes. None of her family may see her all the time she
is shut up, but a single slave woman is appointed to wait on her.
During her lonely confinement, which often lasts seven years, the
girl occupies herself in weaving mats or with other handiwork. Her
bodily growth is stunted by the long want of exercise, and when, on
attaining womanhood, she is brought out, her complexion is pale and
wax-like. She is now shown the sun, the earth, the water, the
trees, and the flowers, as if she were newly born. Then a great
feast is made, a slave is killed, and the girl is smeared with his
blood. In Ceram girls at puberty were formerly shut up by
themselves in a hut which was kept dark. In Yap, one of the
Caroline Islands, should a girl be overtaken by her first
menstruation on the public road, she may not sit down on the earth,
but must beg for a coco-nut shell to put under her. She is shut up
for several days in a small hut at a distance from her
parents’ house, and afterwards she is bound to sleep for a
hundred days in one of the special houses which are provided for
the use of menstruous women.
In the island of Mabuiag, Torres Straits, when the signs of
puberty appear on a girl, a circle of bushes is made in a dark
corner of the house. Here, decked with shoulder-belts, armlets,
leglets just below the knees, and anklets, wearing a chaplet on her
head, and shell ornaments in her ears, on her chest, and on her
back, she squats in the midst of the bushes, which are piled so
high round about her that only her head is visible. In this state
of seclusion she must remain for three months. All this time the
sun may not shine upon her, but at night she is allowed to slip out
of the hut, and the bushes that hedge her in are then changed. She
may not feed herself or handle food, but is fed by one or two old
women, her maternal aunts, who are especially appointed to look
after her. One of these women cooks food for her at a special fire
in the forest. The girl is forbidden to eat turtle or turtle eggs
during the season when the turtles are breeding; but no vegetable
food is refused her. No man, not even her own father, may come into
the house while her seclusion lasts; for if her father saw her at
this time he would certainly have bad luck in his fishing, and
would probably smash his canoe the very next time he went out in
it. At the end of the three months she is carried down to a
freshwater creek by her attendants, hanging on to their shoulders
in such a way that her feet do not touch the ground, while the
women of the tribe form a ring round her, and thus escort her to
the beach. Arrived at the shore, she is stripped of her ornaments,
and the bearers stagger with her into the creek, where they immerse
her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the
girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the
two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon.
The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its
claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the
meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it.
The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws.
After that she is freshly decorated, and the whole party marches
back to the village in a single rank, the girl walking in the
centre between her two old aunts, who hold her by the wrists. The
husbands of her aunts now receive her and lead her into the house
of one of them, where all partake of food, and the girl is allowed
once more to feed herself in the usual manner. A dance follows, in
which the girl takes a prominent part, dancing between the husbands
of the two aunts who had charge of her in her retirement.
Among the Yaraikanna tribe of Cape York Peninsula, in Northern
Queensland, a girl at puberty is said to live by herself for a
month or six weeks; no man may see her, though any woman may. She
stays in a hut or shelter specially made for her, on the floor of
which she lies supine. She may not see the sun, and towards sunset
she must keep her eyes shut until the sun has gone down, otherwise
it is thought that her nose will be diseased. During her seclusion
she may eat nothing that lives in salt water, or a snake would kill
her. An old woman waits upon her and supplies her with roots, yams,
and water. Some Australian tribes are wont to bury their girls at
such seasons more or less deeply in the ground, perhaps in order to
hide them from the light of the sun.
Among the Indians of California a girl at her first menstruation
“was thought to be possessed of a particular degree of
supernatural power, and this was not always regarded as entirely
defiling or malevolent. Often, however, there was a strong feeling
of the power of evil inherent in her condition. Not only was she
secluded from her family and the community, but an attempt was made
to seclude the world from her. One of the injunctions most strongly
laid upon her was not to look about her. She kept her head bowed
and was forbidden to see the world and the sun. Some tribes covered
her with a blanket. Many of the customs in this connection
resembled those of the North Pacific Coast most strongly, such as
the prohibition to the girl to touch or scratch her head with her
hand, a special implement being furnished her for the purpose.
Sometimes she could eat only when fed and in other cases fasted
altogether.”
Among the Chinook Indians who inhabited the coast of Washington
State, when a chief’s daughter attained to puberty, she was
hidden for five days from the view of the people; she might not
look at them nor at the sky, nor might she pick berries. It was
believed that if she were to look at the sky, the weather would be
bad; that if she picked berries, it would rain; and that when she
hung her towel of cedar-bark on a spruce-tree, the tree withered up
at once. She went out of the house by a separate door and bathed in
a creek far from the village. She fasted for some days, and for
many days more she might not eat fresh food.
Amongst the Aht or Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island, when
girls reach puberty they are placed in a sort of gallery in the
house “and are there surrounded completely with mats, so that
neither the sun nor any fire can be seen. In this cage they remain
for several days. Water is given them, but no food. The longer a
girl remains in this retirement the greater honour is it to the
parents; but she is disgraced for life if it is known that she has
seen fire or the sun during this initiatory ordeal.” Pictures
of the mythical thunder-bird are painted on the screens behind
which she hides. During her seclusion she may neither move nor lie
down, but must always sit in a squatting posture. She may not touch
her hair with her hands, but is allowed to scratch her head with a
comb or a piece of bone provided for the purpose. To scratch her
body is also forbidden, as it is believed that every scratch would
leave a scar. For eight months after reaching maturity she may not
eat any fresh food, particularly salmon; moreover, she must eat by
herself, and use a cup and dish of her own.
In the Tsetsaut tribe of British Columbia a girl at puberty
wears a large hat of skin which comes down over her face and
screens it from the sun. It is believed that if she were to expose
her face to the sun or to the sky, rain would fall. The hat
protects her face also against the fire, which ought not to strike
her skin; to shield her hands she wears mittens. In her mouth she
carries the tooth of an animal to prevent her own teeth from
becoming hollow. For a whole year she may not see blood unless her
face is blackened; otherwise she would grow blind. For two years
she wears the hat and lives in a hut by herself, although she is
allowed to see other people. At the end of two years a man takes
the hat from her head and throws it away. In the Bilqula or Bella
Coola tribe of British Columbia, when a girl attains puberty she
must stay in the shed which serves as her bedroom, where she has a
separate fireplace. She is not allowed to descend to the main part
of the house, and may not sit by the fire of the family. For four
days she is bound to remain motionless in a sitting posture. She
fasts during the day, but is allowed a little food and drink very
early in the morning. After the four days’ seclusion she may
leave her room, but only through a separate opening cut in the
floor, for the houses are raised on piles. She may not yet come
into the chief room. In leaving the house she wears a large hat
which protects her face against the rays of the sun. It is believed
that if the sun were to shine on her face her eyes would suffer.
She may pick berries on the hills, but may not come near the river
or sea for a whole year. Were she to eat fresh salmon she would
lose her senses, or her mouth would be changed into a long
beak.
Amongst the Tlingit (Thlinkeet) or Kolosh Indians of Alaska,
when a girl showed signs of womanhood she used to be confined to a
little hut or cage, which was completely blocked up with the
exception of a small air-hole. In this dark and filthy abode she
had to remain a year, without fire, exercise, or associates. Only
her mother and a female slave might supply her with nourishment.
Her food was put in at the little window; she had to drink out of
the wing-bone of a white-headed eagle. The time of her seclusion
was afterwards reduced in some places to six or three months or
even less. She had to wear a sort of hat with long flaps, that her
gaze might not pollute the sky; for she was thought unfit for the
sun to shine upon, and it was imagined that her look would destroy
the luck of a hunter, fisher, or gambler, turn things to stone, and
do other mischief. At the end of her confinement her old clothes
were burnt, new ones were made, and a feast was given, at which a
slit was cut in her under lip parallel to the mouth, and a piece of
wood or shell was inserted to keep the aperture open. Among the
Koniags, an Esquimau people of Alaska, a girl at puberty was placed
in a small hut in which she had to remain on her hands and feet for
six months; then the hut was enlarged a little so as to allow her
to straighten her back, but in this posture she had to remain for
six months more. All this time she was regarded as an unclean being
with whom no one might hold intercourse.
When symptoms of puberty appeared on a girl for the first time,
the Guaranis of Southern Brazil, on the borders of Paraguay, used
to sew her up in her hammock, leaving only a small opening in it to
allow her to breathe. In this condition, wrapt up and shrouded like
a corpse, she was kept for two or three days or so long as the
symptoms lasted, and during this time she had to observe a most
rigorous fast. After that she was entrusted to a matron, who cut
the girl’s hair and enjoined her to abstain most strictly
from eating flesh of any kind until her hair should be grown long
enough to hide her ears. In similar circumstances the Chiriguanos
of South-eastern Bolivia hoisted the girl in her hammock to the
roof, where she stayed for a month: the second month the hammock
was let half-way down from the roof; and in the third month old
women, armed with sticks, entered the hut and ran about striking
everything they met, saying they were hunting the snake that had
wounded the girl.
Among the Matacos or Mataguayos, an Indian tribe of the Gran
Chaco, a girl at puberty has to remain in seclusion for some time.
She lies covered up with branches or other things in a corner of
the hut, seeing no one and speaking to no one, and during this time
she may eat neither flesh nor fish. Meantime a man beats a drum in
front of the house. Among the Yuracares, an Indian tribe of Eastern
Bolivia, when a girl perceives the signs of puberty, her father
constructs a little hut of palm leaves near the house. In this
cabin he shuts up his daughter so that she cannot see the light,
and there she remains fasting rigorously for four days.
Amongst the Macusis of British Guiana, when a girl shows the
first signs of puberty, she is hung in a hammock at the highest
point of the hut. For the first few days she may not leave the
hammock by day, but at night she must come down, light a fire, and
spend the night beside it, else she would break out in sores on her
neck, throat, and other parts of her body. So long as the symptoms
are at their height, she must fast rigorously. When they have
abated, she may come down and take up her abode in a little
compartment that is made for her in the darkest corner of the hut.
In the morning she may cook her food, but it must be at a separate
fire and in a vessel of her own. After about ten days the magician
comes and undoes the spell by muttering charms and breathing on her
and on the more valuable of the things with which she has come in
contact. The pots and drinking-vessels which she used are broken
and the fragments buried. After her first bath, the girl must
submit to be beaten by her mother with thin rods without uttering a
cry. At the end of the second period she is again beaten, but not
afterwards. She is now “clean,” and can mix again with
people. Other Indians of Guiana, after keeping the girl in her
hammock at the top of the hut for a month, expose her to certain
large ants, whose bite is very painful. Sometimes, in addition to
being stung with ants, the sufferer has to fast day and night so
long as she remains slung up on high in her hammock, so that when
she comes down she is reduced to a skeleton.
When a Hindoo maiden reaches maturity she is kept in a dark room
for four days, and is forbidden to see the sun. She is regarded as
unclean; no one may touch her. Her diet is restricted to boiled
rice, milk, sugar, curd, and tamarind without salt. On the morning
of the fifth day she goes to a neighbouring tank, accompanied by
five women whose husbands are alive. Smeared with turmeric water,
they all bathe and return home, throwing away the mat and other
things that were in the room. The Rarhi Brahmans of Bengal compel a
girl at puberty to live alone, and do not allow her to see the face
of any male. For three days she remains shut up in a dark room, and
has to undergo certain penances. Fish, flesh, and sweetmeats are
forbidden her; she must live upon rice and ghee. Among the Tiyans
of Malabar a girl is thought to be polluted for four days from the
beginning of her first menstruation. During this time she must keep
to the north side of the house, where she sleeps on a grass mat of
a particular kind, in a room festooned with garlands of young
coco-nut leaves. Another girl keeps her company and sleeps with
her, but she may not touch any other person, tree or plant.
Further, she may not see the sky, and woe betide her if she catches
sight of a crow or a cat! Her diet must be strictly vegetarian,
without salt, tamarinds, or chillies. She is armed against evil
spirits by a knife, which is placed on the mat or carried on her
person.
In Cambodia a girl at puberty is put to bed under a mosquito
curtain, where she should stay a hundred days. Usually, however,
four, five, ten, or twenty days are thought enough; and even this,
in a hot climate and under the close meshes of the curtain, is
sufficiently trying. According to another account, a Cambodian
maiden at puberty is said to “enter into the shade.”
During her retirement, which, according to the rank and position of
her family, may last any time from a few days to several years, she
has to observe a number of rules, such as not to be seen by a
strange man, not to eat flesh or fish, and so on. She goes nowhere,
not even to the pagoda. But this state of seclusion is discontinued
during eclipses; at such times she goes forth and pays her
devotions to the monster who is supposed to cause eclipses by
catching the heavenly bodies between his teeth. This permission to
break her rule of retirement and appear abroad during an eclipse
seems to show how literally the injunction is interpreted which
forbids maidens entering on womanhood to look upon the sun.
A superstition so widely diffused as this might be expected to
leave traces in legends and folk-tales. And it has done so. The old
Greek story of Danae, who was confined by her father in a
subterranean chamber or a brazen tower, but impregnated by Zeus,
who reached her in the shape of a shower of gold, perhaps belongs
to this class of tales. It has its counterpart in the legend which
the Kirghiz of Siberia tell of their ancestry. A certain Khan had a
fair daughter, whom he kept in a dark iron house, that no man might
see her. An old woman tended her; and when the girl was grown to
maidenhood she asked the old woman, “Where do you go so
often?” “My child,” said the old dame,
“there is a bright world. In that bright world your father
and mother live, and all sorts of people live there. That is where
I go.” The maiden said, “Good mother, I will tell
nobody, but show me that bright world.” So the old woman took
the girl out of the iron house. But when she saw the bright world,
the girl tottered and fainted; and the eye of God fell upon her,
and she conceived. Her angry father put her in a golden chest and
sent her floating away (fairy gold can float in fairyland) over the
wide sea. The shower of gold in the Greek story, and the eye of God
in the Kirghiz legend, probably stand for sunlight and the sun. The
idea that women may be impregnated by the sun is not uncommon in
legends, and there are even traces of it in marriage customs.
4. Reasons for the Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
THE MOTIVE for the restraints so commonly imposed on girls at
puberty is the deeply engrained dread which primitive man
universally entertains of menstruous blood. He fears it at all
times but especially on its first appearance; hence the
restrictions under which women lie at their first menstruation are
usually more stringent than those which they have to observe at any
subsequent recurrence of the mysterious flow. Some evidence of the
fear and of the customs based on it has been cited in an earlier
part of this work; but as the terror, for it is nothing less, which
the phenomenon periodically strikes into the mind of the savage has
deeply influenced his life and institutions, it may be well to
illustrate the subject with some further examples.
Thus in the Encounter Bay tribe of South Australia there is, or
used to be, a “superstition which obliges a woman to separate
herself from the camp at the time of her monthly illness, when if a
young man or boy should approach, she calls out, and he immediately
makes a circuit to avoid her. If she is neglectful upon this point,
she exposes herself to scolding, and sometimes to severe beating by
her husband or nearest relation, because the boys are told from
their infancy, that if they see the blood they will early become
grey-headed, and their strength will fail prematurely.” The
Dieri of Central Australia believe that if women at these times
were to eat fish or bathe in a river, the fish would all die and
the water would dry up. The Arunta of the same region forbid
menstruous women to gather the irriakura bulbs, which form
a staple article of diet for both men and women. They think that
were a woman to break this rule, the supply of bulbs would
fail.
In some Australian tribes the seclusion of menstruous women was
even more rigid, and was enforced by severer penalties than a
scolding or a beating. Thus “there is a regulation relating
to camps in the Wakelbura tribe which forbids the women coming into
the encampment by the same path as the men. Any violation of this
rule would in a large camp be punished with death. The reason for
this is the dread with which they regard the menstrual period of
women. During such a time, a woman is kept entirely away from the
camp, half a mile at least. A woman in such a condition has boughs
of some tree of her totem tied round her loins, and is constantly
watched and guarded, for it is thought that should any male be so
unfortunate as to see a woman in such a condition, he would die. If
such a woman were to let herself be seen by a man, she would
probably be put to death. When the woman has recovered, she is
painted red and white, her head covered with feathers, and returns
to the camp.”
In Muralug, one of the Torres Straits Islands, a menstruous
woman may not eat anything that lives in the sea, else the natives
believe that the fisheries would fail. In Galela, to the west of
New Guinea, women at their monthly periods may not enter a
tobacco-field, or the plants would be attacked by disease. The
Minangkabauers of Sumatra are persuaded that if a woman in her
unclean state were to go near a rice-field, the crop would be
spoiled.
The Bushmen of South Africa think that, by a glance of a
girl’s eye at the time when she ought to be kept in strict
retirement, men become fixed in whatever positions they happen to
occupy, with whatever they were holding in their hands, and are
changed into trees that talk. Cattle-rearing tribes of South Africa
hold that their cattle would die if the milk were drunk by a
menstruous woman; and they fear the same disaster if a drop of her
blood were to fall on the ground and the oxen were to pass over it.
To prevent such a calamity women in general, not menstruous women
only, are forbidden to enter the cattle enclosure; and more than
that, they may not use the ordinary paths in entering the village
or in passing from one hut to another. They are obliged to make
circuitous tracks at the back of the huts in order to avoid the
ground in the middle of the village where the cattle stand or lie
down. These women’s tracks may be seen at every Caffre
village. Among the Baganda, in like manner, no menstruous woman
might drink milk or come into contact with any milk-vessel; and she
might not touch anything that belonged to her husband, nor sit on
his mat, nor cook his food. If she touched anything of his at such
a time it was deemed equivalent to wishing him dead or to actually
working magic for his destruction. Were she to handle any article
of his, he would surely fall ill; were she to touch his weapons, he
would certainly be killed in the next battle. Further, the Baganda
would not suffer a menstruous woman to visit a well; if she did so,
they feared that the water would dry up, and that she herself would
fall sick and die, unless she confessed her fault and the
medicine-man made atonement for her. Among the Akikuyu of British
East Africa, if a new hut is built in a village and the wife
chances to menstruate in it on the day she lights the first fire
there, the hut must be broken down and demolished the very next
day. The woman may on no account sleep a second night in it; there
is a curse both on her and on it.
According to the Talmud, if a woman at the beginning of her
period passes between two men, she thereby kills one of them.
Peasants of the Lebanon think that menstruous women are the cause
or many misfortunes; their shadow causes flowers to wither and
trees to perish, it even arrests the movements of serpents; if one
of them mounts a horse, the animal might die or at least be
disabled for a long time.
The Guayquiries of the Orinoco believe that when a woman has her
courses, everything upon which she steps will die, and that if a
man treads on the place where she has passed, his legs will
immediately swell up. Among the Bri-bri Indians of Costa Rica a
married woman at her periods uses for plates only banana leaves,
which, when she has done with them, she throws away in a
sequestered spot; for should a cow find and eat them, the animal
would waste away and perish. Also she drinks only out of a special
vessel, because any person who should afterwards drink out of the
same vessel would infallibly pine away and die.
Among most tribes of North American Indians the custom was that
women in their courses retired from the camp or the village and
lived during the time of their uncleanness in special huts or
shelters which were appropriated to their use. There they dwelt
apart, eating and sleeping by themselves, warming themselves at
their own fires, and strictly abstaining from all communications
with men, who shunned them just as if they were stricken with the
plague.
Thus, to take examples, the Creek and kindred Indians of the
United States compelled women at menstruation to live in separate
huts at some distance from the village. There the women had to
stay, at the risk of being surprised and cut off by enemies. It was
thought “a most horrid and dangerous pollution” to go
near the women at such times; and the danger extended to enemies
who, if they slew the women, had to cleanse themselves from the
pollution by means of certain sacred herbs and roots. The Stseelis
Indians of British Columbia imagined that if a menstruous woman
were to step over a bundle of arrows, the arrows would thereby be
rendered useless and might even cause the death of their owner; and
similarly that if she passed in front of a hunter who carried a
gun, the weapon would never shoot straight again. Among the
Chippeways and other Indians of the Hudson Bay Territory,
menstruous women are excluded from the camp, and take up their
abode in huts of branches. They wear long hoods, which effectually
conceal the head and breast. They may not touch the household
furniture nor any objects used by men; for their touch “is
supposed to defile them, so that their subsequent use would be
followed by certain mischief or misfortune,” such as disease
or death. They must drink out of a swan’s bone. They may not
walk on the common paths nor cross the tracks of animals. They
“are never permitted to walk on the ice of rivers or lakes,
or near the part where the men are hunting beaver, or where a
fishing-net is set, for fear of averting their success. They are
also prohibited at those times from partaking of the head of any
animal, and even from walking in or crossing the track where the
head of a deer, moose, beaver, and many other animals have lately
been carried, either on a sledge or on the back. To be guilty of a
violation of this custom is considered as of the greatest
importance; because they firmly believe that it would be a means of
preventing the hunter from having an equal success in his future
excursions.” So the Lapps forbid women at menstruation to
walk on that part of the shore where the fishers are in the habit
of setting out their fish; and the Esquimaux of Bering Strait
believe that if hunters were to come near women in their courses
they would catch no game. For a like reason the Carrier Indians
will not suffer a menstruous woman to cross the tracks of animals;
if need be, she is carried over them. They think that if she waded
in a stream or a lake, the fish would die.
Amongst the civilised nations of Europe the superstitions which
cluster round this mysterious aspect of woman’s nature are
not less extravagant than those which prevail among savages. In the
oldest existing cyclopaedia—the Natural History of
Pliny—the list of dangers apprehended from menstruation is
longer than any furnished by mere barbarians. According to Pliny,
the touch of a menstruous woman turned wine to vinegar, blighted
crops, killed seedlings, blasted gardens, brought down the fruit
from trees, dimmed mirrors, blunted razors, rusted iron and brass
(especially at the waning of the moon), killed bees, or at least
drove them from their hives, caused mares to miscarry, and so
forth. Similarly, in various parts of Europe, it is still believed
that if a woman in her courses enters a brewery the beer will turn
sour; if she touches beer, wine, vinegar, or milk, it will go bad;
if she makes jam, it will not keep; if she mounts a mare, it will
miscarry; if she touches buds, they will wither; if she climbs a
cherry tree, it will die. In Brunswick people think that if a
menstruous woman assists at the killing of a pig, the pork will
putrefy. In the Greek island of Calymnos a woman at such times may
not go to the well to draw water, nor cross a running stream, nor
enter the sea. Her presence in a boat is said to raise storms.
Thus the object of secluding women at menstruation is to
neutralise the dangerous influences which are supposed to emanate
from them at such times. That the danger is believed to be
especially great at the first menstruation appears from the unusual
precautions taken to isolate girls at this crisis. Two of these
precautions have been illustrated above, namely, the rules that the
girls may not touch the ground nor see the sun. The general effect
of these rules is to keep her suspended, so to say, between heaven
and earth. Whether enveloped in her hammock and slung up to the
roof, as in South America, or raised above the ground in a dark and
narrow cage, as in New Ireland, she may be considered to be out of
the way of doing mischief, since, being shut off both from the
earth and from the sun, she can poison neither of these great
sources of life by her deadly contagion. In short, she is rendered
harmless by being, in electrical language, insulated. But the
precautions thus taken to isolate or insulate the girl are dictated
by a regard for her own safety as well as for the safety of others.
For it is thought that she herself would suffer if she were to
neglect the prescribed regimen. Thus Zulu girls, as we have seen,
believe that they would shrivel to skeletons if the sun were to
shine on them at puberty, and the Macusis imagine that, if a young
woman were to transgress the rules, she would suffer from sores on
various parts of her body. In short, the girl is viewed as charged
with a powerful force which, if not kept within bounds, may prove
destructive both to herself and to all with whom she comes in
contact. To repress this force within the limits necessary for the
safety of all concerned is the object of the taboos in
question.
The same explanation applies to the observance of the same rules
by divine kings and priests. The uncleanness, as it is called, of
girls at puberty and the sanctity of holy men do not, to the
primitive mind, differ materially from each other. They are only
different manifestations of the same mysterious energy which, like
energy in general, is in itself neither good nor bad, but becomes
beneficent or maleficent according to its application. Accordingly,
if, like girls at puberty, divine personages may neither touch the
ground nor see the sun, the reason is, on the one hand, a fear lest
their divinity might, at contact with earth or heaven, discharge
itself with fatal violence on either; and, on the other hand, an
apprehension that the divine being, thus drained of his ethereal
virtue, might thereby be incapacitated for the future performance
of those magical functions, upon the proper discharge of which the
safety of the people and even of the world is believed to hang.
Thus the rules in question fall under the head of the taboos which
we examined in an earlier part of this book; they are intended to
preserve the life of the divine person and with it the life of his
subjects and worshippers. Nowhere, it is thought, can his precious
yet dangerous life be at once so safe and so harmless as when it is
neither in heaven nor in earth, but, as far as possible, suspended
between the two.
LXI. The Myth of Balder
A DEITY whose life might in a sense be said to be neither in
heaven nor on earth but between the two, was the Norse Balder, the
good and beautiful god, the son of the great god Odin, and himself
the wisest, mildest, best beloved of all the immortals. The story
of his death, as it is told in the younger or prose Edda,
runs thus. Once on a time Balder dreamed heavy dreams which seemed
to forebode his death. Thereupon the gods held a council and
resolved to make him secure against every danger. So the goddess
Frigg took an oath from fire and water, iron and all metals, stones
and earth, from trees, sicknesses and poisons, and from all
four-footed beasts, birds, and creeping things, that they would not
hurt Balder. When this was done Balder was deemed invulnerable; so
the gods amused themselves by setting him in their midst, while
some shot at him, others hewed at him, and others threw stones at
him. But whatever they did, nothing could hurt him; and at this
they were all glad. Only Loki, the mischief-maker, was displeased,
and he went in the guise of an old woman to Frigg, who told him
that the weapons of the gods could not wound Balder, since she had
made them all swear not to hurt him. Then Loki asked, “Have
all things sworn to spare Balder?” She answered, “East
of Walhalla grows a plant called mistletoe; it seemed to me too
young to swear.” So Loki went and pulled the mistletoe and
took it to the assembly of the gods. There he found the blind god
Hother standing at the outside of the circle. Loki asked him,
“Why do you not shoot at Balder?” Hother answered,
“Because I do not see where he stands; besides I have no
weapon.” Then said Loki, “Do like the rest and show
Balder honour, as they all do. I will show you where he stands, and
do you shoot at him with this twig.” Hother took the
mistletoe and threw it at Balder, as Loki directed him. The
mistletoe struck Balder and pierced him through and through, and he
fell down dead. And that was the greatest misfortune that ever
befell gods and men. For a while the gods stood speechless, then
they lifted up their voices and wept bitterly. They took
Balder’s body and brought it to the sea-shore. There stood
Balder’s ship; it was called Ringhorn, and was the hugest of
all ships. The gods wished to launch the ship and to burn
Balder’s body on it, but the ship would not stir. So they
sent for a giantess called Hyrrockin. She came riding on a wolf and
gave the ship such a push that fire flashed from the rollers and
all the earth shook. Then Balder’s body was taken and placed
on the funeral pile upon his ship. When his wife Nanna saw that,
her heart burst for sorrow and she died. So she was laid on the
funeral pile with her husband, and fire was put to it.
Balder’s horse, too, with all its trappings, was burned on
the pile.
Whether he was a real or merely a mythical personage, Balder was
worshipped in Norway. On one of the bays of the beautiful Sogne
Fiord, which penetrates far into the depths of the solemn Norwegian
mountains, with their sombre pine-forests and their lofty cascades
dissolving into spray before they reach the dark water of the fiord
far below, Balder had a great sanctuary. It was called
Balder’s Grove. A palisade enclosed the hallowed ground, and
within it stood a spacious temple with the images of many gods, but
none of them was worshipped with such devotion as Balder. So great
was the awe with which the heathen regarded the place that no man
might harm another there, nor steal his cattle, nor defile himself
with women. But women cared for the images of the gods in the
temple; they warmed them at the fire, anointed them with oil, and
dried them with cloths.
Whatever may be thought of an historical kernel underlying a
mythical husk in the legend of Balder, the details of the story
suggest that it belongs to that class of myths which have been
dramatised an ritual, or, to put it otherwise, which have been
performed as magical ceremonies for the sake of producing those
natural effects which they describe in figurative language. A myth
is never so graphic and precise in its details as when it is, so to
speak, the book of the words which are spoken and acted by the
performers of the sacred rite. That the Norse story of Balder was a
myth of this sort will become probable if we can prove that
ceremonies resembling the incidents in the tale have been performed
by Norsemen and other European peoples. Now the main incidents in
the tale are two—first, the pulling of the mistletoe, and
second, the death and burning of the god; and both of them may
perhaps be found to have had their counterparts in yearly rites
observed, whether separately or conjointly, by people in various
parts of Europe. These rites will be described and discussed in the
following chapters. We shall begin with the annual festivals of
fire and shall reserve the pulling of the mistletoe for
consideration later on.
LXII. The Fire-Festivals of Europe
1. The Fire-festivals in general
ALL over Europe the peasants have been accustomed from time
immemorial to kindle bonfires on certain days of the year, and to
dance round or leap over them. Customs of this kind can be traced
back on historical evidence to the Middle Ages, and their analogy
to similar customs observed in antiquity goes with strong internal
evidence to prove that their origin must be sought in a period long
prior to the spread of Christianity. Indeed the earliest proof of
their observance in Northern Europe is furnished by the attempts
made by Christian synods in the eighth century to put them down as
heathenish rites. Not uncommonly effigies are burned in these
fires, or a pretence is made of burning a living person in them;
and there are grounds for believing that anciently human beings
were actually burned on these occasions. A brief view of the
customs in question will bring out the traces of human sacrifice,
and will serve at the same time to throw light on their
meaning.
The seasons of the year when these bonfires are most commonly
lit are spring and midsummer; but in some places they are kindled
also at the end of autumn or during the course of the winter,
particularly on Hallow E’en (the thirty-first of October),
Christmas Day, and the Eve of Twelfth Day. Space forbids me to
describe all these festivals at length; a few specimens must serve
to illustrate their general character. We shall begin with the
fire-festivals of spring, which usually fall on the first Sunday of
Lent (Quadragesima or Invocavit), Easter Eve, and
May Day.
2. The Lenten Fires
THE CUSTOM of kindling bonfires on the first Sunday in Lent has
prevailed in Belgium, the north of France, and many parts of
Germany. Thus in the Belgian Ardennes for a week or a fortnight
before the “day of the great fire,” as it is called,
children go about from farm to farm collecting fuel. At Grand
Halleux any one who refuses their request is pursued next day by
the children, who try to blacken his face with the ashes of the
extinct fire. When the day has come, they cut down bushes,
especially juniper and broom, and in the evening great bonfires
blaze on all the heights. It is a common saying that seven bonfires
should be seen if the village is to be safe from conflagrations. If
the Meuse happens to be frozen hard at the time, bonfires are lit
also on the ice. At Grand Halleux they set up a pole called
makral, or “the witch,” in the midst of the
pile, and the fire is kindled by the man who was last married in
the village. In the neighbourhood of Morlanwelz a straw man is
burnt in the fire. Young people and children dance and sing round
the bonfires, and leap over the embers to secure good crops or a
happy marriage within the year, or as a means of guarding
themselves against colic. In Brabant on the same Sunday, down to
the beginning of the nineteenth century, women and men disguised in
female attire used to go with burning torches to the fields, where
they danced and sang comic songs for the purpose, as they alleged,
of driving away “the wicked sower,” who is mentioned in
the Gospel for the day. At Pâturages, in the province of Hainaut,
down to about 1840 the custom was observed under the name of
Escouvion or Scouvion. Every year on the first
Sunday of Lent, which was called the Day of the Little Scouvion,
young folks and children used to run with lighted torches through
the gardens and orchards. As they ran they cried at the pitch of
their voices:
“Bear apples, bear pears, and cherries all
black
To Scouvion!”
At these words the torch-bearer whirled his blazing brand and
hurled it among the branches of the apple-trees, the pear-trees,
and the cherry-trees. The next Sunday was called the Day of the
Great Scouvion, and the same race with lighted torches among the
trees of the orchards was repeated in the afternoon till darkness
fell.
In the French department of the Ardennes the whole village used
to dance and sing around the bonfires which were lighted on the
first Sunday in Lent. Here, too, it was the person last married,
sometimes a man and sometimes a woman, who put the match to the
fire. The custom is still kept up very commonly in the district.
Cats used to be burnt in the fire or roasted to death by being held
over it; and while they were burning the shepherds drove their
flocks through the smoke and flames as a sure means of guarding
them against sickness and witchcraft. In some communes it was
believed that the livelier the dance round the fire, the better
would be the crops that year.
In the French province of Franche-Comté, to the west of the Jura
Mountains, the first Sunday of Lent is known as the Sunday of the
Firebrands (Brandons), on account of the fires which it is
customary to kindle on that day. On the Saturday or the Sunday the
village lads harness themselves to a cart and drag it about the
streets, stopping at the doors of the houses where there are girls
and begging fora faggot. When they have got enough, they cart the
fuel to a spot at some little distance from the village, pile it
up, and set it on fire. All the people of the parish come out to
see the bonfire. In some villages, when the bells have rung the
Angelus, the signal for the observance is given by cries of,
“To the fire! to the fire!” Lads, lasses, and children
dance round the blaze, and when the flames have died down they vie
with each other in leaping over the red embers. He or she who does
so without singeing his or her garments will be married within the
year. Young folk also carry lighted torches about the streets or
the fields, and when they pass an orchard they cry out, “More
fruit than leaves!” Down to recent years at Laviron, in the
department of Doubs, it was the young married couples of the year
who had charge of the bonfires. In the midst of the bonfire a pole
was planted with a wooden figure of a cock fastened to the top.
Then there were races, and the winner received the cock as a
prize.
In Auvergne fires are everywhere kindled on the evening of the
first Sunday in Lent. Every village, every hamlet, even every ward,
every isolated farm has its bonfire or figo, as it is
called, which blazes up as the shades of night are falling. The
fires may be seen flaring on the heights and in the plains; the
people dance and sing round about them and leap through the flames.
Then they proceed to the ceremony of the Grannas-mias. A
granno-mio is a torch of straw fastened to the top of a
pole. When the pyre is half consumed, the bystanders kindle the
torches at the expiring flames and carry them into the neighbouring
orchards, fields, and gardens, wherever there are fruit-trees. As
they march they sing at the top of their voices, “Granno my
friend, Granno my father, Granno my mother.” Then they pass
the burning torches under the branches of every tree, singing.
“Brando, brandounci tsaque brantso, in plan
panei!”
that is, “Firebrand burn; every branch a basketful!”
In some villages the people also run across the sown fields and
shake the ashes of the torches on the ground; also they put some of
the ashes in the fowls’ nests, in order that the hens may lay
plenty of eggs throughout the year. When all these ceremonies have
been performed, everybody goes home and feasts; the special dishes
of the evening are fritters and pancakes. Here the application of
the fire to the fruit-trees, to the sown fields, and to the nests
of the poultry is clearly a charm intended to ensure fertility; and
the Granno to whom the invocations are addressed, and who gives his
name to the torches, may possibly be, as Dr. Pommerol suggests, no
other than the ancient Celtic god Grannus, whom the Romans
identified with Apollo, and whose worship is attested by
inscriptions found not only in France but in Scotland and on the
Danube.
The custom of carrying lighted torches of straw
(brandons) about the orchards and fields to fertilise them
on the first Sunday of Lent seems to have been common in France,
whether it was accompanied with the practice of kindling bonfires
or not. Thus in the province of Picardy “on the first Sunday
of Lent people carried torches through the fields, exorcising the
field-mice, the darnel, and the smut. They imagined that they did
much good to the gardens and caused the onions to grow large.
Children ran about the fields, torch in hand, to make the land more
fertile.” At Verges, a village between the Jura and the Combe
d’Ain, the torches at this season were kindled on the top of
a mountain, and the bearers went to every house in the village,
demanding roasted peas and obliging all couples who had been
married within the year to dance. In Berry, a district of Central
France, it appears that bonfires are not lighted on this day, but
when the sun has set the whole population of the villages, armed
with blazing torches of straw, disperse over the country and scour
the fields, the vineyards, and the orchards. Seen from afar, the
multitude of moving lights, twinkling in the darkness, appear like
will-o’-the-wisps chasing each other across the plains, along
the hillsides, and down the valleys. While the men wave their
flambeaus about the branches of the fruit-trees, the women and
children tie bands of wheaten-straw round the tree-trunks. The
effect of the ceremony is supposed to be to avert the various
plagues from which the fruits of the earth are apt to suffer; and
the bands of straw fastened round the stems of the trees are
believed to render them fruitful.
In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the same season similar
customs have prevailed. Thus in the Eifel Mountains, Rhenish
Prussia, on the first Sunday in Lent young people used to collect
straw and brushwood from house to house. These they carried to an
eminence and piled up round a tall, slim beech-tree, to which a
piece of wood was fastened at right angles to form a cross. The
structure was known as the “hut” or
“castle.” Fire was set to it and the young people
marched round the blazing “castle” bareheaded, each
carrying a lighted torch and praying aloud. Sometimes a straw-man
was burned in the “hut.” People observed the direction
in which the smoke blew from the fire. If it blew towards the
corn-fields, it was a sign that the harvest would be abundant. On
the same day, in some parts of the Eifel, a great wheel was made of
straw and dragged by three horses to the top of the hill. Thither
the village boys marched at nightfall, set fire to the wheel, and
sent it rolling down the slope. At Oberstattfeld the wheel had to
be provided by the young man who was last married. About Echternach
in Luxemburg the same ceremony is called “burning the
witch.” At Voralberg in the Tyrol, on the first Sunday in
Lent, a slender young fir-tree is surrounded with a pile of straw
and firewood. To the top of the tree is fastened a human figure
called the “witch,” made of old clothes and stuffed
with gunpowder. At night the whole is set on fire and boys and
girls dance round it, swinging torches and singing rhymes in which
the words “corn in the winnowing-basket, the plough in the
earth” may be distinguished. In Swabia on the first Sunday in
Lent a figure called the “witch” or the “old
wife” or “winter’s grandmother” is made up
of clothes and fastened to a pole. This is stuck in the middle of a
pile of wood, to which fire is applied. While the
“witch” is burning, the young people throw blazing
discs into the air. The discs are thin round pieces of wood, a few
inches in diameter, with notched edges to imitate the rays of the
sun or stars. They have a hole in the middle, by which they are
attached to the end of a wand. Before the disc is thrown it is set
on fire, the wand is swung to and fro, and the impetus thus
communicated to the disc is augmented by dashing the rod sharply
against a sloping board. The burning disc is thus thrown off, and
mounting high into the air, describes a long fiery curve before it
reaches the ground. The charred embers of the burned
“witch” and discs are taken home and planted in the
flax-fields the same night, in the belief that they will keep
vermin from the fields. In the Rhön Mountains, situated on the
borders of Hesse and Bavaria, the people used to march to the top
of a hill or eminence on the first Sunday in Lent. Children and
lads carried torches, brooms daubed with tar, and poles swathed in
straw. A wheel, wrapt in combustibles, was kindled and rolled down
the hill; and the young people rushed about the fields with their
burning torches and brooms, till at last they flung them in a heap,
and standing round them, struck up a hymn or a popular song. The
object of running about the fields with the blazing torches was to
“drive away the wicked sower.” Or it was done in honour
of the Virgin, that she might preserve the fruits of the earth
throughout the year and bless them. In neighbouring villages of
Hesse, between the Rhön and the Vogel Mountains, it is thought that
wherever the burning wheels roll, the fields will be safe from hail
and strom.
In Switzerland, also, it is or used to be customary to kindle
bonfires on high places on the evening of the first Sunday in Lent,
and the day is therefore popularly known as Spark Sunday. The
custom prevailed, for example, throughout the canton of Lucerne.
Boys went about from house to house begging for wood and straw,
then piled the fuel on a conspicuous mountain or hill round about a
pole, which bore a straw effigy called “the witch.” At
nightfall the pile was set on fire, and the young folks danced
wildly round it, some of them cracking whips or ringing bells; and
when the fire burned low enough, they leaped over it. This was
called “burning the witch.” In some parts of the canton
also they used to wrap old wheels in straw and thorns, put a light
to them, and send them rolling and blazing down hill. The more
bonfires could be seen sparkling and flaring in the darkness, the
more fruitful was the year expected to be; and the higher the
dancers leaped beside or over the fire, the higher, it was thought,
would grow the flax. In some districts it was the last married man
or woman who must kindle the bonfire.
It seems hardly possible to separate from these bonfires,
kindled on the first Sunday in Lent, the fires in which, about the
same season, the effigy called Death is burned as part of the
ceremony of “carrying out Death.” We have seen that at
Spachendorf, in Austrian Silesia, on the morning of Rupert’s
Day (Shrove Tuesday?), a straw-man, dressed in a fur coat and a fur
cap, is laid in a hole outside the village and there burned, and
that while it is blazing every one seeks to snatch a fragment of
it, which he fastens to a branch of the highest tree in his garden
or buries in his field, believing that this will make the crops to
grow better. The ceremony is known as the “burying of
Death.” Even when the straw-man is not designated as Death,
the meaning of the observance is probably the same; for the name
Death, as I have tried to show, does not express the original
intention of the ceremony. At Cobern in the Eifel Mountains the
lads make up a straw-man on Shrove Tuesday. The effigy is formally
tried and accused of having perpetrated all the thefts that have
been committed in the neighbourhood throughout the year. Being
condemned to death, the straw-man is led through the village, shot,
and burned upon a pyre. They dance round the blazing pile, and the
last bride must leap over it. In Oldenburg on the evening of Shrove
Tuesday people used to make long bundles of straw, which they set
on fire, and then ran about the fields waving them, shrieking, and
singing wild songs. Finally they burned a straw-man on the field.
In the district of Düsseldorf the straw-man burned on Shrove
Tuesday was made of an unthreshed sheaf of corn. On the first
Monday after the spring equinox the urchins of Zurich drag a
straw-man on a little cart through the streets, while at the same
time the girls carry about a May-tree. When vespers ring, the
straw-man is burned. In the district of Aachen on Ash Wednesday, a
man used to be encased in peas-straw and taken to an appointed
place. Here he slipped quietly out of his straw casing, which was
then burned, the children thinking that it was the man who was
being burned. In the Val di Ledro (Tyrol) on the last day of the
Carnival a figure is made up of straw and brushwood and then
burned. The figure is called the Old Woman, and the ceremony
“burning the Old Woman.”
3. The Easter Fires
ANOTHER occasion on which these fire-festivals are held is
Easter Eve, the Saturday before Easter Sunday. On that day it has
been customary in Catholic countries to extinguish all the lights
in the churches, and then to make a new fire, sometimes with flint
and steel, sometimes with a burning-glass. At this fire is lit the
great Paschal or Easter candle, which is then used to rekindle all
the extinguished lights in the church. In many parts of Germany a
bonfire is also kindled, by means of the new fire, on some open
space near the church. It is consecrated, and the people bring
sticks of oak, walnut, and beech, which they char in the fire, and
then take home with them. Some of these charred sticks are
thereupon burned at home in a newly-kindled fire, with a prayer
that God will preserve the homestead from fire, lightning, and
hail. Thus every house receives “new fire.” Some of the
sticks are kept throughout the year and laid on the hearth-fire
during heavy thunder-storms to prevent the house from being struck
by lightning, or they are inserted in the roof with the like
intention. Others are placed in the fields, gardens, and meadows,
with a prayer that God will keep them from blight and hail. Such
fields and gardens are thought to thrive more than others; the corn
and the plants that grow in them are not beaten down by hail, nor
devoured by mice, vermin, and beetles; no witch harms them, and the
ears of corn stand close and full. The charred sticks are also
applied to the plough. The ashes of the Easter bonfire, together
with the ashes of the consecrated palm-branches, are mixed with the
seed at sowing. A wooden figure called Judas is sometimes burned in
the consecrated bonfire, and even where this custom has been
abolished the bonfire itself in some places goes by the name of
“the burning of Judas.”
The essentially pagan character of the Easter fire festival
appears plainly both from the mode in which it is celebrated by the
peasants and from the superstitious beliefs which they associate
with it. All over Northern and Central Germany, from Altmark and
Anhalt on the east, through Brunswick, Hanover, Oldenburg, the Harz
district, and Hesse to Westphalia the Easter bonfires still blaze
simultaneously on the hill-tops. As many as forty may sometimes be
counted within sight at once. Long before Easter the young people
have been busy collecting firewood; every farmer contributes, and
tar-barrels, petroleum cases, and so forth go to swell the pile.
Neighbouring villages vie with each other as to which shall send up
the greatest blaze. The fires are always kindled, year after year,
on the same hill, which accordingly often takes the name of Easter
Mountain. It is a fine spectacle to watch from some eminence the
bonfires flaring up one after another on the neighbouring heights.
As far as their light reaches, so far, in the belief of the
peasants, the fields will be fruitful, and the houses on which they
shine will be safe from conflagration or sickness. At Volkmarsen
and other places in Hesse the people used to observe which way the
wind blew the flames, and then they sowed flax seed in that
direction, confident that it would grow well. Brands taken from the
bonfires preserve houses from being struck by lightning; and the
ashes increase the fertility of the fields, protect them from mice,
and mixed with the drinking-water of cattle make the animals thrive
and ensure them against plague. As the flames die down, young and
old leap over them, and cattle are sometimes driven through the
smouldering embers. In some places tar-barrels or wheels wrapt in
straw used to be set on fire, and then sent rolling down the
hillside. In others the boys light torches and wisps of straw at
the bonfires and rush about brandishing them in their hands.
In Münsterland these Easter fires are always kindled upon
certain definite hills, which are hence known as Easter or Paschal
Mountains. The whole community assembles about the fire. The young
men and maidens, singing Easter hymns, march round and round the
fire, till the blaze dies down. Then the girls jump over the fire
in a line, one after the other, each supported by two young men who
hold her hands and run beside her. In the twilight boys with
blazing bundles of straw run over the fields to make them fruitful.
At Delmenhorst, in Oldenburg, it used to be the custom to cut down
two trees, plant them in the ground side by side, and pile twelve
tar-barrels against each. Brush-wood was then heaped about the
trees, and on the evening of Easter Saturday the boys, after
rushing about with blazing bean-poles in their hands, set fire to
the whole. At the end of the ceremony the urchins tried to blacken
each other and the clothes of grown-up people. In the Altmark it is
believed that as far as the blaze of the Easter bonfire is visible,
the corn will grow well throughout the year, and no conflagration
will break out. At Braunröde, in the Harz Mountains, it was the
custom to burn squirrels in the Easter bonfire. In the Altmark,
bones were burned in it.
Near Forchheim, in Upper Franken, a straw-man called the Judas
used to be burned in the churchyards on Easter Saturday. The whole
village contributed wood to the pyre on which he perished, and the
charred sticks were afterwards kept and planted in the fields on
Walpurgis Day (the first of May) to preserve the wheat from blight
and mildew. About a hundred years ago or more the custom at
Althenneberg, in Upper Bavaria, used to be as follows. On the
afternoon of Easter Saturday the lads collected wood, which they
piled in a cornfield, while in the middle of the pile they set up a
tall wooden cross all swathed in straw. After the evening service
they lighted their lanterns at the consecrated candle in the
church, and ran with them at full speed to the pyre, each striving
to get there first. The first to arrive set fire to the heap. No
woman or girl might come near the bonfire, but they were allowed to
watch it from a distance. As the flames rose the men and lads
rejoiced and made merry, shouting, “We are burning the
Judas!” The man who had been the first to reach the pyre and
to kindle it was rewarded on Easter Sunday by the women, who gave
him coloured eggs at the church door. The object of the whole
ceremony was to keep off the hail. At other villages of Upper
Bavaria the ceremony, which took place between nine and ten at
night on Easter Saturday, was called “burning the Easter
Man.” On a height about a mile from the village the young
fellows set up a tall cross enveloped in straw, so that it looked
like a man with his arms stretched out. This was the Easter Man. No
lad under eighteen years of age might take part in the ceremony.
One of the young men stationed himself beside the Easter Man,
holding in his hand a consecrated taper which he had brought from
the church and lighted. The rest stood at equal intervals in a
great circle round the cross. At a given signal they raced thrice
round the circle, and then at a second signal ran straight at the
cross and at the lad with the lighted taper beside it; the one who
reached the goal first had the right of setting fire to the Easter
Man. Great was the jubilation while he was burning. When he had
been consumed in the flames, three lads were chosen from among the
rest, and each of the three drew a circle on the ground with a
stick thrice round the ashes. Then they all left the spot. On
Easter Monday the villagers gathered the ashes and strewed them on
their fields; also they planted in the fields palmbranches which
had been consecrated on Palm Sunday, and sticks which had been
charred and hallowed on Good Friday, all for the purpose of
protecting their fields against showers of hail. In some parts of
Swabia the Easter fires might not be kindled with iron or steel or
flint, but only by the friction of wood.
The custom of the Easter fires appears to have prevailed all
over Central and Western Germany from north to south. We find it
also in Holland, where the fires were kindled on the highest
eminences, and the people danced round them and leaped through the
flames or over the glowing embers. Here too, as often in Germany,
the materials for the bonfire were collected by the young folk from
door to door. In many parts of Sweden firearms are discharged in
all directions on Easter Eve, and huge bonfires are lighted on
hills and eminences. Some people think that the intention is to
keep off the Troll and other evil spirits who are especially active
at this season.
4. The Beltane Fires
IN THE CENTRAL Highlands of Scotland bonfires, known as the
Beltane fires, were formerly kindled with great ceremony on the
first of May, and the traces of human sacrifices at them were
particularly clear and unequivocal. The custom of lighting the
bonfires lasted in various places far into the eighteenth century,
and the descriptions of the ceremony by writers of that period
present such a curious and interesting picture of ancient
heathendom surviving in our own country that I will reproduce them
in the words of their authors. The fullest of the descriptions is
the one bequeathed to us by John Ramsay, laird of Ochtertyre, near
Crieff, the patron of Burns and the friend of Sir Walter Scott. He
says: “But the most considerable of the Druidical festivals
is that of Beltane, or May-day, which was lately observed in some
parts of the Highlands with extraordinary ceremonies. … Like
the other public worship of the Druids, the Beltane feast seems to
have been performed on hills or eminences. They thought it
degrading to him whose temple is the universe, to suppose that he
would dwell in any house made with hands. Their sacrifices were
therefore offered in the open air, frequently upon the tops of
hills, where they were presented with the grandest views of nature,
and were nearest the seat of warmth and order. And, according to
tradition, such was the manner of celebrating this festival in the
Highlands within the last hundred years. But since the decline of
superstition, it has been celebrated by the people of each hamlet
on some hill or rising ground around which their cattle were
pasturing. Thither the young folks repaired in the morning, and cut
a trench, on the summit of which a seat of turf was formed for the
company. And in the middle a pile of wood or other fuel was placed,
which of old they kindled with
tein-eigin—i.e., forced-fire or
need-fire. Although, for many years past, they have been
contented with common fire, yet we shall now describe the process,
because it will hereafter appear that recourse is still had to the
tein-eigin upon extraordinary emergencies.
“The night before, all the fires in the country were
carefully extinguished, and next morning the materials for exciting
this sacred fire were prepared. The most primitive method seems to
be that which was used in the islands of Skye, Mull, and Tiree. A
well-seasoned plank of oak was procured, in the midst of which a
hole was bored. A wimble of the same timber was then applied, the
end of which they fitted to the hole. But in some parts of the
mainland the machinery was different. They used a frame of green
wood, of a square form, in the centre of which was an axle-tree. In
some places three times three persons, in others three times nine,
were required for turning round by turns the axle-tree or wimble.
If any of them had been guilty of murder, adultery, theft, or other
atrocious crime, it was imagined either that the fire would not
kindle, or that it would be devoid of its usual virtue. So soon as
any sparks were emitted by means of the violent friction, they
applied a species of agaric which grows on old birch-trees, and is
very combustible. This fire had the appearance of being immediately
derived from heaven, and manifold were the virtues ascribed to it.
They esteemed it a preservative against witch-craft, and a
sovereign remedy against malignant diseases, both in the human
species and in cattle; and by it the strongest poisons were
supposed to have their nature changed.
“After kindling the bonfire with the tein-eigin
the company prepared their victuals. And as soon as they had
finished their meal, they amused themselves a while in singing and
dancing round the fire. Towards the close of the entertainment, the
person who officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake
baked with eggs and scalloped round the edge, called am bonnach
bea-tine—i.e., the Beltane cake. It was divided
into a number of pieces, and distributed in great form to the
company. There was one particular piece which whoever got was
called cailleach beal-tine—i.e., the
Beltane carline, a term of great reproach. Upon his being
known, part of the company laid hold of him and made a show of
putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing, he was
rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground,
making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with
egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole
year. And while the feast was fresh in people’s memory, they
affected to speak of the cailleach beal-tine as
dead.”
In the parish of Callander, a beautiful district of Western
Perthshire, the Beltane custom was still in vogue towards the end
of the eighteenth century. It has been described as follows by the
parish minister of the time: “Upon the first day of May,
which is called Beltan, or Baltein day, all the
boys in a township or hamlet, meet in the moors. They cut a table
in the green sod, of a round figure, by casting a trench in the
ground, of such circumference as to hold the whole company. They
kindle a fire, and dress a repast of eggs and milk in the
consistence of a custard. They knead a cake of oatmeal, which is
toasted at the embers against a stone. After the custard is eaten
up, they divide the cake into so many portions, as similar as
possible to one another in size and shape, as there are persons in
the company. They daub one of these portions all over with
charcoal, until it be perfectly black. They put all the bits of the
cake into a bonnet. Every one, blindfold, draws out a portion. He
who holds the bonnet, is entitled to the last bit. Whoever draws
the black bit, is the devoted person who is to be
sacrificed to Baal, whose favour they mean to implore, in
rendering the year productive of the sustenance of man and beast.
There is little doubt of these inhuman sacrifices having been once
offered in this country, as well as in the east, although they now
pass from the act of sacrificing, and only compel the
devoted person to leap three times through the flames;
with which the ceremonies of this festival are closed.”
Thomas Pennant, who travelled in Perthshire in the year 1769,
tells us that “on the first of May, the herdsmen of every
village hold their Bel-tien, a rural sacrifice. They cut a square
trench on the ground, leaving the turf in the middle; on that they
make a fire of wood, on which they dress a large caudle of eggs,
butter, oatmeal and milk; and bring besides the ingredients of the
caudle, plenty of beer and whisky; for each of the company must
contribute something. The rites begin with spilling some of the
caudle on the ground, by way of libation: on that every one takes a
cake of oatmeal, upon which are raised nine square knobs, each
dedicated to some particular being, the supposed preserver of their
flocks and herds, or to some particular animal, the real destroyer
of them: each person then turns his face to the fire, breaks off a
knob, and flinging it over his shoulders, says, ‘This I give
to thee, preserve thou my horses; this to thee, preserve thou my
sheep; and so on.’ After that, they use the same ceremony to
the noxious animals: ‘This I give to thee, O fox! spare thou
my lambs; this to thee, O hooded crow! this to thee, O
eagle!’ When the ceremony is over, they dine on the caudle;
and after the feast is finished, what is left is hid by two persons
deputed for that purpose; but on the next Sunday they reassemble,
and finish the reliques of the first entertainment.”
Another writer of the eighteenth century has described the
Beltane festival as it was held in the parish of Logierait in
Perthshire. He says: “On the first of May, O.S., a festival
called Beltan is annually held here. It is chiefly
celebrated by the cow-herds, who assemble by scores in the fields,
to dress a dinner for themselves, of boiled milk and eggs. These
dishes they eat with a sort of cakes baked for the occasion, and
having small lumps in the form of nipples, raised all over
the surface.” In this last account no mention is made of
bonfires, but they were probably lighted, for a contemporary writer
informs us that in the parish of Kirkmichael, which adjoins the
parish of Logierait on the east, the custom of lighting a fire in
the fields and baking a consecrated cake on the first of May was
not quite obsolete in his time. We may conjecture that the cake
with knobs was formerly used for the purpose of determining who
should be the “Beltane carline” or victim doomed to the
flames. A trace of this custom survived, perhaps, in the custom of
baking oatmeal cakes of a special kind and rolling them down hill
about noon on the first of May; for it was thought that the person
whose cake broke as it rolled would die or be unfortunate within
the year. These cakes, or bannocks as we call them in Scotland,
were baked in the usual way, but they were washed over with a thin
batter composed of whipped egg, milk or cream, and a little
oatmeal. This custom appears to have prevailed at or near Kingussie
in Inverness-shire.
In the north-east of Scotland the Beltane fires were still
kindled in the latter half of the eighteenth century; the herdsmen
of several farms used to gather dry wood, kindle it, and dance
three times “southways” about the burning pile. But in
this region, according to a later authority, the Beltane fires were
lit not on the first but on the second of May, Old Style. They were
called bone-fires. The people believed that on that evening and
night the witches were abroad and busy casting spells on cattle and
stealing cows’ milk. To counteract their machinations, pieces
of rowan-tree and woodbine, but especially of rowan-tree, were
placed over the doors of the cow-houses, and fires were kindled by
every farmer and cottar. Old thatch, straw, furze, or broom was
piled in a heap and set on fire a little after sunset. While some
of the bystanders kept tossing the blazing mass, others hoisted
portions of it on pitchforks or poles and ran hither and thither,
holding them as high as they could. Meantime the young people
danced round the fire or ran through the smoke shouting,
“Fire! blaze and burn the witches; fire! fire! burn the
witches.” In some districts a large round cake of oat or
barley meal was rolled through the ashes. When all the fuel was
consumed, the people scattered the ashes far and wide, and till the
night grew quite dark they continued to run through them, crying,
“Fire! burn the witches.”
In the Hebrides “the Beltane bannock is smaller than that
made at St. Michael’s, but is made in the same way; it is no
longer made in Uist, but Father Allan remembers seeing his
grandmother make one about twenty-five years ago. There was also a
cheese made, generally on the first of May, which was kept to the
next Beltane as a sort of charm against the bewitching of
milk-produce. The Beltane customs seem to have been the same as
elsewhere. Every fire was put out and a large one lit on the top of
the hill, and the cattle driven round it sunwards
(dessil), to keep off murrain all the year. Each man would
take home fire wherewith to kindle his own.”
In Wales also the custom of lighting Beltane fires at the
beginning of May used to be observed, but the day on which they
were kindled varied from the eve of May Day to the third of May.
The flame was sometimes elicited by the friction of two pieces of
oak, as appears from the following description. “The fire was
done in this way. Nine men would turn their pockets inside out, and
see that every piece of money and all metals were off their
persons. Then the men went into the nearest woods, and collected
sticks of nine different kinds of trees. These were carried to the
spot where the fire had to be built. There a circle was cut in the
sod, and the sticks were set crosswise. All around the circle the
people stood and watched the proceedings. One of the men would then
take two bits of oak, and rub them together until a flame was
kindled. This was applied to the sticks, and soon a large fire was
made. Sometimes two fires were set up side by side. These fires,
whether one or two, were called coelcerth or bonfire.
Round cakes of oatmeal and brown meal were split in four, and
placed in a small flour-bag, and everybody present had to pick out
a portion. The last bit in the bag fell to the lot of the
bag-holder. Each person who chanced to pick up a piece of
brown-meal cake was compelled to leap three times over the flames,
or to run thrice between the two fires, by which means the people
thought they were sure of a plentiful harvest. Shouts and screams
of those who had to face the ordeal could be heard ever so far, and
those who chanced to pick the oatmeal portions sang and danced and
clapped their hands in approval, as the holders of the brown bits
leaped three times over the flames, or ran three times between the
two fires.”
The belief of the people that by leaping thrice over the
bonfires or running thrice between them they ensured a plentiful
harvest is worthy of note. The mode in which this result was
supposed to be brought about is indicated by another writer on
Welsh folk-lore, according to whom it used to be held that
“the bonfires lighted in May or Midsummer protected the lands
from sorcery, so that good crops would follow. The ashes were also
considered valuable as charms.” Hence it appears that the
heat of the fires was thought to fertilise the fields, not directly
by quickening the seeds in the ground, but indirectly by
counteracting the baleful influence of witchcraft or perhaps by
burning up the persons of the witches.
The Beltane fires seem to have been kindled also in Ireland, for
Cormac, “or somebody in his name, says that
belltaine, May-day, was so called from the ‘lucky
fire,’ or the ‘two fires,’ which the druids of
Erin used to make on that day with great incantations; and cattle,
he adds, used to be brought to those fires, or to be driven between
them, as a safeguard against the diseases of the year.” The
custom of driving cattle through or between fires on May Day or the
eve of May Day persisted in Ireland down to a time within living
memory.
The first of May is a great popular festival in the more midland
and southern parts of Sweden. On the eve of the festival huge
bonfires, which should be lighted by striking two flints together,
blaze on all the hills and knolls. Every large hamlet has its own
fire, round which the young people dance in a ring. The old folk
notice whether the flames incline to the north or to the south. In
the former case, the spring will be cold and backward; in the
latter, it will be mild and genial. In Bohemia, on the eve of May
Day, young people kindle fires on hills and eminences, at
crossways, and in pastures, and dance round them. They leap over
the glowing embers or even through the flames. The ceremony is
called “burning the witches.” In some places an effigy
representing a witch used to be burnt in the bonfire. We have to
remember that the eve of May Day is the notorious Walpurgis Night,
when the witches are everywhere speeding unseen through the air on
their hellish errands. On this witching night children in Voigtland
also light bonfires on the heights and leap over them. Moreover,
they wave burning brooms or toss them into the air. So far as the
light of the bonfire reaches, so far will a blessing rest on the
fields. The kindling of the fires on Walpurgis Night is called
“driving away the witches.” The custom of kindling
fires on the eve of May Day (Walpurgis Night) for the purpose of
burning the witches is, or used to be, widespread in the Tyrol,
Moravia, Saxony and Silesia.
5. The Midsummer Fires
BUT THE SEASON at which these firefestivals have been most
generally held all over Europe is the summer solstice, that is
Midsummer Eve (the twenty-third of June) or Midsummer day (the
twenty-fourth of June). A faint tinge of Christianity has been
given to them by naming Midsummer Day after St. John the Baptist,
but we cannot doubt that the celebration dates from a time long
before the beginning of our era. The summer solstice, or Midsummer
Day, is the great turning-point in the sun’s career, when,
after climbing higher and higher day by day in the sky, the
luminary stops and thenceforth retraces his steps down the heavenly
road. Such a moment could not but be regarded with anxiety by
primitive man so soon as he began to observe and ponder the courses
of the great lights across the celestial vault; and having still to
learn his own powerlessness in face of the vast cyclic changes of
nature, he may have fancied that he could help the sun in his
seeming decline—could prop his failing steps and rekindle the
sinking flame of the red lamp in his feeble hand. In some such
thoughts as these the midsummer festivals of our European peasantry
may perhaps have taken their rise. Whatever their origin, they have
prevailed all over this quarter of the globe, from Ireland on the
west to Russia on the east, and from Norway and Sweden on the north
to Spain and Greece on the south. According to a mediæval writer,
the three great features of the midsummer celebration were the
bonfires, the procession with torches round the fields, and the
custom of rolling a wheel. He tells us that boys burned bones and
filth of various kinds to make a foul smoke, and that the smoke
drove away certain noxious dragons which at this time, excited by
the summer heat, copulated in the air and poisoned the wells and
rivers by dropping their seed into them; and he explains the custom
of trundling a wheel to mean that the sun, having now reached the
highest point in the ecliptic, begins thenceforward to descend.
The main features of the midsummer fire-festival resemble those
which we have found to characterise the vernal festivals of fire.
The similarity of the two sets of ceremonies will plainly appear
from the following examples.
A writer of the first half of the sixteenth century informs us
that in almost every village and town of Germany public bonfires
were kindled on the Eve of St. John, and young and old, of both
sexes, gathered about them and passed the time in dancing and
singing. People on this occasion wore chaplets of mugwort and
vervain, and they looked at the fire through bunches of larkspur
which they held in their hands, believing that this would preserve
their eyes in a healthy state throughout the year. As each
departed, he threw the mugwort and vervain into the fire, saying,
“May all my ill-luck depart and be burnt up with
these.” At Lower Konz, a village situated on a hillside
overlooking the Moselle, the midsummer festival used to be
celebrated as follows. A quantity of straw was collected on the top
of the steep Stromberg Hill. Every inhabitant, or at least every
householder, had to contribute his share of straw to the pile. At
nightfall the whole male population, men and boys, mustered on the
top of the hill; the women and girls were not allowed to join them,
but had to take up their position at a certain spring half-way down
the slope. On the summit stood a huge wheel completely encased in
some of the straw which had been jointly contributed by the
villagers; the rest of the straw was made into torches. From each
side of the wheel the axle-tree projected about three feet, thus
furnishing handles to the lads who were to guide it in its descent.
The mayor of the neighbouring town of Sierck, who always received a
basket of cherries for his services, gave the signal; a lighted
torch was applied to the wheel, and as it burst into flame, two
young fellows, strong-limbed and swift of foot, seized the handles
and began running with it down the slope. A great shout went up.
Every man and boy waved a blazing torch in the air, and took care
to keep it alight so long as the wheel was trundling down the hill.
The great object of the young men who guided the wheel was to
plunge it blazing into the water of the Moselle; but they rarely
succeeded in their efforts, for the vineyards which cover the
greater part of the declivity impeded their progress, and the wheel
was often burned out before it reached the river. As it rolled past
the women and girls at the spring, they raised cries of joy which
were answered by the men on the top of the mountain; and the shouts
were echoed by the inhabitants of neighbouring villages who watched
the spectacle from their hills on the opposite bank of the Moselle.
If the fiery wheel was successfully conveyed to the bank of the
river and extinguished in the water, the people looked for an
abundant vintage that year, and the inhabitants of Konz had the
right to exact a waggon-load of white wine from the surrounding
vineyards. On the other hand, they believed that, if they neglected
to perform the ceremony, the cattle would be attacked by giddiness
and convulsions and would dance in their stalls.
Down at least to the middle of the nineteenth century the
midsummer fires used to blaze all over Upper Bavaria. They were
kindled especially on the mountains, but also far and wide in the
lowlands, and we are told that in the darkness and stillness of
night the moving groups, lit up by the flickering glow of the
flames, presented an impressive spectacle. Cattle were driven
through the fire to cure the sick animals and to guard such as were
sound against plague and harm of every kind throughout the year.
Many a householder on that day put out the fire on the domestic
hearth and rekindled it by means of a brand taken from the
midsummer bonfire. The people judged of the height to which the
flax would grow in the year by the height to which the flames of
the bonfire rose; and whoever leaped over the burning pile was sure
not to suffer from backache in reaping the corn at harvest. In many
parts of Bavaria it was believed that the flax would grow as high
as the young people leaped over the fire. In others the old folk
used to plant three charred sticks from the bonfire in the fields,
believing that this would make the flax grow tall. Elsewhere an
extinguished brand was put in the roof of the house to protect it
against fire. In the towns about Würzburg the bonfires used to be
kindled in the market-places, and the young people who jumped over
them wore garlands of flowers, especially of mugwort and vervain,
and carried sprigs of larkspur in their hands. They thought that
such as looked at the fire holding a bit of larkspur before their
face would be troubled by no malady of the eyes throughout the
year. Further, it was customary at Würzburg, in the sixteenth
century, for the bishop’s followers to throw burning discs of
wood into the air from a mountain which overhangs the town. The
discs were discharged by means of flexible rods, and in their
flight through the darkness presented the appearance of fiery
dragons.
Similarly in Swabia, lads and lasses, hand in hand, leap over
the midsummer bonfire, praying that the hemp may grow three ells
high, and they set fire to wheels of straw and send them rolling
down the hill. Sometimes, as the people sprang over the midsummer
bonfire they cried out, “Flax, flax! may the flax this year
grow seven ells high!” At Rottenburg a rude effigy in human
form, called the Angelman, used to be enveloped in flowers and then
burnt in the midsummer fire by boys, who afterwards leaped over the
glowing embers.
So in Baden the children collected fuel from house to house for
the midsummer bonfire on St. John’s Day; and lads and lasses
leaped over the fire in couples. Here, as elsewhere, a close
connexion was traced between these bonfires and the harvest. In
some places it was thought that those who leaped over the fires
would not suffer from backache at reaping. Sometimes, as the young
folk sprang over the flames, they cried, “Grow, that the hemp
may be three ells high!” This notion that the hemp or the
corn would grow as high as the flames blazed or as the people
jumped over them, seems to have been widespread in Baden. It was
held that the parents of the young people who bounded highest over
the fire would have the most abundant harvest; and on the other
hand, if a man contributed nothing to the bonfire, it was imagined
that there would be no blessing on his crops, and that his hemp in
particular would never grow. At Edersleben, near Sangerhausen, a
high pole was planted in the ground and a tarbarrel was hung from
it by a chain which reached to the ground. The barrel was then set
on fire and swung round the pole amid shouts of joy.
In Denmark and Norway also midsummer fires were kindled on St.
John’s Eve on roads, open spaces, and hills. People in Norway
thought that the fires banished sickness from among the cattle.
Even yet the fires are said to be lighted all over Norway on
Midsummer Eve. They are kindled in order to keep off the witches,
who are said to be flying from all parts that night to the
Blocksberg, where the big witch lives. In Sweden the Eve of St.
John (St. Hans) is the most joyous night of the whole year.
Throughout some parts of the country, especially in the provinces
of Bohus and Scania and in districts bordering on Norway, it is
celebrated by the frequent discharge of firearms and by huge
bonfires, formerly called Balder’s Balefires
(Balder’s Bălar), which are kindled at
dusk on hills and eminences and throw a glare of light over the
surrounding landscape. The people dance round the fires and leap
over or through them. In parts of Norrland on St. John’s Eve
the bonfires are lit at the cross-roads. The fuel consists of nine
different sorts of wood, and the spectators cast into the flames a
kind of toad-stool (Bäran) in order to counteract the
power of the Trolls and other evil spirits, who are believed to be
abroad that night; for at that mystic season the mountains open and
from their cavernous depths the uncanny crew pours forth to dance
and disport themselves for a time. The peasants believe that should
any of the Trolls be in the vicinity they will show themselves; and
if an animal, for example a he or she goat, happens to be seen near
the blazing, crackling pile, the peasants are firmly persuaded that
it is no other than the Evil One in person. Further, it deserves to
be remarked that in Sweden St. John’s Eve is a festival of
water as well as of fire; for certain holy springs are then
supposed to be endowed with wonderful medicinal virtues, and many
sick people resort to them for the healing of their
infirmities.
In Austria the midsummer customs and superstitions resemble
those of Germany. Thus in some parts of the Tyrol bonfires are
kindled and burning discs hurled into the air. In the lower valley
of the Inn a tatterdemalion effigy is carted about the village on
Midsummer Day and then burned. He is called the Lotter,
which has been corrupted into Luther. At Ambras, one of the
villages where Martin Luther is thus burned in effigy, they say
that if you go through the village between eleven and twelve on St.
John’s Night and wash yourself in three wells, you will see
all who are to die in the following year. At Gratz on St.
John’s Eve (the twenty-third of June) the common people used
to make a puppet called the Tatermann, which they dragged
to the bleaching ground, and pelted with burning besoms till it
took fire. At Reutte, in the Tyrol, people believed that the flax
would grow as high as they leaped over the midsummer bonfire, and
they took pieces of charred wood from the fire and stuck them in
their flax-fields the same night, leaving them there till the flax
harvest had been got in. In Lower Austria bonfires are kindled on
the heights, and the boys caper round them, brandishing lighted
torches drenched in pitch. Whoever jumps thrice across the fire
will not suffer from fever within the year. Cart-wheels are often
smeared with pitch, ignited, and sent rolling and blazing down the
hillsides.
All over Bohemia bonfires still burn on Midsummer Eve. In the
afternoon boys go about with handcarts from house to house
collecting fuel and threatening with evil consequences the
curmudgeons who refuse them a dole. Sometimes the young men fell a
tall straight fir in the woods and set it up on a height, where the
girls deck it with nosegays, wreaths of leaves, and red ribbons.
Then brushwood is piled about it, and at nightfall the whole is set
on fire. While the flames break out, the young men climb the tree
and fetch down the wreaths which the girls had placed on it. After
that lads and lasses stand on opposite sides of the fire and look
at one another through the wreaths to see whether they will be true
to each other and marry within the year. Also the girls throw the
wreaths across the flames to the men, and woe to the awkward swain
who fails to catch the wreath thrown him by his sweetheart. When
the blaze has died down, each couple takes hands and leaps thrice
across the fire. He or she who does so will be free from ague
throughout the year, and the flax will grow as high as the young
folks leap. A girl who sees nine bonfires on Midsummer Eve will
marry before the year is out. The singed wreaths are carried home
and carefully preserved throughout the year. During thunderstorms a
bit of the wreath is burned on the hearth with a prayer; some of it
is given to kine that are sick or calving, and some of it serves to
fumigate house and cattle-stall, that man and beast may keep hale
and well. Sometimes an old cart-wheel is smeared with resin,
ignited, and sent rolling down the hill. Often the boys collect all
the worn-out besoms they can get hold of, dip them in pitch, and
having set them on fire wave them about or throw them high into the
air. Or they rush down the hillside in troops, brandishing the
flaming brooms and shouting. The stumps of the brooms and embers
from the fire are preserved and stuck in cabbage gardens to protect
the cabbages from caterpillars and gnats. Some people insert
charred sticks and ashes from the midsummer bonfire in their sown
fields and meadows, in their gardens and the roofs of their houses,
as a talisman against lightning and foul weather; or they fancy
that the ashes placed in the roof will prevent any fire from
breaking out in the house. In some districts they crown or gird
themselves with mugwort while the midsummer fire is burning, for
this is supposed to be a protection against ghosts, witches, and
sickness; in particular, a wreath of mugwort is a sure preventive
of sore eyes. Sometimes the girls look at the bonfires through
garlands of wild flowers, praying the fire to strengthen their eyes
and eyelids. She who does this thrice will have no sore eyes all
that year. In some parts of Bohemia they used to drive the cows
through the midsummer fire to guard them against witchcraft.
In Slavonic countries, also, the midsummer festival is
celebrated with similar rites. We have already seen that in Russia
on the Eve of St. John young men and maidens jump over a bonfire in
couples carrying a straw effigy of Kupalo in their arms. In some
parts of Russia an image of Kupalo is burnt or thrown into a stream
on St. John’s Night. Again, in some districts of Russia the
young folk wear garlands of flowers and girdles of holy herbs when
they spring through the smoke or flames; and sometimes they drive
the cattle also through the fire in order to protect the animals
against wizards and witches, who are then ravenous after milk. In
Little Russia a stake is driven into the ground on St. John’s
Night, wrapt in straw, and set on fire. As the flames rise the
peasant women throw birchen boughs into them, saying, “May my
flax be as tall as this bough!” In Ruthenia the bonfires are
lighted by a flame procured by the friction of wood. While the
elders of the party are engaged in thus “churning” the
fire, the rest maintain a respectful silence; but when the flame
bursts from the wood, they break forth into joyous songs. As soon
as the bonfires are kindled, the young people take hands and leap
in pairs through the smoke, if not through the flames; and after
that the cattle in their turn are driven through the fire.
In many parts of Prussia and Lithuania great fires are kindled
on Midsummer Eve. All the heights are ablaze with them, as far as
the eye can see. The fires are supposed to be a protection against
witchcraft, thunder, hail, and cattle disease, especially if next
morning the cattle are driven over the places where the fires
burned. Above all, the bonfires ensure the farmer against the arts
of witches, who try to steal the milk from his cows by charms and
spells. That is why next morning you may see the young fellows who
lit the bonfire going from house to house and receiving jugfuls of
milk. And for the same reason they stick burs and mugwort on the
gate or the hedge through which the cows go to pasture, because
that is supposed to be a preservative against witchcraft. In
Masuren, a district of Eastern Prussia inhabited by a branch of the
Polish family, it is the custom on the evening of Midsummer Day to
put out all the fires in the village. Then an oaken stake is driven
into the ground and a wheel is fixed on it as on an axle. This
wheel the villagers, working by relays, cause to revolve with great
rapidity till fire is produced by friction. Every one takes home a
lighted brand from the new fire and with it rekindles the fire on
the domestic hearth. In Serbia on Midsummer Eve herdsmen light
torches of birch bark and march round the sheepfolds and
cattle-stalls; then they climb the hills and there allow the
torches to burn out.
Among the Magyars in Hungary the midsummer fire-festival is
marked by the same features that meet us in so many parts of
Europe. On Midsummer Eve in many places it is customary to kindle
bonfires on heights and to leap over them, and from the manner in
which the young people leap the bystanders predict whether they
will marry soon. On this day also many Hungarian swineherds make
fire by rotating a wheel round a wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and
through the fire thus made they drive their pigs to preserve them
from sickness.
The Esthonians of Russia, who, like the Magyars, belong to the
great Turanian family of mankind, also celebrate the summer
solstice in the usual way. They think that the St. John’s
fire keeps witches from the cattle, and they say that he who does
not come to it will have his barley full of thistles and his oats
full of weeds. In the Esthonian island of Oesel, while they throw
fuel into the midsummer fire, they call out, “Weeds to the
fire, flax to the field,” or they fling three billets into
the flames, saying, “Flax grow long!” And they take
charred sticks from the bonfire home with them and keep them to
make the cattle thrive. In some parts of the island the bonfire is
formed by piling brushwood and other combustibles round a tree, at
the top of which a flag flies. Whoever succeeds in knocking down
the flag with a pole before it begins to burn will have good luck.
Formerly the festivities lasted till daybreak, and ended in scenes
of debauchery which looked doubly hideous by the growing light of a
summer morning.
When we pass from the east to the west of Europe we still find
the summer solstice celebrated with rites of the same general
character. Down to about the middle of the nineteenth century the
custom of lighting bonfires at midsummer prevailed so commonly in
France that there was hardly a town or a village, we are told,
where they were not kindled. People danced round and leaped over
them, and took charred sticks from the bonfire home with them to
protect the houses against lightning, conflagrations, and
spells.
In Brittany, apparently, the custom of the midsummer bonfires is
kept up to this day. When the flames have died down, the whole
assembly kneels round about the bonfire and an old man prays aloud.
Then they all rise and march thrice round the fire; at the third
turn they stop and every one picks up a pebble and throws it on the
burning pile. After that they disperse. In Brittany and Berry it is
believed that a girl who dances round nine midsummer bonfires will
marry within the year. In the valley of the Orne the custom was to
kindle the bonfire just at the moment when the sun was about to dip
below the horizon; and the peasants drove their cattle through the
fires to protect them against witchcraft, especially against the
spells of witches and wizards who attempted to steal the milk and
butter. At Jumièges in Normandy, down to the first half of the
nineteenth century, the midsummer festival was marked by certain
singular features which bore the stamp of a very high antiquity.
Every year, on the twenty-third of June, the Eve of St. John, the
Brotherhood of the Green Wolf chose a new chief or master, who had
always to be taken from the hamlet of Conihout. On being elected,
the new head of the brotherhood assumed the title of the Green
Wolf, and donned a peculiar costume consisting of a long green
mantle and a very tall green hat of a conical shape and without a
brim. Thus arrayed he stalked solemnly at the head of the brothers,
chanting the hymn of St. John, the crucifix and holy banner leading
the way, to a place called Chouquet. Here the procession was met by
the priest, precentors, and choir, who conducted the brotherhood to
the parish church. After hearing mass the company adjourned to the
house of the Green Wolf, where a simple repast was served up to
them. At night a bonfire was kindled to the sound of hand-bells by
a young man and a young woman, both decked with flowers. Then the
Green Wolf and his brothers, with their hoods down on their
shoulders and holding each other by the hand, ran round the fire
after the man who had been chosen to be the Green Wolf of the
following year. Though only the first and the last man of the chain
had a hand free, their business was to surround and seize thrice
the future Green Wolf, who in his efforts to escape belaboured the
brothers with a long wand which he carried. When at last they
succeeded in catching him they carried him to the burning pile and
made as if they would throw him on it. This ceremony over, they
returned to the house of the Green Wolf, where a supper, still of
the most meagre fare, was set before them. Up till midnight a sort
of religious solemnity prevailed. But at the stroke of twelve all
this was changed. Constraint gave way to license; pious hymns were
replaced by Bacchanalian ditties, and the shrill quavering notes of
the village fiddle hardly rose above the roar of voices that went
up from the merry brotherhood of the Green Wolf. Next day, the
twenty-fourth of June or Midsummer Day, was celebrated by the same
personages with the same noisy gaiety. One of the ceremonies
consisted in parading, to the sound of musketry, an enormous loaf
of consecrated bread, which, rising in tiers, was surmounted by a
pyramid of verdure adorned with ribbons. After that the holy
hand-bells, deposited on the step of the altar, were entrusted as
insignia of office to the man who was to be the Green Wolf next
year.
At Château-Thierry, in the department of Aisne, the custom of
lighting bonfires and dancing round them at the midsummer festival
of St. John lasted down to about 1850; the fires were kindled
especially when June had been rainy, and the people thought that
the lighting of the bonfires would cause the rain to cease. In the
Vosges it is still customary to kindle bonfires upon the hill-tops
on Midsummer Eve; the people believe that the fires help to
preserve the fruits of the earth and ensure good crops.
Bonfires were lit in almost all the hamlets of Poitou on the Eve
of St. John. People marched round them thrice, carrying a branch of
walnut in their hand. Shepherdesses and children passed sprigs of
mullein (verbascum) and nuts across the flames; the nuts
were supposed to cure toothache, and the mullein to protect the
cattle from sickness and sorcery. When the fire died down people
took some of the ashes home with them, either to keep them in the
house as a preservative against thunder or to scatter them on the
fields for the purpose of destroying corn-cockles and darnel. In
Poitou also it used to be customary on the Eve of St. John to
trundle a blazing wheel wrapt in straw over the fields to fertilise
them.
In the mountainous part of Comminges, a province of Southern
France, the midsummer fire is made by splitting open the trunk of a
tall tree, stuffing the crevice with shavings, and igniting the
whole. A garland of flowers is fastened to the top of the tree, and
at the moment when the fire is lighted the man who was last married
has to climb up a ladder and bring the flowers down. In the flat
parts of the same district the materials of the midsummer bonfires
consist of fuel piled in the usual way; but they must be put
together by men who have been married since the last midsummer
festival, and each of these benedicts is obliged to lay a wreath of
flowers on the top of the pile.
In Provence the midsummer fires are still popular. Children go
from door to door begging for fuel, and they are seldom sent empty
away. Formerly the priest, the mayor, and the aldermen used to walk
in procession to the bonfire, and even deigned to light it; after
which the assembly marched thrice round the burning pile. At Aix a
nominal king, chosen from among the youth for his skill in shooting
at a popinjay, presided over the midsummer festival. He selected
his own officers, and escorted by a brilliant train marched to the
bonfire, kindled it, and was the first to dance round it. Next day
he distributed largesse to his followers. His reign lasted a year,
during which he enjoyed certain privileges. He was allowed to
attend the mass celebrated by the commander of the Knights of St.
John on St. John’s Day; the right of hunting was accorded to
him, and soldiers might not be quartered in his house. At
Marseilles also on this day one of the guilds chose a king of the
badache or double axe; but it does not appear that he
kindled the bonfire, which is said to have been lighted with great
ceremony by the préfet and other authorities.
In Belgium the custom of kindling the midsummer bonfires has
long disappeared from the great cities, but it is still kept up in
rural districts and small towns. In that country the Eve of St.
Peter’s Day (the twenty-ninth of June) is celebrated by
bonfires and dances exactly like those which commemorate St.
John’s Eve. Some people say that the fires of St. Peter, like
those of St. John, are lighted in order to drive away dragons. In
French Flanders down to 1789 a straw figure representing a man was
always burned in the midsummer bonfire, and the figure of a woman
was burned on St. Peter’s Day, the twenty-ninth of June. In
Belgium people jump over the midsummer bonfires as a preventive of
colic, and they keep the ashes at home to hinder fire from breaking
out.
The custom of lighting bonfires at midsummer has been observed
in many parts of our own country, and as usual people danced round
and leaped over them. In Wales three or nine different kinds of
wood and charred faggots carefully preserved from the last
midsummer were deemed necessary to build the bonfire, which was
generally done on rising ground. In the Vale of Glamorgan a
cart-wheel swathed in straw used to be ignited and sent rolling
down the hill. If it kept alight all the way down and blazed for a
long time, an abundant harvest was expected. On Midsummer Eve
people in the Isle of Man were wont to light fires to the windward
of every field, so that the smoke might pass over the corn; and
they folded their cattle and carried blazing furze or gorse round
them several times. In Ireland cattle, especially barren cattle,
were driven through the midsummer fires, and the ashes were thrown
on the fields to fertilise them, or live coals were carried into
them to prevent blight. In Scotland the traces of midsummer fires
are few; but at that season in the highlands of Perthshire cowherds
used to go round their folds thrice, in the direction of the sun,
with lighted torches. This they did to purify the flocks and herds
and to keep them from falling sick.
The practice of lighting bonfires on Midsummer Eve and dancing
or leaping over them is, or was till recently, common all over
Spain and in some parts of Italy and Sicily. In Malta great fires
are kindled in the streets and squares of the towns and villages on
the Eve of St. John (Midsummer Eve); formerly the Grand Master of
the Order of St. John used on that evening to set fire to a heap of
pitch barrels placed in front of the sacred Hospital. In Greece,
too, the custom of kindling fires on St. John’s Eve and
jumping over them is said to be still universal. One reason
assigned for it is a wish to escape from the fleas. According to
another account, the women cry out, as they leap over the fire,
“I leave my sins behind me.” In Lesbos the fires on St.
John’s Eve are usually lighted by threes, and the people
spring thrice over them, each with a stone on his head, saying,
“I jump the hare’s fire, my head a stone!” In
Calymnos the midsummer fire is supposed to ensure abundance in the
coming year as well as deliverance from fleas. The people dance
round the fires singing, with stones on their heads, and then jump
over the blaze or the glowing embers. When the fire is burning low,
they throw the stones into it; and when it is nearly out, they make
crosses on their legs and then go straightway and bathe in the
sea.
The custom of kindling bonfires on Midsummer Day or on Midsummer
Eve is widely spread among the Mohammedan peoples of North Africa,
particularly in Morocco and Algeria; it is common both to the
Berbers and to many of the Arabs or Arabic-speaking tribes. In
these countries Midsummer Day (the twenty-fourth of June, Old
Style) is called l’ánsăra. The fires are
lit in the courtyards, at cross-roads, in the fields, and sometimes
on the threshing-floors. Plants which in burning give out a thick
smoke and an aromatic smell are much sought after for fuel on these
occasions; among the plants used for the purpose are giant-fennel,
thyme, rue, chervil-seed, camomile, geranium, and penny-royal.
People expose themselves, and especially their children, to the
smoke, and drive it towards the orchards and the crops. Also they
leap across the fires; in some places everybody ought to repeat the
leap seven times. Moreover they take burning brands from the fires
and carry them through the houses in order to fumigate them. They
pass things through the fire, and bring the sick into contact with
it, while they utter prayers for their recovery. The ashes of the
bonfires are also reputed to possess beneficial properties; hence
in some places people rub their hair or their bodies with them. In
some places they think that by leaping over the fires they rid
themselves of all misfortune, and that childless couples thereby
obtain offspring. Berbers of the Rif province, in Northern Morocco,
make great use of fires at midsummer for the good of themselves,
their cattle, and their fruit-trees. They jump over the bonfires in
the belief that this will preserve them in good health, and they
light fires under fruit-trees to keep the fruit from falling
untimely. And they imagine that by rubbing a paste of the ashes on
their hair they prevent the hair from falling off their heads. In
all these Moroccan customs, we are told, the beneficial effect is
attributed wholly to the smoke, which is supposed to be endued with
a magical quality that removes misfortune from men, animals,
fruit-trees and crops.
The celebration of a midsummer festival by Mohammedan peoples is
particularly remarkable, because the Mohammedan calendar, being
purely lunar and uncorrected by intercalation, necessarily takes no
note of festivals which occupy fixed points in the solar year; all
strictly Mohammedan feasts, being pinned to the moon, slide
gradually with that luminary through the whole period of the
earth’s revolution about the sun. This fact of itself seems
to prove that among the Mohammedan peoples of Northern Africa, as
among the Christian peoples of Europe, the midsummer festival is
quite independent of the religion which the people publicly
profess, and is a relic of a far older paganism.
6. The Hallowe’en Fires
FROM THE FOREGOING survey we may infer that among the heathen
forefathers of the European peoples the most popular and widespread
fire-festival of the year was the great celebration of Midsummer
Eve or Midsummer Day. The coincidence of the festival with the
summer solstice can hardly be accidental. Rather we must suppose
that our pagan ancestors purposely timed the ceremony of fire on
earth to coincide with the arrival of the sun at the highest point
of his course in the sky. If that was so, it follows that the old
founders of the midsummer rites had observed the solstices or
turning-points of the sun’s apparent path in the sky, and
that they accordingly regulated their festal calendar to some
extent by astronomical considerations.
But while this may be regarded as fairly certain for what we may
call the aborigines throughout a large part of the continent, it
appears not to have been true of the Celtic peoples who inhabited
the Land’s End of Europe, the islands and promontories that
stretch out into the Atlantic Ocean on the North-West. The
principal fire-festivals of the Celts, which have survived, though
in a restricted area and with diminished pomp, to modern times and
even to our own day, were seemingly timed without any reference to
the position of the sun in the heaven. They were two in number, and
fell at an interval of six months, one being celebrated on the eve
of May Day and the other on Allhallow Even or Hallowe’en, as
it is now commonly called, that is, on the thirty-first of October,
the day preceding All Saints’ or Allhallows’ Day. These
dates coincide with none of the four great hinges on which the
solar year revolves, to wit, the solstices and the equinoxes. Nor
do they agree with the principal seasons of the agricultural year,
the sowing in spring and the reaping in autumn. For when May Day
comes, the seed has long been committed to the earth; and when
November opens, the harvest has long been reaped and garnered, the
fields lie bare, the fruit-trees are stripped, and even the yellow
leaves are fast fluttering to the ground. Yet the first of May and
the first of November mark turning-points of the year in Europe;
the one ushers in the genial heat and the rich vegetation of
summer, the other heralds, if it does not share, the cold and
barrenness of winter. Now these particular points of the year, as
has been well pointed out by a learned and ingenious writer, while
they are of comparatively little moment to the European husbandman,
do deeply concern the European herdsman; for it is on the approach
of summer that he drives his cattle out into the open to crop the
fresh grass, and it is on the approach of winter that he leads them
back to the safety and shelter of the stall. Accordingly it seems
not improbable that the Celtic bisection of the year into two
halves at the beginning of May and the beginning of November dates
from a time when the Celts were mainly a pastoral people, dependent
for their subsistence on their herds, and when accordingly the
great epochs of the year for them were the days on which the cattle
went forth from the homestead in early summer and returned to it
again in early winter. Even in Central Europe, remote from the
region now occupied by the Celts, a similar bisection of the year
may be clearly traced in the great popularity, on the one hand, of
May Day and its Eve (Walpurgis Night), and, on the other hand, of
the Feast of All Souls at the beginning of November, which under a
thin Christian cloak conceals an ancient pagan festival of the
dead. Hence we may conjecture that everywhere throughout Europe the
celestial division of the year according to the solstices was
preceded by what we may call a terrestrial division of the year
according to the beginning of summer and the beginning of
winter.
Be that as it may, the two great Celtic festivals of May Day and
the first of November or, to be more accurate, the Eves of these
two days, closely resemble each other in the manner of their
celebration and in the superstitions associated with them, and
alike, by the antique character impressed upon both, betray a
remote and purely pagan origin. The festival of May Day or Beltane,
as the Celts called it, which ushered in summer, has already been
described; it remains to give some account of the corresponding
festival of Hallowe’en, which announced the arrival of
winter.
Of the two feasts Hallowe’en was perhaps of old the more
important, since the Celts would seem to have dated the beginning
of the year from it rather than from Beltane. In the Isle of Man,
one of the fortresses in which the Celtic language and lore longest
held out against the siege of the Saxon invaders, the first of
November, Old Style, has been regarded as New Year’s day down
to recent times. Thus Manx mummers used to go round on
Hallowe’en (Old Style), singing, in the Manx language, a sort
of Hogmanay song which began “To-night is New Year’s
Night, Hogunnaa!” In ancient Ireland, a new fire
used to be kindled every year on Hallowe’en or the Eve of
Samhain, and from this sacred flame all the fires in Ireland were
rekindled. Such a custom points strongly to Samhain or All
Saints’ Day (the first of November) as New Year’s Day;
since the annual kindling of a new fire takes place most naturally
at the beginning of the year, in order that the blessed influence
of the fresh fire may last throughout the whole period of twelve
months. Another confirmation of the view that the Celts dated their
year from the first of November is furnished by the manifold modes
of divination which were commonly resorted to by Celtic peoples on
Hallowe’en for the purpose of ascertaining their destiny,
especially their fortune in the coming year; for when could these
devices for prying into the future be more reasonably put in
practice than at the beginning of the year? As a season of omens
and auguries Hallowe’en seems to have far surpassed Beltane
in the imagination of the Celts; from which we may with some
probability infer that they reckoned their year from
Hallowe’en rather than Beltane. Another circumstance of great
moment which points to the same conclusion is the association of
the dead with Hallowe’en. Not only among the Celts but
throughout Europe, Hallowe’en, the night which marks the
transition from autumn to winter, seems to have been of old the
time of year when the souls of the departed were supposed to
revisit their old homes in order to warm themselves by the fire and
to comfort themselves with the good cheer provided for them in the
kitchen or the parlour by their affectionate kinsfolk. It was,
perhaps, a natural thought that the approach of winter should drive
the poor shivering hungry ghosts from the bare fields and the
leafless woodlands to the shelter of the cottage with its familiar
fireside. Did not the lowing kine then troop back from the summer
pastures in the forests and on the hills to be fed and cared for in
the stalls, while the bleak winds whistled among the swaying boughs
and the snow-drifts deepened in the hollows? and could the good-man
and the good-wife deny to the spirits of their dead the welcome
which they gave to the cows?
But it is not only the souls of the departed who are supposed to
be hovering unseen on the day “when autumn to winter resigns
the pale year.” Witches then speed on their errands of
mischief, some sweeping through the air on besoms, others galloping
along the roads on tabby-cats, which for that evening are turned
into coal-black steeds. The fairies, too, are all let loose, and
hobgoblins of every sort roam freely about.
Yet while a glamour of mystery and awe has always clung to
Hallowe’en in the minds of the Celtic peasantry, the popular
celebration of the festival has been, at least in modern times, by
no means of a prevailing gloomy cast; on the contrary it has been
attended by picturesque features and merry pastimes, which rendered
it the gayest night of all the year. Amongst the things which in
the Highlands of Scotland contributed to invest the festival with a
romantic beauty were the bonfires which used to blaze at frequent
intervals on the heights. “On the last day of autumn children
gathered ferns, tar-barrels, the long thin stalks called
gàinisg, and everything suitable for a bonfire. These were
placed in a heap on some eminence near the house, and in the
evening set fire to. The fires were called Samhnagan.
There was one for each house, and it was an object of ambition who
should have the biggest. Whole districts were brilliant with
bonfires, and their glare across a Highland loch, and from many
eminences, formed an exceedingly picturesque scene.” Like the
Beltane fires on the first of May, the Hallowe’en bonfires
seem to have been kindled most commonly in the Perthshire
Highlands. In the parish of Callander they still blazed down to
near the end of the eighteenth century. When the fire had died
down, the ashes were carefully collected in the form of a circle,
and a stone was put in, near the circumference, for every person of
the several families interested in the bonfire. Next morning, if
any of these stones was found to be displaced or injured, the
people made sure that the person represented by it was fey
or devoted, and that he could not live twelve months from that day.
At Balquhidder down to the latter part of the nineteenth century
each household kindled its bonfire at Hallowe’en, but the
custom was chiefly observed by children. The fires were lighted on
any high knoll near the house; there was no dancing round them.
Hallowe’en fires were also lighted in some districts of the
north-east of Scotland, such as Buchan. Villagers and farmers alike
must have their fire. In the villages the boys went from house to
house and begged a peat from each householder, usually with the
words, “Ge’s a peat t’ burn the witches.”
When they had collected enough peats, they piled them in a heap,
together with straw, furze, and other combustible materials, and
set the whole on fire. Then each of the youths, one after another,
laid himself down on the ground as near to the fire as he could
without being scorched, and thus lying allowed the smoke to roll
over him. The others ran through the smoke and jumped over their
prostrate comrade. When the heap was burned down, they scattered
the ashes, vying with each other who should scatter them most.
In the northern part of Wales it used to be customary for every
family to make a great bonfire called Coel Coeth on
Hallowe’en. The fire was kindled on the most conspicuous spot
near the house; and when it had nearly gone out every one threw
into the ashes a white stone, which he had first marked. Then
having said their prayers round the fire, they went to bed. Next
morning, as soon as they were up, they came to search out the
stones, and if any one of them was found to be missing, they had a
notion that the person who threw it would die before he saw another
Hallowe’en. According to Sir John Rhys, the habit of
celebrating Hallowe’en by lighting bonfires on the hills is
perhaps not yet extinct in Wales, and men still living can remember
how the people who assisted at the bonfires would wait till the
last spark was out and then would suddenly take to their heels,
shouting at the top of their voices, “The cropped black sow
seize the hindmost!” The saying, as Sir John Rhys justly
remarks, implies that originally one of the company became a victim
in dead earnest. Down to the present time the saying is current in
Carnarvonshire, where allusions to the cutty black sow are still
occasionally made to frighten children. We can now understand why
in Lower Brittany every person throws a pebble into the midsummer
bonfire. Doubtless there, as in Wales and the Highlands of
Scotland, omens of life and death have at one time or other been
drawn from the position and state of the pebbles on the morning of
All Saints’ Day. The custom, thus found among three separate
branches of the Celtic stock, probably dates from a period before
their dispersion, or at least from a time when alien races had not
yet driven home the wedges of separation between them.
In the Isle of Man also, another Celtic country,
Hallowe’en was celebrated down to modern times by the
kindling of fires, accompanied with all the usual ceremonies
designed to prevent the baneful influence of fairies and
witches.
7. The Midwinter Fires
IF THE HEATHEN of ancient Europe celebrated, as we have good
reason to believe, the season of Midsummer with a great festival of
fire, of which the traces have survived in many places down to our
own time, it is natural to suppose that they should have observed
with similar rites the corresponding season of Midwinter; for
Midsummer and Midwinter, or, in more technical language, the summer
solstice and the winter solstice, are the two great turningpoints
in the sun’s apparent course through the sky, and from the
standpoint of primitive man nothing might seem more appropriate
than to kindle fires on earth at the two moments when the fire and
heat of the great luminary in heaven begin to wane or to wax.
In modern Christendom the ancient fire-festival of the winter
solstice appears to survive, or to have survived down to recent
years, in the old custom of the Yule log, clog, or block, as it was
variously called in England. The custom was widespread in Europe,
but seems to have flourished especially in England, France, and
among the South Slavs; at least the fullest accounts of the custom
come from these quarters. That the Yule log was only the winter
counterpart of the midsummer bonfire, kindled within doors instead
of in the open air on account of the cold and inclement weather of
the season, was pointed out long ago by our English antiquary John
Brand; and the view is supported by the many quaint superstitions
attaching to the Yule log, superstitions which have no apparent
connexion with Christianity but carry their heathen origin plainly
stamped upon them. But while the two solstitial celebrations were
both festivals of fire, the necessity or desirability of holding
the winter celebration within doors lent it the character of a
private or domestic festivity, which contrasts strongly with the
publicity of the summer celebration, at which the people gathered
on some open space or conspicuous height, kindled a huge bonfire in
common, and danced and made merry round it together.
Down to about the middle of the nineteenth century the old rite
of the Yule log was kept up in some parts of Central Germany. Thus
in the valleys of the Sieg and Lahn the Yule log, a heavy block of
oak, was fitted into the floor of the hearth, where, though it
glowed under the fire, it was hardly reduced to ashes within a
year. When the new log was laid next year, the remains of the old
one were ground to powder and strewed over the fields during the
Twelve Nights, which was supposed to promote the growth of the
crops. In some villages of Westphalia, the practice was to withdraw
the Yule log (Christbrand) from the fire so soon as it was
slightly charred; it was then kept carefully to be replaced on the
fire whenever a thunderstorm broke, because the people believed
that lightning would not strike a house in which the Yule log was
smouldering. In other villages of Westphalia the old custom was to
tie up the Yule log in the last sheaf cut at harvest.
In several provinces of France, and particularly in Provence,
the custom of the Yule log or tréfoir, as it was called in
many places, was long observed. A French writer of the seventeenth
century denounces as superstitious “the belief that a log
called the tréfoir or Christmas brand, which you put on
the fire for the first time on Christmas Eve and continue to put on
the fire for a little while every day till Twelfth Night, can, if
kept under the bed, protect the house for a whole year from fire
and thunder; that it can prevent the inmates from having chilblains
on their heels in winter; that it can cure the cattle of many
maladies; that if a piece of it be steeped in the water which cows
drink it helps them to calve; and lastly that if the ashes of the
log be strewn on the fields it can save the wheat from
mildew.”
In some parts of Flanders and France the remains of the Yule log
were regularly kept in the house under a bed as a protection
against thunder and lightning; in Berry, when thunder was heard, a
member of the family used to take a piece of the log and throw it
on the fire, which was believed to avert the lightning. Again, in
Perigord, the charcoal and ashes are carefully collected and kept
for healing swollen glands; the part of the trunk which has not
been burnt in the fire is used by ploughmen to make the wedge for
their plough, because they allege that it causes the seeds to
thrive better; and the women keep pieces of it till Twelfth Night
for the sake of their chickens. Some people imagine that they will
have as many chickens as there are sparks that fly out of the
brands of the log when they shake them; and others place the
extinct brands under the bed to drive away vermin. In various parts
of France the charred log is thought to guard the house against
sorcery as well as against lightning.
In England the customs and beliefs concerning the Yule log used
to be similar. On the night of Christmas Eve, says the antiquary
John Brand, “our ancestors were wont to light up candles of
an uncommon size, called Christmas Candles, and lay a log of wood
upon the fire, called a Yule-clog or Christmas-block, to illuminate
the house, and, as it were, to turn night into day.” The old
custom was to light the Yule log with a fragment of its
predecessor, which had been kept throughout the year for the
purpose; where it was so kept, the fiend could do no mischief. The
remains of the log were also supposed to guard the house against
fire and lightning.
To this day the ritual of bringing in the Yule log is observed
with much solemnity among the Southern Slavs, especially the
Serbians. The log is usually a block of oak, but sometimes of olive
or beech. They seem to think that they will have as many calves,
lambs, pigs, and kids as they strike sparks out of the burning log.
Some people carry a piece of the log out to the fields to protect
them against hail. In Albania down to recent years it was a common
custom to burn a Yule log at Christmas, and the ashes of the fire
were scattered on the fields to make them fertile. The Huzuls, a
Slavonic people of the Carpathians, kindle fire by the friction of
wood on Christmas Eve (Old Style, the fifth of January) and keep it
burning till Twelfth Night.
It is remarkable how common the belief appears to have been that
the remains of the Yule log, if kept throughout the year, had power
to protect the house against fire and especially against lightning.
As the Yule log was frequently of oak, it seems possible that this
belief may be a relic of the old Aryan creed which associated the
oak-tree with the god of thunder. Whether the curative and
fertilising virtues ascribed to the ashes of the Yule log, which
are supposed to heal cattle as well as men, to enable cows to
calve, and to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, may not be
derived from the same ancient source, is a question which deserves
to be considered.
8. The Need-fire
THE FIRE-FESTIVALS hitherto described are all celebrated
periodically at certain stated times of the year. But besides these
regularly recurring celebrations the peasants in many parts of
Europe have been wont from time immemorial to resort to a ritual of
fire at irregular intervals in seasons of distress and calamity,
above all when their cattle were attacked by epidemic disease. No
account of the popular European fire-festivals would be complete
without some notice of these remarkable rites, which have all the
greater claim on our attention because they may perhaps be regarded
as the source and origin of all the other fire-festivals; certainly
they must date from a very remote antiquity. The general name by
which they are known among the Teutonic peoples is need-fire.
Sometimes the need-fire was known as “wild fire,” to
distinguish it no doubt from the tame fire produced by more
ordinary methods. Among Slavonic peoples it is called “living
fire.”
The history of the custom can be traced from the early Middle
Ages, when it was denounced by the Church as a heathen
superstition, down to the first half of the nineteenth century,
when it was still occasionally practised in various parts of
Germany, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Among Slavonic peoples it
appears to have lingered even longer. The usual occasion for
performing the rite was an outbreak of plague or cattle-disease,
for which the need-fire was believed to be an infallible remedy.
The animals which were subjected to it included cows, pigs, horses,
and sometimes geese. As a necessary preliminary to the kindling of
the need-fire all other fires and lights in the neighbourhood were
extinguished, so that not so much as a spark remained alight; for
so long as even a night-light burned in a house, it was imagined
that the need-fire could not kindle. Sometimes it was deemed enough
to put out all the fires in the village; but sometimes the
extinction extended to neighbouring villages or to a whole parish.
In some parts of the Highlands of Scotland the rule was that all
householders who dwelt within the two nearest running streams
should put out their lights and fires on the day appointed. Usually
the need-fire was made in the open air, but in some parts of Serbia
it was kindled in a dark room; sometimes the place was a cross-way
or a hollow in a road. In the Highlands of Scotland the proper
places for performing the rite seem to have been knolls or small
islands in rivers.
The regular method of producing the need-fire was by the
friction of two pieces of wood; it might not be struck by flint and
steel. Very exceptionally among some South Slavs we read of a
practice of kindling a need-fire by striking a piece of iron on an
anvil. Where the wood to be employed is specified, it is generally
said to be oak; but on the Lower Rhine the fire was kindled by the
friction of oak-wood or fir-wood. In Slavonic countries we hear of
poplar, pear, and cornel wood being used for the purpose. Often the
material is simply described as two pieces of dry wood. Sometimes
nine different kinds of wood were deemed necessary, but rather
perhaps to be burned in the bonfire than to be rubbed together for
the production of the need-fire. The particular mode of kindling
the need-fire varied in different districts; a very common one was
this. Two poles were driven into the ground about a foot and a half
from each other. Each pole had in the side facing the other a
socket into which a smooth cross-piece or roller was fitted. The
sockets were stuffed with linen, and the two ends of the roller
were rammed tightly into the sockets. To make it more inflammable
the roller was often coated with tar. A rope was then wound round
the roller, and the free ends at both sides were gripped by two or
more persons, who by pulling the rope to and fro caused the roller
to revolve rapidly, till through the friction the linen in the
sockets took fire. The sparks were immediately caught in tow or
oakum and waved about in a circle until they burst into a bright
glow, when straw was applied to it, and the blazing straw used to
kindle the fuel that had been stacked to make the bonfire. Often a
wheel, sometimes a cart-wheel or even a spinning-wheel, formed part
of the mechanism; in Aberdeenshire it was called “the muckle
wheel”; in the island of Mull the wheel was turned from east
to west over nine spindles of oak-wood. Sometimes we are merely
told that two wooden planks were rubbed together. Sometimes it was
prescribed that the cart-wheel used for fire-making and the axle on
which it turned should both be new. Similarly it was said that the
rope which turned the roller should be new; if possible it should
be woven of strands taken from a gallows rope with which people had
been hanged, but this was a counsel of perfection rather than a
strict necessity.
Various rules were also laid down as to the kind of persons who
might or should make the need-fire. Sometimes it was said that the
two persons who pulled the rope which twirled the roller should
always be brothers or at least bear the same baptismal name;
sometimes it was deemed sufficient if they were both chaste young
men. In some villages of Brunswick people thought that if everybody
who lent a hand in kindling the need-fire did not bear the same
Christian name, they would labour in vain. In Silesia the tree
employed to produce the need-fire used to be felled by a pair of
twin brothers. In the western islands of Scotland the fire was
kindled by eighty-one married men, who rubbed two great planks
against each other, working in relays of nine; in North Uist the
nine times nine who made the fire were all first-begotten sons, but
we are not told whether they were married or single. Among the
Serbians the need-fire is sometimes kindled by a boy and girl
between eleven and fourteen years of age, who work stark naked in a
dark room; sometimes it is made by an old man and an old woman also
in the dark. In Bulgaria, too, the makers of need-fire strip
themselves of their clothes; in Caithness they divested themselves
of all kinds of metal. If after long rubbing of the wood no fire
was elicited they concluded that some fire must still be burning in
the village; so a strict search was made from house to house, any
fire that might be found was put out, and the negligent householder
punished or upbraided; indeed a heavy fine might be inflicted on
him.
When the need-fire was at last kindled, the bonfire was lit from
it, and as soon as the blaze had somewhat died down, the sick
animals were driven over the glowing embers, sometimes in a regular
order of precedence, first the pigs, next the cows, and last of all
the horses. Sometimes they were driven twice or thrice through the
smoke and flames, so that occasionally some of them were scorched
to death. As soon as all the beasts were through, the young folk
would rush wildly at the ashes and cinders, sprinkling and
blackening each other with them; those who were most blackened
would march in triumph behind the cattle into the village and would
not wash themselves for a long time. From the bonfire people
carried live embers home and used them to rekindle the fires in
their houses. These brands, after being extinguished in water, they
sometimes put in the managers at which the cattle fed, and kept
them there for a while. Ashes from the need-fire were also strewed
on the fields to protect the crops against vermin; sometimes they
were taken home to be employed as remedies in sickness, being
sprinkled on the ailing part or mixed in water and drunk by the
patient. In the western islands of Scotland and on the adjoining
mainland, as soon as the fire on the domestic hearth had been
rekindled from the need-fire a pot full of water was set on it, and
the water thus heated was afterwards sprinkled upon the people
infected with the plague or upon the cattle that were tainted by
the murrain. Special virtue was attributed to the smoke of the
bonfire; in Sweden fruit-trees and nets were fumigated with it, in
order that the trees might bear fruit and the nets catch fish. In
the Highlands of Scotland the need-fire was accounted a sovereign
remedy for witchcraft. In the island of Mull, when the fire was
kindled as a cure for the murrain, we hear of the rite being
accompanied by the sacrifice of a sick heifer, which was cut in
pieces and burnt. Slavonian and Bulgarian peasants conceive
cattle-plague as a foul fiend or vampyre which can be kept at bay
by interposing a barrier of fire between it and the herds. A
similar conception may perhaps have originally everywhere underlain
the use of the need-fire as a remedy for the murrain. It appears
that in some parts of Germany the people did not wait for an
outbreak of cattleplague, but, taking time by the forelock, kindled
a need-fire annually to prevent the calamity. Similarly in Poland
the peasants are said to kindle fires in the village streets every
year on St. Rochus’s day and to drive the cattle thrice
through them in order to protect the beasts against the murrain. We
have seen that in the Hebrides the cattle were in like manner
driven annually round the Beltane fires for the same purpose. In
some cantons of Switzerland children still kindle a need-fire by
the friction of wood for the sake of dispelling a mist.
LXIII. The Interpretation of the Fire-Festivals
1. On the Fire-festivals in general
THE FOREGOING survey of the popular fire-festivals of Europe
suggests some general observations. In the first place we can
hardly help being struck by the resemblance which the ceremonies
bear to each other, at whatever time of the year and in whatever
part of Europe they are celebrated. The custom of kindling great
bonfires, leaping over them, and driving cattle through or round
them would seem to have been practically universal throughout
Europe, and the same may be said of the processions or races with
blazing torches round fields, orchards, pastures, or cattle-stalls.
Less widespread are the customs of hurling lighted discs into the
air and trundling a burning wheel down hill. The ceremonial of the
Yule log is distinguished from that of the other fire-festivals by
the privacy and domesticity which characterise it; but this
distinction may well be due simply to the rough weather of
midwinter, which is apt not only to render a public assembly in the
open air disagreeable, but also at any moment to defeat the object
of the assembly by extinguishing the all-important fire under a
downpour of rain or a fall of snow. Apart from these local or
seasonal differences, the general resemblance between the
fire-festivals at all times of the year and in all places is
tolerably close. And as the ceremonies themselves resemble each
other, so do the benefits which the people expect to reap from
them. Whether applied in the form of bonfires blazing at fixed
points, or of torches carried about from place to place, or of
embers and ashes taken from the smouldering heap of fuel, the fire
is believed to promote the growth of the crops and the welfare of
man and beast, either positively by stimulating them, or negatively
by averting the dangers and calamities which threaten them from
such causes as thunder and lightning, conflagration, blight,
mildew, vermin, sterility, disease, and not least of all
witchcraft.
But we naturally ask, How did it come about that benefits so
great and manifold were supposed to be attained by means so simple?
In what way did people imagine that they could procure so many
goods or avoid so many ills by the application of fire and smoke,
of embers and ashes? Two different explanations of the
fire-festivals have been given by modern enquirers. On the one hand
it has been held that they are sun-charms or magical ceremonies
intended, on the principle of imitative magic, to ensure a needful
supply of sunshine for men, animals, and plants by kindling fires
which mimic on earth the great source of light and heat in the sky.
This was the view of Wilhelm Mannhardt. It may be called the solar
theory. On the other hand it has been maintained that the
ceremonial fires have no necessary reference to the sun but are
simply purificatory in intention, being designed to burn up and
destroy all harmful influences, whether these are conceived in a
personal form as witches, demons, and monsters, or in an impersonal
form as a sort of pervading taint or corruption of the air. This is
the view of Dr. Edward Westermarck and apparently of Professor
Eugen Mogk. It may be called the purificatory theory. Obviously the
two theories postulate two very different conceptions of the fire
which plays the principal part in the rites. On the one view, the
fire, like sunshine in our latitude, is a genial creative power
which fosters the growth of plants and the development of all that
makes for health and happiness; on the other view, the fire is a
fierce destructive power which blasts and consumes all the noxious
elements, whether spiritual or material, that menace the life of
men, of animals, and of plants. According to the one theory the
fire is a stimulant, according to the other it is a disinfectant;
on the one view its virtue is positive, on the other it is
negative.
Yet the two explanations, different as they are in the character
which they attribute to the fire, are perhaps not wholly
irreconcilable. If we assume that the fires kindled at these
festivals were primarily intended to imitate the sun’s light
and heat, may we not regard the purificatory and disinfecting
qualities, which popular opinion certainly appears to have ascribed
to them, as attributes derived directly from the purificatory and
disinfecting qualities of sunshine? In this way we might conclude
that, while the imitation of sunshine in these ceremonies was
primary and original, the purification attributed to them was
secondary and derivative. Such a conclusion, occupying an
intermediate position between the two opposing theories and
recognising an element of truth in both of them, was adopted by me
in earlier editions of this work; but in the meantime Dr.
Westermarck has argued powerfully in favour of the purificatory
theory alone, and I am bound to say that his arguments carry great
weight, and that on a fuller review of the facts the balance of
evidence seems to me to incline decidedly in his favour. However,
the case is not so clear as to justify us in dismissing the solar
theory without discussion, and accordingly I propose to adduce the
considerations which tell for it before proceeding to notice those
which tell against it. A theory which had the support of so learned
and sagacious an investigator as W. Mannhardt is entitled to a
respectful hearing.
2. The Solar Theory of the Fire-festivals
IN AN EARLIER part of this work we saw that savages resort to
charms for making sunshine, and it would be no wonder if primitive
man in Europe did the same. Indeed, when we consider the cold and
cloudy climate of Europe during a great part of the year, we shall
find it natural that sun-charms should have played a much more
prominent part among the superstitious practices of European
peoples than among those of savages who live nearer the equator and
who consequently are apt to get in the course of nature more
sunshine than they want. This view of the festivals may be
supported by various arguments drawn partly from their dates,
partly from the nature of the rites, and partly from the influence
which they are believed to exert upon the weather and on
vegetation.
First, in regard to the dates of the festivals it can be no mere
accident that two of the most important and widely spread of the
festivals are timed to coincide more or less exactly with the
summer and winter solstices, that is, with the two turning-points
in the sun’s apparent course in the sky when he reaches
respectively his highest and his lowest elevation at noon. Indeed
with respect to the midwinter celebration of Christmas we are not
left to conjecture; we know from the express testimony of the
ancients that it was instituted by the church to supersede an old
heathen festival of the birth of the sun, which was apparently
conceived to be born again on the shortest day of the year, after
which his light and heat were seen to grow till they attained their
full maturity at midsummer. Therefore it is no very far-fetched
conjecture to suppose that the Yule log, which figures so
prominently in the popular celebration of Christmas, was originally
designed to help the labouring sun of midwinter to rekindle his
seemingly expiring light.
Not only the date of some of the festivals but the manner of
their celebration suggests a conscious imitation of the sun. The
custom of rolling a burning wheel down a hill, which is often
observed at these ceremonies, might well pass for an imitation of
the sun’s course in the sky, and the imitation would be
especially appropriate on Midsummer Day when the sun’s annual
declension begins. Indeed the custom has been thus interpreted by
some of those who have recorded it. Not less graphic, it may be
said, is the mimicry of his apparent revolution by swinging a
burning tar-barrel round a pole. Again, the common practice of
throwing fiery discs, sometimes expressly said to be shaped like
suns, into the air at the festivals may well be a piece of
imitative magic. In these, as in so many cases, the magic force may
be supposed to take effect through mimicry or sympathy: by
imitating the desired result you actually produce it: by
counterfeiting the sun’s progress through the heavens you
really help the luminary to pursue his celestial journey with
punctuality and despatch. The name “fire of heaven,” by
which the midsummer fire is sometimes popularly known, clearly
implies a consciousness of a connexion between the earthly and the
heavenly flame.
Again, the manner in which the fire appears to have been
originally kindled on these occasions has been alleged in support
of the view that it was intended to be a mock-sun. As some scholars
have perceived, it is highly probable that at the periodic
festivals in former times fire was universally obtained by the
friction of two pieces of wood. It is still so procured in some
places both at the Easter and the Midsummer festivals, and it is
expressly said to have been formerly so procured at the Beltane
celebration both in Scotland and Wales. But what makes it nearly
certain that this was once the invariable mode of kindling the fire
at these periodic festivals is the analogy of the needfire, which
has almost always been produced by the friction of wood, and
sometimes by the revolution of a wheel. It is a plausible
conjecture that the wheel employed for this purpose represents the
sun, and if the fires at the regularly recurring celebrations were
formerly produced in the same way, it might be regarded as a
confirmation of the view that they were originally sun-charms. In
point of fact there is, as Kuhn has indicated, some evidence to
show that the midsummer fire was originally thus produced. We have
seen that many Hungarian swine-herds make fire on Midsummer Eve by
rotating a wheel round a wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and that they
drive their pigs through the fire thus made. At Obermedlingen, in
Swabia, the “fire of heaven,” as it was called, was
made on St. Vitus’s Day (the fifteenth of June) by igniting a
cart-wheel, which, smeared with pitch and plaited with straw, was
fastened on a pole twelve feet high, the top of the pole being
inserted in the nave of the wheel. This fire was made on the summit
of a mountain, and as the flame ascended, the people uttered a set
form of words, with eyes and arms directed heavenward. Here the
fixing of a wheel on a pole and igniting it suggests that
originally the fire was produced, as in the case of the need-fire,
by the revolution of a wheel. The day on which the ceremony takes
place (the fifteenth of June) is near midsummer; and we have seen
that in Masuren fire is, or used to be, actually made on Midsummer
Day by turning a wheel rapidly about an oaken pole, though it is
not said that the new fire so obtained is used to light a bonfire.
However, we must bear in mind that in all such cases the use of a
wheel may be merely a mechanical device to facilitate the operation
of fire-making by increasing the friction; it need not have any
symbolical significance.
Further, the influence which these fires, whether periodic or
occasional, are supposed to exert on the weather and vegetation may
be cited in support of the view that they are sun-charms, since the
effects ascribed to them resemble those of sunshine. Thus, the
French belief that in a rainy June the lighting of the midsummer
bonfires will cause the rain to cease appears to assume that they
can disperse the dark clouds and make the sun to break out in
radiant glory, drying the wet earth and dripping trees. Similarly
the use of the need-fire by Swiss children on foggy days for the
purpose of clearing away the mist may very naturally be interpreted
as a sun-charm. In the Vosges Mountains the people believe that the
midsummer fires help to preserve the fruits of the earth and ensure
good crops. In Sweden the warmth or cold of the coming season is
inferred from the direction in which the flames of the May Day
bonfire are blown; if they blow to the south, it will be warm, if
to the north, cold. No doubt at present the direction of the flames
is regarded merely as an augury of the weather, not as a mode of
influencing it. But we may be pretty sure that this is one of the
cases in which magic has dwindled into divination. So in the Eifel
Mountains, when the smoke blows towards the corn-fields, this is an
omen that the harvest will be abundant. But the older view may have
been not merely that the smoke and flames prognosticated, but that
they actually produced an abundant harvest, the heat of the flames
acting like sunshine on the corn. Perhaps it was with this view
that people in the Isle of Man lit fires to windward of their
fields in order that the smoke might blow over them. So in South
Africa, about the month of April, the Matabeles light huge fires to
the windward of their gardens, “their idea being that the
smoke, by passing over the crops, will assist the ripening of
them.” Among the Zulus also “medicine is burned on a
fire placed to windward of the garden, the fumigation which the
plants in consequence receive being held to improve the
crop.” Again, the idea of our European peasants that the corn
will grow well as far as the blaze of the bonfire is visible, may
be interpreted as a remnant of the belief in the quickening and
fertilising power of the bonfires. The same belief, it may be
argued, reappears in the notion that embers taken from the bonfires
and inserted in the fields will promote the growth of the crops,
and it may be thought to underlie the customs of sowing flax-seed
in the direction in which the flames blow, of mixing the ashes of
the bonfire with the seed-corn at sowing, of scattering the ashes
by themselves over the field to fertilise it, and of incorporating
a piece of the Yule log in the plough to make the seeds thrive. The
opinion that the flax or hemp will grow as high as the flames rise
or the people leap over them belongs clearly to the same class of
ideas. Again, at Konz, on the banks of the Moselle, if the blazing
wheel which was trundled down the hillside reached the river
without being extinguished, this was hailed as a proof that the
vintage would be abundant. So firmly was this belief held that the
successful performance of the ceremony entitled the villagers to
levy a tax upon the owners of the neighbouring vineyards. Here the
unextinguished wheel might be taken to represent an unclouded sun,
which in turn would portend an abundant vintage. So the waggon-load
of white wine which the villagers received from the vineyards round
about might pass for a payment for the sunshine which they had
procured for the grapes. Similarly in the Vale of Glamorgan a
blazing wheel used to be trundled down hill on Midsummer Day, and
if the fire were extinguished before the wheel reached the foot of
the hill, the people expected a bad harvest; whereas if the wheel
kept alight all the way down and continued to blaze for a long
time, the farmers looked forward to heavy crops that summer. Here,
again, it is natural to suppose that the rustic mind traced a
direct connexion between the fire of the wheel and the fire of the
sun, on which the crops are dependent.
But in popular belief the quickening and fertilising influence
of the bonfires is not limited to the vegetable world; it extends
also to animals. This plainly appears from the Irish custom of
driving barren cattle through the midsummer fires, from the French
belief that the Yule log steeped in water helps cows to calve, from
the French and Serbian notion that there will be as many chickens,
calves, lambs, and kids as there are sparks struck out of the Yule
log, from the French custom of putting the ashes of the bonfires in
the fowls’ nests to make the hens lay eggs, and from the
German practice of mixing the ashes of the bonfires with the drink
of cattle in order to make the animals thrive. Further, there are
clear indications that even human fecundity is supposed to be
promoted by the genial heat of the fires. In Morocco the people
think that childless couples can obtain offspring by leaping over
the midsummer bonfire. It is an Irish belief that a girl who jumps
thrice over the midsummer bonfire will soon marry and become the
mother of many children; in Flanders women leap over the midsummer
fires to ensure an easy delivery; in various parts of France they
think that if a girl dances round nine fires she will be sure to
marry within the year, and in Bohemia they fancy that she will do
so if she merely sees nine of the bonfires. On the other hand, in
Lechrain people say that if a young man and woman, leaping over the
midsummer fire together, escape unsmirched, the young woman will
not become a mother within twelve months; the flames have not
touched and fertilised her. In parts of Switzerland and France the
lighting of the Yule log is accompanied by a prayer that the women
may bear children, the she-goats bring forth kids, and the ewes
drop lambs. The rule observed in some places that the bonfires
should be kindled by the person who was last married seems to
belong to the same class of ideas, whether it be that such a person
is supposed to receive from, or to impart to, the fire a generative
and fertilising influence. The common practice of lovers leaping
over the fires hand in hand may very well have originated in a
notion that thereby their marriage would be blessed with offspring;
and the like motive would explain the custom which obliges couples
married within the year to dance to the light of torches. And the
scenes of profligacy which appear to have marked the midsummer
celebration among the Esthonians, as they once marked the
celebration of May Day among ourselves, may have sprung, not from
the mere licence of holiday-makers, but from a crude notion that
such orgies were justified, if not required, by some mysterious
bond which linked the life of man to the courses of the heavens at
this turning-point of the year.
At the festivals which we are considering the custom of kindling
bonfires is commonly associated with a custom of carrying lighted
torches about the fields, the orchards, the pastures, the flocks
and the herds; and we can hardly doubt that the two customs are
only two different ways of attaining the same object, namely, the
benefits which are believed to flow from the fire, whether it be
stationary or portable. Accordingly if we accept the solar theory
of the bonfires, we seem bound to apply it also to the torches; we
must suppose that the practice of marching or running with blazing
torches about the country is simply a means of diffusing far and
wide the genial influence of the sunshine of which these flickering
flames are a feeble imitation. In favour of this view it may be
said that sometimes the torches are carried about the fields for
the express purpose of fertilising them, and with the same
intention live coals from the bonfires are sometimes placed in the
fields to prevent blight. On the eve of Twelfth Day in Normandy
men, women, and children run wildly through the fields and orchards
with lighted torches, which they wave about the branches and dash
against the trunks of the fruit-trees for the sake of burning the
moss and driving away the moles and field-mice. “They believe
that the ceremony fulfills the double object of exorcising the
vermin whose multiplication would be a real calamity, and of
imparting fecundity to the trees, the fields, and even the
cattle”; and they imagine that the more the ceremony is
prolonged, the greater will be the crop of fruit next autumn. In
Bohemia they say that the corn will grow as high as they fling the
blazing besoms into the air. Nor are such notions confined to
Europe. In Corea, a few days before the New Year festival, the
eunuchs of the palace swing burning torches, chanting invocations
the while, and this is supposed to ensure bountiful crops for the
next season. The custom of trundling a burning wheel over the
fields, which used to be observed in Poitou for the express purpose
of fertilising them, may be thought to embody the same idea in a
still more graphic form; since in this way the mock-sun itself, not
merely its light and heat represented by torches, is made actually
to pass over the ground which is to receive its quickening and
kindly influence. Once more, the custom of carrying lighted brands
round cattle is plainly equivalent to driving the animals through
the bonfire; and if the bonfire is a suncharm, the torches must be
so also.
3. The Purificatory Theory of the Fire-festivals
THUS far we have considered what may be said for the theory that
at the European fire-festivals the fire is kindled as a charm to
ensure an abundant supply of sunshine for man and beast, for corn
and fruits. It remains to consider what may be said against this
theory and in favour of the view that in these rites fire is
employed not as a creative but as a cleansing agent, which purifies
men, animals, and plants by burning up and consuming the noxious
elements, whether material or spiritual, which menace all living
things with disease and death.
First, then, it is to be observed that the people who practise
the fire-customs appear never to allege the solar theory in
explanation of them, while on the contrary they do frequently and
emphatically put forward the purificatory theory. This is a strong
argument in favour of the purificatory and against the solar
theory; for the popular explanation of a popular custom is never to
be rejected except for grave cause. And in the present case there
seems to be no adequate reason for rejecting it. The conception of
fire as a destructive agent, which can be turned to account for the
consumption of evil things, is so simple and obvious that it could
hardly escape the minds even of the rude peasantry with whom these
festivals originated. On the other hand the conception of fire as
an emanation of the sun, or at all events as linked to it by a bond
of physical sympathy, is far less simple and obvious; and though
the use of fire as a charm to produce sunshine appears to be
undeniable, nevertheless in attempting to explain popular customs
we should never have recourse to a more recondite idea when a
simpler one lies to hand and is supported by the explicit testimony
of the people themselves. Now in the case of the fire-festivals the
destructive aspect of fire is one upon which the people dwell again
and again; and it is highly significant that the great evil against
which the fire is directed appears to be witchcraft. Again and
again we are told that the fires are intended to burn or repel the
witches; and the intention is sometimes graphically expressed by
burning an effigy of a witch in the fire. Hence, when we remember
the great hold which the dread of witchcraft has had on the popular
European mind in all ages, we may suspect that the primary
intention of all these fire-festivals was simply to destroy or at
all events get rid of the witches, who were regarded as the causes
of nearly all the misfortunes and calamities that befall men, their
cattle, and their crops.
This suspicion is confirmed when we examine the evils for which
the bonfires and torches were supposed to provide a remedy.
Foremost, perhaps, among these evils we may reckon the diseases of
cattle; and of all the ills that witches are believed to work there
is probably none which is so constantly insisted on as the harm
they do to the herds, particularly by stealing the milk from the
cows. Now it is significant that the need-fire, which may perhaps
be regarded as the parent of the periodic fire-festivals, is
kindled above all as a remedy for a murrain or other disease of
cattle; and the circumstance suggests, what on general grounds
seems probable, that the custom of kindling the need-fire goes back
to a time when the ancestors of the European peoples subsisted
chiefly on the products of their herds, and when agriculture as yet
played a subordinate part in their lives. Witches and wolves are
the two great foes still dreaded by the herdsman in many parts of
Europe; and we need not wonder that he should resort to fire as a
powerful means of banning them both. Among Slavonic peoples it
appears that the foes whom the need-fire is designed to combat are
not so much living witches as vampyres and other evil spirits, and
the ceremony aims rather at repelling these baleful beings than at
actually consuming them in the flames. But for our present purpose
these distinctions are immaterial. The important thing to observe
is that among the Slavs the need-fire, which is probably the
original of all the ceremonial fires now under consideration, is
not a sun-charm, but clearly and unmistakably nothing but a means
of protecting man and beast against the attacks of maleficent
creatures, whom the peasant thinks to burn or scare by the heat of
the fire, just as he might burn or scare wild animals.
Again, the bonfires are often supposed to protect the fields
against hail and the homestead against thunder and lightning. But
both hail and thunderstorms are frequently thought to be caused by
witches; hence the fire which bans the witches necessarily serves
at the same time as a talisman against hail, thunder, and
lightning. Further, brands taken from the bonfires are commonly
kept in the houses to guard them against conflagration; and though
this may perhaps be done on the principle of homoeopathic magic,
one fire being thought to act as a preventive of another, it is
also possible that the intention may be to keep witch-incendiaries
at bay. Again, people leap over the bonfires as a preventive of
colic, and look at the flames steadily in order to preserve their
eyes in good health; and both colic and sore eyes are in Germany,
and probably elsewhere, set down to the machinations of witches.
Once more, to leap over the midsummer fires or to circumambulate
them is thought to prevent a person from feeling pains in his back
at reaping; and in Germany such pains are called
“witch-shots” and ascribed to witchcraft.
But if the bonfires and torches of the fire-festivals are to be
regarded primarily as weapons directed against witches and wizards,
it becomes probable that the same explanation applies not only to
the flaming discs which are hurled into the air, but also to the
burning wheels which are rolled down hill on these occasions; discs
and wheels, we may suppose, are alike intended to burn the witches
who hover invisible in the air or haunt unseen the fields, the
orchards, and the vineyards on the hillside. Certainly witches are
constantly thought to ride through the air on broomsticks or other
equally convenient vehicles; and if they do so, how can you get at
them so effectually as by hurling lighted missiles, whether discs,
torches, or besoms, after them as they flit past overhead in the
gloom? The South Slavonian peasant believes that witches ride in
the dark hail-clouds; so he shoots at the clouds to bring down the
hags, while he curses them, saying, “Curse, curse Herodias,
thy mother is a heathen, damned of God and fettered through the
Redeemer’s blood.” Also he brings out a pot of glowing
charcoal on which he has thrown holy oil, laurel leaves, and
wormwood to make a smoke. The fumes are supposed to ascend to the
clouds and stupefy the witches, so that they tumble down to earth.
And in order that they may not fall soft, but may hurt themselves
very much, the yokel hastily brings out a chair and tilts it bottom
up so that the witch in falling may break her legs on the legs of
the chair. Worse than that, he cruelly lays scythes, bill-hooks,
and other formidable weapons edge upwards so as to cut and mangle
the poor wretches when they drop plump upon them from the
clouds.
On this view the fertility supposed to follow the application of
fire in the form of bonfires, torches, discs, rolling wheels, and
so forth, is not conceived as resulting directly from an increase
of solar heat which the fire has magically generated; it is merely
an indirect result obtained by freeing the reproductive powers of
plants and animals from the fatal obstruction of witchcraft. And
what is true of the reproduction of plants and animals may hold
good also of the fertility of the human sexes. The bonfires are
supposed to promote marriage and to procure offspring for childless
couples. This happy effect need not flow directly from any
quickening or fertilising energy in the fire; it may follow
indirectly from the power of the fire to remove those obstacles
which the spells of witches and wizards notoriously present to the
union of man and wife.
On the whole, then, the theory of the purificatory virtue of the
ceremonial fires appears more probable and more in accordance with
the evidence than the opposing theory of their connexion with the
sun.
LXIV. The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires
1. The Burning of Effigies in the Fires
WE have still to ask, What is the meaning of burning effigies in
the fire at these festivals? After the preceding investigation the
answer to the question seems obvious. As the fires are often
alleged to be kindled for the purpose of burning the witches, and
as the effigy burnt in them is sometimes called “the
Witch,” we might naturally be disposed to conclude that all
the effigies consumed in the flames on these occasions represent
witches or warlocks, and that the custom of burning them is merely
a substitute for burning the wicked men and women themselves, since
on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic you practically
destroy the witch herself in destroying her effigy. On the whole
this explanation of the burning of straw figures in human shape at
the festivals is perhaps the most probable.
Yet it may be that this explanation does not apply to all the
cases, and that certain of them may admit and even require another
interpretation. For the effigies so burned, as I have already
remarked, can hardly be separated from the effigies of Death which
are burned or otherwise destroyed in spring; and grounds have been
already given for regarding the so-called effigies of Death as
really representatives of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation.
Are the other effigies, which are burned in the spring and
midsummer bonfires, susceptible of the same explanation? It would
seem so. For just as the fragments of the so-called Death are stuck
in the fields to make the crops grow, so the charred embers of the
figure burned in the spring bonfires are sometimes laid on the
fields in the belief that they will keep vermin from the crop.
Again, the rule that the last married bride must leap over the fire
in which the straw-man is burned on Shrove Tuesday, is probably
intended to make her fruitful. But, as we have seen, the power of
blessing women with offspring is a special attribute of
tree-spirits; it is therefore a fair presumption that the burning
effigy over which the bride must leap is a representative of the
fertilising tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation. This character of
the effigy, as representative of the spirit of vegetation, is
almost unmistakable when the figure is composed of an unthreshed
sheaf of corn or is covered from head to foot with flowers. Again,
it is to be noted that, instead of a puppet, trees, either living
or felled, are sometimes burned both in the spring and midsummer
bonfires. Now, considering the frequency with which the tree-spirit
is represented in human shape, it is hardly rash to suppose that
when sometimes a tree and sometimes an effigy is burned in these
fires, the effigy and the tree are regarded as equivalent to each
other, each being a representative of the tree-spirit. This, again,
is confirmed by observing, first, that sometimes the effigy which
is to be burned is carried about simultaneously with a May-tree,
the former being carried by the boys, the latter by the girls; and,
second, that the effigy is sometimes tied to a living tree and
burned with it. In these cases, we can scarcely doubt, the
tree-spirit is represented, as we have found it represented before,
in duplicate, both by the tree and by the effigy. That the true
character of the effigy as a representative of the beneficent
spirit of vegetation should sometimes be forgotten, is natural. The
custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of
thought to escape misinterpretation. Naturally enough the people
who continued to burn his image came in time to identify it as the
effigy of persons, whom, on various grounds, they regarded with
aversion, such as Judas Iscariot, Luther, and a witch.
The general reasons for killing a god or his representative have
been examined in a preceding chapter. But when the god happens to
be a deity of vegetation, there are special reasons why he should
die by fire. For light and heat are necessary to vegetable growth;
and, on the principle of sympathetic magic, by subjecting the
personal representative of vegetation to their influence, you
secure a supply of these necessaries for trees and crops. In other
words, by burning the spirit of vegetation in a fire which
represents the sun, you make sure that, for a time at least,
vegetation shall have plenty of sun. It may be objected that, if
the intention is simply to secure enough sunshine for vegetation,
this end would be better attained, on the principles of sympathetic
magic, by merely passing the representative of vegetation through
the fire instead of burning him. In point of fact this is sometimes
done. In Russia, as we have seen, the straw figure of Kupalo is not
burned in the midsummer fire, but merely carried backwards and
forwards across it. But, for the reasons already given, it is
necessary that the god should die; so next day Kupalo is stripped
of her ornaments and thrown into a stream. In this Russian custom
the passage of the image through the fire, if it is not simply a
purification, may possibly be a sun-charm; the killing of the god
is a separate act, and the mode of killing him—by
drowning—is probably a rain-charm. But usually people have
not thought it necessary to draw this fine distinction; for the
various reasons already assigned, it is advantageous, they think,
to expose the god of vegetation to a considerable degree of heat,
and it is also advantageous to kill him, and they combine these
advantages in a rough-and-ready way by burning him.
2. The Burning of Men and Animals in the Fires
IN THE POPULAR customs connected with the fire-festivals of
Europe there are certain features which appear to point to a former
practice of human sacrifice. We have seen reasons for believing
that in Europe living persons have often acted as representatives
of the tree-spirit and corn-spirit and have suffered death as such.
There is no reason, therefore, why they should not have been
burned, if any special advantages were likely to be attained by
putting them to death in that way. The consideration of human
suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of
primitive man. Now, in the fire-festivals which we are discussing,
the pretence of burning people is sometimes carried so far that it
seems reasonable to regard it as a mitigated survival of an older
custom of actually burning them. Thus in Aachen, as we saw, the man
clad in peas-straw acts so cleverly that the children really
believe he is being burned. At Jumièges in Normandy the man clad
all in green, who bore the title of the Green Wolf, was pursued by
his comrades, and when they caught him they feigned to fling him
upon the midsummer bonfire. Similarly at the Beltane fires in
Scotland the pretended victim was seized, and a show made of
throwing him into the flames, and for some time afterwards people
affected to speak of him as dead. Again, in the Hallowe’en
bonfires of Northeastern Scotland we may perhaps detect a similar
pretence in the custom observed by a lad of lying down as close to
the fire as possible and allowing the other lads to leap over him.
The titular king at Aix, who reigned for a year and danced the
first dance round the midsummer bonfire, may perhaps in days of old
have discharged the less agreeable duty of serving as fuel for that
fire which in later times he only kindled. In the following customs
Mannhardt is probably right in recognising traces of an old custom
of burning a leaf-clad representative of the spirit of vegetation.
At Wolfeck, in Austria, on Midsummer Day, a boy completely clad in
green fir branches goes from house to house, accompanied by a noisy
crew, collecting wood for the bonfire. As he gets the wood he
sings:
“Forest trees I want,
No sour milk for me,
But beer and wine,
So can the wood-man be jolly and gay.”
In some parts of Bavaria, also, the boys who go from house to
house collecting fuel for the midsummer bonfire envelop one of
their number from head to foot in green branches of firs, and lead
him by a rope through the whole village. At Moosheim, in
Wurtemberg, the festival of St. John’s Fire usually lasted
for fourteen days, ending on the second Sunday after Midsummer Day.
On this last day the bonfire was left in charge of the children,
while the older people retired to a wood. Here they encased a young
fellow in leaves and twigs, who, thus disguised, went to the fire,
scattered it, and trod it out. All the people present fled at the
sight of him.
But it seems possible to go farther than this. Of human
sacrifices offered on these occasions the most unequivocal traces,
as we have seen, are those which, about a hundred years ago, still
lingered at the Beltane fires in the Highlands of Scotland, that
is, among a Celtic people who, situated in a remote corner of
Europe and almost completely isolated from foreign influence, had
till then conserved their old heathenism better perhaps than any
other people in the West of Europe. It is significant, therefore,
that human sacrifices by fire are known, on unquestionable
evidence, to have been systematically practised by the Celts. The
earliest description of these sacrifices has been bequeathed to us
by Julius Caesar. As conqueror of the hitherto independent Celts of
Gaul, Caesar had ample opportunity of observing the national Celtic
religion and manners, while these were still fresh and crisp from
the native mint and had not yet been fused in the melting-pot of
Roman civilisation. With his own notes Caesar appears to have
incorporated the observations of a Greek explorer, by name
Posidonius, who travelled in Gaul about fifty years before Caesar
carried the Roman arms to the English Channel. The Greek geographer
Strabo and the historian Diodorus seem also to have derived their
descriptions of the Celtic sacrifices from the work of Posidonius,
but independently of each other, and of Caesar, for each of the
three derivative accounts contain some details which are not to be
found in either of the others. By combining them, therefore, we can
restore the original account of Posidonius with some probability,
and thus obtain a picture of the sacrifices offered by the Celts of
Gaul at the close of the second century before our era. The
following seem to have been the main outlines of the custom.
Condemned criminals were reserved by the Celts in order to be
sacrificed to the gods at a great festival which took place once in
every five years. The more there were of such victims, the greater
was believed to be the fertility of the land. If there were not
enough criminals to furnish victims, captives taken in war were
immolated to supply the deficiency. When the time came the victims
were sacrificed by the Druids or priests. Some they shot down with
arrows, some they impaled, and some they burned alive in the
following manner. Colossal images of wicker-work or of wood and
grass were constructed; these were filled with live men, cattle,
and animals of other kinds; fire was then applied to the images,
and they were burned with their living contents.
Such were the great festivals held once every five years. But
besides these quinquennial festivals, celebrated on so grand a
scale, and with, apparently, so large an expenditure of human life,
it seems reasonable to suppose that festivals of the same sort,
only on a lesser scale, were held annually, and that from these
annual festivals are lineally descended some at least of the
fire-festivals which, with their traces of human sacrifices, are
still celebrated year by year in many parts of Europe. The gigantic
images constructed of osiers or covered with grass in which the
Druids enclosed their victims remind us of the leafy framework in
which the human representative of the tree-spirit is still so often
encased. Hence, seeing that the fertility of the land was
apparently supposed to depend upon the due performance of these
sacrifices, Mannhardt interpreted the Celtic victims, cased in
osiers and grass, as representatives of the tree-spirit or spirit
of vegetation.
These wicker giants of the Druids seem to have had till lately,
if not down to the present time, their representatives at the
spring and midsummer festivals of modern Europe. At Douay, down at
least to the early part of the nineteenth century, a procession
took place annually on the Sunday nearest to the seventh of July.
The great feature of the procession was a colossal figure, some
twenty or thirty feet high, made of osiers, and called “the
giant,” which was moved through the streets by means of
rollers and ropes worked by men who were enclosed within the
effigy. The figure was armed as a knight with lance and sword,
helmet and shield. Behind him marched his wife and his three
children, all constructed of osiers on the same principle, but on a
smaller scale. At Dunkirk the procession of the giants took place
on Midsummer Day, the twenty-fourth of June. The festival, which
was known as the Follies of Dunkirk, attracted multitudes of
spectators. The giant was a huge figure of wicker-work,
occasionally as much as forty-five feet high, dressed in a long
blue robe with gold stripes, which reached to his feet, concealing
the dozen or more men who made it dance and bob its head to the
spectators. This colossal effigy went by the name of Papa Reuss,
and carried in its pocket a bouncing infant of Brobdingnagian
proportions. The rear was brought up by the daughter of the giant,
constructed, like her sire, of wicker-work, and little, if at all,
inferior to him in size. Most towns and even villages of Brabant
and Flanders have, or used to have, similar wicker giants which
were annually led about to the delight of the populace, who loved
these grotesque figures, spoke of them with patriotic enthusiasm,
and never wearied of gazing at them. At Antwerp the giant was so
big that no gate in the city was large enough to let him go
through; hence he could not visit his brother giants in
neighbouring towns, as the other Belgian giants used to do on
solemn occasions.
In England artificial giants seem to have been a standing
feature of the midsummer festival. A writer of the sixteenth
century speaks of “Midsommer pageants in London, where to
make the people wonder, are set forth great and uglie gyants
marching as if they were alive, and armed at all points, but within
they are stuffed full of browne paper and tow, which the shrewd
boyes, underpeering, do guilefully discover, and turne to a greate
derision.” At Chester the annual pageant on Midsummer Eve
included the effigies of four giants, with animals, hobby-horses,
and other figures. At Coventry it appears that the giant’s
wife figured beside the giant. At Burford, in Oxfordshire,
Midsummer Eve used to be celebrated with great jollity by the
carrying of a giant and a dragon up and down the town. The last
survivor of these perambulating English giants lingered at
Salisbury, where an antiquary found him mouldering to decay in the
neglected hall of the Tailors’ Company about the year 1844.
His bodily framework was a lath and hoop, like the one which used
to be worn by Jack-in-the-Green on May Day.
In these cases the giants merely figured in the processions. But
sometimes they were burned in the summer bonfires. Thus the people
of the Rue aux Ours in Paris used annually to make a great
wicker-work figure, dressed as a soldier, which they promenaded up
and down the streets for several days, and solemnly burned on the
third of July, the crowd of spectators singing Salve
Regina. A personage who bore the title of king presided over
the ceremony with a lighted torch in his hand. The burning
fragments of the image were scattered among the people, who eagerly
scrambled for them. The custom was abolished in 1743. In Brie, Isle
de France, a wicker-work giant, eighteen feet high, was annually
burned on Midsummer Eve.
Again, the Druidical custom of burning live animals, enclosed in
wicker-work, has its counterpart at the spring and midsummer
festivals. At Luchon in the Pyrenees on Midsummer Eve “a
hollow column, composed of strong wicker-work, is raised to the
height of about sixty feet in the centre of the principal suburb,
and interlaced with green foliage up to the very top; while the
most beautiful flowers and shrubs procurable are artistically
arranged in groups below, so as to form a sort of background to the
scene. The column is then filled with combustible materials, ready
for ignition. At an appointed hour—about 8 P.M.—a grand
procession, composed of the clergy, followed by young men and
maidens in holiday attire, pour forth from the town chanting hymns,
and take up their position around the column. Meanwhile, bonfires
are lit, with beautiful effect, in the surrounding hills. As many
living serpents as could be collected are now thrown into the
column, which is set on fire at the base by means of torches, armed
with which about fifty boys and men dance around with frantic
gestures. The serpents, to avoid the flames, wriggle their way to
the top, whence they are seen lashing out laterally until finally
obliged to drop, their struggles for life giving rise to
enthusiastic delight among the surrounding spectators. This is a
favourite annual ceremony for the inhabitants of Luchon and its
neighbourhood, and local tradition assigns it to a heathen
origin.” In the midsummer fires formerly kindled on the Place
de Grève at Paris it was the custom to burn a basket, barrel, or
sack full of live cats, which was hung from a tall mast in the
midst of the bonfire; sometimes a fox was burned. The people
collected the embers and ashes of the fire and took them home,
believing that they brought good luck. The French kings often
witnessed these spectacles and even lit the bonfire with their own
hands. In 1648 Louis the Fourteenth, crowned with a wreath of roses
and carrying a bunch of roses in his hand, kindled the fire, danced
at it and partook of the banquet afterwards in the town hall. But
this was the last occasion when a monarch presided at the midsummer
bonfire in Paris. At Metz midsummer fires were lighted with great
pomp on the esplanade, and a dozen cats, enclosed in wicker cages,
were burned alive in them, to the amusement of the people.
Similarly at Gap, in the department of the High Alps, cats used to
be roasted over the midsummer bonfire. In Russia a white cock was
sometimes burned in the midsummer bonfire; in Meissen or Thuringia
a horse’s head used to be thrown into it. Sometimes animals
are burned in the spring bonfires. In the Vosges cats were burned
on Shrove Tuesday; in Alsace they were thrown into the Easter
bonfire. In the department of the Ardennes cats were flung into the
bonfires kindled on the first Sunday in Lent; sometimes, by a
refinement of cruelty, they were hung over the fire from the end of
a pole and roasted alive. “The cat, which represented the
devil, could never suffer enough.” While the creatures were
perishing in the flames, the shepherds guarded their flocks and
forced them to leap over the fire, esteeming this an infallible
means of preserving them from disease and witchcraft. We have seen
that squirrels were sometimes burned in the Easter fire.
Thus it appears that the sacrificial rites of the Celts of
ancient Gaul can be traced in the popular festivals of modern
Europe. Naturally it is in France, or rather in the wider area
comprised within the limits of ancient Gaul, that these rites have
left the clearest traces in the customs of burning giants of
wicker-work and animals enclosed in wicker-work or baskets. These
customs, it will have been remarked, are generally observed at or
about midsummer. From this we may infer that the original rites of
which these are the degenerate successors were solemnised at
midsummer. This inference harmonises with the conclusion suggested
by a general survey of European folk-custom, that the midsummer
festival must on the whole have been the most widely diffused and
the most solemn of all the yearly festivals celebrated by the
primitive Aryans in Europe. At the same time we must bear in mind
that among the British Celts the chief fire-festivals of the year
appear certainly to have been those of Beltane (May Day) and
Hallowe’en (the last day of October); and this suggests a
doubt whether the Celts of Gaul also may not have celebrated their
principal rites of fire, including their burnt sacrifices of men
and animals, at the beginning of May or the beginning of November
rather than at Midsummer.
We have still to ask, What is the meaning of such sacrifices?
Why were men and animals burnt to death at these festivals? If we
are right in interpreting the modern European fire-festivals as
attempts to break the power of witchcraft by burning or banning the
witches and warlocks, it seems to follow that we must explain the
human sacrifices of the Celts in the same manner; that is, we must
suppose that the men whom the Druids burnt in wicker-work images
were condemned to death on the ground that they were witches or
wizards, and that the mode of execution by fire was chosen because
burning alive is deemed the surest mode of getting rid of these
noxious and dangerous beings. The same explanation would apply to
the cattle and wild animals of many kinds which the Celts burned
along with the men. They, too, we may conjecture, were supposed to
be either under the spell of witchcraft or actually to be the
witches and wizards, who had transformed themselves into animals
for the purpose of prosecuting their infernal plots against the
welfare of their fellow-creatures. This conjecture is confirmed by
the observation that the victims most commonly burned in modern
bonfires have been cats, and that cats are precisely the animals
into which, with the possible exception of hares, witches were most
usually supposed to transform themselves. Again, we have seen that
serpents and foxes used sometimes to be burnt in the midsummer
fires; and Welsh and German witches are reported to have assumed
the form both of foxes and serpents. In short, when we remember the
great variety of animals whose forms witches can assume at
pleasure, it seems easy on this hypothesis to account for the
variety of living creatures that have been burnt at festivals both
in ancient Gaul and modern Europe; all these victims, we may
surmise, were doomed to the flames, not because they were animals,
but because they were believed to be witches who had taken the
shape of animals for their nefarious purposes. One advantage of
explaining the ancient Celtic sacrifices in this way is that it
introduces, as it were, a harmony and consistency into the
treatment which Europe has meted out to witches from the earliest
times down to about two centuries ago, when the growing influence
of rationalism discredited the belief in witchcraft and put a stop
to the custom of burning witches. Be that as it may, we can now
perhaps understand why the Druids believed that the more persons
they sentenced to death, the greater would be the fertility of the
land. To a modern reader the connexion at first sight may not be
obvious between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of
the earth. But a little reflection may satisfy him that when the
criminals who perish at the stake or on the gallows are witches,
whose delight it is to blight the crops of the farmer or to lay
them low under storms of hail, the execution of these wretches is
really calculated to ensure an abundant harvest by removing one of
the principal causes which paralyse the efforts and blast the hopes
of the husbandman.
The Druidical sacrifices which we are considering were explained
in a different way by W. Mannhardt. He supposed that the men whom
the Druids burned in wicker-work images represented the spirits of
vegetation, and accordingly that the custom of burning them was a
magical ceremony intended to secure the necessary sunshine for the
crops. Similarly, he seems to have inclined to the view that the
animals which used to be burnt in the bonfires represented the
cornspirit, which, as we saw in an earlier part of this work, is
often supposed to assume the shape of an animal. This theory is no
doubt tenable, and the great authority of W. Mannhardt entitles it
to careful consideration. I adopted it in former editions of this
book; but on reconsideration it seems to me on the whole to be less
probable than the theory that the men and animals burnt in the
fires perished in the character of witches. This latter view is
strongly supported by the testimony of the people who celebrate the
fire-festivals, since a popular name for the custom of kindling the
fires is “burning the witches,” effigies of witches are
sometimes consumed in the flames, and the fires, their embers, or
their ashes are supposed to furnish protection against witchcraft.
On the other hand there is little to show that the effigies or the
animals burnt in the fires are regarded by the people as
representatives of the vegetation-spirit, and that the bonfires are
sun-charms. With regard to serpents in particular, which used to be
burnt in the midsummer fire at Luchon, I am not aware of any
certain evidence that in Europe snakes have been regarded as
embodiments of the tree-spirit or corn-spirit, though in other
parts of the world the conception appears to be not unknown.
Whereas the popular faith in the transformation of witches into
animals is so general and deeply rooted, and the fear of these
uncanny beings is so strong, that it seems safer to suppose that
the cats and other animals which were burnt in the fire suffered
death as embodiments of witches than that they perished as
representatives of vegetation-spirits.
LXV. Balder and the Mistletoe
THE READER may remember that the preceding account of the
popular fire-festivals of Europe was suggested by the myth of the
Norse god Balder, who is said to have been slain by a branch of
mistletoe and burnt in a great fire. We have now to enquire how far
the customs which have been passed in review help to shed light on
the myth. In this enquiry it may be convenient to begin with the
mistletoe, the instrument of Balder’s death.
From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of
superstitious veneration in Europe. It was worshipped by the
Druids, as we learn from a famous passage of Pliny. After
enumerating the different kinds of mistletoe, he proceeds:
“In treating of this subject, the admiration in which the
mistletoe is held throughout Gaul ought not to pass unnoticed. The
Druids, for so they call their wizards, esteem nothing more sacred
than the mistletoe and the tree on which it grows, provided only
that the tree is an oak. But apart from this they choose oak-woods
for their sacred groves and perform no sacred rites without
oak-leaves; so that the very name of Druids may be regarded as a
Greek appellation derived from their worship of the oak. For they
believe that whatever grows on these trees is sent from heaven, and
is a sign that the tree has been chosen by the god himself. The
mistletoe is very rarely to be met with; but when it is found, they
gather it with solemn ceremony. This they do above all on the sixth
day of the moon, from whence they date the beginnings of their
months, of their years, and of their thirty years’ cycle,
because by the sixth day the moon has plenty of vigour and has not
run half its course. After due preparations have been made for a
sacrifice and a feast under the tree, they hail it as the universal
healer and bring to the spot two white bulls, whose horns have
never been bound before. A priest clad in a white robe climbs the
tree and with a golden sickle cuts the mistletoe, which is caught
in a white cloth. Then they sacrifice the victims, praying that God
may make his own gift to prosper with those upon whom he has
bestowed it. They believe that a potion prepared from mistletoe
will make barren animals to bring forth, and that the plant is a
remedy against all poison.”
In another passage Pliny tells us that in medicine the mistletoe
which grows on an oak was esteemed the most efficacious, and that
its efficacy was by some superstitious people supposed to be
increased if the plant was gathered on the first day of the moon
without the use of iron, and if when gathered it was not allowed to
touch the earth; oak-mistletoe thus obtained was deemed a cure for
epilepsy; carried about by women it assisted them to conceive; and
it healed ulcers most effectually, if only the sufferer chewed a
piece of the plant and laid another piece on the sore. Yet, again,
he says that mistletoe was supposed, like vinegar and an egg, to be
an excellent means of extinguishing a fire.
If in these latter passages Pliny refers, as he apparently does,
to the beliefs current among his contemporaries in Italy, it will
follow that the Druids and the Italians were to some extent agreed
as to the valuable properties possessed by mistletoe which grows on
an oak; both of them deemed it an effectual remedy for a number of
ailments, and both of them ascribed to it a quickening virtue, the
Druids believing that a potion prepared from mistletoe would
fertilise barren cattle, and the Italians holding that a piece of
mistletoe carried about by a woman would help her to conceive a
child. Further, both peoples thought that if the plant were to
exert its medicinal properties it must be gathered in a certain way
and at a certain time. It might not be cut with iron, hence the
Druids cut it with gold; and it might not touch the earth, hence
the Druids caught it in a white cloth. In choosing the time for
gathering the plant, both peoples were determined by observation of
the moon; only they differed as to the particular day of the moon,
the Italians preferring the first, and the Druids the sixth.
With these beliefs of the ancient Gauls and Italians as to the
wonderful medicinal properties of mistletoe we may compare the
similar beliefs of the modern Aino of Japan. We read that they,
“like many nations of the Northern origin, hold the mistletoe
in peculiar veneration. They look upon it as a medicine, good in
almost every disease, and it is sometimes taken in food and at
others separately as a decoction. The leaves are used in preference
to the berries, the latter being of too sticky a nature for general
purposes… . But many, too, suppose this plant to have the
power of making the gardens bear plentifully. When used for this
purpose, the leaves are cut up into fine pieces, and, after having
been prayed over, are sown with the millet and other seeds, a
little also being eaten with the food. Barren women have also been
known to eat the mistletoe, in order to be made to bear children.
That mistletoe which grows upon the willow is supposed to have the
greatest efficacy. This is because the willow is looked upon by
them as being an especially sacred tree.”
Thus the Aino agree with the Druids in regarding mistletoe as a
cure for almost every disease, and they agree with the ancient
Italians that applied to women it helps them to bear children.
Again, the Druidical notion that the mistletoe was an
“all-healer” or panacea may be compared with a notion
entertained by the Walos of Senegambia. These people “have
much veneration for a sort of mistletoe, which they call
tob; they carry leaves of it on their persons when they go
to war as a preservative against wounds, just as if the leaves were
real talismans (gris-gris).” The French writer who
records this practice adds: “Is it not very curious that the
mistletoe should be in this part of Africa what it was in the
superstitions of the Gauls? This prejudice, common to the two
countries, may have the same origin; blacks and whites will
doubtless have seen, each of them for themselves, something
supernatural in a plant which grows and flourishes without having
roots in the earth. May they not have believed, in fact, that it
was a plant fallen from the sky, a gift of the divinity?”
This suggestion as to the origin of the superstition is strongly
confirmed by the Druidical belief, reported by Pliny, that whatever
grew on an oak was sent from heaven and was a sign that the tree
had been chosen by the god himself. Such a belief explains why the
Druids cut the mistletoe, not with a common knife, but with a
golden sickle, and why, when cut, it was not suffered to touch the
earth; probably they thought that the celestial plant would have
been profaned and its marvellous virtue lost by contact with the
ground. With the ritual observed by the Druids in cutting the
mistletoe we may compare the ritual which in Cambodia is prescribed
in a similar case. They say that when you see an orchid growing as
a parasite on a tamarind tree, you should dress in white, take a
new earthenware pot, then climb the tree at noon, break off the
plant, put it in the pot and let the pot fall to the ground. After
that you make in the pot a decoction which confers the gift of
invulnerability. Thus just as in Africa the leaves of one parasitic
plant are supposed to render the wearer invulnerable, so in
Cambodia a decoction made from another parasitic plant is
considered to render the same service to such as make use of it,
whether by drinking or washing. We may conjecture that in both
places the notion of invulnerability is suggested by the position
of the plant, which, occupying a place of comparative security
above the ground, appears to promise to its fortunate possessor a
similar security from some of the ills that beset the life of man
on earth. We have already met with examples of the store which the
primitive mind sets on such vantage grounds.
Whatever may be the origin of these beliefs and practices
concerning the mistletoe, certain it is that some of them have
their analogies in the folk-lore of modern European peasants. For
example, it is laid down as a rule in various parts of Europe that
mistletoe may not be cut in the ordinary way but must be shot or
knocked down with stones from the tree on which it is growing.
Thus, in the Swiss canton of Aargau “all parasitic plants are
esteemed in a certain sense holy by the country folk, but most
particularly so the mistletoe growing on an oak. They ascribe great
powers to it, but shrink from cutting it off in the usual manner.
Instead of that they procure it in the following manner. When the
sun is in Sagittarius and the moon is on the wane, on the first,
third, or fourth day before the new moon, one ought to shoot down
with an arrow the mistletoe of an oak and to catch it with the left
hand as it falls. Such mistletoe is a remedy for every ailment of
children.” Here among the Swiss peasants, as among the Druids
of old, special virtue is ascribed to mistletoe which grows on an
oak: it may not be cut in the usual way: it must be caught as it
falls to the ground; and it is esteemed a panacea for all diseases,
at least of children. In Sweden, also, it is a popular superstition
that if mistletoe is to possess its peculiar virtue, it must either
be shot down out of the oak or knocked down with stones. Similarly,
“so late as the early part of the nineteenth century, people
in Wales believed that for the mistletoe to have any power, it must
be shot or struck down with stones off the tree where it
grew.”
Again, in respect of the healing virtues of mistletoe the
opinion of modern peasants, and even of the learned, has to some
extent agreed with that of the ancients. The Druids appear to have
called the plant, or perhaps the oak on which it grew, the
“all-healer”; and “all-healer” is said to
be still a name of the mistletoe in the modern Celtic speech of
Brittany, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. On St. John’s morning
(Midsummer morning) peasants of Piedmont and Lombardy go out to
search the oak-leaves for the “oil of St. John,” which
is supposed to heal all wounds made with cutting instruments.
Originally, perhaps, the “oil of St. John” was simply
the mistletoe, or a decoction made from it. For in Holstein the
mistletoe, especially oak-mistletoe, is still regarded as a panacea
for green wounds and as a sure charm to secure success in hunting;
and at Lacaune, in the south of France, the old Druidical belief in
the mistletoe as an antidote to all poisons still survives among
the peasantry; they apply the plant to the stomach of the sufferer
or give him a decoction of it to drink. Again, the ancient belief
that mistletoe is a cure for epilepsy has survived in modern times
not only among the ignorant but among the learned. Thus in Sweden
persons afflicted with the falling sickness think they can ward off
attacks of the malady by carrying about with them a knife which has
a handle of oak mistletoe; and in Germany for a similar purpose
pieces of mistletoe used to be hung round the necks of children. In
the French province of Bourbonnais a popular remedy for epilepsy is
a decoction of mistletoe which has been gathered on an oak on St.
John’s Day and boiled with rye-flour. So at Bottesford in
Lincolnshire a decoction of mistletoe is supposed to be a
palliative for this terrible disease. Indeed mistletoe was
recommended as a remedy for the falling sickness by high medical
authorities in England and Holland down to the eighteenth
century.
However, the opinion of the medical profession as to the
curative virtues of mistletoe has undergone a radical alteration.
Whereas the Druids thought that mistletoe cured everything, modern
doctors appear to think that it cures nothing. If they are right,
we must conclude that the ancient and widespread faith in the
medicinal virtue of mistletoe is a pure superstition based on
nothing better than the fanciful inferences which ignorance has
drawn from the parasitic nature of the plant, its position high up
on the branch of a tree seeming to protect it from the dangers to
which plants and animals are subject on the surface of the ground.
From this point of view we can perhaps understand why mistletoe has
so long and so persistently been prescribed as a cure for the
falling sickness. As mistletoe cannot fall to the ground because it
is rooted on the branch of a tree high above the earth, it seems to
follow as a necessary consequence that an epileptic patient cannot
possibly fall down in a fit so long as he carries a piece of
mistletoe in his pocket or a decoction of mistletoe in his stomach.
Such a train of reasoning would probably be regarded even now as
cogent by a large portion of the human species.
Again the ancient Italian opinion that mistletoe extinguishes
fire appears to be shared by Swedish peasants, who hang up bunches
of oak-mistletoe on the ceilings of their rooms as a protection
against harm in general and conflagration in particular. A hint as
to the way in which mistletoe comes to be possessed of this
property is furnished by the epithet “thunder-bosom,”
which people of the Aargau canton in Switzerland apply to the
plant. For a thunder-besom is a shaggy, bushy excrescence on
branches of trees, which is popularly believed to be produced by a
flash of lightning; hence in Bohemia a thunder-besom burnt in the
fire protects the house against being struck by a thunder-bolt.
Being itself a product of lightning it naturally serves, on
homoeopathic principles, as a protection against lightning, in fact
as a kind of lightning-conductor. Hence the fire which mistletoe in
Sweden is designed especially to avert from houses may be fire
kindled by lightning; though no doubt the plant is equally
effective against conflagration in general.
Again, mistletoe acts as a master-key as well as a
lightning-conductor; for it is said to open all locks. But perhaps
the most precious of all the virtues of mistletoe is that it
affords efficient protection against sorcery and witchcraft. That,
no doubt, is the reason why in Austria a twig of mistletoe is laid
on the threshold as a preventive of nightmare; and it may be the
reason why in the north of England they say that if you wish your
dairy to thrive you should give your bunch of mistletoe to the
first cow that calves after New Year’s Day, for it is well
known that nothing is so fatal to milk and butter as witchcraft.
Similarly in Wales, for the sake of ensuring good luck to the
dairy, people used to give a branch of mistletoe to the first cow
that gave birth to a calf after the first hour of the New Year; and
in rural districts of Wales, where mistletoe abounded, there was
always a profusion of it in the farmhouses. When mistletoe was
scarce, Welsh farmers used to say, “No mistletoe, no
luck”; but if there was a fine crop of mistletoe, they
expected a fine crop of corn. In Sweden mistletoe is diligently
sought after on St. John’s Eve, the people “believing
it to be, in a high degree, possessed of mystic qualities; and that
if a sprig of it be attached to the ceiling of the dwelling-house,
the horse’s stall, or the cow’s crib, the Troll will
then be powerless to injure either man or beast.”
With regard to the time when the mistletoe should be gathered
opinions have varied. The Druids gathered it above all on the sixth
day of the moon, the ancient Italians apparently on the first day
of the moon. In modern times some have preferred the full moon of
March and others the waning moon of winter when the sun is in
Sagittarius. But the favourite time would seem to be Midsummer Eve
or Midsummer Day. We have seen that both in France and Sweden
special virtues are ascribed to mistletoe gathered at Midsummer.
The rule in Sweden is that “mistletoe must be cut on the
night of Midsummer Eve when sun and moon stand in the sign of their
might.” Again, in Wales it was believed that a sprig of
mistletoe gathered on St. John’s Eve (Midsummer Eve), or at
any time before the berries appeared, would induce dreams of omen,
both good and bad, if it were placed under the pillow of the
sleeper. Thus mistletoe is one of the many plants whose magical or
medicinal virtues are believed to culminate with the culmination of
the sun on the longest day of the year. Hence it seems reasonable
to conjecture that in the eyes of the Druids, also, who revered the
plant so highly, the sacred mistletoe may have acquired a double
portion of its mystic qualities at the solstice in June, and that
accordingly they may have regularly cut it with solemn ceremony on
Midsummer Eve.
Be that as it may, certain it is that the mistletoe, the
instrument of Balder’s death, has been regularly gathered for
the sake of its mystic qualities on Midsummer Eve in Scandinavia,
Balder’s home. The plant is found commonly growing on
pear-trees, oaks, and other trees in thick damp woods throughout
the more temperate parts of Sweden. Thus one of the two main
incidents of Balder’s myth is reproduced in the great
midsummer festival of Scandinavia. But the other main incident of
the myth, the burning of Balder’s body on a pyre, has also
its counterpart in the bonfires which still blaze, or blazed till
lately, in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden on Midsummer Eve. It does
not appear, indeed, that any effigy is burned in these bonfires;
but the burning of an effigy is a feature which might easily drop
out after its meaning was forgotten. And the name of Balder’s
balefires (Balder’s Bălar), by which
these midsummer fires were formerly known in Sweden, puts their
connexion with Balder beyond the reach of doubt, and makes it
probable that in former times either a living representative or an
effigy of Balder was annually burned in them. Midsummer was the
season sacred to Balder, and the Swedish poet Tegner, in placing
the burning of Balder at midsummer, may very well have followed an
old tradition that the summer solstice was the time when the good
god came to his untimely end.
Thus it has been shown that the leading incidents of the Balder
myth have their counterparts in those fire-festivals of our
European peasantry which undoubtedly date from a time long prior to
the introduction of Christianity. The pretence of throwing the
victim chosen by lot into the Beltane fire, and the similar
treatment of the man, the future Green Wolf, at the midsummer
bonfire in Normandy, may naturally be interpreted as traces of an
older custom of actually burning human beings on these occasions;
and the green dress of the Green Wolf, coupled with the leafy
envelope of the young fellow who trod out the midsummer fire at
Moosheim, seems to hint that the persons who perished at these
festivals did so in the character of tree-spirits or deities of
vegetation. From all this we may reasonably infer that in the
Balder myth on the one hand, and the fire-festivals and custom of
gathering mistletoe on the other hand, we have, as it were, the two
broken and dissevered halves of an original whole. In other words,
we may assume with some degree of probability that the myth of
Balder’s death was not merely a myth, that is, a description
of physical phenomena in imagery borrowed from human life, but that
it was at the same time the story which people told to explain why
they annually burned a human representative of the god and cut the
mistletoe with solemn ceremony. If I am right, the story of
Balder’s tragic end formed, so to say, the text of the sacred
drama which was acted year by year as a magical rite to cause the
sun to shine, trees to grow, crops to thrive, and to guard man and
beast from the baleful arts of fairies and trolls, of witches and
warlocks. The tale belonged, in short, to that class of nature
myths which are meant to be supplemented by ritual; here, as so
often, myth stood to magic in the relation of theory to
practice.
But if the victims—the human Balders—who died by
fire, whether in spring or at midsummer, were put to death as
living embodiments of tree-spirits or deities of vegetation, it
would seem that Balder himself must have been a tree-spirit or
deity of vegetation. It becomes desirable, therefore, to determine,
if we can, the particular kind of tree or trees, of which a
personal representative was burned at the fire-festivals. For we
may be quite sure that it was not as a representative of vegetation
in general that the victim suffered death. The idea of vegetation
in general is too abstract to be primitive. Most probably the
victim at first represented a particular kind of sacred tree. But
of all European trees none has such claims as the oak to be
considered as pre-eminently the sacred tree of the Aryans. We have
seen that its worship is attested for all the great branches of the
Aryan stock in Europe; hence we may certainly conclude that the
tree was venerated by the Aryans in common before the dispersion,
and that their primitive home must have lain in a land which was
clothed with forests of oak.
Now, considering the primitive character and remarkable
similarity of the fire-festivals observed by all the branches of
the Aryan race in Europe, we may infer that these festivals form
part of the common stock of religious observances which the various
peoples carried with them in their wanderings from their old home.
But, if I am right, an essential feature of those primitive
fire-festivals was the burning of a man who represented the
tree-spirit. In view, then, of the place occupied by the oak in the
religion of the Aryans, the presumption is that the tree so
represented at the fire-festivals must originally have been the
oak. So far as the Celts and Lithuanians are concerned, this
conclusion will perhaps hardly be contested. But both for them and
for the Germans it is confirmed by a remarkable piece of religious
conservatism. The most primitive method known to man of producing
fire is by rubbing two pieces of wood against each other till they
ignite; and we have seen that this method is still used in Europe
for kindling sacred fires such as the need-fire, and that most
probably it was formerly resorted to at all the fire-festivals
under discussion. Now it is sometimes required that the need-fire,
or other sacred fire, should be made by the friction of a
particular kind of wood; and when the kind of wood is prescribed,
whether among Celts, Germans, or Slavs, that wood appears to be
generally the oak. But if the sacred fire was regularly kindled by
the friction of oak-wood, we may infer that originally the fire was
also fed with the same material. In point of fact, it appears that
the perpetual fire of Vesta at Rome was fed with oak-wood, and that
oak-wood was the fuel consumed in the perpetual fire which burned
under the sacred oak at the great Lithuanian sanctuary of Romove.
Further, that oak-wood was formerly the fuel burned in the
midsummer fires may perhaps be inferred from the custom, said to be
still observed by peasants in many mountain districts of Germany,
of making up the cottage fire on Midsummer Day with a heavy block
of oak-wood. The block is so arranged that it smoulders slowly and
is not finally reduced to charcoal till the expiry of a year. Then
upon next Midsummer Day the charred embers of the old log are
removed to make room for the new one, and are mixed with the
seed-corn or scattered about the garden. This is believed to guard
the food cooked on the hearth from witchcraft, to preserve the luck
of the house, to promote the growth of the crops, and to keep them
from blight and vermin. Thus the custom is almost exactly parallel
to that of the Yule-log, which in parts of Germany, France,
England, Serbia, and other Slavonic lands was commonly of oak-wood.
The general conclusion is, that at those periodic or occasional
ceremonies the ancient Aryans both kindled and fed the fire with
the sacred oak-wood.
But if at these solemn rites the fire was regularly made of
oakwood, it follows that any man who was burned in it as a
personification of the tree-spirit could have represented no tree
but the oak. The sacred oak was thus burned in duplicate; the wood
of the tree was consumed in the fire, and along with it was
consumed a living man as a personification of the oak-spirit. The
conclusion thus drawn for the European Aryans in general is
confirmed in its special application to the Scandinavians by the
relation in which amongst them the mistletoe appears to have stood
to the burning of the victim in the midsummer fire. We have seen
that among Scandinavians it has been customary to gather the
mistletoe at midsummer. But so far as appears on the face of this
custom, there is nothing to connect it with the midsummer fires in
which human victims or effigies of them were burned. Even if the
fire, as seems probable, was originally always made with oak-wood,
why should it have been necessary to pull the mistletoe? The last
link between the midsummer customs of gathering the mistletoe and
lighting the bonfires is supplied by Balder’s myth, which can
hardly be disjoined from the customs in question. The myth suggests
that a vital connexion may once have been believed to subsist
between the mistletoe and the human representative of the oak who
was burned in the fire. According to the myth, Balder could be
killed by nothing in heaven or earth except the mistletoe; and so
long as the mistletoe remained on the oak, he was not only immortal
but invulnerable. Now, if we suppose that Balder was the oak, the
origin of the myth becomes intelligible. The mistletoe was viewed
as the seat of life of the oak, and so long as it was uninjured
nothing could kill or even wound the oak. The conception of the
mistletoe as the seat of life of the oak would naturally be
suggested to primitive people by the observation that while the oak
is deciduous, the mistletoe which grows on it is evergreen. In
winter the sight of its fresh foliage among the bare branches must
have been hailed by the worshippers of the tree as a sign that the
divine life which had ceased to animate the branches yet survived
in the mistletoe, as the heart of a sleeper still beats when his
body is motionless. Hence when the god had to be killed—when
the sacred tree had to be burnt—it was necessary to begin by
breaking off the mistletoe. For so long as the mistletoe remained
intact, the oak (so people might think) was invulnerable; all the
blows of their knives and axes would glance harmless from its
surface. But once tear from the oak its sacred heart—the
mistletoe—and the tree nodded to its fall. And when in later
times the spirit of the oak came to be represented by a living man,
it was logically necessary to suppose that, like the tree he
personated, he could neither be killed nor wounded so long as the
mistletoe remained uninjured. The pulling of the mistletoe was thus
at once the signal and the cause of his death.
On this view the invulnerable Balder is neither more nor less
than a personification of a mistletoe-bearing oak. The
interpretation is confirmed by what seems to have been an ancient
Italian belief, that the mistletoe can be destroyed neither by fire
nor water; for if the parasite is thus deemed indestructible, it
might easily be supposed to communicate its own indestructibility
to the tree on which it grows, so long as the two remain in
conjunction. Or, to put the same idea in mythical form, we might
tell how the kindly god of the oak had his life securely deposited
in the imperishable mistletoe which grew among the branches; how
accordingly so long as the mistletoe kept its place there, the
deity himself remained invulnerable; and how at last a cunning foe,
let into the secret of the god’s invulnerability, tore the
mistletoe from the oak, thereby killing the oak-god and afterwards
burning his body in a fire which could have made no impression on
him so long as the incombustible parasite retained its seat among
the boughs.
But since the idea of a being whose life is thus, in a sense,
outside himself, must be strange to many readers, and has, indeed,
not yet been recognised in its full bearing on primitive
superstition, it will be worth while to illustrate it by examples
drawn both from story and custom. The result will be to show that,
in assuming this idea as the explanation of Balder’s relation
to the mistletoe, I assume a principle which is deeply engraved on
the mind of primitive man.
LXVI. The External Soul in Folk-Tales
IN A FORMER part of this work we saw that, in the opinion of
primitive people, the soul may temporarily absent itself from the
body without causing death. Such temporary absences of the soul are
often believed to involve considerable risk, since the wandering
soul is liable to a variety of mishaps at the hands of enemies, and
so forth. But there is another aspect to this power of disengaging
the soul from the body. If only the safety of the soul can be
ensured during its absence, there is no reason why the soul should
not continue absent for an indefinite time; indeed a man may, on a
pure calculation of personal safety, desire that his soul should
never return to his body. Unable to conceive of life abstractly as
a “permanent possibility of sensation” or a
“continuous adjustment of internal arrangements to external
relations,” the savage thinks of it as a concrete material
thing of a definite bulk, capable of being seen and handled, kept
in a box or jar, and liable to be bruised, fractured, or smashed in
pieces. It is not needful that the life, so conceived, should be in
the man; it may be absent from his body and still continue to
animate him by virtue of a sort of sympathy or action at a
distance. So long as this object which he calls his life or soul
remains unharmed, the man is well; if it is injured, he suffers; if
it is destroyed, he dies. Or, to put it otherwise, when a man is
ill or dies, the fact is explained by saying that the material
object called his life or soul, whether it be in his body or out of
it, has either sustained injury or been destroyed. But there may be
circumstances in which, if the life or soul remains in the man, it
stands a greater chance of sustaining injury than if it were stowed
away in some safe and secret place. Accordingly, in such
circumstances, primitive man takes his soul out of his body and
deposits it for security in some snug spot, intending to replace it
in his body when the danger is past. Or if he should discover some
place of absolute security, he may be content to leave his soul
there permanently. The advantage of this is that, so long as the
soul remains unharmed in the place where he has deposited it, the
man himself is immortal; nothing can kill his body, since his life
is not in it.
Evidence of this primitive belief is furnished by a class of
folk-tales of which the Norse story of “The giant who had no
heart in his body” is perhaps the best-known example. Stories
of this kind are widely diffused over the world, and from their
number and the variety of incident and of details in which the
leading idea is embodied, we may infer that the conception of an
external soul is one which has had a powerful hold on the minds of
men at an early stage of history. For folk-tales are a faithful
reflection of the world as it appeared to the primitive mind; and
we may be sure that any idea which commonly occurs in them, however
absurd it may seem to us, must once have been an ordinary article
of belief. This assurance, so far as it concerns the supposed power
of disengaging the soul from the body for a longer or shorter time,
is amply corroborated by a comparison of the folk-tales in question
with the actual beliefs and practices of savages. To this we shall
return after some specimens of the tales have been given. The
specimens will be selected with a view of illustrating both the
characteristic features and the wide diffusion of this class of
tales.
In the first place, the story of the external soul is told, in
various forms, by all Aryan peoples from Hindoostan to the
Hebrides. A very common form of it is this: A warlock, giant, or
other fairyland being is invulnerable and immortal because he keeps
his soul hidden far away in some secret place; but a fair princess,
whom he holds enthralled in his enchanted castle, wiles his secret
from him and reveals it to the hero, who seeks out the
warlock’s soul, heart, life, or death (as it is variously
called), and by destroying it, simultaneously kills the warlock.
Thus a Hindoo story tells how a magician called Punchkin held a
queen captive for twelve years, and would fain marry her, but she
would not have him. At last the queen’s son came to rescue
her, and the two plotted together to kill Punchkin. So the queen
spoke the magician fair, and pretended that she had at last made up
her mind to marry him. “And do tell me,” she said,
“are you quite immortal? Can death never touch you? And are
you too great an enchanter ever to feel human suffering?”
“It is true,” he said, “that I am not as others.
Far, far away, hundreds of thousands of miles from this, there lies
a desolate country covered with thick jungle. In the midst of the
jungle grows a circle of palm trees, and in the centre of the
circle stand six chattees full of water, piled one above another:
below the sixth chattee is a small cage, which contains a little
green parrot;—on the life of the parrot depends my
life;—and if the parrot is killed I must die. It is,
however,” he added, “impossible that the parrot should
sustain any injury, both on account of the inaccessibility of the
country, and because, by my appointment, many thousand genii
surround the palm trees, and kill all who approach the
place.” But the queen’s young son overcame all
difficulties, and got possession of the parrot. He brought it to
the door of the magician’s palace, and began playing with it.
Punchkin, the magician, saw him, and, coming out, tried to persuade
the boy to give him the parrot. “Give me my parrot!”
cried Punchkin. Then the boy took hold of the parrot and tore off
one of his wings; and as he did so the magician’s right arm
fell off. Punchkin then stretched out his left arm, crying,
“Give me my parrot!” The prince pulled off the
parrot’s second wing, and the magician’s left arm
tumbled off. “Give me my parrot!” cried he, and fell on
his knees. The prince pulled off the parrot’s right leg, the
magician’s right leg fell off; the prince pulled off the
parrot’s left leg, down fell the magician’s left.
Nothing remained of him except the trunk and the head; but still he
rolled his eyes, and cried, “Give me my parrot!”
“Take your parrot, then,” cried the boy; and with that
he wrung the bird’s neck, and threw it at the magician; and,
as he did so, Punchkin’s head twisted round, and, with a
fearful groan, he died! In another Hindoo tale an ogre is asked by
his daughter, “Papa, where do you keep your soul?”
“Sixteen miles away from this place,” he said,
“is a tree. Round the tree are tigers, and bears, and
scorpions, and snakes; on the top of the tree is a very great fat
snake; on his head is a little cage; in the cage is a bird; and my
soul is in that bird.” The end of the ogre is like that of
the magician in the previous tale. As the bird’s wings and
legs are torn off, the ogre’s arms and legs drop off; and
when its neck is wrung he falls down dead. In a Bengalee story it
is said that all the ogres dwell in Ceylon, and that all their
lives are in a single lemon. A boy cuts the lemon in pieces, and
all the ogres die.
In a Siamese or Cambodian story, probably derived from India, we
are told that Thossakan or Ravana, the King of Ceylon, was able by
magic art to take his soul out of his body and leave it in a box at
home, while he went to the wars. Thus he was invulnerable in
battle. When he was about to give battle to Rama, he deposited his
soul with a hermit called Fire-eye, who was to keep it safe for
him. So in the fight Rama was astounded to see that his arrows
struck the king without wounding him. But one of Rama’s
allies, knowing the secret of the king’s invulnerability,
transformed himself by magic into the likeness of the king, and
going to the hermit asked back his soul. On receiving it he soared
up into the air and flew to Rama, brandishing the box and squeezing
it so hard that all the breath left the King of Ceylon’s
body, and he died. In a Bengalee story a prince going into a far
country planted with his own hands a tree in the courtyard of his
father’s palace, and said to his parents, “This tree is
my life. When you see the tree green and fresh, then know that it
is well with me; when you see the tree fade in some parts, then
know that I am in an ill case; and when you see the whole tree
fade, then know that I am dead and gone.” In another Indian
tale a prince, setting forth on his travels, left behind him a
barley plant, with instructions that it should be carefully tended
and watched; for if it flourished, he would be alive and well, but
if it drooped, then some mischance was about to happen to him. And
so it fell out. For the prince was beheaded, and as his head rolled
off, the barley plant snapped in two and the ear of barley fell to
the ground.
In Greek tales, ancient and modern, the idea of an external soul
is not uncommon. When Meleager was seven days old, the Fates
appeared to his mother and told her that Meleager would die when
the brand which was blazing on the hearth had burnt down. So his
mother snatched the brand from the fire and kept it in a box. But
in after-years, being enraged at her son for slaying her brothers,
she burnt the brand in the fire and Meleager expired in agonies, as
if flames were preying on his vitals. Again, Nisus King of Megara
had a purple or golden hair on the middle of his head, and it was
fated that whenever the hair was pulled out the king should die.
When Megara was besieged by the Cretans, the king’s daughter
Scylla fell in love with Minos, their king, and pulled out the
fatal hair from her father’s head. So he died. In a modern
Greek folk-tale a man’s strength lies in three golden hairs
on his head. When his mother pulls them out, he grows weak and
timid and is slain by his enemies. In another modern Greek story
the life of an enchanter is bound up with three doves which are in
the belly of a wild boar. When the first dove is killed, the
magician grows sick; when the second is killed, he grows very sick;
and when the third is killed, he dies. In another Greek story of
the same sort an ogre’s strength is in three singing birds
which are in a wild boar. The hero kills two of the birds, and then
coming to the ogre’s house finds him lying on the ground in
great pain. He shows the third bird to the ogre, who begs that the
hero will either let it fly away or give it to him to eat. But the
hero wrings the bird’s neck, and the ogre dies on the
spot.
In a modern Roman version of “Aladdin and the Wonderful
Lamp,” the magician tells the princess, whom he holds captive
in a floating rock in mid-ocean, that he will never die. The
princess reports this to the prince her husband, who has come to
rescue her. The prince replies, “It is impossible but that
there should be some one thing or other that is fatal to him; ask
him what that one fatal thing is.” So the princess asked the
magician, and he told her that in the wood was a hydra with seven
heads; in the middle head of the hydra was a leveret, in the head
of the leveret was a bird, in the bird’s head was a precious
stone, and if this stone were put under his pillow he would die.
The prince procured the stone, and the princess laid it under the
magician’s pillow. No sooner did the enchanter lay his head
on the pillow than he gave three terrible yells, turned himself
round and round three times, and died.
Stories of the same sort are current among Slavonic peoples.
Thus a Russian story tells how a warlock called Koshchei the
Deathless carried off a princess and kept her prisoner in his
golden castle. However, a prince made up to her one day as she was
walking alone and disconsolate in the castle garden, and cheered by
the prospect of escaping with him she went to the warlock and
coaxed him with false and flattering words, saying, “My
dearest friend, tell me, I pray you, will you never die?”
“Certainly not,” says he. “Well,” says she,
“and where is your death? is it in your dwelling?”
“To be sure it is,” says he, “it is in the broom
under the threshold.” Thereupon the princess seized the broom
and threw it on the fire, but although the broom burned, the
deathless Koshchei remained alive; indeed not so much as a hair of
him was singed. Balked in her first attempt, the artful hussy
pouted and said, “You do not love me true, for you have not
told me where your death is; yet I am not angry, but love you with
all my heart.” With these fawning words she besought the
warlock to tell her truly where his death was. So he laughed and
said, “Why do you wish to know? Well then, out of love I will
tell you where it lies. In a certain field there stand three green
oaks, and under the roots of the largest oak is a worm, and if ever
this worm is found and crushed, that instant I shall die.”
When the princess heard these words, she went straight to her lover
and told him all; and he searched till he found the oaks and dug up
the worm and crushed it. Then he hurried to the warlock’s
castle, but only to learn from the princess that the warlock was
still alive. Then she fell to wheedling and coaxing Koshchei once
more, and this time, overcome by her wiles, he opened his heart to
her and told her the truth. “My death,” said he,
“is far from here and hard to find, on the wide ocean. In
that sea is an island, and on the island there grows a green oak,
and beneath the oak is an iron chest, and in the chest is a small
basket, and in the basket is a hare, and in the hare is a duck, and
in the duck is an egg; and he who finds the egg and breaks it,
kills me at the same time.” The prince naturally procured the
fateful egg and with it in his hands he confronted the deathless
warlock. The monster would have killed him, but the prince began to
squeeze the egg. At that the warlock shrieked with pain, and
turning to the false princess, who stood by smirking and smiling,
“Was it not out of love for you,” said he, “that
I told you where my death was? And is this the return you make to
me?” With that he grabbed at his sword, which hung from a peg
on the wall; but before he could reach it, the prince had crushed
the egg, and sure enough the deathless warlock found his death at
the same moment. “In one of the descriptions of
Koshchei’s death, he is said to be killed by a blow on the
forehead inflicted by the mysterious egg—that last link in
the magic chain by which his life is darkly bound. In another
version of the same story, but told of a snake, the fatal blow is
struck by a small stone found in the yolk of an egg, which is
inside a duck, which is inside a hare, which is inside a stone,
which is on an island.”
Amongst peoples of the Teutonic stock stories of the external
soul are not wanting. In a tale told by the Saxons of Transylvania
it is said that a young man shot at a witch again and again. The
bullets went clean through her but did her no harm, and she only
laughed and mocked at him. “Silly earthworm,” she
cried, “shoot as much as you like. It does me no harm. For
know that my life resides not in me but far, far away. In a
mountain is a pond, on the pond swims a duck, in the duck is an
egg, in the egg burns a light, that light is my life. If you could
put out that light, my life would be at an end. But that can never,
never be.” However, the young man got hold of the egg,
smashed it, and put out the light, and with it the witch’s
life went out also. In a German story a cannibal called Body
without Soul or Soulless keeps his soul in a box, which stands on a
rock in the middle of the Red Sea. A soldier gets possession of the
box and goes with it to Soulless, who begs the soldier to give him
back his soul. But the soldier opens the box, takes out the soul,
and flings it backward over his head. At the same moment the
cannibal drops dead to the ground.
In another German story and old warlock lives with a damsel all
alone in the midst of a vast and gloomy wood. She fears that being
old he may die and leave her alone in the forest. But he reassures
her. “Dear child,” he said, “I cannot die, and I
have no heart in my breast.” But she importuned him to tell
her where his heart was. So he said, “Far, far from here in
an unknown and lonesome land stands a great church. The church is
well secured with iron doors, and round about it flows a broad deep
moat. In the church flies a bird and in the bird is my heart. So
long as the bird lives, I live. It cannot die of itself, and no one
can catch it; therefore I cannot die, and you need have no
anxiety.” However the young man, whose bride the damsel was
to have been before the warlock spirited her away, contrived to
reach the church and catch the bird. He brought it to the damsel,
who stowed him and it away under the warlock’s bed. Soon the
old warlock came home. He was ailing, and said so. The girl wept
and said, “Alas, daddy is dying; he has a heart in his breast
after all.” “Child,” replied the warlock,
“hold your tongue. I can’t die. It will soon
pass over.” At that the young man under the bed gave the bird
a gentle squeeze; and as he did so, the old warlock felt very
unwell and sat down. Then the young man gripped the bird tighter,
and the warlock fell senseless from his chair. “Now squeeze
him dead,” cried the damsel. Her lover obeyed, and when the
bird was dead, the old warlock also lay dead on the floor.
In the Norse tale of “the giant who had no heart in his
body,” the giant tells the captive princess, “Far, far
away in a lake lies an island, on that island stands a church, in
that church is a well, in that well swims a duck, in that duck
there is an egg, and in that egg there lies my heart.” The
hero of the tale, with the help of some animals to whom he had been
kind, obtains the egg and squeezes it, at which the giant screams
piteously and begs for his life. But the hero breaks the egg in
pieces and the giant at once bursts. In another Norse story a
hill-ogre tells the captive princess that she will never be able to
return home unless she finds the grain of sand which lies under the
ninth tongue of the ninth head of a certain dragon; but if that
grain of sand were to come over the rock in which the ogres live,
they would all burst “and the rock itself would become a
gilded palace, and the lake green meadows.” The hero finds
the grain of sand and takes it to the top of the high rock in which
the ogres live. So all the ogres burst and the rest falls out as
one of the ogres had foretold.
In a Celtic tale, recorded in the West Highlands of Scotland, a
giant is questioned by a captive queen as to where he keeps his
soul. At last, after deceiving her several times, he confides to
her the fatal secret: “There is a great flagstone under the
threshold. There is a wether under the flag. There is a duck in the
wether’s belly, and an egg in the belly of the duck, and it
is in the egg that my soul is.” On the morrow when the giant
was gone, the queen contrived to get possession of the egg and
crushed it in her hands, and at that very moment the giant, who was
coming home in the dusk, fell down dead. In another Celtic tale, a
sea beast has carried off a king’s daughter, and an old smith
declares that there is no way of killing the beast but one.
“In the island that is in the midst of the loch is Eillid
Chaisfhion—the white-footed hind, of the slenderest legs, and
the swiftest step, and though she should be caught, there would
spring a hoodie out of her, and though the hoodie should be caught,
there would spring a trout out of her, but there is an egg in the
mouth of the trout, and the soul of the beast is in the egg, and if
the egg breaks, the beast is dead.” As usual the egg is
broken and the beast dies.
In an Irish story we read how a giant kept a beautiful damsel a
prisoner in his castle on the top of a hill, which was white with
the bones of the champions who had tried in vain to rescue the fair
captive. At last the hero, after hewing and slashing at the giant
all to no purpose, discovered that the only way to kill him was to
rub a mole on the giant’s right breast with a certain egg,
which was in a duck, which was in a chest, which lay locked and
bound at the bottom of the sea. With the help of some obliging
animals, the hero made himself master of the precious egg and slew
the giant by merely striking it against the mole on his right
breast. Similarly in a Breton story there figures a giant whom
neither fire nor water nor steel can harm. He tells his seventh
wife, whom he has just married after murdering all her
predecessors, “I am immortal, and no one can hurt me unless
he crushes on my breast an egg, which is in a pigeon, which is in
the belly of a hare; this hare is in the belly of a wolf, and this
wolf is in the belly of my brother, who dwells a thousand leagues
from here. So I am quite easy on that score.” A soldier
contrived to obtain the egg and crush it on the breast of the
giant, who immediately expired. In another Breton tale the life of
a giant resides in an old box-tree which grows in his castle
garden; and to kill him it is necessary to sever the tap-root of
the tree at a single blow of an axe without injuring any of the
lesser roots. This task the hero, as usual, successfully
accomplishes, and at the same moment the giant drops dead.
The notion of an external soul has now been traced in folk-tales
told by Aryan peoples from India to Ireland. We have still to show
that the same idea occurs commonly in the popular stories of
peoples who do not belong to the Aryan stock. In the ancient
Egyptian tale of “The Two Brothers,” which was written
down in the reign of Rameses II., about 1300 B.C., we read how one
of the brothers enchanted his heart and placed it in the flower of
an acacia tree, and how, when the flower was cut at the instigation
of his wife, he immediately fell down dead, but revived when his
brother found the lost heart in the berry of the acacia and threw
it into a cup of fresh water.
In the story of Seyf el-Mulook in the Arabian Nights
the jinnee tells the captive daughter of the King of India,
“When I was born, the astrologers declared that the
destruction of my soul would be effected by the hand of one of the
sons of the human kings. I therefore took my soul, and put it into
the crop of a sparrow, and I imprisoned the sparrow in a little
box, and put this into another small box, and this I put within
seven other small boxes, and I put these within seven chests, and
the chests I put into a coffer of marble within the verge of this
circumambient ocean; for this part is remote from the countries of
mankind, and none of mankind can gain access to it.” But Seyf
el-Mulook got possession of the sparrow and strangled it, and the
jinnee fell upon the ground a heap of black ashes. In a Kabyle
story an ogre declares that his fate is far away in an egg, which
is in a pigeon, which is in a camel, which is in the sea. The hero
procures the egg and crushes it between his hands, and the ogre
dies. In a Magyar folk-tale, an old witch detains a young prince
called Ambrose in the bowels of the earth. At last she confided to
him that she kept a wild boar in a silken meadow, and if it were
killed, they would find a hare inside, and inside the hare a
pigeon, and inside the pigeon a small box, and inside the box one
black and one shining beetle: the shining beetle held her life, and
the black one held her power; if these two beetles died, then her
life would come to an end also. When the old hag went out, Ambrose
killed the wild boar, and took out the hare; from the hare he took
the pigeon, from the pigeon the box, and from the box the two
beetles; he killed the black beetle, but kept the shining one
alive. So the witch’s power left her immediately, and when
she came home, she had to take to her bed. Having learned from her
how to escape from his prison to the upper air, Ambrose killed the
shining beetle, and the old hag’s spirit left her at once. In
a Kalmuck tale we read how a certain khan challenged a wise man to
show his skill by stealing a precious stone on which the
khan’s life depended. The sage contrived to purloin the
talisman while the khan and his guards slept; but not content with
this he gave a further proof of his dexterity by bonneting the
slumbering potentate with a bladder. This was too much for the
khan. Next morning he informed the sage that he could overlook
everything else, but that the indignity of being bonneted with a
bladder was more than he could bear; and he ordered his facetious
friend to instant execution. Pained at this exhibition of royal
ingratitude, the sage dashed to the ground the talisman which he
still held in his hand; and at the same instant blood flowed from
the nostrils of the khan, and he gave up the ghost.
In a Tartar poem two heroes named Ak Molot and Bulat engage in
mortal combat. Ak Molot pierces his foe through and through with an
arrow, grapples with him, and dashes him to the ground, but all in
vain, Bulat could not die. At last when the combat has lasted three
years, a friend of Ak Molot sees a golden casket hanging by a white
thread from the sky, and bethinks him that perhaps this casket
contains Bulat’s soul. So he shot through the white thread
with an arrow, and down fell the casket. He opened it, and in the
casket sat ten white birds, and one of the birds was Bulat’s
soul. Bulat wept when he saw that his soul was found in the casket.
But one after the other the birds were killed, and then Ak Molot
easily slew his foe. In another Tartar poem, two brothers going to
fight two other brothers take out their souls and hide them in the
form of a white herb with six stalks in a deep pit. But one of
their foes sees them doing so and digs up their souls, which he
puts into a golden ram’s horn, and then sticks the
ram’s horn in his quiver. The two warriors whose souls have
thus been stolen know that they have no chance of victory, and
accordingly make peace with their enemies. In another Tartar poem a
terrible demon sets all the gods and heroes at defiance. At last a
valiant youth fights the demon, binds him hand and foot, and slices
him with his sword. But still the demon is not slain. So the youth
asked him, “Tell me, where is your soul hidden? For if your
soul had been hidden in your body, you must have been dead long
ago.” The demon replied, “On the saddle of my horse is
a bag. In the bag is a serpent with twelve heads. In the serpent is
my soul. When you have killed the serpent, you have killed me
also.” So the youth took the saddle-bag from the horse and
killed the twelve-headed serpent, whereupon the demon expired. In
another Tartar poem a hero called Kök Chan deposits with a maiden a
golden ring, in which is half his strength. Afterwards when Kök
Chan is wrestling long with a hero and cannot kill him, a woman
drops into his mouth the ring which contains half his strength.
Thus inspired with fresh force he slays his enemy.
In a Mongolian story the hero Joro gets the better of his enemy
the lama Tschoridong in the following way. The lama, who is an
enchanter, sends out his soul in the form of a wasp to sting
Joro’s eyes. But Joro catches the wasp in his hand, and by
alternately shutting and opening his hand he causes the lama
alternately to lose and recover consciousness. In a Tartar poem two
youths cut open the body of an old witch and tear out her bowels,
but all to no purpose, she still lives. On being asked where her
soul is, she answers that it is in the middle of her shoe-sole in
the form of a seven-headed speckled snake. So one of the youths
slices her shoe-sole with his sword, takes out the speckled snake,
and cuts off its seven heads. Then the witch dies. Another Tartar
poem describes how the hero Kartaga grappled with the Swan-woman.
Long they wrestled. Moons waxed and waned and still they wrestled;
years came and went, and still the struggle went on. But the
piebald horse and the black horse knew that the Swan-woman’s
soul was not in her. Under the black earth flow nine seas; where
the seas meet and form one, the sea comes to the surface of the
earth. At the mouth of the nine seas rises a rock of copper; it
rises to the surface of the ground, it rises up between heaven and
earth, this rock of copper. At the foot of the copper rock is a
black chest, in the black chest is a golden casket, and in the
golden casket is the soul of the Swan-woman. Seven little birds are
the soul of the Swan-woman; if the birds are killed the Swan-woman
will die straightway. So the horses ran to the foot of the copper
rock, opened the black chest, and brought back the golden casket.
Then the piebald horse turned himself into a bald-headed man,
opened the golden casket, and cut off the heads of the seven birds.
So the Swan-woman died. In another Tartar poem the hero, pursuing
his sister who has driven away his cattle, is warned to desist from
the pursuit because his sister has carried away his soul in a
golden sword and a golden arrow, and if he pursues her she will
kill him by throwing the golden sword or shooting the golden arrow
at him.
A Malay poem relates how once upon a time in the city of
Indrapoora there was a certain merchant who was rich and
prosperous, but he had no children. One day as he walked with his
wife by the river they found a baby girl, fair as an angel. So they
adopted the child and called her Bidasari. The merchant caused a
golden fish to be made, and into this fish he transferred the soul
of his adopted daughter. Then he put the golden fish in a golden
box full of water, and hid it in a pond in the midst of his garden.
In time the girl grew to be a lovely woman. Now the King of
Indrapoora had a fair young queen, who lived in fear that the king
might take to himself a second wife. So, hearing of the charms of
Bidasari, the queen resolved to put her out of the way. She lured
the girl to the palace and tortured her cruelly; but Bidasari could
not die, because her soul was not in her. At last she could stand
the torture no longer and said to the queen, “If you wish me
to die, you must bring the box which is in the pond in my
father’s garden.” So the box was brought and opened,
and there was the golden fish in the water. The girl said,
“My soul is in that fish. In the morning you must take the
fish out of the water, and in the evening you must put it back into
the water. Do not let the fish lie about, but bind it round your
neck. If you do this, I shall soon die.” So the queen took
the fish out of the box and fastened it round her neck; and no
sooner had she done so than Bidasari fell into a swoon. But in the
evening, when the fish was put back into the water, Bidasari came
to herself again. Seeing that she thus had the girl in her power,
the queen sent her home to her adopted parents. To save her from
further persecution her parents resolved to remove their daughter
from the city. So in a lonely and desolate spot they built a house
and brought Bidasari thither. There she dwelt alone, undergoing
vicissitudes that corresponded with the vicissitudes of the golden
fish in which was her soul. All day long, while the fish was out of
the water, she remained unconscious; but in the evening, when the
fish was put into the water, she revived. One day the king was out
hunting, and coming to the house where Bidasari lay unconscious,
was smitten with her beauty. He tried to waken her, but in vain.
Next day, towards evening, he repeated his visit, but still found
her unconscious. However, when darkness fell, she came to herself
and told the king the secret of her life. So the king returned to
the palace, took the fish from the queen, and put it in water.
Immediately Bidasari revived, and the king took her to wife.
Another story of an external soul comes from Nias, an island to
the west of Sumatra. Once on a time a chief was captured by his
enemies, who tried to put him to death but failed. Water would not
drown him nor fire burn him nor steel pierce him. At last his wife
revealed the secret. On his head he had a hair as hard as a copper
wire; and with this wire his life was bound up. So the hair was
plucked out, and with it his spirit fled.
A West African story from Southern Nigeria relates how a king
kept his soul in a little brown bird, which perched on a tall tree
beside the gate of the palace. The king’s life was so bound
up with that of the bird that whoever should kill the bird would
simultaneously kill the king and succeed to the kingdom. The secret
was betrayed by the queen to her lover, who shot the bird with an
arrow and thereby slew the king and ascended the vacant throne. A
tale told by the Ba-Ronga of South Africa sets forth how the lives
of a whole family were contained in one cat. When a girl of the
family, named Titishan, married a husband, she begged her parents
to let her take the precious cat with her to her new home. But they
refused, saying, “You know that our life is attached to
it”; and they offered to give her an antelope or even an
elephant instead of it. But nothing would satisfy her but the cat.
So at last she carried it off with her and shut it up in a place
where nobody saw it; even her husband knew nothing about it. One
day, when she went to work in the fields, the cat escaped from its
place of concealment, entered the hut, put on the warlike trappings
of the husband, and danced and sang. Some children, attracted by
the noise, discovered the cat at its antics, and when they
expressed their astonishment, the animal only capered the more and
insulted them besides. So they went to the owner and said,
“There is somebody dancing in your house, and he insulted
us.” “Hold your tongues,” said he,
“I’ll soon put a stop to your lies.” So he went
and hid behind the door and peeped in, and there sure enough was
the cat prancing about and singing. He fired at it, and the animal
dropped down dead. At the same moment his wife fell to the ground
in the field where she was at work; said she, “I have been
killed at home.” But she had strength enough left to ask her
husband to go with her to her parents’ village, taking with
him the dead cat wrapt up in a mat. All her relatives assembled,
and bitterly they reproached her for having insisted on taking the
animal with her to her husband’s village. As soon as the mat
was unrolled and they saw the dead cat, they all fell down lifeless
one after the other. So the Clan of the Cat was destroyed; and the
bereaved husband closed the gate of the village with a branch, and
returned home, and told his friends how in killing the cat he had
killed the whole clan, because their lives depended on the life of
the cat.
Ideas of the same sort meet us in stories told by the North
American Indians. Thus the Navajoes tell of a certain mythical
being called “the Maiden that becomes a Bear,” who
learned the art of turning herself into a bear from the prairie
wolf. She was a great warrior and quite invulnerable; for when she
went to war she took out her vital organs and hid them, so that no
one could kill her; and when the battle was over she put the organs
back in their places again. The Kwakiutl Indians of British
Columbia tell of an ogress, who could not be killed because her
life was in a hemlock branch. A brave boy met her in the woods,
smashed her head with a stone, scattered her brains, broke her
bones, and threw them into the water. Then, thinking he had
disposed of the ogress, he went into her house. There he saw a
woman rooted to the floor, who warned him, saying, “Now do
not stay long. I know that you have tried to kill the ogress. It is
the fourth time that somebody has tried to kill her. She never
dies; she has nearly come to life. There in that covered hemlock
branch is her life. Go there, and as soon as you see her enter,
shoot her life. Then she will be dead.” Hardly had she
finished speaking when sure enough in came the ogress, singing as
she walked. But the boy shot at her life, and she fell dead to the
floor.
LXVII. The External Soul in Folk-Custom
1. The External Soul in Inanimate Things
THUS the idea that the soul may be deposited for a longer or
shorter time in some place of security outside the body, or at all
events in the hair, is found in the popular tales of many races. It
remains to show that the idea is not a mere figment devised to
adorn a tale, but is a real article of primitive faith, which has
given rise to a corresponding set of customs.
We have seen that in the tales the hero, as a preparation for
battle, sometimes removes his soul from his body, in order that his
body may be invulnerable and immortal in the combat. With a like
intention the savage removes his soul from his body on various
occasions of real or imaginary peril. Thus among the people of
Minahassa in Celebes, when a family moves into a new house, a
priest collects the souls of the whole family in a bag, and
afterwards restores them to their owners, because the moment of
entering a new house is supposed to be fraught with supernatural
danger. In Southern Celebes, when a woman is brought to bed, the
messenger who fetches the doctor or the midwife always carries with
him something made of iron, such as a chopping-knife, which he
delivers to the doctor. The doctor must keep the thing in his house
till the confinement is over, when he gives it back, receiving a
fixed sum of money for doing so. The chopping-knife, or whatever it
is, represents the woman’s soul, which at this critical time
is believed to be safer out of her body than in it. Hence the
doctor must take great care of the object; for were it lost, the
woman’s soul would assuredly, they think, be lost with
it.
Among the Dyaks of Pinoeh, a district of South-eastern Borneo,
when a child is born, a medicine-man is sent for, who conjures the
soul of the infant into half a coco-nut, which he thereupon covers
with a cloth and places on a square platter or charger suspended by
cords from the roof. This ceremony he repeats at every new moon for
a year. The intention of the ceremony is not explained by the
writer who describes it, but we may conjecture that it is to place
the soul of the child in a safer place than its own frail little
body. This conjecture is confirmed by the reason assigned for a
similar custom observed elsewhere in the Indian Archipelago. In the
Kei Islands, when there is a newly-born child in a house, an empty
coco-nut, split and spliced together again, may sometimes be seen
hanging beside a rough wooden image of an ancestor. The soul of the
infant is believed to be temporarily deposited in the coco-nut in
order that it may be safe from the attacks of evil spirits; but
when the child grows bigger and stronger, the soul will take up its
permanent abode in its own body. Similarly among the Esquimaux of
Alaska, when a child is sick, the medicine-man will sometimes
extract its soul from its body and place it for safe-keeping in an
amulet, which for further security he deposits in his own
medicine-bag. It seems probable that many amulets have been
similarly regarded as soul-boxes, that is, as safes in which the
souls of the owners are kept for greater security. An old
Mang’anje woman in the West Shire district of British Central
Africa used to wear round her neck an ivory ornament, hollow, and
about three inches long, which she called her life or soul.
Naturally, she would not part with it; a planter tried to buy it of
her, but in vain. When Mr. James Macdonald was one day sitting in
the house of a Hlubi chief, awaiting the appearance of that great
man, who was busy decorating his person, a native pointed to a pair
of magnificent ox-horns, and said, “Ntame has his soul in
these horns.” The horns were those of an animal which had
been sacrificed, and they were held sacred. A magician had fastened
them to the roof to protect the house and its inmates from the
thunder-bolt. “The idea,” adds Mr. Macdonald, “is
in no way foreign to South African thought. A man’s soul
there may dwell in the roof of his house, in a tree, by a spring of
water, or on some mountain scaur.” Among the natives of the
Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain there is a secret society which
goes by the name of Ingniet or Ingiet. On his entrance into it
every man receives a stone in the shape either of a human being or
of an animal, and henceforth his soul is believed to be knit up in
a manner with the stone. If it breaks, it is an evil omen for him;
they say that the thunder has struck the stone and that he who owns
it will soon die. If nevertheless the man survives the breaking of
his soul-stone, they say that it was not a proper soul-stone and he
gets a new one instead. The emperor Romanus Lecapenus was once
informed by an astronomer that the life of Simeon, prince of
Bulgaria, was bound up with a certain column in Constantinople, so
that if the capital of the column were removed, Simeon would
immediately die. The emperor took the hint and removed the capital,
and at the same hour, as the emperor learned by enquiry, Simeon
died of heart disease in Bulgaria.
Again, we have seen that in folk-tales a man’s soul or
strength is sometimes represented as bound up with his hair, and
that when his hair is cut off he dies or grows weak. So the natives
of Amboyna used to think that their strength was in their hair and
would desert them if it were shorn. A criminal under torture in a
Dutch Court of that island persisted in denying his guilt till his
hair was cut off, when he immediately confessed. One man, who was
tried for murder, endured without flinching the utmost ingenuity of
his torturers till he saw the surgeon standing with a pair of
shears. On asking what this was for, and being told that it was to
cut his hair, he begged they would not do it, and made a clean
breast. In subsequent cases, when torture failed to wring a
confession from a prisoner, the Dutch authorities made a practice
of cutting off his hair.
Here in Europe it used to be thought that the maleficent powers
of witches and wizards resided in their hair, and that nothing
could make any impression on the miscreants so long as they kept
their hair on. Hence in France it was customary to shave the whole
bodies of persons charged with sorcery before handing them over to
the torturer. Millaeus witnessed the torture of some persons at
Toulouse, from whom no confession could be wrung until they were
stripped and completely shaven, when they readily acknowledged the
truth of the charge. A woman also, who apparently led a pious life,
was put to the torture on suspicion of witchcraft, and bore her
agonies with incredible constancy, until complete depilation drove
her to admit her guilt. The noted inquisitor Sprenger contented
himself with shaving the head of the suspected witch or wizard; but
his more thoroughgoing colleague Cumanus shaved the whole bodies of
forty-seven women before committing them all to the flames. He had
high authority for this rigorous scrutiny, since Satan himself, in
a sermon preached from the pulpit of North Berwick church,
comforted his many servants by assuring them that no harm could
befall them “sa lang as their hair wes on, and sould newir
latt ane teir fall fra thair ene.” Similarly in Bastar, a
province of India, “if a man is adjudged guilty of
witchcraft, he is beaten by the crowd, his hair is shaved, the hair
being supposed to constitute his power of mischief, his front teeth
are knocked out, in order, it is said, to prevent him from
muttering incantations… . Women suspected of sorcery have to
undergo the same ordeal; if found guilty, the same punishment is
awarded, and after being shaved, their hair is attached to a tree
in some public place.” So among the Bhils of India, when a
woman was convicted of witchcraft and had been subjected to various
forms of persuasion, such as hanging head downwards from a tree and
having pepper put into her eyes, a lock of hair was cut from her
head and buried in the ground, “that the last link between
her and her former powers of mischief might be broken.” In
like manner among the Aztecs of Mexico, when wizards and witches
“had done their evil deeds, and the time came to put an end
to their detestable life, some one laid hold of them and cropped
the hair on the crown of their heads, which took from them all
their power of sorcery and enchantment, and then it was that by
death they put an end to their odious existence.”
2. The External Soul in Plants
FURTHER it has been shown that in folk-tales the life of a
person is sometimes so bound up with the life of a plant that the
withering of the plant will immediately follow or be followed by
the death of the person. Among the M’Bengas in Western
Africa, about the Gaboon, when two children are born on the same
day, the people plant two trees of the same kind and dance round
them. The life of each of the children is believed to be bound up
with the life of one of the trees; and if the tree dies or is
thrown down, they are sure that the child will soon die. In the
Cameroons, also, the life of a person is believed to be
sympathetically bound up with that of a tree. The chief of Old Town
in Calabar kept his soul in a sacred grove near a spring of water.
When some Europeans, in frolic or ignorance, cut down part of the
grove, the spirit was most indignant and threatened the
perpetrators of the deed, according to the king, with all manner of
evil.
Some of the Papuans unite the life of a new-born babe
sympathetically with that of a tree by driving a pebble into the
bark of the tree. This is supposed to give them complete mastery
over the child’s life; if the tree is cut down, the child
will die. After a birth the Maoris used to bury the navel-string in
a sacred place and plant a young sapling over it. As the tree grew,
it was a tohu oranga or sign of life for the child; if it
flourished, the child would prosper; if it withered and died, the
parents augured the worst for the little one. In some parts of Fiji
the navel-string of a male infant is planted together with a
coco-nut or the slip of a breadfruit-tree, and the child’s
life is supposed to be intimately connected with that of the tree.
Amongst the Dyaks of Landak and Tajan, districts of Dutch Borneo,
it is customary to plant a fruit-tree for a baby, and henceforth in
the popular belief the fate of the child is bound up with that of
the tree. If the tree shoots up rapidly, it will go well with the
child; but if the tree is dwarfed or shrivelled, nothing but
misfortune can be expected for its human counterpart.
It is said that there are still families in Russia, Germany,
England, France, and Italy who are accustomed to plant a tree at
the birth of a child. The tree, it is hoped, will grow with the
child, and it is tended with special care. The custom is still
pretty general in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland; an
apple-tree is planted for a boy and a pear-tree for a girl, and the
people think that the child will flourish or dwindle with the tree.
In Mecklenburg the afterbirth is thrown out at the foot of a young
tree, and the child is then believed to grow with the tree. Near
the Castle of Dalhousie, not far from Edinburgh, there grows an
oak-tree, called the Edgewell Tree, which is popularly believed to
be linked to the fate of the family by a mysterious tie; for they
say that when one of the family dies, or is about to die, a branch
falls from the Edgewell Tree. Thus, on seeing a great bough drop
from the tree on a quiet, still day in July 1874, an old forester
exclaimed, “The laird’s deid noo!” and soon after
news came that Fox Maule, eleventh Earl of Dalhousie, was dead.
In England children are sometimes passed through a cleft
ash-tree as a cure for rupture or rickets, and thenceforward a
sympathetic connexion is supposed to exist between them and the
tree. An ash-tree which had been used for this purpose grew at the
edge of Shirley Heath, on the road from Hockly House to Birmingham.
“Thomas Chillingworth, son of the owner of an adjoining farm,
now about thirty-four, was, when an infant of a year old, passed
through a similar tree, now perfectly sound, which he preserves
with so much care that he will not suffer a single branch to be
touched, for it is believed the life of the patient depends on the
life of the tree, and the moment that is cut down, be the patient
ever so distant, the rupture returns, and a mortification ensues,
and terminates in death, as was the case in a man driving a waggon
on the very road in question.” “It is not uncommon,
however,” adds the writer, “for persons to survive for
a time the felling of the tree.” The ordinary mode of
effecting the cure is to split a young ash-sapling longitudinally
for a few feet and pass the child, naked, either three times or
three times three through the fissure at sunrise. In the West of
England it is said that the passage should be “against the
sun.” As soon as the ceremony has been performed, the tree is
bound tightly up and the fissure plastered over with mud or clay.
The belief is that just as the cleft in the tree closes up, so the
rupture in the child’s body will be healed; but that if the
rift in the tree remains open, the rupture in the child will remain
too, and if the tree were to die, the death of the child would
surely follow.
A similar cure for various diseases, but especially for rupture
and rickets, has been commonly practised in other parts of Europe,
as Germany, France, Denmark, and Sweden; but in these countries the
tree employed for the purpose is usually not an ash but an oak;
sometimes a willow-tree is allowed or even prescribed instead. In
Mecklenburg, as in England, the sympathetic relation thus
established between the tree and the child is believed to be so
close that if the tree is cut down the child will die.
3. The External Soul in Animals
BUT in practice, as in folk-tales, it is not merely with
inanimate objects and plants that a person is occasionally believed
to be united by a bond of physical sympathy. The same bond, it is
supposed, may exist between a man and an animal, so that the
welfare of the one depends on the welfare of the other, and when
the animal dies the man dies also. The analogy between the custom
and the tales is all the closer because in both of them the power
of thus removing the soul from the body and stowing it away in an
animal is often a special privilege of wizards and witches. Thus
the Yakuts of Siberia believe that every shaman or wizard keeps his
soul, or one of his souls, incarnate in an animal which is
carefully concealed from all the world. “Nobody can find my
external soul,” said one famous wizard, “it lies hidden
far away in the stony mountains of Edzhigansk.” Only once a
year, when the last snows melt and the earth turns black, do these
external souls of wizards appear in the shape of animals among the
dwellings of men. They wander everywhere, yet none but wizards can
see them. The strong ones sweep roaring and noisily along, the weak
steal about quietly and furtively. Often they fight, and then the
wizard whose external soul is beaten, falls ill or dies. The
weakest and most cowardly wizards are they whose souls are
incarnate in the shape of dogs, for the dog gives his human double
no peace, but gnaws his heart and tears his body. The most powerful
wizards are they whose external souls have the shape of stallions,
elks, black bears, eagles, or boars. Again, the Samoyeds of the
Turukhinsk region hold that every shaman has a familiar spirit in
the shape of a boar, which he leads about by a magic belt. On the
death of the boar the shaman himself dies; and stories are told of
battles between wizards, who send their spirits to fight before
they encounter each other in person. The Malays believe that
“the soul of a person may pass into another person or into an
animal, or rather that such a mysterious relation can arise between
the two that the fate of the one is wholly dependent on that of the
other.”
Among the Melanesians of Mota, one of the New Hebrides islands,
the conception of an external soul is carried out in the practice
of daily life. In the Mota language the word tamaniu
signifies “something animate or inanimate which a man has
come to believe to have an existence intimately connected with his
own… . It was not every one in Mota who had his
tamaniu; only some men fancied that they had this relation
to a lizard, a snake, or it might be a stone; sometimes the thing
was sought for and found by drinking the infusion of certain leaves
and heaping together the dregs; then whatever living thing was
first seen in or upon the heap was the tamaniu. It was
watched but not fed or worshipped; the natives believed that it
came at call, and that the life of the man was bound up with the
life of his tamaniu, if a living thing, or with its
safety; should it die, or if not living get broken or be lost, the
man would die. Hence in case of sickness they would send to see if
the tamaniu was safe and well.”
The theory of an external soul deposited in an animal appears to
be very prevalent in West Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the
Cameroons, and the Gaboon. Among the Fans of the Gaboon every
wizard is believed at initiation to unite his life with that of
some particular wild animal by a rite of blood-brotherhood; he
draws blood from the ear of the animal and from his own arm, and
inoculates the animal with his own blood, and himself with the
blood of the beast. Henceforth such an intimate union is
established between the two that the death of the one entails the
death of the other. The alliance is thought to bring to the wizard
or sorcerer a great accession of power, which he can turn to his
advantage in various ways. In the first place, like the warlock in
the fairy tales who has deposited his life outside of himself in
some safe place, the Fan wizard now deems himself invulnerable.
Moreover, the animal with which he has exchanged blood has become
his familiar, and will obey any orders he may choose to give it; so
he makes use of it to injure and kill his enemies. For that reason
the creature with whom he establishes the relation of
blood-brotherhood is never a tame or domestic animal, but always a
ferocious and dangerous wild beast, such as a leopard, a black
serpent, a crocodile, a hippopotamus, a wild boar, or a vulture. Of
all these creatures the leopard is by far the commonest familiar of
Fan wizards, and next to it comes the black serpent; the vulture is
the rarest. Witches as well as wizards have their familiars; but
the animals with which the lives of women are thus bound up
generally differ from those to which men commit their external
souls. A witch never has a panther for her familiar, but often a
venomous species of serpent, sometimes a horned viper, sometimes a
black serpent, sometimes a green one that lives in banana-trees; or
it may be a vulture, an owl, or other bird of night. In every case
the beast or bird with which the witch or wizard has contracted
this mystic alliance is an individual, never a species; and when
the individual animal dies the alliance is naturally at an end,
since the death of the animal is supposed to entail the death of
the man.
Similar beliefs are held by the natives of the Cross River
valley within the provinces of the Cameroons. Groups of people,
generally the inhabitants of a village, have chosen various
animals, with which they believe themselves to stand on a footing
of intimate friendship or relationship. Amongst such animals are
hippopotamuses, elephants, leopards, crocodiles, gorillas, fish,
and serpents, all of them creatures which are either very strong or
can easily hide themselves in the water or a thicket. This power of
concealing themselves is said to be an indispensable condition of
the choice of animal familiars, since the animal friend or helper
is expected to injure his owner’s enemy by stealth; for
example, if he is a hippopotamus, he will bob up suddenly out of
the water and capsize the enemy’s canoe. Between the animals
and their human friends or kinsfolk such a sympathetic relation is
supposed to exist that the moment the animal dies the man dies
also, and similarly the instant the man perishes so does the beast.
From this it follows that the animal kinsfolk may never be shot
at or molested for fear of injuring or killing the persons whose
lives are knit up with the lives of the brutes. This does not,
however, prevent the people of a village, who have elephants for
their animal friends, from hunting elephants. For they do not
respect the whole species but merely certain individuals of it,
which stand in an intimate relation to certain individual men and
women; and they imagine that they can always distinguish these
brother elephants from the common herd of elephants which are mere
elephants and nothing more. The recognition indeed is said to be
mutual. When a hunter, who has an elephant for his friend, meets a
human elephant, as we may call it, the noble animal lifts up a paw
and holds it before his face, as much as to say, “Don’t
shoot.” Were the hunter so inhuman as to fire on and wound
such an elephant, the person whose life was bound up with the
elephant would fall ill.
The Balong of the Cameroons think that every man has several
souls, of which one is in his body and another in an animal, such
as an elephant, a wild pig, a leopard, and so forth. When a man
comes home, feeling ill, and says, “I shall soon die,”
and dies accordingly, the people aver that one of his souls has
been killed in a wild pig or a leopard and that the death of the
external soul has caused the death of the soul in his body. A
similar belief in the external souls of living people is
entertained by the Ibos, an important tribe of the Niger delta.
They think that a man’s spirit can quit his body for a time
during life and take up its abode in an animal. A man who wishes to
acquire this power procures a certain drug from a wise man and
mixes it with his food. After that his soul goes out and enters
into an animal. If it should happen that the animal is killed while
the man’s soul is lodged in it, the man dies; and if the
animal be wounded, the man’s body will presently be covered
with boils. This belief instigates to many deeds of darkness; for a
sly rogue will sometimes surreptitiously administer the magical
drug to his enemy in his food, and having thus smuggled the
other’s soul into an animal will destroy the creature, and
with it the man whose soul is lodged in it.
The negroes of Calabar, at the mouth of the Niger, believe that
every person has four souls, one of which always lives outside of
his or her body in the form of a wild beast in the forest. This
external soul, or bush soul, as Miss Kingsley calls it, may be
almost any animal, for example, a leopard, a fish, or a tortoise;
but it is never a domestic animal and never a plant. Unless he is
gifted with second sight, a man cannot see his own bush soul, but a
diviner will often tell him what sort of creature his bush soul is,
and after that the man will be careful not to kill any animal of
that species, and will strongly object to any one else doing so. A
man and his sons have usually the same sort of animals for their
bush souls, and so with a mother and her daughters. But sometimes
all the children of a family take after the bush soul of their
father; for example, if his external soul is a leopard, all his
sons and daughters will have leopards for their external souls. And
on the other hand, sometimes they all take after their mother; for
instance, if her external soul is a tortoise, all the external
souls of her sons and daughters will be tortoises too. So
intimately bound up is the life of the man with that of the animal
which he regards as his external or bush soul, that the death or
injury of the animal necessarily entails the death or injury of the
man. And, conversely, when the man dies, his bush soul can no
longer find a place of rest, but goes mad and rushes into the fire
or charges people and is knocked on the head, and that is an end of
it.
Near Eket in North Calabar there is a sacred lake, the fish of
which are carefully preserved because the people believe that their
own souls are lodged in the fish, and that with every fish killed a
human life would be simultaneously extinguished. In the Calabar
River not very many years ago there used to be a huge old
crocodile, popularly supposed to contain the external soul of a
chief who resided in the flesh at Duke Town. Sporting vice-consuls
used from time to time to hunt the animal, and once an officer
contrived to hit it. Forthwith the chief was laid up with a wound
in his leg. He gave out that a dog had bitten him, but no doubt the
wise shook their heads and refused to be put off with so flimsy a
pretext. Again, among several tribes on the banks of the Niger
between Lokoja and the delta there prevails “a belief in the
possibility of a man possessing an alter ego in the form
of some animal such as a crocodile or a hippopotamus. It is
believed that such a person’s life is bound up with that of
the animal to such an extent that, whatever affects the one
produces a corresponding impression upon the other, and that if one
dies the other must speedily do so too. It happened not very long
ago that an Englishman shot a hippopotamus close to a native
village; the friends of a woman who died the same night in the
village demanded and eventually obtained five pounds as
compensation for the murder of the woman.”
Amongst the Zapotecs of Central America, when a woman was about
to be confined, her relations assembled in the hut, and began to
draw on the floor figures of different animals, rubbing each one
out as soon as it was completed. This went on till the moment of
birth, and the figure that then remained sketched upon the ground
was called the child’s tona or second self.
“When the child grew old enough, he procured the animal that
represented him and took care of it, as it was believed that health
and existence were bound up with that of the animal’s, in
fact that the death of both would occur simultaneously,” or
rather that when the animal died the man would die too. Among the
Indians of Guatemala and Honduras the nagual or
naual is “that animate or inanimate object,
generally an animal, which stands in a parallel relation to a
particular man, so that the weal and woe of the man depend on the
fate of the nagual.” According to an old writer,
many Indians of Guatemala “are deluded by the devil to
believe that their life dependeth upon the life of such and such a
beast (which they take unto them as their familiar spirit), and
think that when that beast dieth they must die; when he is chased,
their hearts pant; when he is faint, they are faint; nay, it
happeneth that by the devil’s delusion they appear in the
shape of that beast (which commonly by their choice is a buck, or
doe, a lion, or tigre, or dog, or eagle) and in that shape have
been shot at and wounded.” The Indians were persuaded that
the death of their nagual would entail their own. Legend
affirms that in the first battles with the Spaniards on the plateau
of Quetzaltenango the naguals of the Indian chiefs fought
in the form of serpents. The nagual of the highest chief
was especially conspicuous, because it had the form of a great
bird, resplendent in green plumage. The Spanish general Pedro de
Alvarado killed the bird with his lance, and at the same moment the
Indian chief fell dead to the ground.
In many tribes of South-Eastern Australia each sex used to
regard a particular species of animals in the same way that a
Central American Indian regarded his nagual, but with this
difference, that whereas the Indian apparently knew the individual
animal with which his life was bound up, the Australians only knew
that each of their lives was bound up with some one animal of the
species, but they could not say with which. The result naturally
was that every man spared and protected all the animals of the
species with which the lives of the men were bound up; and every
woman spared and protected all the animals of the species with
which the lives of the women were bound up; because no one knew but
that the death of any animal of the respective species might entail
his or her own; just as the killing of the green bird was
immediately followed by the death of the Indian chief, and the
killing of the parrot by the death of Punchkin in the fairy tale.
Thus, for example, the Wotjobaluk tribe of South-Eastern Australia
“held that ‘the life of
Ngǔnǔngǔnǔt (the Bat)
is the life of a man, and the life of Yártatgǔrk (the
Nightjar) is the life of a woman,’ and that when either of
these creatures is killed the life of some man or of some woman is
shortened. In such a case every man or every woman in the camp
feared that he or she might be the victim, and from this cause
great fights arose in this tribe. I learn that in these fights, men
on one side and women on the other, it was not at all certain which
would be victorious, for at times the women gave the men a severe
drubbing with their yamsticks, while often women were injured or
killed by spears.” The Wotjobaluk said that the bat was the
man’s “brother” and that the nightjar was his
“wife.” The particular species of animals with which
the lives of the sexes were believed to be respectively bound up
varied somewhat from tribe to tribe. Thus whereas among the
Wotjobaluk the bat was the animal of the men, at Gunbower Creek on
the Lower Murray the bat seems to have been the animal of the
women, for the natives would not kill it for the reason that
“if it was killed, one of their lubras [women] would be sure
to die in consequence.” But whatever the particular sorts of
creature with which the lives of men and women were believed to be
bound up, the belief itself and the fights to which it gave rise
are known to have prevailed over a large part of South-Eastern
Australia, and probably they extended much farther. The belief was
a very serious one, and so consequently were the fights which
sprang from it. Thus among some tribes of Victoria “the
common bat belongs to the men, who protect it against injury, even
to the half-killing of their wives for its sake. The fern owl, or
large goatsucker, belongs to the women, and, although a bird of
evil omen, creating terror at night by its cry, it is jealously
protected by them. If a man kills one, they are as much enraged as
if it was one of their children, and will strike him with their
long poles.”
The jealous protection thus afforded by Australian men and women
to bats and owls respectively (for bats and owls seem to be the
creatures usually allotted to the two sexes) is not based upon
purely selfish considerations. For each man believes that not only
his own life but the lives of his father, brothers, sons, and so on
are bound up with the lives of particular bats, and that therefore
in protecting the bat species he is protecting the lives of all his
male relations as well as his own. Similarly, each woman believes
that the lives of her mother, sisters, daughters, and so forth,
equally with her own, are bound up with the lives of particular
owls, and that in guarding the owl species she is guarding the
lives of all her female relations besides her own. Now, when
men’s lives are thus supposed to be contained in certain
animals, it is obvious that the animals can hardly be distinguished
from the men, or the men from the animals. If my brother
John’s life is in a bat, then, on the one hand, the bat is my
brother as well as John; and, on the other hand, John is in a sense
a bat, since his life is in a bat. Similarly, if my sister
Mary’s life is in an owl, then the owl is my sister and Mary
is an owl. This is a natural enough conclusion, and the Australians
have not failed to draw it. When the bat is the man’s animal,
it is called his brother; and when the owl is the woman’s
animal, it is called her sister. And conversely a man addresses a
woman as an owl, and she addresses him as a bat. So with the other
animals allotted to the sexes respectively in other tribes. For
example, among the Kurnai all emu-wrens were “brothers”
of the men, and all the men were emu-wrens; all superb warblers
were “sisters” of the women, and all the women were
superb warblers.
But when a savage names himself after an animal, calls it his
brother, and refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his
totem. Accordingly in the tribes of South-Eastern Australia which
we have been considering the bat and the owl, the emu-wren and the
superb warbler, may properly be described as totems of the sexes.
But the assignation of a totem to a sex is comparatively rare, and
has hitherto been discovered nowhere but in Australia. Far more
commonly the totem is appropriated not to a sex, but to a clan, and
is hereditary either in the male or female line. The relation of an
individual to the clan totem does not differ in kind from his
relation to the sex totem; he will not kill it, he speaks of it as
his brother, and he calls himself by its name. Now if the relations
are similar, the explanation which holds good of the one ought
equally to hold good of the other. Therefore, the reason why a clan
revere a particular species of animals or plants (for the clan
totem may be a plant) and call themselves after it, would seem to
be a belief that the life of each individual of the clan is bound
up with some one animal or plant of the species, and that his or
her death would be the consequence of killing that particular
animal, or destroying that particular plant. This explanation of
totemism squares very well with Sir George Grey’s definition
of a totem or kobong in Western Australia. He says:
“A certain mysterious connexion exists between a family and
its kobong, so that a member of the family will never kill
an animal of the species to which his kobong belongs,
should he find it asleep; indeed he always kills it reluctantly,
and never without affording it a chance to escape. This arises from
the family belief that some one individual of the species is their
nearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime, and to be
carefully avoided. Similarly, a native who has a vegetable for his
kobong may not gather it under certain circumstances, and
at a particular period of the year.” Here it will be observed
that though each man spares all the animals or plants of the
species, they are not all equally precious to him; far from it, out
of the whole species there is only one which is specially dear to
him; but as he does not know which the dear one is, he is obliged
to spare them all from fear of injuring the one. Again, this
explanation of the clan totem harmonises with the supposed effect
of killing one of the totem species. “One day one of the
blacks killed a crow. Three or four days afterwards a Boortwa
(crow) [i.e. a man of the Crow clan] named Larry died. He
had been ailing for some days, but the killing of his
wingong [totem] hastened his death.” Here the
killing of the crow caused the death of a man of the Crow clan,
exactly as, in the case of the sex-totems, the killing of a bat
causes the death of a Bat-man or the killing of an owl causes the
death of an Owl-woman. Similarly, the killing of his
nagual causes the death of a Central American Indian, the
killing of his bush soul causes the death of a Calabar negro, the
killing of his tamaniu causes the death of a Banks
Islander, and the killing of the animal in which his life is stowed
away causes the death of the giant or warlock in the fairy
tale.
Thus it appears that the story of “The giant who had no
heart in his body” may perhaps furnish the key to the
relation which is supposed to subsist between a man and his totem.
The totem, on this theory, is simply the receptacle in which a man
keeps his life, as Punchkin kept his life in a parrot, and Bidasari
kept her soul in a golden fish. It is no valid objection to this
view that when a savage has both a sex totem and a clan totem his
life must be bound up with two different animals, the death of
either of which would entail his own. If a man has more vital
places than one in his body, why, the savage may think, should he
not have more vital places than one outside it? Why, since he can
put his life outside himself, should he not transfer one portion of
it to one animal and another to another? The divisibility of life,
or, to put it otherwise, the plurality of souls, is an idea
suggested by many familiar facts, and has commended itself to
philosophers like Plato, as well as to savages. It is only when the
notion of a soul, from being a quasi-scientific hypothesis, becomes
a theological dogma that its unity and indivisibility are insisted
upon as essential. The savage, unshackled by dogma, is free to
explain the facts of life by the assumption of as many souls as he
thinks necessary. Hence, for example, the Caribs supposed that
there was one soul in the head, another in the heart, and other
souls at all the places where an artery is felt pulsating. Some of
the Hidatsa Indians explain the phenomena of gradual death, when
the extremities appear dead first, by supposing that man has four
souls, and that they quit the body, not simultaneously, but one
after the other, dissolution being only complete when all four have
departed. Some of the Dyaks of Borneo and the Malays of the
Peninsula believe that every man has seven souls. The Alfoors of
Poso in Celebes are of opinion that he has three. The natives of
Laos suppose that the body is the seat of thirty spirits, which
reside in the hands, the feet, the mouth, the eyes, and so on.
Hence, from the primitive point of view, it is perfectly possible
that a savage should have one soul in his sex totem and another in
his clan totem. However, as I have observed, sex totems have been
found nowhere but in Australia; so that as a rule the savage who
practises totemism need not have more than one soul out of his body
at a time.
If this explanation of the totem as a receptacle in which a man
keeps his soul or one of his souls is correct, we should expect to
find some totemic people of whom it is expressly said that every
man amongst them is believed to keep at least one soul permanently
out of his body, and that the destruction of this external soul is
supposed to entail the death of its owner. Such a people are the
Bataks of Sumatra. The Bataks are divided into exogamous clans
(margas) with descent in the male line; and each clan is
forbidden to eat the flesh of a particular animal. One clan may not
eat the tiger, another the ape, another the crocodile, another the
dog, another the cat, another the dove, another the white buffalo,
and another the locust. The reason given by members of a clan for
abstaining from the flesh of the particular animal is either that
they are descended from animals of that species, and that their
souls after death may transmigrate into the animals, or that they
or their forefathers have been under certain obligations to the
creatures. Sometimes, but not always, the clan bears the name of
the animal. Thus the Bataks have totemism in full. But, further,
each Batak believes that he has seven or, on a more moderate
computation, three souls. One of these souls is always outside the
body, but nevertheless whenever it dies, however far away it may be
at the time, that same moment the man dies also. The writer who
mentions this belief says nothing about the Batak totems; but on
the analogy of the Australian, Central American, and African
evidence we may conjecture that the external soul, whose death
entails the death of the man, is housed in the totemic animal or
plant.
Against this view it can hardly be thought to militate that the
Batak does not in set terms affirm his external soul to be in his
totem, but alleges other grounds for respecting the sacred animal
or plant of his clan. For if a savage seriously believes that his
life is bound up with an external object, it is in the last degree
unlikely that he will let any stranger into the secret. In all that
touches his inmost life and beliefs the savage is exceedingly
suspicious and reserved; Europeans have resided among savages for
years without discovering some of their capital articles of faith,
and in the end the discovery has often been the result of accident.
Above all, the savage lives in an intense and perpetual dread of
assassination by sorcery; the most trifling relics of his
person—the clippings of his hair and nails, his spittle, the
remnants of his food, his very name—all these may, he
fancies, be turned by the sorcerer to his destruction, and he is
therefore anxiously careful to conceal or destroy them. But if in
matters such as these, which are but the outposts and outworks of
his life, he is so shy and secretive, how close must be the
concealment, how impenetrable the reserve in which he enshrouds the
inner keep and citadel of his being! When the princess in the fairy
tale asks the giant where he keeps his soul, he often gives false
or evasive answers, and it is only after much coaxing and wheedling
that the secret is at last wrung from him. In his jealous reticence
the giant resembles the timid and furtive savage; but whereas the
exigencies of the story demand that the giant should at last reveal
his secret, no such obligation is laid on the savage; and no
inducement that can be offered is likely to tempt him to imperil
his soul by revealing its hiding-place to a stranger. It is
therefore no matter for surprise that the central mystery of the
savage’s life should so long have remained a secret, and that
we should be left to piece it together from scattered hints and
fragments and from the recollections of it which linger in fairy
tales.
4. The Ritual of Death and Resurrection
THIS view of totemism throws light on a class of religious rites
of which no adequate explanation, so far as I am aware, has yet
been offered. Amongst many savage tribes, especially such as are
known to practice totemism, it is customary for lads at puberty to
undergo certain initiatory rites, of which one of the commonest is
a pretence of killing the lad and bringing him to life again. Such
rites become intelligible if we suppose that their substance
consists in extracting the youth’s soul in order to transfer
it to his totem. For the extraction of his soul would naturally be
supposed to kill the youth or at least to throw him into a
death-like trance, which the savage hardly distinguishes from
death. His recovery would then be attributed either to the gradual
recovery of his system from the violent shock which it had
received, or, more probably, to the infusion into him of fresh life
drawn from the totem. Thus the essence of these initiatory rites,
so far as they consist in a simulation of death and resurrection,
would be an exchange of life or souls between the man and his
totem. The primitive belief in the possibility of such an exchange
of souls comes clearly out in a story of a Basque hunter who
affirmed that he had been killed by a bear, but that the bear had,
after killing him, breathed its own soul into him, so that the
bear’s body was now dead, but he himself was a bear, being
animated by the bear’s soul. This revival of the dead hunter
as a bear is exactly analogous to what, on the theory here
suggested, is supposed to take place in the ceremony of killing a
lad at puberty and bringing him to life again. The lad dies as a
man and comes to life again as an animal; the animal’s soul
is now in him, and his human soul is in the animal. With good
right, therefore, does he call himself a Bear or a Wolf, etc.,
according to his totem; and with good right does he treat the bears
or the wolves, etc., as his brethren, since in these animals are
lodged the souls of himself and his kindred.
Examples of this supposed death and resurrection at initiation
are as follows. In the Wonghi or Wonghibon tribe of New South Wales
the youths on approaching manhood are initiated at a secret
ceremony, which none but initiated men may witness. Part of the
proceedings consists in knocking out a tooth and giving a new name
to the novice, indicative of the change from youth to manhood.
While the teeth are being knocked out an instrument known as a
bull-roarer, which consists of a flat piece of wood with serrated
edges tied to the end of a string, is swung round so as to produce
a loud humming noise. The uninitiated are not allowed to see this
instrument. Women are forbidden to witness the ceremonies under
pain of death. It is given out that the youths are each met in turn
by a mythical being, called Thuremlin (more commonly known as
Daramulun) who takes the youth to a distance, kills him, and in
some instances cuts him up, after which he restores him to life and
knocks out a tooth. Their belief in the power of Thuremlin is said
to be undoubted.
The Ualaroi of the Upper Darling River said that at initiation
the boy met a ghost, who killed him and brought him to life again
as a young man. Among the natives on the Lower Lachlan and Murray
Rivers it was Thrumalun (Daramulun) who was thought to slay and
resuscitate the novices. In the Unmatjera tribe of Central
Australia women and children believe that a spirit called
Twanyirika kills the youth and afterwards brings him to life again
during the period of initiation. The rites of initiation in this
tribe, as in the other Central tribes, comprise the operations of
circumcision and subincision; and as soon as the second of these
has been performed on him, the young man receives from his father a
sacred stick (churinga), with which, he is told, his
spirit was associated in the remotest past. While he is out in the
bush recovering from his wounds, he must swing the bull-roarer, or
a being who lives up in the sky will swoop down and carry him off.
In the Binbinga tribe, on the western coast of the Gulf of
Carpentaria, the women and children believe that the noise of the
bull-roarer at initiation is made by a spirit named Katajalina, who
lives in an ant-hill and comes out and eats up the boy, afterwards
restoring him to life. Similarly among their neighbours the Anula
the women imagine that the droning sound of the bull-roarer is
produced by a spirit called Gnabaia, who swallows the lads at
initiation and afterwards disgorges them in the form of initiated
men.
Among the tribes settled on the southern coast of New South
Wales, of which the Coast Murring tribe may be regarded as typical,
the drama of resurrection from the dead was exhibited in a graphic
form to the novices at initiation. The ceremony has been described
for us by an eye-witness. A man, disguised with stringy bark fibre,
lay down in a grave and was lightly covered up with sticks and
earth. In his hand he held a small bush, which appeared to be
growing in the soil, and other bushes were stuck in the ground to
heighten the effect. Then the novices were brought and placed
beside the grave. Next, a procession of men, disguised in stringy
bark fibre, drew near. They represented a party of medicine-men,
guided by two reverend seniors, who had come on pilgrimage to the
grave of a brother medicine-man, who lay buried there. When the
little procession, chanting an invocation to Daramulun, had defiled
from among the rocks and trees into the open, it drew up on the
side of the grave opposite to the novices, the two old men taking
up a position in the rear of the dancers. For some time the dance
and song went on till the tree that seemed to grow from the grave
began to quiver. “Look there!” cried the men to the
novices, pointing to the trembling leaves. As they looked, the tree
quivered more and more, then was violently agitated and fell to the
ground, while amid the excited dancing of the dancers and the
chanting of the choir the supposed dead man spurned from him the
superincumbent mass of sticks and leaves, and springing to his feet
danced his magic dance in the grave itself, and exhibited in his
mouth the magic substances which he was supposed to have received
from Daramulun in person.
Some tribes of Northern New Guinea—the Yabim, Bukaua, Kai,
and Tami—like many Australian tribes, require every male
member of the tribe to be circumcised before he ranks as a
full-grown man; and the tribal initiation, of which circumcision is
the central feature, is conceived by them, as by some Australian
tribes, as a process of being swallowed and disgorged by a mythical
monster, whose voice is heard in the humming sound of the
bull-roarer. Indeed the New Guinea tribes not only impress this
belief on the minds of women and children, but enact it in a
dramatic form at the actual rites of initiation, at which no woman
or uninitiated person may be present. For this purpose a hut about
a hundred feet long is erected either in the village or in a lonely
part of the forest. It is modelled in the shape of the mythical
monster; at the end which represents his head it is high, and it
tapers away at the other end. A betel-palm, grubbed up with the
roots, stands for the backbone of the great being and its
clustering fibres for his hair; and to complete the resemblance the
butt end of the building is adorned by a native artist with a pair
of goggle eyes and a gaping mouth. When after a tearful parting
from their mothers and women folk, who believe or pretend to
believe in the monster that swallows their dear ones, the
awe-struck novices are brought face to face with this imposing
structure, the huge creature emits a sullen growl, which is in fact
no other than the humming note of bull-roarers swung by men
concealed in the monster’s belly. The actual process of
deglutition is variously enacted. Among the Tami it is represented
by causing the candidates to defile past a row of men who hold
bull-roarers over their heads; among the Kai it is more graphically
set forth by making them pass under a scaffold on which stands a
man, who makes a gesture of swallowing and takes in fact a gulp of
water as each trembling novice passes beneath him. But the present
of a pig, opportunely offered for the redemption of the youth,
induces the monster to relent and disgorge his victim; the man who
represents the monster accepts the gift vicariously, a gurgling
sound is heard, and the water which had just been swallowed
descends in a jet on the novice. This signifies that the young man
has been released from the monster’s belly. However, he has
now to undergo the more painful and dangerous operation of
circumcision. It follows immediately, and the cut made by the knife
of the operator is explained to be a bite or scratch which the
monster inflicted on the novice in spewing him out of his capacious
maw. While the operation is proceeding, a prodigious noise is made
by the swinging of bull-roarers to represent the roar of the
dreadful being who is in the act of swallowing the young man.
When, as sometimes happens, a lad dies from the effect of the
operation, he is buried secretly in the forest, and his sorrowing
mother is told that the monster has a pig’s stomach as well
as a human stomach, and that unfortunately her son slipped into the
wrong stomach, from which it was impossible to extricate him. After
they have been circumcised the lads must remain for some months in
seclusion, shunning all contact with women and even the sight of
them. They live in the long hut which represents the
monster’s belly. When at last the lads, now ranking as
initiated men, are brought back with great pomp and ceremony to the
village, they are received with sobs and tears of joy by the women,
as if the grave had given up its dead. At first the young men keep
their eyes rigidly closed or even sealed with a plaster of chalk,
and they appear not to understand the words of command which are
given them by an elder. Gradually, however, they come to themselves
as if awakening from a stupor, and next day they bathe and wash off
the crust of white chalk with which their bodies had been
coated.
It is highly significant that all these tribes of New Guinea
apply the same word to the bull-roarer and to the monster, who is
supposed to swallow the novices at circumcision, and whose fearful
roar is represented by the hum of the harmless wooden instruments.
Further, it deserves to be noted that in three languages out of the
four the same word which is applied to the bull-roarer and to the
monster means also a ghost or spirit of the dead, while in the
fourth language (the Kai) it signifies “grandfather.”
From this it seems to follow that the being who swallows and
disgorges the novices at initiation is believed to be a powerful
ghost or ancestral spirit, and that the bull-roarer, which bears
his name, is his material representative. That would explain the
jealous secrecy with which the sacred implement is kept from the
sight of women. While they are not in use, the bull-roarers are
stowed away in the men’s club-houses, which no woman may
enter; indeed no woman or uninitiated person may set eyes on a
bull-roarer under pain of death. Similarly among the Tugeri or
Kaya-Kaya, a large Papuan tribe on the south coast of Dutch New
Guinea, the name of the bull-roarer, which they call
sosom, is given to a mythical giant, who is supposed to
appear every year with the south-east monsoon. When he comes, a
festival is held in his honour and bull-roarers are swung. Boys are
presented to the giant, and he kills them, but considerately brings
them to life again.
In certain districts of Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian
Islands, the drama of death and resurrection used to be acted with
much solemnity before the eyes of young men at initiation. In a
sacred enclosure they were shown a row of dead or seemingly dead
men lying on the ground, their bodies cut open and covered with
blood, their entrails protruding. But at a yell from the high
priest the counterfeit dead men started to their feet and ran down
to the river to cleanse themselves from the blood and guts of pigs
with which they were beslobbered. Soon they marched back to the
sacred enclosure as if come to life, clean, fresh, and garlanded,
swaying their bodies in time to the music of a solemn hymn, and
took their places in front of the novices. Such was the drama of
death and resurrection.
The people of Rook, an island between New Guinea and New
Britain, hold festivals at which one or two disguised men, their
heads covered with wooden masks, go dancing through the village,
followed by all the other men. They demand that the circumcised
boys who have not yet been swallowed by Marsaba (the devil) shall
be given up to them. The boys, trembling and shrieking, are
delivered to them, and must creep between the legs of the disguised
men. Then the procession moves through the village again, and
announces that Marsaba has eaten up the boys, and will not disgorge
them till he receives a present of pigs, taro, and so forth. So all
the villagers, according to their means, contribute provisions,
which are then consumed in the name of Marsaba.
In the west of Ceram boys at puberty are admitted to the Kakian
association. Modern writers have commonly regarded this association
as primarily a political league instituted to resist foreign
domination. In reality its objects are purely religious and social,
though it is possible that the priests may have occasionally used
their powerful influence for political ends. The society is in fact
merely one of those widely-diffused primitive institutions, of
which a chief object is the initiation of young men. In recent
years the true nature of the association has been duly recognised
by the distinguished Dutch ethnologist, J. G. F. Riedel. The Kakian
house is an oblong wooden shed, situated under the darkest trees in
the depth of the forest, and is built to admit so little light that
it is impossible to see what goes on in it. Every village has such
a house. Thither the boys who are to be initiated are conducted
blindfold, followed by their parents and relations. Each boy is led
by the hand of two men, who act as his sponsors or guardians,
looking after him during the period of initiation. When all are
assembled before the shed, the high priest calls aloud upon the
devils. Immediately a hideous uproar is heard to proceed from the
shed. It is made by men with bamboo trumpets, who have been
secretly introduced into the building by a back door, but the women
and children think it is made by the devils, and are much
terrified. Then the priests enter the shed, followed by the boys,
one at a time. As soon as each boy has disappeared within the
precincts, a dull chopping sound is heard, a fearful cry rings out,
and a sword or spear, dripping with blood, is thrust through the
roof of the shed. This is a token that the boy’s head has
been cut off, and that the devil has carried him away to the other
world, there to regenerate and transform him. So at sight of the
bloody sword the mothers weep and wail, crying that the devil has
murdered their children. In some places, it would seem, the boys
are pushed through an opening made in the shape of a
crocodile’s jaws or a cassowary’s beak, and it is then
said that the devil has swallowed them. The boys remain in the shed
for five or nine days. Sitting in the dark, they hear the blast of
the bamboo trumpets, and from time to time the sound of musket
shots and the clash of swords. Every day they bathe, and their
faces and bodies are smeared with a yellow dye, to give them the
appearance of having been swallowed by the devil. During his stay
in the Kakian house each boy has one or two crosses tattooed with
thorns on his breast or arm. When they are not sleeping, the lads
must sit in a crouching posture without moving a muscle. As they
sit in a row cross-legged, with their hands stretched out, the
chief takes his trumpet, and placing the mouth of it on the hands
of each lad, speaks through it in strange tones, imitating the
voice of the spirits. He warns the lads, under pain of death, to
observe the rules of the Kakian society, and never to reveal what
has passed in the Kakian house. The novices are also told by the
priests to behave well to their blood relations, and are taught the
traditions and secrets of the tribe.
Meantime the mothers and sisters of the lads have gone home to
weep and mourn. But in a day or two the men who acted as guardians
or sponsors to the novices return to the village with the glad
tidings that the devil, at the intercession of the priests, has
restored the lads to life. The men who bring this news come in a
fainting state and daubed with mud, like messengers freshly arrived
from the nether world. Before leaving the Kakian house, each lad
receives from the priest a stick adorned at both ends with a
cock’s or cassowary’s feathers. The sticks are supposed
to have been given to the lads by the devil at the time when he
restored them to life, and they serve as a token that the youths
have been in the spirit land. When they return to their homes they
totter in their walk, and enter the house backward, as if they had
forgotten how to walk properly; or they enter the house by the back
door. If a plate of food is given to them, they hold it upside
down. They remain dumb, indicating their wants by signs only. All
this is to show that they are still under the influence of the
devil or the spirits. Their sponsors have to teach them all the
common acts of life, as if they were newborn children. Further,
upon leaving the Kakian house the boys are strictly forbidden to
eat of certain fruits until the next celebration of the rites has
taken place. And for twenty or thirty days their hair may not be
combed by their mothers or sisters. At the end of that time the
high priest takes them to a lonely place in the forest, and cuts
off a lock of hair from the crown of each of their heads. After
these initiatory rites the lads are deemed men, and may marry; it
would be a scandal if they married before.
In the region of the Lower Congo a simulation of death and
resurrection is, or rather used to be, practised by the members of
a guild or secret society called ndembo. “In the
practice of Ndembo the initiating doctors get some one to fall down
in a pretended fit, and in that state he is carried away to an
enclosed place outside the town. This is called ‘dying
Ndembo.’ Others follow suit, generally boys and girls, but
often young men and women… . They are supposed to have died.
But the parents and friends supply food, and after a period
varying, according to custom, from three months to three years, it
is arranged that the doctor shall bring them to life again… .
When the doctor’s fee has been paid, and money (goods) saved
for a feast, the Ndembo people are brought to life. At
first they pretend to know no one and nothing; they do not even
know how to masticate food, and friends have to perform that office
for them. They want everything nice that any one uninitiated may
have, and beat them if it is not granted, or even strangle and kill
people. They do not get into trouble for this, because it is
thought that they do not know better. Sometimes they carry on the
pretence of talking gibberish, and behaving as if they had returned
from the spirit-world. After this they are known by another name,
peculiar to those who have ‘died Ndembo.’ … We
hear of the custom far along on the upper river, as well as in the
cataract region.”
Among some of the Indian tribes of North America there exist
certain religious associations which are only open to candidates
who have gone through a pretence of being killed and brought to
life again. In 1766 or 1767 Captain Jonathan Carver witnessed the
admission of a candidate to an association called “the
friendly society of the Spirit” (Wakon-Kitchewah)
among the Naudowessies, a Siouan or Dacotan tribe in the region of
the great lakes. The candidate knelt before the chief, who told him
that “he himself was now agitated by the same spirit which he
should in a few moments communicate to him; that it would strike
him dead, but that he would instantly be restored again to life; to
this he added, that the communication, however terrifying, was a
necessary introduction to the advantages enjoyed by the community
into which he was on the point of being admitted. As he spoke this,
he appeared to be greatly agitated; till at last his emotions
became so violent, that his countenance was distorted, and his
whole frame convulsed. At this juncture he threw something that
appeared both in shape and colour like a small bean, at the young
man, which seemed to enter his mouth, and he instantly fell as
motionless as if he had been shot.” For a time the man lay
like dead, but under a shower of blows he showed signs of
consciousness, and finally, discharging from his mouth the bean, or
whatever it was that the chief had thrown at him, he came to life.
In other tribes, for example, the Ojebways, Winnebagoes, and
Dacotas or Sioux, the instrument by which the candidate is
apparently slain is the medicine-bag. The bag is made of the skin
of an animal (such as the otter, wild cat, serpent, bear, raccoon,
wolf, owl, weasel), of which it roughly preserves the shape. Each
member of the society has one of these bags, in which he keeps the
odds and ends that make up his “medicine” or charms.
“They believe that from the miscellaneous contents in the
belly of the skin bag or animal there issues a spirit or breath,
which has the power, not only to knock down and kill a man, but
also to set him up and restore him to life.” The mode of
killing a man with one of these medicine-bags is to thrust it at
him; he falls like dead, but a second thrust of the bag restores
him to life.
A ceremony witnessed by the castaway John R. Jewitt during his
captivity among the Indians of Nootka Sound doubtless belongs to
this class of customs. The Indian king or chief “discharged a
pistol close to his son’s ear, who immediately fell down as
if killed, upon which all the women of the house set up a most
lamentable cry, tearing handfuls of hair from their heads, and
exclaiming that the prince was dead; at the same time a great
number of the inhabitants rushed into the house armed with their
daggers, muskets, etc., enquiring the cause of their outcry. These
were immediately followed by two others dressed in wolf-skins, with
masks over their faces representing the head of that animal. The
latter came in on their hands and feet in the manner of a beast,
and taking up the prince, carried him off upon their backs,
retiring in the same manner they entered.” In another place
Jewitt mentions that the young prince—a lad of about eleven
years of age—wore a mask in imitation of a wolf’s head.
Now, as the Indians of this part of America are divided into totem
clans, of which the Wolf clan is one of the principal, and as the
members of each clan are in the habit of wearing some portion of
the totem animal about their person, it is probable that the prince
belonged to the Wolf clan, and that the ceremony described by
Jewitt represented the killing of the lad in order that he might be
born anew as a wolf, much in the same way that the Basque hunter
supposed himself to have been killed and to have come to life again
as a bear.
This conjectural explanation of the ceremony has, since it was
first put forward, been to some extent confirmed by the researches
of Dr. Franz Boas among these Indians; though it would seem that
the community to which the chief’s son thus obtained
admission was not so much a totem clan as a secret society called
Tlokoala, whose members imitated wolves. Every new member of the
society must be initiated by the wolves. At night a pack of wolves,
personated by Indians dressed in wolf-skins and wearing wolf-masks,
make their appearance, seize the novice, and carry him into the
woods. When the wolves are heard outside the village, coming to
fetch away the novice, all the members of the society blacken their
faces and sing, “Among all the tribes is great excitement,
because I am Tlokoala.” Next day the wolves bring back the
novice dead, and the members of the society have to revive him. The
wolves are supposed to have put a magic stone into his body, which
must be removed before he can come to life. Till this is done the
pretended corpse is left lying outside the house. Two wizards go
and remove the stone, which appears to be quartz, and then the
novice is resuscitated. Among the Niska Indians of British
Columbia, who are divided into four principal clans with the raven,
the wolf, the eagle, and the bear for their respective totems, the
novice at initiation is always brought back by an artificial totem
animal. Thus when a man was about to be initiated into a secret
society called Olala, his friends drew their knives and pretended
to kill him. In reality they let him slip away, while they cut off
the head of a dummy which had been adroitly substituted for him.
Then they laid the decapitated dummy down and covered it over, and
the women began to mourn and wail. His relations gave a funeral
banquet and solemnly burnt the effigy. In short, they held a
regular funeral. For a whole year the novice remained absent and
was seen by none but members of the secret society. But at the end
of that time he came back alive, carried by an artificial animal
which represented his totem.
In these ceremonies the essence of the rite appears to be the
killing of the novice in his character of a man and his restoration
to life in the form of the animal which is thenceforward to be, if
not his guardian spirit, at least linked to him in a peculiarly
intimate relation. It is to be remembered that the Indians of
Guatemala, whose life was bound up with an animal, were supposed to
have the power of appearing in the shape of the particular creature
with which they were thus sympathetically united. Hence it seems
not unreasonable to conjecture that in like manner the Indians of
British Columbia may imagine that their life depends on the life of
some one of that species of creature to which they assimilate
themselves by their costume. At least if that is not an article of
belief with the Columbian Indians of the present day, it may very
well have been so with their ancestors in the past, and thus may
have helped to mould the rites and ceremonies both of the totem
clans and of the secret societies. For though these two sorts of
communities differ in respect of the mode in which membership of
them is obtained—a man being born into his totem clan but
admitted into a secret society later in life—we can hardly
doubt that they are near akin and have their root in the same mode
of thought. That thought, if I am right, is the possibility of
establishing a sympathetic relation with an animal, a spirit, or
other mighty being, with whom a man deposits for safe-keeping his
soul or some part of it, and from whom he receives in return a gift
of magical powers.
Thus, on the theory here suggested, wherever totemism is found,
and wherever a pretence is made of killing and bringing to life
again the novice at initiation, there may exist or have existed not
only a belief in the possibility of permanently depositing the soul
in some external object—animal, plant, or what not—but
an actual intention of so doing. If the question is put, why do men
desire to deposit their life outside their bodies? the answer can
only be that, like the giant in the fairy tale, they think it safer
to do so than to carry it about with them, just as people deposit
their money with a banker rather than carry it on their persons. We
have seen that at critical periods the life or soul is sometimes
temporarily stowed away in a safe place till the danger is past.
But institutions like totemism are not resorted to merely on
special occasions of danger; they are systems into which every one,
or at least every male, is obliged to be initiated at a certain
period of life. Now the period of life at which initiation takes
place is regularly puberty; and this fact suggests that the special
danger which totemism and systems like it are intended to obviate
is supposed not to arise till sexual maturity has been attained, in
fact, that the danger apprehended is believed to attend the
relation of the sexes to each other. It would be easy to prove by a
long array of facts that the sexual relation is associated in the
primitive mind with many serious perils; but the exact nature of
the danger apprehended is still obscure. We may hope that a more
exact acquaintance with savage modes of thought will in time
disclose this central mystery of primitive society, and will
thereby furnish the clue, not only to totemism, but to the origin
of the marriage system.
LXVIII. The Golden Bough
THUS the view that Balder’s life was in the mistletoe is
entirely in harmony with primitive modes of thought. It may indeed
sound like a contradiction that, if his life was in the mistletoe,
he should nevertheless have been killed by a blow from the plant.
But when a person’s life is conceived as embodied in a
particular object, with the existence of which his own existence is
inseparably bound up, and the destruction of which involves his
own, the object in question may be regarded and spoken of
indifferently as his life or his death, as happens in the fairy
tales. Hence if a man’s death is in an object, it is
perfectly natural that he should be killed by a blow from it. In
the fairy tales Koshchei the Deathless is killed by a blow from the
egg or the stone in which his life or death is secreted; the ogres
burst when a certain grain of sand—doubtless containing their
life or death—is carried over their heads; the magician dies
when the stone in which his life or death is contained is put under
his pillow; and the Tartar hero is warned that he may be killed by
the golden arrow or golden sword in which his soul has been stowed
away.
The idea that the life of the oak was in the mistletoe was
probably suggested, as I have said, by the observation that in
winter the mistletoe growing on the oak remains green while the oak
itself is leafless. But the position of the plant—growing not
from the ground but from the trunk or branches of the
tree—might confirm this idea. Primitive man might think that,
like himself, the oak-spirit had sought to deposit his life in some
safe place, and for this purpose had pitched on the mistletoe,
which, being in a sense neither on earth nor in heaven, might be
supposed to be fairly out of harm’s way. In a former chapter
we saw that primitive man seeks to preserve the life of his human
divinities by keeping them poised between earth and heaven, as the
place where they are least likely to be assailed by the dangers
that encompass the life of man on earth. We can therefore
understand why it has been a rule both of ancient and of modern
folk-medicine that the mistletoe should not be allowed to touch the
ground; were it to touch the ground, its healing virtue would be
gone. This may be a survival of the old superstition that the plant
in which the life of the sacred tree was concentrated should not be
exposed to the risk incurred by contact with the earth. In an
Indian legend, which offers a parallel to the Balder myth, Indra
swore to the demon Namuci that he would slay him neither by day nor
by night, neither with staff nor with bow, neither with the palm of
the hand nor with the fist, neither with the wet nor with the dry.
But he killed him in the morning twilight by sprinkling over him
the foam of the sea. The foam of the sea is just such an object as
a savage might choose to put his life in, because it occupies that
sort of intermediate or nondescript position between earth and sky
or sea and sky in which primitive man sees safety. It is therefore
not surprising that the foam of the river should be the totem of a
clan in India.
Again, the view that the mistletoe owes its mystic character
partly to its not growing on the ground is confirmed by a parallel
superstition about the mountain-ash or rowan-tree. In Jutland a
rowan that is found growing out of the top of another tree is
esteemed “exceedingly effective against witchcraft: since it
does not grow on the ground witches have no power over it; if it is
to have its full effect it must be cut on Ascension Day.”
Hence it is placed over doors to prevent the ingress of witches. In
Sweden and Norway, also, magical properties are ascribed to a
“flying-rowan” (flögrönn), that is to a rowan
which is found growing not in the ordinary fashion on the ground
but on another tree, or on a roof, or in a cleft of the rock, where
it has sprouted from seed scattered by birds. They say that a man
who is out in the dark should have a bit of
“flying-rowan” with him to chew; else he runs a risk of
being bewitched and of being unable to stir from the spot. Just as
in Scandinavia the parasitic rowan is deemed a countercharm to
sorcery, so in Germany the parasitic mistletoe is still commonly
considered a protection against witch-craft, and in Sweden, as we
saw, the mistletoe which is gathered on Midsummer Eve is attached
to the ceiling of the house, the horse’s stall or the
cow’s crib, in the belief that this renders the Troll
powerless to injure man or beast.
The view that the mistletoe was not merely the instrument of
Balder’s death, but that it contained his life, is
countenanced by the analogy of a Scottish superstition. Tradition
ran that the fate of the Hays of Errol, an estate in Perthshire,
near the Firth of Tay, was bound up with the mistletoe that grew on
a certain great oak. A member of the Hay family has recorded the
old belief as follows: “Among the low country families the
badges are now almost generally forgotten; but it appears by an
ancient MS., and the tradition of a few old people in Perthshire,
that the badge of the Hays was the mistletoe. There was formerly in
the neighbourhood of Errol, and not far from the Falcon stone, a
vast oak of an unknown age, and upon which grew a profusion of the
plant: many charms and legends were considered to be connected with
the tree, and the duration of the family of Hay was said to be
united with its existence. It was believed that a sprig of the
mistletoe cut by a Hay on Allhallowmas eve, with a new dirk, and
after surrounding the tree three times sunwise, and pronouncing a
certain spell, was a sure charm against all glamour or witchery,
and an infallible guard in the day of battle. A spray gathered in
the same manner was placed in the cradle of infants, and thought to
defend them from being changed for elfbairns by the fairies.
Finally, it was affirmed, that when the root of the oak had
perished, ‘the grass should grow in the hearth of Errol, and
a raven should sit in the falcon’s nest.’ The two most
unlucky deeds which could be done by one of the name of Hay was, to
kill a white falcon, and to cut down a limb from the oak of Errol.
When the old tree was destroyed I could never learn. The estate has
been sold out of the family of Hay, and of course it is said that
the fatal oak was cut down a short time before.” The old
superstition is recorded in verses which are traditionally ascribed
to Thomas the Rhymer:
While the mistletoe bats on Errol’s aik,
And that aik stands fast,
The Hays shall flourish, and their good grey hawk
Shall nocht flinch before the blast.
But when the root of the aik decays,
And the mistletoe dwines on its withered breast,
The grass shall grow on Errol’s hearthstane,
And the corbie roup in the falcon’s nest.
It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe.
True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with mistletoe.
But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour
over the humble plant. Or, more probably, his description was based
on a popular superstition that at certain times the mistletoe
blazed out into a supernatural golden glory. The poet tells how two
doves, guiding Aeneas to the gloomy vale in whose depth grew the
Golden Bough, alighted upon a tree, “whence shone a
flickering gleam of gold. As in the woods in winter cold the
mistletoe—a plant not native to its tree—is green with
fresh leaves and twines its yellow berries about the boles; such
seemed upon the shady holm-oak the leafy gold, so rustled in the
gentle breeze the golden leaf.” Here Virgil definitely
describes the Golden Bough as growing on a holm-oak, and compares
it with the mistletoe. The inference is almost inevitable that the
Golden Bough was nothing but the mistletoe seen through the haze of
poetry or of popular superstition.
Now grounds have been shown for believing that the priest of the
Arician grove—the King of the Wood—personified the tree
on which grew the Golden Bough. Hence if that tree was the oak, the
King of the Wood must have been a personification of the oakspirit.
It is, therefore, easy to understand why, before he could be slain,
it was necessary to break the Golden Bough. As an oak-spirit, his
life or death was in the mistletoe on the oak, and so long as the
mistletoe remained intact, he, like Balder, could not die. To slay
him, therefore, it was necessary to break the mistletoe, and
probably, as in the case of Balder, to throw it at him. And to
complete the parallel, it is only necessary to suppose that the
King of the Wood was formerly burned, dead or alive, at the
midsummer fire festival which, as we have seen, was annually
celebrated in the Arician grove. The perpetual fire which burned in
the grove, like the perpetual fire which burned in the temple of
Vesta at Rome and under the oak at Romove, was probably fed with
the sacred oak-wood; and thus it would be in a great fire of oak
that the King of the Wood formerly met his end. At a later time, as
I have suggested, his annual tenure of office was lengthened or
shortened, as the case might be, by the rule which allowed him to
live so long as he could prove his divine right by the strong hand.
But he only escaped the fire to fall by the sword.
Thus it seems that at a remote age in the heart of Italy, beside
the sweet Lake of Nemi, the same fiery tragedy was annually enacted
which Italian merchants and soldiers were afterwards to witness
among their rude kindred, the Celts of Gaul, and which, if the
Roman eagles had ever swooped on Norway, might have been found
repeated with little difference among the barbarous Aryans of the
North. The rite was probably an essential feature in the ancient
Aryan worship of the oak.
It only remains to ask, Why was the mistletoe called the Golden
Bough? The whitish-yellow of the mistletoe berries is hardly enough
to account for the name, for Virgil says that the bough was
altogether golden, stems as well as leaves. Perhaps the name may be
derived from the rich golden yellow which a bough of mistletoe
assumes when it has been cut and kept for some months; the bright
tint is not confined to the leaves, but spreads to the stalks as
well, so that the whole branch appears to be indeed a Golden Bough.
Breton peasants hang up great bunches of mistletoe in front of
their cottages, and in the month of June these bunches are
conspicuous for the bright golden tinge of their foliage. In some
parts of Brittany, especially about Morbihan, branches of mistletoe
are hung over the doors of stables and byres to protect the horses
and cattle, probably against witchcraft.
The yellow colour of the withered bough may partly explain why
the mistletoe has been sometimes supposed to possess the property
of disclosing treasures in the earth; for on the principles of
homoeopathic magic there is a natural affinity between a yellow
bough and yellow gold. This suggestion is confirmed by the analogy
of the marvellous properties popularly ascribed to the mythical
fern-seed, which is popularly supposed to bloom like gold or fire
on Midsummer Eve. Thus in Bohemia it is said that “on St.
John’s Day fern-seed blooms with golden blossoms that gleam
like fire.” Now it is a property of this mythical fern-seed
that whoever has it, or will ascend a mountain holding it in his
hand on Midsummer Eve, will discover a vein of gold or will see the
treasures of the earth shining with a bluish flame. In Russia they
say that if you succeed in catching the wondrous bloom of the fern
at midnight on Midsummer Eve, you have only to throw it up into the
air, and it will fall like a star on the very spot where a treasure
lies hidden. In Brittany treasure-seekers gather fern-seed at
midnight on Midsummer Eve, and keep it till Palm Sunday of the
following year; then they strew the seed on the ground where they
think a treasure is concealed. Tyrolese peasants imagine that
hidden treasures can be seen glowing like flame on Midsummer Eve,
and that fern-seed, gathered at this mystic season, with the usual
precautions, will help to bring the buried gold to the surface. In
the Swiss canton of Freiburg people used to watch beside a fern on
St. John’s night in the hope of winning a treasure, which the
devil himself sometimes brought to them. In Bohemia they say that
he who procures the golden bloom of the fern at this season has
thereby the key to all hidden treasures; and that if maidens will
spread a cloth under the fast-fading bloom, red gold will drop into
it. And in the Tryol and Bohemia if you place fern-seed among
money, the money will never decrease, however much of it you spend.
Sometimes the fern-seed is supposed to bloom on Christmas night,
and whoever catches it will become very rich. In Styria they say
that by gathering fern-seed on Christmas night you can force the
devil to bring you a bag of money.
Thus, on the principle of like by like, fern-seed is supposed to
discover gold because it is itself golden; and for a similar reason
it enriches its possessor with an unfailing supply of gold. But
while the fern-seed is described as golden, it is equally described
as glowing and fiery. Hence, when we consider that two great days
for gathering the fabulous seed are Midsummer Eve and
Christmas—that is, the two solstices (for Christmas is
nothing but an old heathen celebration of the winter
solstice)—we are led to regard the fiery aspect of the
fern-seed as primary, and its golden aspect as secondary and
derivative. Fern-seed, in fact, would seem to be an emanation of
the sun’s fire at the two turning-points of its course, the
summer and winter solstices. This view is confirmed by a German
story in which a hunter is said to have procured fern-seed by
shooting at the sun on Midsummer Day at noon; three drops of blood
fell down, which he caught in a white cloth, and these blood-drops
were the fern-seed. Here the blood is clearly the blood of the sun,
from which the fern-seed is thus directly derived. Thus it may be
taken as probable that fern-seed is golden, because it is believed
to be an emanation of the sun’s golden fire.
Now, like fern-seed, the mistletoe is gathered either at
Midsummer or at Christmas—that is, either at the summer or at
the winter solstice—and, like fern-seed, it is supposed to
possess the power of revealing treasures in the earth. On Midsummer
Eve people in Sweden make divining-rods of mistletoe, or of four
different kinds of wood one of which must be mistletoe. The
treasure-seeker places the rod on the ground after sundown, and
when it rests directly over treasure, the rod begins to move as if
it were alive. Now, if the mistletoe discovers gold, it must be in
its character of the Golden Bough; and if it is gathered at the
solstices, must not the Golden Bough, like the golden fern-seed, be
an emanation of the sun’s fire? The question cannot be
answered with a simple affirmative. We have seen that the old
Aryans perhaps kindled the solstitial and other ceremonial fires in
part as sun-charms, that is, with the intention of supplying the
sun with fresh fire; and as these fires were usually made by the
friction or combustion of oak-wood, it may have appeared to the
ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire
which resided in the sacred oak. In other words, the oak may have
seemed to him the original storehouse or reservoir of the fire
which was from time to time drawn out to feed the sun. But if the
life of the oak was conceived to be in the mistletoe, the mistletoe
must on that view have contained the seed or germ of the fire which
was elicited by friction from the wood of the oak. Thus, instead of
saying that the mistletoe was an emanation of the sun’s fire,
it might be more correct to say that the sun’s fire was
regarded as an emanation of the mistletoe. No wonder, then, that
the mistletoe shone with a golden splendour, and was called the
Golden Bough. Probably, however, like fern-seed, it was thought to
assume its golden aspect only at those stated times, especially
midsummer, when fire was drawn from the oak to light up the sun. At
Pulverbatch, in Shropshire, it was believed within living memory
that the oak-tree blooms on Midsummer Eve and the blossom withers
before daylight. A maiden who wishes to know her lot in marriage
should spread a white cloth under the tree at night, and in the
morning she will find a little dust, which is all that remains of
the flower. She should place the pinch of dust under her pillow,
and then her future husband will appear to her in her dreams. This
fleeting bloom of the oak, if I am right, was probably the
mistletoe in its character of the Golden Bough. The conjecture is
confirmed by the observation that in Wales a real sprig of
mistletoe gathered on Midsummer Eve is similarly placed under the
pillow to induce prophetic dreams; and further the mode of catching
the imaginary bloom of the oak in a white cloth is exactly that
which was employed by the Druids to catch the real mistletoe when
it dropped from the bough of the oak, severed by the golden sickle.
As Shropshire borders on Wales, the belief that the oak blooms on
Midsummer Eve may be Welsh in its immediate origin, though probably
the belief is a fragment of the primitive Aryan creed. In some
parts of Italy, as we saw, peasants still go out on Midsummer
morning to search the oak-trees for the “oil of St.
John,” which, like the mistletoe, heals all wounds, and is,
perhaps, the mistletoe itself in its glorified aspect. Thus it is
easy to understand how a title like the Golden Bough, so little
descriptive of its usual appearance on the tree, should have been
applied to the seemingly insignificant parasite. Further, we can
perhaps see why in antiquity mistletoe was believed to possess the
remarkable property of extinguishing fire, and why in Sweden it is
still kept in houses as a safeguard against conflagration. Its
fiery nature marks it out, on homoeopathic principles, as the best
possible cure or preventive of injury by fire.
These considerations may partially explain why Virgil makes
Aeneas carry a glorified bough of mistletoe with him on his descent
into the gloomy subterranean world. The poet describes how at the
very gates of hell there stretched a vast and gloomy wood, and how
the hero, following the flight of two doves that lured him on,
wandered into the depths of the immemorial forest till he saw afar
off through the shadows of the trees the flickering light of the
Golden Bough illuminating the matted boughs overhead. If the
mistletoe, as a yellow withered bough in the sad autumn woods, was
conceived to contain the seed of fire, what better companion could
a forlorn wanderer in the nether shades take with him than a bough
that would be a lamp to his feet as well as a rod and staff to his
hands? Armed with it he might boldly confront the dreadful spectres
that would cross his path on his adventurous journey. Hence when
Aeneas, emerging from the forest, comes to the banks of Styx,
winding slow with sluggish stream through the infernal marsh, and
the surly ferryman refuses him passage in his boat, he has but to
draw the Golden Bough from his bosom and hold it up, and
straightway the blusterer quails at the sight and meekly receives
the hero into his crazy bark, which sinks deep in the water under
the unusual weight of the living man. Even in recent times, as we
have seen, mistletoe has been deemed a protection against witches
and trolls, and the ancients may well have credited it with the
same magical virtue. And if the parasite can, as some of our
peasants believe, open all locks, why should it not have served as
an “open Sesame” in the hands of Aeneas to unlock the
gates of death?
Now, too, we can conjecture why Virbius at Nemi came to be
confounded with the sun. If Virbius was, as I have tried to show, a
tree-spirit, he must have been the spirit of the oak on which grew
the Golden Bough; for tradition represented him as the first of the
Kings of the Wood. As an oak-spirit he must have been supposed
periodically to rekindle the sun’s fire, and might therefore
easily be confounded with the sun itself. Similarly we can explain
why Balder, an oak-spirit, was described as “so fair of face
and so shining that a light went forth from him,” and why he
should have been so often taken to be the sun. And in general we
may say that in primitive society, when the only known way of
making fire is by the friction of wood, the savage must necessarily
conceive of fire as a property stored away, like sap or juice, in
trees, from which he has laboriously to extract it. The Senal
Indians of California “profess to believe that the whole
world was once a globe of fire, whence that element passed up into
the trees, and now comes out whenever two pieces of wood are rubbed
together.” Similarly the Maidu Indians of California hold
that “the earth was primarily a globe of molten matter, and
from that the principle of fire ascended through the roots into the
trunk and branches of trees, whence the Indians can extract it by
means of their drill.” In Namoluk, one of the Caroline
Islands, they say that the art of making fire was taught men by the
gods. Olofaet, the cunning master of flames, gave fire to the bird
mwi and bade him carry it to earth in his bill. So the
bird flew from tree to tree and stored away the slumbering force of
the fire in the wood, from which men can elicit it by friction. In
the ancient Vedic hymns of India the fire-god Agni “is spoken
of as born in wood, as the embryo of plants, or as distributed in
plants. He is also said to have entered into all plants or to
strive after them. When he is called the embryo of trees or of
trees as well as plants, there may be a side-glance at the fire
produced in forests by the friction of the boughs of
trees.”
A tree which has been struck by lightning is naturally regarded
by the savage as charged with a double or triple portion of fire;
for has he not seen the mighty flash enter into the trunk with his
own eyes? Hence perhaps we may explain some of the many
superstitious beliefs concerning trees that have been struck by
lightning. When the Thompson Indians of British Columbia wished to
set fire to the houses of their enemies, they shot at them arrows
which were either made from a tree that had been struck by
lightning or had splinters of such wood attached to them. Wendish
peasants of Saxony refuse to burn in their stoves the wood of trees
that have been struck by lightning; they say that with such fuel
the house would be burnt down. In like manner the Thonga of South
Africa will not use such wood as fuel nor warm themselves at a fire
which has been kindled with it. On the contrary, when lightning
sets fire to a tree, the Winamwanga of Northern Rhodesia put out
all the fires in the village and plaster the fireplaces afresh,
while the head men convey the lightning-kindled fire to the chief,
who prays over it. The chief then sends out the new fire to all his
villages, and the villagers reward his messengers for the boon.
This shows that they look upon fire kindled by lightning with
reverence, and the reverence is intelligible, for they speak of
thunder and lightning as God himself coming down to earth.
Similarly the Maidu Indians of California believe that a Great Man
created the world and all its inhabitants, and that lightning is
nothing but the Great Man himself descending swiftly out of heaven
and rending the trees with his flaming arms.
It is a plausible theory that the reverence which the ancient
peoples of Europe paid to the oak, and the connexion which they
traced between the tree and their sky-god, were derived from the
much greater frequency with which the oak appears to be struck by
lightning than any other tree of our European forests. This
peculiarity of the tree has seemingly been established by a series
of observations instituted within recent years by scientific
enquirers who have no mythological theory to maintain. However we
may explain it, whether by the easier passage of electricity
through oak-wood than through any other timber, or in some other
way, the fact itself may well have attracted the notice of our rude
forefathers, who dwelt in the vast forests which then covered a
large part of Europe; and they might naturally account for it in
their simple religious way by supposing that the great sky-god,
whom they worshipped and whose awful voice they heard in the roll
of thunder, loved the oak above all the trees of the wood and often
descended into it from the murky cloud in a flash of lightning,
leaving a token of his presence or of his passage in the riven and
blackened trunk and the blasted foliage. Such trees would
thenceforth be encircled by a nimbus of glory as the visible seats
of the thundering sky-god. Certain it is that, like some savages,
both Greeks and Romans identified their great god of the sky and of
the oak with the lightning flash which struck the ground; and they
regularly enclosed such a stricken spot and treated it thereafter
as sacred. It is not rash to suppose that the ancestors of the
Celts and Germans in the forests of Central Europe paid a like
respect for like reasons to a blasted oak.
This explanation of the Aryan reverence for the oak and of the
association of the tree with the great god of the thunder and the
sky, was suggested or implied long ago by Jacob Grimm, and has been
in recent years powerfully reinforced by Mr. W. Warde Fowler. It
appears to be simpler and more probable than the explanation which
I formerly adopted, namely, that the oak was worshipped primarily
for the many benefits which our rude forefathers derived from the
tree, particularly for the fire which they drew by friction from
its wood; and that the connexion of the oak with the sky was an
after-thought based on the belief that the flash of lightning was
nothing but the spark which the sky-god up aloft elicited by
rubbing two pieces of oak-wood against each other, just as his
savage worshipper kindled fire in the forest on earth. On that
theory the god of the thunder and the sky was derived from the
original god of the oak; on the present theory, which I now prefer,
the god of the sky and the thunder was the great original deity of
our Aryan ancestors, and his association with the oak was merely an
inference based on the frequency with which the oak was seen to be
struck by lightning. If the Aryans, as some think, roamed the wide
steppes of Russia or Central Asia with their flocks and herds
before they plunged into the gloom of the European forests, they
may have worshipped the god of the blue or cloudy firmament and the
flashing thunderbolt long before they thought of associating him
with the blasted oaks in their new home.
Perhaps the new theory has the further advantage of throwing
light on the special sanctity ascribed to mistletoe which grows on
an oak. The mere rarity of such a growth on an oak hardly suffices
to explain the extent and the persistence of the superstition. A
hint of its real origin is possibly furnished by the statement of
Pliny that the Druids worshipped the plant because they believed it
to have fallen from heaven and to be a token that the tree on which
it grew was chosen by the god himself. Can they have thought that
the mistletoe dropped on the oak in a flash of lightning? The
conjecture is confirmed by the name thunder-besom which is applied
to mistletoe in the Swiss canton of Aargau, for the epithet clearly
implies a close connexion between the parasite and the thunder;
indeed “thunder-besom” is a popular name in Germany for
any bushy nest-like excrescence growing on a branch, because such a
parasitic growth is actually believed by the ignorant to be a
product of lightning. If there is any truth in this conjecture, the
real reason why the Druids worshipped a mistletoe-bearing oak above
all other trees of the forest was a belief that every such oak had
not only been struck by lightning but bore among its branches a
visible emanation of the celestial fire; so that in cutting the
mistletoe with mystic rites they were securing for themselves all
the magical properties of a thunder-bolt. If that was so, we must
apparently conclude that the mistletoe was deemed an emanation of
the lightning rather than, as I have thus far argued, of the
midsummer sun. Perhaps, indeed, we might combine the two seemingly
divergent views by supposing that in the old Aryan creed the
mistletoe descended from the sun on Midsummer Day in a flash of
lightning. But such a combination is artificial and unsupported, so
far as I know, by any positive evidence. Whether on mythical
principles the two interpretations can really be reconciled with
each other or not, I will not presume to say; but even should they
prove to be discrepant, the inconsistency need not have prevented
our rude forefathers from embracing both of them at the same time
with an equal fervour of conviction; for like the great majority of
mankind the savage is above being hidebound by the trammels of a
pedantic logic. In attempting to track his devious thought through
the jungle of crass ignorance and blind fear, we must always
remember that we are treading enchanted ground, and must beware of
taking for solid realities the cloudy shapes that cross our path or
hover and gibber at us through the gloom. We can never completely
replace ourselves at the standpoint of primitive man, see things
with his eyes, and feel our hearts beat with the emotions that
stirred his. All our theories concerning him and his ways must
therefore fall far short of certainty; the utmost we can aspire to
in such matters is a reasonable degree of probability.
To conclude these enquiries we may say that if Balder was
indeed, as I have conjectured, a personification of a
mistletoe-bearing oak, his death by a blow of the mistletoe might
on the new theory be explained as a death by a stroke of lightning.
So long as the mistletoe, in which the flame of the lightning
smouldered, was suffered to remain among the boughs, so long no
harm could befall the good and kindly god of the oak, who kept his
life stowed away for safety between earth and heaven in the
mysterious parasite; but when once that seat of his life, or of his
death, was torn from the branch and hurled at the trunk, the tree
fell—the god died—smitten by a thunderbolt.
And what we have said of Balder in the oak forests of
Scandinavia may perhaps, with all due diffidence in a question so
obscure and uncertain, be applied to the priest of Diana, the King
of the Wood, at Aricia in the oak forests of Italy. He may have
personated in flesh and blood the great Italian god of the sky,
Jupiter, who had kindly come down from heaven in the lightning
flash to dwell among men in the mistletoe—the
thunder-besom—the Golden Bough—growing on the sacred
oak in the dells of Nemi. If that was so, we need not wonder that
the priest guarded with drawn sword the mystic bough which
contained the god’s life and his own. The goddess whom he
served and married was herself, if I am right, no other than the
Queen of Heaven, the true wife of the sky-god. For she, too, loved
the solitude of the woods and the lonely hills, and sailing
overhead on clear nights in the likeness of the silver moon looked
down with pleasure on her own fair image reflected on the calm, the
burnished surface of the lake, Diana’s Mirror.
LXIX. Farewell to Nemi
WE are at the end of our enquiry, but as often happens in the
search after truth, if we have answered one question, we have
raised many more; if we have followed one track home, we have had
to pass by others that opened off it and led, or seemed to lead, to
far other goals than the sacred grove at Nemi. Some of these paths
we have followed a little way; others, if fortune should be kind,
the writer and the reader may one day pursue together. For the
present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is time to
part. Yet before we do so, we may well ask ourselves whether there
is not some more general conclusion, some lesson, if possible, of
hope and encouragement, to be drawn from the melancholy record of
human error and folly which has engaged our attention in this
book.
If then we consider, on the one hand, the essential similarity
of man’s chief wants everywhere and at all times, and on the
other hand, the wide difference between the means he has adopted to
satisfy them in different ages, we shall perhaps be disposed to
conclude that the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can
trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to
science. In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the
difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes
in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely
count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he
discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order
of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had
believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he
ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts,
and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible
beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those
far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the
acuter minds magic is gradually superseded by religion, which
explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the
will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in
kind, though vastly superior to him in power.
But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be
unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of natural
events is not determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent
variable and irregular, and this assumption is not borne out by
closer observation. On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that
succession the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the
punctual precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the
operations of nature are carried on. Every great advance in
knowledge has extended the sphere of order and correspondingly
restricted the sphere of apparent disorder in the world, till now
we are ready to anticipate that even in regions where chance and
confusion appear still to reign, a fuller knowledge would
everywhere reduce the seeming chaos to cosmos. Thus the keener
minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries
of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of nature as
inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of
magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only been
implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order
of natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables us to
foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly. In
short, religion, regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced
by science.
But while science has this much in common with magic that both
rest on a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things,
readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order
presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis
of science. The difference flows naturally from the different modes
in which the two orders have been reached. For whereas the order on
which magic reckons is merely an extension, by false analogy, of
the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds, the order
laid down by science is derived from patient and exact observation
of the phenomena themselves. The abundance, the solidity, and the
splendour of the results already achieved by science are well
fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of
its method. Here at last, after groping about in the dark for
countless ages, man has hit upon a clue to the labyrinth, a golden
key that opens many locks in the treasury of nature. It is probably
not too much to say that the hope of progress—moral and
intellectual as well as material—in the future is bound up
with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the
way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity.
Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding
that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that
has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We
must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in
common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised
to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we
dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe.
In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but
theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its
predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more
perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of
looking at the phenomena—of registering the shadows on the
screen—of which we in this generation can form no idea. The
advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that
for ever recedes. We need not murmur at the endless pursuit:
Fatti non foste a viver come bruti
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.
Great things will come of that pursuit, though we may not enjoy
them. Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the
future—some great Ulysses of the realms of thought—than
shine on us. The dreams of magic may one day be the waking
realities of science. But a dark shadow lies athwart the far end of
this fair prospect. For however vast the increase of knowledge and
of power which the future may have in store for man, he can
scarcely hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to
be making silently but relentlessly for the destruction of all this
starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck or mote. In the
ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control,
the wayward courses of the winds and clouds, but hardly will his
puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in
its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the
philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes
may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions,
like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that
unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void,
and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked
to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to common
eyes seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.
Without dipping so far into the future, we may illustrate the
course which thought has hitherto run by likening it to a web woven
of three different threads—the black thread of magic, the red
thread of religion, and the white thread of science, if under
science we may include those simple truths, drawn from observation
of nature, of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Could
we then survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should
probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a
patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the
red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric
and you will remark that, while the black and white chequer still
runs through it, there rests on the middle portion of the web,
where religion has entered most deeply into its texture, a dark
crimson stain, which shades off insensibly into a lighter tint as
the white thread of science is woven more and more into the tissue.
To a web thus chequered and stained, thus shot with threads of
diverse hues, but gradually changing colour the farther it is
unrolled, the state of modern thought, with all its divergent aims
and conflicting tendencies, may be compared. Will the great
movement which for centuries has been slowly altering the
complexion of thought be continued in the near future? or will a
reaction set in which may arrest progress and even undo much that
has been done? To keep up our parable, what will be the colour of
the web which the Fates are now weaving on the humming loom of
time? will it be white or red? We cannot tell. A faint glimmering
light illumines the backward portion of the web. Clouds and thick
darkness hide the other end.
Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped
her weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to
Nemi. It is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian
Way up to the Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky aflame with
sunset, its golden glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint
over Rome and touching with a crest of fire the dome of St.
Peter’s. The sight once seen can never be forgotten, but we
turn from it and pursue our way darkling along the mountain side,
till we come to Nemi and look down on the lake in its deep hollow,
now fast disappearing in the evening shadows. The place has changed
but little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in
the sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has
vanished and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over
the Golden Bough. But Nemi’s woods are still green, and as
the sunset fades above them in the west, there comes to us, borne
on the swell of the wind, the sound of the church bells of Aricia
ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they
chime out from the distant town and die lingeringly away across the
wide Campagnan marshes. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Ave
Maria!
Proof read and edited by Frater D.M.T. © Thelemagick.
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