 chapters 23 and 24 of the Golden Bough this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for further information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the Golden Bough by Sir James Fraser chapters 23 chapter 23 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 inquiries 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 worshipers 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 reverting the ills to which flesh is air 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 worshipers 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 sores 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 was spun about the path of the old king the human God who in mashed 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 teams 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 floor 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 stigmatize 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 realize 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 in gratitude to ignore the heap while vaulting 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 about safe 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 inquiry 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 willful 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 i teque wetere's audiendi sunt chapter 24 the killing of the divine king part one 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 believe 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 inquiries 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 kabunian haitzi eibib a god or divine hero of the hotentots died several times and came to life again his graves are generally to be met with in narrow defiles between mountains when the hotentots 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 besides the golden statue of apollo and his tomb bore the inscription here lies Dionysus dead the son of semily 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 diaries 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 thinniss boasted of the mummy of anhurri and heliopolis rejoiced in the possession of that of tumul the high gods of Babylon also though they appeared to their worshipers 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 part two 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 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 worshipers 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 worshipers 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 affect 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 worshipers 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 Chitome 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 worshiped 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 Ergaminese a contemporary of Ptolemy II king of Egypt having received a Greek education which emancipated him from the superstitions of his countrymen Ergaminese 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 sword appear to have prevailed in this part of Africa down to modern times in some tribes of Fazok 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 shillock of the white Nile and in recent years it has been carefully investigated by Dr. C. G. Seligman the reverence which the shillock paid to their king appears to arrive chiefly from the conviction that he is a reincarnation of the spirit of Nyakong the semi-divine hero who founded the dynasty and settled the tribe in their present territory it is a fundamental article of the shillock creed that the spirit of the divine or semi-divine Nyakong is incarnate in the reigning king who is accordingly himself invested to some extent with the character of a divinity but while the shillock 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 vigor 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 shillock 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 Foshoda when this ominous weakness manifested itself the wives reported it to the chiefs who were 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 announced 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 inquiries it appears that not only was the shill look 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 shill look 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 favorite wives and there was no man near to defend him except a few herdsmen whose hut 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 blackish 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 honor with the king not to call the herdsmen for his assistance like nyakong himself their founder each of the shillok kings after death is worshiped 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 nyakong 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 nyakong 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 nyakong the grave shrines of the kings are tended by certain old men and women who correspond to the guardians of the shrines of nyakong they're 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 nyakong 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 successes 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 man 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 hail 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 vigor and has not yet been impaired by the weakness of disease and old age in this connection 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 shill look 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 nyakung 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 shill look correspond very nearly to the theory and practice of the priests of nami 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 vigor 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 worshipers entail a corresponding degeneration on mankind 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 congaria 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're said to be reduced to great extremities hence the rainmaker is a very important personage among them to this day indeed the men in authority whom travelers dubbed chiefs or shakes are in fact the actual or potential rainmakers of the tribe or community each of them is believed to be animated by the spirit of a great rainmaker which has come down to him through a succession of rainmakers and in virtue of this inspiration a successful rainmaker enjoys very great power and is consulted on all important matters yet in spite or rather in virtue of the high honor in which he is held no dinka rainmaker 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 rainmaker 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 rainmaker 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 honorable career of a rainmaker in all the dinka tribes the chore adad dinka told dr seligman that when they have dug the grave for their rainmaker they strangle him in his house the father and paternal uncle of one of dr seligman's informants had both been rainmakers and both had been killed in the most regular and orthodox fashion even if a rainmaker 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 rainmaker 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 rainmaker 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 buñoro 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 around his neck which they draw gradually tighter till he dies if the king of jindiro 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 nijia in their country the town of ghatri 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 jukor king knows that he cannot have very many more years to live and that he is certain of his predecessors fate this however does not seem to frighten candidates the same custom of king killing is said to prevail at kwande and wukari as well as at ghatri in the three house are kingdoms of gobir katsina and daura in northern nigeria as soon as the 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 matiambo is a great king or emperor in the interior of angola one of the inferior kings of the country by name challa go to a portuguese expedition the following account of the manner in which the matiambo comes by his end it has been customary he said for our matiambo's to die either in war or by a violent death and the present matiambo 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 causes 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 anacolo this slaughter being accomplished the matiambo dressed in all his pomp awaits his own death which immediately follows by an officer sent by the powerful neighboring chiefs kanikinja and kanika 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 matiambo they also take possession of all the property belonging to the deceased monarch and his family which they convey to their own residents i then provide for the funeral of the mutilated remains of the late matiambo 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 40 slaves i ransom them together with the merchandise and other property belonging to the deceased which i give up to the new matiambo who has been proclaimed this is what has happened to many matiambo's 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 gray 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 19th 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 the 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 zulus in their choice or election of their kings that he must have neither wrinkles nor gray 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 gray 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 admits to specify the mode in which a gray haired and wrinkled zulu chief used quote to make his exit from this sublunary world end of quote 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 kafa 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 quote 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 honor that he should die and seek another life where he would be made whole for there everything was perfect but the kiteve or 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 recognize 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 successes to follow his example end of quote the king of sofala who dared to survive the loss of his front tooth was thus a bold reformer like Ergamani's 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 Wadi must have no obvious 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 Acoil and many other authorities no king who was afflicted with a personal blemish might reign over Ireland at Tara hence when the great king Kormakmak Art lost one eye by an accident he at once abdicated many days journeyed to the northeast of Abome the old capital of Dahomey lies the kingdom of Aeol the Aeol's 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 parrot's 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 Aeol whom his ministers attempted to remove in the customary manner positively refused to accept the proffered parrot's 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 counselors 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 19th century for a Catholic missionary writing in 1884 speaks of the practice as if it was still in vogue another missionary writing in 1881 thus describes the usage of the egg buzz and the Yoruba's of West Africa quote 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 counselors 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 the Ogbony 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 end of quote the old Prashans 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 heat 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 burnt in front of the holy oak tree and lighting the pile with it burnt himself to death part three 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 vigor of life accordingly they have fixed the 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 12 years thus according to the old traveller in the province of Kila Kare quote there is a Gentile house of prayer in which there is an idol which they hold in great account and every 12 years they celebrate a great feast to it wither 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 12 years to reign from jubilee to jubilee his manner of living is in this wise that is to say when the 12 years are completed on the day of this feast they're assembled together innumerable people and much money is spent in giving food to the Brahmins 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 onto 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 other 12 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 end of quotation the king of Calicut on the Malabar coast bears the title of Samorin or Samori he pretends to be of a higher rank than the Brahmins and to be inferior only to the invisible gods a pretension that was acknowledged by his subjects but which is held as absurd and abominable by the Brahmins by whom he is only treated as a sudra formally the Samorin had to cut his throat in public at the end of a 12 years reign but towards the end of the 17th century the rule had been modified as follows quote 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 12 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 public 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 to the scaffold and very decently cut his own throat in the view of the assembly and his body was a little while after burnt 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 12 years and a tent is pitched for him in a spacious plain and a great feast is celebrated for 10 or 12 days with mirth and jollity guns firing night and day so that 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 thirty or forty thousand of his guards and kill the Samorin in his tent he that kills him succeeds in his empire in anno 1695 one of those jubilees happened and the tent pitched near Penani a seaport of his about 15 leagues to the southward of Calicut there were but three men who 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 15 or 16 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 dispatched 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 chance to come that time along the coast and heard the guns for two or three days and nights successively end of quotation the English traveler 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 19th century they were examined by Mr. W. Logan with a 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 12th year when the planet Jupiter was in retrograde motion in the sign of the crab and it lasted 28 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 12 years which is roughly Jupiter's period of revolution around 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 Tirunavalli temple on the north bank of the Ponani 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 riverbank 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 top most 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 the high tablelands their lower slopes empowered in woods while a far off looms the great chain of the western gats and in the further distance the nilgaries or blue mountains hardly distinguishable from the asia 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 rice fields 40 000 fighting men or more were gathered there to defend the king but if the plane 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 valor and swordsmanship to the world on the last day 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 honor to life it is a singular custom in bangore says an old native historian of india that there is little of hereditary dissent 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 bangore say we are faithful to the throne whoever fills the throne we are obedient and true to it a custom of the same sort formally prevailed in the little kingdom of pasia on the northern coast of sumatra the old portuguese historian de baruch who informs us of it remarks with surprise that no wise man would wish to be king of pasia 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 can drive to maintain his seat peaceably for a single day this however the regicide did not always succeed in doing when found now perished and radia on a voyage to china put in at pasia 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 on the dusty road of death in a single day the people defended the custom which they esteem very laudable and even of divine institution by saying that god would never allow so high and mightier being as a king who reigned as his vice regent on earth to perish by violence and last 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 gun and jamalic 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 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 the 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 native authority on that country that quote in some places all powers both executive and judicial were delegated for a fixed period to natives by the sovereign this institution was styled talaveti parothium 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 end of quote 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 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 on 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 Uppsala 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 ola 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 10 years when he was driven from the throne while the real odin came to his own again his discomforted 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 Uppsala 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 effers 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 formally limited among the spartans to eight years we may naturally ask why was that precise period selected as the measure of the king's reign the reason is probably to be found in those astronomical considerations which determined the early greek calendar the difficulty of reconciling luna with solar time is one of the standing puzzles which has taxed the ingenuity of men who are emerging from barbarism now an octenial cycle is the shortest period at the end of which sun and moon really marked 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 luna 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 the knowledge of the right seasons for propitiating the diaries whose favor 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 around 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 Knossos and 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 they're communed with his divine father Zeus giving him an account of his kingship in the years that were passed 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 connection with the renewal of the king's power for another octenial 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 shot 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 son whom he personated this at all events is suggested by the legend of Talos a bronze man who clutched people to his breast and leapt with them into the fire so that they were roasted alive he is said to have been given by his use 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 son probably he was identical with the Minotaur and stripped of his mythical features was nothing but a bronze image of the son 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 Turrent of Aggregentum 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 the 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 life long yet in theory it would seem to have been merely annual for every year at the festival of Zagmuc 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 Issyria the monarchs of that country were expected to legalize 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 Sakia it began on the 16th day of the month Lois 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 Zorganis 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 occlusion of an oriental despots 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 rites 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 Eyo the rule was boldly set aside by enlightened monarchs and that in Calicut the old custom of killing the king at the end of 12 years was changed into a permission granted to anyone at the end of the 12 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 civilization the sacrifice of an innocent person would be revolting to the public sentiment and accordingly a condemned criminal would be invested with a 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 shill look 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 makahiti 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 makahiti 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 the 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 30 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 here or or 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 hamamaya 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 anyone on the island is to throw it at him during the makahiti 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 moya a province of the ancient kingdom of kongo 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 moya throne and of chapter 24 chapters 25 26 and 27 of the golden bow this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Sheila Morton, Jefferson City, Tennessee the golden bow by Sir James Frazier chapter 25 temporary kings in some places the modified form of the old custom of regicide which appears to have prevailed a 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 Mayak or February the king of Cambodia annually abdicated for three days during this time he performed no active 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 Sdakmyak that is King February the office of temporary king was hereditary in a family distantly connected with the royal house the son succeeding the fathers and the younger brothers the elder brothers just as in the succession to the real sovereignty on a favorable 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 neighboring peoples of Siam, Anem, 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 underfoot 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 bizarre and open shops even the ships and junks which arrive in harbor during the three days are forfeited to him and must be redeemed he goes to a field in the middle of the city whether they bring a gilded plow drawn by galey decked oxen after the plow has been anointed and the oxen rubbed with incense the mock king traces nine furrows with the plow followed by the 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 sewn believing that mixed with the seed rice it will ensure a plentiful crop then the oxen are unyoked and rice, maize, sesame, sego, bananas, sugarcane, 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 fire folotep, 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 more over 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's conducted in procession to an open place opposite the temple of the brahmins where there are a number of poles dressed like upon which the brahmins 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's supported by a wooden frame with a guilt canopy and two brahmins stand one on each side of him the dancing brahmins carry buffalo horns with which they draw water from a large copper cauldron 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 quote to prove the dispositions of the divitas and spirits unquote if he lets his foot down quote he is liable to forfeit his property and have his family enslaved by the king as it is believed to be a bad omen pretending destruction to the state and instability to the throne but if he stand firm he is believed to have gained victory over evil spirits and he has moreover the privilege ostensibly at least of seizing any ship which may enter the harbor during these three days and taking its contents and also of entering any open shop in the town and carrying away what he chooses end quote such were the duties and privileges of the siamese king hop down to about the middle of the 19th 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 brahmins rushing through the air in a swing suspended between two tall masts each some 90 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 to tell of the invasion of the east by the ideas and civilization 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 tattered malian band of the old style in gaudy garb of vermilion and yellow bangs and toodles 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 march through georgia on the first day of the sixth month which was regarded as the beginning of the year the king and people of samarkand used to put on new clothes and cut their hair and beards then they're 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 hid 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 10th day 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 fools 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 fella 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 muhammadan 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 to 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 holders freed from taxes thence forward and he has the right of asking a favor from the real sultan that favor 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 quote sultan of the scribes and quote nominally last three weeks but when six days of the last week have passed the mock sultan runs back to the town by night this temporary sultan ship always falls in spring about the beginning of april its origin is said to have been as follows when mulai rashid the second 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 affect their purpose they resorted to an ingenious stratagem 40 of them cause 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 40 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 device to explain an old custom of which the real meaning in origin had been forgotten a custom of annually appointing a mock king for a single day was observed at lost with you in cornwall down to the 16th century on little easter sunday the freeholders of the town and manner 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 scepter in his hand and a sword born 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 style 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 rights due to the estates of a prince the ceremony ended with a dinner and every man returned home sometimes the temporary king occupies the throne not annually but once for all at the beginning of each train 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 belasper it seems to be the custom after the death of a rajah for a brahmin 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 brahmin receives presence and is dismissed from the territory being forbidden apparently to return quote the idea seems to be that the spirit of the rajah enters into the brahmin who eats the cure rice and milk out of his hand when he is dead as the brahmin is apparently carefully watched during the whole year and not allowed to go away end quote the same or a similar custom is believed to obtain among the hill states of kongra the custom of banishing the brahmin who represents the king may be a substitute for putting him to death at the installation of a prince of karinthia 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 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 60 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 symees 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 syam gained a victory over the evil spirits whereas by letting it down he imperiled the existence of the state again the cambodian ceremony of trampling down the mountain of rice and the symees ceremony of opening the plowing 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 symees representative of the king is guiding the plow 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 silk and 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 halfway down the calf of his leg so closely is the course of nature and with it the wheel 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 wise ganthos 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 wise ganthos 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 homeopathic 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 practiced 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 usofi 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 re-ascended his throne in a most propitious hour was promised by his astrologers a long and glorious reign end of chapter 25 the golden bow by sir james frazier chapter 26 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 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 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 syam 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 a flattice 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 on or on king of sweden sacrificed nine of his sons to odin at upsalah 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 upsalah 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 matching through thesely 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 lefistian 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 athemas carried a wife nifeli and had by her a son called frixus and a daughter named hella afterward he took himself a second wife called eno by whom he had two sons liarkas and melisertis but his second wife was jealous of her stepchildren frixus and hella 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 inquire 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 athemas by his first wife had been sacrificed to zeus when athemas 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 frixus was brought safe to the land of colchis where reigned a child of the son frixus married the king's daughter and she bore him a son citisaurus 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 lefistian zeus the golden fleece itself he gave to his wife's father who knelt it to an oak tree guarded by a sleepless dragon in a sacred grove of aries meanwhile at home an oracle had commanded that king athemas 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 citisaurus who arrived in the nick of time from colchis or by hercules who brought tidings that the king's son frixus was yet alive thus athemas was saved but afterward he went mad and mistaking his son liarkis for a wild beast shot him dead next he attempted the life of his remaining son melisertis but the child was rescued by his mother eno 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 tennidos where babes were sacrificed to him thus bereft of wife and children the unhappy athemas quitted his country and on inquiring 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 athemas had not been sacrificed as a sin offering for the whole country it was divinely decreed that the eldest melsion 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 lafistian Zeus by one of the house of athemas 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 Lysius and by the descendants of athemas the suspicion that this barburs custom by no means fell into disuse even in latter days is strengthened by a case of human sacrifice which occurred in Plutarch's time at Orca Menus a very ancient city of Biosia distant only a few miles across the plain from the historian's birthplace here dwelled a family of which the men went by the name of Solius or sooty and the women by the name of Olia 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 Minas the famous old king of Orca Menus 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 Orca Menus 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 distep in the loom while the rest wreathed with flowers the disheveled locks streaming to the wind roamed in ecstasy the barren mountains that rise above Orca Menus 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 Lucipa and she surrendered her son Hipposus who was torn limb from limb by the three from these misguided women spring the Olia and the Solius of whom the men were said to be called because they wore sad colored raiment in token of their mourning and grief now this practice of taking human victims from a family of royal descent at Orca Menus is all the more significant because Athomas himself is said to have reigned in the land of Orca Menus even before the time of Menus and because over against the city there rises Mount Lephistius on which as at Alice in Thessaly there was a sanctuary of Lephistine Zeus where according to tradition Athomas proposed to sacrifice his two children Frixus and Hela on the whole comparing the traditions about Athomas with the custom that obtained with regard to his descendants in historical times we may fairly infer that in Thessaly and probably in Biosia 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 Lephistian 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 Lephistian Zeus by one of his kinsmen but if he were rash enough to enter the place of doom to thrust himself willfully 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 inculmency of the one or the failure of the other. Athimus 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 solemn neus the brother of Athimus 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 practiced 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 biblis 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 jayud for in the Phoenician tongue jayud 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 end of chapter twenty six the golden bow by sir james frazier chapter twenty seven succession to the soul to the view that in early times and among barbarous races kings have frequently been put to death at the hand 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 kinship 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 fulfill 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 combered with babies on the march they recruited their numbers by adopting boys and girls of 13 or 14 years of age whose parents they had killed and eaten among the Mabaya 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 Mabaya nation who had been for many years the most formidable enemies of the Spaniards among the Lengua Indians of the Grand Chaco the missionaries discovered what they described as quote a carefully planned system of racial suicide by the practice of infanticide by abortion and other methods end quote nor is infanticide the only mode in which a savage tribe commits suicide a lavish use of the poison or deal may be equally effective some time ago a small tribe named Uit came down from the hill country and settled on the left branch of the Halabar 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 civilization 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 pre possession 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 shuluk 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 imminent in every one of his slain successors but if this is the only actual example of such a belief which I can induce 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 trans migrate 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 neos the oldest 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 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 this last breath is chief equally with the appointed successor hence the other brothers and sometimes also strangers crowd around the dying man to catch his soul as it passes the house is in neos a 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 celibus the regalia often consists of corporeal portions of deceased rajas which are treasured as sacred relics and confer the right to the throne similarly among the saculavas 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 alaka or king of abakuta 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 honors 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 abakuta 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 quote he has eaten the king end quote a custom of the same sort is still practiced at ibadun a large town in the interior of lago swast africa when the king dies his head is cut off and sent to his nominal suzerain the alefin of oil 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 ibadun 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 shaluk of the white Nile who regularly killed 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 end of chapter twenty seven