 Chapter 11 and 12 of the Golden Bau, 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 Monsbruh Ruslachs, Finland. The Golden Bau by Sir James Frazier, Chapter 11. The influence of the sexes on vegetation. From the preceding examination of the spring and summer festivals of Europe, we may infer that our rude forefathers personified the powers of vegetation as male and female, and attempted, on the principle of homeopathic or imitative magic, to quicken the growth of trees and plants by representing the marriage of the Sylvan deities in the persons of a king and queen of May, a wits and bridegroom and a bride, and so forth. Such representations were accordingly no mere symbolic or allegorical dramas pastoral plays designed to amuse or instruct the rustic audience. They were charms intended to make the woods to grow green, the fresh grass to sprout, the corn to shoot, and flowers to blow. And it was natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the leaf clad of flower-decked mummers aped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective would be the charm. Accordingly, we may assume with a high degree of probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess, but an essential part of the rites, and that in the opinion of those who performed them, the marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of the human sexes. At the present day it may perhaps be vain to look in civilised Europe for customs of this sort observed for the explicit purpose of promoting the growth of vegetation. But the rudor races in other parts of the world have consciously employed the intercourse of the sexes as a means to ensure the fruitfulness of the earth. And some rites which are still, or were till lately, kept up in Europe can be reasonably explained only as standard relics of a similar practice. The following facts will make this plain. Four days before they committed the seed to the earth, the pea piles of Central America kept apart from their wives in order that on the night before planting they might indulge their passions to the fullest extent. Certain persons are even said to have been appointed to form the sexual act at the very moment when the first seeds were deposited in the ground. The use of their wives at that time was indeed enjoined upon the people by the priests as a religious duty, in default of which it was not lawful to sow the seed. The only possible explanation of this custom seems to be that the Indians confused the process by which human beaks reproduce their kind with the process by which plants discharge the same function and fancied that by resorting to the former they were simultaneously forwarding the latter. In some parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be under rise, the husband man and his wife visit their fields by night and they are engaged in sexual intercourse for the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop. In the Leti, Sarmata and some other groups of islands which lie between the western end of New Guinea and the northern part of Australia, the heathen population regard the sun as the male principle by whom the earth or female principle is fertilized. They call him Upulera or Mr. Sun, and present him under the form of a lamp made of coconut leaves which may be seen hanging everywhere in their houses and in the sacred fig tree. Under the tree is a large flat stone which serves as a sacrificial table. On it the heads of slain foes wear and are still placed in some of the islands. Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy season, Mr. Sun comes down into the holy fig tree to fertilize the earth and to facilitate his descent a ladder with seven rungs is considerably placed at his disposal. It is set up under the tree and is adorned with carved figures of the birds whose shrill clarion heralds the approach of the sun in the east. On this occasion pigs and dogs are sacrificed in profusion, men and women alike indulged in a Saturnalia and the mystic union of the sun and the earth is dramatically represented in public amid song and dance by the real union of the sexes under the tree. The object of the festival, we are told, is to procure rain, plenty of food and drink, abundance of cattle and children and riches from Grandfather Sun. They pray that he may make every shego to cast two or three young, the people to multiply, the dead pigs to be replaced by living pigs, the empty rice baskets to be filled, and so on. And to indulge him to grant their requests they offer him pork and rice and liquor and invite him to fall too. In the Babar Islands a special flag is hoisted at this festival as a symbol of the creative energy of the sun. It is a white cotton about nine feet high and consists of a figure of a man in an appropriate attitude. It would be unjust to treat these orgies as a mere outburst of unbridled passion. No doubt they are deliberately and solemnly organised as essential to the fertility of the earth and the will for a man. The same means which are thus adopted to stimulate the growth of the crops are naturally employed to ensure the fruitfulness of trees. In some parts of Amboina, when the state of the clove plantation indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men go naked to the plantations by night and their seek to fertilise the trees precisely as they would impregnate women while at the same time they call out for more clothes. This is supposed to make the trees bear fruit more abundantly. The Baganda of Central Africa believes so strongly in the intimate relation between the intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of the ground that among them a barren wife is generally sent away because she is supposed to prevent her husband's garden from bearing fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with the corresponding power of increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain trees, which furnish them with their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the twins, a ceremony is performed, the object of which clearly is the transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to the plantains. The mother lies down on her back in the thick grass near the house and places a flower of the plantain between her legs. Then her husband comes and knocks the flower away with his genital member. Further, the parents go through the country performing dances in the gardens of favourite friends, apparently for the purpose of causing the plantain trees to bear fruit more abundantly. In various parts of Europe, customs have prevailed both at spring and harvest, which are clearly based on the same crude notion that the relation of the human sexes to each other can be used to quicken the growth of plants. For example, in the Ukraine on St. George's Day, that 23rd of April, the priest in his robes, attended by his acolytes, goes out to the fields at the village where the crops are beginning to show green above the ground and blesses them. After that the young married people lie down in couples on their own fields and roll several times over them in the belief that this will promote the growth of the crops. In some parts of Russia the priest himself is rolled by women over the sprouting crop, and that without regard to the mud and holes which he may encounter in his beneficent progress. If the shepherd resists or demonstrates his flock murmurs, little father, you do not really wish us well, you do not wish us to have corn, although you do wish to live on our corn. In some parts of Germany at harvest the men and women keep the corn, rolled together on the field. This again is probably a mitigation of an older and ruder custom designed to impart fertility to the fields by methods like those resorted to by the pepiles of Central America long ago and by the cultivators of rice in Java at the present time. To the student who cares to track the devious course of the human mind in its gropings of the truth, it is of some interest to observe that the same theoretical belief in the sympathetic influence of the sexes and vegetation, which has led some people to indulge their passions as a means of fertilizing the earth, has led others to seek the same end by directly opposite means. From the moment that they sowed the mice till the time that they reaped it, the Indians of Nicaragua lived chastely, keeping apart from their wives and sleeping in a separate place. They ate no salt and drank neither cocoa nor chicha, the fermented liquor made from mice. In short, the season was for them, as the Spanish historian observes, a time of abstinence. To this day, some of the Indian tribes of Central America practice continence for the purpose of thereby promoting the growth of the crops. Thus, we are told that before the sowing the mice, the Kikchi Indians sleep apart on their wives and eat no flesh for five days. While among the Languineros and Cajaboneros, the period of abstinence from these carnal pleasures extends to 13 days. So, amongst some of the Germans of Transylvania, it is a rule that no man may sleep with his wife during the whole of the time that he is engaged in sowing his fields. The same rule is observed at Kalotatzeg in Hungary, that people think that if the custom were not observed, the corn would be mildewed. Similarly, a central Australian headman of the Kaitish tribe strictly obtains from marital relations with his wife all the time that he is performing magical ceremonies to make the grass grow, for he believes that the breach of this rule would prevent the grass seed from sprouting properly. In some of the Balinese islands, when the yam vines are being trained, the men sleep near the gardens and never approach their wives. Should they enter the garden after breaking this rule of continence, the fruits of the garden would be spoiled. If we ask why it is that similar beliefs should logically lead among different peoples to such opposite modes of conduct as strict chastity and more or less open debauchery, the reason, as it prevents itself to the primitive mind, is perhaps not very far to seek, if rude man identifies himself in a manner with nature, if he fails to distinguish the impulses and processes in himself from the methods which nature adopts to ensure the reproduction of plants and animals, he may leap to one of two conclusions. Either he may infer that by yielding to his appetites he will thereby assist in the multiplication of plants and animals, or he may imagine that the vigor which he refuses to expend in reproducing his own kind will form as it were a store of energy whereby other creatures, whether vegetable or animal, will somehow benefit in propagating their species. Thus, from the same crude philosophy, the same primitive notions of nature and life, the savage may derive by different channels a rule either of progliphacy or of asceticism. To readers spread in the region which is saturated with the ascetic idealism of the East, the explanation which I have given of the rule of continence observed under certain circumstances by rude or savage peoples may seem far-fetched and improbable. They may think that moral purity, which is so intimately associated in their minds with the observance of such a rule, furnishes a sufficient explanation of it. They may hold with Milton that chastity in itself is an noble virtue, and that the restraint which it imposes on one of the strongest impulses of our animal nature marks out those who can submit to it as men raised above the common herd and therefore worthy to receive the seal of the divine approbation. However natural this mode of thought may seem to us, utterly foreign and indeed incomprehensible to this savage. If he resists on occasion the sexual instinct, it is from no high idealism, no ethereal aspiration of the moral purity, but for the sake of some ulterior, yet perfectly definite and concrete object to gain which he is prepared to sacrifice the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is, or may be so, the examples I have cited are amply sufficient to prove. They show that where the instinct of self-preservation, which manifests itself chiefly in the search of food, conflicts or appears to conflict with the instinct which conduces to the propagation of the species, the former instinct, as the primary and more fundamental is capable of overmastering the latter. In short, the savages willing to restrain his sexual propensity for the sake of food. Another object for the sake of which he consents to exercise the same self-restraint is victory in war. Not only the warrior in the field, but his friends at home will often bridle their central appetites from a belief that by so doing they will more easily overcome their enemies. The fallacy of such a belief, like the belief that the chastity of the sower conduces to the growth of the seed, is plain enough to us, yet perhaps the self-restraint, which these and the like beliefs, vain and false as they are, have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility to sustain the breed. For strength of character in the race, as in the individual, consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future. Of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasures for the more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised, the higher and stronger becomes the character. Till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life, and even life itself for the sake of others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth. End of chapter 11 Chapter 12 The Sacred Marriage 1. Diana as a goddess of fertility We have seen that according to a widespread belief, which is not without a foundation, in fact, plants reproduce their kinds through the sexual union of male and female elements, and that with the principle of homeopathic or imitative magic, this reproduction is supposed to be stimulated by the real or mock marriage of men and women who masquerade for the time being a spirit of meditation. Such magical dramas have placed great part in the popular festivals of Europe, and based as they are on a very crude conception of natural law, it is clear that they must have been handed down from remote antiquity, which will hardly therefore err in assuming that they date from a time when the forefathers of the civilized nations of Europe were still barbarians, herding their cattle and cultivating patches of corn in the clearings of the vast forests, which then covered the greater part of the continent. From the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean, but if these old spells and enchantments for the growth of leaves and blossoms, of grass and flowers and fruit, have lingered down to our time in the shape of pastoral place in popular merry-makings, is it not reasonable to suppose that they survived in less attenuated forms some two thousand years ago among the civilized people of antiquity? Or, to put it otherwise, is it not likely that in certain festivals of the ancients we may be able to detect the equivalents of our May Day, with Suntide and Midsummer celebrations, with this difference that in those days the ceremonies had not yet dwindled into mere shows and pageants, but were still religious or magical rites in which the actors consciously supported the high parts of gods and goddesses. Now, in the first chapter of this book, we found reason to believe that the priest who bore the title of King of the Woods at Nemi had for his mate the goddess of the grove, Diana herself. May not he and she, as king and queen of the wood, have been serious counterparts of the merry-mumbers who played the king and queen of May, the with Suntide bride-groom and bride in Mother New-Europe, and may not their union have been related in a theogami or divine marriage, such dramatic weddings of gods and goddesses, as we shall see presently, were carried out as solemn religious rites in many parts of the ancient world. Hence, there is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the sacred grove at Nemi may have been the scene of an annual ceremony of this sort. Direct evidence that it was so, there is none, but analogy pleads in favour of the view, as I shall now endeavor to show. Diana was essentially a goddess of the woodlands, as serious was a goddess of the corn and bakus a god of the vine. Her sanctuaries were commonly in groves, indeed, every grove was sacred to her, and she is often associated with the forest called sylvanus in dedications. But whatever her origin may have been, Diana was not always a mere goddess of trees. Like her Greek sister Artemis, it appears to have developed into a personification of the teeming life of nature, both animal and vegetable. As mistress of the greenwood she would naturally be thought to own the beasts, while the wild-lord tame that ranged through it, looking for their prey in its gloomy depths, munching the fresh leaves and shoots among the boughs, or cropping the herbage in the open glades and tells. Thus she might come to be the patron goddess of both hunters and herdsmen, just as sylvanus was the god not only of woods, but of cattle. Similarly in Finland, the wild beasts of the forest were regarded as the herds of the woodland god Tapio, and of his stately and beautiful wife. No man might slay one of these animals without the gracious permission of their divine owners. Hence the hunters prayed to the sylvan deities and vowed rich offerings to them if they would drive the game across his path, and cattle also seemed to have enjoyed the protection of those spirits of the woods both when they were in their stalls and while they strayed in the forest. Before the gaios of Sumatra hunt deer, wild goats or wild pigs with hounds in the woods, they deem it necessary to obtain the leave of the unseen lord of the forest. This is done according to a prescribed form by a man who has special skill in woodcraft. He lays down a quid of beetle before a stake which is cut in a particular way to represent the lord of the wood. And having done so, he prays for the spirit to signify his consent or refusal. In his treatise on hunting Arrian tells us that the Celts used to offer an annual sacrifice to Artemis on her birthday, purchasing the sacrificial victim of the fines they had paid into her treasury for every fox hair and roe that they killed in the course of the year. The custom clearly implied that the wild beasts belonged to the goddess and that she must be compensated for their slaughter. But Diana was not merely a patroness of wild beasts, a mistress of woods and hills, of lonely glades and sounding rivers, conceived as the moon, and especially it would seem, as the yellow harvest moon she filled the farmers' grains with godly fruits, and heard the prayers of women in travail. In her sacred grove at Nemi, as we have seen, she was especially worshiped as a goddess of childbirth and a third offspring on men and women. Thus Diana, like the Greek Artemis, with whom she was constantly identified, maybe described as a goddess of nature in general and of fertility in particular. We need not wonder therefore that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis with all its crowned emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law attributed to King Tullus Hostelus. Prescribe that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For you know that the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a dearth. Hence it would be meat that atonement for the offense should be made to the goddess of fertility. Now the principle that the goddess of fertility must herself be fertile, it behooped Diana to have a male partner. Her mate, if the testimony of Syravius may be trusted, was that Virbius who had his representative or perhaps rather his embodiment in the king of the wood at Nimi. The aim of their union would be to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of animals and of mankind and it might naturally be thought that this object would be more surely attained if the sacred and uptiles were celebrated every year. The parts of divine bride and bridegroom are being played either by their images or by living persons. No ancient writer mentions that this was done in the grove at Nimi, but our knowledge of diaritian ritual is so scanty that the warmth of information on this head can hardly count as a fatal objection to the theory. That theory in the absence of direct evidence must necessarily be based on the analogy of similar customs practiced elsewhere. Some modern examples of such customs more or less degenerate were described in the last chapter. Here we shall consider their ancient counterparts. 2. The Marriage of the Gods At Babylon the imposing sanctuary of Baal rose like a pyramid above the city in a series of eight towers or stories planted one on the top of the other. On the highest tower reached by an ascent which wound about all the rest thus to the spacious temple and in the temple of great bed magnificently draped and cushioned with a golden table beside it. In that temple no image was to be seen and no human being passed the night there save a single woman whom according to the Kaldian priests the god chose from among all the women of Babylon. They said that the deity himself came into the temple at night and slept in the great bed and the concert of the god might have no intercourse with mortal men. At Thebes in Egypt a woman slept in the temple of Ammon as the concert of the god and like the human wife of Baal at Babylon she was said to have no commerce with a man. In Egyptian texts she is often mentioned as the divine concert and usually she was no lesser personage than the queen of Egypt herself for according to the Egyptians their monarch was actually forgotten by the god Ammon who assumed for the time being the form of the reigning king and in that disguise had intercourse with the queen. The divine procreation is carved and painted in great detail on the walls of two of the oldest temples in Egypt, those of Deir al-Bahari and Luxor and the inscriptions attached to the paintings leave no doubt as to the meaning of the scenes. At Athens the god of the vine Dionysus was annually married to the queen it appears that the consummation of the divine union as well as their esposals was enacted at the ceremony but whether the part of the god was played by a man or an image we do not know we learned from Aristotle that the ceremony took place in an old official residence of the king known as the cattle stall which stood near the Britaneum or town hall on the northeastern slope of the acropolis the object of the marriage can hardly have been any other than that of ensuring the fertility of the vines and other tree fruits of which Dionysus was the king thus both in form and meaning the ceremony would answer to the nobtiles of the king and queen of May In the great mystery Solomonized at Elyseus in the month of September the union with the sky god Zeus with the corn goddess Demeter appears to have been represented by the union of the hero font with the priestess of Demeter who acted the parts of god and goddess but there intercourse was only a static or symbolical for the hero font had temporarily deprived himself of his virility by an application of hemlock the torches having been extinguished the pair descended into a murky place while the throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic congress on which they believe their own salivation to depend after a time the hero font reappeared and in a blaze of light silently exhibited to the assembly after the divine marriage then in a loud voice he proclaimed Queen Brimo has brought forth the sacred boy Brimos by which he meant the mighty one has brought form the mighty the corn mother in fact had given birth to her child the corn and her travail pangs were enacted in the sacred drama this revelation of the reap and the corn appears to have been the crowning act of the mysteries thus through the glamour shed around these rites by the poetry and philosophy of later ages there still looms like a distant landscape through a sunlight haze a symbol rustic festival designed to cover the wild Yulusenian plain with a plentious harvest by wedding the goddess of the corn to the sky god who fertilized the bear earth with genial showers every few years the people of Plataea in Biotia held a festival called the Little Diadella in which they fell the oak tree in an ancient oak forest out of the tree they carved an image and having dressed it as a bride they set it on a block cart with the bridesmaid beside it the image seems then to have been drawn to the bank of the river Asopus and back to the town attended by a piping and dancing crown every 60 years the festival of the great Diadella was celebrated by all the people of Biotia and at it all the images both in a number which had accumulated at the lesser festivals were dragged on wanes in procession to the river Asopus and then to the top of Mount Keteron where they were burned on a great pyre the story told to explain the festivals suggests that they celebrated the marriage of Zeus to Hera represented by the oaken image in bridal array in Sweden every year a life-size image of free the god of fertility was drawn about the country in a wagon attended by a beautiful girl who was called the god's wife she acted also as his priestess in his great temple at Uppsala wherever the wagon came with the image of the god and his blooming young bride people crowded to meet them and offered sacrifices for a fruitful year thus the custom of marrying gods either to images or to human beings was widespread among the nations of antiquity the ideas on which such a custom is based are too crude to allow us to doubt that the civilized Babylonians Egyptians and Greeks inherited it from their barbarians or savage forefathers this presumption is strengthened when we find rites of similar kind in vogue among the lower races thus for example we are told that once upon a time the Votiax of the Malmyz district in Russia were distressed by a series of bad harvests they did not know what to do but their last concluded that the powerful but mischievous god Kimirit must be angry at being unmarried so a reputation of elders visited the Votiax of Kura and came to an understanding with them on the subject then they returned home laid in a large stock of brandy and having made ready a gaily decked wagon and horses they drove in procession with bells ringing as they do when they are fetching home a bride to the sacred grove at Kura there they ate and drank merrily all night and next morning they cut a square piece of turf in the grove and took it home with them after that though it fared well with the people of Malmyz it fared ill with the people of Kura for in Malmyz the bread was good but in Kura it was bad hence the men of Kura who had consented to the marriage were blamed and roughly handled by their indignant fellow villagers what they means by this marriage ceremony as the writer reports it is not easy to imagine perhaps as Pechtera thinks they meant to marry Kemaret to the kindly and fruitful Mukulitin the earthwife in order that she may influence him for good when well served again Bengal a wooden image of a god is made and married to the goddess of water often the bride destined for the god is not a log or a clod but a living woman of flesh and blood the Indians of a village in Peru have been known to marry a beautiful girl about 14 years of age to a stone shaped like human being which they regarded as a god Huaca all the villagers took part in the marriage ceremony which lasted three days and was attended with much revelry the girl thereafter remained a virgin and sacrificed to the idol for the people they showed her the utmost reverence and deemed her divine every year about the middle of March when the season for fishing with the dragnet began the Algonquins and Hurons married their nets to two young girls aged 6 or 7 at the wedding feast the net was placed between the two maidens and was exhorted to take courage and catch many fish the reason for choosing the bride so young was to make sure that they were virgins the origin of the custom is said to have been this one year when the fishing season came around the Algonquins cast their nets as usual but took nothing surprised that they weren't of success they did not know what to make of it till the soul or genius orky or the net appeared to them in the likeness of a tall well built man who said to them in great passion I have lost my wife and I cannot find one who is no other man but me that is why you do not succeed and why you never will succeed till you give me satisfaction on this head so the Algonquins held a council and dissolved to appease the spirit of the net by marrying him to two such very young girls that he could have no ground of complaint on that score for the future and they did so and the fishing turned out all that could be wished the thing got wind among their neighbours the Hurons and they adopted the custom a share of the catch was always given to the families of the two girls who acted as brides of the net for the year the Hurons of Bengal worshipped the earth as a goddess and annually celebrate her marriage with the sun god Dharm at the time when the shawl tree is in blossom the ceremony is as follows all bathed then the men repair to the sacred grove Sharna while the women assemble at the house of the village priest after sacrificing some falls to the sun god and the demon of the grove the men eat and drink the priest is then carried back to the village on the shoulders of a strong man near the village the women meet the men and wash their feet with beating of drums and singing dancing and jumping all proceed to the priest's house which has been decorated with leaves and flowers then the usual form of marriage is performed between the priest and his wife symbolizing the supposed union between sun and earth after the ceremony all eat and drink and make merry they dance and sing obscene songs and finally indulge in the wildest orgies the object is to move the mother earth and become fruitful thus the sacred marriage of the sun and earth personated by the priest and his wife is celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility of the ground and for the same purpose on the principle of homeopathic magic the people indulge in licentious orgy it deserves to be remarked that the supernatural being to whom women are married is often a god or spirit of water thus Mukasa the god of the victoria niansa lake was propitiated by the baganda every time they undertook a long voyage had virgins provided for him to service his wives like the vestals they were bound to chastity but unlike the vestals they seem to have been often unfaithful the custom lasted until muwanga was converted to christianity the akikuyu of british east africa worshiped the snake of a certain river and at intervals of several years they married the snake god to women especially the young girls for this purpose huts are built by order of the medicine men who there consummate the sacred marriage with the credulous female devotees if the girls do not repair to the huts of their own accord in sufficient numbers they are ceased and dragged thither to the embraces of the deity the offspring of these mystic unions appear to be fathered on god certainly there are children among the akikuyu who pass for children of god it is said that once when the inhabitants of kaili in buru an east indian island were threatened with destruction by a swarm of crocodiles they ascribe the misfortune to a passion which the prince of the crocodiles had conceived for a certain girl accordingly they compelled the damsel's father to dress her in bridal array and deliver her over to the clutches of her crocodile lover a usage of the same sort is reported to have prevailed al-div islands before the conversions of the inhabitants to Islam the famous Arab traveler ibn batuta has described the custom and the manner in which it came to an end he was assured by several trustworthy natives whose name sigives that when the people of the islands were idolaters there appeared to them every month an evil spirit among the jinn who came from across the sea in the likeness of a ship full of burning lamps the want of the inhabitants as soon as they perceived him was to take a young virgin and having adorned her to lead her to a heathen temple that stood on the shore with a window looking out to the sea there they left the damsel for the night and when they came back in the morning they found her a maid no more and dead every month they drew lots and he whom upon the lot fell gave up his daughter to the jinny of the sea the last of the maidens that offered the demon was rescued by a pious berber who by reciting the Quran succeeded in driving the jinny back into the sea even Batuta's narrative of the demon lover and his mortal brides closely resemble a well known type of folktale of which versions have been found from Japan and Annam in the east to Senigambia, Scandinavia and Scotland in the west the story varies in detail from people to people but as commonly told it runs thus a certain country is infested by many-headed serpent dragon or other monster which would destroy the whole people if a human victim, generally a virgin were not delivered up to him periodically many victims have perished and at last it has fallen to the lot of the king's own daughter to be sacrificed she is exposed to the monster but the hero of the tale generally a young man of humble birth interposes on her behalf slays the monster and receives the hand of the princess as his reward in many of these tales the monster who is sometimes described as a serpent inhabits the water of the sea a lake or a fountain in other versions he is a serpent or dragon who takes possession of the springs of water and only allows the water to flow over the people to make use of it on condition of receiving a human victim it would probably be a mistake to dismiss all these tales as pure inventions of the storyteller rather we may suppose that they reflect a real custom of sacrificing girls or women to be the wives of water spirits who are very often conceived as great serpents or dragons End of Chapter 12 Recording by Monsbruhe Rue Slux Finland Chapters 13 and 14 of The Golden Bow 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 Bow by Sir James Fraser Chapter 13 The Kings of Rome and Alba 1. Numa and Agelia From the forgoing survey of custom and legend we may infer that the sacred marriage of the powers of vegetation and of water has been celebrated by many peoples for the sake of promoting the fertility of the earth on which the life of animals and men ultimately depends and that in such rites the part of the divine bridegroom or bride is often sustained by a man or woman The evidence may therefore lend some countenance to the conjecture that in the sacred grove at Nami where the powers of vegetation and of water manifested themselves in the fair forms of shady woods tumbling cascades and glassy lake a marriage like that of our king and queen of May was annually celebrated between the mortal king of the wood and the immortal queen of the wood Diana In this connection an important figure in the grove was the water nymph Agelia who was worshipped by pregnant women because she, like Diana could grant them an easy delivery From this it seems fairly safe to conclude that like many other springs the water of Agelia was credited with the power of facilitating conception as well as delivery The votive offerings found on the spot which clearly refer to the begetting of children may possibly have been dedicated to Agelia rather than to Diana or perhaps we should rather say that the water nymph Agelia is only another form of the great nature goddess Diana herself The mistress of sounding rivers as well as of umbrageous woods who had her home by the lake and her mirror in its calm waters and whose Greek counterpart Artemis loved to haunt mirrors and springs The identification of Agelia with Diana is confirmed by a statement of Plutarch that Agelia was one of the oak nymphs whom the Romans believed to preside over every green oak grove For while Diana was a goddess of the woodlands in general she appears to have been intimately associated with oaks in particular, especially at her sacred grove of Namie Perhaps then Agelia was the fairy of a spring that flowed from the roots of a sacred oak such a spring is said to have gushed from the foot of the great oak at Dodona and from its murmurous flow the priestess drew oracles Among the Greeks a draught of water from certain sacred springs or wells was supposed to confer prophetic powers This would explain the more-than-mortal wisdom with which, according to tradition Agelia inspired her royal husband or lover Numa When we remember how very often in early society the king is held responsible for the fall of rain and the fruitfulness of the earth it seems hardly rash to conjecture that in the legend of the nuptials of Numa and Agelia we have a reminiscence of a sacred marriage which the old Roman kings regularly contracted with a goddess of vegetation and water for the purpose of enabling him to discharge his divine or magical functions In such a right the part of the goddess might be played either by an image or a woman, and if by a woman probably by the queen If there is any truth in this conjecture we may suppose that the king and queen of Rome masqueraded as god and goddess at their marriage exactly as the king and queen of Egypt appear to have done The legend of Numa and Agelia points to a sacred grove rather than to a house as the scene of the nuptial union which, like the marriage of the king and queen of May, or of the vine god and the queen of Athens may have been annually celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility not only of the earth but of man and beast Now, according to some accounts the scene of the marriage was no other than the sacred grove of Nemi, and on quite independent grounds we have been led to suppose that in that same grove the king of the wood was wedded to Diana The convergence of the two distinct lines of inquiry suggests that the legendary union of the Roman king with Ageria may have been a reflection or duplicate of the union of the king of the wood with Ageria or her double Diana This does not imply that the Roman kings ever served as kings of the wood in the Arisian grove that may originally have been invested with a sacred character of the same general kind and may have held office on similar terms To be more explicit it is possible that they reigned not by right of birth but in virtue of their supposed divinity as representatives or embodiments of a god and that as such they mated with a goddess and had to prove their fitness from time to time to discharge divine functions by engaging in a severe bodily struggle which may often have proved fatal to them leaving the crown to their victorious adversary Our knowledge of the Roman kingship is far too scanty to allow us to affirm any one of these propositions with confidence but at least there are some scattered hints or indications of a similarity in all these respects between the priests of Nami and the kings of Rome or perhaps rather between their remote predecessors in the Dark Ages which preceded the dawn of legend 2. The King as Jupiter In the first place then it would seem that the Roman king personated no lesser deity than Jupiter himself for down to imperial times victorious generals celebrating a triumph and magistrates presiding at the games of the Great Temple on the capital and it has been held with a high degree of probability both by ancients and moderns that in so doing they copied the traditionary attire and insignia of the Roman kings They rode a chariot drawn by four laurel crowned horses through the city where everyone else went on foot They wore purple robes embroidered or spangled with gold In the right hand they bore a branch of laurel and in the left hand an ivory scepter topped with an eagle a wreath of laurel crowned their brows Their face was reddened with vermilion and over their head a slave held a heavy crown of massy gold fashioned in the likeness of oak leaves In this attire the assimilation of the man to the god comes out above all in the eagle the reddened fester the oaken crown and the reddened face for the eagle was the bird of jove the oak was his sacred tree and the face of his image standing in his four horse chariot on the capital was in like manner regularly died red on festivals indeed so important was it deemed to keep the divine features properly rouged that one of the first duties as the triumphal procession always ended in the temple of Jupiter on the capital it was peculiarly appropriate that the head of the victor should be graced by a crown of oak leaves for not only was every oak consecrated to Jupiter but the capital line temple of the god was said to have been built by Romulus beside a sacred oak venerated by shepherds to which the king attached the spoils one by him from the enemies general in battle we are expressly told that the oak crown was sacred to capital line Jupiter a passage of Ovid proves that it was regarded as the god's special emblem according to a tradition which we have no reason to reject Rome was founded by settlers from Alba Longa a city situated on the slope of the Alban hills overlooking the lake and Campania if the Roman kings claimed to be representatives or embodiments of Jupiter the god of the sky of the thunder and of the oak it is natural to suppose that the kings of Alba from whom the founder of Rome traced his descent may have set up the same claim before them now the Alban dynasty bore the name of Sylvie and it can hardly be without significance that in the vision of the historic glories of Rome revealed to Aeneas in the underworld Virgil, an antiquary as well as a poet should represent all the line of Sylvie as crowned with oak a chaplet of oak leaves would thus seem to have been part of the insignia of the old kings of Alba Longa as of their successors the kings of Rome in both cases it marked the monarch as the human representative of the oak god the Roman annals record the kings of Alba, Romulus Remulus or Amulius Silvius by name set up for being a god in his own person the equal or superior of Jupiter to support his pretensions and over all his subjects he constructed machines whereby he mimicked the clap of thunder and the flash of lightning Didorus relates that in the season of frutige when thunder is loud and frequent the king commanded his soldiers to drown the roar of heaven's artillery by clashing their swords against their shields but he paid the penalty of his impiety for he perished he and his house struck by a thunderbolt in the midst of a dreadful storm swollen by the rain the Albin lake rose in flood and drowned his palace but still, says an ancient historian when the water is low and the surface unruffled by a breeze you may see the ruins of the palace at the bottom of the clear lake taken along with the similar story of Salmoneus king of Elis this legend points to a real custom observed by the early kings of Greece and Italy who, like their fellows in Africa down to modern times may have been expected to produce rain and thunder for the good of the crops the priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of lightning from the sky mock thunder we know has been made by various peoples as a rain charm in modern times why should it not have been made by kings in antiquity thus, if the kings of Alba and Rome imitated Jupiter as god of the oak by wearing a crown of oak leaves they seem also to have copied him in his character of a weather god by pretending to make thunder and lightning and if they did so they would have been able to do so like Jupiter in heaven and many kings on earth they also acted as public rain makers ringing showers from the dark sky by their enchantments whenever the parched earth cried out for the refreshing moisture at Rome the sluices of heaven were opened by means of a sacred stone and the ceremony appears to have formed part of the ritual of Jupiter Elicius the god who elicits from the clouds the king lightning and the dripping rain and who so well fitted to perform the ceremony as the king the living representative of the sky god if the kings of Rome aped capitaline jove their predecessors, the kings of Alba probably laid themselves out to mimic the great Laitian Jupiter who had his seat above the city on the summit of the alban mountain Latinus the legendary ancestor of the dynasty was said to have been changed into Laitian Jupiter after vanishing from the world in the mysterious fashion characteristic of the old Latin kings the sanctuary of the god on the top of the mountain was the religious centre of the Latin league as Alba was its political capital till Rome rested the supremacy from its ancient rival apparently no temple in our sense of the word was ever erected to Jupiter on this his holy mountain as god of the sky and thunder he appropriately received the homage of his worshipers in the open air the massive wall of which some remains still enclose the old garden of the passionist monastery seems to have been part of the sacred precinct which Tarquin the proud the last king of Rome marked out for the solemn annual assembly of the Latin league the god's oldest sanctuary mount in top was a grove and bearing in mind not merely the special consecration of the oak to Jupiter but also the traditional oak crown of the Alban kings and the analogy of the capital line Jupiter at Rome we may suppose that the trees in the grove were oaks we know that in antiquity Mount Algidus an outlying group of the Alban hills was covered with dark forests of oak along to the Latin league in the earliest days and were entitled to share the flesh of the white bull sacrificed on the Alban mount there was one whose members styled themselves the men of the oak doubtless on account of the woods among which they dwelt but we should err if we pictured to ourselves the country is covered in historical times with an unbroken forest of oaks Theophrastus has left us a description of the woods of Latham as they were in the fourth century before Christ he says the land of the Latins is all moist the plains produce laurels, myrtles and wonderful beaches for they fell trees of such a size that a single stem suffices for the keel of a Tyrrhenian ship Pines and furs grow in the mountains what they call the land of Cersei is a lofty headland thickly wooded with oak, myrtle laurels the natives say that Cersei dwelt there and they show the grave of Elpinor from which grow myrtles such as wreaths are made of whereas the other myrtle trees are tall thus the prospect from the top of the Alban mount in the early days of Rome must have been very different in some respects from what it is today the purple Apennines indeed in their eternal calm on the one hand and the shining Mediterranean in its eternal unrest on the other no doubt look then much as they look now whether bathed in sunshine or checkered by the fleeting shadows of clouds but instead of the desolate brown expanse of the fever stricken campania spanned by its long lines of ruined aqueducts like the broken arches of the bridge in the vision of Myrza the eye must have ranged over woodlands that stretched away mile after mile on all sides till their varied hues of green or autumnal scarlet and gold melted insensibly into the blue of the distant mountains and sea but Jupiter did not reign alone on the top of his holy mountain he had his consort with him the goddess Juno who was worshipped here under the same title Moneta as on the capital at Rome as the oak crown was sacred to Jupiter Juno on the capital so we may suppose it was on the alban mount from which the capitaline worship was derived thus the oak god would have his oak goddess in the sacred oak grove so at Dodona the oak god Zeus was coupled with Dione whose very name is only a dialectically different form of Juno and so on the top of Mount Kithiron as we have seen he appears to periodically wedded to an oaken image of Hera it is probable though it cannot be positively proved that the sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno was annually celebrated by all the peoples of the Latin stock in the month which they named after the goddess the mid summer month of June if at any time of the year the Romans celebrated the sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno as the Greeks commonly celebrated the corresponding marriage of Zeus and Hera we may suppose that under the Republic the ceremony was either performed over images of the divine pair or acted by the Flamen Dialis and his wife the Flamenica for the Flamen Dialis was the priest of Jove indeed ancient and modern writers have regarded him with much probability as a living image of Jupiter a human embodiment of the sky god in earlier times the Roman king as representative of Jupiter would naturally play the part of the heavenly bridegroom at the sacred marriage while his queen would figure as the heavenly bride just as in Egypt the king and queen masqueraded in the character of deities and as at Athens the queen annually wedded the vine god Dionysus that the Roman king and queen should act the parts of Jupiter and Juno would seem all natural because these diaries themselves bore the title of king and queen whether that was so or not the legend of Numa and Igeria appears to embody a reminiscence of a time when the priestly king himself played the part of the divine bridegroom and as we have seen reason to suppose that the Roman kings personated the oak god while Igeria is expressly said to have been an oak nymph the story of their union the sacred grove raises a presumption that at Rome in the regal period a ceremony was periodically performed exactly analogous to that which was annually celebrated at Athens down to the time of Aristotle the marriage of the king of Rome to the oak goddess like the wedding of the vine god to the queen of Athens must have been intended to quicken the growth of vegetation by homeopathic magic of the two forms of the rite we can hardly doubt that the Roman was the older and that long before the northern invaders met with the vine on the shores of the Mediterranean their forefathers had married the tree god to the tree goddess in the vast oak forests of central and northern Europe in the England of our day the forests have mostly disappeared yet still on many a village green and in many a country lane a faded image of the sacred marriage lingers the majestic pageantry of May day end of chapter 13 chapter 14 the succession to the kingdom in ancient Latham in regard to the Roman king whose priestly functions were inherited by his successor the king of sacred rites the foregoing discussion has led us to the following conclusions he represented and indeed personated Jupiter the great god of the sky the thunder and the oak and in that character made rain thunder and lightning for the good of his subjects like many more kings of the weather in other parts of the world further he not only mimicked the oak god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of divinity but he was married to the oak nymph Egeria who appears to have been merely a local form of Diana in her character of a goddess of woods of waters and of childbirth all these conclusions which we have reached mainly by consideration of the Roman evidence may with great probability be applied to the other Latin communities they too probably had of old their divine or priestly kings who transmitted their religious functions without their civil powers to their successors the kings of the sacred rites but we have still to ask the rule of succession to the kingdom among the old Latin tribes according to tradition there were in all eight kings of Rome and with regard to the five last of them at all events we can hardly doubt that they actually sat on the throne and that the traditional history of their reigns is in its main outlines correct now it is very remarkable that though the first king of Rome Romulus is said to have descended from the royal house of Alba in which the kingship is represented as hereditary in the male line not one of the Roman kings was immediately succeeded by his son on the throne yet several left sons or grandsons behind them on the other hand one of them was descended from a former king through his mother not through his father and three of the kings namely Taceus the elder Tarquin and Servius Tullius were succeeded by their sons in law who were all either foreigners or a foreign descent this suggests that the right to kingship was transmitted in the female line and was actually exercised by foreigners who married the royal princesses to put it in technical language the succession to kingship at Rome and probably in Laceum generally would seem to have been determined by certain rules which have moulded early society in many parts of the world namely exogamy bina marriage and female kinship or motherkin exogamy is the rule which obliges a man to marry a woman of a different clan from his own bina marriage is the rule that he must leave the home of his birth and live with his wife's people and female kinship or motherkin is the system of tracing relationship and transmitting the family name through women instead of through men if these principles regulated descent of the kingship among the ancient latins the state of things in this respect would be somewhat as follows the political and religious centre of each community would be the perpetual fire on the king's hearth tended by vestal virgins of the royal clan the king would be a man of another clan perhaps of another town or even of another race pre-disessor and received the kingdom with her the children whom he had by her would inherit their mother's name not his the daughters would remain at home the sons, when they grew up would go away into the world marry and settle in their wife's country whether as kings or commoners of the daughters who stayed at home some or all would be dedicated as vestal virgins for a longer or shorter time to the service of their father on the hearth and one of them would in time become the consort of her father's successor this hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and natural way some obscure features in the traditional history of the latin kingship thus the legends which tell how latin kings were born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more intelligible for stripped of their fabulous element the importance of this sort mean no more than that a woman has been gotten with child by a man unknown and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is more easily compatible with a system of kinship which ignores paternity than with one which makes it all important if at the birth of the latin kings their fathers were really unknown the fact points either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions when men and women reverted for a season to the license of an earlier age such satan alias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution in our own country traces of them long survived in the practices of mayday and witsentide if not of christmas children born of more or less promiscuous intercourse which characterizes festivals of this kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom the particular festival was dedicated in this connection it may be significant that a festival of jollity and drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves at Rome on midsummer day and that the festival was specially associated with the fireborn king Servius Turius being held in honour of Fortuna the goddess who loved Servius as a geria loved Numa and the popular merry makings at this season included foot races and boat races the Tiber was gay with flowery boats in which the young folk sat quaffing wine the festival appears to have been a sort of midsummer satan alia answering to the real satan alia which fell at midwinter in modern europe as we shall learn later on the great midsummer festival has been above all a festival of lovers and of fire its principal features is the pairing of sweethearts who leap over the bonfires hand in hand or throw flowers across the flames to each other and many omens of love and marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this mystic season it is the time of the roses and of love yet the innocence and beauty of such festivals in modern times ought not to blind us to the likelihood that in earlier days they were marked by coarser features which were probably of the essence of the rites indeed among the rude estonian peasantry these features seem to have lingered down to our own generation if not to the present day one other feature in the roman celebration of midsummer deserves to be specially noticed the custom of rowing in flower decked boats on the river on this day proves that it was to some extent a water festival and water has always down to modern times played a conspicuous part in the rites of midsummer day which explains why the church in throwing its cloak over the old heathen festival chose to dedicate it to St John the Baptist the hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten at an annual festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture though the traditional birth of Numa at the festival of the Parilia when shepherds leapt to cross the spring bonfires as lovers leap across the midsummer fires may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint colour of probability but it is quite possible that the uncertainty as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of the kings when their figures began to melt away into the cloud land of fable assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they passed from earth to heaven if they were alien immigrants strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over it would be natural enough that the people should forget their lineage and forgetting it should provide them with another which made up in lustre what it lacked in truth the final apotheosis which represented the kings not merely as sprung from gods but as themselves deities incarnate would be much facilitated if in their lifetime as we have seen reason to think they had actually laid claim to divinity if among the latins the women of royal blood always stayed at home and received as their consorts men of another stock and often of another country who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage with a native princess we can understand not only why foreigners wore the crown at Rome but also why foreign names occur in the list of the Melbourne kings in a state of society where nobility is reckoned only through women in other words where descent through the mother is everything and descent through the father is nothing no objection will be felt to uniting girls of the highest rank to men of humble birth even to aliens or slaves provided that in themselves the men appear to be suitable mates what really matters is that the royal stock the prosperity and even the existence of the people is supposed to depend should be perpetuated in a vigorous and efficient form and for this purpose it is necessary that the women of the royal family should bear children to men who are physically and mentally fit according to the standard of early society to discharge the important duty of procreation thus the personal qualities of the kings at this stage of social evolution are deemed of vital importance if they, like their consorts are of royal and divine descent so much the better but it is not essential that they should be so at Athens as at Rome we find traces of succession to the throne by marriage with a royal princess for two of the most ancient kings of Athens namely Kekrops and Amphictheon are said to have married the daughters of their predecessors and the succession is to a certain extent confirmed by evidence pointing to the conclusion that at Athens male kinship was preceded by female kinship further if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latham the royal families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons to marry princesses and reign among their wives people it will follow that the male descendants would reign in successive generations over different kingdoms now this seems to have happened both in ancient Greece and in ancient Sweden from which we may legitimately infer that it was a custom practised by more than one branch of the Aryan stock in Europe many Greek traditions relate how a prince left his native land and going to a far country married the king's daughter and succeeded to the kingdom various reasons are assigned by ancient Greek writers to the migrations of the princes a common one is that the king's son had been banished for murder this would explain very well why he fled his own land but it is no reason at all why he should become king of another we may suspect that such reasons are after thoughts devised by writers who are accustomed to the rule that a son should succeed to his father's property and kingdom were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of king's sons who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign kingdom in Scandinavian traditions we meet with traces of similar customs for we read of daughters husbands who received a share of the kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law even when these fathers-in-law had sons of their own in particular during the five generations which preceded Harold the Fairhead now members of the Inglingar family which is said to have come from Sweden are reported in the Heimskringler or sagas of the Norwegian kings to have obtained at least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the daughters of the local kings thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples at a certain stage of their social evolution it has been customary to regard women and not men as the channels in which royal blood flows and to bestow the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of another family and often of another country who marries one of the princesses and reigns over his wife's people a common type of popular tale which relates how an adventurer coming to a strange land wins the hand of the king's daughter and with her the half or the whole of the kingdom may well be a reminiscence of a real custom where usages and ideas of this sort prevail it is obvious that the kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood royal the old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrud, a legendary queen of Scotland indeed she was a queen says Hermutrud and but that her sex-gainsaid it might be deemed a king, nay and this is yet truer whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once a king and she yielded her kingdom with herself thus her scepter and her hand went together the statement is all the more significant because it appears to reflect the actual practice of the Pictish kings we know from the testimony of Bede that whenever a doubt arose as to the succession they would use their kings from the female rather than the male line the personal qualities which recommended a man for a royal alliance and a succession to the throne would naturally vary according to the popular ideas of the time and the character of the king or his substitute but it is reasonable to suppose that among them in early society physical strength and beauty would hold a prominent place sometimes apparently for the princess and to the throne has been determined by a race the Alitamnian Libyans awarded the kingdom to the fleetist runner amongst the old Prussians candidates for nobility raced on horseback to the king and the one who reached him first was ennobled according to tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by Endymion who set his sons to run a race for the kingdom soon was said to be at the point of the race course from which the runners started the famous story of Pilops and Hippodamia is perhaps only another version of the legend that the first races at Olympia were run for no less a prize than a kingdom these traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a bride for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various peoples though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or pretense thus there is one race called Lovechase which may be considered a part of the form of marriage among the Kyrgys in this the bride armed with a formidable whip mounts a fleet horse and is pursued by all the young men who make any pretensions to her hand she will be given as a prize to the one who catches her but she has the right besides urging on her horse to the utmost to use her whip often with no mean force to keep off those lovers who are unwelcome to her and she will probably favour the one whom she has already chosen in her heart the race for the bride is found also among the Koryaks of northeastern Asia it takes place in a large tent round which many separate compartments called Pollogues are arranged in a continuous circle the girl gets a start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through all the compartments without being caught by the bridegroom the women of the encampment place every obstacle in the man's way tripping him up belaboring him with switches and so forth so that he has little chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes it and waits for him similar customs appear to have been practised by all the Teutonic peoples for the German, Anglo-Saxon and Norse languages possess in common a word for marriage which means simply bride race moreover traces of the custom survived into modern times thus it appears that the right to marry a girl and especially a princess has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic contest there would be no reason therefore for surprise if the Roman kings before bestowing their daughters in marriage should have resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal qualities of their future sons-in-law and successors if my theory is correct the Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine consort and in the character of these divinities went through the annual ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply thus they did what in more northern lands we may suppose the king and queen of May were believed to do in days of old now we have seen that the right to play the part of the king of May and to wed the queen of May has sometimes been determined by an athletic contest particularly a race this may have been a relic of an old marriage custom of the sort we have examined a custom designed to test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony such a test might reasonably be applied with peculiar rigor to the king in order to ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate him for the performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on which even more than on the dispatch of his civil and military duties the safety and prosperity of the community were believed to depend and it would be natural to require of him that from time to time he should submit himself afresh for any more deal for the sake of publicly demonstrating that he was still equal to the discharge of his high calling a relic of that test perhaps survived in the ceremony known as the Flight of the King Regifugium which continued to be annually observed at Rome down to imperial times on the 24th day of February a sacrifice used to be offered in the Commitium and when it was over the sacred rites fled from the forum we may conjecture that the Flight of the King was originally a race for an annual kingship which may have been awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner at the end of the year the king might run again for a second term of office and so on until he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain in this way what had once been a race would tend to assume the character of a flight and a pursuit would be given a start he ran and his competitors ran after him and if he were overtaken he had to yield the crown and perhaps his life to the lightest of foot among them in time a man of masterful character might succeed in seating himself permanently on the throne and reducing the annual race or flight to the empty form which it seems always to have been within historical times the rite was sometimes interpreted as a commemoration of the expulsion of the kings from Rome but this appears to have been a mere afterthought devised to explain a ceremony of which the old meaning was forgotten it is far more likely that in acting thus the king of the sacred rites was merely keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had been annually observed by his predecessors the kings what the original intention of the rite may have been must probably always remain more or less a matter of conjecture the present explanation is suggested with a full sense of the difficulty and obscurity in which the subject is involved thus if my theory is correct the yearly flight of the Roman king was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office awarded along with the hand of a princess to the victorious athlete or gladiator who thereafter figured along with his bride as a god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the fertility of the earth by homeopathic magic if I am right in supposing that in very early times the old Latin kings personated a god and were regularly put to death in that character we can better understand the mysterious or violent ends to which so many of them are said to have come we have seen that according to tradition one of the kings of Alba was killed by a thunderbolt for impiously mimicking the thunder of Jupiter Romulus is said to have vanished mysteriously like Aeneas or to have been cut to pieces by the patricians whom he had offended and the 7th of July the day on which he perished was a festival which bore some resemblance to the Saturnalia for on that day the female slaves were allowed to take certain remarkable liberties they dressed up as free women in the attire of matrons and maids and in this guise they went forth from the city scoffed and jeered at all whom they met and engaged among themselves in a fight striking and throwing stones at each other another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius the Sabine colleague of Romulus it is said that he was at Lavinium offering a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods when some men to whom he had given umbrage dispatched him with the sacrificial knives and spits which they had snatched from the altar the occasion and the manner of his death suggest that the slaughter may have been a sacrifice rather than an assassination again Tullius Hostilius the successor of Numa was commonly said to have been killed by lightning but many held that he was murdered by the creation of Ancus Marcius who reigned after him speaking of the more or less mythical Numa the type of the priestly king Plutarch observes that his fame was enhanced by the fortunes of the later kings for of the five who reigned after him the last was deposed and ended his life in exile and of the remaining four not one died a natural death for three of them were assassinated and Tullius Hostilius was consumed by thunderbolts these legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest that the contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have been a mortal combat rather than a race if that were so the analogy which we have traced between Rome and Nami would be still closer at both places the sacred kings the living representatives of the godhead would thus be liable to suffer deposition death at the hands of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword it would not be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should often have been settled by single combat for down to historical time the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes to the ordeal of battle and he who cut his adversaries throat was thought thereby to approve the justice of his cause beyond the reach of Cavill and of Chapter 14 perhaps the oldest and certainly one of the most famous sanctuaries in Greece was that of Dodana where Zeus was revered in the oracular oak the thunderstorms which are said to rage at Dodona more frequently than anywhere else in Europe would render the spot a fitting home for the god whose voice was heard alike in the rustling of oak leaves and in the crash of thunder and in the fall of the war and in the fall of the war and in the fall of the war and in the fall of the war of oak leaves and in the crash of thunder perhaps the bronze gongs which kept up a humming in the wind around the sanctuary were meant to mimic the thunder that might so often be heard rolling and rumbling in the combs of the stern and barren mountains which shut in the gloomy valley in Beosia as we have seen the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera the oak god and the oak goddess appears to have been celebrated with much pomp by a religious federation of states and on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia the character of Zeus as god both of the oak and of the rain comes out clearly in the rain charm practiced by the priest of Zeus who dipped an oak branch in a sacred spring in his latter capacity Zeus was the god to whom the Greeks regularly prayed for rain nothing could be more natural for often though not always he had his seat on the mountains where the clouds gather and the oaks grow on the acropolis at Athens there was an image of earth praying to Zeus for rain and in time of drought rain o' dear Zeus on the corn land of Athenians and on the plains again Zeus wielded the thunder and lightning as well as the rain at Olympia and elsewhere he was worshipped under the surname of Thunderbolt and at Athens there was a sacrificial hearth of lightning Zeus on the city wall where some priestly officials watched for lightning over Mount Parnas at certain seasons of the year further spots which had been struck by lightning were regularly fenced in by the Greeks and consecrated to Zeus as descender to the god who came down in the flash from heaven alters were set up within the enclosures and sacrifices offered on them several such places are known from inscriptions to have existed in Athens thus when ancient Greek kings claimed to be descended from Zeus and even to bear his name we may reasonably suppose that they also attempted to exercise his divine functions by making thunder and rain for the good of their people or the terror and confusion of their foes in this respect the legend of Salmonius probably reflects the pretensions of a whole class of petty sovereigns who reigned of old each over his little canton in the oak-clad highlands of Greece like their kinsmen the Irish kings they were expected to be a source of fertility to the land and of fecundity to the cattle and how could they fulfill these expectations better than by acting the part of their kinsmen Zeus the great god of the oak the thunder and the rain they personified him apparently just as the Italian kings personified Jupiter in ancient Italy every oak was sacred to Jupiter the Italian counterpart of Zeus and on the capital at Rome the god was worshiped as the deity not merely of the oak but of the rain and the thunder contrasting the piety of the good old times with the skepticism of the age when nobody thought that heaven was heaven or cared a fig for Jupiter a Roman writer tells us that in former days noble matrons used to go with bare feet streaming hair and pure minds up the long capitaline slope praying to Jupiter for rain the great way he goes on it rained buckets full then or never and everybody returned to dripping like drowned rats but nowadays says he we are no longer religious so the fields lie baking when we pass from southern to central Europe we still meet with the great god of the oak and the thunder among the barbarous Aryans who dwelt in the vast primeval forests thus among the Celts of Gaul the druids esteemed nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the oak on which it grew the Celts of Oaks for the scene of their solemn service and they performed none of their rites without oak leaves the Celts, says a Greek writer worship Zeus and the Celtic image of Zeus is a tall oak the Celtic conquerors who settled in Asia in the third century before our era appeared to have carried the worship of the oak with them to their new home for in the heart of Asia Minor the Galatian senate met in a place which bore the pure Celtic name of Drinematum of the oak indeed the very name of druids is believed by good authorities to mean no more than oak men in the religion of the ancient Germans the veneration for sacred groves seems to have held to the foremost place and according to Grimm the chief of their holy trees was the oak it appears to have been especially dedicated to the god of thunder Donar or Thunar the equivalent of the Norse Thor for a sacred oak near Gismar even by the name of Jupiter's oak Robert Jovis which in old German would be the oak of Donar that the Teutonic thunder god Donar Thunar Thor was identified with the Italian thunder god Jupiter appears from our word Thursday Thunar's day which is merely a rendering of the Latin Deis Jovis thus among the ancient Teutons as among the Greeks and Italians the god of the oak was also the god of the thunder however, he was regarded as the great fertilizing power who sent rain and caused the earth to bear fruit for Adam of Bremen tells us that quote, Thor presides in the air he it is who rules thunder and lightning wind and rains, fine weather and crops in these respects therefore the Teutonic thunder god again resembled his southern counterparts Zeus and Jupiter amongst the Slavs also the oak appears to have been the sacred tree of the thunder god Peron the counterpart of Zeus and Jupiter it is said that at Novgorod there used to stand an image of Peron in the likeness of a man with a thunder stone in his hand a fire of oak wood burned day and night and if ever it went out the attendants paid for their negligence with their lives Peron seems like Zeus and Jupiter to have been the chief god of his people for Procopius tells us that the Slavs quote, believe that one god the maker of lightning is alone lord of all things and they sacrifice to him every person and every victim end quote the chief deity of the Lithuanians was Perkunas or Perkuns the god of thunder and lightning whose resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter has often been pointed out oaks were sacred to him and when they were cut down by the Christian missionaries the people loudly complained that their sylvan deities were destroyed perpetual fires kindled with the wood of certain oak trees were kept up in honor of Perkunas if such a fire went out it was lighted again by friction of sacred wood men sacrifice to oak trees for good crops while women did the same to lime trees from which we may infer that they regarded oaks as male and lime trees as female and in time of drought when they wanted rain they used to sacrifice a black heifer a black he goat and a black cock to the thunder god in the depths of the woods on such occasions the people assembled in great numbers from the country round about ate and drank and called upon Perkunas they carried a bowl of beer rice around the fire then poured the liquor on the flames while they prayed to the god to send showers thus the chief Lithuanian deity represents a close resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter since he was the god of the oak the thunder and the rain from the foregoing survey it appears that a god of the oak the thunder and the rain was worshiped of old by all the main branches of the Aryan stock in Europe and was indeed the chief deity of their pantheon End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 of the Golden Bau 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 Kristi Noak The Golden Bau by Sir James Fraser Chapter 16 Diana's and Diana in this chapter I propose to recapitulate the conclusions to which the inquiry has thus far led us and drawing together the scattered rays of light to turn them on the dark figure of the priest of Nemi we have found that in an early stage of society men ignorant of the secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits within which it is our power to control and direct them have commonly irrigated to themselves functions which in the present state of knowledge we should deem superhuman or divine the illusion has been fostered and maintained by the same causes which we got it namely the marvelous order and uniformity with which nature conducts her operations the wheels of her great machine revolving with a smoothness and precision which enable the patient observer to anticipate in general the season if not the very hour when they will bring around the fulfillment of his hopes or the accomplishment of his fears the regularly recurring events of this great cycle or rather series of cycles soon stamped themselves even on the dull mind of the savage he foresees them and foreseeing them mistakes the desired recurrence for an effort of his own will and the dreaded recurrence for an effect of the will of his enemies thus the springs which set the vast machine in motion though they lie far beyond our ken shrouded in a mystery which we can never hope to penetrate appear to ignorant man to lie within his reach he fancies he can touch them and so work by magic art all manner of good to himself and evil to his foes in time the fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him he discovers that there are things he cannot do pleasures which he is unable of himself pains which even the most potent magician is powerless to avoid the unattainable good the inevitable ill are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers whose favor is joy and life whose anger is misery and death thus magic tends to be displaced by religion and the sorcerer by the priest at this stage of thought the ultimate causes of all things are conceived to be personal beings many in number and often discordant in character who partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man though their might is greater than his and their life far exceeds the span of his ephemeral existence their sharply marked individualities their clear cut outlines have not yet begun under the powerful solvent of philosophy to melt and coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomenon which according to the qualities with which our imagination invests it goes by one or other of the high names which the wit of man has divide to hide his ignorance accordingly so long as men look on their gods as being akin to themselves and not raised to an unapproachable height above them they believe it to be possible for those of their own number who surpass their fellows to attain to the divine rank after death or even in life incarnate human deities of this latter sort may be said to halt midway between the age of magic and the age of religion if they bear to display the pump of deities the powers which they are supposed to wield are commonly those of their predecessor the magician like him they are expected to guard their people against hostile enchantments to heal them in sickness to bless them with offspring and to provide them with an abundant supply of food by regulating the weather and performing the other ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth and the multiplication of animals men who are credited with powers in far reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land and while the rift between the spiritual and the temporal spheres has not yet widened too far they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters in a word they are kings as well as gods thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down in human history and long ages past before these are sapped by the profounder view of nature and man in the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign of kings was for the most part a thing of the past yet the stories of their lineage titles and pretensions suffice to prove that they too claimed to rule by divine right and to exercise superhuman powers hence we may without undue to merity assume that the king of the wood at Nemi though shorn in later times of his glory and fallen on evil days represented a long line of sacred kings who had once received not only the homage but the adoration of their subjects in return for the blessings which they were supposed to dispense what little we know of the functions of Diana in the Eretian grove seems to prove that she was here conceived as a goddess of fertility and particularly as a divinity of childbirth it is reasonable therefore to suppose that in the discharge of these important duties she was assisted by her priest the two figuring as king and queen of the wood in a solemn marriage which was intended to make the earth gay with the blossoms of spring and the fruits of autumn and to gladden the hearts of men and women with healthful offspring. If the priest of Nemi posed not merely as a king but as a god of the grove we have still to ask what deity in particular did he personate? The answer of antiquity is that he represented Virbius the consort or lover of Diana but this does not help us much for a Virbius we know little more than the name a clue to the mystery is perhaps supplied by the vestal fire which burned in the grove for the perpetual holy fires of the Europe appeared to have been commonly kindled and fed with oak wood and in Rome itself not many miles from Nemi the fuel of the vestal fire consisted of oak and sticks or logs as has been proved by a microscopic analysis of the charred embers of the vestal fire which were discovered by Comandantor G. Boney in the course of the memorable excavations which he conducted in the Roman form at the end of the 19th century but the ritual of the various Latin towns seems to have been marked by great uniformity hence it is reasonable to conclude that wherever in Latium a vestal fire was maintained it was fed as at Rome with the wood of the sacred oak if this was so at Nemi it becomes probable that the hallowed grove there consisted of a natural oak wood and that therefore the tree which the king of the wood had to guard at the peril of his life was itself an oak indeed it was from an evergreen oak according to Virgil that Aeneas plucked the golden bow now the oak was the sacred tree of Jupiter of the Latins hence it follows that the king of the wood whose life was bound up in a fashion with an oak personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself at least the evidence slight as it is seems to point to this conclusion the old Alban dynasty of the Sylvie or woods with their crown of oak leaves apparently aped the style and emulated the powers of the Latian Jupiter who dwelt on the top of the Alban mount it is not impossible that the king of the wood who guarded the sacred oak a little lower down the mountain was the lawful successor and representative of this ancient line of the Sylvie or woods at all events if I am right in supposing that he passed for a human Jupiter it would appear that Virbius with whom legend identified him was nothing but a local form of Jupiter considered perhaps in his original aspect as a god of the green wood the hypothesis that in latter times at all events the king of the wood played the part of the oak god Jupiter is confirmed by the examination of his divine partner Diana for two distinct lines of argument converged to show that if Diana was a queen of the woods in general she was at Nemi a goddess of the oak in particular in the first place she bore the title of Vesta and as such presided over a perpetual fire which we have seen reason to believe was fed with oak wood but a goddess of fire is not far removed from a goddess of the fuel which burns in the fire primitive thought perhaps drew no sharp line of distinction between the blaze and the wood that blazes in the second place the nymph Egeria at Nemi appears to have been merely a form of Diana and Egeria is definitely said to have been a dryad a nymph of the oak elsewhere in Italy the goddess had her home on oak clad mountains thus Mount Algidus the spur of the Albin Hills was covered in antiquity with dark forests of oak both of the evergreen and the deciduous sort in winter the snow lay long on those cold hills and their gloomy oak woods were believed to be a favorite haunt of Diana as they have been living in the gardens in modern times again Mount Tafata the long abrupt ridge of the Apennines which looks down on the Campion Plain behind Capua was wooded of old with evergreen oaks among which Diana had a temple here Sulla thanked the goddess for his victory over the Marians in the plain below a testing to his gratitude by inscriptions which were long afterwards to be seen in the temple on the whole then we conclude that at Nemi the king of the wood personated the oak god Jupiter and mated the sacred grove an echo of their mystic union has come down to us in the legend of the loves of Numa and Nigeria who according to some had their tristing place in these holy woods to this theory it may naturally be objected that the divine concert of Jupiter was not Diana but Juno and that if Diana had a maid at all he might be expected to bear the name not of Jupiter but of Diana's or Janus the latter of these forms being merely a corruption of the former all this is true but the objection may be proven that the two pairs of deities Jupiter and Juno on the one side and Diana's and Diana or Janus and Diana on the other side are merely duplicates of each other their names and their functions being in substance and origin identical with regard to their names all four of them came from the same area in root D which means bright which occurs in the names of the corresponding Greek deities Zeus and his old female concert Diana in regard to their functions Juno and Diana both goddesses of fecundity and child birth and both were sooner or later identified with the moon as to the true nature and functions of Janus the ancients themselves were puzzled and where they hesitated it is not for us confidently to decide but the view mentioned by Varro that Janus was the god of the sky is supported not only of the etymology identified of his name with that of the sky god Jupiter but also by the relation in which he appears to have stood to Jupiter's two mates Juno and the epithet Junonian bestowed on Janus points to a marriage union between the two deities and according to one account Janus was the husband of the water nymph Jutarna who according to others was beloved by Jupiter moreover Janus like Joe was regularly invoked and commonly spoken of under the title of father indeed he was identified with Jupiter not merely by the logic of the learned St. Augustine but by the piety of a pagan worshipper who dedicated an offering to Jupiter Diana a trace of his relation to the oak may be found in the oak woods of the genoculum the hill on the right bank of the Tiber where Janus is said to have reigned as a king in the remotest ages of Italian history thus if I am right the same ancient pair of deities was variously known among the Greek and Italian peoples as Azus and Diana Jupiter and Juno or Diana's Janus and Diana Janna the names of the divinities being identical in substance though varying in form with the dialect of the particular tribe which worshiped them at first when the peoples dwelt near each other the difference between the deities would hardly be more than one of name in other words it would be almost purely dialectical but the gradual dispersion of the tribes and their consequent isolation from each other would favor the growth of divergent modes of conceiving and worshiping the gods whom they had carried with them from their old home so that in time discrepancies of myth and ritual would tend to spring up and thereby to convert a nominal into a real distinction between the divinities accordingly when the slow progress of culture the long period of barbarism and separation was passing away and the rising political power of a single strong community had begun to draw or hammer its weaker neighbors into a nation the confluent peoples would throw their gods like their dialects into a common stock and thus it might come about that the same ancient deities which their forefathers had worshiped together before the dispersion would now be so disguised by the accumulated effect of dialectical and religious divergences that their original identity might fail to be recognized and they would take their places side by side as independent divinities in the national pantheon. If there is any truth in this conjecture it may explain very simply the origin of the double head of Janus which has so long exercised the ingenuity of mythologists. When it had become customary to guard the entrance of houses and towns with an image of Janus it might well be deemed necessary to make the sentinel god look both ways before and behind at the same time in order that nothing should escape his vigilant eye. For if the divine watchman always faced in one direction it is easy to imagine what mischief might be wrought with impunity behind his back. This explanation of the double headed Janus at Rome is confirmed by the double headed idol which the bush knee grows in the interior of Suriname regularly set up as a guardian at the entrance of a village. The idol consists of a block of wood with a human face rudely carved on each side. It stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and a crossbar. Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the devil and sometimes there is also a stick which seems to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further from the crossbar hangs a small log which serves the useful purpose of knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to pass through the gateway. Clearly this double headed fetish at the gateway of the Negro villages in Suriname bears a close resemblance to the double headed images of Janus which grasping a stick and in a key in the other stood sentinel at Roman gates and doorways and we can hardly doubt that in both cases the heads facing two ways are to be similarly explained as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian god who kept his eye on spiritual foes behind and before and stood ready to bludgeon them on the spot. We may therefore dispense with the tedious and unsatisfactory explanations which if we may trust Ovid the wily Janus himself fobbed off an anxious Roman inquirer. To apply these conclusions to the priest of Nemi we may suppose that as the maid of Diana he represented originally Dianus or Janus rather than Jupiter but that the difference between these deities was of old merely superficial going little deeper than the names and leaving practically unaffected the essential functions of the god as a power of the sky the thunder and the oak. It was fitting therefore that his human representatives at Nemi should dwell as we have seen reason to believe he did in an oak grove. His title of king of the wood clearly indicates the silver character of the deity whom he served and since he could only be assailed by him who had plucked the bow of a certain tree in the grove his own life might be said to be bound up with that of the sacred tree. Thus he not only served but embodied the great Aryan god of the oak and as an oak god he would mate with the oak goddess whether she went by the name of Egeria or Diana. Their union however consummated would be deemed essential to the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of the east. Further as the oak god was also a god of the sky the thunder and the rain so his human representative would be required like many other divine kings to cause the clouds to gather the thunder to peel and the rain to descend in due season that the fields and orchards might bear fruit and the pastures be covered with luxuriant herbage. The reputed possessor of power so exalted must have been a very important personage and the remains of buildings and evotive offerings which have been found on the side of the line with the testimony of classical writers to prove that in later times it was one of the greatest and most popular shrines in Italy. Even in the old days when the champagne country around was still parceled out among the petty tribes who composed the Latin league the sacred grove is known to have been an object of their common reverence and care and just as the kings of Cambodia used to send offerings to the mystic kings of fire and water far in the dim depths of the tropical forest so we may well believe from all sides of the broad Latin plain the eyes and footsteps of Italian pilgrims turned to the quarter where standing sharply out against the faint blue line of the Apennines or the deeper blue of the distant sea the Albin mountain rose before them the home of the mysterious priest of Nemi the king of the wood there among the green woods and beside the still waters of the lonely hills the ancient Aryan worship of the god of the oak the thunder and the dripping sky lingered in its early almost druidical form long after great political and intellectual revolution had shifted the capital of the Latin region from the forest to the city from Nemi to Rome end of chapter 16