§ 1. Numa and Egeria
|Egeria at Nemi a nymph of water and of the oak, perhaps a form of Diana.| From the foregoing survey of custom and legend we may infer that the sacred marriage of the powers both of vegetation and of water has been celebrated by many peoples for the sake of promoting the fertility of the earth, on which the life of animals and men ultimately depends, and that in such rites the part of the divine bridegroom or bride is often sustained by a man or woman. The evidence may, therefore, lend some countenance to the conjecture that in the sacred grove at Nemi, where the powers of vegetation and of water manifested themselves in the fair forms of shady woods, tumbling cascades, and glassy lake, a marriage like that of our King and Queen of May was annually celebrated between the mortal King of the Wood and the immortal Queen of the Wood, Diana. In this connexion an important figure in the grove was the water-nymph Egeria, who was worshipped by pregnant women because she, like Diana, could grant them an easy delivery.[[540]] From this it seems fairly safe to conclude that, like many other springs, the water of Egeria was credited with a power of facilitating conception as well as delivery. The votive offerings found on the spot, which clearly refer to the begetting of children,[[541]] may possibly have been dedicated to Egeria rather than to Diana, or perhaps we should rather say that the water-nymph Egeria is only another form of the great nature-goddess Diana herself, the mistress of sounding rivers as well as of umbrageous woods,[[542]] who had her home by the lake and her mirror in its calm waters, and whose Greek counterpart Artemis loved to haunt meres and springs.[[543]] The identification of Egeria with Diana is confirmed by a statement of Plutarch that Egeria was one of the oak-nymphs[[544]] whom the Romans believed to preside over every green oak-grove;[[545]] for while Diana was a goddess of the woodlands in general she appears to have been intimately associated with oaks in particular, especially at her sacred grove of Nemi.[[546]] Perhaps, then, Egeria was the fairy of a spring that flowed from the roots of a sacred oak. Such a spring is said to have gushed from the foot of the great oak at Dodona, and from its murmurous flow the priestess drew oracles.[[547]] Among the Greeks a draught of water from certain sacred springs or wells was supposed to confer prophetic powers.[[548]] This would explain the more than mortal wisdom with which, according to tradition, Egeria inspired her royal husband or lover Numa.[[549]] 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 |The legend of the nuptials of Numa and Egeria may be a reminiscence of a sacred marriage which the kings of Rome contracted with a goddess of water and of vegetation.| Egeria we have a reminiscence of a sacred marriage which the old Roman kings regularly contracted with a goddess of vegetation and water for the purpose of enabling him to discharge his divine or magical functions. In such a rite the part of the goddess might be played either by an image or a woman, and if by a woman, probably by the Queen. If there is any truth in this conjecture, we may suppose that the King and Queen of Rome masqueraded as god and goddess at their marriage, exactly as the King and Queen of Egypt appear to have done.[[550]] The legend of Numa and Egeria points to a sacred grove rather than to a house as the scene of the nuptial union, which, like the marriage of the King and Queen of May, or of the vine-god and the Queen of Athens, may have been annually celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility not only of the earth but of man and beast. Now, according to some accounts, the scene of the marriage was no other than the sacred grove of Nemi, and on quite independent grounds we have been led to suppose that in that same grove the King of the Wood was wedded to Diana. The convergence of the two distinct lines of enquiry suggests that the legendary union of the Roman king with Egeria may have been a reflection or duplicate of the union of the King of the Wood with Egeria or her double Diana. This does not imply that the Roman kings ever served as Kings of the Wood in the Arician grove, but only that they may originally have been invested with a sacred character of the same general kind, and may have held office on similar terms. To be more explicit, it is possible that they reigned, not by right of birth, but in virtue of their supposed divinity as representatives or embodiments of a god, and that as such they mated with a goddess, and had to prove their fitness from time to time to discharge their divine functions by engaging in a severe bodily struggle, which may often have proved fatal to them, leaving the crown to their victorious adversary. Our knowledge of the Roman kingship is far too scanty to allow us to affirm any one of these propositions with confidence; but at least there are some scattered hints or indications of a similarity in all these respects between the priests of Nemi and the kings of Rome, or perhaps rather between their remote predecessors in the dark ages which preceded the dawn of legend.[[551]]
§ 2. The King as Jupiter
|The Roman king seems to have personated Jupiter and worn his costume.| In the first place, then, it would seem that the Roman king personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself. For down to imperial times victorious generals celebrating a triumph, and magistrates presiding at the games in the Circus, wore the costume of Jupiter, which was borrowed for the occasion from his great temple on the Capitol; and it has been held with a high degree of probability both by ancients and moderns that in so doing they copied the traditionary attire and insignia of the Roman kings.[[552]] They rode a chariot drawn by four laurel-crowned horses through the city, where every one else went on foot;[[553]] they wore purple robes embroidered or spangled with gold; in the right hand they bore a branch of laurel and in the left hand an ivory sceptre topped with an eagle; a wreath of laurel crowned their brows; their face was reddened with vermilion; and over their head a slave held a heavy crown of massy gold fashioned in the likeness of oak leaves.[[554]] In this attire the assimilation of the man to the god comes out above all in the eagle-topped sceptre, the oaken crown, and the reddened face. For the eagle was the bird of Jove, the oak was his sacred tree, and the face of his image standing in his four-horse chariot on the Capitol was in like manner regularly dyed red on festivals; indeed, so important was it deemed to keep the divine features properly rouged that one of the first duties of the censors was to contract for having this done.[[555]] The Greeks sometimes painted red the face or the whole body of the wine-god Dionysus.[[556]] These customs may have been a substitute for an older practice of feeding a god by smearing the face, and especially the lips, of his idol with the blood of a sacrificial victim. Many examples of such a practice might be adduced from the religion of barbarous peoples.[[557]] As the triumphal procession always ended in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, it was peculiarly appropriate that the head of the victor should be graced by a crown of oak leaves, for not only was every oak consecrated to Jupiter,[[558]] but the Capitoline temple of the god was said to have been built by Romulus beside a sacred oak, venerated by shepherds, to which the king attached the spoils won by him from the enemy’s general in battle.[[559]] We are expressly told that the oak crown was |The oak crown as an emblem of Jupiter and of the Roman emperors.| sacred to Capitoline Jupiter;[[560]] a passage of Ovid proves that it was regarded as the god’s special emblem. Writing in exile on the shores of the Black Sea, the poet sends the book which he has just composed to Rome to be published there; he personifies the volume and imagines it passing along the Sacred Way and up to the door of the emperor’s stately palace on the Palatine hill. Above the portal hung shining arms and a crown of oak leaves. At the sight the poet starts: “Is this, quoth I, the house of Jove? For sure to my prophetic soul the oaken crown was reason good to think it so.”[[561]] The senate had granted Augustus the right to have the wreath of oak always suspended over his door;[[562]] and elsewhere Ovid counts this among the more than mortal honours bestowed on the emperor.[[563]] On the Capitol at Cirta there stood a silver image of Jupiter wearing a silver crown of oak leaves and acorns.[[564]] Similarly at Dodona, the most famous sanctuary of the oak in Greece, the image of Zeus appears to have worn a chaplet of oak leaves; for the god is constantly thus portrayed on coins of Epirus.[[565]] And just as Roman kings appear to have personated the oak-god Jupiter, so Greek kings appear to have personated the oak-god Zeus. The legendary Salmoneus of Elis is certainly reported to have done so;[[566]] Periphas, an ancient king of Athens, is said to have been styled Zeus by his people, and to have been changed into an eagle by his jealous name-sake.[[567]] In Homer kings are often spoken of as nurtured by Zeus and divine.[[568]] Indeed we are told that in ancient days every Greek king was called Zeus.[[569]]
|To the Romans the breach between the human and the divine was not so wide as it seems to us.| Thus we may fairly assume that on certain solemn occasions Roman generals and magistrates personated the supreme god, and that in so doing they revived the practice of the early kings. To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and the divine has deepened into an impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking gods and men were akin, for many families traced their descent from a divinity, and the deification of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to them as the canonisation of a saint seems to a modern Catholic. The Romans in particular were quite familiar with the spectacle of men masquerading as spirits; for at the funerals of great houses all the illustrious dead of the family were personated by men specially chosen for their resemblance to the departed. These representatives wore |Roman custom of representing dead ancestors by masked men.| masks fashioned and painted in the likeness of the originals: they were dressed in rich robes of office, resplendent with purple and gold, such as the dead nobles had worn in their lifetime: like them, they rode in chariots through the city preceded by the rods and axes, and attended by all the pomp and heraldry of high station; and when at last the funeral procession, after threading its way through the crowded streets, defiled into the Forum, the maskers solemnly took their seats on ivory chairs placed for them on the platform of the Rostra, in the sight of the people, recalling no doubt to the old, by their silent presence, the memories of an illustrious past, and firing the young with the ambition of a glorious future.[[570]]
|The kings of Alba seem also to have claimed to represent Jupiter.| According to a tradition which we have no reason to reject, Rome was founded by settlers from Alba Longa, a city situated on the slope of the Alban hills, overlooking the lake and the Campagna.[[571]] Hence if the Roman kings claimed to be representatives or embodiments of Jupiter, the god of the sky, of the thunder, and of the oak, it is natural to suppose that the kings of Alba, from whom the founder of Rome traced his descent, may have set up the same claim before them. Now the Alban dynasty bore the name of Silvii or Wood, and it can hardly be without significance that in the vision of the historic glories of Rome revealed to Aeneas in the underworld, Virgil, an antiquary as well as a poet, should represent all the line of Silvii as crowned |The Silvii and the Julii.| with oak.[[572]] 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. With regard to Silvius, the first king of the Alban dynasty, we are told that he got his name because he had been born or brought up in the forest, and that when he came to man’s estate he contested the kingdom with his kinsman Julus, whose name, as some of the ancients themselves |Julus, the little Jupiter.| perceived, means the Little Jupiter. The people decided in favour of Silvius, but his rival Julus was consoled for the loss of the crown by being invested with religious authority and the office of chief pontiff, or perhaps rather of Flamen Dialis, the highest dignity after the kingship. From this Julus or Little Jupiter, the noble house of the Julii, and hence the first emperors of Rome, believed themselves to be sprung.[[573]] The legend of the dispute between Silvius and Julus may preserve a reminiscence of such a partition of spiritual and temporal powers in Alba Longa as afterwards took place in Rome, when the old regal office was divided between the Consuls and the King of the Sacred Rites.[[574]] Many more instances of such a schism will meet us later on. That the Julian house worshipped Vejovis, the Little Jupiter, according to the ancient rites of Alba Longa, is proved by the inscription on an altar which they dedicated to him at their ancestral home of Bovillae, a colony of Alba Longa, situated at the foot of the Alban hills.[[575]] The Caesars, the most illustrious family of the Julian house, took their name from their long hair (caesaries),[[576]] which was probably in those early days, as it was among the Franks long afterwards, a symbol of royalty.[[577]]
|The Alban kings seem to have been expected to make thunder and rain for the good of their subjects.| But in ceding the pontificate to their rivals, it would seem that the reigning dynasty of the Silvii or Woods by no means renounced their own claim to personate the god of the oak and the thunder; for the Roman annals record that one of them, Romulus, Remulus, or Amulius Silvius by name, set up for being a god in his own person, the equal or superior of Jupiter. To support his pretensions and overawe his subjects, he constructed machines whereby he mimicked the clap of thunder and the flash of lightning. Diodorus relates that in the season of fruitage, when thunder is loud and frequent, the king commanded his soldiers to drown the roar of heaven’s artillery by clashing their swords against their shields. But he paid the penalty of his impiety, for he perished, he and his house, struck by a thunderbolt in the midst of a dreadful storm. Swollen by the rain, the Alban lake rose in flood and drowned his palace. But still, says an ancient historian, when the water is low and the surface unruffled by a breeze, you may see the ruins of the palace at the bottom of the clear lake.[[578]] Taken along with the similar story of Salmoneus, king of Elis,[[579]] 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.[[580]] The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of drawing down lightning from the sky.[[581]] Mock thunder, we know, has been made by various peoples as a rain-charm in modern times;[[582]] why should it not have been made by kings in antiquity?
|The legends of the deaths of Roman kings point to a close connexion between the king and the thunder-god.| In this connexion it deserves to be noted that, according to the legend, Salmoneus, like his Alban counterpart, was killed by a thunderbolt; and that one of the Roman kings, Tullus Hostilius, is reported to have met with the same end in an attempt to draw down Jupiter in the form of lightning from the sky.[[583]] Aeneas himself, the legendary ancestor both of the Alban and the Roman kings, vanished from the world in a violent thunderstorm, and was afterwards worshipped as Jupiter Indiges. A mound of earth, encircled with fine trees, on the bank of the little river Numicius was pointed out as his grave.[[584]] Romulus, too, the first king of Rome, |Death and deification of Romulus.| disappeared in like manner. It was the seventh of July, and the king was reviewing his army at the Goat’s Marsh, outside the walls of the city. Suddenly the sky lowered and a tempest burst, accompanied by peals of thunder. Soon the storm had swept by, leaving the brightness and serenity of the summer day behind. But Romulus was never seen again. Those who had stood by him said they saw him caught up to heaven in a whirlwind; and not long afterwards a certain Proculus Julius, a patrician of Alban birth and descent, declared on oath that Romulus had appeared to him clad in bright armour, and announced that the Romans were to worship him as a god under the name of Quirinus, and to build him a temple on the spot. The temple was built and the place was henceforth known as the Quirinal hill.[[585]] In this legend it is significant that the annunciation of the king’s divinity should be put in the mouth of a member of the Julian house, a native of Alba; for we have seen reason to believe that at Alba the Julii had competed with the Silvii, from whom Romulus was descended, for the kingship, and with it for the honour of personating Jupiter. If, as seems to be philologically possible, the word Quirinus is derived from the same root as quercus, “an oak,” the name of the deified Romulus would mean no more than “the oak-god,” that is, Jupiter.[[586]] Thus the tradition would square perfectly with the other indications of custom and legend which have led us to conclude that the kings both of Rome and of Alba claimed to embody in their own persons the god of the sky, of thunder, and of the oak. Certainly the stories which associated the deaths of so many of them with thunderstorms point to a close connexion with the god of thunder and lightning. A king who had been wont to fulminate in his lifetime might naturally be supposed at death to be carried up in a thunderstorm to heaven, there to discharge above the clouds the same duties which he had performed on earth. Such a tale would be all the more likely to attach itself to the twin Romulus, if the early Romans shared the widespread superstition that twins have power over the weather in general and over rain and wind in particular.[[587]] That tempests are caused by the spirits of the dead is a belief of the Araucanians of Chili. Not a storm bursts upon the Andes or the ocean which these Indians do not ascribe to a battle between the souls of their fellow-countrymen and the dead Spaniards. In the roaring of the wind they hear the trampling of the ghostly horses, in the peal of the thunder the roll of the drums, and in the flashes of lightning the fire of the artillery.[[588]]
|Every Latin town probably had its local Jupiter.| Thus, if the kings of Alba and Rome imitated Jupiter as god of the oak by wearing a crown of oak leaves, they seem also to have copied him in his character of a weather-god by pretending to make thunder and lightning. And if they did so, it is probable that, like Jupiter in heaven and many kings on earth, they also acted as public rain-makers, wringing showers from the dark sky by their enchantments whenever the parched earth cried out for the refreshing moisture. At Rome the sluices of heaven were opened by means of a sacred stone, and the ceremony appears to have formed part of the ritual of Jupiter Elicius, the god who elicits from the clouds the flashing lightning and the dripping rain.[[589]] And who so well fitted to perform the ceremony as the king, the living representative of the sky-god?
|Many local Jupiters in Latium.| The conclusion which we have reached as to the kings of Rome and Alba probably holds good of all the kings of ancient Latium: each of them, we may suppose, represented or embodied the local Jupiter. For we can hardly doubt that of old every Latin town or settlement had its own Jupiter, as every town and almost every church in modern Italy has its own Madonna; and like the Baal of the Semites the local Jupiter was commonly worshipped on high places. Wooded heights, round which the rain-clouds gather, were indeed the natural sanctuaries for a god of the sky, the rain, and the oak. At Rome he occupied one summit of the Capitoline hill, while the other summit was assigned to his wife Juno, whose temple, with the long flight |Capitoline Jupiter and Juno.| of stairs leading up to it, has for ages been appropriately replaced by the church of St. Mary “in the altar of the sky” (in Araceli).[[590]] That both heights were originally wooded seems certain, for down to imperial times the saddle which joins them was known as the place “between the two groves.”[[591]] Virgil tells us that the hilltop where gilded temples glittered in his day had been covered of old by shaggy thickets, the haunt of woodland elves and savage men, “born of the tree-trunks and the heart of oak.”[[592]] These thickets were probably composed of oaks, for the oak crown |The hills of Rome once wooded with oaks.| was sacred to Capitoline Juno as well as to Jupiter;[[593]] it was to a sacred oak on the Capitol that Romulus fastened the spoils,[[594]] and there is evidence that in early times oak-woods clothed other of the hills on which Rome was afterwards built. Thus the Caelian hill went originally by the name of the Mountain of the Oak Grove on account of the thickets of oak by which it was overgrown,[[595]] and Jupiter was here worshipped in his character of the oak-god;[[596]] one of the old gates of Rome, apparently between the Caelian and the Esquiline hills, was called the Gate of the Oak Grove for a similar reason;[[597]] and within the walls hard by was a Chapel of the Oak Grove dedicated to the worship of the oak-nymphs.[[598]] These nymphs appear on coins of the Accoleian family as three women supporting on their shoulders a pole from which rise leafy branches.[[599]] The Esquiline hill seems also to have derived its name from its oaks. After mentioning the Chapel of the Oak and other hallowed groves which still dotted the hill in his time, the antiquary Varro tells us that their bounds were now much curtailed, adding with a sigh that it was no wonder the sacred old trees should give way to the modern worship of Mammon.[[600]] Apparently the Roman nobles of those days sold the ancient woods, as their descendants sell their beautiful gardens, for building-land. To this list of oak-clad hills on the left bank of the Tiber must be added the Quirinal, if Quirinus, who had a very ancient shrine on the hill, was the oak-god.[[601]] Under the Aventine was a grove of evergreen oaks,[[602]] which appears to have been no other than the grove of Egeria outside the Porta Capena.[[603]] The old grove of Vesta, which once skirted the foot of the Palatine hill on the side of the Forum,[[604]] must surely have been a grove of oaks; for not only does an oak appear growing beside the temple of Vesta on a fine relief preserved in the gallery of the Uffizi at Florence, but |The sacred Vestal fire fed with oak-wood.| charred embers of the sacred Vestal fire have in recent years been discovered at the temple of Vesta in the Forum, and a microscopic analysis of them has proved that they consist of the pith or heart of trunks or great branches of oak (quercus).[[605]] The full significance of this discovery will appear later on. When the plebeians seceded to the Janiculum in the third century before Christ, the dictator Q. Hortensius summoned a meeting of the people and passed a law in an oak grove, which perhaps grew on the hill.[[606]] In this neighbourhood there was a street called the Street of the Oak Grove; it is mentioned in an inscription found in its original position near the modern Garibaldi bridge.[[607]] On the Vatican hill there stood an evergreen oak which was believed to be older than Rome; an inscription in Etruscan letters on a bronze tablet proclaimed the sanctity of the tree.[[608]] Finally, that oak woods existed at or near Rome in the earliest times has lately been demonstrated by the discovery in the Forum itself of a prehistoric cemetery, which contains amongst other sepultures the bones of several young children deposited in rudely hollowed trunks of oak.[[609]] With all this evidence before us we need not wonder that Virgil should speak of the primitive inhabitants of Rome as “born of the tree-trunks and the heart of oak,” and that the Roman kings should have worn crowns of oak leaves in imitation of the oak-god Jupiter, who dwelt in his sacred grove on the Capitol.
|The Alban kings may have imitated Latian Jupiter, who dwelt on the top of the Alban Mount.| If the kings of Rome aped Capitoline Jove, their predecessors the kings of Alba probably laid themselves out to mimic the great Latian Jupiter, who had his seat above the city on the summit of the Alban Mountain. Latinus, the legendary ancestor of the dynasty, was said to have been changed into Latian Jupiter after vanishing from the world in the mysterious fashion characteristic of the old Latin kings.[[610]] The sanctuary of the god on the top of the mountain was the religious centre of the Latin League, as Alba was its political capital till Rome wrested the supremacy from its ancient rival. Apparently no temple, in our sense of the word, was ever erected to Jupiter on this his holy mountain; as god of the sky and thunder he appropriately received the homage of his worshippers in the open air. The massive wall, of which some remains still enclose the old garden of the Passionist monastery, seems to have been part of the sacred precinct which Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, marked out for the solemn annual assembly of the Latin League.[[611]] The god’s oldest sanctuary on this airy mountain-top was a grove;[[612]] and bearing in mind not merely the special consecration of the oak to Jupiter, but also the traditional oak crown of the Alban kings and the analogy of the Capitoline Jupiter at Rome, we may suppose that the trees in the grove were oaks.[[613]] We know that in antiquity Mount Algidus, an outlying group of the Alban hills, was covered with dark forests of oak;[[614]] and among the tribes who belonged to the Latin League in the earliest days, and were entitled to share the flesh of the white bull sacrificed on the Alban Mount, there was one whose members styled themselves the Men of the Oak,[[615]] doubtless on account of the woods among which they dwelt.
|Theophrastus’s description of the woods of Latium.| But we should err if we pictured to ourselves the country as covered in historical times with an unbroken forest of oaks. Theophrastus has left us a description of the woods of Latium as they were in the fourth century before Christ. He says: “The land of the Latins is all moist. The plains produce laurels, myrtles, and wonderful beeches; for they fell trees of such a size that a single stem suffices for the keel of a Tyrrhenian ship. Pines and firs grow in the mountains. What they call the land of Circe is a lofty headland thickly wooded with oak, myrtle, and luxuriant laurels. The natives say that Circe dwelt there, and they shew the grave of Elpenor, from which grow myrtles such as wreaths are made of, whereas the other myrtle-trees are tall.”[[616]] Thus the prospect from the top |The prospect from the Alban Mount in antiquity.| of the Alban Mount in the early days of Rome must have been very different in some respects from what it is to-day. The purple Apennines, indeed, in their eternal calm on the one hand, and the shining Mediterranean in its eternal unrest on the other, no doubt looked then much as they look now, whether bathed in sunshine, or chequered by the fleeting shadows of clouds; but instead of the desolate brown expanse of the fever-stricken Campagna, spanned by its long lines of ruined aqueducts, like the broken arches of the bridge in the vision of Mirza, the eye must have ranged over woodlands that stretched away, mile after mile, on all sides, till their varied hues of green or autumnal scarlet and gold melted insensibly into the blue of the distant mountains and sea.
Thus the Alban Mount was to the Latins what Olympus was to the Greeks, the lofty abode of the sky-god, who hurled his thunderbolts from above the clouds. The white steers which were here sacrificed to him in his sacred grove, as in the Capitol at Rome,[[617]] remind us of the white bulls which the Druids of Gaul sacrificed under the holy oak when |Resemblance between the Latin worship of Jupiter and the Druidical worship of the oak.| they cut the mistletoe;[[618]] and the parallel would be all the closer if, as we have seen reason to think, the Latins worshipped Jupiter originally in groves of oak. Other resemblances between ancient Gaul and Latium will meet us later on. When we remember that the ancient Italian and Celtic peoples spoke languages which are nearly related to each other,[[619]] we shall not be surprised at discovering traces of community in their religion, especially in what concerns the worship of the god of the oak and the thunder. For that worship, as we shall see presently, belongs to the oldest stratum of Aryan civilisation in Europe.
|Sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno.| But Jupiter did not reign alone on the top of his holy mountain. He had his consort with him, the goddess Juno, who was worshipped here under the same title, Moneta, as on the Capitol at Rome.[[620]] As the oak crown was sacred to Jupiter and Juno on the Capitol,[[621]] so we may suppose it was on the Alban Mount, from which the Capitoline worship was derived. Thus the oak-god would have his oak-goddess in the sacred oak grove. So at Dodona the oak-god Zeus was coupled with Dione, whose very name is only a dialectically different form of Juno;[[622]] and so on the top of Mount Cithaeron he was periodically wedded to an oaken image of Hera.[[623]] It is probable, though it cannot be positively proved, that the sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno was annually celebrated by all the peoples of the Latin stock in the month which they named after the goddess, the midsummer month of June.[[624]] Now on the first of June the Roman pontiffs performed certain rites in the grove of Helernus beside the Tiber, and on the same day, and perhaps in the same place, a nymph of the grove, by name Carna, received offerings of lard and bean-porridge. She was said to be a huntress, chaste and coy, who gave |Janus and Carna.| the slip to her lovers in the depths of the wood, but was caught by Janus. Some took her to be Diana herself.[[625]] If she were indeed a form of that goddess, her union with Janus, that is, Dianus, would be appropriate; and as she had a chapel on the Caelian hill, which was once covered with oak-woods,[[626]] she may have been, like Egeria, an oak-nymph. Further, Janus, or Dianus, and Diana, as we shall see later on, were originally mere doubles of Jupiter and Juno, with whom they coincide in name and to some extent in function. Hence it appears to be not impossible that the rite celebrated by the pontiffs on the first of June in the sacred grove of Helernus was the marriage of Jupiter and Juno under the forms of Janus and Diana. It would be some confirmation of this view if we could be sure that, as Ovid seems to imply, the Romans were in the habit of placing branches of white thorn or buckthorn in their |Ancient use of white thorn or buckthorn to ward off witchcraft.| windows on the first of June to keep out the witches;[[627]] for in some parts of Europe precisely the same custom is observed, for the same reason, a month earlier, on the marriage day of the King and Queen of May.[[628]] The Greeks certainly believed that branches of white thorn or buckthorn fastened to a door or outside the house had power to disarm the malignant arts of sorcerers[[629]] and to exclude spirits. Hence they hung up branches of it before the door when sacrifices were being offered to the dead, lest any of the prowling ghosts should be tempted to revisit their old homes or to invade those of other people.[[630]] When the atheist Bion lay adying, he not only caused sacrifices to be offered on his behalf to the gods whose existence he had denied, but got an old hag to mumble incantations over him and to bind magical thongs about his arms, and he had boughs of buckthorn and laurel attached to the lintel to keep out death.[[631]] However, the evidence as to the rites observed by the Romans on the first of June is too slight and dubious to allow us to press the parallel with May Day.
|At the sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno in later times the parts of the deities may have been acted by the Flamen Dialis and the Flaminica.| 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,[[632]] we may suppose that under the Republic the ceremony was either performed over images of the divine pair or acted by the Flamen Dialis and his wife the Flaminica. For the Flamen Dialis was the priest of Jove; indeed, ancient and modern writers have regarded him, with much probability, as a living image of Jupiter, a human embodiment of the sky-god.[[633]] 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 Flamen and Flaminica may have been the deputies of the king and queen.| the king and queen masqueraded in the character of deities, and as at Athens the queen annually wedded the vine-god Dionysus. That the Roman king and queen should act the parts of Jupiter and Juno would seem all the more natural because these deities themselves bore the title of King and Queen.[[634]] Even if the office of Flamen Dialis existed under the kings, as it appears to have done, the double representation of Jupiter by the king and the flamen need not have seemed extraordinary to the Romans of the time. The same sort of duplication, as we saw, appears to have taken place at Alba, when the Julii were allowed to represent the supreme god in the character of Little Jupiters, while the royal dynasty of the Silvii continued to wield the divine thunder and lightning.[[635]] And long ages afterwards, history repeating itself, another member of the Julian house, the first emperor of Rome, was deified in his lifetime under the title of Jupiter, while a flamen was appointed to do for him what the Flamen Dialis did for the heavenly Jove.[[636]] It is said that Numa, the typical priestly king, at first himself discharged the functions of Flamen Dialis, but afterwards appointed a separate priest of Jupiter with that title, in order that the kings, untrammeled by the burdensome religious observances attached to the priesthood, might be free to lead their armies to battle.[[637]] The tradition may be substantially correct; for analogy shews that the functions of a priestly king are too harassing and too incongruous to be permanently united in the same hands, and that sooner or later the holder of the office seeks to rid himself of part of his burden by deputing to others, according to his temper and tastes, either his civil or his religious duties. Hence we may take it as probable that the fighting kings of Rome, tired of parading as Jupiter and of observing all the elaborate ritual, all the tedious restrictions which the character of godhead entailed on them, were glad to relegate these pious mummeries to a substitute, in whose hands they left the crosier at home while they went forth to wield the sharp Roman sword abroad. This would explain why the traditions of the later kings, from Tullus Hostilius onwards, exhibit so few traces of sacred or priestly functions adhering to their office. Among the ceremonies which they henceforward performed by deputy may have been the rite of the sacred marriage.
|At the sacred marriage the King and Queen of Rome probably personated the god and goddess of the oak.| Whether that was so or not, the legend of Numa and Egeria appears to embody a reminiscence of a time when the priestly king himself played the part of the divine bridegroom; and as we have seen reason to suppose that the Roman kings personated the oak-god, while Egeria is expressly said to have been an oak-nymph, the story of their union in the sacred grove raises a presumption that at Rome in the regal period a ceremony was periodically performed exactly analogous to that which was annually celebrated at Athens down to the time of Aristotle.[[638]] The marriage of the King of Rome to the oak-goddess, like the wedding of the vine-god to the Queen of Athens, must have been intended to quicken the growth of vegetation by homoeopathic magic. Of the two forms of the rite we can hardly doubt that the Roman was the older, and that long before the northern invaders met with the vine on the shores of the Mediterranean their forefathers had married the tree-god to the tree-goddess in the vast oak forests of Central and Northern Europe. In the England of our day the forests have mostly disappeared, yet still on many a village green and in many a country lane a faded image of the sacred marriage lingers in the rustic pageantry of May Day.
CHAPTER XIV
THE KING’S FIRE
|Sacred Marriage of the Fire-god with a woman.| Thus far we have dealt mainly with those instances of the Sacred Marriage in which a human being is wedded to the divine powers of vegetation or water. Now we pass to the consideration of a different class of cases, in which the divine bridegroom is the fire and his bride a human virgin. And these cases are particularly important for our present enquiry into the early Latin kingship, since it appears that the old Latin kings were commonly supposed to be the offspring of the fire-god by mortal mothers. The evidence which points to this conclusion is as follows.
|Legend of the birth of King Servius Tullius from the fire.| First, let us take the legend of the birth of King Servius Tullius. It is said that one day the virgin Ocrisia, a slave-woman of Queen Tanaquil, the wife of King Tarquin the elder, was offering as usual cakes and libations of wine on the royal hearth, when a flame in the shape of the male member shot out from the fire. Taking this for a sign that her handmaiden was to be the mother of a more than mortal son, the wise Queen Tanaquil bade the girl array herself as a bride and lie down beside the hearth. Her orders were obeyed; Ocrisia conceived by the god or spirit of the fire, and in due time brought forth Servius Tullius, who was thus born a slave, being the reputed son of a slave mother and a divine father, the fire-god. His birth from the fire was attested in his childhood by a lambent flame which played about his head as he slept at noon in the king’s palace.[[639]] This story, as others have pointed out before,[[640]] seems clearly to imply that the mother of Servius was a Vestal Virgin charged with the care and worship of the sacred fire in the king’s house. Now, in Promathion’s History of Italy, cited by Plutarch, a similar tale was told of the birth of Romulus himself. It is |Legend of the birth of Romulus from the fire.| said that in the house of the King of Alba a flame like to the male organ of generation hung over the hearth for many days. Learning from an oracle that a virgin should conceive by this phantom and bear a son of great valour and renown, the king bade one of his daughters submit to its embraces, but she disdained to do so, and sent her handmaid instead. Angry at her disobedience, her father ordered both the maidens to be put to death. But Vesta appeared to him in a dream, forbade the execution, and commanded that both the girls should be imprisoned until they had woven a certain web, after which they were to be given in marriage. But the web was never finished, for as fast as they wove it by day, other maidens, in obedience to the king’s orders, unwove it at night. Meantime the handmaiden conceived by the flame of fire, and gave birth to Romulus and Remus.[[641]] In this legend, as in the story of the birth of Servius Tullius, it is plain that the mother of the future King of Rome was both a slave and a priestess of Vesta. Orthodox Roman tradition always admitted that she was a Vestal, but naturally enough represented her as the king’s daughter rather than his slave. The god Mars, it was said, got her with child as she drew water in his sacred grove.[[642]] However, when we compare this legend with the similar story of the birth of Servius, we may suspect that Promathion has preserved, though perhaps in a perverted form, an old feature of the Latin kingship, namely, that one of the king’s parents might be, and sometimes was, a slave. Whether that was so or not, such tales at least bear witness to an old belief that the early Roman kings were born of virgins and of the fire. Similarly Caeculus, the founder of Praeneste, passed for a |Legend of the birth of Caeculus from the fire.| son of Vulcan. It was said that his mother conceived him through a spark, which leapt from the fire and struck her as she sat by the hearth. She exposed the child near a temple of Jupiter, and he was found there beside a fire by some maidens who were going to draw water. In after-life he proved his divine birth by working an appropriate miracle. When an infidel crowd refused to believe that he was the son of a god, he prayed to his father, and immediately the unbelievers were surrounded with a flame of fire.[[643]] More than this, the whole of the Alban dynasty appear to have traced their descent from a Vestal, for the wife of King Latinus, their legendary ancestor, was named Amata[[644]] or Beloved, and this was the regular title bestowed on a Vestal after her election,[[645]] a title which cannot be fully understood except in the light of the foregoing traditions, which seem to shew that the Vestals were regularly supposed to be beloved by the fire-god. Moreover, fire is said to have played round the head of Amata’s daughter Lavinia,[[646]] just as it played round the head of the fire-born Servius Tullius. As the same prodigy was reported of Julus or Ascanius, the son of Aeneas,[[647]] we may suspect that a similar legend was told of his miraculous conception at the hearth.
|The Vestal Virgins seem to have been regarded as the wives of the fire-god.| Now we may take it as certain that the Romans and Latins would never have traced the descent of their kings from Vestal Virgins unless they had thought that such a descent, far from being a stain, was, under certain circumstances, highly honourable. What the circumstances were that permitted a Vestal to become a mother, not only with impunity but with honour and glory, appear plainly from the stories of the birth of Caeculus, Romulus, and Servius Tullius. If she might not know a mortal man, she was quite free, and indeed was encouraged, to conceive and bear a son to the fire-god. In fact the legends suggest that the Vestals were regularly regarded as the fire-god’s wives. This would explain why they were bound to chastity during their term of service: the bride must be true to her divine bridegroom. And the theory of chastity could be easily reconciled with the practice of maternity by allowing a man to masquerade as the fire-god at a sacred marriage, just as in Egypt the king disguised himself as the god Ammon when he wedded the queen,[[648]] or as among the Ewe tribes the priest poses as the python-god when he goes in to the human brides of the serpent.[[649]] Thus the doctrine of the divine birth of kings presents no serious difficulty to people who believe that a god may be made flesh in a man, and that a virgin may conceive and bear him a son. Of course the theory of the divine motherhood of the Vestals applies only to the early regal and therefore prehistoric period. Under the Republic the demand for kings had ceased, and with it, therefore, the supply. Yet a trace of the old view of the Vestals as virgin mothers lingered down to the latest times in the character of Vesta herself, their patroness and type; for Vesta always bore the official title of Mother, never that of Virgin.[[650]] We may surmise that a similar belief and practice once obtained in Attica. For Erichthonius, king of Athens, is said to have been a son of the fire-god Hephaestus by the virgin goddess Athena: the story told of his miraculous birth from the ground, which had been impregnated by the seed of the fire-god, is clearly a later version devised to save the virginity of his mother.[[651]] The perpetual lamp of Athena, which burned in the Erechtheum or house of Erechtheus (who was identical with Erichthonius) on the acropolis of Athens,[[652]] may have answered to the perpetual fire of Vesta at Rome; and it is possible that the maidens called Arrephoroi or Errephoroi, who dwelt close to the Erechtheum,[[653]] may at one time have personated Athena and passed, like the Vestals, for wives of the fire-god.
|Rationalistic theory of the duties of the Vestals rejected.| It has, indeed, been held that the Vestals were of old the king’s daughters, who were kept at home and forbidden to marry for no other reason than that they might devote themselves to the domestic duties of drawing water, mopping the house, tending the fire, and baking cakes.[[654]] But this rationalistic theory could hardly explain the superstitious horror which the infidelity of a Vestal always excited in the Roman mind. Customs which begin in reason seldom end in superstition. It is likely, therefore, that the rule of chastity imposed on the Vestals was based from the first on a superstition rather than on a mere consideration of practical convenience. The belief that the Vestals were the spouses of the fire-god would explain the rule.[[655]] We have seen that the practice of marrying women to gods has been by no means uncommon. If the spirit of the water has his human wife, why not the spirit of the fire? Indeed, primitive man has a special reason for thinking that the fire-god should always be married. What that reason is, I will now try to explain.
|The Vestal fire of later times was a continuation of the fire on the king’s hearth.| But first it is necessary to apprehend clearly that the Vestal fire of republican and imperial Rome was strictly the successor or continuation of the fire which in the regal period had burned on the king’s hearth. That it was so appears plainly from the stories of the birth of Romulus and Servius Tullius, which shew that Vesta was believed to be worshipped at the royal fireside by maidens who were either the king’s daughters or his slaves. This conclusion is amply confirmed by a study of the temple of Vesta and the adjoining edifices in the Roman Forum. For the so-called temple of the goddess never was, strictly speaking, a temple at all. This fact we have on the authority of Varro himself, the greatest of Roman antiquaries.[[656]] The little round building in which the sacred fire always burned was merely a copy of the round hut in which the king, like his |The round temple of Vesta a copy of the ancient Italian hut.| subjects, had dwelt in days of old. Tradition preserved a memory of the time when its walls were made of wattled osiers and the roof was of thatch;[[657]] indeed, with that peculiar clinging to the forms of the past which is characteristic of royalty and religion, the inmost shrine continued down even to late times to be fashioned of the same simple materials.[[658]] The hut of Romulus, or what passed for it, constructed of wood, reeds, and straw, was always preserved and carefully repaired in the original style. It stood on the side of the Palatine hill facing the Circus Maximus.[[659]] A similar hut, roofed with thatch, was in like manner maintained on the Capitoline hill, and traditionally associated with Romulus.[[660]] The so-called temple of Vesta in historical times stood not on any of the hills, but in the Forum, at the northern foot of the Palatine. Its situation in the flat ground is quite consistent with the view that the building represents the king’s house of early, though not of the very earliest, times; for, according to tradition, it was built by Numa in this position between the Palatine and the Capitol, at the time when he united the two separate towns on these hills and turned the low swampy ground between them into their common place of assembly. Here, too, beside the temple of Vesta, the king built himself a house, which was ever afterwards known as the Regia or palace; formerly he had dwelt on the Quirinal.[[661]] In after-times this old palace of the kings was perhaps the official residence of their successor, the King of the Sacred Rites.[[662]] Adjoining it was the house of the Vestals,[[663]] at first, no doubt, a simple and unpretentious edifice, but afterwards a stately pile gathered round a spacious open court which must have resembled the cloister of a mediaeval monastery. We may assume that the kernel of this group of buildings was the round temple of Vesta, and that the hearth in it, on which burned the sacred fire, was originally the hearth of the king’s house. That the so-called temple was built on the model of the round huts of the old Latins is proved by the discoveries made at an ancient necropolis near Albano. The ashes of the dead were here deposited in urns, which are shaped like |Hut-urns found at Albano and Rome.| little round huts with conical roofs, obviously in order that the souls of the dead might live in houses such as they had inhabited during life. The roofs of these miniature dwellings are raised on cross-beams, sometimes with one or more holes to let out the smoke. The door is fastened by a crossbar, which is passed through a ring on the outside and tied to the two side-posts. In some of these hut-urns the side-posts are duplicated, or even triplicated, for the sake of ornament; and it is probable that the ring of columns which encircled the little temple of Vesta in historical times was merely an extension of the door-posts of the prehistoric hut. The necropolis in which these urns were found must be very ancient, since it was buried under the streams of lava vomited by the Alban Mountain in eruption. But the mountain has not been an active volcano within historical times, unless, indeed, the showers of stones and the rain of blood often recorded as ominous prodigies by Roman writers may be explained as jets of pumice and red volcanic dust discharged by one of the craters.[[664]] The prehistoric burial-ground lately discovered in the Roman Forum has yielded several hut-urns of precisely the same shape as those of the Alban cemetery. Hence we may infer with tolerable certainty that the earliest Latin settlers both on the Alban hills and at Rome dwelt in round huts built of wattle and dab, with peaked roofs of thatch.[[665]]
|“Numa’s crockery,” the primitive earthenware vessels used by the Vestals.| If further evidence were needed to convince us that the round temple of Vesta merely reproduced a Roman house of the olden time, it might be supplied by the primitive vessels of coarse earthenware in which the Vestals always presented their offerings, and which, in memory of the artlessness of an earlier age, went by the name of “Numa’s crockery.”[[666]] A Greek historian, writing when Rome was at the height of her power and glory under Augustus, praises the Romans for the austere simplicity with which, in an age of vulgar wealth and ostentation, they continued to honour the gods of their fathers. “I have seen,” said he, “meals set before the gods on old-fashioned wooden tables, in mats and earthenware dishes, the food consisting of barley loaves and cakes and spelt and firstfruits and such-like things, all plain and inexpensive and free from any touch of vulgarity. And I have seen libations offered, not in vessels of silver and gold, but in little earthen cups and jugs; and I heartily admired a people which thus walked in the ways of their fathers, not deviating from the ancient rites into extravagance and display.”[[667]] Specimens of this antique pottery have come to light of late years at the house of the Vestals, the temple of Vesta, and other religious centres in the Forum;[[668]] others had been found previously on the Esquiline hill and in the necropolis of Alba Longa.[[669]] We may conjecture that if the Romans continued to serve the gods their meals in simple earthenware dishes long after they themselves quaffed their wine from goblets of crystal and gold or from murrhine cups with their cloudy iridescent hues of purple and white,[[670]] they did so, not from any principle of severe good taste, but rather from that superstitious fear of innovation which has embalmed in religious ritual, as in amber, so many curious relics of the past. The old forms and materials of the vessels were consecrated by immemorial usage and might not be changed with impunity. Indeed, in the ritual of the Arval Brothers the holy pots themselves appear to have been an object of worship.[[671]] Specimens of these pots have been found on the site of the sacred grove where the Brothers performed their quaint service, and they shed an interesting light on the conservatism of the Roman religion. Some of them are moulded in the most primitive fashion by |Rude pottery used by the Arval Brothers.| the hand without any mechanical appliance. But most of them belong to a stage of art, later indeed than this rude beginning, yet earlier than the invention of the potter’s wheel. In order to give the vessels their proper shape and prevent the sides from collapsing, wooden hoops were inserted in them, and the marks made by these hoops in the soft clay may still be seen on the inside of most of the pots found in the grove. We may suppose that when the potter’s wheel came into universal use, the old art of making pottery by the hand was lost; but as religion would have nothing to do with pots made in the new-fangled way, the pious workman had to imitate the ancient ware as well as he could, eking out his imperfect skill with the aid of wooden hoops.[[672]] Perhaps the fictores Vestalium and the fictores Pontificum, of whom we read in inscriptions,[[673]] were those potters who, combining a retrograde art with sound religious principles, provided the Vestals and Pontiffs with the coarse crockery so dear to gods and to antiquaries. If that was so, they may have had in the exercise of their craft to observe some such curious rules as are still |Savage superstitions as to the making of pottery.| observed in similar circumstances by the savage Yuracares, a tribe of Indians living dispersed in the depths of beautiful tropical forests, at the eastern foot of the Bolivian Andes. We are told by an explorer that “the manufacture of pottery is not an everyday affair with this superstitious people, and accordingly they surround it with singular precautions. The women, who alone are entrusted with the duty, go away very solemnly to look for the clay, but they do so only when there is no crop to be gathered. In the fear of thunder they betake themselves to the most sequestered spots of the forest in order not to be seen. There they build a hut. While they are at work they observe certain ceremonies and never open their mouth, speaking to each other by signs, being persuaded that one word spoken would infallibly cause all their pots to break in the firing; and they do not go near their husbands, for if they did, all the sick people would die.”[[674]] Among the Ba-Ronga of South Africa pottery is made by women only, and they prefer to employ a child under puberty to light the fire in which the pots are to be baked, because the child has pure hands and the pots are therefore less likely to crack in the furnace than if the woman lit the fire herself.[[675]] If the reader objects that Roman potters cannot have been trammelled by superstitions like those which hamper the savage potters of America and Africa, I would remind him of the rules laid down by grave Roman writers for the moral guidance of cooks, bakers, and butlers. After mentioning a number of these writers by name, Columella informs us that “all of them are of opinion that he who engages in any one of these occupations is bound to be |Chastity required in persons who handle dishes and food.| chaste and continent, since everything depends on taking care that neither the dishes nor the food should be handled by any one above the age of puberty, or at least by any one who is not exceedingly abstemious in sexual matters. Therefore a man or woman who is sexually unclean ought to wash in a river or running water before he touches the contents of the storeroom. That is why there should be a boy or a maid to fetch from the storeroom the things that are needed.”[[676]] When Roman cooks, bakers, and butlers were expected to be so strict in the service of their human masters, it might naturally be thought that the potters should be not less so whose business it was to fashion the rude yet precious vessels meet for the worship of the gods.
|Sanctity of the storeroom (penus) and of the Penates in a Roman house.| If the storeroom (penus) of a Roman house was deemed so holy that its contents could only be handled by persons ceremonially clean, the reason was that the Penates or gods of the storeroom dwelt in it.[[677]] The domestic hearth, where the household meals were cooked in the simple days of old, was the natural altar of the Penates;[[678]] their images, together with those of the Lares, stood by it and shone in the cheerful glow of the fire, when the family gathered round it in the evening.[[679]] Thus in every house Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, was intimately bound up with the Penates or gods of the storeroom; indeed, she was reckoned one of them.[[680]] Now the temple of Vesta, being nothing more than a type of the oldest form of Roman house, naturally had, like an ordinary house, its sacred storeroom, and its Penates or gods of the storeroom.[[681]] Hence if in every common house strict chastity was, theoretically at least, expected of all who entered the storeroom, we can well understand why such an obligation should have been laid on the Vestals, who had in their charge the holiest of all storerooms, the chamber in which were popularly supposed to be preserved the talismans on which the safety of the state depended.[[682]]
|Thus the temple of Vesta, with its perpetual fire and its sacred storeroom, was merely a copy of the Roman king’s house.| Thus on the whole we may regard it as highly probable that the round temple of Vesta in the Forum, with its sacred storeroom and perpetual fire, was merely a survival, under changed conditions, of the old house of the Roman kings, which again may have been a copy of the still older house of the kings of Alba. Both were modelled on the round huts of wattled osiers in which the early Latins dwelt among the woods and hills of Latium in the days when the Alban Mountain was still an active volcano. Hence it is legitimate to compare the old legends of the royal hearth with the later practice in regard to the hearth of Vesta, and from the comparison to explain, if we can, the meaning both of the legends and of the practice.
CHAPTER XV
THE FIRE-DRILL
|Mode of rekindling the Vestal fire at Rome by means of the fire-drill.| In historical times, whenever the Vestal fire at Rome happened to be extinguished, the virgins were beaten by the pontiff; after which it was their custom, apparently with the aid of the pontiff, to rekindle the fire by drilling a hole in a board of lucky wood till a flame was elicited by friction. The new fire thus obtained was carried into the temple of Vesta by one of the virgins in a bronze sieve.[[683]] As this mode of producing fire is one of the most primitive known to man, and has been commonly employed by many savage |Use of the fire-drill by savages.| tribes down to modern times,[[684]] we need have no difficulty in believing that its use in the worship of Vesta was a survival from prehistoric ages, and that whenever the fire on the hearth of the Latin kings went out it was regularly relit in the same fashion. In its simplest form the fire-drill, as the apparatus has been appropriately named by Professor E. B. Tylor, consists of two sticks, the one furnished with a point and the other with a hole. The point of the one stick is inserted into the hole of the other, which is laid flat on the ground, while the operator holds the pointed stick upright in position and twirls it rapidly between his hands till the rubbing of the two sticks against each other produces sparks and at last a flame.
|Many savages regard the two sticks of the fire-drill as male and female, and the rubbing of the two together as a sexual union.| Many savages see in this operation a resemblance to the union of the sexes, and have accordingly named the pointed stick the man and the holed stick the woman. Thus we are told that among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia “fire was obtained by means of the fire-drill, which consisted of two dried sticks, each over a foot in length, and rounded off to less than an inch in diameter. One stick was sharpened at one end; while the other was marked with a couple of notches close to each other—one on the side, and the other on top. The sharpened end of the first stick was placed in the top notch of the other stick, and turned rapidly between the straightened palms of both hands. The heat thus produced by the friction of the sticks caused sparks to fall down the side notch upon tinder placed underneath, which, when it commenced to smoke, was taken in the hands, and blown upon until fanned into a flame. The tinder was dry grass, the shredded dry bark of the sagebrush, or cedar-bark. The sharpened stick was called the ‘man,’ and was made of black-pine root, tops of young yellow pine, heart of yellow-pine cones, service-berry wood, etc. The notched stick was called the ‘woman,’ and was generally made of poplar-root. However, many kinds of wood were used for this purpose. When hot ashes or a spark fell upon the tinder, they said, ‘The woman has given birth.’”[[685]] The Hopi Indians kindle fire ceremonially by the friction of two sticks, which are regarded respectively as male and female. The female stick has a notch in it and is laid flat on the floor; the point of the male stick is inserted in the notch of the female stick and is made to revolve rapidly by twirling the stick between the hands. Pollen is added as a male symbol, and the spark is caught in a tinder of shredded cedar bark.[[686]] The Urabunna tribe of Central Australia, who also make fire by means of the fire-drill, call the upright piece “the child-stick,” while they give to the horizontal or notched piece the name of “the mother-stick” or “the mother of the fire.”[[687]] So in the Murray Islands, Torres Straits, the upright stick is called the child (werem), and the horizontal stick the mother (apu). In Mabuiag, Torres Straits, on the other hand, the vertical stick is known as the male organ (ini), and the horizontal stick as the hole (sakai).[[688]]
|The fire-drill among the Arabs.| “The ancient Bedouins kindled fire by means of the fire-drill, which was composed of a horizontal stick, the zenda, and an upright stick, the zend. The science of language furnishes us with many parallels for this mode of regarding the two parts as male and female; the two parts of the lock are distinguished in like manner; the spark is then the child, tifl; compare also our German Schraubenmutter, Muttergewinde. The sticks for making fire by friction are not taken from the same tree; on the contrary, they choose one as hard and tough as possible, and the other soft, which allows the hard one to fit into it more easily and catches fire the quicker on account of its loose texture. The soft wood was naturally the horizontal stick, the zenda, which the Arabs made out of Calotropis procera (’oshar), while for the upright stick they used a hard branch of markh.”[[689]]
|The fire-drill in Africa.| The Ngumbu of South Cameroons, in West Africa, formerly made fire by rubbing two sticks against each other. Of the sticks the one, called the male nschio, was put into a hole of the other, which was called the female nschio.[[690]] In East Africa the Masai men make fire by drilling a hole in a flat piece of wood with a hard pointed stick. They say that the hard pointed stick is a man and that the flat piece of wood is his wife. The former is cut from Ficus sycomorus and Ekebergia sp., the latter from any fibrous tree, such as Kigelia africana, Cordia ovalis, or Acacia albida. The women get their fire from the one which has thus been kindled by the men.[[691]] The Nandi similarly produce fire by rapidly drilling a hard pointed stick into a small hole in a flat piece of soft wood. The hard stick is called the male (kirkit) and the piece of soft wood the female (kôket). Among the Nandi, as apparently among the Masai, fire-making is an exclusive privilege of the men of the tribe.[[692]] The Baganda of Central Africa also made fire by means of the fire-drill; they called the upright stick the male, and the horizontal stick the female.[[693]] Among the Bantu tribes of south-eastern Africa, “when the native Africans use special fire, either in connection with sacrifice or the festival of first-fruits, it is produced by a doctor, and in the following manner:—Two sticks, made of the Uzwati tree, and called the ‘husband and wife,’ are given to him by the chief. These sticks are prepared by the magicians, and are the exclusive property of the chief, the ‘wife’ being the shorter of the two. The doctor cuts a piece off each stick, and proceeds to kindle fire in the usual manner, by revolving the one rapidly between the palms of his hands, while its end rests in a small hollow dug in the side of the other. After he has obtained fire, he gives it to his attendant, who gets the pots in order, and everything ready for cooking the newly-reaped fruits. The sticks are handed back to the chief by the doctor—no other hand must touch them—and put away till they are required next season. They are regarded as in a measure sacred, and no one, except the chief’s personal servant, may go to the side of the hut where they are kept. After being repeatedly used for fire-making, the doctor disposes of what remains, and new ones are made and consecrated by the magician. A special pot is used for the preparation of the feast, and no other than it may be set on a fire produced from the ‘husband and wife.’ When the feast is over, the fire is carefully extinguished, and the pot placed along with the sticks, where it remains untouched for another year.”[[694]] But even for the purposes of daily life these tribes still kindle fire in this manner, if they happen to be without matches. “A native takes two special sticks, made of a light wood. One of these he points: this is called the male stick. He then makes a conical hole in the centre of the other stick, which is called the female. Placing the female stick on the ground, he holds it firmly by his feet—a native finds no difficulty in this, as he can easily pick things off the ground with his toes if his hands are full. He then places the pointed stick into the conical hole, and slowly twirls the male stick between his hands. He does this while using a good deal of pressure, and the wood becomes powdered, lying round the revolving point in a little heap of dust. When he thinks he has made sufficient of the wood dust, he twirls the stick very fast, and in a moment the powder bursts into flame, which he uses to set fire to some dried grass.”[[695]]
|Fire-customs of the Herero.| The Damaras or Herero of Damaraland, in south-western Africa, maintain sacred fires in their villages, and their customs and beliefs in this respect present a close resemblance to the Roman worship of Vesta. Fortunately the Herero fire-worship has been described by a number of independent witnesses, and as their accounts agree substantially with each other, we may assume that they are correct. The people are a tall, finely-built race of nomadic herdsmen belonging to the Bantu stock, who seem to have migrated into their present country from the north and east about a hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago. The desert character of the country and its seclusion from the outer world long combined to preserve the primitive manners of the inhabitants.[[696]] In their native state the Herero are a purely pastoral people, possessing |The Herero a pastoral people.| immense herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats, which are the pride and joy of their hearts, almost their idols. They subsist chiefly on the milk of their herds, which they commonly drink sour. Of the flesh they make but little use, for they seldom kill any of their cattle, and never a cow, a calf, or a lamb. Even oxen and weathers are only slaughtered on solemn and festal occasions, such as visits, burials, and the like. Such slaughter is a great event in a village, and young and old flock from far and near to partake of the meat.[[697]] Their huts are of a round |Huts and villages of the Herero.| beehive shape, about ten feet in diameter. The framework consists of stout branches, of which the lower ends are rammed into the ground, while the upper ends are bent together and tied with bark. A village is composed of a number of these round huts arranged in a circle about the calves’ pen as a centre and surrounded by an artificial hedge of thorn-bushes.[[698]] At night the cattle are driven in through the hedge and take up their quarters in the open space round the calves’ pen.[[699]]
|Sacred fire of the Herero village maintained in or before the hut of the chief’s principal wife.| The hut of the great or principal wife of the chief, built and furnished in a more elaborate style than the rest, regularly stands to the east of the calves’ pen, in the direction of sunrise, so that from its position we can always learn approximately the season of the year when the village was founded. The chief or headman of the village has no special hut of his own; he passes the day in the hut of the great wife, and the night commonly in one of the huts of his other wives in the northern semicircle. Between the house of the great wife and the calves’ pen, but somewhat nearer to the pen, is a large heap of ashes on which, in good weather, a small, faintly glimmering fire may be seen to burn at any time of the day. The heap of ashes is the sacred hearth (okuruo); the fire is the holy fire (omurangere or omurangerero) of the village. The open space between the sacred hearth and the house of the great wife is known as the holy ground or the holy house (otyizero).[[700]] Betwixt the hearth and the calves’ fold stands a great withered branch of the omumborombonga (Combretum primigenum), the sacred tree of the Herero, from which they believe that both they and their cattle are descended. When a branch of this tree cannot be obtained its place is taken by a bough of the omwapu tree (Grevia spec.)[[701]] At night and in rainy weather the fire is transferred to the hut of the great wife, where it is carefully kept alight.[[702]] According to another account, the fire is regularly preserved in the house, and a brand is only brought out into the open air when the cattle are being milked at morning and evening in order that in presence of the fire the cow may be healthy and give much milk.[[703]] The custom in this respect perhaps varies in different villages, and may be determined in some measure by the climate. The sacred fire is regarded as the centre of the village; from it at evening the people fetch a light to kindle the fire on their own hearths, for every householder has his own private hearth in front of his hut. At the holy hearth are kept the most sacred possessions of the tribe, to wit, the bundle of sticks which represent their ancestors; here sacrifices are offered and enchantments performed; here the flesh of the victims is cooked; here is the proper place of the chief; here the elders assemble in council, and judgment is given; here strangers are received and ambassadors entertained. At the banquets held on solemn occasions all may partake of the flesh, whether they be friends or foes; the stranger’s curse would rest on the churl who should refuse him his just share; and this curse the Herero dreads above everything because he believes its effect to be infallible. So great is the veneration felt by the natives for the sacred hearth, with its hallowed bough, that they dare not approach it without testifying the deepest respect. They take off their sandals, throw themselves on the ground, and pray their great ancestor (Tate Mukuru) to be gracious to them. The horns of the oxen slaughtered at festivals lie beside the hearth; the chief sits on the largest pair when he is engaged in performing his magical rites. Near the fire, too, is a stone on which none but the chief has the right to sit.[[704]]
|The sacred fire among the Herero is watched and fed by the chief’s eldest unmarried daughter, who performs other priestly duties.| The duty of maintaining the sacred fire and preserving it from extinction is entrusted to the eldest unmarried daughter of the chief by his great wife; if he has no daughter, the task devolves on the unmarried girl who is next of kin to him. She bears the title of ondangere, derived from the name of the sacred fire (omurangere).[[705]] Besides keeping up the fire she has other priestly functions to discharge. Before the men start on a dangerous expedition, she rubs the holy ashes on their foreheads.[[706]] When a woman brings her new-born infant to the sacred hearth to receive its name, the maiden priestess or Vestal, as we may call her, sprinkles water on both mother and child.[[707]] Every morning, when the cattle walk out of the fold, she besprinkles the fattest of them with a brush dipped in water.[[708]] When an ox dies by accident at the village, she lays a piece of wood on its back, praying at the same time for long life, plenty of cattle, and so forth. Moreover, she ties a double knot in her apron for the dead beast, for a curse would follow if she neglected to do so.[[709]] Lastly, when the site of the village is changed, the priestess walks at the head of the people and of the herds, carrying a firebrand from the old sacred hearth and taking the utmost care to keep it alight.[[710]]
The chief or headman of the village is also the priest; |The Herero chief acts as a priest.| he alone may perform religious ceremonies except such as fall within the province of the Vestal priestess, his daughter. In his capacity of priest he keeps the sacred bundle of sticks which represent the ancestors, and at sacrifices he offers meat to them that they may consecrate it. When the old village is abandoned, it is his duty to carry, like Aeneas quitting the ruins of Troy,[[711]] these rude penates to the new home. However, it is deemed enough if he merely places the holy bundle on his back, and then hands it to a servant, who carries it for him. As a priest he introduces the newborn children to the spirits of the ancestors at the sacred hearth, and gives the infants their names; and as a priest he has a cow to himself, whose milk no one else may drink. This milk is kept in vessels which differ from the ordinary milk vessels, not only in shape and size, but also in being marked with the badge of his paternal clan. When a man goes forth from the village with his family and servants to herd the cattle on a distant pasture, or to found another village, he takes with him a burning brand from the sacred hearth wherewith to kindle the holy fire in his new home. By |Fire taken from the chief’s hearth by the founder of a new village.| doing so he acknowledges himself the vassal of the chief from whose hearth he took the fire. In this way a single village may give out swarm after swarm, till it has become the metropolis or capital of a whole group of villages, the inhabitants of which recognise the supremacy of the parent community, and regard themselves as all sitting round its sacred fire. It is thus that a village may grow into a tribe and its headman into a powerful chief, who, by means of marriage alliances and the adhesion of weaker rivals, may extend his sway over alien communities, and so gradually acquire the rank and authority of a king.[[712]] The political evolution of the Herero has indeed stopped short of this final stage; but among the more advanced branches of the Bantu race, such as the Zulus and the Matabeles, it is possible that the kingship has developed along these lines.
|The combined office of chief and priest among the Herero descends in the male line.| The possession of the sacred fire and of the ancestral sticks, carrying with it both political authority and priestly dignity, descends in the male line, and hence generally passes from father to son. In any case, whether the deceased had a son or not, the double office of chief and priest must always remain in his paternal clan (oruzo). If it should happen that the clan becomes extinct by his death, the |A chief’s sacred hearth abandoned for some time after his death.| sacred fire is put out, the hearth destroyed, no brand is taken from it, and the sticks representing the ancestors are laid with the dead man in the grave. But should there be an heir, as usually happens, he takes a fire-brand from the sacred hearth and departs with all the people to seek a new home, abandoning the old village for years. In time, however, they return to the spot, rebuild the huts on the same sites, and inhabit them again. But in the interval none of the kinsmen of the deceased may approach the deserted village under pain of incurring the wrath of the ghost. When the return at last takes place, and the people have announced their arrival to the dead chief at his grave, which is generally in the cattle-pen, they make a new fire by the friction of the two sacred fire-sticks on the old hearth; for it is not lawful to bring with them a brand from their last settlement.[[713]]
|The sacred Herero fire rekindled by the fire-drill.| If the sacred fire should go out through the neglect of the priestess, a sudden shower of rain, or any other accident, the Herero deem it a very evil omen. The whole tribe is immediately summoned and large offerings of cattle are made as an expiation. Then the fire is relit by means of the friction of two sacred fire-sticks, which have been handed down from father to son. Every chief possesses such fire-sticks, and keeps them tied up with the bundle of holy sticks that represent the ancestors. One of the fire-sticks is pointed, the other has a hole in the middle, and sometimes also a notch cut round it. In the notch some fungus or rotten wood is placed as tinder. The holed stick is held fast on the ground by the knees of the operator, who inserts the point of the other stick in the hole and twirls it rapidly between the palms of his hands in the usual way. As soon as a spark is emitted it catches the tinder, which can then easily be blown up into a flame. Thus it is from the tinder, we are told, and not from the sticks, that the flame is elicited. In this fashion, if everything is very dry, as it generally is in Hereroland, the native gets fire in about a minute. The names applied to the two sticks indicate that the pointed stick (ondume) is regarded as male and the holed stick (otyiya) as female, and that the process of making fire by the friction of the two is compared to the intercourse of the sexes. As to the wood of which the fire-sticks are made accounts differ. According to Dr. H. Schinz the holed or female stick is of a soft wood, the pointed or male stick of a hard wood, generally of the |The male fire-stick made of the sacred omumborombonga tree.| sacred omumborombonga tree (Combretum primigenum). According to Mr. C. G. Büttner, neither of the sticks need be of a special tree, and any wood that happens to be at hand may be employed for the purpose; only the wood of the thorny acacias, which abound in the country, appears to be unsuitable.[[714]] Probably the rule mentioned by Dr. Schinz is the original one, and if in some places the wood of the sacred tree has ceased to be used to light the holy fire, the reason may be simply that the tree does not grow there, and that accordingly the people are obliged to use such wood as they can find. We have seen that a branch of the sacred omumborombonga tree is regularly planted beside the village hearth, but that in default of it the people have to put up with a bough of another kind of tree, the omuwapu (Grevia spec).[[715]] Such substitutions were especially apt to be forced on the Herero in the southern part of the country, where the omumborombonga tree is very rare and forests do not exist, the larger trees growing singly or in clumps. In the north, on the other hand, vegetation is much richer, and regular woods are to be found. Here, in particular, the omumborombonga tree is one of the ornaments of the landscape. It grows only beside water-courses, and generally stands solitary, surpassing a tall oak in height, and rivalling it in girth; indeed, so thick is the trunk that were it hollowed out a family could lodge in it. Unlike most trees in the country it is thornless. Whole forests of it grow to the eastward of Hereroland, in the direction of Lake Ngami. So close is the grain and so heavy the wood that some of the early explorers gave it the name of the “iron tree.”[[716]] Hence it is well adapted to form the upright stick of the fire-drill, for which a hard wood is required.
|Herero tradition of the origin of men and cattle from the sacred omumborombonga tree.| The Herero have a tradition that in the beginning they and their cattle and all four-footed beasts came forth from the omumborombonga tree in a single day, whereas birds, fish, and creeping things sprang from the rain. However, slightly different versions of the Herero genesis appear to be current. As to the origin of men and cattle from the tree, public opinion is unanimous; but some dissenters hold that sheep and perhaps goats, but certainly sheep, issued from a flat rock in the north of the country. For some time past, unfortunately, the tree has ceased to be prolific; it is of no use waiting beside it in the hope of capturing such oxen and sheep as it might bear. Yet still the Herero testify great respect for the tree which they regard as their ancestor (omukuru). To injure it is deemed a sacrilege which the ancestor will punish sooner or later. In passing it they bow reverently and stick a bunch of green twigs or grass into the trunk or throw it down at the foot. They address the tree, saying, “U-zera tate mukururume, Thou art holy, grandfather!” and they even enter into conversation with it, giving the answers themselves in a changed voice. They hardly dare to sit down in its shadow. All this reverence they display for every tree of the species.[[717]]
|Migration from one country to another sometimes involves a change of sacred tree.| On the whole, then, we may infer that so long as the Herero dwelt in a land where their ancestral tree abounded, they made the male fire-stick from its wood; but that as they gradually migrated from a region of tropical rains and luxuriant forests to the arid mountains, open grass lands, and dry torrid climate of their present country,[[718]] they had in some places to forgo its use and to take another tree in its stead. Similarly the Aryan invaders of Greece and Italy were obliged, under a southern sky, to seek substitutes for the sacred oak of their old northern home; and more and more, as time went on and the deciduous woods retreated up the mountain slopes, they found what they sought in the laurel, the olive, and the vine. Zeus himself had to put up with the white poplar at his great sanctuary of Olympia in the hot lowlands of Elis;[[719]] and on summer days, when the light leaves of the poplar hardly stirred in the languid air and the buzz of the flies was more than usually exasperating, he perhaps looked wistfully away to the Arcadian mountains, looming blue in the distance through a haze of heat, and sighed for the shadow and the coolness of their oak woods.
|The worship of the chief’s fire a form of ancestor-worship.| Thus it appears that the sanctity ascribed by the Herero to the chief’s fire springs from a custom of kindling it with the wood of their ancestral tree; in fact, the cult of the fire resolves itself into a form of ancestor-worship. For the religion of the Herero, like that of all Bantu peoples, is first and foremost a propitiation of the spirits of their forefathers conceived as powerful beings able and willing to harm them. From youth to death the Herero live in constant dread of their ancestors (ovakuru, plural of omukuru), who, sometimes seen and sometimes unseen, return to earth and play their descendants many a spiteful trick. They glide into the village, steal the milk, drive the cattle from the fold, and waylay women. More than that, they can inflict disease and death, decide the issue of war, and send or withhold rain at pleasure. They are the cause of every vexation and misfortune, and the whole aim of the living is by frequent sacrifices to mollify and appease the dead.[[720]]
|The sacred hearth a special seat of the ancestral spirits.| Now the sacred hearth seems to be in a special sense the seat of the worship paid to the ancestral spirits. Here the head of the family sits and communes with his forefather, giving himself the answers he thinks fit.[[721]] Hither the newborn child is brought with its mother to be introduced to the spirits and to receive its name, and the chief, addressing his ancestors, announces, “To you a child is born in your village; may this village never come to an end!”[[722]] Hither the bride is conducted at her marriage, and a sheep having been sacrificed, its flesh is placed on the holy bushes at the hearth.[[723]] Hither the sick are carried to be commended to the care of their ghostly kinsmen, and as the sufferer is borne round and round the fire his friends chant:—
“See, Father, we have come here,
With this sick man to you,
That he may soon recover.”[[724]]
|Sacred sticks representing the deceased ancestors of the Herero.| But the most tangible link between the worship of the fire and the worship of the dead is furnished by the sacred sticks representing the ancestors, which are kept in a bundle together with the two sticks used for kindling the fire by friction. Each of these rude idols or Lares, as we may call them, “symbolises a definite ancestor of the paternal clan, and, taken together, they may be regarded as the most sacred possession of a family. They stand in the closest relation to the holy hearth, or rather to the priestly dignity, and must therefore always remain in the same paternal clan.”[[725]] These sticks “are cut from trees or bushes which are dedicated to the ancestors, and they represent the ancestors at the sacrificial meals, for the cooked flesh of the victims is always set before them first. Many people always keep these sticks, tied up in a bundle with straps and hung with amulets, in the branches of the sacrificial bushes which stand on the sacred hearth (okuruo). The sacrificial bush serves to support the severed pieces of the victim, and thus in a measure represents an altar or table of sacrifice.”[[726]] When after an absence of years the people return to a village where a chief died and was buried, a new fire is kindled by friction on the old hearth, the flesh of the first animal slaughtered here is cooked in a particular vessel, and the chief hands a portion of it to every person present. “An image, consisting of two pieces of wood, supposed to represent the household deity, or rather the deified parent, is then produced, and moistened in the platter of each individual. The chief then takes the image, and, after affixing a piece of meat to the upper end of it, he plants it in the ground, on the identical spot where his parent was accustomed to sacrifice. The first pail of milk produced from the cattle is also taken to the grave; a small quantity is poured on the ground, and a blessing asked on the remainder.” Each clan, the writer adds, has a particular tree or shrub consecrated to it, and of this tree or shrub the two sticks representing the deceased are made.[[727]]
|The sacred sticks representing the ancestors are probably the fire-sticks which were used to kindle fresh fire in the village after a death.| In these accounts the sacred sticks which stand for the ancestors, and to which the meat of sacrifices is first offered, are distinguished, expressly or implicitly, from the sacred sticks which are used to make the holy fire.[[728]] Other writers, however, identify the two sets of sticks. Thus we are told that the Herero “make images of their ancestors as follows. They take the two sticks with which they make fire and tie them together with a fresh wisp of corn. Then they worship this object as their ancestor. They may approach it only on their knees. For hours together they sit before it and talk with it. If you ask them where they imagine their ancestors to be, since they cannot surely be these sticks, they answer that they do not know. The sticks are kept in the house of the great wife.”[[729]] Again, another writer defines the ondume or male fire-stick as a “stick representing an omukuru, i.e. ancestor, deity, with which and the otyiza the holy fire is made.”[[730]] Again, the Rev. G. Viehe, in describing the ceremonies observed at the return to a deserted village where an ancestor (omukuru) is buried, tells us that they bring no fire with them, “but holy fire must now be obtained from the omukuru. This is done with the ondume and the otyiza. The meaning of these two words plainly shows that the first represents the omukuru, and the other his wife.”[[731]] The same excellent authority defines the ozondume as “sticks which represent the ovakuru, i.e. ancestors, deities”;[[732]] and ozondume is simply the plural of ondume, the male fire-stick.[[733]] Hence it appears highly probable that the sticks representing the ancestors are, in fact, nothing but the male fire-sticks, each of which was cut to make a new fire on the return to the old village after a chiefs death. The stick would be an appropriate emblem of the deceased, who had been in his lifetime the owner of the sacred fire, and who now after his death bestowed it on his descendants by means of the friction of his wooden image. And the symbolism will appear all the more natural when we remember that the male fire-stick is generally made from the ancestral tree, that the process of fire-making is regarded by the Herero as the begetting of a child, and that their name for the stick, according to the most probable etymology, signifies “the begetter.” Such sticks would be far too sacred to be thrown away when they had served their immediate purpose of kindling a new fire, and thus in time a whole bundle of them would accumulate, each of them recalling, and in a sense representing, one of the great forefathers of the tribe. When the old sticks had ceased to be used as fire-lighters, and were preserved merely as memorials of the dead, it is not surprising that their original function should be overlooked by some European observers, who have thus been led to distinguish them from the sticks by which the fire is actually produced at the present day.[[734]] Amongst the |Sacred fire-boards among the Koryaks and Chuckchees of north-eastern Asia.| Koryaks of north-eastern Asia, when the sacred fire-boards, roughly carved in human form, are so full of holes that they can no longer be used for the purpose of kindling fire, they are still kept as holy relics in a shrine near the door of the house; and a stranger who observed the respect with which they are treated, but who did not know their history, might well mistake them for figures of worshipful ancestors and never guess the practical purpose which they once served as fire-lighters. A Koryak family regards its sacred fire-board not only as the deity of the household fire, the guardian of the family hearth, but also as the guardian of the reindeer, and they call it the “master of the herd.” It is supposed to protect the reindeer from wolves and from sickness and to prevent the animals from straying away and being lost. When a reindeer is slaughtered, the sacred fire-board is taken out and smeared with the blood. The maritime Koryaks, who do not live by reindeer, regard the sacred fire-board as the master of the underground house and the helper in the hunt of sea-mammals. They call it “father” and feed it from time to time with fat, which they smear on its mouth.[[735]] Among the neighbouring Chuckchees in the north-eastern extremity of Asia similar ideas and customs obtain in respect of the fire-boards. These are roughly carved in human form and personified, almost deified, as the supernatural guardians of the reindeer. The holes made by drilling in the board are deemed the eyes of the figure and the squeaking noise produced by the friction of the fire-drill in the hole is thought to be its voice. At every sacrifice the mouth of the figure is greased with tallow or with the marrow of bones. When a new fire-board is made, it is consecrated by being smeared with the blood of a slaughtered reindeer, and the owner says, “Enough! Take up your abode here!” Then the other fire-boards are brought to the same place and set side by side on the ground. The owner says, “Ho! these are your companions. See that I always find easily every kind of game!” Next he slaughters another reindeer and says, “Hi! Since you are one of my young men, go and drive the herd hither!” Then after a pause he asks the fire-board, “Have you brought it?” to which in the name of the fire-board he answers, “I have.” Thereupon, speaking in his own person, he says, “Then catch some reindeer! It seems that you will keep a good watch over the herd. There, from the actual chief of the fire-boards, you may learn wisdom.” These sacred fire-boards are often handed down from generation to generation as family heir-looms. During the calving-season they are taken from their bag and placed behind the frame in the outer tent in order that they may protect the dams.[[736]]
|The evolution of a fire-god or fire-goddess.| These Koryak and Chuckchee customs illustrate the evolution of a fire-god into the patron deity of a family and his representation in human form by the board which is used in fire-making. As the fire-board is that part of the kindling apparatus which is commonly regarded as female in contradistinction to the drill, which is regarded as male, we can easily understand why the deity of the fire should sometimes, as at Rome, be conceived as a goddess rather than as a god; whereas if the drill itself were viewed as the essential part of the apparatus we should expect to find a fire-god and not a fire-goddess.
CHAPTER XVI
FATHER JOVE AND MOTHER VESTA
|Similarity between the fire-customs of the Herero and the ancient Latins.| The reader may remember that the preceding account of the fire-customs of the Herero was introduced for the sake of comparison with the Latin worship of Vesta. The points of similarity between the two will now be indicated. In the first place we have seen reason to hold that the ever-burning Vestal fire at Rome was merely a survival of the fire on the king’s hearth. So among the Herero the sacred fire of the village is the chief’s fire, which is kept burning or smouldering in his house by day and by night. In Rome, as in Hereroland, the extinction of the fire was regarded as an evil omen, which had to be expiated by sacrifices,[[737]] and new fire was procured in primitive fashion by twirling the point of one stick in the hole of another. The Roman fire was fed with the wood of the sacred oak tree, just as the African fire is kindled with the wood of the sacred omumborombonga tree. Beside both were kept the images of the ancestors, the Lares at Rome, the ozondume in Hereroland. The king’s house which sheltered the fire and the images was originally in Italy what the chief’s hut still is in Hereroland, a circular hut of osiers, not as ancient dreamers thought, because the earth is round,[[738]] nor yet because a circle is the symbol of rest, but simply because it is both easier and cheaper to build a round hut than a square.[[739]]
|The Roman Vestals, or some of them, appear to have been originally the king’s daughters.| Further, in Rome the sacred fire was tended, as it still is in Hereroland, by unmarried women, and as the Herero priestesses are the chiefs daughters, so, we may conjecture, it was with some at least of the Vestals among the ancient Latins. The Roman Vestals appear to have been under the patria potestas of the king, and, in republican times, of the Pontifex Maximus, who succeeded to some of the king’s functions.[[740]] But if they were under the patria potestas of the king, they must have been either his wives or daughters; as virgins they cannot have been his wives; it remains, therefore, that they were his daughters. Various circumstances confirm this view. Their house at Rome, as we saw, always adjoined the Regia, the old palace of the kings; they were treated with marks of respect usually accorded to royalty;[[741]] and the most famous of all the Vestals, the mother of Romulus, was said to be a daughter of the King of Alba.[[742]] The custom of putting an unfaithful Vestal to death by immuring her in a subterranean chamber[[743]] may have been adopted in order to avoid the necessity of taking the life of a princess by violence;[[744]] for, as we shall learn later on, there is a very widespread reluctance to spill royal blood.
|Rites performed by the Vestals for the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of cattle.| Amongst the Herero the chief’s daughter who tends the holy fire has also to perform certain priestly rites, which have for their object the prosperity and multiplication of the cattle.[[745]] So, too, it was with the Roman Vestals. On the fifteenth of April every year pregnant cows were sacrificed to the Earth goddess; the unborn calves were torn from their mothers’ wombs, the chief Vestal burned them and kept their ashes for use at the shepherds’ festival of the Parilia. This sacrifice of pregnant cows was a fertility charm designed, by a curious application of homoeopathic magic, to quicken both the seed in the ground and the wombs of the cows and the ewes.[[746]] At the Parilia, held on the twenty-first of April, the Vestals mixed the ashes of the unborn calves with the blood of a horse which had been sacrificed in October, and this mixture they distributed to shepherds, who fumigated their flocks with it as a means of ensuring their fecundity and a plentiful supply of milk.[[747]]
|The Vestals were probably regarded as embodiments of Vesta, who was a mother-goddess, the bestower of offspring on cattle and women.| Strange as at first it may seem to find holy virgins assisting in operations intended to promote the fertility of the earth and of cattle, this reproductive function accords perfectly with the view that they were of old the wives of the fire-god and the mothers of kings. On that view, also, we can understand why down to imperial times the Vestals adored the male emblem of generation,[[748]] and why Vesta herself, the goddess of whom they were the priestesses and probably the embodiments, was worshipped by the Romans not as a virgin but as a mother.[[749]] She was sometimes identified with Venus.[[750]] Like Diana, with whom she was identified at Nemi, she appears to have been a goddess of fecundity, who bestowed offspring both on cattle and on women. That she was supposed to multiply cattle is indicated by the ceremonies which the Vestals performed in April; that she made women to be mothers is hinted at not obscurely by the legends of the birth of the old Latin kings.[[751]] The ancient Aryan practice of leading a bride thrice round the hearth of her new home[[752]] may have been intended not merely to introduce her to the ancestral spirits who had their seats there, but also to promote conception, perhaps by allowing one of these very spirits to enter into her and be born again. When the ancient Hindoo bridegroom led his bride round the fire, he addressed the fire-god |Custom of leading a bride round the fire perhaps a fertility charm.| Agni with the words, “Mayst thou give back, Agni, to the husband the wife together with offspring.”[[753]] When a Slavonian bride enters her husband’s house after marriage she is led thrice round the hearth; then she must stir the fire with the poker, saying, “As many sparks spring up, so many cattle, so many male children shall enliven the new home.”[[754]] At Mostar, in Herzegovina, the bride seats herself on a bag of fruit beside the hearth in her new home and pokes the fire thrice. While she does so, they bring her a small boy and set him on her lap. She turns the child thrice round in order that she may give birth to male children.[[755]] Still more clearly does belief in the impregnation of a woman by fire come out in another South Slavonian custom. When a wife wishes to have a child, she will hold a vessel full of water beside the fire on the hearth, while her husband knocks two burning brands together so that the sparks fly out. When some of them have fallen into the vessel, the woman drinks the water which has thus been fertilised by the fire.[[756]] The same belief seems still to linger in England; for there is a Lincolnshire saying that if a woman’s apron is burned above the knee by a spark or red-hot cinder flying out of a fire, she will become a mother.[[757]] Thus the superstition which gave rise to the stories of the birth of the old Roman kings holds its ground to this day in Europe, even in our own country. So indestructible are the crude fancies of our savage forefathers. Thus we may safely infer that the old practice of leading a bride formally to or round the hearth was designed to make her fruitful through the generative virtue ascribed to the fire. The custom is not confined to peoples of the Aryan stock, for it is observed also by the Esthonians and the Wotyaks of Russia[[758]] and, as we have seen, by the Herero of South Africa.[[759]] It expresses in daily life the same idea which is embodied in the myths of the birth of Servius Tullius and the other Latin kings, whose virgin mothers conceived through contact with a spark or tongue of fire.[[760]]
|New-born children brought to the hearth as a mode of introducing them to the ancestral spirits.| Accordingly, where beliefs and customs of this sort have prevailed, it is easy to understand why new-born children should be brought to the hearth, and why their birth should there be solemnly announced to the ancestors. This is done by the Herero,[[761]] and in like manner on the fifth or seventh day after a birth the ancient Greeks used to run naked round the hearth with the new-born babe in their arms.[[762]] This Greek ceremony may perhaps be regarded as merely a purification, in other words as a means of keeping at bay the demons who lie in wait for infants. Certainly in other parts of the world a custom has prevailed of passing a newly born child backwards and forwards through the smoke of the fire for the express purpose of warding off evil spirits or other baleful influences.[[763]] Yet on the analogy of the preceding customs we may conjecture that a practice of solemnly bringing infants to the domestic hearth has also been resorted to as a mode of introducing them to the spirits of their fathers.[[764]] In Russia the old belief that the souls of the ancestors were somehow in the fire on the hearth has left traces of itself down to the present time. Thus in the Nijegorod Government it is still forbidden to break up the smouldering faggots in a stove, because to do so might cause the ancestors to fall through into hell. And when a Russian family moves from one house to another, the fire is raked out of the old stove into a jar and solemnly conveyed to the new one, where it is received with the words, “Welcome, grandfather, to the new home!”[[765]]
|Reasons why a procreative virtue was ascribed to fire.| But why, it may be asked, should a procreative virtue be attributed to the fire, which at first sight appears to be a purely destructive agent? and why in particular should the ancestral spirits be conceived as present in it? Two different reasons perhaps led savage philosophers to these conclusions. In the first place the common mode of making fire by means of the fire-drill has suggested, as we have seen, to many savages the notion that fire is the child of the fire-sticks, in other words that the rubbing of the fire-sticks together is a sexual union which begets offspring in the shape of a flame. This of itself suffices to impress on the mind of a savage the idea that a capacity of reproduction is innate in the fire, and consequently that a woman may conceive by contact with it. Strictly speaking, he ought perhaps to refer this power of reproduction not to the fire but to the fire-sticks; but savage thought is in general too vague to distinguish clearly between cause and effect. If he thinks the matter out, as he may do if he is more than usually reflective, the savage will probably conclude that fire |The process of making fire by friction seems to the savage an act of generation.| exists unseen in all wood, and is only elicited from it by friction,[[766]] so that the spark or flame is the child, not so much of the fire-sticks, as of the parent fires in them. But this refinement of thought may well be above the reach even of a savage philosopher. The second reason which seems to have led early man to associate the fire with the souls of his ancestors was a superstitious veneration for the ancestral tree which furnished either the fuel for the sacred fire or the material out of which he carved one or both of the fire-sticks. Among the Herero, as we |Again, the fire was associated with the ancestors through the sacred ancestral tree which furnished either the fuel or the fire-sticks.| saw, the male fire-stick commonly is, or used to be, made out of the holy omumborombonga tree, from which they believe that they and their cattle sprang in days of old. Hence nothing could be more natural than that they should regard the fire produced by the friction of a piece of the ancestral tree, as akin to themselves, the offspring of the same mighty forefather, to wit, the sacred tree. Similarly, the Vestal fire at Rome was fed with the wood of the oak, the sacred tree of Jupiter, and the first Romans are described as “born of the tree trunks and the heart of oak.”[[767]] No wonder, then, that the Latin kings, who claimed to represent Jupiter, and in that capacity masqueraded in his costume and made mock thunder, should have prided themselves on being sprung from a fire which was fed with the wood of the god’s holy tree; such an origin was only another form of descent from the oak and from the god of the oak, Jupiter himself.
|Esthonian marriage custom.| The theory that impregnation by fire is really impregnation by the wood of the tree with which the fire is kindled, derives some confirmation from a custom which is observed at marriage by some of the Esthonians in the neighbourhood of Oberpahlen. The bride is escorted to a tree, which is thereupon cut down and burned. When the fire blazes up, she is led thrice round it and placed between three armed men, who clash their swords over her head, while the women sing a song. Then some coins are thrown into the fire, and when it has died out they are recovered and knocked into the stump of the tree, which was cut down to serve as fuel.[[768]] This is clearly a mode of rewarding, first the fire, and next the tree, for some benefit they have conferred on the bride. But in early society husband and wife desire nothing so much as offspring; this therefore may very well be the benefit for which the Esthonian bride repays the tree.
|The conception of the Fire-mother intimately bound up with that of the female fire-stick in the fire-drill.| Thus far we have regarded mainly the paternal aspect of the fire, which the Latins mythically embodied in Jupiter, that is literally Father Jove, the god of the oak. The maternal aspect of the fire was for them represented by Mother Vesta, as they called her; and as the Roman king stood for Father Jove, so his wife or daughter—the practice on this point appears to have varied—stood for Mother Vesta. Sometimes, as we have seen, the Vestal virgins, the priestesses or rather incarnations of Vesta, appear to have been the daughters, not the wives, of the king. But, on the other hand, there are grounds for thinking that the wife of King Latinus, the legendary ancestor of the Latins, was traditionally regarded as a Vestal,[[769]] and the analogy of the Flamen Dialis with his wife the Flaminica, as I shall shew presently, points also to a married pair of priestly functionaries concerned with the kindling and maintenance of the sacred fire. However that may have been, we may take it as probable that the notion of the fire-mother was intimately associated with, if it did not spring directly from, the female fire-stick of the fire-drill, just as the conception of the fire-father was similarly bound up with the male fire-stick.
|The Fire-father and the Fire-mother represented by a priest and priestess who together made the sacred fire by means of the fire-drill.| Further, it seems that these mythical beings, the fire-father and the fire-mother, were represented in real life by a priest and a priestess, who together made the sacred fire, the priest appropriately twirling the pointed male stick, while the priestess held fast on the ground the holed female stick, ready to blow up into a flame the spark which fell on the tinder. In the composite religion of Rome, formed like the Roman state by the fusion of several tribes, each with its own gods and priests, such pairs of fire-priests may at first have been duplicated. In one or more of the tribes which afterwards made up the Roman commonwealth the function of kindling the holy fire of oak was perhaps assigned to the Flamen Dialis and his wife the Flaminica, the living representatives of Jupiter and Juno; and if, as some scholars think, the name flamen comes from flare, “to blow up,”[[770]] the derivation would fit well with this theory. But in historical Rome the duty of making the sacred fire lay with the Vestal virgins and the chief pontiff.[[771]] The mode in which they shared the work between them is not described by ancient writers, but we may suppose that one of the virgins held the board of lucky wood on the ground while the pontiff inserted the point of a peg into the hole of the board and made the peg revolve rapidly between the palms of his hands. When the likeness of this mode of producing fire to the intercourse of the sexes had once struck people, they would deem it unnatural, and even indecent, for a woman to usurp the man’s function of twirling the pointed male stick. But the Vestals certainly helped to make fire by friction; it would seem, therefore, that the part they took in the process can only have been the one I have conjecturally assigned to them. At all events, the conjecture is supported by the following analogies.
|Among the Djakuns fire is made by the leader and his unmarried daughter.| The Djakuns, a wild tribe of the Malay Peninsula, are in the habit of making fire by friction. A traveller has described the custom as follows: “When a troop was on a journey and intended either to pitch a temporary camp, or to make a longer settlement, the first camp fire was kindled for good luck by an unmarried girl with the help of the fire-drill. Generally this girl was the daughter of the man who served the troop as leader. It was deemed of special importance that on the first night of a settlement the fire of every band should be lit by the unmarried daughter of a leader. But she might only discharge this duty if she had not her monthly sickness on her at the time. This custom is all the more remarkable inasmuch as the Djakuns in their migrations always carried a smouldering rope of bark with them.” “When the fire was to be kindled, the girl took the piece of soft wood and held it on the ground, while her father, or any other married man, twirled the vertical borer upon it. She waited for the spark to spring from the wood, and fanned it into a flame either by blowing on it or by waving the piece of wood quickly about in her hand. For this purpose she caught the spark in a bundle of teased bark and exposed it to a draught of air.” “Fire so produced was employed to kindle the other fires for that night. They ascribed to it good luck in cooking and a greater power of keeping off tigers and so forth, than if the first fire had been kindled by a spark from the smouldering bark rope.”[[772]] This account suggests a reason why a holy fire should be tended by a number of virgins: one or more of them might at any time be incapacitated by a natural infirmity for the discharge of the sacred duty.
|Among the Slavs of the Balkans fire is made by a young girl and boy.| Again, the Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula ascribe a healing or protective power to “living fire,” and when an epidemic is raging in a village they will sometimes extinguish all the fires on the hearths and procure a “living fire” by the friction of wood. At the present day this is done by various mechanical devices, but the oldest method, now almost obsolete, is said to be as follows:—A girl and a boy between the ages of eleven and fourteen, having been chosen to make the fire, are led into a dark room, where they must strip themselves of all their clothes without speaking a word. Then two perfectly dry cylindrical pieces of lime-wood are given them, which they must rub rapidly against each other, turn about, till they take fire. Tinder is then lit at the flame and used for the purpose of healing. This mode of kindling the “living fire” is still practised in the Schar Mountains of Old Servia. The writer who describes it witnessed some years ago the use of the sacred fire at the village of Setonje, at the foot of the Homolye Mountains, in the heart of the great Servian forest. But on that occasion the fire was made in the manner described, not by a boy and girl, but by an old woman and an old man. Every fire in the village had previously been extinguished, and was afterwards relit with the new fire.[[773]]
|Among the Kachins fire is made by a man and woman jointly.| Among the Kachins of Burma, when people take solemn possession of a new house, a new fire is made in front of it by a man and woman jointly. A dry piece of bamboo is pegged down on the ground; the two fire-makers sit down facing each other at either end of it, and together rub another piece of bamboo on the horizontal piece, one of them holding the wrists of the other and both pressing down firmly till fire is elicited.[[774]]
|Thus the conception of the fire-sticks as male and female is carried out by requiring the male stick to be worked by a man and the female stick to be worked by a woman.| In the first at least of these customs, it is plain, the conception of the fire-sticks as male and female has been logically carried out by requiring the male fire-stick to be worked by a man and the female fire-stick to be held by a woman. But opinions seem to differ on the question whether the fire-makers |But opinions differ as to whether the fire-makers should be married or single.| should be wedded or single. The Djakuns prefer that the man should be married and the woman unmarried; on the other hand, the Slavs of the Schar Mountains clearly think it better that both should be single, since they entrust the duty of making the fire to a boy and girl. In so far as the man’s part in the work is concerned, some of our Scottish Highlanders agree with the Djakuns at the other end of the world; for the natives of Lewis “did also make use of a fire called Tin-egin, i.e. a forced fire, or fire of necessity, which they used as an antidote against the plague or murrain in cattle; and it was performed thus: all the fires in the parish were extinguished, and then eighty-one married men, being thought the necessary number for effecting this design, took two great planks of wood, and nine of them were employed by turns, who by their repeated efforts rubbed one of the planks against the other until the heat thereof produced fire; and from this forced fire each family is supplied with new fire, which is no sooner kindled than a pot full of water is quickly set on it, and afterwards sprinkled upon the people infected with the plague, or upon the cattle that have the murrain. And this they all say they find successful by experiment: it was practised in the main land, opposite to the south of Skie, within these thirty years.”[[775]] On the other hand, the Germans of Halberstadt sided with the South Slavs on this point, for they caused the forced fire, or need fire, as it is commonly called, to be made by two chaste boys, who pulled at a rope which ran round a wooden cylinder.[[776]] The theory and practice of the Basutos in South Africa were similar. After a birth had taken place they used to kindle the fire of the hut afresh, and “for this purpose it was necessary that a young man of chaste habits should rub two pieces of wood quickly one against another, until a flame sprung up, pure as himself. It was firmly believed that a premature death awaited him who should dare to take upon himself this office, after having lost his innocence. As soon, therefore, as a birth was proclaimed in the village, the fathers took their sons to undergo the ordeal. Those who felt themselves guilty confessed their crime, and submitted to be scourged rather than expose themselves to the consequences of a fatal temerity.”[[777]]
|Reasons for entrusting the making of fire to unmarried boys and girls.| It is not hard to divine why the task of twirling the male fire-stick in the hole of the female fire-stick should by some people be assigned to married men. The analogy of the process to the intercourse of the sexes furnishes an obvious reason. It is less easy to understand why other people should prefer to entrust the duty to unmarried boys. But probably the preference is based on a belief that chastity leaves the boys with a stock of reproductive energy which they may expend on the operation of fire-making, whereas married men dissipate the same energy in other channels. A somewhat similar train of thought may explain a rule of virginity enjoined on women who assist in the production of fire by holding the female fire-stick on the ground. As a virgin’s womb is free to conceive, so, it might be thought, will be the womb of the female fire-stick which she holds; whereas had the female fire-maker been already with child, she could not be reimpregnated, and consequently the female fire-stick could not give birth to a spark. Thus, in the sympathetic connexion between the fire-sticks and the fire-makers we seem to reach the ultimate origin of the order of the Vestal Virgins: they had to be chaste, because otherwise they could not light the fire. Once when the sacred fire had gone out, the Vestal in charge of it was suspected of having brought about the calamity by her unchastity, but she triumphantly repelled the suspicion by eliciting a flame from the cold ashes.[[778]] Ideas of the same primitive kind still linger among the French peasantry, who think that if a girl can blow up a smouldering candle into a flame she is a virgin, but that if she fails to do so, she is not.[[779]] In ancient Greece none but persons of pure life were allowed to blow up the holy fire with their mouths; a vile man who had polluted his lips was deemed unworthy to discharge the duty.[[780]]
|The holy fire and virgins of St. Brigit in Ireland.| The French superstition, which I have just mentioned, may well date from Druidical times, for there are some grounds for thinking that among the old Celts, as among their near kinsmen the Latins, holy fires were tended by virgins. In our own country perpetual fires were maintained in the temple of a goddess whom the Romans identified with Minerva,[[781]] but whose native Celtic name seems to have been Brigit. Like Minerva, Brigit was a goddess of poetry and wisdom, and she had two sisters also called Brigit, who presided over leechcraft and smithcraft respectively. This appears to be only another way of saying that Brigit was the patroness of bards, physicians, and smiths.[[782]] Now, at Kildare in Ireland the nuns of St. Brigit tended a perpetual holy fire down to the suppression of the monasteries under Henry VIII.; and we can hardly doubt that in doing so they merely kept up, under a Christian name, an ancient pagan worship of Brigit in her character of a fire-goddess or patroness of smiths. The nuns were nineteen in number. Each of them had the care of the fire for a single night in turn; and on the twentieth evening the last nun, having heaped wood on the fire, used to say, “Brigit, take charge of your own fire; for this night belongs to you.” She then went away, and next morning they always found the fire still burning and the usual quantity of fuel consumed. Like the Vestal fire at Rome in the old days, the fire of St. Brigit burned within a circular enclosure made of stakes and brushwood, and no male might set foot inside the fence. The nuns were allowed to fan the fire or blow it up with bellows, but they might not blow on it with their breath.[[783]] |Not to breathe on a holy fire.| Similarly it is said that the Balkan Slavs will not blow with their mouths on the holy fire of the domestic hearth;[[784]] a Brahman is forbidden to blow a fire with his mouth;[[785]] and among the Parsees the priests have to wear a veil over their mouth lest they should defile the sacred fire by their breath.[[786]] The custom of maintaining a perpetual fire was not peculiar |Other perpetual fires in Ireland.| to Kildare, but seems to have been common in Ireland, for the native records shew that such fires were kept up in several monasteries, in each of which a small church or oratory was set apart for the purpose. This was done, for example, at the monasteries of Seirkieran, Kilmainham, and Inishmurray.[[787]] We may conjecture that these holy fires were merely survivals of the perpetual fires which in pagan |St. Brigit’s fire perhaps fed with oak-wood.| times had burned in honour of Brigit. The view that Brigit was a fire-goddess is confirmed by the observation that in the Christian calendar her festival falls the day before Candlemas, and the customs observed at that season by Celtic peasantry seem to prove that she was a goddess of the crops as well as of fire.[[788]] If that was so, it is another reason for comparing her to Vesta, whose priestesses performed ceremonies to fertilise both the earth and the cattle.[[789]] Further, there are some grounds for connecting Brigit, like Vesta, with the oak; for at Kildare her Christian namesake, St. Brigit, otherwise known as St. Bride or St. Bridget, built her church under an oak-tree, which existed till the tenth century, and gave its name to the spot, for Kildare is Cilldara, “the church of the oak-tree.”[[790]] The “church of the oak” may well have displaced a temple or sanctuary of the oak, where in Druidical days the holy fire was fed, like the Vestal fire at Rome, with the wood of the sacred tree.
|Early Irish monasteries built in oak groves.| We may suspect that a conversion of this sort was often effected in Ireland by the early Christian missionaries. The monasteries of Derry and Durrow, founded by St. Columba, were both named after the oak groves amidst which they were built; and at Derry the saint spared the beautiful trees and strictly enjoined his successors to do the same. In his old age, when he lived an exile on the shores of the bleak storm-swept isle of Iona, his heart yearned to the home of his youth among the oak groves of Ireland, and he gave expression to the yearning in passionate verse:—
“That spot is the dearest on Erin’s ground,
For the treasures that peace and purity lend,
For the hosts of bright angels that circle it round,
Protecting its borders from end to end.
“The dearest of any on Erin’s ground,
For its peace and its beauty I gave it my love;
Each leaf of the oaks around Derry is found
To be crowded with angels from heaven above.
“My Derry! my Derry! my little oak grove,
My dwelling, my home, and my own little cell,
May God the Eternal in Heaven above
Send death to thy foes, and defend thee well.”[[791]]
A feeling of the same sort came over a very different exile in a very different scene, when growing old amid the turmoil, the gaieties, the distractions of Paris, he remembered the German oak woods of his youth.
“Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland.
Der Eichenbaum
Wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft.
Es war ein Traum.”
|Virgin priestesses of fire among the Incas of Peru.| Far from the oaks of Erin and the saint’s last home among the stormy Hebrides, a sacred fire has been tended by holy virgins, with statelier rites and in more solemn fanes, under the equinoctial line. The Incas of Peru, who deemed themselves the children of the Sun, procured a new fire from their great father at the solstice in June, our Midsummer Day. They kindled it by holding towards the sun a hollow mirror, which reflected his beams on a tinder of cotton wool. But if the sky happened to be overcast at the time, they made the new fire by rubbing two sticks against each other; and they looked upon it as a bad omen when they were obliged to do this, for they said the Sun must be angry with them, since he refused to kindle the flame with his own hand. The sacred fire, however obtained, was deposited at Cuzco, the capital of Peru, in the temple of the Sun, and also in a great convent of holy virgins, who guarded it carefully throughout the year, and it was an evil augury if they suffered it to go out. These |Wives of the Sun in Peru.| virgins were regarded as the wives of the Sun, and they were bound to perpetual chastity. If any of them proved unfaithful to her husband the Sun, she was buried alive, like a Roman Vestal, and her paramour was strangled. The reason for putting her to death in this manner was probably, as at Rome, a reluctance to shed royal blood; for all these virgins were of the royal family, being daughters of the Incas or of his kinsmen. Besides tending the holy fire, they had to weave and make all the clothes worn by the Inca and his legitimate wife, to bake the bread that was offered to the Sun at his great festivals, and to brew the wine which the Inca and his family drank on these occasions. All the furniture of the convent, down to the pots, pans, and jars, were of gold and silver, just as in the temple of the Sun, because the virgins were deemed to be his wives. And they had a golden garden, where the very clods were of fine gold; where golden maize reared its stalks, leaves and cobs, all of the precious metal; and where golden shepherds, with slings and crooks of gold, tended golden sheep and lambs.[[792]] The analogy of these virgin guardians of the sacred flame furnishes an argument in favour of the view set forth in the preceding pages; for if the Peruvian Vestals were the brides of the Sun, may not the Roman Vestals have been the brides of the Fire?
|Virgin priestesses of fire in Mexico and Yucatan.| On the summit of the great pyramidal temple at Mexico two fires burned continually on stone hearths in front of two chapels, and dreadful misfortunes were supposed to follow if the fires were allowed to go out. They were kept up by priests and maidens, some of whom had taken a vow of perpetual virginity. But most of these girls seem to have served only for a year or more until their marriage. They offered incense to the idols, wove cloths for the service of the temple, swept the sacred area, and baked the cakes which were presented to the gods but eaten by their priests. They were clad all in white, without any ornament. A broom and a censer were their emblems. Death was the penalty inflicted on the faithless virgin who polluted by her incontinence the temple of the god.[[793]] In Yucatan there was an order of Vestals instituted by a princess, who acted as lady-superior and was deified after her death under the title of the Virgin of the Fire. The members enrolled themselves voluntarily either for life or for a term of years, after which they might marry. Their duty was to tend the sacred fire, the emblem of the sun. If they broke their vow of chastity or allowed the fire to go out, they were shot to death with arrows.[[794]]
|Virgin priestesses of fire among the Baganda.| Amongst the Baganda of Central Africa there used to be an order of Vestal Virgins (bakaja) who were attached to the temples of the gods. Their duties were to keep the fire of the god burning all night, to see that there was a good supply of firewood, and to watch that the suppliants did not bring to the deity anything that was tabooed to him. These maidens are also said to have had charge of some of the vessels. All of them were young girls; no man might touch them; and when they reached the age of puberty, the god ordered them to be given in marriage. The place of a girl who thus vacated office had to be supplied by another girl taken from the same clan.[[795]]
|Resemblance between the Flamen Dialis of the Romans and the Agnihotri or fire-priest of the Brahmans.| We have seen that some people commit the task of making fire by friction to married men; and following the opinion of other scholars I have conjectured that in some of the Latin tribes the duty of kindling and feeding the sacred fire may have been assigned to the Flamen Dialis, who had always to be married; if his wife died, he vacated his office.[[796]] The sanctity of his fire is proved by the rule that no brand might be taken from his house except for the purpose of a sacrifice.[[797]] Further, the importance ascribed to the discharge of his duties is attested by another old rule which forbade him to be absent from his house in Rome for a single night.[[798]] The prohibition would be intelligible if one of his duties had formerly been to superintend the maintenance of a perpetual fire. However that may have been, the life of the priest was regulated by a whole code of curious restrictions or taboos, which rendered the office so burdensome and vexatious that, in spite of the high honours attached to the post, for a period of more than seventy years together no man was found willing to undertake it.[[799]] Some of these restrictions will be examined later on.[[800]] Their similarity to the rules of life still observed in India by the Brahmans who are fire-priests (Agnihotris) seems to confirm the view that the Flamen also was originally a fire-priest. The parallel between the two priesthoods would be all the more remarkable if, as some scholars hold, the very names Brahman and Flamen are philologically identical.[[801]] As to these Brahmanical fire-priests or Agnihotris we are told that the number of them nowadays is very limited, because the ceremonies involve heavy expenditure, and the rules which regulate them are very elaborate and difficult. The offering of food to the fire at meals is, indeed, one of the five daily duties of every Brahman; but the regular fire-service is the special duty of the Agnihotri. In order that he may be ceremonially pure he is bound by certain obligations not to travel or remain away from home for any long time; to sell nothing which is produced by himself or his family; to pay little attention to worldly affairs; to speak the truth; to bathe and worship the deities in the afternoon as well as in the morning; and to sacrifice to his deceased ancestors on the fifteenth of every month. He is not allowed to take food at night. He may not eat alkaline salt, meat, honey, and inferior grain, such as some varieties of pulse, millet, and the egg plant. He never wears shoes nor sleeps on a bed, but always on the ground. He is expected to keep awake most of the night and to study the Shâstras. He may have no connexion with, nor unholy thoughts regarding, any woman but his wife; and he must abstain from every other act that involves personal impurity.[[802]] With these rules we may compare some of the obligations laid on the Flamen Dialis. In the old days, as we saw, he was bound never to be absent from his house for a single night. He might not touch or even name raw meat, beans, ivy, and a she-goat; he might not eat leavened bread, nor touch a dead body; and the feet of his bed had always to be smeared with mud.[[803]] This last rule seems to be a mitigation of an older custom of sleeping on the ground, a custom which is still observed by the fire-priest in India, as it was in antiquity by the priests of Zeus at Dodona.[[804]] Similarly the priest of the old Prussian god Potrimpo was bound to sleep on the bare earth for three nights before he sacrificed to the deity.[[805]]
|Mode in which the Agnihotri procures fresh fire by the friction of fire-sticks.| Every Agnihotri has a separate room in his house where the sacred fire is kept burning in a small pit of a cubit square. Should the fire chance to go out, the priest must get fresh fire from another priest or procure it by the friction of fire-sticks (arani). These comprise, first, a block of sami wood (Prosopis spicigera) in which a small hole is made emblematical of the female principle (sakti yoni), and, second, an upright shaft which is made to revolve in the hole of the block by means of a rope. The point in the drill where the rope is applied to cause it to revolve is called deva yoni. Two priests take part in the operation. Before they begin they sing a hymn in honour of the fire-god Agni. When the fire has been kindled they place it in a copper vessel and sprinkle it with powdered cow-dung. When it is well alight, they cover it with another copper vessel, sprinkle it with drops of water, and sing another hymn in honour of Agni. Finally, the new fire is consigned to the fire-pit.[[806]] According to another description of the modern Indian fire-drill, the lower block is usually made of the hard wood of the khadira or khair tree (Acacia catechu), and it contains two shallow holes. In one of these holes the revolving drill works and produces sparks by friction; the other hole contains tinder which is ignited by means of the sparks. This latter hole is known as the yoni, the female organ of generation. The upper or revolving portion of the drill is called the pramantha. It consists of a round shaft of hard wood, with a spike of softer wood inserted in its lower end. One priest causes the shaft to revolve by pulling a cord, while another priest presses the spike down into the hole in the block by leaning hard upon a flat board placed on the top of the shaft. The spike is generally made of the peepul or sacred fig-tree. When it has become charred by friction, it is replaced by another.[[807]] According to one account, the fire is made in this fashion, not by two priests, but by the Brahman and his wife; she pulls the cord, while he holds the borer in the hole and recites the spells necessary for the production of the fire.[[808]]
|The Indian fire-sticks made from the sacred fig and sami wood.| This practice of the modern Agnihotri or fire-priest of India is in general accord with the precepts laid down in the ancient sacred books of his religion. For these direct that the upper or male stick of the fire-drill should be made of the sacred fig-tree (asvattha), and the lower or female stick of sami wood (Prosopis spicigera); and they draw out the analogy between the process of fire-making and the intercourse of the sexes in minute detail.[[809]] It deserves to be |The male fire-stick made by preference from a sacred fig-tree growing as a parasite on the female sami tree.| noted that the male fire-stick was cut by preference from a sacred fig-tree which grew as a parasite on a sami or female tree. The reason for this preference is obvious to the primitive mind. A parasite clasping a tree with its tendrils is conceived as a man embracing a woman, hence a pair of fire-sticks made from a pair of trees thus interlaced will naturally possess the power of procreating fire by friction in an unusually high degree.[[810]] So completely, in the Hindoo mind, does the process of making fire by friction blend with the union of the human sexes that it is actually employed as part of a charm to procure male offspring.[[811]] Such a confusion of thought helps us to understand the part played by the domestic fire in the ritual of marriage and birth as well as in the legends of the miraculous origin of the Latin kings.[[812]] In ancient India the male and the female fire-stick were identified with King Pururavas and the nymph Urvasi, whose loves and sorrows formed the theme of a beautiful tale.[[813]]
|The Greeks also preferred to make one of the fire-sticks from a parasitic plant.| Like the ancient Indians, the Greeks seem to have preferred that one of the two fire-sticks should be made from a parasitic or creeping plant. They recommended that the borer of the fire-drill should be made of laurel and the board of ivy or another creeper, apparently a kind of wild vine which grew like ivy upon trees; but in practice both the borer and the board were sometimes made of other woods, among which buckthorn, the evergreen oak, and the lime are particularly mentioned.[[814]] When we consider the analogy of the Indian preference for a borer made from a parasite, and remember how deeply rooted in the primitive mind is the comparison of the friction of the fire-sticks to the union |The reason for such a preference is the analogy of the union of the sexes.| of the sexes, we shall hardly doubt that the Greeks originally chose the ivy or wild vine for a fire-stick from motives of the sort which led the Hindoos to select the wood of a parasitic fig-tree for the same purpose. But while the Hindoos regarded the parasite as male and the tree to which it clung as female, the Greeks of Theophrastus’s time seem to have inverted this conception, since they recommended that the board, which plays the part of the female in the fire-drill, should be made of ivy or another creeper, whereas the borer, which necessarily represents the male, was to be fashioned out of laurel. This would imply that the ivy was a female and the laurel a male. Yet in Greek, on the contrary, the word for ivy is masculine, and the plant was identified mythologically with the male god Dionysus;[[815]] whereas the word for laurel is feminine and the tree was identified with a nymph. Hence we may conjecture that at first the Greeks, like the Hindoos, regarded the clinging creeper as the male and the tree which it embraced as the female, and that of old, therefore, they made the borer of the fire-drill out of ivy and the board out of laurel. If this was so, the reasons which led them to reverse the usage can only be guessed at. Perhaps practical convenience had a share in bringing about the change. For the laurel is, as the late Professor H. Marshall Ward kindly informed me, a harder wood than the ivy, and to judge by general, though not universal, practice most people find it easier to make fire by the friction of a hard borer on a soft board than by rubbing a hard board with a soft point. This, therefore, would be a reason for making the borer of laurel and the board of ivy. If such a change took place in the history of the Greek fire-drill, it would be an interesting example of superstition modified, if not vanquished, by utility in the struggle for existence.
CHAPTER XVII
THE ORIGIN OF PERPETUAL FIRES
|The custom of maintaining a perpetual fire probably originated in the difficulty of making fire by friction.| Whatever superstitions may have gathered about it in the course of ages, the custom of maintaining a perpetual fire probably sprang from a simple consideration of practical convenience. The primitive mode of making fire by the friction of wood is laborious at all times, and it is especially so in wet weather. Hence the savage finds it convenient to keep a fire constantly burning or smouldering in order to spare himself the troubling of kindling it. This convenience becomes a necessity with people who do not know how to make fire. That there have been such tribes down to our own time is affirmed by witnesses whose evidence we have no reason to doubt. Thus Mr. E. H. Man, who resided eleven years in the Andaman Islands and was intimately acquainted with the natives, tells us that, being ignorant of |Some races said to be ignorant of the means of making fire.| the art of making fire, they take the utmost pains to prevent its extinction. When they leave a camp intending to return in a few days, they not only take with them one or more smouldering logs, wrapped in leaves if the weather be wet, but they also place a large burning log or faggot of suitable wood in some sheltered spot, where it smoulders for several days and can be easily rekindled when it is needed. While it is the business of the women to gather the wood, the duty of keeping up the fires both at home and in travelling by land or sea is not confined to them, but is undertaken by persons of either sex who have most leisure or are least burdened.[[816]] The Russian traveller, Baron Miklucho-Maclay, who lived among the natives of the Maclay coast of northern New Guinea at a time when they had hardly come into contact with Europeans, writes: “It is remarkable that here almost all the inhabitants of the coast possess no means whatever of making fire, hence they always and everywhere carry burning or glowing brands about with them. If they go in the morning to the plantation they carry a half-burnt brand from their hearth in order to kindle a fire at the corner of the plantation. If they go on a longer journey into the mountains, they again take fire with them for the purpose of smoking, since their cigars, wrapped in green leaves, continually go out. On sea voyages they usually keep glowing coals in a half-broken pot partly filled with earth. The people who remain behind in the village never forget to keep up the fire.” They repeatedly told him that they had often to go to other villages to fetch fire when the fires in all the huts of their own village had chanced to go out. Yet the same traveller tells us that the mountain tribes of this part of New Guinea, such as the Englam-Mana and Tiengum-Mana, know how to make fire by friction. They partially cleave a log of dry wood with a stone axe and then draw a stout cord, formed of a split creeper, rapidly to and fro in the cleft, till sparks fly out and set fire to a tinder of dry coco-nut fibres.[[817]] It is odd that the people of the coast should not have learned this mode of producing fire from their neighbours in the mountains. The Russian explorer’s observations, however, have been confirmed by German writers. One of them, a Mr. Hoffmann, says of these people: “In every house care is taken that fire burns day and night on the hearth. For this purpose they choose a kind of wood which burns slowly, but glimmers for a long time and retains its glow. When a man sets out on a journey or goes to the field he has always a glimmering brand with him. If he wishes to make fire, he waves the smouldering wood to and fro till it bursts into a glow.” On frequented paths, crossways, and so forth, you may often see trunks of trees lying which have been felled for the purpose of being ignited and furnishing fire to passers-by. Such trees continue to smoulder for weeks.[[818]] Similarly the dwarf tribes of Central Africa “do not know how to kindle a fire quickly, and in order to get one readily at any moment they keep the burning trunks of fallen trees in suitable spots, and watch over their preservation like the Vestals of old.”[[819]] It seems to be at least doubtful whether these dwarfs of the vast and gloomy equatorial forests are acquainted with the art of making fire at all. A German traveller observes that the care which they take to preserve fire is extremely remarkable. “It appears,” he says, “that the pygmies, as other travellers have reported, do not know how to kindle fire by rubbing sticks against each other. Like the Wambuba of the forest, in leaving a camp, they take with them a thick glowing brand, and carry it, often for hours, in order to light a fire at their next halting place.”[[820]]
|Fire kindled by natural causes was probably used by men long before they learned to make it for themselves.| Whether or not tribes ignorant of the means of making fire have survived to modern times, it seems likely that mankind possessed and used fire long before they learned how to kindle it. In the violent thunderstorms which accompany the end of the dry season in Central and Eastern Africa, it is not uncommon for the lightning to strike and ignite a tree, from which the fire soon spreads to the withered herbage, till a great conflagration is started. From a source of this sort a savage tribe may have first obtained fire, and the same thing may have happened independently in many parts of the world.[[821]] Other people, perhaps, procured fire from volcanoes, the lava of which will, under favourable circumstances, remain hot enough to kindle shavings of wood years after an eruption has taken place.[[822]] Others again may have lit their first fire at the jets of inflammable gas which spring from the ground in various parts of the world, notably at Baku on the Caspian, where the flames burn day and night, summer and winter, to a height of fifteen or twenty feet.[[823]] It is harder to conjecture how man first learned the great secret of making fire by friction. The discovery was perhaps made by jungle or forest races, who saw dry bamboos or branches thus ignited by rubbing against each other in a high wind. Fires are sometimes started in this way in the forests of New Zealand.[[824]] It has also been suggested that savages may have accidentally elicited a flame for the first time in the process of chipping flints over dry moss, or boring holes with hard sticks in soft wood.[[825]]
|Many savages carry fire constantly with them as a matter of convenience.| But even when the art of fire-making has been acquired, the process itself is so laborious that many savages keep fire always burning rather than be at the trouble of extracting it by friction. This, for example, was true of the roving Australian aborigines before they obtained matches from the whites. On their wanderings they carried about with them pieces of smouldering bark or cones of the Banksia tree wherewith to kindle their camp fires.[[826]] The duty of thus transporting fire from one place to another seems commonly to have fallen to the women. “A stick, a piece of decayed wood, or more often the beautiful seed-stem of the Banksia, is lighted at the fire the woman is leaving; and from her bag, which, in damp weather, she would keep filled with dry cones, or from materials collected in the forest, she would easily, during her journey, preserve the fire got at the last encampment.”[[827]] Another writer tells us that the Australian native always had his fire-stick with him, and if his wife let it go out, so much the worse for her. The dark brown velvety-looking core of the Banksia is very retentive of fire and burns slowly, so that one of these little fire-sticks would last a considerable time, and a bag of them would suffice for a whole day.[[828]] The Tasmanians knew how to make fire by twirling the point of a stick in a piece of soft bark; “but as it was difficult at times to obtain fire by this means, especially in wet weather, they generally, in their peregrinations, carried with them a fire-stick lighted at their last encampment.”[[829]] With them, as with the Australians, it was the special task of the women to keep the fire-brand alight and to carry it from place to place.[[830]] When the natives of Materbert, off New Britain, are on a voyage they carry fire with them. For this purpose they press some of the soft fibrous husk of the ripe coco-nut into a coco-nut shell, and then place a red-hot ember in the middle of it. This will smoulder for three or four days, and from it they obtain a light for their fires wherever they may land.[[831]] The Polynesians made fire by the friction of wood, rubbing a score in a board with a sharp-pointed stick till the dust so produced kindled into sparks, which were caught in a tinder of dry leaves or grass. While they rubbed, they chanted a prayer or hymn till the fire appeared. But in wet weather the task of fire-making was laborious, so at such times the natives usually carried fire about with them in order to avoid the trouble of kindling it.[[832]] The Fuegians make fire by striking two lumps of iron pyrites together and letting the sparks fall on birds’ down or on dry moss, which serves as tinder. But rather than be at the pains of doing this they carry fire with them everywhere, both by sea and land, taking great care to prevent its extinction.[[833]] The Caingua Indians of Paraguay make fire in the usual way by the fire-drill, but to save themselves trouble they keep fire constantly burning in their huts by means of great blocks of wood.[[834]] The Indians of Guiana also produce fire by twirling the point of one stick in the hole of another, but they seldom need to resort to this laborious process, for they keep fire burning in every house, and on long journeys they usually carry a large piece of smouldering timber in their canoes. Even in walking across the savannah an Indian will sometimes take a fire-brand with him.[[835]] The Jaggas, a Bantu tribe in the Kilimanjaro district of East Africa, keep up fire day and night in their huts on account of their cattle. If it goes out, the women fetch glowing brands from a neighbour’s house; these they carry wrapped up in banana leaves. Thus they convey fire for great distances, sometimes the whole day long. Hence they seldom need to kindle fire, though the men can make it readily by means of the fire-drill.[[836]] The tribes of British Central Africa also know how to produce fire in this fashion, but they do not often put their knowledge in practice. For there is sure to be a burning brand on one or other of the hearths of the village from which a fire can be lit; and when men go on a journey they take smouldering sticks with them and nurse the glowing wood rather than be at the trouble of making fire by friction.[[837]] In the huts of the Ibos on the lower Niger burning embers are always kept and never allowed to go out.[[838]] And this is the regular practice among all the tribes of West Africa who have not yet obtained matches. If the fire in a house should go out, a woman will run to a neighbour’s hut and fetch a burning stick from the hearth. Hence in most of their villages fire has probably not needed to be made for years and years. Among domesticated tribes, like the Effiks or Agalwa, when the men are going out to the plantation they will enclose a burning stick in a hollow piece of a certain kind of wood, which has a lining of its pith left in it, and they will carry this “fire-box” with them.[[839]]
|The theft of fire by Prometheus.| Before the introduction of matches Greek peasants used to convey fire from place to place in a stalk of giant fennel. The stalks of the plant are about five feet long by three inches thick, and are encased in a hard bark. The core of the stalk consists of a white pith which, when it is dry, burns slowly like a wick without injury to the bark.[[840]] Thus when Prometheus, according to the legend, stole the first fire from heaven and brought it down to earth hidden in a stalk of giant fennel,[[841]] he carried his fire just as every Greek peasant and mariner did on a journey.
|When people settled in villages, it would be convenient to keep up a perpetual fire in the house of the head man.| When a tribe ceased to be nomadic and had settled in more or less permanent villages, it would be a convenient custom to keep a fire perpetually burning in every house. Such a custom, as we have seen, has been observed by various peoples, and it appears to have prevailed universally among all branches of the Aryans.[[842]] Arnobius implies that it was formerly practised by the Romans, though in his own time the usage had fallen into abeyance.[[843]] But it would be obviously desirable that there should be some one place in the village where every housewife could be sure of obtaining fire without having to kindle it by friction, if her own should chance to go out. The most natural spot to look for it would be the hearth of the head man of the village, who would come in time to be regarded as responsible for its maintenance. This is what seems to have happened not only among the Herero of South Africa and the Latin peoples of Italy, but also among the ancestors of the Greeks; for in ancient Greece the perpetual fire kept up in the Prytaneum, or town-hall, was at first apparently the fire on the king’s hearth.[[844]] From this simple origin may have sprung the custom which in various parts of the world associates the maintenance of a perpetual fire with chiefly or royal dignity. Thus it was a distinguishing mark of the |Hence the maintenance of a perpetual fire came to be associated with chiefly or royal dignity.| chieftainship of one of the Samoan nobility, that his fire never went out. His attendants had a particular name, from their special business of keeping his fire ablaze all night long while he slept.[[845]] Among the Gallas the maintenance of a perpetual fire, even when it serves no practical purpose, is a favourite mode of asserting high rank, and the chiefs often indulge in it.[[846]] The Chitomé, a grand pontiff in the kingdom of Congo, of whom we shall hear more hereafter, kept up in his hut, day and night, a sacred fire, of which he dispensed brands to such as came to ask for them and could pay for them. He is said to have done a good business in fire, for the infatuated people believed that it preserved them from many accidents.[[847]] In Uganda a perpetual sacred fire, supposed to have come down to earth with the first man Kintu, is maintained by a chief, who is put to death if he suffers it to be extinguished. From this sacred fire the king’s fire (gombolola) is lighted and kept constantly burning at the gate of the royal enclosure during the whole of his reign. By day it burns in a small hut, but at night it is brought out and set in a little hole in the ground, where it blazes brightly till daybreak, whatever the weather may be. When the king journeys the fire goes with him, and when he dies it is extinguished. The death of a king is indeed announced to the people by the words, “The fire has gone out.” A man who bears a special title is charged with the duty of maintaining the fire, and of looking after all the fuel and torches used in the royal enclosure. When the king dies the guardian of his fire is strangled near the hearth.[[848]] Similarly in Dageou, a country to the west of Darfur, it is said that a custom prevailed of kindling a fire on the inauguration of a king and keeping it alight till his death.[[849]] Among the Mucelis of Angola, when the king of Amboin or Sanga dies, all fires in the kingdom are extinguished. Afterwards the new king makes new fire by rubbing two sticks against each other.[[850]] Such a custom is probably nothing more than an extension of the practice of putting out a chief’s own fire at his death. Similarly, when a new Muata Jamwo, a great potentate in the interior of Angola, comes to the throne, one of his first duties is to make a new fire by the friction of wood, for the old fire may not be used.[[851]] Before the palace gate of the king of Siam there burns, or used to burn, a perpetual fire, which was said to have been lit from heaven with a fiery ball.[[852]]
|Perpetual fire maintained by the chief called the Great Sun among the Natchez Indians.| Among the Natchez Indians of the lower Mississippi a perpetual fire, supposed to have been brought down from the sun, was maintained in a square temple which stood beside the hut of the supreme chief of the nation. He bore the title of the Great Sun, and believed himself to be a descendant or brother of the luminary his namesake. Every morning when the sun rose he blew three whiffs of his pipe towards it, and raising his hands above his head, and turning from east to west, he marked out the course which the bright orb was to pursue in the sky. The sacred fire in the temple was fed with logs of walnut or oak, and the greatest care was taken to prevent its extinction; for such an event would have been thought to put the whole nation in jeopardy. Eight men were appointed to guard the fire, two of whom were bound to be always on watch; and the Great Sun himself looked to the maintenance of the fire with anxious attention. If any of the guardians of the fire failed to do his duty, the rule was that he should be put to death. When the great chief died his bones were deposited in the temple, along with the bones of many attendants who were strangled in order that their souls might wait upon him in the spirit land. On such an occasion the chief’s fire was extinguished, and this was the signal for putting out all the other fires in the country. Every village had also its own temple in which a perpetual fire was maintained under the guardianship of a subordinate chief. These lesser chiefs also bore the title of Suns, but acknowledged the supremacy of the head chief, the Great Sun. All of these Suns were supposed to be descended from a man and woman who had come down from the luminary from which they took their names. There were female Suns as well as male Suns, but they might not marry among themselves; they had always to mate with a woman or a man of lower rank. Their nobility was transmitted in the maternal line; that is, the children of a female Sun, both sons and daughters, were Suns, but the children of a male Sun were not. Hence a chief was never succeeded by his own son, but always by the son either of his sister or of his nearest female relation. The Natchez knew how to produce fire by means of the fire-drill; but if the sacred fire in the temple went out, they relit it, not by the friction of wood, but by a brand brought from another temple or from a tree which had been ignited by lightning.[[853]] In these customs of the Natchez we have clearly fire-worship and sun-worship of the same general type which meets us again at a higher state of evolution among the Incas of Peru. Both sets of customs probably sprang originally from the perpetual fire on the chief’s domestic hearth.
|Fire carried before chiefs and kings as a symbol of royalty.| When a perpetual fire has thus become a symbol of royalty, it is natural that it should be carried before the king or chief on the march. Among the Indians of the Mississippi a lighted torch used to be borne in front of a chief, and no commoner would dare to walk between a chief and his torch-bearer.[[854]] A sacred fire, supposed to have descended from heaven, was carried in a brazier before the Persian kings,[[855]] and the custom was adopted as a badge of imperial dignity by later Roman emperors.[[856]] The practice appears to have been especially observed in time of war. Amongst the Ovambo of South Africa the chief appoints a general to lead the army to battle, and next to the general the greatest officer is he who carries a fire-brand at the head of the warriors. If the fire goes out on the march, it is an evil omen and the army beats a retreat.[[857]] When the king of Monomotapa, or Benomotapa, was at war, a sacred fire was kept burning perpetually in a hut near his tent.[[858]] In old days it is said that the king of Mombasa in East Africa could put an army of eighty thousand men in the field. On the march his guards were preceded by men carrying fire.[[859]] High above the tent of Alexander the Great hung a fiery cresset on a pole, and “the flame of it was seen by night, and the smoke by day.”[[860]] When a Spartan king was about to lead an army abroad he first sacrificed at home to Zeus the Leader. Then a man called the fire-bearer took fire from the altar and marched with it at the head of the troops to the frontier. There the king again sacrificed to Zeus and Athena, and if the omens were favourable, he crossed the border, preceded by the fire from the sacrifices, which thenceforth led the way and might not be quenched. To perform such sacrifices the king always rose very early in the morning, while it was still dark, in order to get the ear of the god before the enemy could forestall him.[[861]]
|The custom of keeping up a perpetual fire during a king’s reign and extinguishing it at his death, might lead to a belief that his life was bound up with the fire.| A custom of maintaining a fire during a king’s reign and extinguishing it at his death, even if it did not originate in a superstition, would naturally lend itself to a superstitious interpretation. The distinction between the sign and the cause of an event is not readily grasped by a dull mind; hence the extinction of the king’s fire, from being merely a signal of his death, might come in time to be regarded as a cause of it. In other words, a vital connexion might be supposed to exist between the king and the fire, so that if the fire were put out the king would die. That a sympathetic bond of some sort united the king’s life with the fire on his hearth was apparently believed by the ancient Scythians. For their most solemn oath was by the king’s hearth, and if any man who had taken this oath forswore himself, they believed that the king would fall ill.[[862]] The story of Meleager,[[863]] whose life was said to be bound up with a brand plucked from the fire on the hearth, belongs to the same class of ideas, which will be examined at large in a later part of this work. Wherever a superstition of this sort gathered round the king’s hearth, it is obvious that he would be moved to watch over the fire with redoubled vigilance. On a certain day the Vestal Virgins at Rome used to go to the King of the Sacred Rites, the successor of the old Roman kings, and say to him, “Watchest thou, O King? Watch.”[[864]] The ceremony may have been a reminiscence or survival of a time when the king’s life as well as the general safety was supposed to hang on the maintenance of the fire, to the guardianship of which he would thus be impelled by the motive of self-preservation as well as of public duty. When natives of the Kei Islands in the East Indies are away on a long voyage, a sacred fire is kept up the whole time of their absence by their friends at home. Three or four young girls are appointed to feed it and watch over it day and night with a jealous care lest it should go out; its extinction would be deemed a most evil omen, for the fire is the symbol of the life of the absent ones.[[865]] This belief and this practice may help us to understand the corresponding beliefs and practices concerned with the maintenance of a perpetual fire at Rome.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SUCCESSION TO THE KINGDOM IN ANCIENT LATIUM
|The Vestal fire and the great priesthoods appear to have been institutions common to the whole Latin race.| Thus it appears that a variety of considerations combined to uphold, if not to originate, the custom of maintaining a perpetual fire. The sanctity of the wood which fed it, the belief in the generative virtue of the process by which it was kindled, the supposed efficacy of fire in repelling the powers of evil, the association of the hearth with the spirits of the dead and with the majesty or even the life of the king all worked together to invest the simple old custom with a halo of mystery and romance. If this was so at Rome we may assume that matters were not very different in the other Latin towns which kept up a Vestal fire. These too had their kings of the Sacred Rites, their flamens, and their pontiffs, as well as their Vestal Virgins.[[866]] All the great priesthoods of Rome appear, in fact, to have had their doubles in the other ancient cities of Latium; all were probably primitive institutions common to the whole Latin race.[[867]]
|Priestly or divine functions of the Roman kings, including the maintenance of the Vestal fire.| Accordingly, whatever is true or probable of the Roman priesthoods, about which we know most, may reasonably be regarded as true or probable of the corresponding priesthoods elsewhere in Latium, about which for the most part we know nothing more than the names. Now in regard to the Roman king, whose priestly functions were inherited by his successor the king of the Sacred Rites, the foregoing discussion has led us to the following conclusions. He represented and indeed personated Jupiter, the great god of the oak, the sky, and the thunder, and in that character made rain, thunder, and lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more kings of the weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not only mimicked the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of divinity, but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria, who appears to have been merely a local form of Diana in her character of a goddess of woods, of waters, and of childbirth. Moreover, he was descended from the oak, since he was born of a virgin who conceived by contact with a fire of sacred oak-wood. Hence he had to guard the ancestral fire and keep it constantly burning, inasmuch as on its maintenance depended the continuance of the royal family. Only on certain stated occasions was it lawful and even necessary to extinguish the old fire in order to revive it in a purer and more vigorous form by the friction of the sacred wood. This was done once a year on the first of March,[[868]] and we may conjecture that it was also done by the new king on his accession to power; for, as we have seen, it has been customary in |But the fire was formally extinguished and rekindled on certain occasions, perhaps on the death of the king.| various places to extinguish the king’s fire at his death.[[869]] Among the ancient Persians the perpetual sacred fire was put out on the death of a king and remained unlit until after his funeral.[[870]] It is a common practice to extinguish the fire in any house where a death has taken place,[[871]] apparently from a fear that the ghost may scorch or singe himself at it, like a moth at the flame of a candle; and the custom of putting out the king’s fire at his decease may in its origin have been nothing more than this. But when the fire on the king’s hearth came to be viewed as bound up in a mysterious fashion with his life, it would naturally be extinguished at his death, not to spare his fluttering ghost the risk and pain of falling into it, but because, as a sort of life-token or external soul, it too must die at his death and be born again from the holy tree. At all events, it seems probable that whenever and from whatever cause it became necessary to rekindle the royal and sacred fire by the friction of wood, the operation was performed jointly by the king and the Vestals, one or more of whom may have been his daughters or the daughters of his predecessor. Regarded as impersonations of Mother Vesta herself, these priestesses would be the chosen vessels, not only to bring to birth the seed of fire in working the fire-drill, but also to receive the seed of the fire-god in their chaste wombs, and so to become the mothers of fire-begotten kings.
|What is true of the Roman kings is probably true of the Latin kings in general.| All these conclusions, which we have reached mainly by a consideration of the Roman evidence, may with great probability be applied to the other Latin communities. They too probably had of old their divine or priestly kings, who transmitted their religious functions, without their civil powers, to their successors the kings of the Sacred Rites.
|What was the rule of succession to the Latin kingship?| But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the kingdom among the old Latin tribes? We possess two lists of Latin kings both professedly complete. One is the list of the kings of Alba, the other is the list of the |The list of the Alban kings seems to imply that the kingship was hereditary in the male line.| kings of Rome. If we accept as authentic the list of the Alban kings, we can only conclude that the kingdom was hereditary in the male line, the son regularly succeeding his father on the throne.[[872]] But this list, if it is not, as Niebuhr held, a late and clumsy fabrication, has somewhat the appearance of an elastic cord which ancient historians stretched in order to link Aeneas to Romulus.[[873]] Yet it would be rash to set these names wholly aside as a chronological stop-gap deliberately foisted in by later annalists. In early monarchies, before the invention of writing, tradition is remarkably retentive of the names of kings. The Baganda of Central Africa, for example, remember the names of more than thirty of their kings in an unbroken chain of twenty-two generations.[[874]] Even the occurrence of foreign names among the Alban kings is not of itself sufficient to condemn the list as a forgery; for, as I shall shew presently, this feature is explicable by a rule of descent which appears to have prevailed in many ancient monarchies, including that of Rome. Perhaps the most we can say for the history of the Alban kings is that their names may well be genuine, and that some general features of the monarchy, together with a few events which happened to strike the popular imagination, may have survived in the memory of the people till they found their way into written history. But no dependence can be placed either on the alleged years of their reigns, or on the hereditary principle which is assumed to have connected each king with his predecessor.
When we come to the list of the Roman kings we are on much firmer, though still slippery ground. According to tradition there were in all eight kings of Rome,[[875]] 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.[[876]] Now it is very remarkable that though the first king of Rome, Romulus, is said to have been descended from the royal house of Alba, in which the kingship is represented as hereditary in the male line, not one of the |On the other hand none of the Roman kings was immediately succeeded by his son, but three were succeeded by their sons-in-law, who were foreigners.| Roman kings was immediately succeeded by his son on the throne. Yet several left sons or grandsons behind them.[[877]] On the other hand, one of them was descended from a former king through his mother, not through his father,[[878]] and three of the kings, namely Tatius, the elder Tarquin, and Servius Tullius, were succeeded by their sons-in-law,[[879]] who were all either foreigners or of foreign descent.[[880]] This |This suggests that the kingship was transmitted in the female line and was held by foreigners who married the royal princesses.| suggests that the right to the kingship was transmitted in the female line, and was actually exercised by foreigners who married the royal princesses. To put it in technical language, the succession to the kingship at Rome and probably in Latium generally would seem to have been determined by certain rules which have moulded early society in many parts of the world, namely exogamy, beena marriage, and female kinship or mother-kin. Exogamy is the rule which obliges a man to marry a woman of a different clan from his own; beena marriage is the rule that he must leave the home of his birth and live with his wife’s people;[[881]] and female kinship or mother-kin is the system of tracing relationship and transmitting the family name through women instead of through men.[[882]] If these principles regulated descent of the kingship among the ancient Latins, the state of things in this respect would be somewhat as follows. The political and religious centre of each community would be the perpetual fire on the king’s hearth tended by Vestal Virgins of the royal clan. The king would be a man of another clan, perhaps of another town or even of another race, who had married a daughter of his predecessor and received the kingdom with her. The children whom he had by her would inherit their mother’s name, not his; the daughters would remain at home; the sons, when they grew up, would go away into the world, marry, and settle in their wives’ country, whether as kings or commoners. Of the daughters who stayed at home, some or all would be dedicated as Vestal Virgins for a longer or shorter time to the service of the fire on the hearth, and one of them would in time become the consort of her father’s successor.
|This hypothesis explains some obscure features in the traditional history of the Latin kings, such as the stories of their miraculous birth.| This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and natural way some obscure features in the traditional history of the Latin kingship. Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more intelligible. For, stripped of their fabulous element, tales of this sort mean no more than that a woman has been gotten with child by a man unknown; and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is more easily compatible with a system of kinship which ignores paternity than with one which makes it all-important. If at the birth of the Latin kings their fathers were really unknown,[[883]] the fact points either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation |The Latin kings perhaps begotten at a Saturnalia.| of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution. In our own country traces of them long survived in the practices of May Day and Whitsuntide, if not of Christmas. Children born of the more or less promiscuous intercourse which characterises festivals of this kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom the particular festival was dedicated.
|The Roman festival of Midsummer was a kind of Saturnalia, and was specially associated with the fire-born King Servius Tullius.| In this connexion it may not be without significance 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 fire-born King Servius Tullius, being held in honour of Fortuna, the goddess who loved Servius as Egeria loved Numa. The popular merrymakings at this season included foot-races and boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in which young folk sat quaffing wine.[[884]] The festival appears to have been a sort of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which fell at Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall learn later on, the great Midsummer festival has been above all a festival of lovers and of fire; one of its principal features is the pairing of sweethearts, who leap over the bonfires hand in hand or throw flowers across the flames to each other. And many omens of love and marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this mystic season.[[885]] It is the time of the roses and of love. Yet the innocence and beauty of such festivals in modern times ought not to blind us to the likelihood that in earlier days they were marked by coarser features, which were probably of the essence of the rites. Indeed, among the rude Esthonian peasantry these features seem to have lingered down to our own generation, if not to the present day. One other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer deserves to be specially noticed. The custom of rowing in flower-decked boats on the river on this day proves that it was to some extent a water festival; and, as we shall learn later on, 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.[[886]]
|But the uncertainty as to the paternity of the Roman kings may only mean that in later times the names of their fathers were forgotten.| 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 on the festival of the Parilia, when shepherds leaped across the spring bonfires,[[887]] as lovers leap across the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the cloudland of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants, strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be natural enough that the people should forget their lineage, and forgetting it should provide them with another, which made up in lustre what it lacked in truth. The final apotheosis, which represented the kings as not merely 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.
|Where descent is traced through women only, girls of the highest rank may be married to men of humble birth, even to aliens and slaves.| If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at home and received as their consorts men of another stock, and often of another country, who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage with a native princess, we can understand not only why foreigners wore the crown at Rome, but also why foreign names occur in the list of the Alban kings. In a state of society where nobility is reckoned only through women—in other words, where descent through the mother is everything, and descent through the father is nothing—no objection will be felt to uniting girls of the highest rank to men of humble birth, even to aliens or slaves, provided that in themselves the men appear to be suitable mates. What really matters is that the royal stock, on which the prosperity and even the existence of the people is supposed to depend, should be perpetuated in a vigorous and efficient form, and for this purpose it is necessary that the women of the royal family should bear children to men who are physically and mentally fit, according to the standard of early society, to discharge the important duty of procreation. Thus the personal qualities of the kings at this stage of social evolution are deemed of vital importance. If they, like their consorts, are of royal and divine descent, so much the better; but it is not essential that they should be so.
|In Ashantee, where the kingdom descends through women, the rank of the king’s father is not regarded.| The hypothesis which we have been led to frame of the rule of succession to the Latin kingship will be confirmed by analogy if we can shew that elsewhere, under a system of female kinship, the paternity of the kings is a matter of indifference—nay, that men who are born slaves may, like Servius Tullius, marry royal princesses and be raised to the throne. Now this is true of the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast in West Africa. Thus in Ashantee, where the kingdom descends in the female line to the king’s brothers and afterwards to the sons of his sister in preference to his own sons, the sisters of the reigning monarch are free to marry or intrigue with whom they please, provided only that their husband or lover be a very strong and handsome man, in order that the kings whom he begets may be men of finer presence than their subjects. It matters not how low may be the rank and position of the king’s father. If the king’s sisters, however, have no sons, the throne will pass to the king’s own son, and failing a son, to the chief vassal or the chief slave. But in the Fantee country the principal slave succeeds to the exclusion of the son. So little regard is paid by these people to the lineage, especially the paternal lineage, of their kings.[[888]] Yet Ashantee has attained a barbaric civilisation as high perhaps as that of any negro state, and probably not at all inferior to that of the petty Latin kingdoms at the dawn of history.
|Traces of a similar state of things in Uganda.| A trace of a similar state of things appears to survive in Uganda, another great African monarchy. For there the queen dowager and the queen sister are, or were, allowed to have as many husbands as they choose, without going through any marriage ceremony. “Of these two women it is commonly said all Uganda is their husband; they appear to be fond of change, only living with a man for a few days and then inviting some one else to take his place.” We are reminded of the legends of the lustful queen Semiramis, and the likeness may be more than superficial. Yet these women are not allowed, under pain of death, to bear children; hence they practise abortion.[[889]] Both the licence and the prohibition may be explained if we suppose that formerly the kingdom descended, as it still does in Ashantee, first to the king’s brothers and next to the sons of his sisters. For in that case the next heirs to the throne would be the sons of the king’s mother and of his sisters, and these women might accordingly be allowed, as the king’s sisters still are allowed in Ashantee, to mate with any handsome men who took their fancy, in order that their offspring might be of regal part. But when the line of descent was changed from the female to the male line, in other words, when the kings were succeeded by their sons instead of by their brothers or their sisters’ sons, then the king’s mother and his sisters would be forbidden to bear children lest the descent of the crown to the king’s own children should be endangered by the existence of rivals who, according to the old law of the kingdom, had a better right to the throne. We may surmise that the practice of putting the king’s brothers to death at the beginning of his reign, which survived till Uganda passed under English protection,[[890]] was instituted at the same time as the prohibition of child-bearing laid on the king’s mother and sisters. The one custom got rid of existing rivals; the other prevented them from being born. That the kingship in Uganda was formerly transmitted in the female line is strongly indicated by the rule that the kings and the rest of the royal family take their totems from their mothers, whereas all the other people of the country get their totems from their fathers.[[891]]
|In Loango also, where the blood royal is traced in the female line, the princesses are free to cohabit with whom they please, and their consorts are practically their slaves.| In Loango the blood royal is traced in the female line, and here also the princesses are free to choose and divorce their husbands at pleasure, and to cohabit at the same time with other men. These husbands are nearly always plebeians, for princes and princesses, who are very numerous and form a ruling caste in the country, may not marry each other. The lot of a prince consort is not a happy one, for he is rather the slave and prisoner than the mate of his imperious princess. In marrying her he engages never more to look at a woman during the whole time he cohabits with his royal spouse. When he goes out he is preceded by guards who drive away all females from the road where he is to pass. If in spite of these precautions he should by ill-luck cast his eyes on a woman, the princess may have his head chopped off, and commonly exercises, or used to exercise, the right. This sort of libertinism, sustained by power, often carries the princesses to the greatest excesses, and nothing is so much dreaded as their anger. No wonder that commoners in general avoid the honour of a royal alliance. Only poor and embarrassed men seek it as a protection against their creditors and enemies. All the children of such a man by such a wife are princes and princesses, and any one of the princes may in time be chosen king; for in Loango the crown is not hereditary but elective.[[892]] Thus it would seem that the father of the King of Loango is nearly always a plebeian, and often little better than a slave.
|Similar rights enjoyed by queens in Central Africa.| Near the Chambezi river, which falls into Lake Bengweolo in Central Africa, there is a small state governed by a queen who belongs to the reigning family of Ubemba. She bears the title of Mamfumer or Mother of Kings. “The privileges attached to this dignity are numerous. The most singular is that the queens may choose for themselves their husband among the common people. The chosen man becomes prince-consort without sharing in the administration of affairs. He is bound to leave everything to follow his royal and often but little accommodating spouse. To shew that in these households the rights are inverted and that a man may be changed into a woman, the queen takes the title of Monsieur and her husband that of Madame.”[[893]]
|Traces of female descent of the kingship in ancient Greece.| At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the throne by marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most ancient kings of Athens, namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to have married the daughters of their predecessors.[[894]] This tradition is confirmed by the evidence, which I shall adduce presently, that at Athens male kinship was preceded by female kinship.
|With this rule of descent of the kingship males rule over different kingdoms in successive generations.| Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the royal families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons to marry princesses and reign among their wives’ people, it will follow that the male descendants would reign in successive generations over different kingdoms. Now this seems to have happened both in ancient Greece and in ancient Sweden; from which we may legitimately infer that it was a custom practised by more than one branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. Take, for instance, the great house of Aeacus, the grandfather of Achilles and Ajax. Aeacus himself reigned in Aegina, but his descendants, as has been justly observed, “from the beginning went forth to other lands.”[[895]] His son Telamon migrated to the |Migrations of the male descendants of Aeacus.| island of Salamis, married the king’s daughter, and reigned over the country.[[896]] Telamon’s son Teucer, in his turn, migrated to Cyprus, wedded the king’s daughter, and succeeded his father-in-law on the throne.[[897]] Again, Peleus, another son of Aeacus, quitted his native land and went away to Phthia in Thessaly, where he received the hand of the king’s daughter, and with her a third of the kingdom.[[898]] Of Achilles, the son of Peleus, we are told that in his youth he was sent to the court of Lycomedes, King of Scyros, where he got one of the princesses with child.[[899]] The tradition seems to shew that Achilles followed the custom of his family in seeking his fortune in a foreign land. His son Neoptolemus, after him, went away to Epirus, where he settled and became the ancestor of the kings of the country.[[900]]
|Migrations of the male descendants of Tydeus and Pelops.| Again, Tydeus was a son of Oeneus, the King of Calydon in Aetolia, but he went to Argos and married the king’s daughter.[[901]] His son Diomede migrated to Daunia in Italy, where he helped the king in a war with his enemies, receiving as his reward the king’s daughter in marriage and part of the kingdom.[[902]] As another example we may take the family of the Pelopidae, whose tragic fortunes the Greek poets never wearied of celebrating. Their ancestor was Tantalus, King of Sipylus in Asia Minor. But his son Pelops passed into Greece, won Hippodamia, the daughter of the King of Pisa, in the famous chariot-race, and succeeded his father-in-law on the throne.[[903]] His son Atreus did not remain in Pisa, but migrated to Mycenae, of which he became king;[[904]] and in the next generation Menelaus, son of Atreus, went to Sparta, where he married Helen, the king’s daughter, and himself reigned over the country.[[905]] Further, it is very notable that, according to the old lyric poets, Agamemnon himself, the elder brother of Menelaus, reigned not at Mycenae but in Lacedaemon, the native land of his wife Clytaemnestra, and that he was buried at Amyclae, the ancient capital of the country.[[906]]
|These migrations not understood in later times.| Various reasons are assigned by ancient Greek writers for these migrations of the princes. A common one is that the king’s son had been banished for murder. This would explain very well why he fled his own land, but it is no reason at all why he should become king of another. We may suspect that such reasons are afterthoughts devised by writers who, accustomed to the rule that a son should succeed to his father’s property and kingdom, were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of kings’ sons who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign kingdom.
|Traces of similar migrations in Scandinavian tradition.| In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs. For we read of daughters’ husbands who received a share of the kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law, even when these fathers-in-law had sons of their own; in particular, during the five generations which preceded Harold the Fair-haired, male members of the Ynglingar family, which is said to have come from Sweden, are reported in the Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norwegian Kings to have obtained at least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the daughters of the local kings.[[907]]
|A reminiscence of the transmission of the kingship through women is preserved in popular tales.| 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.[[908]]
|Where such customs prevail, the kingship is an appanage of marriage with a princess.| Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that the kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary queen of Scotland, and her statement is all the more significant because, as we shall see presently, it reflects the actual practice of the Pictish kings. “Indeed she was a queen,” says Hermutrude, “and but that her sex gainsaid it, might be deemed a king; nay (and this is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her sceptre and her hand went together.”[[909]] Wherever a custom of this sort is observed, a man may clearly acquire the kingdom just as well by marrying the widow as the daughter of his predecessor. This is what Aegisthus did at Mycenae, and what Hamlet’s uncle Feng and Hamlet’s successor Wiglet did in Denmark; all three slew their predecessors, married their widows, and then sat peacefully on the throne.[[910]] The tame submission of the people to their rule would be intelligible, if they regarded the assassins, in spite of their crime, as the lawful occupants of the throne by reason of their marriage with the widowed queens. Similarly, Gyges murdered Candaules, King of Lydia, |The Lydian kingship apparently transmitted through women.| married his queen, and reigned over the country.[[911]] Nor was this the only instance of such a succession in the history of Lydia. The wife of King Cadys conspired against his life with her paramour Spermus, and though her husband recovered from the dose of poison which she administered to him, he died soon afterwards, and the adulterer married his leman and succeeded to the throne.[[912]] These cases excite a suspicion that in the royal house of Lydia descent was traced in the female line, and the suspicion is strengthened by the legendary character of Omphale, the ancestress of the dynasty. For she is represented as a masculine but dissolute queen of the Semiramis type, who wore male attire and put all her favoured lovers to death, while on the other hand her consort Hercules was her purchased slave, was treated with indignity, and went about dressed as a woman.[[913]] This plainly implies that the queen was a far more powerful and important personage than the king, as would naturally happen wherever it is the queen who confers royalty on her consort at marriage instead of receiving it from him. The story that she prostituted the daughters of the Lydians to their male slaves[[914]] is of a piece with the tradition that she herself married her slave Hercules. It may mean little more than that the Lydians were indifferent to paternity, and that the children of freewomen by slaves ranked as free. Such an indifference to fatherhood, coupled with the ancient accounts of the loose morals of the Lydian girls, who were accustomed to earn a dowry by prostitution,[[915]] is a mark of the system of female kinship. Hence we may conjecture that Herodotus was wrong in saying that from Hercules to Candaules the crown of Lydia had descended for twenty-two generations from father to son.[[916]] The old mode of transmitting the crown of Lydia through women probably did not end with Candaules. At least we are told that his murderer and successor Gyges, like Hercules, the mythical founder of the dynasty, gave himself and his kingdom into the hands of the woman he loved, and that when she died he collected all the slaves from the country round about and raised in her memory a mound so lofty that it could be seen from every part of the Lydian plain, and for centuries after was known as the Harlot’s Tomb.[[917]]
|Marriage of Canute with the widow of his predecessor.| When Canute the Dane had been acknowledged King of England, he married Emma, the widow of his predecessor Ethelred, whose throne he had overturned and whose children he had driven into exile. The marriage has not unnaturally puzzled the historians, for Emma was much older than her second husband, she was then living in Normandy, and it is very doubtful whether Canute had ever seen her before she became his bride. All, however, becomes plain if, as the cases of Feng and Wiglet seem to shew, it was an old Danish custom that marriage with a king’s widow carried the kingdom with it as a matter of right. In that case the young but prudent Canute married the mature widow merely out of policy in order to clinch, according to Danish notions, by a legal measure his claim to that crown which he had already won for himself by the sword.[[918]] Among the Saxons and their near kinsmen the Varini it appears to have been a regular custom for the new king to marry his stepmother. Thus Hermegisclus, King of the Varini, on his deathbed enjoined his son Radigis to wed his stepmother in accordance with their ancestral practice, and his injunction was obeyed.[[919]] Edbald, King of Kent, married his stepmother after the death of his father Ethelbert;[[920]] and as late as the ninth century Ethelbald, King of the West Saxons, wedded Judith, the widow of his father Ethelwulf.[[921]] Such marriages are intelligible if we suppose that old Saxon as well as old Danish law gave the kingdom to him who married the late king’s widow.
|Traces of the system of female kinship among the Aryans.| To the view that the right to the Latin kingship was derived from women and not from men, it may be objected that the system of female kinship or mother-kin is unknown among the Aryans,[[922]] and that even if faint traces of it may be met with elsewhere, the last place in the world where we should look for it would be Rome, the stronghold of the patriarchal family. To meet this objection it is necessary to point to some facts which appear to be undoubted survivals among Aryan peoples of a custom of tracing descent through the mother only.
|Female kinship among the Athenians, the Epizephyrian Locrians, the Cantabrians, and the Germans.| In Attica tradition ran that of old the women were the common property of the men, who coupled with them like beasts, so that while every one knew his mother, nobody knew who his father was. This system of sexual communism was abolished by Cecrops, the first King of Athens, who introduced individual marriage in its place.[[923]] Little weight could be attached to this tradition, if it were not supported to a certain extent by the Attic usage which always allowed a man to marry his half-sister by the same father but not his half-sister by the same mother.[[924]] Such a rule seems clearly to be a relic of a time when kinship was counted only through women. Again, the Epizephyrian Locrians in Italy traced all ancestral distinction in the female, not the male line. Among them the nobles were the members of the hundred houses from whom were chosen by lot the maidens to be sent to Troy.[[925]] For in order, it is said, to expiate the sacrilege committed by the Locrian Ajax when he violated Cassandra in the sanctuary of Athena at Troy, the cities of Locris used annually to send to the Trojan goddess two maidens, whom the Trojans slew, and, burning their bodies on the wood of certain trees which bore no fruit, threw the ashes into the sea. If the maidens contrived to escape they took refuge in the sanctuary of Athena, which they thenceforth swept and washed, never quitting it except at night, and always going barefoot, shorn, and clad in a single garment. The custom is said to have been observed for a thousand years down to the fourth century before our era.[[926]] Among the Locrians, as elsewhere, the system of female kinship would seem to have gone hand in hand with dissolute morals; for there is reason to think that of old the Locrians, like the Lydians and Armenians, had been wont to prostitute their daughters before marriage, though in later times the custom fell into abeyance.[[927]] The Cantabrians of Spain seem also to have had mother-kin; for among them it was the daughters who inherited property and who portioned out their brothers in marriage.[[928]] Again, the ancient Germans deemed the tie between a man and his sister’s children as close as that between a father and his children; indeed some regarded the bond as even closer and more sacred, and therefore in exacting hostages they chose the children of a man’s sister rather than his own children, believing that this gave them a firmer hold on the family.[[929]] The superiority thus assigned to the maternal uncle over the father is an infallible mark of mother-kin, either present or past, as may be observed, for instance, in very many African tribes to this day, among whom both property and political power pass, not from father to son, but from the maternal uncle to his nephews.[[930]] Similarly, in Melanesia the close relation of the mother’s brother to his nephew is maintained even where the system of relationship has become patriarchal.[[931]] Amongst the Germans in the time of Tacitus, it is true, a man’s heirs were his own children,[[932]] but the mother’s brother could never have attained the position he held except under a system of maternal descent. Another vestige of mother-kin among a Teutonic people appears to be found in the Salic law. For it was a custom with the Salian Franks that when a widow married again, a price had to be paid to her family, and in laying down the order in which her kinsmen were entitled to receive this payment the law gave a decided preference to the female over the male line; thus the first person entitled to claim the money was the eldest son of the widow’s sister.[[933]]
|Among the Picts the kingship was transmitted through women.| It is a moot point whether the Picts of Scotland belonged to the Aryan family or not;[[934]] but among them the kingdom was certainly transmitted through women. Bede tells us that down to his own time, in the early part of the eighth century, whenever a doubt arose as to the succession, the Picts chose their king from the female rather than the male line.[[935]] The statement is amply confirmed by historical evidence. For we possess a list of the Pictish kings and their fathers which was drawn up in the reign of Cenaed, King of the Scots, towards the end of the tenth century; and for the period from the year 583 to the year 840 the register is authenticated by the Irish Annals of Tigernach and Ulster. Now, it is significant that in this list the fathers of the kings are never themselves kings; in other words, no king was succeeded on the throne by his son. Further, if we may judge by their names, the fathers of the Pictish kings were not Picts but foreigners—men of Irish, Cymric, or English race. The inference from these facts seems to be that among the Picts the royal family was exogamous, and that the crown descended in the female line; in other words, that the princesses married men of another clan or even of another race, and that their issue by these strangers sat on the throne, whether they succeeded in a prescribed order according to birth, or whether they were elected from among the sons of princesses, as the words of Bede might be taken to imply.[[936]]
|Female kinship among the Etruscans.| Another European, though apparently not Aryan, people among whom the system of female kinship appears to have prevailed were the Etruscans. For in Etruscan sepulchral inscriptions the name of the mother of the deceased is regularly recorded along with or even without the name of the father; and where the names of both father and mother are mentioned, greater prominence is given to the mother’s name by writing it in full, whereas the father’s name is, in accordance with Roman usage, merely indicated by an initial.[[937]] The statement of Theopompus that among the Etruscans sexual communism was a recognised practice, and that paternity was unknown,[[938]] may be only an exaggerated way of saying that they traced their descent through their mothers and not through their fathers. Yet apparently in Etruria, as elsewhere, this system of relationship was combined with a real indifference to fatherhood and with the dissolute morals which that indifference implies; for Etruscan girls were wont to earn a dowry by prostitution.[[939]] In these customs the Etruscans resembled the Lydians, and the similarity confirms the common opinion of antiquity, which modern historians have too lightly set aside, that the Etruscans were of Lydian origin.[[940]] However that may be, in considering the vestiges of mother-kin among the Latins, we shall do well to bear in mind that the same archaic mode of tracing descent appears to have prevailed among the neighbouring Etruscans, who not only exercised a powerful influence on Rome, but gave her two, if not three, of her kings.[[941]]
|Mother-kin may survive in the royal family after it has been exchanged for father-kin in all others.| It would be neither unnatural nor surprising if among the ancient Latins mother-kin survived in the royal family after it had been exchanged for father-kin in all others. For royalty, like religion, is essentially conservative; it clings to old forms and old customs which have long vanished from ordinary life. Thus in Uganda persons of royal blood still inherit their totems from their mothers, while other people inherit them from their fathers. So in Denmark and Scandinavia, as we have seen, the kingdom would appear to have been transmitted through women long after the family name and property had become hereditary in the male line among the people. Sometimes the difference in custom between kings and commoners is probably based rather on a distinction of race than on varying degrees of social progress; for a dynasty is often a family of alien origin who have imposed their rule on their subjects by force of arms, as the Normans did on the Saxons, and the Manchus on the Chinese. More rarely, perhaps, it may have happened that from motives of policy or superstition a |Sometimes a conquering race may have left a nominal kingship to members of the old royal house.| conquering tribe has left a nominal kingship to the members of the old royal house. Such a concession would be most likely to be made where the functions of the king were rather religious than civil, and where the prosperity of the country was supposed to depend on the maintenance of the established relations between the people and the gods of the land. In that case the new-comers, knowing not how to appease and conciliate these strange deities, might be glad to let the priestly kings of the conquered race perform the quaint rites and mumble the venerable spells, which had been found to answer their purpose time out of mind.[[942]] In a commonwealth like the Roman, formed by the union of different stocks, the royal family might thus belong either to the conquerors or to the conquered; in other words, either to the |This perhaps happened at Rome, where many of the kings seem to have been plebeians.| patricians or to the plebeians. But if we leave out of account Romulus and Tatius, who are more or less legendary figures, and the two Tarquins, who came of a noble Etruscan house, all the other Roman kings appear from their names to have been men of plebeian, not patrician, families.[[943]] Hence it seems probable that they belonged to the indigenous race, who may have retained mother-kin, at least in the royal succession, after they had submitted to invaders who knew father-kin only.
|The abolition of the monarchy at Rome may have been a revolution whereby the patricians wrested the shadow of sovereignty from the plebeians and transferred it to themselves, who already wielded the substance.| If that was so, it confirms the view that the old Roman kingship was essentially a religious office; for the conquerors would be much more ready to leave an office of this sort in the hands of the conquered than a kingship of the type with which we are familiar. “Let these puppets,” they might think, “render to the gods their dues, while we rule the people in peace and lead them in war.” Of such priestly kings Numa was the type. But not all of his successors were willing to model themselves on his saintly figure and, rejecting the pomps and vanities of earth, to devote themselves to communion with heaven. Some were men of strong will and warlike temper, who could not brook the dull routine of the cloister. They longed to exchange the stillness and gloom of the temple or the sacred grove for the sunshine, the dust, and the tumult of the battlefield. Such men broke bounds, and when they threatened to get completely out of hand and turn the tables on the patricians, it was time that they should go. This, we may conjecture, was the real meaning of the abolition of the kingship at Rome. It put an end to the solemn pretence that the state was still ruled by the ancient owners of the soil: it took the shadow of power from them and gave it to those who had long possessed the substance. The ghost of the monarchy had begun to walk and grow troublesome: the revolution laid it for centuries.
|At first the intention seems to have been to leave the annual kingship or consulship to the old royal family.| But though the effect of the revolution was to substitute the real rule of the patricians for the nominal rule of the plebeians, the break with the past was at the outset less complete than it seems. For the first two consuls were both men of the royal blood. One of them, L. Junius Brutus, was sister’s son of the expelled King Tarquin the Proud.[[944]] As such he would have been the heir to the throne under a strict system of mother-kin. The other consul, L. Tarquinius Collatinus, was a son of the late king’s cousin Egerius.[[945]] These facts suggest that the first intention of the revolutionaries was neither to abolish the kingship nor to wrest it from the royal family, but, merely retaining the hereditary monarchy, to restrict its powers. To achieve this object they limited the tenure of office to a year and doubled the number of the kings, who might thus be expected to check and balance each other. But it is not impossible that both restrictions were merely the revival of old rules which the growing power of the kings had contrived for a time to set aside in practice. The legends of Romulus and Remus, and afterwards of Romulus and Tatius, may be real reminiscences of a double kingship like that of Sparta;[[946]] and in the yearly ceremony of the Regifugium or Flight of the King we seem to detect a trace of an annual, not a life-long, tenure of office.[[947]] The same thing may perhaps be true of the parallel change which took place at Athens when the people deprived the Medontids of their regal powers and reduced them from kings to responsible magistrates, who held office at first for life, but afterwards only for periods of ten years.[[948]] Here, too, the limitation of the tenure of the kingship may have been merely the reinforcement of an old custom which had fallen into abeyance. At Rome, however, the attempt to maintain the hereditary principle, if it was made at all, was almost immediately abandoned, and the patricians openly transferred to themselves the double kingship, which thenceforth was purely elective, and was afterwards known as the consulship.[[949]]
|The abolition of the monarchy at Rome seems to have been hastened by an attempt of the last king to shift the succession from the female to the male line.| The history of the last king of Rome, Tarquin the Proud, leads us to suspect that the offence which he gave by his ambitious and domineering character was heightened by an attempt to shift the succession of the kingship from the female to the male line. He himself united both rights in his own person; for he had married the daughter of his predecessor, Servius Tullius, and he was the son or grandson of Tarquin the Elder,[[950]] who preceded Servius Tullius on the throne. But in asserting his right to the crown, if we can trust Roman history on this point, Tarquin the Proud entirely ignored his claim to it through women as the son-in-law of his predecessor, and insisted only on his claim in the male line as the son or grandson of a former king.[[951]] And he evidently intended to bequeath the kingdom to one of his sons; for he put out of the way two of the men who, if the succession had been through women in the way I have indicated, would have been entitled to sit on the throne before his own sons, and even before himself. One of these was his sister’s husband, the other was her elder son. Her younger son, the famous Lucius Junius Brutus, only escaped the fate of his father and elder brother by feigning, like Hamlet, imbecility, and thus deluding his wicked uncle into the belief that he had nothing to fear from such a simpleton.[[952]] This design of Tarquin to alter the line of succession from the female to the male side of the house may have been the last drop which filled his cup of high-handed tyranny to overflowing. At least it is a strange coincidence, if it is nothing more, that he was deposed by the man who, under a system of female kinship, was the rightful heir, and who in a sense actually sat on the throne from which he pushed his uncle. For the curule chair of the consul was little less than the king’s throne under a limited tenure.
|The hereditary principle does not necessarily exclude the elective in the succession to a monarchy; many African chieftainships or kingships are both hereditary and elective.| It has often been asked whether the Roman monarchy was hereditary or elective. The question implies an opposition between the two modes of succession which by no means necessarily exists. As a matter of fact, in many African tribes at the present day the succession to the kingdom or the chieftainship is determined by a combination of the hereditary and the elective principle, that is, the kings or chiefs are chosen by the people or by a body of electors from among the members of the royal family. And as the chiefs have commonly several wives and many children by them, the number of possible candidates may be not inconsiderable. For example, we are told that “the government of the Banyai is rather peculiar, being a sort of feudal republicanism. The chief is elected, and they choose the son of the deceased chief’s sister in preference to his own offspring. When dissatisfied with one candidate, they even go to a distant tribe for a successor, who is usually of the family of the late chief, a brother, or a sister’s son, but never his own son or daughter. When first spoken to on the subject, he answers as if he thought himself unequal to the task and unworthy of the honour, but, having accepted it, all the wives, goods, and children of his predecessor belong to him, and he takes care to keep them in a dependent position.” Among these people “the children of the chief have fewer privileges than common free men. They may not be sold, but, rather than choose any one of them for a chief at any future time, the free men would prefer to elect one of themselves who bore only a very distant relationship to the family.”[[953]]
|Chiefs and kings in Africa elected from several families in rotation.| Sometimes the field of choice is extended still further by a rule that the chief may or must be chosen from one of several families in a certain order. Thus among the Bangalas of the Cassange Valley in Angola the chief is elected from three families in rotation.[[954]] And Diagara, a country bordering on Senegambia, is ruled by an absolute monarch who is chosen alternately from two families, one of which lives in Diapina and the other in Badumar.[[955]] In the Winamwanga tribe, to the south of Lake Tanganyika, “the first male child born to a chief after he succeeds to the chieftainship is the natural heir, but many years ago there were two claimants to the throne, whose supporters were about equal, and to avoid a civil war the following arrangement was made. One of them was allowed to reign, but the other claimant or his son was to succeed him. This was carried out, so that now there are continually alternate dynasties.”[[956]] So in the Matse tribe of Togoland in West Africa, there are two royal families descended from two women, which supply a king alternately. Hence the palm forest which belongs to the crown is divided into two parts; the reigning king has the right to one part, and the representative of the other royal house has a right to the other part.[[957]] Among the Yorubas in western Africa the sovereign chief is always taken from one or more families which have the hereditary right of furnishing the community with rulers. In many cases the succession passes regularly from one to a second family alternately; but in one instance, apparently unique, the right of succession to the sovereignty seems to be possessed by four princely families, from each of which the head chief is elected in rotation. The principle of primogeniture is not necessarily followed in the election, but the choice of the electors must always fall on one who is related to a former chief in the male line. For paternal descent alone is recognised in Yorubaland, where even the greatest chief may take to wife a woman of the lowest rank. Sometimes the choice of the ruling chief is made by divine authority, intimated to the people through the high priest of the principal god of the district.[[958]] Among the Igaras, on the lower Niger, the royal family is divided into four branches, each of which provides a king in turn. The capital and its district, both of which bear the name of Idah, are always occupied by the reigning branch of the royal family, while the three other branches, not being allowed to live there, retreat into the interior. Hence at the death of a king a double change takes place. On the one hand the late reigning family, with all their dependants, have to leave the homes in which many of them have been born and brought up, and to migrate to towns in the forest, which they know only by name. On the other hand, the new reigning family come into the capital, and their people settle in the houses occupied by their forefathers four reigns ago. The king is generally elected by the leading men of his branch of the royal family; they choose the richest and most powerful of their number.[[959]]
|Among the Khasis of Assam, also, the succession to the kingdom is partly hereditary and partly elective.| Again, among the Khasis of Assam we meet with the same combination of the hereditary with the elective principle in the succession to the kingdom. Indeed, in this people the kingship presents several features of resemblance to the old Latin kingship as it appears to have existed at the dawn of history. For a Khasi king is the religious as well as the secular head of the state; along with the sooth-sayers he consults the auspices for the public good, and sometimes he has priestly duties to perform. Succession to the kingship always runs in the female line, for the Khasis have a regular system of mother-kin as opposed to father-kin; hence it is not the king’s sons, but his uterine brothers and the sons of his uterine sisters who succeed him on the throne in order of birth. But this hereditary principle is controlled by a body of electors, who have the right of rejecting unsuitable claimants to the throne. Generally the electors are a small body composed of the heads of certain priestly clans; but in some Khasi states the number of the electors has been greatly increased by the inclusion of representative headmen of certain important lay clans, or even by the inclusion of village headmen or of the chief superintendents of the village markets. Nay, in the Langrim state all the adult males regularly vote at the election of a monarch; and here the royal family is divided into two branches, a Black and a White, from either of which, apparently, the electors are free to choose a king. Similarly, in the Nobosohpoh state there are two royal houses, a Black and a White, and the people may select the heir to the throne from either of them.[[960]]
|Thus the Roman monarchy may have combined the hereditary with the elective principle.| Thus the mere circumstance that all the Roman kings, with the exception of the two Tarquins, appear to have belonged to different families, is not of itself conclusive against the view that heredity was one of the elements which determined the succession. The number of families from whom the king might be elected may have been large. And even if, as is possible, the electors were free to chose a king without any regard to his birth, the hereditary principle would still be maintained if, as we have seen reason to conjecture, it was essential that the chosen candidate should marry a woman of the royal house, who would generally be either the daughter or the widow of his predecessor. In this way the apparently disparate principles of unfettered election and strict heredity would be combined; the marriage of the elected king with the hereditary princess would furnish the link between the two. Under such a system, to put it otherwise, the kings are elective and the queens hereditary. This is just the converse of what happens under a system of male kinship, where the kings are hereditary and the queens elective.
In the later times of Rome it was held that the custom had been for the people to elect the kings and for the senate to ratify the election.[[961]] But we may suspect, with Mommsen, that this was no more than an inference from the mode of electing the consuls. The magistrates who, under the republic, represented the kings most closely were the dictator and the King of the Sacred Rites, and neither of these was elected by the people. Both were nominated, the dictator by the consul, and the King of the Sacred Rites by the chief pontiff.[[962]] Accordingly it seems probable that under |The king was probably nominated either by his predecessor or by an interim king.| the monarchy the king was nominated either by his predecessor or, failing that, by an interim king (interrex) chosen from the senate.[[963]] Now if, as we have been led to think, an essential claim to the throne was constituted by marriage with a princess of the royal house, nothing could be more natural than that the king should choose his successor, who would commonly be also his son-in-law. If he had several sons-in-law and had omitted to designate the one who was to reign after him, the election would be made by his substitute, the interim king.
|Personal qualities which commended a man for marriage with a princess and succession to the throne.| The personal qualities which recommended a man for a royal alliance and succession to the throne would naturally vary according to the popular ideas of the time and the character of the king or his substitute, but it is reasonable to suppose that among them in early society physical strength and beauty would hold a prominent place.[[964]] We have seen that in Ashantee the husbands or paramours of the princesses must always be men of fine presence, because they are to be the fathers of future kings. Among the Ethiopians in antiquity, as among the Ashantees and many other African tribes to this day, the crown passed in the female line to the son of the king’s sister, but if there was no such heir they chose the handsomest and most valiant man to reign over them.[[965]] We are told that the Gordioi |Fat kings.| elected the fattest man to the kingship,[[966]] nor is this incredible when we remember that in Africa corpulence is still regarded as a great distinction and beauty, and that both the chiefs and their wives are sometimes so fat that they can hardly walk. Thus among the Caffres chiefs and rich men attain to an enormous bulk, and the queens fatten themselves on beef and porridge, of which they partake freely in the intervals of slumber. To be fat is with them a mark of riches, and therefore of high rank; common folk cannot afford to eat and drink and lounge as much as they would like to do.[[967]] The Syrakoi in antiquity are reported to have bestowed the crown on the tallest man or on the man with |Long-headed kings and chiefs.| the longest head in the literal, not the figurative, sense of the word.[[968]] They seem to have been a Sarmatian people to the north of the Caucasus,[[969]] and are probably the same with the long-headed people described by Hippocrates, who says that among them the men with the longest heads were esteemed the noblest, and that they applied bandages and other instruments to the heads of their children in infancy for the sake of moulding them into the shape which they admired.[[970]] Such reports are probably by no means fabulous, for among the Monbuttu or Mang-bettou of Central Africa down to this day “when the children of chiefs are young, string is wound round their heads, which are gradually compressed into a shape that will allow of the longest head-dress. The skull thus treated in childhood takes the appearance of an elongated egg.”[[971]] Similarly |Heads artificially moulded as a mark of high rank.| some of the Indian tribes on the north-west coast of America artificially mould the heads of their children into the shape of a wedge or a sugar-loaf by compressing them between boards; some of them regard such heads as a personal beauty, others as a mark of high birth.[[972]] For instance, “the practice among some of the Salish seems to have had a definite social, as well as aesthetic, significance. There appear to have been recognised degrees of contortion marking the social status of the individual. For example slaves, of which the Salish kept considerable numbers, were prohibited from deforming the heads of their children at all, consequently a normal, undeformed head was the sign and badge of servitude. And in the case of the base-born of the tribes the heads of their children were customarily but slightly deformed, while the heads of the children born of wealthy or noble persons, and particularly those of chiefs, were severely and excessively deformed.”[[973]]
|Among the Bororos the best singers are the chiefs.| Among the Bororos of Brazil at the present day the title to chieftaincy is neither corpulence nor an egg-shaped head, but the possession of a fine musical ear and a rich baritone, bass, or tenor voice. The best singer, in fact, becomes the chief. There is no other way to supreme power but this. Hence in the education of the Bororo youth the main thing is to train, not their minds, but their voices, for the best of the tuneful quire will certainly be chief. In this tribe, accordingly, there is no such thing as hereditary chieftainship; for if the son of a chief has an indifferent ear or a poor voice, he will be a commoner to the end of his days. When two rival songsters are found in the same village, they sing against each other, and he who is judged to have acquitted himself best in the musical contest mounts the throne. His defeated rival sometimes retires in a huff with his admirers and founds a new village. Once seated in the place of power, the melodious singer is not only highly honoured and respected, but can exact unconditional obedience from all, and he gives his orders, like an operatic king or hero, in a musical recitativo. It is especially at eventide, when the sun has set and the labours of the day are over, that he pours out his soul in harmony. At that witching hour he takes up his post in front of the men’s club-house, and while his subjects are hushed in attention he bursts into sacred song, passing from that to lighter themes, and concluding the oratorio by chanting his commands to each individual for the next day.[[974]] When Addison ridiculed the new fashion of the Italian opera, in which generals sang the word of command, ladies delivered their messages in music, and lovers chanted their billet-doux, he little suspected that among the backwoods of Brazil a tribe of savages in all seriousness observed a custom which he thought absurd even on the stage.[[975]]
|Succession to the throne determined by a race.| Sometimes apparently the right to the hand of the princess and to the throne has been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Libyans awarded the kingdom to the fleetest runner.[[976]] Amongst the old Prussians, candidates for nobility raced on horseback to the king, and the one who reached him first was ennobled.[[977]] According to tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by Endymion, who set his sons to run a race for the kingdom. His tomb was said to be at the point of the racecourse from which the runners started.[[978]] The famous story of Pelops and Hippodamia |Greek traditions of princesses whose hands were won in a race.| is perhaps only another version of the legend that the first races at Olympia were run for no less a prize than a kingdom. For Oenomaus was king of Pisa, a town close to Olympia; and having been warned by an oracle that he would die by the hand of the man who married his daughter Hippodamia, he resolved to keep her a maid. So when any one came a-wooing her, the king made the suitor drive away in a chariot with Hippodamia, while he himself pursued the pair in another car drawn by fleet horses, and, overtaking the unlucky wight, slew him. In this way he killed twelve suitors and nailed their heads to his house, the ruins of which were shewn at Olympia down to the second century of our era. The bodies of the suitors were buried under a lofty mound, and it is said that in former days sacrifices were offered to them yearly. When Pelops came to win the hand of Hippodamia, he bribed the charioteer of Oenomaus not to put the pins into the wheels of the king’s chariot. So Oenomaus was thrown from the car and dragged by his horses to death. But some say he was despatched by Pelops according to the oracle. Anyhow, he died, and Pelops married Hippodamia and succeeded to the kingdom.[[979]] The grave of Oenomaus was shown at Olympia; it was a mound of earth enclosed with stones.[[980]] Here, too, precincts were dedicated to Pelops and Hippodamia, in which sacrifices were offered to them annually; the victim presented to Pelops was a black ram, whose blood was poured into a pit.[[981]] Other traditions were current in antiquity of princesses who were offered in marriage to the fleetest runner and won by the victor in the race. Thus Icarius at Sparta set the wooers of his daughter Penelope to run a race; Ulysses won and wedded her. His father-in-law is said to have tried to induce him to take up his abode in Sparta; which seems to shew that if Ulysses had accepted the invitation he would have inherited the kingdom through his wife.[[982]] So, too, the Libyan King Antaeus placed his beautiful daughter Barce or Alceis at the end of the racecourse; her many noble suitors, both Libyans and foreigners, ran to her as the goal, and Alcidamus, who touched her first, gained her in marriage.[[983]] Danaus, also, at Argos is said to have stationed his many daughters at the goal, and the runner who reached them first had first choice of the maidens.[[984]] Somewhat different from these traditions is the story of Atalante, for in it the wooers are said to have contended, not with each other, but with the coy maiden herself in a foot-race. She slew her vanquished suitors and hung up their heads in the racecourse, till Hippomenes gained the race and her hand by throwing down the golden apples which she stooped to pick up.[[985]]
|Custom of racing for a bride among the Kirghiz and Calmucks.| These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various peoples, though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or pretence. Thus “there is one race, called the ‘Love Chase,’ which may be considered a part of the form of marriage among the Kirghiz. In this the bride, armed with a formidable whip, mounts a fleet horse, and is pursued by all the young men who make any pretensions to her hand. She will be given as a prize to the one who catches her, but she has the right, besides urging on her horse to the utmost, to use her whip, often with no mean force, to keep off those lovers who are unwelcome to her, and she will probably favour the one whom she has already chosen in her heart. As, however, by Kirghiz custom, a suitor to the hand of a maiden is obliged to give a certain kalym, or purchase-money, and an agreement must be made with the father for the amount of dowry which he gives his daughter, the ‘Love Chase’ is a mere matter of form.”[[986]] Similarly “the ceremony of marriage among the Calmucks is performed on horseback. A girl is first mounted, who rides off in full speed. Her lover pursues; and if he overtakes her, she becomes his wife, and the marriage is consummated on the spot, after which she returns with him to his tent. But it sometimes happens that the woman does not wish to marry the person by whom she is pursued, in which case she will not suffer him to overtake her; and we were assured that no instance occurs of a Calmuck girl being thus caught unless she has a partiality for her pursuer. If she dislikes him she rides, to use the language of English sportsmen, ‘neck or nothing,’ until she has completely escaped, or until the pursuer’s horse is tired out, leaving her at liberty to return, to be afterwards chased by some more favoured admirer.”[[987]] The race for the bride is found also among the Koryaks of north-eastern Asia. It takes place in a large tent, round which many separate compartments called pologs are arranged in a continuous circle. The girl gets a start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through all the compartments without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of the encampment place every obstacle in the man’s way, tripping him up, belabouring him with switches, and so forth, so that he has little chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes it and waits for him.[[988]] Among some of the rude indigenous tribes of the Malay Peninsula “marriage is preceded by a singular ceremony. An old man presents the future couple to the assembled guests, and, followed by their families, he leads them to a great circle, round which the girl sets off to run as fast as she can. If the young man succeeds in overtaking her, she becomes his mate; otherwise he loses all rights, which happens especially when he is not so fortunate as to please his bride.”[[989]] Another writer tells us that among these savages, when there is a river at hand, the race takes place on the water, the bride paddling away in one canoe and pursued by the bridegroom in another.[[990]] Before the wedding procession starts for the |Caffre race for bride.| bridegroom’s hut, a Caffre bride is allowed to make one last bid for freedom, and a young man is told off to catch her. Should he fail to do so, she is theoretically allowed to return to her father, and the whole performance has to be repeated; but the flight of the bride is usually a pretence.[[991]]
|The bride-race among Teutonic peoples, and its traces in modern Europe.| 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.[[992]] Moreover, traces of the custom survived into modern times. Thus in the Mark of Brandenburg, down to the first half of the nineteenth century at least, it was the practice for bride and bridegroom to run a race on their wedding day in presence of all the guests. Two sturdy men took the bride between them and set off. The bridegroom gave them a start and then followed hot-foot. At the end of the course stood two or three young married women, who took from the bride her maiden’s crown and replaced it by the matron’s cap. If the bridegroom failed to overtake his bride, he was much ridiculed.[[993]] In other parts of Germany races are still held at marriage, but the competitors are no longer the bride and bridegroom. Thus in Hesse at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer his friends race on horseback to the house of the bride, and her friends similarly race on horseback to the house of the bridegroom. The prize hangs over the gate of the farmyard or the door of the house. It consists of a silken or woollen handkerchief, which the winner winds round his head or fastens to his breast. The victors have also the right to escort the marriage procession.[[994]] In Upper Bavaria, down at least to some fifty years ago, a regular feature of a rustic wedding used to be what was called the “bride-race” or the “key-race.” It generally took place when the bridal party was proceeding from the church to the alehouse. A course was marked out and two goals, consisting of heaps of straw, were set up at distances of three and four hundred yards respectively. The strongest and fleetest of the young fellows raced barefoot, clad only in shirt and trousers. He who first reached the further goal received the first prize; this was regularly a key of gilt wood, which the winner fastened to his hat. Often, as in some of the Greek legends, the bride herself was the goal of the race. The writers who record the custom suggest that the race was originally for the key of the bridechamber, and that the bridegroom ran with the rest.[[995]] In Scotland also the guests at a rustic wedding used to ride on horseback for a prize, which sometimes consisted of the bride’s cake set up on a pole in front of the bridegroom’s house. The race was known as the broose.[[996]] At Weitensfeld, in Carinthia, a festival called the Bride-race is still held every year. It is popularly supposed to commemorate a time when a plague had swept away the whole people except a girl and three young men. These three, it is said, raced with each other in order that the winner might get the maiden to wife, and so repeople the land. The race is now held on horseback. The winner receives as the prize a garland of flowers called the Bride-wreath, and the man who comes in last gets a wreath of ribbons and pig’s bristles.[[997]] It seems not impossible that this custom is a relic of a fair at which the marriageable maidens of the year were assigned in order of merit to the young men who distinguished themselves by their feats of strength and agility. A practice of this sort appears to have prevailed |Assignment of brides to picked young men among the Samnites.| among the ancient Samnites. Every year the youths and maidens were tested publicly, and the young man who was adjudged best had first choice of the girls; the second best had the next choice, and so on with the rest.[[998]] “They say,” writes Strabo, “that the Samnites have a beautiful custom which incites to virtue. For they may not give their daughters in marriage to whom they please, but every year the ten best maidens and the ten best youths are picked out, and the best of the ten maidens is given to the best of the ten youths, and the second to the second, and so on. But if the man who wins one of these prizes should afterwards turn out a knave, they disgrace him and take the girl from him.”[[999]] The nature of the test to which the young men and women were subjected is not mentioned, but we may conjecture that it was mainly athletic.
|Contests for a bride other than races.| The contests for a bride may be designed to try the skill, strength, and courage of the suitors as well as their horsemanship and speed of foot. Speaking of King’s County, Ireland, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Arthur Young says: “There is a very ancient custom here, for a number of country neighbours among the poor people, to fix upon some young woman that ought, as they think, to be married; they also agree upon a young fellow as a proper husband for her; this determined, they send to the fair one’s cabin to inform her that on the Sunday following ‘she is to be horsed,’ that is, carried on men’s backs. She must then provide whisky and cyder for a treat, as all will pay her a visit after mass for a hurling match. As soon as she is horsed, the hurling begins, in which the young fellow appointed for her husband has the eyes of all the company fixed on him: if he comes off conqueror, he is certainly married to the girl; but if another is victorious, he as certainly loses her, for she is the prize of the victor. These trials are not always finished in one Sunday, they take sometimes two or three, and the common expression when they are over is, that ‘such a girl was goal’d.’ Sometimes one barony hurls against another, but a marriageable girl is always the prize. Hurling is a sort of cricket, but instead of throwing the ball in order to knock down a wicket, the aim is to pass it through a bent stick, the ends stuck in the ground.”[[1000]] In the great Indian epic the Mahabharata it is |The Indian Svayamvara.| related that the hand of the lovely Princess Draupadi or Krishna, daughter of the King of the Panchalas, was only to be won by him who could bend a certain mighty bow and shoot five arrows through a revolving wheel so as to hit the target beyond. After many noble wooers had essayed the task in vain, the disguised Arjun was successful, and carried off the princess to be the wife of himself and his four brothers.[[1001]] This was an instance of the ancient Indian practice of Svayamvara, in accordance with which a maiden of high rank either chose her husband from among her assembled suitors or was offered as the prize to the conqueror in a trial of skill. The custom was occasionally observed among the Rajputs down to a late time.[[1002]] The Tartar king Caidu, the cousin and opponent of Cublay Khan, is said to have had a beautiful daughter named Aijaruc, or “the Bright Moon,” who was so tall and brawny that she outdid all men in her father’s realm in feats of strength. She vowed she would never marry till she found a man who could vanquish her in wrestling. Many noble suitors came and tried a fall with her, but she threw them all; and from every one whom she had overcome she exacted a hundred horses. In this way she collected an immense stud.[[1003]] In the Nibelungenlied the fair Brunhild, Queen of Iceland, was only to be won in marriage by him who could beat her in three trials of strength, and the unsuccessful wooers forfeited their heads. Many had thus perished, but at last Gunther, King of the Burgundians, vanquished and married her.[[1004]] It is said that Sithon, King of the Odomanti in Thrace, had a lovely daughter, Pallene, and that many |Hippoclides at Sicyon, and how he danced away his marriage.| men came a-wooing her not only from Thrace but from Illyria and the country of the Don. But her father said that he who would wed his daughter must first fight himself and pay with his life the penalty of defeat. Thus he slew many young men. But when he was grown old and his strength had failed, he set two of the wooers, by name Dryas and Clitus, to fight each other for the kingdom and the hand of the princess. The combat was to take place in chariots, but the princess, being in love with Clitus, bribed his rival’s charioteer to put no pins in the wheels of his chariot; so Dryas came to the ground, and Clitus slew him and married the king’s daughter.[[1005]] The tale agrees closely with that of Pelops and Hippodamia. Both stories probably contain, in a legendary form, reminiscences of a real custom. Within historical times Clisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, made public proclamation at the Olympian games that he would give his daughter Agariste in marriage to that suitor who, during a year’s trial, should prove himself the best. So many young men who prided themselves on their persons and on their lineage assembled at Sicyon from all parts of the Greek world. The tyrant had a racecourse and a wrestling school made on purpose for them, and there he put them through their paces. Of all the suitors none pleased him so much as Hippoclides, the handsomest and richest man of Athens, a scion of the old princely house of Cypselus. And when the year was up and the day had come on which the award was to be made, the tyrant sacrificed a hundred oxen and entertained the suitors and all the people of Sicyon at a splendid banquet. Dinner being over, the wine went round and the suitors fell to wrangling as to their accomplishments and their wit. In this feast of reason the gay Hippoclides outshone himself and them all until, flushed with triumph and liquor, he jumped on a table, danced to music, and then, as a finishing touch, stood on his head and sawed the air with his legs. This was too much. The tyrant in disgust told him he had danced away his marriage.[[1006]]
|The annual flight of the king (regifugium) at Rome may have been a relic of his contest for the kingdom and for the hand of the princess.| Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and especially a princess, has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic contest. There would be no reason, therefore, for surprise if the Roman kings, before bestowing their daughters in marriage, should have resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal qualities of their future sons-in-law and successors. If my theory is correct, the Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine consort, and in the character of these divinities went through the annual ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus they did what in more northern lands we may suppose the King and Queen of May were believed to do in days of old. Now we have seen that the right to play the part of the King of May and to wed the Queen of May has sometimes been determined by an athletic contest, particularly by a race.[[1007]] This may have been a relic of an old marriage custom of the sort we have examined, a custom designed to test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony. Such a test might reasonably be applied with peculiar rigour to the king in order to ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate him for the performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on which, even more than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the safety and prosperity of the community were believed to depend. And it would be natural to require of him that from time to time he should submit himself afresh to the same ordeal for the sake of publicly demonstrating that he was still equal to the discharge of his high calling. A relic of that test perhaps survived in the ceremony known as the Flight of the King (regifugium), continued to be annually observed at Rome down to imperial times. On the twenty-fourth day of February a sacrifice used to be offered in the Comitium, and when it was over the King of the Sacred Rites fled from the Forum.[[1008]] We may conjecture that the Flight of the King was originally a race for an annual kingship, which may have been awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner. At the end of the year the king might run again for a second term of office; and so on, until he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain. In this way what had once been a race would tend to assume the character of a flight and a pursuit. The king would be given a start; he ran and his competitors ran after him, and if he were overtaken he had to yield the crown and perhaps his life to the lightest of foot among them. In time a man of masterful character might succeed in seating himself permanently on the throne and reducing the annual race or flight to the empty form which it seems always to have been within historical times.[[1009]] 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.
|The theory is confirmed by the evidence that at the Saturnalia a man used to personate the god Saturn and to be put to death in that character.| Thus, if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman king was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office awarded, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride as a god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. Now this theory is to a certain extent remarkably confirmed by an ancient account of the Saturnalia which was discovered and published some years ago by a learned Belgian scholar, Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent. From that account we learn that down to the beginning of the fourth century of our era, that is, down nearly to the establishment of Christianity by Constantine, the Roman soldiers stationed on the Danube were wont to celebrate the Saturnalia in a barbarous fashion which must certainly have dated from a very remote antiquity. Thirty days before the festival they chose by lot from among themselves a young and handsome man, who was dressed in royal robes to resemble the god Saturn. In that character he was allowed to indulge all his passions to the fullest extent; but when his brief reign of thirty days was over, and the festival of Saturn was come, he had to cut his own throat on the altar of the god he personated.[[1010]] We can hardly doubt that this tragic figure, whom a fatal lot doomed to masquerade for a short time as a deity and to die as such a violent death, was the true original of the merry monarch or King of the Saturnalia, as he was called, whom a happier lot invested with the playful dignity of Master of the Winter Revels.[[1011]] In all probability the grim predecessor of the frolicsome King of the Saturnalia belonged to that class of puppets who in some countries have been suffered to reign nominally for a few days each year merely for the sake of discharging a burdensome or fatal obligation which otherwise must have fallen on the real king.[[1012]] If that is so, we may infer that the part of the god Saturn, who was commonly spoken of as a king,[[1013]] was formerly played at the Saturnalia by the Roman king himself. And a trace of the Sacred Marriage may perhaps be detected in the licence accorded to the human representatives of Saturn, a licence which, if I am right, is strictly analogous to the old orgies of May Day and other similar festivals. It is to be observed that Saturn was |Saturn the god of seed, and the Saturnalia a festival of sowing.| the god of the seed, and the Saturnalia the festival of sowing held in December,[[1014]] when the autumn sowing was over and the husbandman gave himself up to a season of jollity after the long labours of summer and autumn.[[1015]] On the principles of homoeopathic magic nothing could be more natural than that, when the last seeds had been committed to the earth, the marriage of the powers of vegetation should be simulated by their human representatives for the purpose of sympathetically quickening the seed. In short, no time could be more suitable for the celebration of the Sacred Marriage. We have seen as a matter of fact that the sowing of the seed has often been accompanied by sexual orgies with the express intention of thereby promoting the growth of the crops. At all events the view that the King’s Flight at Rome was a mitigation of an old custom of putting him to death at the end of a year’s tenure of office, is confirmed by the practice of annually slaying a human representative of the divine king Saturn, which survived in some parts of the Roman empire, though not at Rome itself, down to Christian times.
|If the Latin kings were begotten at the licentious festival of the Saturnalia, we could understand why their paternity was sometimes uncertain, and why they might be of servile parentage.| This theory would throw light on some dark passages in the legends of the Roman kingship, such as the obscure and humble births of certain kings and their mysterious ends. For if the sacred marriage took place at a licentious festival like the Saturnalia, when slaves were temporarily granted the privileges of freemen,[[1016]] it might well be that the paternity of the children begotten at this time, including those of the royal family, was a matter of uncertainty; nay, it might be known that the king or queen had offspring by a slave. Such offspring of a royal father and a slave mother, or of a royal mother and a slave father, would rank as princes and princesses according as male or female kinship prevailed. Under a system of male kinship the union of the king with a slave woman would give birth to a Servius Tullius, and, according to one tradition, to a Romulus. If female kinship prevailed in the royal family, as we have seen reason to suppose, it is possible that the stories of the birth of Romulus and Servius from slave mothers is a later inversion of the facts, and that what really happened was that some of the old Latin kings were begotten by slave fathers on royal princesses at the festival of the Saturnalia. The disappearance of female kinship would suffice to account for the warping of the tradition. All that was distinctly remembered would be that some of the kings had had a slave for one of their parents; and people living under a system of paternal descent would naturally conclude that the slave parent of a king could only be the mother, since according to their ideas no son of a slave father could be of royal blood and sit on the throne.[[1017]]
|The violent ends of the Roman kings.| Again, 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. Too much stress should not, however, be laid on such legends, for in a turbulent state of society kings, like commoners, are apt to be knocked on the head for much sounder reasons than a claim to divinity. Still, it is worth while to note that Romulus is said to have vanished mysteriously like Aeneas, or to have been cut to pieces by the patricians whom he had offended,[[1018]] |Death of Romulus on the seventh of July, the Nonae Caprotinae, at a festival resembling the Saturnalia.| and that the seventh of July, the day on which he perished, was a festival which bore some resemblance to the Saturnalia. For on that day the female slaves were allowed to take certain remarkable liberties. They dressed up as free women in the attire of matrons and maids, and in this guise they went forth from the city, scoffed and jeered at all whom they met, and engaged among themselves in a fight, striking and throwing stones at each other. Moreover, they feasted under a wild fig-tree, made use of a rod cut from the tree for a certain purpose, perhaps to beat each other with, and offered the milky juice of the tree in sacrifice to Juno Caprotina, whose name appears to mean either the goddess of the goat (caper) or the goddess of the wild fig-tree, for |The Nonae Caprotinae seems to have been the festival of the fertilisation of the fig.| the Romans called a wild fig-tree a goat-fig (caprificus). Hence the day was called the Nonae Caprotinae after the animal or the tree. The festival was not peculiar to Rome, but was held by women throughout Latium.[[1019]] It can hardly be dissociated from a custom which was observed by ancient husbandmen at this season. They sought to fertilise the fig-trees or ripen the figs by hanging strings of fruit from a wild fig-tree among the boughs. The practice appears to be very old. It has been employed in Greece both in ancient and modern times, and Roman writers often refer to it. Palladius recommends the solstice in June, that is Midsummer Day, as the best time for the operation; Columella prefers July.[[1020]] In Sicily at the present day the operation is performed either on Midsummer Day (the festival of St. John the Baptist) or in the early days of July;[[1021]] in Morocco and North Africa generally it takes place on Midsummer Day.[[1022]] The wild fig-tree is a male and the cultivated fig-tree is a female, and the fertilisation is effected by insects, which are engendered in the fruit of the male tree and convey the pollen to the blossom of the female.[[1023]] Thus the placing of wild figs, laden with pollen and insects, among the boughs of the cultivated fig-tree is, like the artificial fertilisation of the date-palm,[[1024]] a real marriage of the trees, and it may well have been regarded as such by the peasants of antiquity long before the true theory of the process was discovered. Now the fig is an |Importance of the fig as an article of diet.| important article of diet in countries bordering on the Mediterranean. In Palestine, for example, the fruit is not, as with us, merely an agreeable luxury, but is eaten daily and forms indeed one of the staple productions of the country. “To sit every man under his vine, and under his fig tree” was the regular Jewish expression for the peaceable possession of the Holy Land; and in the fable of Jotham the fig-tree is invited by the other trees, next after the olive, to come and reign over them.[[1025]] When Sandanis the Lydian attempted to dissuade Croesus from marching against the Persians, he represented to him that there was nothing to be gained by conquering the inhabitants of a barren country who neither drank wine nor ate figs.[[1026]] An Arab commentator on the Koran observes that “God swears by these two trees, the fig and the olive, because among fruit-trees they surpass all the rest. They relate that a basket of figs was offered to the prophet Mohammed, and when he had eaten one he bade his comrades do the same, saying, ‘Truly, if I were to say that any fruit had come down from Paradise, I would say it of the fig.’”[[1027]] Hence it would be natural that a process supposed to be essential to the ripening of so favourite a fruit should be the occasion of a popular festival. We may suspect that the license allowed to slave women on this day formed part of an ancient Saturnalia, at which the loose behaviour of men and women was supposed to secure the fertilisation of the fig-trees by homoeopathetic magic.
|At the festival of the seventh of July women were probably thought to be fertilised by the fig as well as to fertilise it.| But it is possible and indeed probable that the fertilisation was believed to be mutual; in other words, it may have been imagined, that while the women caused the fig-tree to bear fruit, the tree in its turn caused them to bear children. This conjecture is confirmed by a remarkable African parallel. The Akikuyu of British East Africa attribute to the wild fig-tree |Supposed fertilisation of barren women by the wild fig-tree among the Akikuyu of British East Africa.| the power of fertilising barren women. For this purpose they apply the white sap or milk to various parts of the body of the would-be mother; then, having sacrificed a goat, they tie the woman to a wild fig-tree with long strips cut from the intestines of the sacrificial animal. “This seems,” writes Mr. C. W. Hobley, who reports the custom, “to be a case of the tree marriage of India. I fancy there is an idea of ceremonial marriage with the ancestral spirits which are said to inhabit certain of these fig-trees; in fact it supports the Kamba idea of the spiritual husbands.”[[1028]] The belief in spiritual husbands, |Belief of the Akamba that the spirits of the dead live in wild fig-trees.| to which Mr. Hobley here briefly refers, is as follows. The Akamba of British East Africa imagine that every married woman is at the same time the wife of a living man and also the wife of the spirit of some departed ancestor (aimu). They are firmly convinced that the fertility of a wife depends to a great extent on the attentions of her spiritual husband, and if she does not conceive within six months after marriage they take it as a sign that her spiritual husband is neglecting her; so they offer beer and kill a goat as a propitiatory sacrifice. If after that the woman still remains barren, they make a bigger feast and kill a bullock. On the other hand, if a wife is found to be with child soon after marriage, they are glad and consider it a proof that she has found favour in the eyes of her ghostly husband. Further, they believe that at death the human spirit quits the bodily frame and takes up its abode in a wild fig-tree (mumbo); hence they build miniature huts at the foot of those fig-trees which are thought to be haunted by the souls of the dead, and they periodically sacrifice to these spirits.[[1029]] Accordingly, we may conjecture, though we are not told, that amongst the Akamba, as among the Akikuyu, a barren woman sometimes resorts to a wild fig-tree in order to obtain a child, since she believes that her spiritual spouse has his abode in the tree. The Akikuyu clearly attribute a special power of fertilisation to the milky sap of the tree, since they apply it to various parts of the woman who desires to become a mother: perhaps they regard it as the seed of the fig. This may explain why the Roman slave-women offered the milky juice of the tree to Juno Caprotina; they may have intended thereby to add to the fecundity of the mother goddess. And we can scarcely doubt that the rods which they cut from the wild fig-tree, for the purpose apparently of beating each other, were supposed to communicate the generative virtue of the tree to the women who |Supposed fertilisation of women by the wild banana-tree among the Baganda.| were struck by them. The Baganda of Central Africa appear to ascribe to the wild banana-tree the same power of removing barrenness which the Akikuyu attribute to the wild fig-tree. For when a wife has no child, she and her husband will sometimes repair to a wild banana-tree and there, standing one on each side of the tree, partake of the male organs of a goat, the man eating the flesh and drinking the soup and the woman drinking the soup only. This is believed to ensure conception after the husband has gone in to his wife.[[1030]] Here again, as among the Akikuyu, we see that the fertilising virtue of the tree is reinforced by the fertilising virtue of the goat; and we can therefore better understand why the Romans called the male wild fig-tree “goat-fig,” and why the Messenians dubbed it simply “he-goat.”
|The Roman king may have celebrated a sacred marriage on the Nonae Caprotinae as a charm to make the fig-trees bear fruit.| The association of the death of Romulus with the festival of the wild fig-tree can hardly be accidental, especially as he and his twin-brother Remus were said to have been suckled by the she-wolf under a fig-tree, the famous ficus Ruminalis, which was shewn in the forum as one of the sacred objects of Rome and received offerings of milk down to late times.[[1031]] Indeed, some have gone so far both in ancient and modern times as to derive the names of Romulus and Rome itself from this fig-tree (ficus Ruminalis); if they are right, Romulus was “the fig-man” and Rome “the fig-town.”[[1032]] Be that as it may, the clue to the association of Romulus with the fig is probably furnished by the old belief that the king is responsible for the fruits of the earth and the rain from heaven. We may conjecture that on this principle the Roman king was expected to make the fig-trees blossom and bear figs, and that in order to do so he masqueraded as the god of the fig-tree and went through a form of sacred marriage, either with his queen or with a slave-woman, on the July day when the husbandmen resorted to a more efficacious means of producing the same result. The ceremony of the sacred marriage need not have been restricted to a single day in the year. It may well have been repeated for many different crops and fruits. If the Queen of Athens was annually married to the god of the vine, why should not the King of Rome have annually wedded the goddess of the fig?
|The marriage of the divine king or human god often followed by his death.| But, as we have seen, Romulus, the first king of Rome, is said to have perished on the day of this festival of the fig, which, if our hypothesis is correct, was also the day of his ceremonial marriage to the tree. That the real date of his death should have been preserved by tradition is very improbable; rather we may suppose that the reason for dating his death and his marriage on the same day was drawn from some ancient ritual in which the two events were actually associated. But we have still to ask, Why should the king’s wedding-day be also the day of his death? The answer must be deferred for the present. All we need say now is that elsewhere the marriage of the divine king or human god has been regularly followed at a brief interval by his violent end. For him, as for others, death often treads on the heels of love.[[1033]]
|Violent ends of Tatius, Tullus Hostilius, and other Roman kings.| Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the Sabine colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium offering a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men to whom he had given umbrage despatched him with the sacrificial knives and spits which they had snatched from the altar.[[1034]] The occasion and the manner of his death suggest that the slaughter may have been a sacrifice rather than an assassination. Again, Tullus Hostilius, the successor of Numa, was commonly said to have been killed by lightning, but many held that he was murdered at the instigation of Ancus Marcius, who reigned after him.[[1035]] Speaking of the more or less mythical Numa, the type of the priestly king, Plutarch observes that “his fame was enhanced by the fortunes of the later kings. For of the five who reigned after him the last was deposed and ended his life in exile, and of the remaining four not one died a natural death; for three of them were assassinated and Tullus Hostilius was consumed by thunderbolts.”[[1036]] This implies that King Ancus Marcius, as well as Tarquin the Elder and Servius Tullius, perished by the hand of an assassin. No other ancient historian, so far as I know, records this of Ancus Marcius, though one of them says that the king “was carried off by an untimely death.”[[1037]] Tarquin the Elder was slain by two murderers whom the sons of his predecessor, Ancus Marcius, had hired to do the deed.[[1038]] Lastly, Servius Tullius came by his end in circumstances which recall the combat for the priesthood of Diana at Nemi. He was attacked by his successor and killed by his orders, though not by his hand. Moreover, he lived among the oak groves of the Esquiline Hill at the head of the Slope of Virbius, and it was here, beside a sanctuary of Diana, that he was slain.[[1039]]
|The succession to the Latin kingshipmay sometimes have been decided by single combat.| These legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest that the contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have been a mortal combat rather than a race. If that were so, the analogy which we have traced between Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical times the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes to the ordeal of battle, and he who cut his adversary’s throat was thought thereby to have proved the justice of his cause beyond the reach of cavil.[[1040]] “Any one who remembers how in the forests of Westphalia the Femgericht set the modern civil law at defiance down into the eighteenth century, and how in the mountains of Corsica and Sardinia blood-revenge has persisted and persists to our own days, will not wonder that hardly a century after the union of Italy the Roman legislation had not yet succeeded in putting down the last relics of this ancient Italian or rather Indo-European mode of doing justice in the nests of the Apennines.”[[1041]]
|Combats for the kingdom in Africa.| A parallel to what I conceive to have been the rule of the old Latin kingship is furnished by a West African custom of to-day. When the Maluango or king of Loango, who is deemed the representative of God on earth, has been elected, he has to take his stand at Nkumbi, a large tree near the entrance to his sacred ground. Here, encouraged by one of his ministers, he must fight all rivals who present themselves to dispute his right to the throne.[[1042]] This is one of the many instances in which the rites and legends of ancient Italy are illustrated by the practice of modern Africa. Similarly among the Banyoro of Central Africa, whose king had to take his life with his own hand whenever his health and strength began to fail, the succession to the throne was determined by a mortal combat among the claimants, who fought till only one of them was left alive.[[1043]] Even in England a relic of a similar custom survived till lately in the coronation ceremony, at which a champion used to throw down his glove and challenge to mortal combat all who disputed the king’s right to the crown. The ceremony was witnessed by Pepys at the coronation of Charles the Second.[[1044]]
|In Greece and Italy kings probably personated Cronus and Saturn, the god of the seed, before they personated Zeus and Jupiter, the god of the oak.| In the foregoing enquiry we have found reason to suppose that the Roman kings personated not only Jupiter the god of the oak, but Saturn the god of the seed and perhaps also the god of the fig-tree. The question naturally arises, Did they do so simultaneously or successively? In other words, did the same king regularly represent the oak-god at one season of the year, the seed-god at another, and the fig-god at a third? or were there separate dynasties of oak-kings, seed-kings, and fig-kings, who belonged perhaps to different stocks and reigned at different times? The evidence does not allow us to answer these questions definitely. But tradition certainly points to the conclusion that in Latium and perhaps in Italy generally the seed-god Saturn was an older deity than the oak-god Jupiter, just as in Greece Cronus appears to have preceded Zeus. Perhaps Saturn and Cronus were the gods of an old indigenous and agricultural people; while Jupiter and Zeus were the divinities of a ruder invading race, which swarmed down into Italy and Greece from the forests of central Europe, bringing their wild woodland deities to dwell in more fertile lands, under softer skies, side by side with the gods of the corn and the vine, the olive and the fig. If that was so, we may suppose that before the irruption of these northern barbarians the old kings of Greece and Italy personated the gods of the fat field and fruitful orchard, and that it was not till after the conquest that their successors learned to pose as the god of the verdant oak and the thundering sky. However, on questions so obscure we must be content to suspend our judgment. It is unlikely that the student’s search-light will ever pierce the mists that hang over these remote ages. All that we can do is to follow the lines of evidence backward as far as they can be traced, till, after growing fainter and fainter, they are lost altogether in the darkness.
CHAPTER XIX
ST. GEORGE AND THE PARILIA
|The early Italians were as much a pastoral as an agricultural people, and their kings would be expected to ensure the safety and fecundity of the flocks and herds.| In the course of the preceding investigation we found reason to assume that the old Latin kings, like their brethren in many parts of the world, were charged with certain religious duties or magical functions, amongst which the maintenance of the fertility of the earth held a principal place. By this I do not mean that they had to see to it only that the rain fell, and that the corn grew and trees put forth their fruit in due season. In those early days it is probable that the Italians were quite as much a pastoral as an agricultural people, or, in other words, that they depended for their subsistence no less on their flocks and herds than on their fields and orchards. To provide their cattle with grass and water, to ensure their fecundity and the abundance of their milk, and to guard them from the depredations of wild beasts, would be objects of the first importance with the shepherds and herdsmen who, according to tradition, founded Rome;[[1045]] and the king, as the representative or embodiment of the deity, would be expected to do his part towards procuring these blessings for his people by the performance of sacred rites. The Greeks of the Homeric age, as we have seen, thought that the reign of a good king not only made the land to bear wheat and barley, but also caused the flocks to multiply and the sea to yield fish.[[1046]]
|Numa is said to have been born and Rome to have been founded on the shepherds’ festival of the Parilia, the twenty-first of April.| In this connexion, accordingly, it can be no mere accident that Rome is said to have been founded and the pious king Numa to have been born on the twenty-first of April, the day of the great shepherds’ festival of the Parilia.[[1047]] It is very unlikely that the real day either of the foundation of the city or of Numa’s birth should have been remembered, even if we suppose Numa to have been an historical personage rather than a mythical type; it is far more probable that both events were arbitrarily assigned to this date by the speculative antiquaries of a later age on the ground of some assumed fitness or propriety. In what did this fitness or propriety consist? The belief that the first Romans were shepherds and herdsmen would be reason enough for supposing that Rome was founded on the day of the shepherds’ festival, or even that the festival was instituted to commemorate the event.[[1048]] But why should Numa be thought to have been born on that day of all days? Perhaps it was because the old sacred kings, of whom he was the model, had to play an important part in the ceremonies of the day. The birthdays of the gods were celebrated by festivals;[[1049]] the kings were divine or semi-divine; it would be natural, therefore, that their birthdays should be identified with high feasts and holidays. Whether this was so or not, the festival of the Parilia presents so many points of resemblance to some of the popular customs discussed in these volumes that a brief examination of it may not be inappropriate in this place.[[1050]]
|The Parilia, a festival celebrated by shepherds and herdsmen in honour of Pales, for the safety and increase of their flocks and herds.| The spring festival of the twenty-first of April, known as the birthday of Rome,[[1051]] was deemed second in importance to none in the calendar.[[1052]] It was held by shepherds and herdsmen for the welfare and increase of their flocks and herds.[[1053]] The pastoral deity to whom they paid their devotions was Pales, as to whose sex the ancients themselves were not at one. In later times they commonly spoke of her as a goddess; but Varro regarded Pales as masculine,[[1054]] and we may follow his high authority. The day was celebrated with similar rites both in the town and the country, but in its origin it must have been a strictly rural festival. Indeed, it could hardly be carried out in full except among the sheepfolds and cattle-pens. At some time of the day, probably in the morning, the people repaired to the temple of Vesta, where they received from the Vestal Virgins ashes, blood, and bean-straw to be used in fumigating themselves and probably their beasts. The ashes were those of the unborn calves which had been torn from their mothers’ wombs on the fifteenth of April; the blood was that which had dripped from the tail of a horse sacrificed in October.[[1055]] Both were probably supposed to exercise a fertilising as well as a cleansing influence on the people and on the cattle;[[1056]] for apparently one effect of the ceremonies, in the popular opinion, was to quicken the wombs of women no less than of cows and ewes.[[1057]] At break of day the shepherd purified his sheep, after sprinkling and sweeping the ground. The fold was decked with leafy boughs, and a great wreath was hung on the door.[[1058]] The purification of the flocks apparently consisted in driving them over burning heaps of grass, pine-wood, laurel, and branches of the male olive-tree.[[1059]] Certainly at some time of |The flocks purified by being driven through fire.| the day the sheep were compelled to scamper over a fire.[[1060]] Moreover, the bleating flocks were touched with burning sulphur and fumigated with its blue smoke.[[1061]] Then the shepherd offered to Pales baskets of millet, cakes of millet, and pails of warm milk. Next he prayed to the god that he would guard the fold from the evil powers, including probably witchcraft;[[1062]] that the flocks, the men, and the dogs might be hale and free from disease; that the sheep might not fall a prey to wolves; that grass and leaves might abound; that water might be plentiful; that the udders of the dams might be full of milk; that the rams might be lusty, and the ewes prolific; that many lambs might be born; and that there might be much wool at shearing.[[1063]] This prayer the shepherd had to repeat four times, looking to the east; then he washed his hands in the morning dew. After that he drank a bowl of milk and wine, and, warmed with the liquor, leaped ever burning heaps of crackling straw. This practice of jumping over a straw fire would seem to have been a principal part of the ceremonies: at least it struck the ancients themselves, for they often refer to it.[[1064]]
|The shepherd’s prayer.| The shepherd’s prayer at the Parilia is instructive, because it gives us in short a view of the chief wants of |The shepherd has to propitiate the tree-spirits and water-spirits.| the pastoral life. The supplication for grass and leaves and water reminds us that the herdsman no less than the husbandman depends ultimately on vegetation and rain; so that the same divine powers which cover the fields of the one with yellow corn may be conceived to carpet the meadows of the other with green grass, and to diversify them with pools and rivers for the refreshment of the thirsty cattle. And it is to be borne in mind that in countries where grass is less plentiful than under the rainy skies of northern Europe, sheep, goats, and cattle still subsist in great measure on the leaves and juicy twigs of trees.[[1065]] Hence in these lands the pious shepherd and goatherd cannot afford to ignore or to offend the tree-spirits, on whose favour and bounty his flocks are dependent for much of their fodder. Indeed, at the Parilia the shepherd made elaborate excuses to these divine beings for any trespass he might unwittingly have committed on their hallowed domain by entering a sacred grove, sitting in the shadow of a holy tree, or lopping leafy branches from it with which to feed a sickly sheep.[[1066]] In like manner he craved pardon of the water-nymphs, if the hoofs of his cattle had stirred up the mud in their clear pools; and he implored Pales to intercede for him with the divinities of springs “and the gods dispersed through every woodland glade.”[[1067]]
|The Parilia was perhaps the time when the flocks and herds were turned out for the first time in spring to graze in the open.| The Parilia was generally considered to be the best time for coupling the rams and the ewes;[[1068]] and it has been suggested that it was also the season when the flocks and herds, after being folded and stalled throughout the winter, were turned out for the first time to pasture in spring.[[1069]] The occasion is an anxious one for the shepherd, especially in countries which are infested with wolves, as ancient Italy was.[[1070]] Accordingly the Italian shepherd propitiated Pales with a slaughtered victim before he drove his flocks afield in spring;[[1071]] but it is doubtful whether this sacrifice formed part of the Parilia. None of the ancient authors who expressly describe the Parilia mention the slaughter of a victim; and in Plutarch’s day a tradition ran that of old no blood was shed at the festival.[[1072]] But such a tradition seems to point to a contrary practice in after-times. In the absence of decisive evidence the question must be left open; but modern analogy, as we shall see, strongly supports the opinion that immediately at the close of the Parilia the flocks and herds were driven out to graze in the open pastures for the first time after their long winter confinement. On this view a special significance is seen to attach to some of the features of the festival, such as the prayer for protection against the wolf; for the brute could hardly do the sheep and kine much harm so long as they were safely pent within the walls of the sheepcote and the cattle-stall.
|The Roman kings had perhaps to discharge some important religious function at the Parilia.| As the Parilia is said to have been celebrated by Romulus, who sacrificed to the gods and caused the people to purify themselves by leaping over flames,[[1073]] some scholars have inferred that it was customary for the king, and afterwards for his successor, the chief pontiff, or the King of the Sacred Rites, to offer sacrifices for the people at the Parilia.[[1074]] The inference is reasonable and receives some confirmation, as we shall see presently, from the analogy of modern custom. Further, the tradition that Numa was born on the day of the Parilia may be thought to point in the same way, since it is most naturally explicable on the hypothesis that the king had to discharge some important function at the festival. Still, it must be confessed that the positive evidence for connecting the Roman kings with the celebration of the twenty-first of April is slight and dubious.
|The Parilia intended to ensure the welfare of the cattle and to guard them against witches and wolves.| On the whole the festival of the Parilia, which probably fell at or near the time of turning out the cattle to pasture in spring, was designed to ensure their welfare and increase, and to guard them from the insidious machinations or the open attacks of their various enemies, among whom witches and wolves were perhaps the most dreaded.
|A celebration of the same sort is still held in eastern Europe on the twenty-third of April, the festival of St. George, the patron saint of cattle, horses, and wolves.| Now it can hardly be a mere coincidence that down to modern times a great popular festival of this sort has been celebrated only two days later by the herdsmen and shepherds of eastern Europe, who still cherish a profound belief in witchcraft, and still fear, with far better reason, the raids of wolves on their flocks and herds. The festival falls on the twenty-third of April and is dedicated to St. George, the patron saint of cattle, horses, and wolves. The Esthonians say that on St. George’s morning the wolf gets a ring round his snout and a halter about his neck, whereby he is rendered less dangerous till Michaelmas. But if the day should chance to be a Friday at full moon, or if before the day came round any person should have been so rash as to thump the dirty linen in the wash-tub with two beetles, the cattle will run a serious risk of being devoured by wolves. Many are the precautions taken by the anxious Esthonians |Precautions taken by the Esthonians against wolves and witches on St. George’s Day.| on this day to guard their herds from the ravening beasts. Thus some people gather wolf’s dung on the preceding night, burn it, and fumigate the cattle with it in the morning. Or they collect bones from the pastures and burn them at a cross-road, which serves as a charm against sickness, sorcery, and demons quite as well as against wolves. Others smoke the cattle with asa foetida or sulphur to protect them against witchcraft and noxious exhalations. They think, too, that if you sew stitches on St. George’s morning the cubs of the wolves will be blind, no doubt because their eyes are sewed up by the needle and thread. In order to forecast the fate of their herds the peasants put eggs or a sharp weapon, such as an axe or a scythe, before the doors of the stalls, and the animal which crushes an egg or wounds itself will surely be rent by a wolf or will perish in some other fashion before the year is out. So certain is its fate that many a man prefers to slaughter the doomed beast out of hand for the sake of saving at least the beef.
|The Esthonians generally drive their cattle out to pasture for the first time on St. George’s Day.| As a rule the Esthonians drive their cattle out to pasture for the first time on St. George’s Day, and the herdsman’s duties begin from then. If, however, the herds should have been sent out to graze before that day, the boys who look after them must eat neither flesh nor butter while they are on duty; else the wolves will destroy many sheep, and the cream will not turn to butter in the churn. Further, the boys may not kindle a fire in the wood, or the wolf’s tooth would be fiery and he would bite viciously. By St. George’s Day, the twenty-third of April, there is commonly fresh grass in the meadows. But even if the spring should be late and the cattle should have to return to their stalls hungrier than they went forth, many Esthonian farmers insist on turning out the poor beasts on St. George’s Day in order that the saint may guard them against his creatures the wolves. On this morning the farmer treats the herdsman to a dram of brandy, and gives him two copper kopecks as “tail-money” for every cow in the herd. This money the giver first passes thrice round his head and then lays it on the dunghill; for if the herdsman took it from his hand, it would in some way injure the herd. Were this ceremony omitted, the wolves would prove very destructive, because they had not been appeased on St. George’s Day. After receiving the “tail-money” some herdsmen are wont to collect the herd on the village common. Here they set up their crook in the ground, place their hat on it, and walk thrice round the cattle, muttering spells or the Lord’s Prayer as they do so. The pastoral crook should be cut from the rowan or mountain-ash and consecrated by a wise man, who carves mystic signs on it. Sometimes the upper end of the crook is hollowed out and filled with quicksilver and asa foetida, the aperture being stopped up with resin. Some Esthonians cut a cross with a scythe under the door through which the herd is to be driven, and fill the furrows of the cross with salt to prevent certain evil beings from harming the cattle. Further, it is an almost universal custom in Esthonia not to hang bells on the necks of the kine till St. George’s Day; the few who can give a reason for the rule say that the chiming of the bells before that season would attract the wild beasts.[[1075]]
|Sacrifices for horses offered on St. George’s Day by the Esthonians of Dago.| In the island of Dago down to the early part of the nineteenth century there were certain holy trees from which no one dared to break a bough; in spite of the lack of wood in the island the fallen branches were allowed to rot in heaps on the ground. Under such trees the Esthonians used to offer sacrifices on St. George’s Day for the safety and welfare of their horses. The offerings, which consist of an egg, a piece of money, and a bunch of horse-hair tied up with a red thread, were buried in the earth.[[1076]] The custom is interesting because it exhibits St. George in the two-fold character of a patron of horses and of trees. In the latter capacity he has already met us more than once under the name of Green George.[[1077]]
|St. George as the patron of wolves and cattle in Russia; the herds are driven out to pasture for the first time on his day.| In Russia the saint is known as Yegory or Yury, and here, as in Esthonia, he is a patron of wolves as well as of flocks and herds. Many legends speak of the connexion which exists between St. George and the wolf. In Little Russia the beast is known as “St. George’s Dog,” and the carcases of sheep which wolves have killed are not eaten, it being held that they have been made over by divine command to the beasts of the field.[[1078]] The festival of St. George on the twenty-third of April has a national as well as an ecclesiastical character in Russia, and the mythical features of the songs which are devoted to the day prove that the saint has supplanted some old Slavonian deity who used to be honoured at this season in heathen times. It is not as a slayer of dragons and a champion of forlorn damsels that St. George figures in these songs, but as a patron of farmers and herdsmen who preserves cattle from harm, and on whose day accordingly the flocks and herds are driven out to browse the fresh pastures for the first time after their confinement through the long Russian winter. “What the wolf holds in its teeth, that Yegory has given,” is a proverb which shews how completely he is thought to rule over the fold and the stall. Here is one of the songs:—
“We have gone around the field,
We have called Yegory ...
‘O thou, our brave Yegory,
Save our cattle,
In the field, and beyond the field,
In the forest, and beyond the forest,
Under the bright moon,
Under the red sun,
From the rapacious wolf,
From the cruel bear,
From the cunning beast.’”
A White-Russian song represents St. George as opening with golden keys, probably the sunbeams, the soil which has been frost-bound all the winter:—
“Holy Jury, the divine envoy,
Has gone to God,
And having taken the golden keys,
Has unlocked the moist earth,
Having scattered the clinging dew
Over White-Russia and all the world.”
In Moravia they “meet the Spring” with a song in which they ask Green Thursday, that is, the day before Good Friday, what he has done with the keys, and he answers: “I gave them to St. George. St. George arose and unlocked the earth, so that the grass grew—the green grass.” In White Russia it is customary on St. George’s Day to drive the cattle afield through the morning dew, and in Little Russia and Bulgaria young folk go out early and roll themselves in it.[[1079]] In the Smolensk Government on this day the cattle are driven out first to the rye-fields and then to the pastures. A religious service is held in the stalls before the departure of the herd and afterwards in the field, where the stool which supported the holy picture is allowed to stand for several weeks till the next procession with the pictures of the saints takes place. St. George’s Day in this government is the herdsmen’s festival, and it is the term from which their engagements are dated.[[1080]] And in the Smolensk Government, when the herds are being sent out to graze on St. George’s Day, the following spell is uttered:—
“Deaf man, deaf man, dost thou hear us?”
“I hear not.”
“God grant that the wolf may not hear our cattle!”
“Cripple, cripple, canst thou catch us?”
“I cannot catch.”
“God grant that the wolf may not catch our cattle!”
“Blind man, blind man, dost thou see us?”
“I see not.”
“God grant that the wolf may not see our cattle!”[[1081]]
|In Russia witches try to steal the milk of the cattle on the eve of St. George.| But in the opinion of the Russian peasant wolves are not the only foes of cattle at this season. On the eve of St. George’s Day, as well as on the night before Whitsunday and on Midsummer Eve, witches go out naked in the dark and cut chips from the doors and gates of farmyards. These they boil in a milk-pail, and thus charm away the milk from the farms. Hence careful housewives examine their doors and smear mud in any fresh gashes they may find in them, which frustrates the knavish tricks of the milk-stealing witch. Not to be baffled, however, the witches climb the wooden crosses by the wayside and chip splinters from them, or lay their hands on stray wooden wedges. These they stick into a post in the cattle-shed and squeeze them with their hands till milk flows from them as freely as from the dugs of a cow. At this time also wicked people turn themselves by magic art into dogs and black cats, and in that disguise they suck the milk of cows, mares, and ewes, while they slaughter the bulls, horses, and rams.[[1082]]
|St. George’s Day among the Ruthenians.| The Ruthenians of Bukowina and Galicia believe that at midnight before St. George’s Day (the twenty-third of April) the witches come in bands of twelve to the hills at the boundaries of the villages and there dance and play with fire. Moreover, they cull on the mountains the herbs they need for their infernal enchantments. Like the Esthonians and the Russians, the Ruthenians drive their cattle out to pasture for the first time on St. George’s Day; hence during the preceding night the witches are very busy casting their spells on the cows; and the farmer is at great pains to defeat their fell purpose. With this intent many people catch a snake, skin it, and fumigate the cows with the skin on the eve of the saint’s day. To rub the udders and horns of the cows with serpent’s fat is equally effective. Others strew meal about the animals, saying, “Not till thou hast gathered up this meal, shalt thou take the milk from my cow So-and-so.” Further, sods of turf, with thorn-branches stuck in them, are laid on the gate-posts; and crosses are painted with tar on the doors. These precautions keep the witches from the cows. If, however, a beast should after all be bewitched, the farmer’s wife drags a rope about in the dew on the morning of St. George’s Day. Then she chops it up small, mixes salt with it, and scatters the bits among the cow’s fodder. No sooner has the afflicted animal partaken of this compound than the spell is broken.[[1083]]
|St. George’s Day among the Huzuls of the Carpathians.| The Huzuls of the Carpathian Mountains believe that when a cow gives milk tinged with blood, or no milk at all, a witch is the cause of it. These maleficent beings play their pranks especially on the eve of St. George’s Day and on Midsummer Eve, but they are most dangerous at the former season, for that night they and the foul fiends hold their greatest gathering or sabbath. To steal the cows’ milk they resort to various devices. Sometimes they run about in the shape of dogs and smell the cows’ udders. Sometimes they rub the udders of their own cows with milk taken from a neighbour’s kine; then their own cows yield abundant milk, but the udders of the neighbour’s cows shrivel up or give only blood. Others again make a wooden cow on the spot where the real cows are generally milked, taking care to stick into the ground the knife they used in carving the image. Then the wooden cow yields the witch all the milk of the cattle which are commonly milked there, while the owner of the beasts gets nothing but blood from them.
|Precautions taken by the Huzuls against the witches who try to steal milk on the eve of St. George.| Hence the Huzuls take steps to guard their cows from the machinations of witches at this season. For this purpose they kindle a great fire before the house on the eve of St. George’s Day, using as fuel the dung which has accumulated during the winter. Also they place on the gate-posts clods in which are stuck the branches consecrated on Palm Sunday or boughs of the silver poplar, the wood of which is deemed especially efficacious in banning fiends. Moreover, they make crosses on the doors, sprinkle the cows with mud, and fumigate them with incense or the skin of a snake. To tie red woollen threads round the necks or tails of the animals is also a safeguard against witchcraft. And in June, when the snow has melted and the cattle are led to the high mountain pastures, the herds have no sooner reached their summer quarters than the herdsman makes “living fire” by the friction of wood and drives the animals over the ashes in order to protect them against witches and other powers of evil. The fire thus kindled is kept constantly burning in the herdsman’s hut till with the chill of autumn the time comes to drive the herds down the mountains again. If the fire went out in the interval, it would be an ill omen for the owner of the pastures.[[1084]]
|Sacrifice for horses in Silesia on St. George’s Day.| In some parts of Silesia the might of the witches is believed to be at the highest pitch on St. George’s Day. The people deem the saint very powerful in the matter of cattle-breeding and especially of horse-breeding. At the Polish village of Ostroppa, not far from Gleiwitz, a sacrifice for horses used to be offered at the little village church. It has been described by an eye-witness. Peasants on horseback streamed to the spot from all the neighbouring villages, not with the staid and solemn pace of pilgrims, but with the noise and clatter of merrymakers hastening to a revel. The sorry image of the saint, carved in wood and about an ell high, stood in the churchyard on a table covered with a white cloth. It represented him seated on horseback and spearing the dragon. Beside it were two vessels to receive offerings of money and eggs respectively. As each farmer galloped up, he dismounted, led his horse by the bridle, knelt before the image of the saint, and prayed. After that he made his offering of money or eggs, according to his means, in the name of his horse. Then he led the beast round the church and churchyard, tethered it, and went into the church to hear mass and a sermon. Having thus paid his devotions to the saint, every man leaped into the saddle and made for the nearest public-house as fast as his horse could lay legs to the ground.[[1085]]
|Festival of St. George, as the patron of horses, at Ertringen in Bavaria.| At Ertringen, in South Bavaria, there is a chapel of St. George, where a festival of the saint used to be held on April the twenty-fourth down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the whole neighbourhood people streamed thither on horseback and in waggons to take part in the ceremony. More than fourteen hundred riders are said to have been present on one occasion. The foundation of the chapel was attributed to the monastery of Holy Cross Vale (Heiligkreuztal), and the abbot and prior with their suite attended the festival in state mounted on white horses. A burgher of Ertringen had to ride as patron in the costume of St. George, whom he represented. He alone bestrode a fiery stallion. After the celebration of high mass the horses were blessed at the chapel. Then the procession of men on horseback moved round the common lands, winding up at the parish church, where it broke up.[[1086]] In many villages near Freiburg in Baden St. George is the patron of horses, and in some parts of Baden the saint’s day (April the twenty-third) is the season when cattle are driven out to pasture for the first time in spring.[[1087]]
|St. George’s Day among the Saxons and Roumanians of Transylvania.| The Saxons of Transylvania think that on the eve of St. George’s Day the witches ride on the backs of the cows into the farmyard, if branches of wild rosebushes or other thorny shrubs are not stuck over the gate of the yard to keep them out.[[1088]] Beliefs and practices of this sort are shared by the Roumanians of Transylvania. They hold that on St. George’s Day the witches keep their sabbath in sequestered spots, such as woodland glades, deserted farm-steadings, and the like. In Walachia green sods are laid on the window-sills and on the lintels of the doors to avert the uncanny crew. But in Transylvania the Roumanians, not content with setting a thorn-bush in the doorway of the house, keep watch and ward all night beside the cattle or elsewhere, to catch the witches who are at work stealing the milk from the cows. Here, as elsewhere, the day is above all the herdsman’s festival. It marks the beginning of spring; the shepherds are preparing to start for the distant pastures, and they listen with all their ears to some wiseacre who tells them how, if the milk should fail in the udders of the sheep, they have only to thrash the shepherd’s pouch, and every stroke will fall on the witch who is pumping the lost milk into her pails.[[1089]]
|St. George’s Day the herdsman’s festival among the Walachians.| The Walachians look on St. George’s Day as very holy; for they are mainly a pastoral folk, and St. George is the patron of herds and herdsmen. On that day also, as well as on the day before and the day after, the Walachian numbers his herd, beginning at one and counting continuously up to the total. This he never does at any other time of the year. On this day, too, he milks his sheep for the first time into vessels which have been carefully scoured and are wreathed with flowers. Then too a cake of white meal is baked in the shape of a ring, and is rolled on the ground in sight of the herd; and from the length of its course omens are drawn as to the good or bad luck of the cattle in their summer pastures. If the herd is owned by several men, they afterwards lay hold of the ring, and break it among them, and the one who gets the largest piece will have the best luck. The milk is made into a cheese which is divided; and the pieces of the cake are given to the shepherds. In like manner the wreaths of flowers which crowned the pails are thrown into the water, and from the way in which they float down-stream the shepherds presage good or evil fortune.[[1090]]
|St. George’s Day among the Bulgarians and South Slavs.| The Bulgarians seem to share the belief that cattle are especially exposed to the machinations of witches at this season, for it is a rule with them not to give away milk, butter, or cheese on the eve of St. George’s Day; to do so, they say, would be to give away the profit of the milch kine.[[1091]] They rise very early on the morning of this day, and wash themselves in the dew, that they may be healthy.[[1092]] It is said, too, that a regular sacrifice is still offered on St. George’s Day in Bulgaria. An old man kills a ram, while girls spread grass on which the blood is poured forth.[[1093]] The intention of the sacrifice may be to make the herbage grow abundantly in the pastures. Amongst the South Slavs the twenty-third of April, St. George’s Day, is the chief festival of the spring. The herdsman thinks that if his cattle are well on that day they will thrive throughout the year. As we have already seen,[[1094]] he crowns the horns of his cows with garlands of flowers to guard them against witchcraft, and in the evening the garlands are hung on the doors of the stalls, where they remain until the next St. George’s Day. Early in the morning of that day, when the herdsman drives the cows from the byres, the housewife takes salt in one hand and a potsherd with glowing coals in the other. She offers the salt to the cow, and the beast must step over the smouldering coals, on which various kinds of roses are smoking. This deprives the witches of all power to harm the cow. On the eve or the morning of the day old women cut thistles and fasten them to the doors and gates of the farm; and they make crosses with cow’s dung on the doors of the byres to ward off the witches. Many knock great nails into the doors, which is thought to be a surer preventive even than thistles. In certain districts the people cut thistles before sunrise and put some on each other’s heads, some on the fences, the windows, the doors, and some in the shape of wreaths round the necks of the cows, in order that the witches may be powerless to harm man and beast, house and homestead, throughout the year. If, nevertheless, a witch should contrive to steal through the garden fence and into the byre, it is all over with the cows. A good housewife will also go round her house and cattle-stalls early in the morning of the fateful day and sprinkle them with holy water. Another approved means of driving the witches away is furnished by the froth which is shot from the spokes of a revolving mill-wheel; for common-sense tells us that just as the froth flies from the wheel, so the witches will fly from our house, if only we apply the remedy in the right way. And the right way is this. On the eve of St. George’s Day you must send a child to fetch froth from the mill, three stones from three cross-roads, three twigs of a blackberry bush, three sprigs of beech, and three shoots of a wild vine. Then you insert the plants in a buttered roll, put the stones in the fire, boil the froth, toast the buttered roll over the glowing stones, and speak these words: “The blackberry twigs gather together, the beeches pull together, but the foam from the wheel shakes all evil away.” Do this, and you may take my word for it that no witch will be able to charm away the milk from your cows.[[1095]]
|Precautions of the same sort are taken against wolves and witches whenever the cattle are driven out to pasture for the first time in spring.| Thus on the whole the festival of St. George at the present day, like the Parilia of ancient Italy, is a ceremony intended to guard the cattle against their real and their imaginary foes, the wolves and the witches, at the critical season when the flocks and herds are driven out to pasture for the first time in spring. Precautions of the same sort are naturally taken by the superstitious herdsman whenever, the winter being over, he turns his herds out into the open for the first time, whether it be on St. George’s Day or not. Thus in Prussia and Lithuania, when the momentous morning broke, the herd-boy ran from house to house in the village, knocked at the windows, and cried: “Put out the fire, spin not, reel not, but drive the cattle out!” Meantime the herdsman had fetched sand from the church, which he strewed on the road by which the beasts must go from the farmyard. At the same time he laid a woodcutter’s axe in every doorway, with the sharp edge outwards, over which the cows had to step. Then he walked in front of them, speaking never a word, and paying no heed to the herd, which was kept together by the herd-boys alone. His thoughts were occupied by higher things, for he was busy making crosses, blessing the cattle, and murmuring prayers, till the pastures were reached. The axe in the doorway signified that the wolf should flee from the herd as from the sharp edge of the axe: the sand from the church betokened that the cattle should not disperse and wander in the meadows, but should keep as close together as people in church.[[1096]]
|Swedish observances at turning out the cattle to graze after their winter confinement.| In Sweden the cattle are confined almost wholly to their stalls during the long and dreary northern winter; and the first day in spring on which they are turned out into the forest to graze has been from time immemorial a great popular festival. The time of its celebration depends more or less on the mildness or severity of the season. For the most part it takes place about the middle of May. On the preceding evening bonfires are kindled everywhere in the forest, because so far as their flickering light extends the cattle will be safe from the attacks of wild beasts throughout the summer. For the same reason people go about the woods that night firing guns, blowing horns, and making all kinds of discordant noises. The mode of celebrating the festival, which in some places is called the feast of flowers, varies somewhat in different provinces. In Dalsland the cattle are driven home that day from pasture at noon instead of at evening. Early in the morning the herd-boy repairs with the herd to the forest, where he decks their horns with wreaths of flowers and provides himself with a wand of the rowan or mountain-ash. During his absence the girls pluck flowers, weave them into a garland, and hang it on the gate through which the cattle must pass on their return from the forest. When they come back, the herd-boy takes the garland from the gate, fastens it to the top of his wand, and marches with it at the head of his beasts to the hamlet. Afterwards the wand with the garland on it is set up on the muck-heap, where it remains all the summer. The intention of these ceremonies is not said, but on the analogy of the preceding customs we may conjecture that both the flowers and the rowan-wand are supposed to guard the cattle against witchcraft. A little later in the season, when the grass is well grown in the forest, most of the cattle are sent away to the säter, or summer pastures, of which every hamlet commonly has one or more. These are clearings in the woods, and may be many miles distant from the village. In Dalecarlia the departure usually takes place in the first week of June. It is a great event for the pastoral folk. An instinctive longing seems to awaken both in the people and the beasts. The preparations of the women are accompanied by the bleating of the sheep and goats and the lowing of the cattle, which make incessant efforts to break through the pens near the house where they are shut up. Two or more girls, according to the size of the herd, attend the cattle on their migration and stay with them all the summer. Every animal as it goes forth, whether cow, sheep, or goat, is marked on the brow with a cross by means of a tar-brush in order to protect it against evil spirits. But more dangerous foes lie in wait for the cattle in the distant pastures, where bears and wolves not uncommonly rush forth on them from the woods. On such occasions the herd-girls often display the utmost gallantry, belabouring the ferocious beasts with sticks, and risking their own lives in defence of the herds.[[1097]]
|These modern parallels throw light on some features of the Parilia.| The foregoing customs, practised down to modern times by shepherds and herdsmen with a full sense of their meaning, throw light on some features of the Parilia which might otherwise remain obscure. They seem to shew that when the Italian shepherd hung green boughs on his folds, and garlands on his doors, he did so in order to keep the witches from the ewes; and that in fumigating his flocks with sulphur and driving them over a fire of straw he sought to interpose a fiery barrier between them and the powers of evil, whether these were conceived as witches or mischievous spirits.
|Green George a personification of a spirit of trees or of vegetation in general.| But St. George is more than a patron of cattle. The mummer who dresses up in green boughs on the saint’s day and goes by the name of Green George[[1098]] clearly personifies the saint himself, and such a disguise is appropriate only to a spirit of trees or of vegetation in general. As if to make this quite clear, the Slavs of Carinthia carry a tree decked with flowers in the procession in which Green George figures; and the ceremonies in which the leaf-clad masker takes a part plainly indicate that he is thought to stand in intimate connexion with rain as well as with cattle. This counterpart of our Jack in the Green is known in some parts of Russia, and the Slovenes call him Green George. Dressed in leaves and flowers, he appears in public on St. George’s Day carrying a lighted torch in one hand and a pie in the other. Thus arrayed he goes out to the cornfields, followed by girls, who sing appropriate songs. A circle of brushwood is then lighted, and the pie is set in the middle of it. All who share in the ceremony sit down around the fire, and the pie is divided among them. The observance has perhaps a bearing on the cattle as well as on the cornfields, for in some parts of Russia when the herds go out to graze for the first time in spring a pie baked in the form of a sheep is cut up by the chief herdsman, and the bits are kept as a cure for the ills to which sheep are subject.[[1099]]
|“Ringing out the grass” on St. George’s Day.| At Schwaz, an old Tyrolese town in the lower valley of the Inn, young lads assemble on St. George’s Day, which is here the twenty-fourth of April, and having provided themselves with bells, both large and small, they go in procession ringing them to the various farms of the neighbourhood, where they are welcomed and given milk to drink. These processions, which take place in other parts of the Tyrol also, go by the name of “ringing out the grass” (Grasausläuten), and it is believed that wherever the bell-ringers come, there the grass grows and the crops will be abundant. This beneficial effect appears to be ascribed to the power of the bells to disperse the evil spirits, which are thought to be rampant on St. George’s Day. For the same purpose of averting demoniac influence at this time, people in Salzburg and the neighbouring districts of Upper Austria go in procession round the fields and stick palm branches or small crosses in them; also they fasten branches of the Prunus Padus, L., at the windows of the houses and cattle-stalls.[[1100]] In some parts of Germany the farmer looks to the height of his corn on St. George’s Day, expecting that it should then be high enough to hide a crow.[[1101]]
|St. George supposed to get barren women with child.| Even when we have said that St. George of Eastern Europe represents an old heathen deity of sheep, cattle, horses, wolves, vegetation, and rain, we have not exhausted all the provinces over which he is supposed to bear sway. According to an opinion which appears to be widely spread, he has the power of blessing barren women with offspring. This belief is clearly at the root of the South Slavonian custom, described above, whereby a childless woman hopes to become a mother by wearing a shirt which has hung all night on a fruitful tree on St. George’s Eve.[[1102]] Similarly, a Bulgarian wife who desires to have a child will strike off a serpent’s head on St. George’s Day, put a bean in its mouth, and lay the head in a hollow tree or bury it in the earth at a spot so far from the village that the crowing of the cocks cannot be heard there. If the bean buds, her wishes will be granted.[[1103]]
|Love-charms practised among the Slavs on St. George’s Day.| It is natural to suppose that a saint who can bestow offspring can also bring fond lovers together. Hence among the Slavs, with whom St. George is so popular, his day is one of the seasons at which youths and maidens resort to charms and divination in order to win or discover the affections of the other sex. Thus, to take examples, a Bohemian way of gaining a girl’s love is as follows. You catch a frog on St. George’s Day, wrap it in a white cloth, and put it in an ant-hill after sunset or about midnight. The creature croaks terribly while the ants are gnawing the flesh from its bones. When silence reigns again, you will find nothing left of the frog but one little bone in the shape of a hook and another little bone in the shape of a shovel. Take the hook-shaped bone, go to the girl of your choice, and hook her dress with the bone, and she will fall over head and ears in love with you. If you afterwards tire of her, you have only to touch her with the shovel-shaped bone, and her affection will vanish as quickly as it came.[[1104]] Again, at Ceklinj, in Crnagora, maidens go at break of day on St. George’s morning to a well to draw water, and look down into its dark depth till tears fill their eyes and they fancy they see in the water the image of their future husband.[[1105]] At Krajina, in Servia, girls who would pry into the book of fate gather flowers in the meadows on the eve of St. George, make them up into nosegays, and give to the nosegays the names of the various lads whose hearts they would win. Late at night they place the flowers by stealth under the open sky, on the roof or elsewhere, and leave them there till daybreak. The lad on whose nosegay most dew has fallen will love the girl most truly throughout the year. Sometimes mischievous young men secretly watch these doings, and steal the bunches of flowers, which makes sore hearts among the girls.[[1106]] Once more, in wooded districts of Bohemia a Czech maiden will sometimes go out on St. George’s Eve into an oak or beech forest and catch a young wild pigeon. It may be a ring-dove or a wood-pigeon, but it must always be a male. She takes the bird home with her, and covers it with a sieve or shuts it up in a box that nobody may know what she is about. Having kept and fed it till it can fly, she rises very early in the morning, while the household is still asleep, and goes with the dove to the hearth. Here she presses the bird thrice to her bare breast, above her heart, and then lets it fly away up the chimney, while she says:—
“Out of the chimney, dove,
Fly, fly from here.
Take me, dear Hans, my love,
None, none so dear.
“Fly to your rocks, fair dove,
Fly to your lea.
So may I get, my love,
None, none but thee.”[[1107]]
|St. George in Syria esteemed a giver of offspring to childless women.| In the East, also, St. George is reputed to be a giver of offspring to barren women, and in this character he is revered by Moslems as well as Christians. His shrines may be found in all parts of Syria; more places are associated with him than with any other saint in the calendar. The most famous of his sanctuaries is at Kalat el Hosn, in Northern Syria. Childless women of all sects resort to it in order that the saint may remove their reproach. Some people shrug their shoulders when the shrine is mentioned in this connexion. Yet many Mohammedan women who desired offspring used to repair to it with the full consent of their husbands. Nowadays the true character of the place is beginning to be perceived, and many Moslems have forbidden their wives to visit it.[[1108]] Such beliefs and practices |The Syrian St. George may represent Tammuz.| lend some colour to the theory that in the East the saint has taken the place of Tammuz or Adonis.[[1109]]
|In Europe St. George seems to have displaced an old Aryan god of the spring, such as the Lithuanian Pergrubius.| But we cannot suppose that the worship of Tammuz has been transplanted to Europe and struck its roots deep among the Slavs and other peoples in the eastern part of our continent. Rather amongst them we must look for a native Aryan deity who now masquerades in the costume of the Cappadocian saint and martyr St. George. Perhaps we may find him in the Pergrubius of the Lithuanians, a people who retained their heathen religion later than any other branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. This Pergrubius is described as “the god of the spring,” as “he who makes leaves and grass to grow,” or more fully as “the god of flowers, plants, and all buds.” On St. George’s Day, the twenty-third of April, the heathen Prussians and Lithuanians offered a sacrifice to Pergrubius. A priest, who bore the title of Wurschait, held in his hand a mug of beer, while he thus addressed the deity: “Thou drivest away the winter; thou bringest back the pleasant spring. By thee the fields and gardens are green, by thee the groves and the woods put forth leaves.” According to another version, the prayer ran as follows: “Thou drivest the winter away, and givest in all lands leaves and grass. We pray thee that thou wouldst make our corn to grow and wouldst put down all weeds.” After praying thus, the priest drank the beer, holding the mug with his teeth, but not touching it with his hands. Then without handling it he threw the mug backward over his head. Afterwards it was picked up and filled again, and all present drank out of it. They also sang a hymn in praise of Pergrubius, and then spent the whole day in feasting and dancing.[[1110]] Thus it appears that Pergrubius was a Lithuanian god of the spring, who caused the grass and the corn to grow and the trees to burst into leaf. In this he resembles Green George, the embodiment of the fresh vegetation of spring, whose leaf-clad representative still plays his pranks on the very same day in some parts of Eastern Europe. Nothing, indeed, is said of the relation of Pergrubius to cattle, and so far the analogy between him and St. George breaks down. But our accounts of the old Lithuanian mythology are few and scanty; if we knew more about Pergrubius we might find that as a god or personification of spring he, like St. George, was believed to exert all the quickening powers of that genial season—in other words, that his beneficent activity was not confined to clothing the bare earth with verdure, but extended to the care of the teeming flocks and herds, as well as to the propagation of mankind. Certainly it is not easy to draw a sharp line of division between the god who attends to cattle and the god who provides the food on which they subsist.
|The Roman equivalent of St. George was Pales, who may have been personated by the king at the Parilia.| Thus Pergrubius may perhaps have been the northern equivalent of the pastoral god Pales, who was worshipped by the Romans only two days earlier at the spring festival of the Parilia. It will be remembered that the Roman shepherds prayed to Pales for grass and leaves, the very things which it was the part of Pergrubius to supply. Is it too bold to conjecture that in rural districts of Italy Pales may have been personated by a leaf-clad man, and that in the early age of Rome the duty of thus representing the god may have been one of the sacred functions of the king? The conjecture at least suggests a reason for the tradition that Numa, the typical priestly king of Rome, was born on the day of the Parilia.