Burton says (ii. 87), “One of the Dahoman monarch’s peculiarities is that he is double, not merely binonymous, nor dual, like the spiritual Mickado and temporal Tycoon of Japan, but two in one. Gelele, for instance, is king of the city and addo-kpon of the ‘bush’; i.e. of the farmer folk and the country as opposed to the city. This country ruler has his official mother, the Dank-li-ke.... Thus Dahome has two points of interest to the ethnologist—the distinct precedence of women and the double king.”—Vide also [p. 80].
Here two or three questions suggest themselves. If this ceremony is primitive, will not dual royalty give a clue to the duality we find so commonly in mythology, assuming the basis of mythology to be historical? 2d, Is there no clue in the name, official name, of Dank-li-ke? What does the reader guess the meaning to be? (p. 58.) Mr Burton tells us it means, “Dank (the rainbow), li (stand), and ke (the world).” Is it a forced paraphrase to construe this to mean—The rainbow is the sign that the world shall stand?
Upon the point of the precedence of woman, to which the Dahoman ceremony testifies, but to which it gives no clue, I shall, as it is so very important in more bearings than one, give at some length the following scene from Catlin:—
“When ‘the evil spirit’ enters the camp during the ceremony, he proceeds to make various attacks, which are defeated by the intervention of the master of the ceremonies. In several attempts of this kind the evil spirit was thus defeated, after which he came wandering back amongst the dancers, apparently much fatigued and disappointed.... In this distressing dilemma he was approached by an old matron, who came up slyly behind him, with both hands full of yellow dirt, which (by reaching around him) she suddenly dashed in his face, covering him from head to foot, and changing his colour, as the dirt adhered to the undried bear’s grease on his skin; ... at length another snatched his wand from his hand and broke it across her knee ... his power was thus gone ... bolting through the crowd, he made his way to the prairies.”—P. 24.
We shall not be surprised to learn, then, that when the “Feast of the Buffaloes” (distinct from the bull-dance) commences (p. 33), several old men perambulated the village in various directions, in the character of criers, with rattles in their hands, proclaiming that “the whole government of the Mandans was then in the hands of one woman—she who had disarmed the evil spirit ... that the chiefs that night were old women; that they had nothing to say; that no one was allowed to be out of their wigwams excepting the favoured ones whom ‘the governing woman’ had invited,” &c. Will not this give a clue to the precedence in Dahome, probandis probatis, and is not the precedence in Dahome thus interpreted, and the interlude above described evidence of the tradition, that the woman should break the head of the serpent? (Gen. iii. 15). It is of great significance, and, if so many points of comparison had not occurred, ought to have been stated at the outset, that at Dahome “the Sin-kwain (“sin,” water—“kwain,” sprinkling), or water-sprinkling custom follows closely upon the “So-sin or Horse-tie rites.”—Vide Burton, ii. 167.
Now, if the reader will turn to Boulanger, i. 90, 91, he will find this identical custom in Persia, Pegu, China, and Japan. But I relinquish the details, as I fear I shall have exhausted the patience of the few readers I shall have carried with me to this point; and because the King of Dahome has a custom perhaps still more demonstrably cognate to not only the ancient Grecian ceremonies on the shores of the ocean and on the banks of rivers, but with widely diffused tradition. I shall here place four writers in juxtaposition, and with this testimony I shall conclude:—
BOULANGER.
The ancient inhabitants of Italy repaired once a year to the Lake Cutilia, where they made sacrifices and celebrated secret mysteries or ceremonies (Dion. Halicarnassus, i. 2).
The pontiffs in ancient Rome also went annually to the banks of the Tiber, “là ils faisoient des sacrifices expiatoires à Saturne, ce Dieu chronique,” &c. (Dion. Hal. i. 8.)