But we are able to carry the conjecture a step beyond this. Here I am glad to avail myself of the criticism of Professor Westermarck, who has pointed out that a semi-supernatural character is very generally ascribed to strangers, and that intercourse with a stranger would thus be productive of blessings—especially the blessing of fertility—to the woman.[285.1] From the large collections on the subject of relations with strangers brought together by Professor Frazer and Professor Westermarck himself it results that a stranger is regarded as uncanny. He is a being possessed of unknown powers for good or ill. His orenda, as we have seen, is incalculable.[285.2] He must therefore be either repulsed at once as a foe or received and treated with extraordinary respect. The former course is not usually adopted unless the strangers come in force or there are other circumstances that suggest hostile intent. The latter course has given birth to laws of hospitality recognized all over the world, however the exact procedure may differ among different peoples. But even in this case the stranger is looked upon with suspicion until he has undergone what M. van Gennep calls rites of aggregation to the group or society to which he has come. These rites may be of the most simple character, such as spitting upon his host or drinking a cup of water or coffee from his host’s hand; or they may involve a trial of strength, an exchange of gifts, the offering of sacrifices or entry into a blood-covenant.[286.1]
The uncanny character thus attributed to a stranger includes not merely the possession of magical powers. In a society where everyone, or at least a large and unknown number of persons, is believed to be endowed more or less with magical powers, this is a matter of course. But a halo of still more mysterious possibility encircles a stranger: he may be a superhuman Power, a dead man, or even a god. Hence arise the numerous stories, many of which have been collected by Mr Gerould in his monograph on The Grateful Dead, published by the Folk-Lore Society in 1908. These stories usually represent the stranger as a dead man to whom the hero has rendered some service, such as that of burying his corpse. But perhaps the best known, and among the most ancient is that found in the book of Tobit, where the stranger is the angel Raphael. A tale even older and more widespread is preserved among the Hebrew traditions as that of Lot and the two angels who visited him in Sodom. Probably it was part of the common Semitic stock, and as such would have been known at Babylon. Substantially the same story is that of Baucis and Philemon reported by Ovid; and the tale of Demeter’s wanderings and many another in Greek legend rest on a common basis of belief. Continental folklore down to modern days identifies the unknown beggar as Jesus Christ Himself or, if a woman, his Mother. The Bantu of South-West Africa tell of the great goddess Nzambi who begs in disguise for a little palm-wine to slake the thirst of her child. Refusal is followed in the night by punishment; the smiling valley, like that of Sodom, is covered by the waters of a lake; and the only person saved is he who had taken compassion and granted the poor old mendicant’s request.[287.1] Lest this be thought a tale imported from Europe, let me add that in Annam a similar tale is told to account for three lakes in the province of Thay Nguyen. There a beggar-woman is repulsed by all save an old widow and her son, who give of their poverty food and a night’s lodging to the miserable and unattractive creature. She turns out to be a supernatural personage. She has come down to test the hearts of the devotees who have flocked to a great religious festival periodically held in the place. The hypocrites who repulsed her are all overwhelmed in a deluge of waters; only the widow and her son are saved.[287.2]
To labour the proof is unnecessary. It is abundantly clear that a stranger may be far more than mortal, and that this possibility has deeply affected the evolution of hospitality. The stranger must be conciliated. He must be bound by sacred ties to the host—ties which he cannot break so long as he remains under the host’s protection. Among the rites of aggregation—the rites effecting this union—M. van Gennep reckons the use of the women frequently accorded to visitors in the lower culture; and he suggests that the rite at the temple of Mylitta was such a rite of aggregation. It may have been so. It may have been expected of all masculine strangers at Babylon to unite themselves with the natives by means of this homage to the goddess. All that can be said is that Herodotus gives no hint of it. According to him it was only on the women that the duty lay—and that no more than once in their lives—of submitting to the rite. The mystery attaching to a stranger and involving the expectation of divine blessing is a sufficient reason for the performance of the rite with one who might be a god in person, and in any event must have been held to be divinely sent; for chance is the servant of the gods. Thence it is but a step (and the step was taken elsewhere, if not at Babylon) to the substitution of the priest for the stranger or the god; and the way is opened to the abuses of the jus primæ noctis.[288.1]
Before dismissing the subject reference may be made to Professor Cumont’s note on the subject of religious prostitution in Les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain (Paris, 1907), pp. 143, 286, as showing the facility with which a learned and highly distinguished scholar may fail to appreciate the complexity of the problem. He makes no distinction between the three customs of sacrifice of virginity, prostitution to earn a dowry, and a life of religious prostitution in the service of the goddess. He refers them all to the primitive constitution of the Semitic tribe, and explains them as a modified form, become utilitarian, of an ancient exogamy. Mating with a virgin, he holds, resulted in defilement; therefore she was given first to a stranger; only after that could she be married to a man of her own race. I pass by the confusion between the three customs in question, to all of which his explanation will not equally apply. But if the explanation be correct for any of them, either the ancient exogamy of the Semites must have been quite different from exogamy as generally understood, or it must have been not merely modified but transformed. Exogamy, as generally understood, has nothing to do with race or nationality. It is simply the savage rule corresponding to our table of prohibited degrees.[289.1] A man may not marry or have sexual relations with one who is akin to him; every member of his clan (not of his tribe or his race) is akin to him; therefore, he cannot marry or have sexual relations with any member of his clan. The origin of this rule is still disputed by anthropologists, and we need not here discuss it. But since exogamy bars a man from sexual relations with every member of his kin, it is obvious that it cannot be merely a preliminary to marriage within the kin. Where exogamy is the law, the bar is absolute; it is the law for the whole of life; it is not intended to provide for a temporary union outside the kin in order to prepare the way for a permanent union within the kin. Exogamy, therefore, I submit, cannot explain these customs.
THE VOICE OF THE STONE OF
DESTINY
In the following pages I propose to consider some of the auguries which have been deemed necessary to the choice of a king. Kingship is not found in the most archaic forms of society known to us. But where the community is organized on the basis of monarchy the king tends to be regarded as something more than ordinary humanity. He has powers and privileges denied to other mortals. These very powers and privileges and the sanctity of which they are the appanage entail, however, taboos and penalties of the most burdensome description. Professor Frazer has abundantly illustrated this side of royalty, and has also fully discussed some of the means whereby pretensions to the throne are enforced. But there remain others witnessing not less than those he has described to the extraordinary position of a king. Some of these and their echoes in folk-tale and romance will repay a little attention.
The famous Coronation Stone has an authentic history of six hundred years. At the time of the conquest of Scotland by Edward I., it was the stone on which the kings of the Scots were, according to immemorial custom, installed. Regarded by the Scots as sacred, it was therefore removed by Edward’s order from Scone, where it stood, to Westminster, and was enclosed in what is now, and has been ever since, the Coronation Chair. Its earlier history, as distinguished from conjecture and legend, goes no further back than the middle of the thirteenth century, or something less than half a century before its removal to Westminster, when it is recorded by Fordun that Alexander III. was solemnly placed upon it and hallowed to king by the Bishop of St. Andrews (1249). But what is wanting in authentic history has been abundantly made up in legend. The tale, of which there are two versions, is the creation of a literary age. The Irish version brings it, with the Tuatha Dé Danann, from Lochlann, or Scandinavia, to Ireland. The Scottish version traces it on the other hand from Egypt, whence it was carried by the Milesians. This was improved upon, to the extent of identifying the stone with that used by Jacob as a pillow on his journey from Beersheba to Haran. The attempt was thus made, by connecting the ruling race in Scotland with the legends of the Hebrew patriarchs, to confer upon the stone the united sanctity of religion, of antiquity, and of patriotism.
In the course of its wanderings the stone is said to have reached Tara; and it is declared to be the famous Lia Fáil, or Stone of Destiny, one of the two wonders of Tara celebrated in Irish sagas. We are indebted to the Book of Lismore, a fifteenth-century manuscript, for an enumeration of the wonderful properties of the Lia Fáil. The Colloquy with the Ancients, which is comprised in this precious manuscript, records a number of Irish traditions, some of which would else in all probability have perished beyond recovery. There we learn—the account is put into the mouth of no less a personage than Ossian himself—that “Anyone of all Ireland on whom an ex parte imputation rested was set upon that stone: then if the truth were in him he would turn pink and white; but if otherwise, it was a black spot that in some conspicuous place would appear on him. Further, when Ireland’s monarch stepped on to it the stone would cry out under him, and her three arch-waves would boom in answer: as the wave of Cleena, the wave of Ballintoy, and the wave of Loch Rury; when a provincial king went on it the flag would rumble under him; when a barren woman trod it, it was a dew of dusky blood that broke out on it; when one that would bear children tried it, it was a ‘nursing drop’”—that is, says Mr Standish O’Grady, from whose translation I quote, semblance of milk—“that it sweated.”[292.1] The Colloquy is imperfect, the legible portion of the manuscript ceasing a line or two further on, just as we are about to be told how it was that the stone left Ireland.[292.2] Its subsequent adventures are related by Keating, who says that it was sent to Feargus the Great, “to sit upon, for the purpose of being proclaimed king of Scotland.” However, it is not to the adventures of the stone, but to its properties that I wish now to direct attention. With regard to the former, all that I need add is that the legend has been subjected by Skene, and more recently by Mr P. J. O’Reilly, to an exhaustive analysis, which renders it clear that there is no trustworthy evidence that the stone of Tara is the Coronation Stone. The antecedent improbability is great; and even if it were indisputable that the stone in question was no longer at Tara in the eleventh century, the chasm between that period and Fergus, whose very existence only rested on legend, would still have to be bridged, and the variants of the story would need to be reconciled.[293.1]
The properties of the stone of Tara were oracular; and the stone itself was one of a large class of stones endowed in popular opinion with divining powers, and actually resorted to for the purpose of enquiry. When the reputation of an oracle is once established, it is consulted for many purposes. Not only political, but juridical and domestic purposes are enumerated by the author of the Colloquy in regard to the Lia Fáil. Among these functions is the recognition of the monarch. The phrase used in the Colloquy is ambiguous. It is not stated why, or on what occasion, the stone was expected to make its voice heard. In practice the only object of obtaining such a recognition would be that of determining the succession to the throne. Keating supplies the missing explanation. “It was a stone,” he says, “on which were enchantments, for it used to roar under the person who had the best right to obtain the sovereignty of Ireland at the time of the men of Ireland being in assembly at Tara to choose a king over them.”[293.2] Whether as a matter of fact the stone ever was consulted with this object is another question. It is enough at present to know that Irish tradition asserted this use of the oracle. In a semi-civilized community a disputed succession is of frequent occurrence. To prevent a dispute, and to settle it when it arises, various means are adopted. The usual Irish plan seems to have been the custom of Tanistry. “During the lifetime of a chief,” Sullivan tells us, “his successor was elected under the name of Tanaiste; and on the death of the former the latter succeeded him. The Tanaiste was not necessarily the son of the chief: he might be his brother or nephew; but he should belong to his Fine,” or family.[294.1]
That this mode of election was not always successful we may easily believe. That it was the gradual outcome of the experience of a long series of generations is probable. Where for one cause or another it failed, how would the succession be determined? The most obvious means would be either conflict or divination. According to the legends, divination was sometimes actually used to determine the appointment of king. On one occasion in the days of Conchobar, the famous King of Ulster, the monarchy of Ireland had been vacant for seven years. This state of things being found intolerable, a general assembly was held at Tara to choose a king. The royal houses of Connaught, South Munster, North Munster, and Leinster were there, but the Ulstermen were absent; for there was bitter feud between Ulster and the rest of Ireland, and they would not hold kingly counsel together. The mode of election adopted was divination by means of a dream induced by certain ceremonies. The ceremonies began with a bull-feast. A bull was killed, and a man was gorged with its flesh and broth. We are told “he slept under that meal.” It is not incredible. Then “a true oration,” which I understand to mean an incantation, was pronounced over him by four Druids. He dreamed, and screamed out of his sleep, and related to the assembled kings that he had seen in his dream “a soft youth, noble, and powerfully made, with two red stripes on his skin around his body, and he standing at the pillow of a man who was lying in a decline at Emain Macha,” the royal palace of Ulster. Messengers were accordingly sent thither, and the description was found to correspond with that of Lugaidh Reo-derg, the pupil of Cuchulainn, who was then lying ill. Lugaidh was brought to Tara, recognized as the subject of the vision, and proclaimed as monarch of Ireland.[295.1]