Other instances elsewhere point to the same analogies. In 1814, a pestilence broke out among the reindeer of the Chukches (a Siberian tribe); and the shamans declared that the beloved chief Koch must be sacrificed to the angry gods (probably his ancestors); so the chief’s own son stabbed him with a dagger. On the coral island of Niue in the South Pacific there once reigned a line of kings; but they were also “high-priests” (that is to say, divine representatives of divine ancestors); and they were supposed to make the crops grow, for a reason which will come out more fully in the sequel. In times of scarcity, the people “grew angry with them and killed them,” or more probably, as I would interpret the facts, sacrificed them for crops to their own deified ancestors. So in time there were no kings left, and the monarchy ceased altogether on the island.
The divine kings being thus responsible for rain and wind, and for the growth of crops, whose close dependence upon them we shall further understand hereafter, it is clear that they are persons of the greatest importance and value to the community. Moreover, in the ideas of early men, their spirit is almost one with that of external nature, over which they exert such extraordinary powers. A subtle sympathy seems to exist between the king and the world outside. The sacred trees which embody his ancestors; the crops, which, as we shall see hereafter, equally embody them; the rain-clouds in which they dwell; the heaven they inhabit;—all these, as it were, are parts of the divine body, and therefore by implication part of the god-king’s, who is but the avatar of his deified fathers. Hence, whatever affects the king, affects the sky, the crops, the rain, the people. There is even reason to believe that the man-god, representative of the ancestral spirit and tribal god, is therefore the representative and embodiment of the tribe itself—the soul of the nation.
L'état, c’est moi is no mere personal boast of Louis Quatorze; it is the belated survival of an old and once very powerful belief, shared in old times by kings and peoples. Whatever hurts the king, hurts the people, and hurts by implication external nature. Whatever preserves the king from danger, preserves and saves the world and the nation.
Mr. Frazer has shown many strange results of these early beliefs—which he traces, however, to the supposed primitive animism, and not (as I have done) to the influence of the ghost-theory. Whichever interpretation we accept, however, his facts at least are equally valuable. He calls attention to the number of kingly taboos which are all intended to prevent the human god from endangering or imperilling his divine life, or from doing anything which might react hurtfully upon nature and the welfare of his people. The man-god is guarded by the strictest rules, and surrounded by precautions of the utmost complexity. He may not set his sacred foot on the ground, because he is a son of heaven; he may not eat or drink with his sacred mouth certain dangerous, impure, or unholy foods; he may not have his sacred hair cut, or his sacred nails pared; he must preserve intact his divine body, and every part of it—the incarnation of the community,—lest evil come of his imprudence or his folly.
The Mikado, for example, was and still is regarded as an incarnation of the sun, the deity who rules the entire universe, gods and men included. The greatest care must therefore be taken both by him and of him. His whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that no act of his may upset the established order of nature. Lest he should touch the earth, he used to be carried wherever he went on men’s shoulders. He could not expose his sacred person to the open air, nor eat out of any but a perfectly new vessel. In every way his sanctity and his health were jealously guarded, and he was treated like a person whose security was important to the whole course of nature.
Mr. Frazer quotes several similar examples, of which the most striking is that of the high pontiff of the Zapotecs, an ancient people of Southern Mexico. This spiritual lord, a true Pope or Lama, governed Yopaa, one of the chief cities of the kingdom, with absolute dominion. He was looked upon as a god “whom earth was not worthy to hold or the sun to shine upon.” He profaned his sanctity if he touched the common ground with his holy foot. The officers who bore his palanquin on their shoulders were chosen from the members of the highest families; he hardly deigned to look on anything around him; those who met him prostrated themselves humbly on the ground, lest death should overtake them if they even saw his divine shadow. (Compare the apparition of Jahweh to Moses.) A rule of continence was ordinarily imposed upon him; but on certain days in the year which were high festivals, it was usual for him to get ceremonially and sacramentally drunk. On such days, we may be sure, the high gods peculiarly entered into him with the intoxicating pulque, and the ancestral spirits reinforced his godhead. While in this exalted state (“full of the god,” as a Greek or Roman would have said) the divine pontiff received a visit from one of the most beautiful of the virgins consecrated to the service of the gods. If the child she bore him was a son, it succeeded in due time to the throne of the Zapotecs. We have here again an instructive mixture of the various ideas out of which such divine kingship and godship is constructed.
It might seem at first sight a paradoxical corollary that people who thus safeguard and protect their divine king, the embodiment of nature, should also habitually and ceremonially kill him. Yet the apparent paradox is, from the point of view of the early worshipper, both natural and reasonable. We read of the Congo negroes that they have a supreme pontiff whom they regard as a god upon earth, and all-powerful in heaven. But, “if he were to die a natural death, they thought the world would perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power and merit, would immediately be annihilated.” This idea of a god as the creator and supporter of all things, without whom nothing would be, is of course a familiar component element of the most advanced theology. But many nations which worship human gods carry out the notion to its logical conclusion in the most rigorous manner. Since the god is a man, it would obviously be quite wrong to let him grow old and weak; since thereby the whole course of nature might be permanently enfeebled; rain would but dribble; crops would grow thin; rivers would trickle away; and the race he ruled would dwindle to nothing. Hence senility must never overcome the sacred man-god; he must be killed in the fulness of his strength and health (say, about his thirtieth year), so that the indwelling spirit, yet young and fresh, may migrate unimpaired into the body of some newer and abler representative. Mr. Frazer was the first, I believe, to point out this curious result of primitive human reasoning, and to illustrate it by numerous and conclusive instances.
I cannot transcribe here in full Mr. Frazer’s admirable argument, with the examples which enforce it; but I must at least give so much of it in brief as will suffice for comprehension of our succeeding exposition. “No amount of care and precaution,” he says, “will prevent the man-god from growing old and feeble, and at last dying. His worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough. For if the man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means, according to the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed from his body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been extracted or at least detained in its wanderings by a demon or sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to his worshippers; and with it their prosperity is gone and their very existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul of the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer it to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, thus dying of disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last stage of weakness and exhaustion, and as such it would continue to drag out a feeble existence in the body to which it might be transferred. Whereas by killing him his worshippers could, in the first place, make sure of catching his soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable successor; and, in the second place, by killing him before his natural force was abated, they would secure that the world should not fall into decay with the decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore, was answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor.”
For this reason, when the pontiff of Congo grew old, and seemed likely to die, the man who was destined to succeed him in the pontificate entered his house with a rope or club, and strangled or felled him. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods; but when the priests thought fit, they sent a messenger to the king, ordering him to die, and alleging an oracle of the gods (or earlier kings) as the reason of their command. This command the kings always obeyed down to the reign of Ergamenes, a contemporary of Ptolemy II. of Egypt. So, when the king of Unyoro in Central Africa falls ill, or begins to show signs of approaching age, one of his own wives is compelled by custom to kill him. The kings of Sofala were regarded by their people as gods who could give rain or sunshine; but the slightest bodily blemish, such as the loss of a tooth, was considered a sufficient reason for putting one of these powerful man-gods to death; he must be whole and sound, lest all nature pay for it. Many kings, human gods, divine priests, or sultans are enumerated by Mr. Frazer, each of whom must be similarly perfect in every limb and member. The same perfect manhood is still exacted of the Christian Pope, who, however, is not put to death in case of extreme age or feebleness. But there is reason to believe that the Grand Lama, the divine Pope of the Tibetan Buddhists, is killed from time to time, so as to keep him “ever fresh and ever young,” and to allow the inherent deity within him to escape full-blooded into another embodiment.
In all these cases the divine king or priest is suffered by his people to retain office, or rather to house the godhead, till by some outward defect, or some visible warning of age or illness, he shows them that he is no longer equal to the proper performance of his divine functions. Until such symptoms appear, he is not put to death. Some peoples, however, as Mr. Frazer shows, have not thought it safe to wait for even the slightest symptom of decay before killing the human god or king; they have destroyed him in the plenitude of his life and vigour. In such cases, the people fix a term beyond which the king may not reign, and at the close of which he must die, the term being short enough to prevent the probability of degeneration meanwhile. In some parts of Southern India, for example, the term was fixed at twelve years; at the expiration of that time, the king had to cut himself to pieces visibly, before the great local idol, of which he was in all probability the human equivalent. “Whoever desires to reign other twelve years,” says an early observer, “and to undertake this martyrdom for the sake of the idol, has to be present looking on at this; and from that place they raise him up as king.”