|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.