We all know about this medicine-king. If we like we can call him divine. On his force and his mana—what Hesiod, I venture to suggest, calls his κράτος τε βία τε—depends the welfare of his people, in the way of rain and thunderstorms, of abundance of game, of crops, of success in war. He also affects floods, earthquake, and pestilence. If he suffers in any way, if his mana is weakened, his whole people suffers and is weakened too. Consequently he is encouraged and kept strong as long as possible; if he shows any weakness, he must be got rid of and a better man found to take his place. There seem to be three main methods. Either he is set aside periodically, at the end of five years, or nine years, or the like; or he is quietly deposed when he shows signs of age, like Peleus, Oineus, Aison, in the legends; or, and this is our main subject to-day, when some one else shows superior mana by killing him. At present my mana is supreme; I am king; my will carries itself out. But if your mana, your Kratos and Bia, conquer mine, then you are king. If you can also get my mana into you, so much the better. For κράτος and βία are tricky things and may desert any one of us, or, according to Hesiod, any except Zeus: ‘No house of Zeus is without them, no seat of Zeus, there is no going forth of the god where they do not follow him, and they sit for ever beside the Thunderer.’[51] Already, in Hesiod, these mana qualities have become half anthropomorphic; much more so, of course, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus.
Now in anthropology we are always making fresh efforts at the imaginative understanding of men far removed from us, and naturally, therefore, we are always slightly correcting and modifying our conceptions. I want here to suggest that with regard to this Divine King the ordinary classical conception is slightly wrong. We speak of deification; and this deification always remains rather a puzzle for us. It may be all very well for the mysterious Minos: but when applied to Julius Caesar or to Hadrian, in the full light and plain prose of history, it seems such an absurd and gratuitous blasphemy. I think the mistake lies in applying our highly abstract conception ‘God’, a conception rarefied and ennobled during many centuries by the philosophic and religious thought of the highest of mankind, to a stratum of human ideas to which it does not belong. In one of the presidential addresses delivered to the recent Congress of Religions, Mr. Hartland dwelt on a significant fact with regard to this idea of God, viz. that whenever this word is used our best witnesses tend to contradict one another. Among the most competent observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance, some hold that they had no conception of a God, others that they were constantly thinking about God. Much may be said about this; but one thing, I think, emerges with some clearness: that this idea of a god far away in the sky—I do not say merely a god who is ‘without body, parts, or passions’, but even a god who is very remote and is a cause behind the regular phenomena of the world—this idea is one which practically does not enter their minds at all, or, if by an effort they can reach and accept it, it has little working value and is soon forgotten. For most primitive races, I suspect, the medicine-chief, the βασιλεύς, with his immense mana, is Theos, and equally the Theos is the medicine-chief. The rainmaker, the bringer of game, the possessor of the power to make dead and to make alive—there he is, the visible doer of all those things which later races have delegated to higher and more shadowy beings, walking palpably before you with his medicine and perhaps his pipe, his grand manner, his fits, and his terrific dress.
The Basileus, the possessor of great mana, wants people to obey him, and by will-power, by force of character, aided by impressive ritual, he makes them. In the same way he makes rain; he says so vehemently ‘It shall rain’ that it cannot help itself. It does. This lies at the back of what we somewhat erroneously call mimetic magic. For the real rainmaker does not imitate rain, he just makes it. One must bear in mind always the extreme sensitiveness of savages to suggestion—to hocus-pocus, to bullying, to paroxysms of rage. When Kyknos-Ares, who presumably belonged to this class of Basileus, was waiting for Heracles to attack him in his temenos, he did not simply make suitable arrangements and stay on guard; no, περιμαίνετο, he ‘raged round’, working up his mana and inspiring all the terror possible. Think of the scolding priests of the Middle Ages. Think even of the Bull ‘Ausculta Fili’. Think of the rages that are characteristic of ancient prophets, such as Tiresias, just as they are of modern yogis and Maroccan saints.
In the first place, then, on sociological grounds, I think we should not conceive this primitive king as a man deified, but rather as a pre-deistic medicine-man possessed of those powers which more cultured ages have relegated to the gods. In the second place, though I know that etymological arguments are often like broken reeds and pierce the hand of him who leans thereon, I cannot but remember that Curtius derived θεός from the root thes- which appears in πολύθεστος, ἀπόθεστος, θέσσασθαι, perhaps θεσμός, the Latin festus and feriae, and which has the special connotation of ‘spell’ or ‘magic prayer’. Professor Conway, who prefers another derivation (Lith. dvãse, ‘spirit, breath,’ MHG. ge-twas, ‘ghost,’ see Brugmann, Gr. Gr. s.v.), writes to me that the fatal objection to the thes- derivation is that θεσός could not mean God; it could only mean ‘prayer’ or ‘one who prays’. Now, except that the word suggests ‘spell’ rather than ‘prayer’, that is exactly what I want it to mean. If the word θεός was originally neuter it meant magic or medicine, like φάρμακον. If masculine, it was the medicine-man or magic-man—not very far from φαρμακός.
The process of thought, if I may over-simplify it a little, seems to be like this. First the Theos or Rainmaker on earth makes his rain. Then it is found that he does not always or unconditionally make the rain, and you reach the hypothesis that a greater rainmaker lives far away, on some remote mountain, or perhaps in the sky. That is the true Theos. The Theos on earth only knows his ways, belongs to him, partly controls him; sometimes indeed he can only humbly pray to him. The so-called Theos on earth, in fact, is not Theos at all. Here comes one of the strongest antitheses between Homeric and non-Homeric, between the reformed Olympian religion and the old savage stuff from which it was made. Homer drew clear the line between mortal and immortal, between God in Olympus and man here. And most early Greek poetry rings with the antithesis. Μὴ μάτευε Ζεὺς γενέσθαι. θνητὸν ὄντα θνητὰ χρὴ φρονεῖν. By the fifth century the time was long past when ‘gods and mortal men strove in Mêkônê’, and the gods had carried the day. Yet even Sophocles makes his Thebans go with prayer and supplication to a Basileus, to stop the plague; and it seems significant that he makes the priest explain
θεοῖσι μέν νυν οὐκ ἱσούμενόν σ’ ἑγὼ οὑδ’ οἴδε παῖδες ἑζόμεσθ’ ἑφέστιοι ἁνδρῶν δὲ πρῶτον ἔν τε συμφοραῖς βίου κρίνοντες ἒν τε δαιμόνων συναλλαγαῖς (O.T. 31 ff.).
The suppliant comes to him not exactly as a God, but as the first of men and as holding some special intercourse with the δαίμονες.
A great collection of these medicine-kings, especially of rain and thunder-makers, is to be found in Mr. A. B. Cook’s very remarkable articles on ‘Zeus, Jupiter and the Oak’, published in the Classical Review for 1903, and again in his ‘European Sky God’ in Folk Lore, xv, pp. 371-90. I will run briefly through a few of them.
The clearest of all is Salmoneus. His nature was explained, I believe, partly by M. Salomon Reinach and partly by Miss Jane Harrison. ‘He declared that he was Zeus,’ says Apollodorus (i. 9, 7), ‘and depriving Zeus of his sacrifices bade men offer them to himself. He attached to a chariot leather thongs with bronze caldrons and, trailing them after him, said he was thundering; he tossed blazing torches into the air and said he was lightening.’—So he was; at least, he was doing his best. Mr. Cook shows that he had also some justification for saying that he was Zeus. For he was an Olympian victor; and thereby became Basileus, or Zeus, of Olympia, and had the thunder-making as part of his official duties.
Almost exactly similar is Remulus Silvius, Remulus ... imitator fulminis, as Ovid calls him. ‘In contempt of the gods he contrived mock thunderbolts and noises like thunder, wherewith he thought to frighten men as though he were a god. But a storm fraught with rain and lightning falling upon his house, and the lake near which it stood swelling in an unusual manner, he was drowned with his whole family.’[52] As with Salmoneus, amid his mock thunder-storms came the real thunder-storm and slew him.