The two questions to be answered. The questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly two: first, why had Diana’s priest at Nemi, the King of the Wood, to slay his predecessor? second, why before doing so had he to pluck the branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of the ancients identified with Virgil’s Golden Bough? The two questions are to some extent distinct, and it will be convenient to consider them separately. We begin with the first, which, with the preliminary enquiries, will occupy this and several following volumes. In the last part of the book I shall suggest an answer to the second question.
The first point on which we fasten is the priest’s title. Why was he called the King of the Wood? Why was his office spoken of as a kingdom?
Priestly kings in ancient Italy and Greece.
Traditional origin of these priestly kings.
The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites.?[157] In republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were religious. For example, the king superintended the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, the Lenaean festival of Dionysus, and the torch-races, which were held at several of {p45} the great Athenian festivals. Moreover, he presided at the curious trials of animals and inanimate objects, which had caused the death of a human being. To him in short were assigned, in the words of Plato, “the most solemn and most truly ancestral rites of the ancient sacrifices.”?[158] Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly, and to have centred round the Common Hearth of the state.?[159] For example, in Cos the King sacrificed to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, the equivalent of the Italian Vesta; and he received the hide and one leg of the victim as his perquisite.?[160] In Mytilene the kings, of whom there were several, invited to banquets at the Common Hearth those guests whom the state delighted to honour.?[161] In Chios, if any herdsman or shepherd drove his cows, his sheep, or his swine to pasture in a sacred grove, the first person who witnessed the transgression was bound to denounce the transgressor to the kings, under pain of incurring the wrath of the god and, what was perhaps even worse, of having to pay a fine to the offended deity.?[162] In the same island the king was charged with the duty of pronouncing the public curses,?[163] a spiritual weapon of which much use was made by the ancients.?[164] Every eighth year the King at Delphi took part in a quaint {p46} ceremony. He sat in public distributing barley-meal and pulse to all who chose to apply for the bounty, whether citizens or strangers. Then an image of a girl was brought to him, and he slapped it with his shoe. After that the president of the Thyiads, a college of women devoted to the orgiastic worship of Bacchus, carried away the image to a ravine and there buried it with a rope round its neck. The ceremony was said to be an expiation for the death of a girl who in a time of famine had been publicly buffeted by the king and, smarting under the insult, had hanged herself.?[165] In some cities, such as Megara, Aegosthena, and Pagae, the kingship was an annual office and the years were dated by the kings’ names.?[166] The people of Priene appointed a young man king for the purpose of sacrificing a bull to Poseidon at the Panionian festival.?[167] Some Greek states had several of these titular kings, who held office simultaneously.?[168] At Rome the tradition was that the Sacrificial King had been appointed after the abolition of the monarchy in order to offer the sacrifices which before had been offered by the kings.?[169] A similar view as to the origin of the priestly kings appears to have prevailed in Greece.?[170] In itself the opinion is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of Sparta, almost the only purely Greek state which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of the god.?[171] One of the two Spartan kings held {p47} the priesthood of Zeus Lacedaemon, the other the priesthood of Heavenly Zeus.?[172] Sometimes the descendants of the old kings were allowed to retain this shadowy royalty after the real power had departed from them. Thus at Ephesus the descendants of the Ionian kings, who traced their pedigree to Codrus of Athens, kept the title of king and certain privileges, such as the right to occupy a seat of honour at the games, to wear a purple robe and carry a staff instead of a sceptre, and to preside at the rites of Eleusinian Demeter.?[173] So at Cyrene, when the monarchy was abolished, the deposed King Battus was assigned certain domains and allowed to retain some priestly functions.?[174] Thus the classical evidence points to the conclusion that in prehistoric ages, before the rise of the republican form of government, the various tribes or cities were ruled by kings, who discharged priestly duties and probably enjoyed a sacred character as reputed descendants of deities.
Priestly kings in various parts of the world.
This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred slaves, and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pessinus.?[175] Teutonic kings, again, in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position, and to have exercised the powers, of high priests.?[176] The Emperors of China offer public sacrifices, the details of which are regulated by the ritual books.?[177] The King of Madagascar was {p48} high-priest of the realm. At the great festival of the new year, when a bullock was sacrificed for the good of the kingdom, the king stood over the sacrifice to offer prayer and thanksgiving, while his attendants slaughtered the animal.?[178] In the monarchical states which still maintain their independence among the Gallas of Eastern Africa, the king sacrifices on the mountain tops and regulates the immolation of human victims;?[179] and the dim light of tradition reveals a similar union of temporal and spiritual power, of royal and priestly duties, in the kings of that delightful region of Central America whose ancient capital, now buried under the rank growth of the tropical forest, is marked by the stately and mysterious ruins of Palenque.?[180] Among the Matabeles the king is high-priest. Every year he offers sacrifices at the great and the little dance, and also at the festival of the new fruits, which ends the dances. On these occasions he prays to the spirits of his forefathers and likewise to his own spirit; for it is from these higher powers that he expects every blessing.?[181]
Divinity of kings.
The Spartan kings supposed to be attended by Castor and Pollux, who were thought to manifest themselves in certain electric lights.
This last example is instructive because it shews that the king is something more than a priest. He prays not only to the spirits of his fathers but to his own spirit. He is clearly raised above the standard of mere humanity; there is something divine about him. Similarly we may suppose that the Spartan kings were thought not only to be descended from the great god Zeus but also to partake of his holy spirit. This is indeed indicated by a curious Spartan belief which has been recorded by Herodotus. The old historian tells us that formerly both of the Spartan kings went forth with the army to battle, but that in later times a rule was made that when one king marched out to fight the other should stay at home. “And accordingly,” says {p49} Herodotus, “one of the kings remaining at home, one of the Tyndarids is left there too; for hitherto both of them were invoked and followed the kings.”?[182] The Tyndarids are, of course, the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, the sons of Zeus; and it should be remembered that the two Spartan kings themselves were believed to be descended from twins?[183] and hence may have been credited with the wondrous powers which superstition often associates with twins.?[184] The belief described by Herodotus plainly implies that one of the heavenly twins was supposed to be in constant attendance on each of their human kinsmen the two Spartan kings, staying with them where they stayed and going with them wherever they went; hence they were probably thought to aid the kings with their advice in time of need. Now Castor and Pollux are commonly represented as spearmen, and they were constantly associated or identified, not only with stars, but also with those lurid lights which, in an atmosphere charged with electricity, are sometimes seen to play round the masts of ships under a murky sky.?[185] Moreover, similar lights were observed by the ancients to glitter in the darkness on the points of spears. Pliny tells us that he had seen such lambent flames on the spears of Roman sentinels {p50} as they paced their rounds by night in front of the camp;?[186] and it is said that Cossacks riding across the steppes on stormy nights perceive flickerings of the same sort at their lance-heads.?[187] Since, therefore, the divine brothers Castor and Pollux were believed to attend the Spartan kings, it seems not impossible that they may have been thought to accompany the march of a Spartan army in a visible form, appearing to the awe-stricken soldiers in the twilight or the darkness either as stars in the sky or as the sheen of spears on earth. Perhaps the stories of the appearance of the heavenly twins in battle, charging on their milk-white steeds at the head of the earthly chivalry, may have originated in similar lights seen to glitter in the gloaming on a point here and there in the long hedge of levelled or ported spears; for any two riders on white horses whose spearheads happened to be touched by the mystic light might easily be taken for Castor and Pollux in person. If there is any truth in this conjecture, we should conclude that the divine brothers were never seen in broad day, but only at dusk or in the darkness of night. Now their most famous appearance was at the battle of Lake Regillus, as to which we are expressly told that it was late in the evening of a summer day before the fighting was over.?[188] Such statements should not be lightly dismissed as late inventions of a rhetorical historian. The memories of great battles linger long among the peasantry of the neighbourhood.
The divinity of kings in early society.
But when we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests also, we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of their office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty form of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings were revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought, if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice {p51} offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece with early modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own well-being and that of his fellow-men.
Sympathetic magic.
This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency. The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of superstition. In early society the king is frequently a magician as well as a priest; indeed he appears to have often attained to power by virtue of his supposed proficiency in the black or white art. Hence in order to understand the evolution of the kingship and the sacred character with which the office has commonly been invested in the eyes of savage or barbarous peoples, it is essential to have some acquaintance with the principles of magic and to form some conception of the extraordinary hold which that ancient system of superstition has had on the human mind in all ages and all countries. Accordingly I propose to consider the subject in some detail.