RITUAL AND BELIEF (continued 2)

Ill weeds grow rank in such a soil. Not only are sexual appetites and affections almost the strongest; but, as is now well recognized, in the complex attitude of mankind to the invisible world they have no inconsiderable share. Marriage is a status hemmed about by many taboos and easily lending itself to mystical presentation. It is natural that the demise of one of the parties should cause a shock to the survivor corresponding to the change of condition involved, and should powerfully affect the sexual impulses. Even apart from marriage they are an object on which the thought of mankind, whether savage or civilized, broods with a persistent endeavour to solve the mystery surrounding them. Hints are seen in them for the solution of many a problem other than that of the propagation of the species. The ideas suggested by their contemplation are utilized alike for practical and economical purposes (for example, in agricultural magic), and for speculation on the transcendent themes of life and death and the constitution of the universe. The tales and superstitions I have brought together exhibit these impulses emphasizing the terror of the dead. Many of the phenomena of dreams, and the phenomena of hysteria and various forms of delusion are due to the sexual impulses. The sexual impulses in turn are in many, if not all, of the cases referred to above greatly aided by the conditions imposed on the patient. No less than luxury and over-feeding, fasting and abstinence from the ordinary and reasonable gratification of animal appetites, and from social intercourse, are the parents of nightmare and delusion. Both extremes lead through physical disturbances to disorders of the imagination and the reason. Hermits and celibates have probably suffered even more than rakes and gluttons and drunkards. The annals of monasticism with tiresome and pitiful iteration record the disastrous effects of asceticism upon body and mind. Among savage and barbarous peoples these effects are as a rule less noxious, because the conditions inducing and accelerating them are less continuous. But it is precisely at the time when sexual relations are put out of normal gear, and the sexual impulses are left without their normal gratification, that exclusion from society and abstinence, sometimes from sleep, always from food usual in quality and amount, are imposed. The imagination, already stimulated by the shock of the death (rarely attributed to natural causes), the possibility of an accusation of witchcraft hanging over the widow’s head, the certainty in many cases (as among the tribes of British Columbia) of a long period of hardship and even torture, all combine with the exclusion and enforced abstinence to produce a state of unnatural excitement, amounting at times to terror and delusion—in any case liable powerfully to affect the dreams, and to produce hysteria.

It must be remembered that the entire community shares to the full the underlying beliefs, and participates in varying degrees in the fears of the bereaved spouse. We are familiar even in Europe with the effect upon a crowd—nay, upon an entire nation—of emotions felt in common. They are intensified. The atmosphere becomes electrical, and a spark suffices to produce a conflagration. When the object of the emotion is strange, imperfectly apprehended, mysterious, the effect is heightened; it becomes a species of insanity. Things are imagined which do not exist; eyewitnesses attest what a dispassionate observer knows to be impossibilities. The most appalling of the tales and the most vivid of the rites we have been considering are thus easily accounted for. The marvel is that they are not more widely distributed over the world than our present information enables us to affirm.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOURNING CLOTHES

It is a commonplace among anthropologists that certain events in a community cause a state of taboo, which affects the members of the community in a greater or less degree, according to their nearness of place or blood to the person principally concerned, or according to the magnitude of the event. Among these events a death is not the least important. In the lower culture the whole village or settlement is often attainted by the occurrence of a death. But it is more particularly the near relatives, and those who have been brought into contact with the corpse, who are affected by the death-taboo (or, as it is often called, the death-pollution), most of all the widow or widower. We call the period of the death-taboo—mourning. The duration of the taboo, as well as its intensity, varies among different peoples, and not only according to the relationship of the mourners to the deceased, but also to his rank, from a few days to many months, and even to years. It is very rare that there is no mourning on a death; but if our reports may be trusted, there are a few cases, which, however, need not detain us.

The colours of the mourning garb vary widely. Dr Frazer has collected a considerable list, to which it is needless to add. Let it suffice to say that though emblematic colours are often used, the main principle, especially in the lower culture, is that just discussed of reversing, or wearing something quite distinctive from, the ordinary costume.

If it be objected that a mask is by its very nature intended to deceive, we must not forget that that is very often not its primary object. A nurse in play with a child will sometimes put on a mask for an instant. She does so not to deceive the child as to her identity, but to cause a momentary terror. So the horrible distortions of the human countenance, the wild, the grotesque, the impossible mingling of human and bestial features characteristic of many of the masks used in these dances, are often intended rather to terrify than to deceive the supernatural beings against whom the performance is directed. A warrior going to battle decks himself out with paint and feathers, with helmet and grinning crest, in order to strike fear into the heart of his foe. Spirits are as easily frightened as human beings. Indeed, happily for the comfort of mankind, they are possessed of uncommonly weak nerves which fail them, with all their malevolence, at every turn. All that is necessary is for the man who knows how to deal with them to put on a bold front, and they will flee before him.

Many customs, sometimes born of widely differing motives, converge in a similarity of expression. Hence it is impossible in the present state of our knowledge dogmatically to assert a single origin for practices of a like character extending over so wide an area as those we have just passed in review. They are the expression of the psychological reaction caused by the shock of death and the consequent breach of the circle of kinship or other social bonds. The taboo results from the bewilderment and terror caused by the entry of death into the circle. The conduct and garb of the mourners are the outcome of grief and sympathy, but also of fear. That fear has for its object survivors who have it in their power to involve the mourners in even a more terrible doom by an accusation of witchcraft. Even more, it has regard to death itself, and to the inimical designs of him whose earthly life has been severed, and who has thereby been converted into an envious, and if not a malicious, at least a peevish and easily angered, being, armed by his death with greater, because more mysterious, powers. Mourning garb is often a device to secure his compassion; it is often a defence against his overt attacks; but on the whole tangible proof is lacking that it is a disguise to deceive him.

THE RITE AT THE TEMPLE OF MYLITTA

What is the relation of these three customs? They have usually been considered as closely connected. It may be, as Dr Frazer suspects, that the real motive for the custom described as that of earning dowries by prostitution was religious, rather than economical, although my own suspicions point in another direction. But putting that custom aside for further examination, both the others are certainly portrayed as religious. As practised by the nations of Western Asia for a thousand years prior to the fall of paganism they were annexed to the cult of certain divinities. There is, however, a broad distinction to be drawn between a custom requiring every woman once in her lifetime to submit to the embraces of a stranger, and one which consecrated a life of prostitution. Such a life was one of devotion to the goddess as a more or less permanent servant. The other custom demanded a single act which freed the worshipper for the rest of her days. It may be freely conceded that the goddess at whose temple, or on whose feast-day, the act was performed was endowed with similar characteristics to those of the goddess in whose service the life of prostitution was lived. It may even have been that sometimes the same goddess had bands of harlots attached to her shrine, and also required the sacrifice of the virginity of all other women in the manner described. This perhaps, as we shall see, was the case in Lydia. We should still need to investigate separately the two customs. One of the most fertile sources of error in the interpretation of custom is the fatal tendency of rites distinct, or even altogether different in origin and intention, but similar in expression, to converge. This convergence is accelerated by a variety of causes. The natural vagueness of tradition, the forgetfulness of the exact original meaning, the gradual predominance of one idea over another owing to circumstances which, for want of knowledge, we call accidental, the tendency to repeat by way of precaution in one rite acts which essentially belong to another, are all causes of the kind referred to. Moreover, we have so often found in the similarity of rite the real key to a common interpretation, that where convergence does not in fact occur there is a temptation to read identity of meaning into two rites having a superficial likeness. It behoves us, therefore, to be on our guard, and to scrutinize with some scepticism all cases where the identity both of act and intention is not demonstrably complete.

The practices I have enumerated have all been interpreted as expiations for marriage. Marriage, it is said,—the appropriation of one or more women to one man—is an evolution from the primeval condition of promiscuity. Religious prostitution, the jus primæ noctis and other customs are expiations exacted by society from women who are thus appropriated. They witness to the primeval common rights of the male sex, thus asserted for the last time by one or more on behalf of all on abandoning the woman to the exclusive possession of one of their number.

It may be objected to this reading of Herodotus that while he uses the generic term women (γυναῖκες) in speaking of the victims, on the other hand, in a previous chapter referring to the Babylonian marriage customs, he reports that once a year in every village the marriageable maidens (παρθένοι) were all put up to auction, the respective purchasers being required to give security that they would marry them; and it was unlawful to give them in marriage in any other way. The objection is of little weight. It is needless to consider whether we are to understand the specific term παρθένοι literally. Even if so, there would doubtless be ample time for the performance of the rite at the temple of Mylitta between the auction and the marriage. It does not appear that marriage followed the auction immediately. Had that been contemplated, security would hardly have been necessary. When the anniversary came round all the maidens who had during the preceding year attained puberty and thus become ripe for marriage (γάμων ὡραῖαι) were probably put up. Those who had not previously undergone the rite would, if my interpretation be correct, be required to submit to it before marriage.

I would venture to suggest then that the Babylonian rite was a puberty rite, and that a maiden was not admitted to the status and privileges of adult life until she had thus been ceremonially deflowered. Among those privileges, and the chief of them, was the gratification of the sexual instinct. It was, therefore, a prerequisite to marriage. Ceremonial defloration of the bride by others than her husband has prevailed in many places. When marriage follows closely after puberty it is difficult to determine whether the custom really belongs to the puberty rites, or to those of marriage. I am not concerned here to deny that among many peoples who practise it as part of the marriage rites it may have been such ab initio. The determination of this question would involve an examination of marriage customs extending far beyond the space at my disposal. But it will be admitted that as puberty rites gradually became simplified or altogether obsolete such a custom could only maintain existence as part of the marriage rites. It is then usually (but, as we shall see, not always) performed by one or more of the bridegroom’s friends or by an appointed official, and ultimately degenerates into the jus primæ noctis vested in some powerful personage, as a lord or priest. Nothing of the sort appears in the accounts which have come down to us of the ancient rite in Western Asia. In all of them (save among the Lydians) emphasis is laid on the performance by a stranger. At Babylon our information does not connect the rite with marriage at all. Elsewhere it is referred to not as part of the marriage rites, but as a preliminary to marriage.

That such a rite should be found annexed to the temple and worship of a luxurious goddess causes no surprise; on the contrary, it is what might have been anticipated. Every reader will call to mind numerous examples of archaic rites which have become attached to Christian festivals, and of Christian shrines which are simply shrines of an earlier religion adapted and consecrated afresh under Christian names. The difficulty of uprooting old customs, and their consequent incorporation and adaptation by advancing culture or a new religion, are phenomena too well known to be insisted on here. Probably the Cypriote mysteries were adapted to the worship of Aphrodite from a ruder stage in which no divinity was invoked. And if this could happen once in Western Asia, it might have happened also at Babylon, at Heliopolis and elsewhere. It is possible that other practices, such as the prostitution of the Armenian girls at the temple of Anaitis, or that of the Lydian and Paphian girls to earn their dowries, are no more than the adaptation of a custom common enough in the lower barbarism, by which unmarried girls have unfettered liberty in their sexual relations. The Armenian maidens, at all events, though spoken of as harlots by Strabo, do not seem to have exercised their calling for money, nor to have admitted indiscriminately to their favours all who offered. They reserved themselves for their equals in rank, and entertained them in their dwellings with more hospitality than in a spinsters’ house in the Pacific Islands. The surmise may be indulged that it was in fact originally, if not in later times, their way of choosing husbands. The Lydian girls are expressly said to have bestowed themselves in marriage.

Moreover, at the stage of decay which the rite had reached at Babylon and elsewhere in Western Asia, the proviso that the person with whom the act was performed must be a stranger might be intended to prevent an assignation. When the act had to be performed as a sacrifice in honour of the goddess it might be regarded as a profanation to perform it as an act of inclination with a favoured lover. The best way to prevent this would be to require that it should be performed with a chance stranger, who might further be looked upon, if Mannhardt’s interpretation be correct, as a representative sent by the goddess to play Adonis to the maiden’s Aphrodite. The rite at Byblus lends countenance to this conjecture. It is supported also by the artificial defloration enacted only in symbol by Roman brides, but in grim earnest at the temples of Siva by brides in Southern India.

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.

A traditional story is not a record of fact. It is a record only of what is believed. Probably both Lugaidh Reo-derg and Conaire are mythical personages, but their stories certainly embody what was thought to be possible. The description of the election by divination is substantially the same in both. It may therefore be taken, if not as approximately correct, at least as showing that election by divination was regarded among the ancient Irish as in the last resort a reasonable and proper manner of ascertaining and appointing a king. In this the Irish were by no means singular. The traditions of other nations point to the same result, and the customs in various parts of the world confirm it. The incident of election by divination is so picturesque and so suitable for the purposes of a story-teller that it is to be expected far more often in a tale than in real life. But that the story-incident is based on actual practice, I think there is sufficient ground for believing.

The Taouist dignitary seems to possess only spiritual power, except probably in his own monastery. The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, retains some portion of civil rule. In both cases the person of the ruler is looked upon as sacred. Among savage and barbarous nations the office of priest or medicine-man is often not clearly distinguished from that of temporal ruler. The instances in which the chief or king is looked upon as divine, in which he is responsible for the weather, in which he causes the crops to grow, and performs other superhuman functions, are too numerous, and too well-known to be mentioned here. Since the publication of The Golden Bough they have been among the commonplaces of folklore. I need only remind you that “the divinity that doth hedge a king” is not confined to savagery and barbarism. It has lasted far into civilization, and been sedulously cultivated for political purposes by royalty in every age. A Roman Emperor was Divus Augustus. When the dignity of king becomes hereditary, the monarch is held to be at least descended from the gods. The Mikado traces his descent from the Sun-goddess. King George V. traces his from Woden, the war-god of the Anglo-Saxon tribes which colonized Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is true that this genealogy, at one time seriously credited, is now treated as fable; but even yet the coronation ceremonies of “His Sacred Majesty,” though not directly of pagan origin, witness to the mysterious sanctity that surrounds him.

“It sparkede, and ful brith shon,

So doth the gode charbucle ston,

That men mouthe se by the lith

The romance in which the incident is found is a literary version of the local tradition of Grimsby, still commemorated in the seal of the corporation. The poem dates from the end of the thirteenth century. There are two French versions which I have not seen. Professor Skeat has epitomized the longer in the preface to his edition of the English romance. In it a flame issues from Havelok’s mouth when he sleeps. This is a personal peculiarity, also found in the English lay. His heirship to the throne of Denmark is determined by his ability to blow a horn which none but the true heir could sound. Thus we are brought back to the succession by divination from which we started, and of which the simple diagnosis of royal descent is a corruption and a weakening. It is preserved here, we know not by what cause, after its true meaning had been forgotten. Adopted first of all into tradition from living custom, when the custom was superseded by other means of determining the succession it survived as a tradition until, its true intent being gradually lost, while the hereditary principle was strengthened and fenced about with sanctity, the incident faded into a merely picturesque presentation, in some places of prophecy, in other places of the claims of birth.

[The End]