Chapter XII · THE SACRED MARRIAGE

§ 1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility

|Dramatic marriages of gods and goddesses as a charm to promote vegetation.| In the last chapter we saw that according to a widespread belief, which is not without a foundation in fact, plants reproduce their kinds through the sexual union of male and female elements, and that on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic this reproduction can be stimulated by the real or mock marriage of men and women, who masquerade for the time being as spirits of vegetation. Such magical dramas have played a great part in the popular festivals of Europe, and based as they are on a very crude conception of natural law, it is clear that they must have been handed down from a remote antiquity. We shall hardly, therefore, err in assuming that they date from a time when the forefathers of the civilised nations of Europe were still barbarians, herding their cattle and cultivating patches of corn in the clearings of the vast forests, which then covered the greater part of the continent, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean. But if these old spells and enchantments for the growth of leaves and blossoms, of grass and flowers and fruit, have lingered down to our own time in the shape of pastoral plays and popular merry-makings, is it not reasonable to suppose that they survived in less attenuated forms some two thousand years ago among the civilised peoples of antiquity? Or, to put it otherwise, is it not likely that in certain festivals of the ancients we may be able to detect the equivalents of our May Day, Whitsuntide, and Midsummer celebrations, with this difference, 121that in those days the ceremonies had not yet dwindled into mere shows and pageants, but were still religious or magical rites, in which the actors consciously supported the high parts of gods and goddesses? Now in the first chapter of this book we found reason to believe that the priest who bore the title of King of the Wood at Nemi had for his mate the goddess of the grove, Diana herself. May not he and she, as King and Queen of the Wood, have been serious counterparts of the merry mummers who play the King and Queen of May, the Whitsuntide Bridegroom and Bride in modern Europe? and may not their union have been yearly celebrated in a theogamy or divine marriage? Such dramatic weddings of gods and goddesses, as we shall see presently, were carried out as solemn religious rites in many parts of the ancient world; hence there is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the sacred grove at Nemi may have been the scene of an annual ceremony of this sort. Direct evidence that it was so there is none, but analogy pleads in favour of the view, as I shall now endeavour to shew.

|Diana a goddess of the woodlands.| Diana was essentially a goddess of the woodlands, as Ceres was a goddess of the corn and Bacchus a god of the vine.^[411] Her sanctuaries were commonly in groves, indeed every grove was sacred to her,^[412] and she is often associated with the forest god Silvanus in dedications.^[413] We must not |Sanctity of holy groves in antiquity.| forget that to the ancients the sanctity of a holy grove was very real and might not be violated with impunity. For example, in Attica there was a sanctuary of Erithasean Apollo, and it was enacted by law that any person caught in the act of cutting trees in it, or carrying away timber, firewood, or fallen leaves, should be punished with fifty stripes, if he was a slave, or with a fine of fifty drachms, if he was a freeman. The culprit was denounced by the priest to the king, that is, to the sacred official or minister of state who bore the 122royal title.^[414] Similarly it was the duty of the sacred men at Andania, in Messenia, to scourge slaves and fine freemen who cut wood in the grove of the Great Goddesses.^[415] In Crete it was forbidden, under pain of curses and fines, to fell timber, sow corn, and herd or fold flocks within the precinct of Dictaean Zeus.^[416] In Italy like customs prevailed. Near Spoletium there was a sacred grove from which nothing might be taken, and in which no wood might be cut except just so much as was needed for the annual sacrifice. Any person who knowingly violated the sanctity of the grove had to expiate his offence by sacrificing an ox to Jupiter, and to pay besides a fine of three hundred pence.^[417] In his treatise on farming Cato directs that before thinning a grove the Roman husbandman should offer a pig as an expiatory sacrifice to the god or goddess of the place, and should entreat his or her favour for himself, his children, and his household.^[418] The Fratres Arvales or Brethren of the Tilled Fields were a Roman college of twelve priests, who performed public religious rites for the purpose of making the crops to grow, and they wore wreaths of ears of corn as a badge of their office.^[419] Their sacrifices were offered in the grove of the goddess Dia, situated five miles down the Tiber from Rome. So hallowed was this grove, which is known to have included laurels and holly-oaks, that expiatory sacrifices of sows and lambs had to be offered when a rotten bough fell to the ground, or when an old tree was laid low by a storm or dragged down by a load of snow on its branches. And still more elaborate expiation had to be made with the slaughter of sows, sheep, and bulls when any of the sacred trees were struck by lightning and it was necessary to dig them up by the roots, split them, burn them, and plant others in their room.^[420] At the annual 123festival of the Parilia, which was intended to ensure the welfare of the flocks and herds, Roman shepherds prayed to be forgiven if they had entered a hallowed grove, or sat down under a sacred tree, or lopped a holy bough in order to feed a sick sheep on the leaves.^[421]

|Sense of the divinity of woods shared by polite Roman writers.| Nor was this sense of the indwelling divinity of the woods confined to the simple rustics who, tending their flocks in the chequered shade, felt the presence of spirits in the solemn stillness of the forest, heard their voices in the sough of the wind among the branches, and saw their handiwork in the fresh green of spring and the fading gold of autumn. The feeling was shared by the most cultivated minds in the greatest age of Roman civilisation. Pliny says that “the woods were formerly the temples of the deities, and even now simple country folk dedicate a tall tree to a god with the ritual of the olden time; and we adore sacred groves and the very silence that reigns in them not less devoutly than images that gleam with gold and ivory.”^[422] Similarly Seneca writes: “If you come upon a grove of old trees that have shot up above the common height and shut out the sight of the sky by the gloom of their matted boughs, you feel there is a spirit in the place, so lofty is the wood, so lone the spot, so wondrous the thick unbroken shade.”^[423]

|The breaking of the Golden Bough a rite of solemn significance, not a mere piece of bravado.| Thus the ancients, like many other people in various parts of the world, were deeply impressed with the sanctity of holy groves, and regarded even the cutting of a bough in them as a sacrilege which called for expiation. If therefore a candidate for the priesthood of Diana at Nemi had to break a branch of a certain tree in the sacred grove before he could fight the King of the Wood, we may be sure that the act was a rite of solemn significance, and that to treat it as a mere piece of bravado, a challenge to the priest to come on and defend his domain, would be to commit the commonest of all errors in dealing with the past, that, namely, of interpreting 124the customs of other races and other generations by reference to modern European standards. In order to understand an alien religion the first essential is to divest ourselves, as well as we can, of our own familiar prepossessions, and to place ourselves at the point of view of those whose faith and practice we are studying. To do this at all is difficult; to do it completely is perhaps impossible; yet the attempt must be made if the enquiry is to progress instead of returning on itself in a vicious circle.

|Diana not a mere goddess of trees, but, like Artemis, a personification of the teeming life of nature, both animal and vegetable.| But whatever her origin may have been, Diana was not always a mere goddess of trees. Like her Greek sister Artemis, she appears to have developed into a personification of the teeming life of nature, both animal and vegetable. As mistress of the greenwood she would naturally be thought to own the beasts, whether wild or tame, that ranged through it, lurking for their prey in its gloomy depths, munching the fresh leaves and shoots among the boughs, or cropping the herbage in the open glades and dells. Thus she might come |A deity of the woods is naturally the patron of the beasts in the woods, both game and cattle.| to be the patron goddess both of hunters and herdsmen,^[424] just as Silvanus was the god not only of woods, but of cattle.^[425] Similarly in Finland the wild beasts of the forest were regarded as the herds of the woodland God Tapio and of his stately and beautiful wife. No man might slay one of these animals without the gracious permission of their divine owners. Hence the hunter prayed to the sylvan deities, and vowed rich offerings to them if they would drive the game across his path. And cattle also seem to have enjoyed the protection of those spirits of the woods, both when they were in their stalls and while they strayed in the forest.^[426] So in the belief of Russian peasants the spirit Leschiy rules both the wood and all the creatures in it. The bear is to him what the dog is to man; and the migrations of the squirrels, the field-mice, and other denizens of the woods are carried out in obedience to his behests. Success in the chase depends on his favour, and to assure himself of the spirit’s help the 125huntsman lays an offering, generally of bread and salt, on the trunk of a tree in the forest. In White Russia every herdsman must present a cow to Leschiy in summer, and in the Government of Archangel some herdsmen have won his favour so far that he even feeds and tends their herds for them.^[427] Similarly the forest-god of the Lapps ruled over all the beasts of the forest; they were viewed as his herds, and good or bad luck in hunting depended on his will.^[428] So, too, the Samagitians deemed the birds and beasts of the woods sacred, doubtless because they were under the protection of the sylvan god.^[429] Before the Gayos of Sumatra hunt deer, wild goats, or wild pigs with hounds in the woods, they deem it necessary to obtain the leave of the unseen Lord of the forest. This is done according to a prescribed form by a man who has special skill in woodcraft. He lays down a quid of betel before a stake which is cut in a particular way to represent the Lord of the Wood, and having done so he prays to the spirit to signify his consent or refusal.^[430]

|The crowning of hunting dogs on Diana’s day was probably a purificatory ceremony to cleanse them from the guilt of having killed game, the creatures of the goddess.| We have seen that at Diana’s festival it was customary to crown hunting dogs, to leave wild beasts in peace, and to perform a purificatory ceremony for the benefit of young people.^[431] Some light is thrown on the meaning of these customs by a passage in Arrian’s treatise on hunting. He tells us that a good hound is a boon conferred by one of the gods upon the huntsman, who ought to testify his gratitude by sacrificing to the Huntress Artemis. Further, Arrian goes on to say: “It is right that after a successful chase a man should sacrifice and dedicate the first-fruits of his bag to the goddess, in order to purify both the hounds and the hunters, in accordance with old custom and usage.” He tells us that the Celts were wont to form a treasury for the goddess Artemis, into which they paid a fine of two obols for every hare they killed, a drachm for every fox, and four drachms for every roe. Once a year, on the birthday of Artemis, 126they opened the treasury, and with the accumulated fines purchased a sacrificial victim, it might be a sheep, a goat, or a calf. Having slain the animal and offered her share to the Huntress Artemis, they feasted, both men and dogs; and they crowned the dogs on that day “in order to signify,” says Arrian, “that the festival was for their benefit.”^[432] The Celts to whom Arrian, a native of Bithynia, here refers were probably the Galatians of Asia Minor; but doubtless the custom he describes was imported by these barbarians, along with their native tongue^[433] and the worship of the oak,^[434] from their old home in Central or Northern Europe. The Celtic divinity whom Arrian identifies with Artemis may well have been really akin both to her and to the Italian Diana. We know from other sources that the Celts revered a woodland goddess of this type; thus Arduinna, goddess of the forest of the Ardennes, was represented, like Artemis and Diana, with a bow and quiver.^[435] In any case the custom described by Arrian is good evidence of a belief that the wild beasts belong to the goddess of the wilds, who must be compensated for their destruction; and, taken with what he says of the need of purifying the hounds after a successful chase, the Celtic practice of crowning them at the annual festival of Artemis may have been meant to purge them of the stain they had contracted by killing the creatures of the goddess. The same explanation would naturally apply to the same custom observed by the Italians at the festival of Diana.

|Cattle crowned to protect them from witchcraft.| But why, it may be asked, should crowns or garlands cleanse dogs from the taint of bloodshed? An answer to this question is indicated by the reason which the South Slavonian peasant assigns for crowning the horns of his cows with wreaths of flowers on St. George’s Day, the twenty-third of April. He does it in order to guard the cattle against witchcraft; cows that have no crowns are regarded 127as given over to the witches. In the evening the chaplets are fastened to the door of the cattle-stall, and remain there throughout the year. A herdsman who fails to crown his beasts is scolded and sometimes beaten by his master.^[436] The German and French custom of crowning cattle on Midsummer Day^[437] probably springs from the same motive. For on Midsummer Eve, just as on Walpurgis Night, witches are very busy holding their nocturnal assemblies and trying to steal the milk and butter from the cows. To guard against them some people at this season lay besoms crosswise before the doors of the stalls. Others make fast the doors and stop up the chinks, lest the witches should creep through them on their return from the revels. In Swabia all the church bells used to be kept ringing from nine at night till break of day on Midsummer morning to drive away the infernal rout from honest folk’s houses. South Slavonian peasants are up betimes that morning, gather the dew from the grass, and wash the cows with it; that saves their milk from the hellish charms of the witches.^[438]

|Similarly the crowning of hunting dogs may have been meant to protect them against the angry spirits of the beasts they had killed.| Now when we observe that garlands of flowers, like hawthorn and other green boughs,^[439] avail to ward off the unseen powers of mischief, we may conjecture that the practice of crowning dogs at the festival of a huntress 128goddess was intended to preserve the hounds from the angry and dangerous spirits of the wild beasts which they had killed in the course of the year. Fantastical as this explanation may sound to us, it is perfectly in accordance with the ideas of the savage, who, as we shall see later on, resorts to a multitude of curious expedients for disarming the wrath of the animals whose life he has been obliged to take. Thus conceived, the custom in question might still be termed a purification; but its original purpose, like that of many other purificatory rites, would be not so much to cleanse moral guilt, as to raise a physical barrier against the assaults of malignant and mischievous spirits.^[440]

|Conceived as the moon, Diana was also a goddess of crops and of childbirth.| But Diana was not merely a patroness of wild beasts, a mistress of woods and hills, of lonely glades and sounding rivers; conceived as the moon, and especially, it would seem, as the yellow harvest moon, she filled the farmer’s grange with goodly fruits, and heard the prayers of women in travail.^[441] In her sacred grove at Nemi, as we have seen, she was especially worshipped as a goddess of childbirth, who bestowed offspring on men and women.^[442] Thus Diana, like the Greek Artemis, with whom she was constantly identified, may be described as a goddess of nature in general and of fertility in particular.^[443] We need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant fecundity.^[444] Hence too we can understand why an ancient 129Roman law, attributed to King Tullius Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana.^[445] For we know that the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a dearth;^[446] hence it would be meet that atonement for the offence should be made to the goddess of fertility.

|As a goddess of fertility Diana had herself to be fertile, and for that purpose needed a male partner.| Now on the principle that the goddess of fertility must herself be fertile, it behoved Diana to have a male partner. Her mate, if the testimony of Servius may be trusted, was that Virbius who had his representative, or perhaps rather his embodiment, in the King of the Wood at Nemi.^[447] The aim of their union would be to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of animals, and of mankind; and it might naturally be thought that this object would be more surely attained if the sacred nuptials were celebrated every year, the parts of the divine bride and bridegroom being played either by their images or by living persons. No ancient writer mentions that this was done in the grove at Nemi; but our knowledge of the Arician ritual is so scanty that the want of information on this head can hardly count as a fatal objection to the theory. That theory, in the absence of direct evidence, must necessarily be based on the analogy of similar customs practised elsewhere. Some modern examples of such customs, more or less degenerate, were described in the last chapter. Here we shall consider their ancient counterparts.

§ 2. The Marriage of the Gods

|Marriages of the gods in Babylonia and Assyria.| At Babylon the imposing sanctuary of Bel rose like a pyramid above the city in a series of eight towers or stories, planted one on the top of the other. On the highest tower, reached by an ascent which wound about all the rest, there stood a spacious temple, and in the temple a great bed, magnificently draped and cushioned, with a golden table beside it. In the temple no image was to be seen, and no human being passed the night there, save a single woman, whom, according to the Chaldean priests, the god chose 130from among all the women of Babylon. They said that the deity himself came into the temple at night and slept in the great bed; and the woman, as a consort of the god, might have no intercourse with mortal man.^[448] As Bel at Babylon was identified with Marduk, the chief god of the city,^[449] the woman who thus shared his bed was doubtless one of the “wives of Marduk” mentioned in the code of Hammurabi.^[450] At Calah, which was for some time the capital of Assyria before it was displaced by Nineveh,^[451] the marriage of the god Nabu appears to have been annually celebrated on the third of the month Iyyar or Airu, which corresponded to May. For on that day his bed was consecrated in the city, and the god entered his bedchamber, to return to his place on the following day. The ceremonies attending the consecration of the couch are minutely described in a liturgical text. After the appropriate offerings had been presented, the officiating priestess purified the feet of the divine image with a sprig of reed and a vessel of oil, approached the bed thrice, kissed the feet of the image, then retired and sat down. After that she burned cedar wood dipped in wine, set before the image the heart of a sheep wrapped in a cloth, and offered libations. Aromatic woods were consecrated and burnt, more libations and offerings were made, tables were spread for various divinities, and the ceremony ended with a prayer for the King. The god also went in procession to a grove, riding in a chariot beside his charioteer.^[452]

|Marriage of the god Ammon to the Queen of Egypt.| At Thebes in Egypt a woman slept in the temple of Ammon as the consort of the god, and, like the human wife of Bel at Babylon, she was said to have no commerce with 131a man.^[453] In Egyptian texts she is often mentioned as “the divine consort,” and usually she was no less a personage than the Queen of Egypt herself. For, according to the Egyptians, their monarchs were actually begotten by the god Ammon, who assumed for the time being the form of the reigning king, and in that disguise had intercourse with the queen. The divine procreation is carved and painted in great detail on the walls of two of the oldest temples in Egypt, those of Deir el Bahari and Luxor; and the inscriptions attached to the paintings leave no doubt as to the meaning of the scenes. The pictures at Deir el Bahari, which represent the begetting and birth of Queen Hatshopsitou, are the more ancient, and have been reproduced with but little change at Luxor, where they represent the begetting and birth of King Amenophis III. The nativity is depicted in about fifteen scenes, which may be grouped in three acts: first, the carnal union of the god with the queen; second, the birth; and third, the recognition of the infant by the gods. The marriage of Ammon with the queen is announced by a prologue in heaven; Ammon summons his assessors, the gods of Heliopolis, reveals to them the future birth of a new Pharaoh, a royal princess, and requests them to make ready the fluid of life and of strength, of which they are masters. Then the god is seen approaching the queen’s bedchamber; in front of him marches Thoth, with a roll of papyrus in his hand, who, to prevent mistakes, recites the official names of the queen, the spouse of the reigning king (Thothmes I. at Deir el Bahari, Thothmes IV. at Luxor), the fairest of women. Then Thoth withdraws behind Ammon, lifting his arm behind the god in order to renew his vital fluid at this critical moment. Next, according to the inscription, the mystery of incarnation takes place. Ammon lays aside his godhead and becomes flesh in the likeness of the king, the human spouse of the queen. The consummation of the divine union follows immediately. On a bed of state the god and the queen appear seated opposite each other, with their legs crossed. The queen receives from her husband the symbols of life and strength, while two goddesses, Neit and Selkit, the patronesses of matrimony, support the 132feet of the couple and guard them from harm. The text which encloses the scene sets forth clearly the reality of this mystic union of the human with the divine. “Thus saith Ammon-Ra, king of the gods, lord of Karnak, he who rules over Thebes, when he took the form of this male, the King of Upper and Nether Egypt, Thothmes I. (or Thothmes IV.), giver of life. He found the queen then when she lay in the glory of her palace. She awoke at the fragrance of the god, and marvelled at it. Straightway his Majesty went towards her, took possession of her, placed his heart in her, and shewed himself to her in his divine form. And upon his coming she was uplifted at the sight of his beauty, the love of the god ran through all her limbs, and the smell of the god and his breath were full of the perfumes of Pounit. And thus saith the royal spouse, the royal mother Ahmasi (or Moutemouaa), in presence of the majesty of this glorious god, Ammon, lord of Karnak, lord of Thebes, ‘Twice great are thy souls! It is noble to behold thy countenance when thou joinest thyself to my majesty in all grace! Thy dew impregnates all my limbs.’ Then, when the majesty of the god had accomplished all his desire with her, Ammon, the lord of the two lands, said to her: ‘She who is joined to Ammon, the first of the nobles, verily, such shall be the name of the daughter who shall open thy womb, since such is the course of the words that came forth from thy mouth. She shall reign in righteousness in all the earth, for my soul is hers, my heart is hers, my will is hers, my crown is hers, truly, that she may rule over the two lands, that she may guide the souls of all living.’”

|Nativity of the divine Egyptian kings represented on the monuments.| After the begetting of the divine child—for we must remember that the kings and queens of Egypt were regarded as divinities in their lifetime—another series of scenes represents the fashioning of its body and its birth. The god Khnoumou, who in the beginning of time moulded gods and men on his potter’s wheel, is seen seated at his wheel modelling the future king or queen and their doubles—those spiritual duplicates or external souls which were believed to hover invisible about both men and gods all through life. In front of Khnoumou kneels Hiqit, the frog-headed goddess, “the great magician”; she is holding out to the newly-created 133figures the symbol of life, the crux ansata ♀, in order that they may breathe and live. Another scene represents the birth. At Deir el Bahari the queen has already been delivered, and is presenting her daughter to several goddesses, who have acted the part of midwives. At Luxor the double of the royal infant is born first; the goddesses who serve as nurses have him in their arms, and the midwives are preparing to receive the real child. Behind the queen are the goddesses who watch over childbirth, led by Isis and Nephthys; and all around the spirits of the East, the West, the North, and the South are presenting the symbol of life or uttering acclamations. In a corner the grotesque god Bes and the female hippopotamus Api keep off all evil influence and every malignant spirit.

|These representations probably copied from the life.| We shall probably not err in assuming, with some eminent authorities, that the ceremonies of the nativity of the Pharaohs, thus emblazoned on the walls of Egyptian temples, were copied from the life; in other words, that the carved and painted scenes represent a real drama, which was acted by masked men and women whenever a queen of Egypt was brought to bed. “Here, as everywhere else in Egypt,” says Professor Maspero, “sculptor and painter did nothing but faithfully imitate reality. Theory required that the assimilation of the kings to the gods should be complete, so that every act of the royal life was, as it were, a tracing of the corresponding act of the divine life. From the moment that the king was Ammon, he wore the costume and badges of Ammon—the tall hat with the long plumes, the cross of life, the greyhound-headed sceptre—and thus arrayed he presented himself in the queen’s bedchamber to consummate the marriage. The assistants also assumed the costume and appearance of the divinities whom they incarnated; the men put on masks of jackals, hawks, and crocodiles, while the women donned masks of cows or frogs, according as they played the parts of Anubis, Khnoumou, Sovkou, Hathor, or Hiqit; and I am disposed to believe that the doubles of the new-born child were represented by as many puppets as were required by the ceremonies. Some of the rites were complicated, and must have tired excessively the mother and child who underwent them; but 134they are nothing to those that have been observed in similar circumstances in other lands. In general, we are bound to hold that all the pictures traced on the walls of the temples, in which the person of the king is concerned, correspond to a real action in which disguised personages played the part of gods.”^[454]

|Human wives of Ammon in the decline of Egypt.| In the decline of Egypt from the eleventh century onward, the wives of Ammon at Thebes were called on to play a conspicuous part in the government of the country. The strong grip of the Pharaohs was relaxed and under their feeble successors the empire crumbled away into a number of petty independent states. In this dissolution of the central authority the crafty high priests of Ammon at Thebes contrived to usurp regal powers and to reign far and wide in the name of the deity, veiling their rescripts under the guise of oracles of the god, who, with the help of a little jugglery, complacently signified his assent to their wishes by nodding his head or even by speech. But curiously enough under this pretended theocracy the nominal ruler was not the priest himself, but his wife, the earthly consort of Ammon. Thus Thebes became for a time a ghostly principality governed ostensibly by a dynasty of female popes. Their office was hereditary, passing by rights from mother to daughter. But probably the entail was often broken by the policy or ambition of the men who stood behind the scenes and worked the religious puppet-show by hidden wires to the awe and astonishment of the gaping vulgar. Certainly we know that on one occasion King Psammetichus First foisted his own daughter into the Holy See by dedicating her to Ammon under a hypocritical profession of gratitude for favours bestowed on him by the deity. And the female pope had to submit to the dictation with the 135best grace she could assume, protesting her affection for the adopted daughter who had ousted her own daughter from the throne.^[455]

|Human concubines of Ammon in Roman times.| At a later period, when Egypt lay under the heel of Rome, the character of “the divine consort” of Ammon at Thebes had greatly changed. For at the beginning of our era the custom was to appoint a young and beautiful girl, the scion of one of the noblest houses, to serve Ammon as his concubine. The Greeks called these maidens Pallades, apparently after their own virgin goddess Pallas; but the conduct of the girls was by no means maidenly, for they led the loosest of lives till puberty. Then they were mourned over and given in marriage.^[456] Their graves were shown near Thebes.^[457] The reason why their services ended at puberty may have been that as concubines of the god they might not bear children to mortal fathers; hence it was deemed prudent to terminate their relations with the divinity before they were of an age to become mothers. It was an Egyptian doctrine that a mortal woman could conceive by a god, but that a goddess could not conceive by a mortal man.^[458] The certainty of maternity and the uncertainty of paternity suggest an obvious and probably sufficient ground for this theological distinction.

|Apollo and his prophetess at Patara.| Apollo was said to spend the winter months at Patara in Lycia and the summer months in the island of Delos, and accordingly he gave oracles for one half of the year in the one place, and for the other half in the other.^[459] So long as he tarried at Patara, his prophetess was shut up with him in the temple every night.^[460] At Ephesus there was a college |The Essenes of Artemis at Ephesus.| of sacred men called Essenes or King Bees who held office for a year, during which they had to observe strict chastity and other rules of ceremonial purity.^[461] How many of them 136there were at a time we do not know, but there must have been several, for in Ephesian inscriptions they are regularly referred to in the plural. They cannot have been bound to lifelong celibacy, for in one of the inscriptions an Essen mentions his wife.^[462] Possibly they were deemed the annual husbands of Artemis, the great many-breasted goddess of fertility at Ephesus, whose association with the bee is vouched for by the figures of bees which appear commonly both on her statues and on the coins of Ephesus.^[463] If this conjecture is right, the King Bees and their bee-goddess Artemis at Ephesus would be closely parallel to the King of the Wood and his woodland-goddess Diana at Nemi, as these latter are interpreted by me. The rule of chastity imposed on the King Bees during their year of office would be easily explicable on this hypothesis. As the temporary husbands of the goddess they would be expected for the time being to have no intercourse with mortal women, just as the human wives of Bel and Ammon were supposed to have no commerce with mortal men.

|Marriage of Dionysus to the Queen at Athens.| At Athens the god of the vine, Dionysus, was annually married to the Queen, and it appears that the consummation of the divine union, as well as the espousals, was enacted at the ceremony; but whether the part of the god was played by a man or an image we do not know. Attic law required that the Queen should be a burgess and should never have known any man but her husband. She had to offer certain 137secret sacrifices on behalf of the state, and was permitted to see what no foreign woman might ever behold, and to enter where no other Athenian might set foot. She was assisted in the discharge of her solemn functions by fourteen sacred women, one for each of the altars of Dionysus. The old Dionysiac festival was held on the twelfth day of the month Anthesterion, corresponding roughly to our February, at the ancient sanctuary of Dionysus in the Marshes, which was never opened throughout the year save on that one day. At this festival the Queen exacted an oath of purity and chastity from the fourteen sacred women at the altar. Possibly her marriage was celebrated on the same day, though of that we have no positive evidence, and we learn from Aristotle that the ceremony took place, not at the sanctuary in the marshes, but in the old official residence of the King, known as the Cattle-stall, which stood near the Prytaneum or Town-hall on the north-eastern slope of the Acropolis.^[464] But whatever the date of the wedding, its object can hardly have been any other than that of ensuring the fertility of the vines and other fruit-trees, of which Dionysus was the god. Thus both in form and in meaning the ceremony would answer to the nuptials of the King and Queen of May. Again, the story, dear to poets 138and artists, of the forsaken and sleeping Ariadne, waked and wedded by Dionysus, resembles so closely the little drama acted by French peasants of the Alps on May Day,^[465] that, considering the character of Dionysus as a god of vegetation, we can hardly help regarding it as the reflection of a spring ceremony like the French one. In point of fact the |Dionysus and Ariadne.| marriage of Dionysus and Ariadne was believed by Preller to have been acted every spring in Crete.^[466] His evidence, indeed, is inconclusive, but the view itself is probable. If I am right in comparing the two, the chief difference between the French and the Greek ceremonies appears to have been that in the former the sleeper was a forsaken bridegroom, in the latter a forsaken bride; and the group of stars in the sky, in which fancy saw Ariadne’s wedding crown,^[467] may have been only a translation to heaven of the garland worn by the Greek girl who played the Queen of May.

|Marriage of Zeus with Demeter at Eleusis.| If at Athens, and probably elsewhere, the vine-god was married to a queen in order that the vines might be loaded with clusters of grapes, there is reason to think that a marriage of a different kind, intended to make the fields wave with yellow corn, was annually celebrated not many miles off, beyond the low hills that bound the plain of Athens on the west. In the great mysteries solemnised at Eleusis in the month of September the union of the sky-god Zeus with the corn-goddess Demeter appears to have been represented by the union of the hierophant with the priestess of Demeter, who acted the parts of god and goddess. But their intercourse was only dramatic or symbolical, for the hierophant had temporarily deprived himself of his virility by an application of hemlock. The torches having been extinguished, the pair descended into a murky place, while the throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic congress, on which they believed their own salvation to depend. After a time the hierophant reappeared, and in a blaze of light silently exhibited to the assembly a reaped ear of corn, the fruit of the divine marriage. Then in a loud voice he proclaimed, 139“Queen Brimo has brought forth a sacred boy Brimos,” by which he meant, “The Mighty One has brought forth the Mighty.” The corn-mother in fact had given birth to her child, the corn, and her travail-pangs were enacted in the sacred drama.^[468] This revelation of the reaped corn appears to have been the crowning act of the mysteries. Thus through the glamour shed round these rites by the poetry and philosophy of later ages there still looms, like a distant landscape through a sunlit haze, a simple rustic festival 140designed to cover the wide Eleusinian plain with a plenteous harvest by wedding the goddess of the corn to the sky-god, who fertilised the bare earth with genial showers.

|Marriage of Zeus and Hera at Plataea.| But Zeus was not always the sky-god, nor did he always marry the corn-goddess. If in antiquity a traveller, quitting Eleusis and passing through miles of olive-groves and corn-fields, had climbed the pine-clad mountains of Cithaeron and descended through the forest on their northern slope to Plataea, he might have chanced to find the people of that little Boeotian town celebrating a different marriage of the great god to a different goddess. The ceremony is described by a Greek antiquary whose note-book has fortunately preserved for us not a few rural customs of ancient Greece, of which the knowledge would otherwise have perished.

Every few years the people of Plataea held a festival which they called the Little Daedala. On the day of the festival they went out into an ancient oak forest, the trees of which were of gigantic girth. There they set some boiled meat on the ground, and watched the birds that gathered round it. When a raven was observed to carry off a piece of the meat and perch on an oak, the people followed it and cut down the tree. With the wood of the tree they made an image, dressed it as a bride, and placed it on a bullock-cart with a bridesmaid beside it. It seems then to have been drawn to the banks of the river Asopus and back to the town, attended by a piping and dancing crowd. After the festival the image was put away and kept till the celebration of the Great Daedala, which fell only once in sixty years, and was held by all the people of Boeotia. On this occasion all the images, fourteen in number, that had accumulated from the celebrations of the Little Daedala were dragged on wains in procession to the river Asopus, and then to the top of Mount Cithaeron. There an altar had been constructed of square blocks of wood fitted together, with brushwood heaped over it. Animals were sacrificed by being burned on the altar, and the altar itself, together with the images, was consumed by the flames. The blaze, we are told, rose to a prodigious height and was seen for many miles. To explain the origin of the festival a story ran that once 141upon a time Hera had quarrelled with Zeus and left him in high dudgeon. To lure her back Zeus gave out that he was about to marry the nymph Plataea, daughter of the river Asopus. He had a fine oak cut down, shaped and dressed as a bride, and conveyed on a bullock-cart. Transported with rage and jealousy, Hera flew to the cart, and tearing off the veil of the pretended bride, discovered the deceit that had been practised on her. Her rage now turned to laughter, and she became reconciled to her husband Zeus.^[469]

|Resemblance of the Plataean ceremony to the spring and midsummer festivals of modern Europe.| The resemblance of this festival to some of the European spring and midsummer festivals is tolerably close. We have seen that in Russia at Whitsuntide the villagers go out into the wood, fell a birch-tree, dress it in woman’s clothes, and bring it back to the village with dance and song. On the third day it is thrown into the water.^[470] Again, we have seen that in Bohemia on Midsummer Eve the village lads fell a tall fir or pine-tree in the wood and set it up on a height, where it is adorned with garlands, nosegays, and ribbons, and afterwards burnt.^[471] The reason for burning the tree will appear afterwards; the custom itself is not uncommon in modern Europe. In some parts of the Pyrenees a tall and slender tree is cut down on May Day and kept till Midsummer Eve. It is then rolled to the top of a hill, set up, and burned.^[472] In Angoulême on St. Peter’s Day, the twenty-ninth of June, a tall leafy poplar is set up in the market-place and burned.^[473] Near Launceston in Cornwall there is a large tumulus known as Whiteborough, with a fosse round it. On this tumulus “there was formerly a great bonfire on Midsummer Eve; a large summer pole was fixed in the centre, round which the fuel was heaped up. It had a large bush on the top of it. Round this were parties of wrestlers contending for small prizes.” The rustics believed that giants were buried in such mounds, and nothing would tempt them to disturb their bones.^[474] In Dublin on May-morning 142boys used to go out and cut a May-bush, bring it back to town, and then burn it.^[475]

|All such ceremonies were originally magical rites intended to bring about the effects which they dramatically represented.| Probably the Boeotian festival belonged to the same class of rites. It represented the marriage of the powers of vegetation—the union of the oak-god with the oak-goddess^[476]—in spring or midsummer, just as the same event is represented in modern Europe by a King and Queen or a Lord and Lady of the May. In the Boeotian, as in the Russian, ceremony the tree dressed as a woman stands for the English May-pole and May-queen in one. All such ceremonies, it must be remembered, are not, or at least were not originally, mere spectacular or dramatic exhibitions. They are magical rites designed to produce the effect which they dramatically set forth. If the revival of vegetation in spring is mimicked by the awakening of a sleeper, the mimicry is intended actually to quicken the growth of leaves and blossoms; if the marriage of the powers of vegetation is simulated by a King and Queen of May, the idea is that the powers thus personated will really be rendered more productive by the ceremony. In short, all these spring and midsummer festivals fall under the head of homoeopathic or imitative magic. The thing which people wish to bring about they represent dramatically, and the very representation is believed to effect, or at least to contribute to, the production of the desired result. In the case of the Daedala the story of Hera’s quarrel with Zeus and her sullen retirement may perhaps without straining be interpreted as a mythical expression for a bad season and the failure of the crops. The same disastrous effects were attributed to the anger and seclusion of Demeter after the loss of her daughter Proserpine.^[477] Now the institution of a festival is often explained by a mythical story, which relates how upon a particular occasion those very calamities occurred which it is the real 143object of the festival to avert; so that if we know the myth told to account for the historical origin of the festival, we can often infer from it the real intention with which the festival was celebrated. If, therefore, the origin of the Daedala was explained by a story of a failure of crops and consequent famine, we may infer that the real object of the festival was to prevent the occurrence of such disasters; and, if I am right in my interpretation of the festival, the object was supposed to be effected by dramatically representing the marriage of the divinities most concerned with the production of trees and plants. The marriage of Zeus and Hera was acted at annual festivals in various parts of Greece,^[478] and it is at least a fair conjecture that the nature and intention of these ceremonies were such as I have assigned to the Plataean festival of the Daedala; in other words, that Zeus and Hera at these festivals were the Greek equivalents of the Lord and Lady of the May. Homer’s glowing picture of Zeus and Hera couched on fresh hyacinths and crocuses,^[479] like Milton’s description of the dalliance of Zephyr with Aurora, “as he met her once a-Maying,” was perhaps painted from the life.

|The god Frey and his human wife in Sweden.| The sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera had, as was natural, its counterpart among the northern kinsfolk of the Greeks. In Sweden every year a life-size image of Frey, the god of fertility, both animal and vegetable, was drawn about the country in a waggon attended by a beautiful girl who was called the god’s wife. She acted also as his 144priestess in his great temple at Upsala. Wherever the waggon came with the image of the god and his blooming young bride, the people crowded to meet them and offered sacrifices for a fruitful year. Once on a time a Norwegian exile named Gunnar Helming gave himself out to be Frey in person, and rode about on the sacred waggon dressed up in the god’s clothes. Everywhere the simple folk welcomed him as the deity, and observed with wonder and delight that a god walked about among men and ate and drank just like other people. And when the months went by, and the god’s fair young wife was seen to be with child, their joy waxed greatly, for they thought, “Surely this is an omen of a fruitful season.” It happened that the weather was then so mild, and the promise of a plenteous harvest so fair, that no man ever remembered such a year before. But one night the god departed in haste, with his wife and all the gold and silver and fine raiment which he had got together; and though the Swedes made after him, they could not catch him. He was over the hills and far away in Norway.^[480] Similar ceremonies appear to have been observed by the |Similar customs in Gaul.| peasantry of Gaul in antiquity; for Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century of our era, says that at Autun the people used to carry about an image of a goddess in a waggon drawn by oxen. The intention of the ceremony was to ensure the safety of the crops and vines, and the rustics danced and sang in front of the image.^[481] The old historian identifies the goddess with Cybele, the Great Mother goddess of Phrygia, and the identification would seem to be correct. For we learn from another source that men wrought up to a pitch of frenzy by the shrill music of flutes and the clash of cymbals, sacrificed their virility 145to the goddess, dashing the severed portions of themselves against her image.^[482] Now this religious castration was a marked feature of the Phrygian worship of Cybele, but it is alien to Western modes of thought, although it still finds favour with a section of the barbarous, fanatical, semi-Oriental peasantry of Russia.^[483] But whether of native or of Eastern origin the rites of the goddess of Autun closely conformed to those of the great Phrygian goddess and appear to have been, like them, a perverted form of the Sacred Marriage, which was designed to fertilise the earth, and in which eunuchs, strange as it may seem, personated the lovers of the goddess.^[484]

|The custom of marrying gods to images or to living persons is found also among uncivilised peoples.| Thus the custom of marrying gods either to images or to human beings was widespread among the nations of antiquity. The ideas on which such a custom is based are too crude to allow us to doubt that the civilised Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks inherited it from their barbarous or savage forefathers. This presumption is strengthened when we find rites of a similar kind in vogue among the lower races. Thus, for example, we are told that once upon a |Custom of the Wotyaks.| time the Wotyaks of the Malmyz district in Russia were distressed by a series of bad harvests. They did not know what to do, but at last concluded that their powerful but mischievous god Keremet must be angry at being unmarried. So a deputation of elders visited the Wotyaks of Cura and came to an understanding with them on the subject. Then they returned home, laid in a large stock of brandy, and having made ready a gaily decked waggon and horses, they drove in procession with bells ringing, as they do when they are fetching home a bride, to the sacred grove at Cura. There they ate and drank merrily all night, and next morning they cut a square piece of turf in the grove and took it home with them. After this, though it fared well with the people of Malmyz, it fared ill with the people of Cura; for in Malmyz the bread was good, but in Cura it was bad. 146Hence the men of Cura who had consented to the marriage were blamed and roughly handled by their indignant fellow-villagers. “What they meant by this marriage ceremony,” says the writer who reports it, “it is not easy to imagine. Perhaps, as Bechterew thinks, they meant to marry Keremet to the kindly and fruitful Mukylćin, the Earth-wife, in order that she might influence him for good.”^[485] This carrying of turf, like a bride, in a waggon from a sacred grove resembles the Plataean custom of carting an oak log as a bride from an ancient oak forest; and we have seen ground for thinking that the Plataean ceremony, like its Wotyak counterpart, was intended as a charm to secure fertility. When wells are dug in Bengal, a wooden image of a god is made and married to the goddess of water.^[486]

|Custom of the Peruvian Indians.| Often the bride destined for the god is not a log or a clod, but a living woman of flesh and blood. The Indians of a village in Peru have been known to marry a beautiful girl, about fourteen years of age, to a stone shaped like a human being, which they regarded as a god (huaca). All the villagers took part in the marriage ceremony, which lasted three days, and was attended with much revelry. The girl thereafter remained a virgin and sacrificed to the idol for the people. They shewed her the utmost reverence and deemed her divine.^[487] The Blackfoot Indians of North |Marriage of a woman to the Sun among the Blackfoot Indians.| America used to worship the Sun as their chief god, and they held a festival every year in his honour. Four days before the new moon of August the tribe halted on its march, and all hunting was suspended. Bodies of mounted men were on duty day and night to carry out the orders of the high priest of the Sun. He enjoined the people to fast and to take vapour baths during the four days before the new moon. Moreover, with the help of his council, he chose the Vestal who was to represent the Moon and to be married to the Sun at the festival. She might be either a virgin or a woman who had had but one husband. Any girl or woman found to have discharged the sacred duties without fulfilling the prescribed conditions was put to death. On the third 147day of preparation, after the last purification had been observed, they built a round temple of the Sun. Posts were driven into the ground in a circle; these were connected with cross-pieces, and the whole was covered with leaves. In the middle stood the sacred pole, supporting the roof. A bundle of many small branches of sacred wood, wrapped in a splendid buffalo robe, crowned the summit of the temple. The entrance was on the east, and within the sanctuary stood an altar on which rested the head of a buffalo. Beside the altar was the place reserved for the Vestal. Here, on a bed prepared for her, she slept “the sleep of war,” as it was called. Her other duties consisted in maintaining a sacred fire of fragrant herbs, in presenting a lighted pipe to her husband the Sun, and in telling the high priest the dream she dreamed during “the sleep of war.” On learning it the priest had it proclaimed to the whole nation to the beat of drum.^[488] Every year about the middle of March, when the season for fishing with the drag-net began, the |Marriage of girls to fishing nets among the Hurons and Algonquins.| Algonquins and Hurons married their nets to two young girls, aged six or seven. At the wedding feast the net was placed between the two maidens, and was exhorted to take courage and catch many fish. The reason for choosing the brides so young was to make sure that they were virgins. The origin of the custom is said to have been this. One year, when the fishing season came round, the Algonquins cast their nets as usual, but took nothing. Surprised at their want of success, they did not know what to make of it, till the soul or genius (oki) of the net appeared to them in the likeness of a tall well-built man, who said to them in a great passion, “I have lost my wife and I cannot find one who has known no other man but me; that is why you do not succeed, and why you never will succeed till you give me satisfaction on this head.” So the Algonquins held a council and resolved to appease the spirit of the net by marrying him to two such very young girls that he could have no ground of complaint on that score for the future. They did so, and the fishing turned out all that could be wished. The thing got wind among their neighbours the Hurons, and they adopted the custom. A share of the 148catch was always given to the families of the two girls who acted as brides of the net for the year.^[489]

|Sacred Marriage of the Sun-god and Earth-goddess among the Oraons.| The Oraons of Bengal worship the Earth as a goddess, and annually celebrate her marriage with the Sun-god Dharmē at the time when the sāl tree is in blossom. The ceremony is as follows. All bathe, then the men repair to the sacred grove (sarnā), while the women assemble at the house of the village priest. After sacrificing some fowls to the Sun-god and the demon of the grove, the men eat and drink. “The priest is then carried back to the village on the shoulders of a strong man. Near the village the women meet the men and wash their feet. With beating of drums and singing, dancing, and jumping, all proceed to the priest’s house, which has been decorated with leaves and flowers. Then the usual form of marriage is performed between the priest and his wife, symbolizing the supposed union between Sun and Earth. After the ceremony all eat and drink and make merry; they dance and sing obscene songs, and finally indulge in the vilest orgies. The object is to move the mother earth to become fruitful.”^[490] Thus the Sacred Marriage of the Sun and Earth, personated by the priest and his wife, is celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility of the ground; and for the same purpose, on the principle of homoeopathic magic, the people indulge in a licentious orgy. Among the Sulka of New Britain, at the village of Kolvagat, a certain man has charge of two stone figures which are called respectively “Our grandfather” (ngur es) and “Our grandmother” (ngur pei). They are said to be kept in a house built specially for the purpose. Fruits of the field are offered to them and left beside them to rot. When their guardian puts the two figures with their faces turned towards each other, the plantations are believed to flourish; but when he sets them back to back, there is dearth and the people suffer from eruptions on the skin.^[491] 149This turning of the two images face to face may be regarded as a simple form of Sacred Marriage between the two divine powers represented by them, who are clearly supposed to control the fertility of the plantations.

|Marriage of women to gods in India and Africa.| At the village of Bas Doda, in the Gurgaon district of North-Western India, a fair is held on the twenty-sixth of the month Chait and the two following days. We are told that formerly girls of the Dhinwar class used to be married to the god at these festivals, and that they always died soon afterwards. Of late years the practice is said to have been discontinued.^[492] In Behar during the month of Sawan (August) crowds of women, calling themselves Nagin or “wives of the snake,” go about for two and a half days begging; during this time they may neither sleep under a roof nor eat salt. Half the proceeds of their begging is given to Brahmans, and the other half spent in salt and sweet-meats, which are eaten by all the villagers.^[493] Amongst the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast in West Africa human wives of gods are very common. In Dahomey they swarm, and it has even been estimated that every fourth woman is devoted to the service of some deity. The chief business of these female votaries is prostitution. In every town there is at least one seminary where the handsomest girls, between ten and twelve years of age, are trained. They stay for three years, learning the chants and dances peculiar to the worship of the gods, and prostituting themselves to the priests and the inmates of the male seminaries. At the end of their noviciate they become public harlots. But no disgrace attaches to their profession, for it is believed that they are married to the god, and that their excesses are caused and directed by him. Strictly speaking, they should confine their favours to the male worshippers at the temple, but in practice they bestow them indiscriminately. Children born of such unions belong to the deity. As the wives of a god, these sacred women may not marry. But they are not bound to the service of the divinity for life. Some only bear his name and 150sacrifice to him on their birthdays.^[494] Amongst these polygamous West African gods the sacred python seems to be particularly associated with the fertility of the earth; for he is invoked in excessively wet, dry, and barren seasons, and the time of year when young girls are sought out to be his brides is when the millet is beginning to sprout.^[495]

|Women married to water-gods.| It deserves to be remarked that the supernatural being to whom women are married is often a god or spirit of water. Thus Mukasa, the god of the Victoria Nyanza lake, who was propitiated by the Baganda every time they undertook a long voyage, had virgins provided for him to serve as his wives. Like the Vestals they were bound to chastity, but unlike the Vestals they seem to have been often unfaithful. The custom lasted until Mwanga was converted to Christianity.^[496] The Akikuyu of British East Africa worship the snake of a certain river, and at intervals of several years they marry the snake-god to women, but especially to young girls. For this purpose huts are built by order of the medicine-men, who there consummate the sacred marriage with the credulous female devotees. If the girls do not repair to the huts of their own accord in sufficient numbers, they are seized and dragged thither to the embraces of the deity. The offspring of these mystic unions appears to be fathered on God (Ngai); certainly there are children among the Akikuyu who pass for children of God.^[497] In Kengtung, one of the principal Shan states of Upper Burma, the spirit of the Nawng Tung lake is regarded as very powerful, and is propitiated with offerings in the eighth month (about July) of each year. A remarkable feature of the worship of this spirit consists in the dedication to him of four virgins in marriage. Custom requires that this should be done once in every three years. It was actually done by the late king or chief (Sawbwa) in 1893, but down to 1901 the rite had not been performed by his successor. The following are the chief features of the ceremony. The virgins who are to wed the spirit of the lake must be of pure Hkön race. Orders are sent out for all the Hkön of 151the valley to attend. From the unmarried women of suitable age, ten are selected. These are as beautiful as may be, and must be without spot or blemish. Four maidens out of the ten are chosen by lot, and carefully dressed in new garments. A festival is held, usually at the house of the Chief Minister, where the girls sit on a raised platform. Four old women, thought to be possessed by spirits, enter and remain as long as the feast lasts. During this time anything they may want, such as food, betel, or cheroots, is handed to them by the four girls. Apparently the old women pass for representatives of the spirit, and hence they are waited on by the maidens destined to be his wives. Dotage, blindness, or any great infirmity of age seems to be accounted possession by a spirit for the purposes of this function. When the feast is over, the maidens are formally presented to the spirit, along with the various sacrifices and offerings. They are next taken to the chief’s residence, where strings are tied round their wrists by the ministers and elders to guard them against ill-luck. Usually they sleep a night or two at the palace, after which they may return to their homes. There seems to be no objection to their marrying afterwards. If nothing happens to any of the four, it is believed that the spirit of the lake loves them but little; but if one of them dies soon after the ceremony, it shews that she has been accepted by him. The spirit is propitiated with the sacrifice of pigs, fowls, and sometimes a buffalo.^[498]

|Egyptian custom of drowning a girl as a sacrifice to the Nile.| In this last custom the death of the woman is regarded as a sign that the god has taken her to himself. Sometimes, apparently, it has not been left to the discretion of the divine bridegroom to take or leave his human bride; she was made over to him once for all in death. When the Arabs conquered Egypt they learned that at the annual rise of the Nile the Egyptians were wont to deck a young virgin in gay apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice, in order to obtain a plentiful inundation. The Arab general abolished the barbarous custom.^[499] It is 152said that under the Tang dynasty the Chinese used to marry a young girl to the Yellow River once a year by drowning her in the water. For this purpose the witches chose the fairest damsel they could find and themselves superintended the fatal marriage. At last the local mandarin, a man of sense and humanity, forbade the custom. But the witches disregarded his edicts and made their preparations for the usual murder. So when the day was come, the magistrate appeared on the scene with his soldiers and had all the witches bound and thrown into the river to drown, telling them that no doubt the god would be able to choose his bride for himself from among them.^[500] The princes of Koepang, a state in the East Indian island of Timor, deemed themselves descended from crocodiles; and on |Girls sacrificed as brides of crocodiles.| the coronation of a new prince a solemn sacrifice was made to the crocodiles in presence of the people. The offerings consisted of a pig with red bristles and a young girl prettily dressed, perfumed, and decked with flowers. She was taken down to the bank of the river and set on a sacred stone in a cave. Then one of the prince’s guards summoned the crocodiles. Soon one of the beasts appeared and dragged the girl down into the water. The people thought that he married her, and that if he did not find her a maid he would bring her back.^[501] On festal occasions in the same state a new-born girl was sometimes dedicated to a crocodile, and then, with certain ceremonies of consecration, brought up to be married to a priest.^[502] It is said that once, when the inhabitants of Cayeli in Buru—another East Indian island—were threatened with destruction by a swarm of crocodiles, they ascribed the misfortune to a passion which the prince of the crocodiles had conceived for a certain girl. Accordingly, they compelled the damsel’s father to dress her in bridal array and deliver her over to the clutches of her crocodile lover.^[503]

|Virgin sacrificed as a bride to a jinnee of the sea in the Maldive Islands.| A usage of the same sort is reported to have prevailed 153in the Maldive Islands before the conversion of the inhabitants to Islam. The famous Arab traveller Ibn Batutah has described the custom and the manner in which it came to an end. He was assured by several trustworthy natives, whose names he gives, that when the people of the islands were idolaters there appeared to them every month an evil spirit among the jinn, who came from across the sea in the likeness of a ship full of burning lamps. The wont of the inhabitants, as soon as they perceived him, was to take a young virgin, and, having adorned her, to lead her to a heathen temple that stood on the shore, with a window looking out to sea. There they left the damsel for the night, and when they came back in the morning they found her a maid no more, and dead. Every month they drew lots, and he upon whom the lot fell gave up his daughter to the jinnee of the sea. In time there came to them a Berber named Abu ’lberecat, who knew the Coran by heart. He lodged in the house of an old woman of the isle of Mahal. One day, visiting his hostess, he found that she had gathered her family about her, and that the women were weeping as if there were a funeral. On enquiring into the cause of their distress, he learned that the lot had fallen on the old woman, and that she had an only daughter, who must be slain by the evil jinnee. Abu ’lberecat said to the old dame, “I will go this night instead of thy daughter.” Now he was quite beardless. So when the night was come they took him, and after he had performed his ablutions, they put him in the temple of idols. He set himself to recite the Coran; then the demon appeared at the window, but the man went on with his recitation. No sooner was the jinnee within hearing of the holy words than he dived into the sea. When morning broke, the old woman and her family and the people of the island came, according to their custom, to carry away the girl and burn her body. They found the stranger repeating the Coran, and took him to their king, whose name was Chenourazah, and made him relate his adventure. The king was astonished at it. The Berber proposed to the king that he should embrace Islam. Chenourazah said to him, “Tarry with us till next month; if thou shalt do what thou hast done, and shalt escape from the evil jinnee, I will 154be converted.” The stranger abode with the idolaters, and God disposed the king’s heart to receive the true faith. So before the month was out he became a Mussalman, he and his wives and his children and the people of his court. And when the next month began, the Berber was conducted to the temple of idols; but the demon did not appear, and the Berber set himself to recite the Coran till break of day. Then the Sultan and his subjects broke the idols and demolished the temple. The people of the island embraced Islam and sent messengers to the other isles, and their inhabitants were converted likewise. But by reason of the demon many of the Maldive Islands were depopulated before their conversion to Islam. When Ibn Batutah himself landed in the country he knew nothing of these things. One night, as he was going about his business, he heard of a sudden people saying in a loud voice, “There is no God but God,” and “God is great.” He saw children carrying copies of the Coran on their heads, and women beating on basins and vessels of copper. He was astonished at what they did, and he said, “What has happened?” They answered, “Dost thou not behold the sea?” He looked towards the sea, and beheld in the darkness, as it were, a great ship full of burning lamps and cressets. They said to him, “That is the demon. It is his wont to shew himself once a month; but after we have done that which thou hast seen, he returns to his place and does us no manner of harm.”^[504]

|The story based on the phosphorescence of the sea.| It occurred to me that this myth of the demon lover may have been based on some physical phenomenon, electrical, lunar, or otherwise, which is periodically seen at night in the Maldive Islands. Accordingly I consulted Professor J. Stanley Gardiner, our foremost authority on the archipelago. His answer, which confirms my conjecture, runs thus: “A peculiar phosphorescence, like the glow of a lamp hidden by a roughened glass shade, is occasionally visible on lagoon shoals in the Maldives. I imagine it to have been due to some single animal with a greater phosphorescence than any at present known to us. A periodical appearance at some 155phase of the moon due to reproduction is not improbable and has parallels. The myth still exists in the Maldives, but in a rather different form.” He adds that “a number of these animals might of course appear on some shoal near Male,” the principal island of the group. To the eyes of the ignorant and superstitious such a mysterious glow, suddenly lighting up the sea in the dusk of the evening, might well appear a phantom ship, hung with burning lamps, bearing down on the devoted islands, and in the stillness of night the roar of the surf on the barrier reef might sound in their ears like the voice of the demon calling for his prey.^[505]

§ 3. Sacrifices to Water-spirits

|Stories of the Perseus and Andromeda type.| Ibn Batutah’s narrative of the demon lover and his mortal brides closely resembles a well-known type of folk-tale, of which versions have been found from Japan and Annam in the East to Senegambia, Scandinavia, and Scotland in the West. The story varies in details from people to people, but as commonly told it runs thus. A certain country is infested by a many-headed serpent, dragon, or other monster, which would destroy the whole people if a human victim, generally a virgin, were not delivered up to him periodically. Many victims have perished, and at last it has fallen to the lot of the king’s own daughter to be sacrificed. She is exposed to the monster, but the hero of the tale, generally a young man of humble birth, interposes in her behalf, slays the monster, and receives the hand of the princess as his reward. In many of the tales the monster, who is sometimes described as a serpent, inhabits the water of a sea, a lake, or a fountain. In other versions he is a serpent or dragon who takes possession of the springs of water, and only allows the water to flow or the people to make use of it on condition of receiving a human victim.^[506]

156|Water-spirits conceived as serpents or dragons.| It would probably be a mistake to dismiss all these tales as pure inventions of the story-teller. Rather we may suppose that they reflect a real custom of sacrificing girls or women to be the wives of water-spirits, who are very often conceived as great serpents or dragons. Elsewhere I have cited many instances of this belief in serpent-shaped spirits of water;^[507] here it may be worth while to add a few more. Thus the Warramunga of Central Australia perform elaborate ceremonies to appease or coerce a gigantic, but purely mythical water-snake who is said to have destroyed a number of people.^[508] Some of the natives of western Australia fear to approach large pools, supposing them to be inhabited by a great serpent, who would kill them if they dared to drink or draw water there by night.^[509] The Indians of New Granada believed that when the mother of all mankind, named Bachue, was grown old, she and her husband plunged into the Lake of Iguague, where they were changed into two enormous serpents, which still live in the lake and sometimes shew themselves.^[510] The Oyampi Indians of French Guiana imagine that each waterfall has a guardian in the shape of a monstrous snake, who lies hidden under the eddy of the cascade, but has sometimes been seen to lift up its huge head. To see it is fatal. Canoe and Indians are then dragged down to the bottom, where the monster swallows all the men, and sometimes the canoe also. Hence the Oyampis never name a waterfall till they have passed it, for fear that the snake at the bottom of the water might hear its name and attack the rash intruders.^[511] The Huichol Indians of Mexico adore water. Springs are sacred, and the gods in them are mothers or serpents, that rise with the clouds and descend as fructifying rain.^[512] The Tarahumares, another Indian tribe of Mexico, think 157that every river, pool, and spring has its serpent, who causes the water to come up out of the earth. All these water-serpents are easily offended; hence the Tarahumares place their houses some little way from the water, and will not sleep near it when they are on a journey. Whenever they construct weirs to catch fish, they take care to offer fish to the water-serpent of the river; and when they are away from home and are making pinole, that is, toasted maize-meal, they drop the first of the pinole into the water as an offering to the serpents, who would otherwise try to seize them and chase them back to their own land.^[513] In Basutoland the rivers Ketane and Maletsunyane tumble, with a roar of waters and a cloud of iridescent spray, into vast chasms hundreds of feet deep. The Basutos fear to approach the foot of these huge falls, for they think that a spirit in the shape of a gigantic snake haunts the seething cauldron which receives the falling waters.^[514]

|Sacrifices of human beings to water-spirits.| The perils of the sea, of floods, of rapid rivers, of deep pools and lakes, naturally account for the belief that water-spirits are fickle and dangerous beings, who need to be appeased by sacrifices. Sometimes these sacrifices consist of animals, such as horses and bulls,^[515] but often the victims are human beings. Thus at the mouth of the Bonny River there is a dangerous bar on which vessels trading to the river have been lost. This is bad for business, and accordingly the negroes used to sacrifice a young man annually to the spirit of the bar. The handsomest youth was chosen for the purpose, and for many months before the ceremony he lodged with the king. The people regarded him as sacred or ju-ju, and whatever he touched, even when he passed casually through the streets, shared his sanctity and 158belonged to him. Hence whenever he appeared in public the inhabitants fled before him, lest he should touch their garments or anything they might be carrying. He was kept in ignorance of the fate in store for him, and no one might inform him of it under pain of death. On an appointed day he was taken out to the bar in a canoe and induced to jump into the water. Then the rowers plied their paddles and left him to drown. A similar ceremony used to be performed at the New Calabar River, but the victim was a culprit. He was thrown into the water to be devoured by the sharks, which are there the principal fetish or ju-ju.^[516] The chiefs of Duke Town, on the same coast of Guinea, were wont to make an annual offering to the river. A young woman of a light colour, or an albino, was chosen as the victim. On a set day they decked her with finery, took her down to Parrot Island, and with much ceremony plunged her in the stream. The fishermen of Efiat, at the mouth of the river, are said still to observe the rite in order to ensure a good catch of fish.^[517] The King of Dahomey used to send from time to time a man, dressed out with the insignia of office, to Whydah to be drowned at the mouth of the river. The intention of the sacrifice was to attract merchant ships.^[518] When a fisherman has been carried off by a crocodile, some of the natives on the banks of Lake Tanganyika take this for a sign that the spirit deems himself slighted, since he is obliged to come and find victims for himself instead of having them presented to him. Hence the sorcerers generally decide that a second victim is wanted; so, having chosen one, they bind him hand and foot and fling him into the lake to feed the crocodiles.^[519] The crater of the volcano Tolucan in Mexico encloses two lakes of clear cold water, surrounded by gloomy forests of pine. Here, in the eighteenth month of the Toltec year, answering to February, children beautifully dressed and decked with flowers and gay feathers used to be drowned as 159an offering to Tlaloc, the god of the waters, who had a fine temple on the spot.^[520] The Chams of Annam have traditions of a time when living men were thrown into the sea every year in order to propitiate the deities who looked after the fishing, and when children of good family were drowned in the water-channels in order that the rice-fields might be duly irrigated.^[521]

|Water-spirits conceived as beneficent beings who dispense fertility.| This last instance brings out a more kindly aspect of the water-spirits. If these beings are dreaded by the fisherman and the mariner who tempt the angry sea, and by the huntsman who has to swim or ford the rushing rivers, they are viewed in a different light by the shepherd and the husbandman in hot and arid lands, where the pasture for the cattle and the produce of the fields alike depend on the supply of water, and where prolonged drought means starvation and death for man and beast. To men in such circumstances the spirits of the waters are beneficent beings, the dispensers of life and fertility, whether their blessings descend as rain from heaven or well up as springs of bubbling water in the parched desert. In the Semitic East, for example, where the rainfall is precarious or confined to certain seasons, the face of the earth is bare and withered for most of the year, except where it is kept fresh by irrigation or by the percolation of underground water. Here, accordingly, the local gods or Baalim had their seats originally in spots of natural fertility, by fountains and the banks of rivers, in groves and tangled thickets and green glades of mountain hollows and deep watercourses. As lords of the springs and subterranean waters they were supposed to be the sources of all the gifts of the land, the corn, the wine and the oil, the wool and the flax, the vines and the fig-trees.^[522]

|Water-spirits conceived as bestowing offspring on women.| Where water-spirits are thus conceived as the authors of fertility in general, it is natural that they should be held to extend the sphere of their operations to men and animals; in other words, that the power of bestowing offspring on barren women and cattle should be ascribed to them. This ascription comes out clearly in a custom observed by Syrian 160women at the present day. Some of the channels of the Orontes are used for irrigation, but at a certain season of the year the streams are turned off and the dry bed of the channels is cleared of mud and any other matter that might clog the flow of the water. The first night that the water is turned on again, it is said to have the power of procreation. Accordingly barren women take their places in the channel, waiting for the embrace of the water-spirit in the rush of the stream.^[523] Again, a pool of water in a cave at Juneh enjoys the same reputation. The people think a childless couple who bathe in the water will have offspring.^[524] In India many wells are supposed to cure sterility, which is universally attributed to the agency of evil spirits. The water of seven wells is collected on the night of the Diwali or feast of lamps, and barren women bathe in it in order to remove their reproach. There is a well in Orissa where the priests throw betel-nuts into the mud. Childless women scramble for the nuts, and she who finds them will be a happy mother before long. For the same reason, after childbirth an Indian mother is taken to worship the village well. She walks round it in the course of the sun and smears the platform with red lead, which may be a substitute for blood. A Khandh priest will take a childless woman to the meeting of two streams, where he makes an offering to the god of births and sprinkles the woman with water in order to rid her of the influence of the spirit who hinders conception.^[525] In the Punjaub a barren woman who desires to become a mother will sometimes be let down into a well on a Sunday or Tuesday night during the Diwali festival. After stripping herself of her clothes and bathing in the water, she is drawn up again and performs the chaukpurna ceremony with incantations taught by a wizard. When this ceremony has been performed, the well is supposed to run dry; its quickening and fertilising virtue has been abstracted by the woman.^[526] The Indian sect of the Vallabhacharyas or Maharajas believe that bathing in a sacred well is a remedy for 161barrenness in women.^[527] In antiquity the waters of Sinuessa in Campania were thought to bless childless wives with offspring.^[528] To this day Syrian women resort to hot springs in order to obtain children from the saint or jinnee of the waters.^[529] In Scotland the same fertilising virtue used to be, and probably still is, ascribed to certain springs. Wives who wished to become mothers formerly resorted to the well of St. Fillan at Comrie, and to the wells of St. Mary at Whitekirk and in the Isle of May.^[530] In the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway, women desirous of children pray at St. Eany’s Well, by the Angels’ Walk, and the men pray at the rag well by the church of the Four Comely Ones at Onaght.^[531] Child’s Well in Oxford was supposed to have the virtue of making barren women to bring forth.^[532] Near Bingfield in Northumberland there is a copious sulphur spring known as the Borewell. On the Sunday following the fourth day of July, that is about Midsummer Day, according to the old style, great crowds of people used to assemble at the well from all the surrounding hamlets and villages. The scene was like a fair, stalls for the sale of refreshments being brought and set up for the occasion. The neighbouring slopes were terraced, and seats formed for the convenience of pilgrims and visitors. Barren women prayed at the well that they might become mothers. If their faith was strong enough, their prayers were heard within the year.^[533]

|Love of river-spirits for women in Greek mythology.| In Greek mythology similar ideas of the procreative power of water meet us in the stories of the loves of rivers for women and in the legends which traced the descent of heroes and heroines from river-gods.^[534] In Sophocles’s play of The Trachinian Women Dejanira tells how she was 162wooed by the river Achelous, who came to her father and claimed her hand, appearing in the likeness now of a bull, now of a serpent, and now of a being with the body of a man and the front of an ox, while streams of water flowed from his shaggy beard. She relates, too, how glad she was when Hercules presented himself and vanquished the river-god in single combat and took her to wife.^[535] The legend perhaps preserves a reminiscence of that custom of providing a water-god with a human wife which has been practised elsewhere. The motive of such a custom may have varied with the particular conception which happened to prevail of the character of the water-god. Where he was supposed to be a cruel and destructive being, who drowned men and laid waste the country, a wife would be offered simply to keep him in good humour, and so prevent him from doing mischief. But where he was viewed as the procreative power on whom the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of men and animals depended, his marriage would be deemed necessary for the purpose of enabling him to discharge his beneficent functions. This belief in the amorous character of rivers comes out plainly in a custom which was observed at Troy down to classical times. Maidens about to marry were wont to bathe in the Scamander, saying as they did so, “Scamander, take my virginity.” A similar custom appears to have been observed at the river Maeander, and perhaps in other parts of the Greek world. Occasionally, it would seem, young men took advantage of the practice to ravish the girls, and the offspring of such a union was fathered on the river-god.^[536] The bath which a Greek bride and bridegroom regularly took before marriage appears to have been intended to bless their union with offspring through the fertilising influence of the water-nymphs.^[537]

Thus it would appear that in many parts of the world a 163custom has prevailed of sacrificing human beings to water-spirits, and that in not a few cases the ceremony has taken the form of making over a woman to the spirit to be his wife, in order either to pacify his fury or to give play to his generative powers. Where the water-spirit was regarded as female, young men might be presented to her for a similar purpose, and this may be the reason why the victims sacrificed to water-spirits are sometimes males. Among civilised peoples these customs survive for the most part only in popular tales, of which the legend of Perseus and Andromeda, with its mediaeval counterpart of St. George and the Dragon, is the most familiar example. But occasionally they appear to have left traces of themselves in ceremonies and pageants. Thus at Furth in Bavaria a |Midsummer custom of slaying the dragon at Furth in Bavaria.| drama called the Slaying of the Dragon used to be acted every year about Midsummer, on the Sunday after Corpus Christi Day. Crowds of spectators flocked from the neighbourhood to witness it. The scene of the performance was the public square. On a platform stood or sat a princess wearing a golden crown on her head, and as many silver ornaments on her body as could be borrowed for the purpose. She was attended by a maid of honour. Opposite her was stationed the dragon, a dreadful monster of painted canvas stretched on a wooden skeleton and moved by two men inside. From time to time the creature would rush with gaping jaws into the dense crowd of spectators, who retreated hastily, tumbling over each other in their anxiety to escape. Then a knight in armour, attended by his men-at-arms, rode forth and asked the princess what she did “on this hard stone,” and why she looked so sad. She told him that the dragon was coming to eat her up. On that the knight bade her be of good cheer, for that with his sword he would rid the country of the monster. With that he charged the dragon, thrusting his spear into its maw and taking care to stab a bladder of bullock’s blood which was there concealed. The gush of blood which followed was an indispensable part of the show, and if the knight missed his stroke he was unmercifully jeered and taunted by the crowd. Having despatched the monster with sword and pistol, the knight then hastened to the princess and told her that he 164had slain the dragon who had so long oppressed the town. In return she tied a wreath round his arm, and announced that her noble father and mother would soon come to give them half the kingdom. The men-at-arms then escorted the knight and the princess to the tavern, there to end the day with dance and revelry. Bohemians and Bavarians came from many miles to witness this play of the Slaying of the Dragon, and when the monster’s blood streamed forth they eagerly mopped it up, along with the blood-soaked earth, in white cloths, which they afterwards laid on the flax-fields, in order that the flax might thrive and grow tall. For the “dragon’s blood” was thought to be a sure protection against witchcraft.^[538] This use of the blood suffices to prove that the Slaying of the Dragon at Furth was not a mere popular spectacle, but a magical rite designed to fertilise the fields. As such it probably descended from a very remote antiquity, and may well have been invested with a character of solemnity, if not of tragedy, long before it degenerated into a farce.

|St. Romain delivers Rouen from a dragon.| More famous was the dragon from which, according to legend, St. Romain delivered Rouen, and far more impressive was the ceremony with which, down to the French Revolution, the city commemorated its deliverance. The stately and beautiful edifices of the Middle Ages, which still adorn Rouen, formed a fitting background for a pageant which carried the mind back to the days when Henry II. of England and Richard Cœur-de-Lion, Dukes of Normandy, still had their palace in this ancient capital of their ancestral domains. Legend ran that about the year 520 A.D. a forest or marsh near the city was infested by a 165monstrous beast in the shape of a serpent or dragon, which every day wrought great harm to Rouen and its neighbourhood, devouring man and beast, causing boats and mariners on the river Seine to perish, and inflicting other woes innumerable on the commonwealth. At last the archbishop, St. Romain, resolved to beard the monster in his den. He could get none to accompany him but a prisoner condemned to death for murder. On their approach the dragon made as though he would swallow them up; but the archbishop, relying on the divine help, made the sign of the cross, and at once the monster became so gentle that he suffered the saint to bind him with his stole and the murderer to lead him like a lamb to the slaughter. Thus they went in procession to a public place in Rouen, where the dragon was burnt in the presence of the people and its ashes cast into the river. The murderer was pardoned for his services; and the fame of the deed having gone abroad, St. Romain, or his successor St. Ouen, whose memory is enshrined in a church of dreamlike beauty at Rouen, obtained from King Dagobert in perpetuity a privilege for the archbishop, dean, and canons of the cathedral, to wit, that every year on Ascension Day, the anniversary of the miracle, they should |In memory of this deliverance the archbishop and chapter of Rouen were annually allowed to pardon a malefactor on Ascension Day.| pardon and release from prison a malefactor, whomsoever they chose, and whatever the crime of which he had been guilty. This privilege, unique in France, was claimed by the chapter of the cathedral as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century; for in 1210, the governor of the castle of Rouen having boggled at giving up a prisoner, the chapter appealed to King Philip Augustus, who caused an enquiry to be made into the claim. At this enquiry nine witnesses swore that never in the reigns of Henry II. and Richard Cœur-de-Lion, Dukes of Normandy, had there been any difficulty raised on the point in question. Henceforward the chapter seems to have enjoyed the right without opposition down to 1790, when it exercised its privilege of mercy for the last time. Next year the face of things had changed; there was neither archbishop nor chapter at Rouen. A register of the names of the prisoners who were pardoned, together with an account of their crimes, was kept and still exists. Only a few of the names in the thirteenth century 166are known, and there are many gaps in the first half of the fourteenth century; but from that time onward the register is nearly complete. Most of the crimes appear to have been murder or homicide.