Note 1009 — Chapter XVIII · THE SUCCESSION TO THE KINGDOM IN ANCIENT LATIUM

Another proposed explanation of the regifugium is that the king fled because at the sacrifice he had incurred the guilt of slaying a sacred animal. See W. Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic, pp. 328 sqq. The best-known example of such a ritual flight is that of the men who slew the ox at the Athenian festival of the Bouphonia. See The Golden Bough, Second Edition, ii. 294. Amongst the Pawnees the four men who assisted at the sacrifice of a girl to Ti-ra’-wa used to run away very fast after the deed was done and wash themselves in the river. See G. B. Grinnell, Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales (New York, 1889), pp. 365 sq. Among the ancient Egyptians the man whose duty it was to slit open a corpse for the purpose of embalming it fled as soon as he had done his part, pursued by all the persons present, who pelted him with stones and cursed him, “turning as it were the pollution on him; for they suppose that any one who violates or wounds or does any harm to the person of a fellow-tribesman is hateful” (Diodorus Siculus, i. 91. 4). Similarly in the western islands of Torres Straits the man whose duty it was to decapitate a corpse for the purpose of preserving the skull was shot at with arrows by the relatives of the deceased as an expiation for the injury he had done to the corpse of their kinsman. See Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, v. (Cambridge, 1904) pp. 249, 251. This explanation of the regifugium certainly deserves to be considered. But on this as on so many other points of ancient ritual we can hardly hope ever to attain to certainty.