James Frazer - The Golden Bough - A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 1 of 2)

At her annual festival all young people went through a purificatory ceremony in her honour; dogs were crowned; and the feast consisted of a young kid, wine, and cakes, served up piping hot on platters of leaves. 10 10 Statius, l. c. ; Gratius Faliscus, v. 483 sqq.

But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi. Two lesser divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph of the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to fall in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Le Mole. 11 11 Athenaeum , 10th October 1885. The water was diverted a few years ago to supply Albano. For Egeria, compare Strabo, v. 3, 12; Ovid, Fasti , iii. 273 sqq. ; id. Met. xv. 487 sqq. According to one story the grove was first consecrated to Diana by a Manius Egerius, who was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line. Hence the proverb “There are many Manii at Ariciae.” Others explained the proverb very differently. They said it meant that there were a great many ugly and deformed people, and they referred to the word Mania which meant a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. 12 12 Festus, p. 145, ed. Müller; Schol. on Persius, vi. 56 ap. Jahn on Macrobius, i. 7, 35.

The other of these minor deities was Virbius. Legend had it that Virbius was the youthful Greek hero Hippolytus, who had been killed by his horses on the sea-shore of the Saronic Gulf. Him, to please Diana, the leech Aesculapius brought to life again by his simples. But Jupiter, indignant that a mortal man should return from the gates of death, thrust down the meddling leech himself to Hades; and Diana, for the love she bore Hippolytus, carried him away to Italy and hid him from the angry god in the dells of Nemi, where he reigned a forest king under the name of Virbius. Horses were excluded from the grove and sanctuary, because horses had killed Hippolytus. 13 13 Virgil, Aen. vii. 761 sqq. ; Servius, ad l. ; Ovid, Fasti , iii. 265 sq. ; id. Met. xv. 497 sqq. ; Pausanias, ii. 27. Some thought that Virbius was the sun. It was unlawful to touch his image. 14 14 Servius on Virgil, Aen. vii. 776. His worship was cared for by a special priest, the Flamen Virbialis. 15 15 Inscript. Lat. ed. Orelli, Nos. 2212, 4022. The inscription No. 1457 (Orelli) is said to be spurious.

Such then are the facts and theories bequeathed to us by antiquity on the subject of the priesthood of Nemi. From materials so slight and scanty it is impossible to extract a solution of the problem. It remains to try whether the survey of a wider field may not yield us the clue we seek. The questions to be answered are two: first, why had the priest to slay his predecessor? and second, why, before he slew him, had he to pluck the Golden Bough? The rest of this book will be an attempt to answer these questions.

The first point on which we fasten is the priest's title. Why was he called the King of the Wood? why was his office spoken of as a Kingdom? 16 16 See above, p. 4 , note 1.

The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other Italian cities there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred Rites ( Rex Sacrificulus or Rex Sacrorum ), and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites. 17 17 Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung , iii. 2 321 sqq. In republican Athens the second magistrate of the state was called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were religious. 18 18 G. Gilbert, Handbuch der griechischen Staatsalterthümer , i. 241 sq. Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly. 19 19 Gilbert, op. cit. ii. 323 sq. At Rome the tradition was that the Sacrificial King had been appointed after the expulsion of the kings in order to offer the sacrifices which had been previously offered by the kings. 20 20 Livy, ii. 2, 1; Dionysius Halic. iv. 74, 4. In Greece a similar view appears to have prevailed as to the origin of the priestly kings. 21 21 Demosthenes, contra Neacr. § 74, p. 1370. Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 63. In itself the view is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of Sparta, the only purely Greek state which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of the god. 22 22 Xenophon, Repub. Lac. c. 15, cp. id. 13; Aristotle, Pol. iii. 14, 3. This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of “sacred slaves,” and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pessinus. 23 23 Strabo, xii. 3, 37. 5, 3; cp. xi. 4, 7. xii. 2, 3. 2, 6. 3, 31 sq. 3, 34. 8, 9. 8, 14. But see Encyc. Brit. , art. “Priest,” xix. 729. Teutonic kings, again, in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position, and exercised the powers of high priests. 24 24 Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer , p. 243. The Emperors of China offer public sacrifices, the details of which are regulated by the ritual books. 25 25 See the Lî-Kî (Legge's translation), passim . It is needless, however, to multiply examples of what is the rule rather than the exception in the early history of the kingship.

But when we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests also, we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of their office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty form of speech but the expression of a sober belief. Kings were revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of man, and are sought, if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece with early modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is mostly worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their fears, and their hopes. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher power; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the supernatural powers necessary to further his own well-being and that of his fellow men.

This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there is another. Side by side with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces, primitive man has another conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency. The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of superstition. One of the principles of sympathetic magic is that any effect may be produced by imitating it. To take a few instances. If it is wished to kill a person an image of him is made and then destroyed; and it is believed that through a certain physical sympathy between the person and his image, the man feels the injuries done to the image as if they were done to his own body, and that when it is destroyed he must simultaneously perish. Again, in Morocco a fowl or a pigeon may sometimes be seen with a little red bundle tied to its foot. The bundle contains a charm, and it is believed that as the charm is kept in constant motion by the bird a corresponding restlessness is kept up in the mind of him or her against whom the charm is directed. 26 26 A. Leared, Morocco and the Moors , p. 272. In Nias when a wild pig has fallen into the pit prepared for it, it is taken out and its back is rubbed with nine fallen leaves, in the belief that this will make nine more wild pigs fall into the pit just as the nine leaves fell from the tree. 27 27 J. W. Thomas, “De jacht op het eiland Nias,” in Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde , xxvi. 277. When a Cambodian hunter has set his nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes some way off, then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it, lets himself be caught in it and cries, “Hillo! what's this? I'm afraid I'm caught.” After that the net is sure to catch game. 28 28 E. Aymonier, “Notes sur les coutumes et croyances superstitieuses des Cambodgiens,” in Cochinchine Française, Excursions et Reconnaissances , No. 16, p. 157. In Thüringen the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax crop to wave in the wind. 29 29 Witzschel, Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Thüringen , p. 218, No. 36. In the interior of Sumatra the rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. 30 30 Van Hasselt, Volksbeschrijving van Midden-Sumatra , p. 323. Again, magic sympathy is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut. This superstition is world-wide. Further, the sympathy in question exists between friends and relations, especially at critical times. Hence, for example, the elaborate code of rules which regulates the conduct of persons left at home while a party of their friends is out fishing or hunting or on the war-path. It is thought that if the persons left at home broke these rules their absent friends would suffer an injury, corresponding in its nature to the breach of the rule. Thus when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife or, if he is unmarried, his sister, must wear a sword day and night in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the morning, lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep by an enemy. 31 31 J. C. E. Tromp, “De Rambai en Sebroeang Dajaks,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde , xxv. 118. In Laos when an elephant hunter is setting out for the chase he warns his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence; for if she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled herself it would slip through them. 32 32 E. Aymonier, Notes sur le Laos , p. 25 sq.