| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
§ 3. Kings
killed at the End of a Fixed Term |
| |
| IN THE CASES hitherto
described, the divine king or priest is suffered by his people to
retain office until some outward defect, some visible symptom of
failing health or advancing age, warns them that he is no longer
equal to the discharge of his divine duties; but not until such
symptoms have made their appearance is he put to death. Some
peoples, however, appear to have thought it unsafe to wait for even
the slightest symptom of decay and have preferred to kill the king
while he was still in the full vigour of life. Accordingly, they
have fixed a term beyond which he might not reign, and at the close
of which he must die, the term fixed upon being short enough to
exclude the probability of his degenerating physically in the
interval. In some parts of Southern India the period fixed was
twelve years. Thus, according to an old traveller, in the province
of Quilacare, “there is a Gentile house of prayer, in which there is
an idol which they hold in great account, and every twelve years
they celebrate a great feast to it, whither
all the Gentiles go as to a jubilee. This temple possesses many
lands and much revenue: it is a very great affair. This province has
a king over it, who has not more than twelve years to reign from
jubilee to jubilee. His manner of living is in this wise, that is to
say: when the twelve years are completed, on the day of this feast
there assemble together innumerable people, and much money is spent
in giving food to Bramans. The king has a wooden scaffolding made,
spread over with silken hangings: and on that day he goes to bathe
at a tank with great ceremonies and sound of music, after that he
comes to the idol and prays to it, and mounts on to the scaffolding,
and there before all the people he takes some very sharp knives, and
begins to cut off his nose, and then his ears, and his lips, and all
his members, and as much flesh off himself as he can; and he throws
it away very hurriedly until so much of his blood is spilled that he
begins to faint, and then he cuts his throat himself. And he
performs this sacrifice to the idol, and whoever desires to reign
another twelve years and undertake this martyrdom for love of the
idol, has to be present looking on at this: and from that place they
raise him up as king.” |
1 |
| The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, bears the
title of Samorin or Samory. He “pretends to be of a higher rank than
the Brahmans, and to be inferior only to the invisible gods; a
pretention that was acknowledged by his subjects, but which is held
as absurd and abominable by the Brahmans, by whom he is only treated
as a Sudra.” Formerly the Samorin had to cut his throat in public at
the end of a twelve years’ reign. But towards the end of the
seventeenth century the rule had been modified as follows: “Many
strange customs were observed in this country in former times, and
some very odd ones are still continued. It was an ancient custom for
the Samorin to reign but twelve years, and no longer. If he died
before his term was expired, it saved him a troublesome ceremony of
cutting his own throat, on a publick scaffold erected for the
purpose. He first made a feast for all his nobility and gentry, who
are very numerous. After the feast he saluted his guests, and went
on the scaffold, and very decently cut his own throat in the view of
the assembly, and his body was, a little while after, burned with
great pomp and ceremony, and the grandees elected a new Samorin.
Whether that custom was a religious or a civil ceremony, I know not,
but it is now laid aside. And a new custom is followed by the modern
Samorins, that jubilee is proclaimed throughout his dominions, at
the end of twelve years, and a tent is pitched for him in a spacious
plain, and a great feast is celebrated for ten or twelve days, with
mirth and jollity, guns firing night and day, so at the end of the
feast any four of the guests that have a mind to gain a crown by a
desperate action, in fighting their way through 30 or 40,000 of his
guards, and kill the Samorin in his tent, he that kills him succeeds
him in his empire. In anno 1695, one of those jubilees happened, and
the tent pitched near Pennany, a seaport of his, about fifteen
leagues to the southward of Calicut. There were but three men that
would venture on that desperate action, who fell in, with sword and target, among the guard, and, after
they had killed and wounded many, were themselves killed. One of the
desperados had a nephew of fifteen or sixteen years of age, that
kept close by his uncle in the attack on the guards, and, when he
saw him fall, the youth got through the guards into the tent, and
made a stroke at his Majesty’s head, and had certainly despatched
him if a large brass lamp which was burning over his head had not
marred the blow; but, before he could make another, he was killed by
the guards; and, I believe, the same Samorin reigns yet. I chanced
to come that time along the coast and heard the guns for two or
three days and nights successively.” |
2 |
| The English traveller, whose account I have quoted,
did not himself witness the festival he describes, though he heard
the sound of the firing in the distance. Fortunately, exact records
of these festivals and of the number of men who perished at them
have been preserved in the archives of the royal family at Calicut.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century they were examined by
Mr. W. Logan, with the personal assistance of the reigning king, and
from his work it is possible to gain an accurate conception both of
the tragedy and of the scene where it was periodically enacted down
to 1743, when the ceremony took place for the last time. |
3 |
| The festival at which the king of Calicut staked his
crown and his life on the issue of battle was known as the “Great
Sacrifice.” It fell every twelfth year, when the planet Jupiter was
in retrograde motion in the sign of the Crab, and it lasted
twenty-eight days, culminating at the time of the eighth lunar
asterism in the month of Makaram. As the date of the festival was
determined by the position of Jupiter in the sky, and the interval
between two festivals was twelve years, which is roughly Jupiter’s
period of revolution round the sun, we may conjecture that the
splendid planet was supposed to be in a special sense the king’s
star and to rule his destiny, the period of its revolution in heaven
corresponding to the period of his reign on earth. However that may
be, the ceremony was observed with great pomp at the Tirunavayi
temple, on the north bank of the Ponnani River. The spot is close to
the present railway line. As the train rushes by, you can just catch
a glimpse of the temple, almost hidden behind a clump of trees on
the river bank. From the western gateway of the temple a perfectly
straight road, hardly raised above the level of the surrounding
rice-fields and shaded by a fine avenue, runs for half a mile to a
high ridge with a precipitous bank, on which the outlines of three
or four terraces can still be traced. On the topmost of these
terraces the king took his stand on the eventful day. The view which
it commands is a fine one. Across the flat expanse of the
rice-fields, with the broad placid river winding through them, the
eye ranges eastward to high tablelands, their lower slopes embowered
in woods, while afar off looms the great chain of the western
Ghauts, and in the furthest distance the Neilgherries or Blue
Mountains, hardly distinguishable from the azure of the sky
above. |
4 |
| But it was not to the distant prospect that the
king’s eyes naturally turned at this crisis
of his fate. His attention was arrested by a spectacle nearer at
hand. For all the plain below was alive with troops, their banners
waving gaily in the sun, the white tents of their many camps
standing sharply out against the green and gold of the ricefields.
Forty thousand fighting men or more were gathered there to defend
the king. But if the plain swarmed with soldiers, the road that cuts
across it from the temple to the king’s stand was clear of them. Not
a soul was stirring on it. Each side of the way was barred by
palisades, and from the palisades on either hand a long hedge of
spears, held by strong arms, projected into the empty road, their
blades meeting in the middle and forming a glittering arch of steel.
All was now ready. The king waved his sword. At the same moment a
great chain of massy gold, enriched with bosses, was placed on an
elephant at his side. That was the signal. On the instant a stir
might be seen half a mile away at the gate of the temple. A group of
swordsmen, decked with flowers and smeared with ashes, has stepped
out from the crowd. They have just partaken of their last meal on
earth, and they now receive the last blessings and farewells of
their friends. A moment more and they are coming down the lane of
spears, hewing and stabbing right and left at the spearmen, winding
and turning and writhing among the blades as if they had no bones in
their bodies. It is all in vain. One after the other they fall, some
nearer the king, some farther off, content to die, not for the
shadow of a crown, but for the mere sake of approving their
dauntless valour and swordsmanship to the world. On the last days of
the festival the same magnificent display of gallantry, the same
useless sacrifice of life was repeated again and again. Yet perhaps
no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves that there are men who
prefer honour to life. |
5 |
| “It is a singular custom in Bengal,” says an old
native historian of India, “that there is little of hereditary
descent in succession to the sovereignty… . Whoever kills the king,
and succeeds in placing himself on that throne, is immediately
acknowledged as king; all the amirs, wazirs, soldiers, and
peasants instantly obey and submit to him, and consider him as being
as much their sovereign as they did their former prince, and obey
his orders implicitly. The people of Bengal say, ‘We are faithful to
the throne; whoever fills the throne we are obedient and true to
it.’” A custom of the same sort formerly prevailed in the little
kingdom of Passier, on the northern coast of Sumatra. The old
Portuguese historian De Barros, who informs us of it, remarks with
surprise that no wise man would wish to be king of Passier, since
the monarch was not allowed by his subjects to live long. From time
to time a sort of fury seized the people, and they marched through
the streets of the city chanting with loud voices the fatal words,
“The king must die!” When the king heard that song of death he knew
that his hour had come. The man who struck the fatal blow was of the
royal lineage, and as soon as he had done the deed of blood and
seated himself on the throne he was regarded as the legitimate king,
provided that he contrived to maintain his seat peaceably for a
single day. This, however, the regicide did
not always succeed in doing. When Fernão Peres d’Andrade, on a
voyage to China, put in at Passier for a cargo of spices, two kings
were massacred, and that in the most peaceable and orderly manner,
without the smallest sign of tumult or sedition in the city, where
everything went on in its usual course, as if the murder or
execution of a king were a matter of everyday occurrence. Indeed, on
one occasion three kings were raised to the dangerous elevation and
followed each other in the dusty road of death in a single day. The
people defended the custom, which they esteemed very laudable and
even of divine institution, by saying that God would never allow so
high and mighty a being as a king, who reigned as his vicegerent on
earth, to perish by violence unless for his sins he thoroughly
deserved it. Far away from the tropical island of Sumatra a rule of
the same sort appears to have obtained among the old Slavs. When the
captives Gunn and Jarmerik contrived to slay the king and queen of
the Slavs and made their escape, they were pursued by the
barbarians, who shouted after them that if they would only come back
they would reign instead of the murdered monarch, since by a public
statute of the ancients the succession to the throne fell to the
king’s assassin. But the flying regicides turned a deaf ear to
promises which they regarded as mere baits to lure them back to
destruction; they continued their flight, and the shouts and clamour
of the barbarians gradually died away in the distance. |
6 |
| When kings were bound to suffer death, whether at
their own hands or at the hands of others, on the expiration of a
fixed term of years, it was natural that they should seek to
delegate the painful duty, along with some of the privileges of
sovereignty, to a substitute who should suffer vicariously in their
stead. This expedient appears to have been resorted to by some of
the princes of Malabar. Thus we are informed by a native authority
on that country that “in some places all powers both executive and
judicial were delegated for a fixed period to natives by the
sovereign. This institution was styled Thalavettiparothiam or
authority obtained by decapitation…. It was an office tenable for
five years during which its bearer was invested with supreme
despotic powers within his jurisdiction. On the expiry of the five
years the man’s head was cut off and thrown up in the air amongst a
large concourse of villagers, each of whom vied with the other in
trying to catch it in its course down. He who succeeded was
nominated to the post for the next five years.” |
7 |
| When once kings, who had hitherto been bound to die
a violent death at the end of a term of years, conceived the happy
thought of dying by deputy in the persons of others, they would very
naturally put it in practice; and accordingly we need not wonder at
finding so popular an expedient, or traces of it, in many lands.
Scandinavian traditions contain some hints that of old the Swedish
kings reigned only for periods of nine years, after which they were
put to death or had to find a substitute to die in their stead. Thus
Aun or On, king of Sweden, is said to have sacrificed to Odin for
length of days and to have been answered by
the god that he should live so long as he sacrificed one of his sons
every ninth year. He sacrificed nine of them in this manner, and
would have sacrificed the tenth and last, but the Swedes would not
allow him. So he died and was buried in a mound at Upsala. Another
indication of a similar tenure of the crown occurs in a curious
legend of the deposition and banishment of Odin. Offended at his
misdeeds, the other gods outlawed and exiled him, but set up in his
place a substitute, Oller by name, a cunning wizard, to whom they
accorded the symbols both of royalty and of godhead. The deputy bore
the name of Odin, and reigned for nearly ten years, when he was
driven from the throne, while the real Odin came to his own again.
His discomfited rival retired to Sweden and was afterwards slain in
an attempt to repair his shattered fortunes. As gods are often
merely men who loom large through the mists of tradition, we may
conjecture that this Norse legend preserves a confused reminiscence
of ancient Swedish kings who reigned for nine or ten years together,
then abdicated, delegating to others the privilege of dying for
their country. The great festival which was held at Upsala every
nine years may have been the occasion on which the king or his
deputy was put to death. We know that human sacrifices formed part
of the rites. |
8 |
| There are some grounds for believing that the reign
of many ancient Greek kings was limited to eight years, or at least
that at the end of every period of eight years a new consecration, a
fresh outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in
order to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties.
Thus it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth
year the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting
down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a
meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned
against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until
the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them. This
custom, which has all the air of great antiquity, was not suffered
to remain a dead letter even in the last period of the Spartan
monarchy; for in the third century before our era a king, who had
rendered himself obnoxious to the reforming party, was actually
deposed on various trumped-up charges, among which the allegation
that the ominous sign had been seen in the sky took a prominent
place. |
9 |
| If the tenure of the regal office was formerly
limited among the Spartans to eight years, we may naturally ask, why
was that precise period selected as the measure of a king’s reign?
The reason is probably to be found in those astronomical
considerations which determined the early Greek calendar. The
difficulty of reconciling lunar with solar time is one of the
standing puzzles which has taxed the ingenuity of men who are
emerging from barbarism. Now an octennial cycle is the shortest
period at the end of which sun and moon really mark time together
after overlapping, so to say, throughout the whole of the interval.
Thus, for example, it is only once in every eight years that the
full moon coincides with the longest or
shortest day; and as this coincidence can
be observed with the aid of a simple dial, the observation is
naturally one of the first to furnish a base for a calendar which
shall bring lunar and solar times into tolerable, though not exact,
harmony. But in early days the proper adjustment of the calendar is
a matter of religious concern, since on it depends a knowledge of
the right seasons for propitiating the deities whose favour is
indispensable to the welfare of the community. No wonder, therefore,
that the king, as the chief priest of the state, or as himself a
god, should be liable to deposition or death at the end of an
astronomical period. When the great luminaries had run their course
on high, and were about to renew the heavenly race, it might well be
thought that the king should renew his divine energies, or prove
them unabated, under pain of making room for a more vigorous
successor. In Southern India, as we have seen, the king’s reign and
life terminated with the revolution of the planet Jupiter round the
sun. In Greece, on the other hand, the king’s fate seems to have
hung in the balance at the end of every eight years, ready to fly up
and kick the beam as soon as the opposite scale was loaded with a
falling star. |
10 |
| Whatever its origin may have been, the cycle of
eight years appears to have coincided with the normal length of the
king’s reign in other parts of Greece besides Sparta. Thus Minos,
king of Cnossus in Crete, whose great palace has been unearthed in
recent years, is said to have held office for periods of eight years
together. At the end of each period he retired for a season to the
oracular cave on Mount Ida, and there communed with his divine
father Zeus, giving him an account of his kingship in the years that
were past, and receiving from him instructions for his guidance in
those which were to come. The tradition plainly implies that at the
end of every eight years the king’s sacred powers needed to be
renewed by intercourse with the godhead, and that without such a
renewal he would have forfeited his right to the throne. |
11 |
| Without being unduly rash we may surmise that the
tribute of seven youths and seven maidens whom the Athenians were
bound to send to Minos every eight years had some connexion with the
renewal of the king’s power for another octennial cycle. Traditions
varied as to the fate which awaited the lads and damsels on their
arrival in Crete; but the common view appears to have been that they
were shut up in the labyrinth, there to be devoured by the Minotaur,
or at least to be imprisoned for life. Perhaps they were sacrificed
by being roasted alive in a bronze image of a bull, or of a
bull-headed man, in order to renew the strength of the king and of
the sun, whom he personated. This at all events is suggested by the
legend of Talos, a bronze man who clutched people to his breast and
leaped with them into the fire, so that they were roasted alive. He
is said to have been given by Zeus to Europa, or by Hephaestus to
Minos, to guard the island of Crete, which he patrolled thrice
daily. According to one account he was a bull, according to another he was the sun. Probably he was
identical with the Minotaur, and stripped of his mythical features
was nothing but a bronze image of the sun represented as a man with
a bull’s head. In order to renew the solar fires, human victims may
have been sacrificed to the idol by being roasted in its hollow body
or placed on its sloping hands and allowed to roll into a pit of
fire. It was in the latter fashion that the Carthaginians sacrificed
their offspring to Moloch. The children were laid on the hands of a
calf-headed image of bronze, from which they slid into a fiery oven,
while the people danced to the music of flutes and timbrels to drown
the shrieks of the burning victims. The resemblance which the Cretan
traditions bear to the Carthaginian practice suggests that the
worship associated with the names of Minos and the Minotaur may have
been powerfully influenced by that of a Semitic Baal. In the
tradition of Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum, and his brazen bull we
may have an echo of similar rites in Sicily, where the Carthaginian
power struck deep roots. |
12 |
| In the province of Lagos, the Ijebu tribe of the
Yoruba race is divided into two branches, which are known
respectively as the Ijebu Ode and the Ijebu Remon. The Ode branch of
the tribe is ruled by a chief who bears the title of Awujale and is
surrounded by a great deal of mystery. Down to recent times his face
might not be seen even by his own subjects, and if circumstances
obliged him to communicate with them he did so through a screen
which hid him from view. The other or Remon branch of the Ijebu
tribe is governed by a chief, who ranks below the Awujale. Mr. John
Parkinson was informed that in former times this subordinate chief
used to be killed with ceremony after a rule of three years. As the
country is now under British protection the custom of putting the
chief to death at the end of a three years’ reign has long been
abolished, and Mr. Parkinson was unable to ascertain any particulars
on the subject. |
13 |
| At Babylon, within historical times, the tenure of
the kingly office was in practice lifelong, yet in theory it would
seem to have been merely annual. For every year at the festival of
Zagmuk the king had to renew his power by seizing the hands of the
image of Marduk in his great temple of Esagil at Babylon. Even when
Babylon passed under the power of Assyria, the monarchs of that
country were expected to legalise their claim to the throne every
year by coming to Babylon and performing the ancient ceremony at the
New Year festival, and some of them found the obligation so
burdensome that rather than discharge it they renounced the title of
king altogether and contented themselves with the humbler one of
Governor. Further, it would appear that in remote times, though not
within the historical period, the kings of Babylon or their
barbarous predecessors forfeited not merely their crown but their
life at the end of a year’s tenure of office. At least this is the
conclusion to which the following evidence seems to point. According
to the historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with
ample knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival
called the Sacaea. It began on the sixteenth day of the month Lous, and lasted for five
days, during which masters and servants changed places, the servants
giving orders and the masters obeying them. A prisoner condemned to
death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne,
allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and
enjoy himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines. But at the end
of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and
hanged or impaled. During his brief term of office he bore the title
of Zoganes. This custom might perhaps have been explained as merely
a grim jest perpetrated in a season of jollity at the expense of an
unhappy criminal. But one circumstance—the leave given to the mock
king to enjoy the king’s concubines—is decisive against this
interpretation. Considering the jealous seclusion of an oriental
despot’s harem we may be quite certain that permission to invade it
would never have been granted by the despot, least of all to a
condemned criminal, except for the very gravest cause. This cause
could hardly be other than that the condemned man was about to die
in the king’s stead, and that to make the substitution perfect it
was necessary he should enjoy the full rights of royalty during his
brief reign. There is nothing surprising in this substitution. The
rule that the king must be put to death either on the appearance of
any symptom of bodily decay or at the end of a fixed period is
certainly one which, sooner or later, the kings would seek to
abolish or modify. We have seen that in Ethiopia, Sofala, and Eyeo
the rule was boldly set aside by enlightened monarchs; and that in
Calicut the old custom of killing the king at the end of twelve
years was changed into a permission granted to any one at the end of
the twelve years’ period to attack the king, and, in the event of
killing him, to reign in his stead; though, as the king took care at
these times to be surrounded by his guards, the permission was
little more than a form. Another way of modifying the stern old rule
is seen in the Babylonian custom just described. When the time drew
near for the king to be put to death (in Babylon this appears to
have been at the end of a single year’s reign) he abdicated for a
few days, during which a temporary king reigned and suffered in his
stead. At first the temporary king may have been an innocent person,
possibly a member of the king’s own family; but with the growth of
civilisation the sacrifice of an innocent person would be revolting
to the public sentiment, and accordingly a condemned criminal would
be invested with the brief and fatal sovereignty. In the sequel we
shall find other examples of a dying criminal representing a dying
god. For we must not forget that, as the case of the Shilluk kings
clearly shows, the king is slain in his character of a god or a
demigod, his death and resurrection, as the only means of
perpetuating the divine life unimpaired, being deemed necessary for
the salvation of his people and the world. |
14 |
| A vestige of a practice of putting the king to death
at the end of a year’s reign appears to have survived in the
festival called Macahity, which used to be celebrated in Hawaii
during the last month of the year. About a
hundred years ago a Russian voyager described the custom as follows:
“The taboo Macahity is not unlike to our festival of Christmas. It
continues a whole month, during which the people amuse themselves
with dances, plays, and sham-fights of every kind. The king must
open this festival wherever he is. On this occasion his majesty
dresses himself in his richest cloak and helmet, and is paddled in a
canoe along the shore, followed sometimes by many of his subjects.
He embarks early, and must finish his excursion at sunrise. The
strongest and most expert of the warriors is chosen to receive him
on his landing. This warrior watches the canoe along the beach; and
as soon as the king lands, and has thrown off his cloak, he darts
his spear at him, from a distance of about thirty paces, and the
king must either catch the spear in his hand, or suffer from it:
there is no jesting in the business. Having caught it, he carries it
under his arm, with the sharp end downwards, into the temple or
heavoo. On his entrance, the assembled multitude begin their
sham-fights, and immediately the air is obscured by clouds of
spears, made for the occasion with blunted ends. Hamamea [the king]
has been frequently advised to abolish this ridiculous ceremony, in
which he risks his life every year; but to no effect. His answer
always is, that he is as able to catch a spear as any one on the
island is to throw it at him. During the Macahity, all punishments
are remitted throughout the country; and no person can leave the
place in which he commences these holidays, let the affair be ever
so important.” |
15 |
| That a king should regularly have been put to death
at the close of a year’s reign will hardly appear improbable when we
learn that to this day there is still a kingdom in which the reign
and the life of the sovereign are limited to a single day. In Ngoio,
a province of the ancient kingdom of Congo, the rule obtains that
the chief who assumes the cap of sovereignty is always killed on the
night after his coronation. The right of succession lies with the
chief of the Musurongo; but we need not wonder that he does not
exercise it, and that the throne stands vacant. “No one likes to
lose his life for a few hours’ glory on the Ngoio throne.” |
16 |
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