Part 5

One might begin by discussing the remnants of primitive secret societies. The remains are fairly rich. Mr. Webster, in his instructive book,[41] has traced the normal genesis of these bodies which exercise such an enormous influence over savage life. The first stage he takes to be the ordinary system of ordeals and puberty rites through which all males of the tribe have to pass before they can be admitted as full men. The ordeals of the Arunta and of the various Red Indian tribes are familiar to most of us. These ceremonies are often involved in a good deal both of mystery and of charlatanry. The youths initiated, for instance, sometimes are supposed to die and be born again. The process is secret. The women of the tribe are kept carefully away. The neighbourhood is filled with the warning sound of the Rhombos or Bull-roarer--that ‘whirring of immortal things’ which Hesiod perhaps means when he speaks of the air resounding ῥιπᾖ ὑπ’ ἀθανάτων.[42] The next stage begins when this initiation ceremony ceases to be compulsory. This sometimes depends on the separation of the War Chief from the medicine-man or the elders. For of course the initiation ceremonies are specially the department of the last named. In the third stage we find a full-flown Secret Society. The initiated form a definite body and work together for the maintenance of such conduct as is pleasing to the gods and themselves.

Take the case of Dukduk, a powerful society in the Bismarck Archipelago, north-east of New Guinea. I will not dwell on its power nor on the advantages which accrue to its worshippers. But I cite from Mr. Webster an eyewitness’s account of an epiphany of Dukduk.

Dukduk arrives about six times a year, and always on the day of the new moon. His arrival is announced a month beforehand by the Old Men--the Gerontes. During that month great quantities of food are made ready for Dukduk, and are ‘taken care of’ by the Old Men, his votaries. The day before the epiphany all women disappear from sight. It is death to them to look on the divine being. Before daybreak all the males of the tribe assemble on the beach, most of the young men looking frightened. At the first streak of dawn singing and drum-beating is heard out at sea, and as soon as there is enough light five or six canoes are seen at a distance, lashed together and with a platform built over them. On this platform are two Dukduks, dancing and uttering shrill cries. They are got up like gigantic cassowaries, some ten feet high, surmounted by a grotesque human mask. At least, says Mr. Romilly, the witness whom I cite, the body looks much like the body of the cassowary, but the head is like nothing but the head of a Dukduk. The canoes make the beach. The natives fall back in apprehension, for if Dukduk is touched he frequently tomahawks the offender on the spot. They proceed through the settlement, always dancing and screaming, to the secret house which has been prepared for them in the bush. They stay about a fortnight. They beat people a good deal, and exact money from suitable sources, especially plundering the women; if any one has shown disrespect of any sort to any member of the Dukduk society, not to speak of Dukduk himself, the punishment is swift and terrible.

Now Dukduk, like Egbo and Mumbo-Jumbo, is an anti-feminist, whereas Dionysus was essentially worshipped by women. There are several West African parallels to this. The Bundu of the Mendi country is a very powerful woman‘s society.[43] But otherwise is not the whole of this story curiously reminiscent of the Dionysus myths, as they occur, for instance, in the early Corinthian epos attributed to Eumelos? In his native Thrace, very possibly, everybody was initiated to Dionysus; but in Greece his worshippers form a special society. Dionysus arrives in a ship from unknown seas: when he moves inland this ship is set bodily upon a wagon.[44] He makes his epiphany at various places, claiming worship for himself and honours for his worshippers. In the regular propagandist legend that comes down to us, Lycurgus perished for wrongs done to the Bacchic society and the god himself. He ‘sought to stay the women possessed of god and the Bacchic fire’.[45] He smote or drove into the sea Dionysus himself and his Nurses.[46] The same with Pentheus. In the actual ritual, we can have little doubt, a man personated Dionysus, exactly as a man personates the Dukduk or Egbo or Mumbo-Jumbo. And presumably, in just the same way, the uninitiated, as Mungo Park says, ‘were so ignorant, or at least were obliged to pretend to be so,’ as to take the figure on the ship for a divine being.

The Mysteries are all intimately connected with Secret Societies. The Demeter mystery has an epiphany in it; it has the arrival of Demeter at Eleusis; it has the Rhombos or Bull-roarer and the exclusion of the uninitiated. And, a sign perhaps of declining influence in this actual world, it professes, like many of these societies, to do wonderful things in the next.

There are, to my mind, traces in prehistoric Greece of another kind of secret society, resembling the Human Leopards or Human Lions of West Africa. I must refer here to the long expected book of my friend Mr. Penmorlan Maine on Werewolves. But, to give the mere outlines of the subject, the members of these societies are apt to turn, at certain seasons, into leopards or lions, and then kill human beings in a leopard-like or lion-like way. Their object is partly to obtain human fat for ‘medicine’, partly to remove or discourage their enemies. Sir H. H. Johnston[47] tells of a series of murders committed by an old man, who concealed himself in long grass and leaped out on solitary travellers. He killed them and then mutilated the bodies. He confessed the murders freely, but explained that he at times turned into a lion, and had to act as such.[48] The leopard societies have special three-pronged forks or gloves with knives at the end to imitate the wound of a leopard’s claw. And I have seen a long club ending in claws like a wild beast’s, which I suspect had the same purpose. My father-in-law bought it in Khartoum from a negro from the south, who professed not to know what it was. He said it was a ‘fantasia’--as no doubt it was.

To take a particular instance, the mode of initiation in the Sherbro leopard society strongly recalls certain pre-Hellenic myths. The society chooses some stranger and asks him to a dinner at which human flesh is secretly mixed among the other food. At the end of the meal they reveal to him what he has eaten, and in proof (I think) show him the hands, and sometimes the head, of the murdered human being. He has shared the leopard feast, and is now a leopard.[49]

Was it not exactly like this that Atreus kept the hands and feet of the murdered children apart, hidden with a cloth, and at the end of the feast removed the cloth to show Thyestes what he had eaten? Lykaon too, though his name can scarcely be derived from λύκος, turned into a wolf because he had ‘sacrificed a child on the altar of Zeus Lykaios’. As he himself can scarcely be different from Zeus Lykaios, this must originally have implied some cannibal act. And you will remember that ever afterwards in the ritual of Zeus Lykaios legend said that one piece of human flesh was mixed up with the rest of the sacrificial meat, and the man who unknowingly tasted that bit was doomed to turn into a wolf.[50]

There are the burning questions of totems and of matriarchy; there is Earth-magic, there is Purification, there is Fetichism: there are many other marks of ‘the Religions of the Lower Culture’ to be found in the ancient pre-Hellenic myths. But I must turn to the special point which I wish to illustrate in the remainder of this lecture.

I wish to deal with a most familiar part of the subject, the Divine King, or, as I prefer to call him, the Medicine-King, and then to apply the results which we reach to the most obvious remnant of non-Homeric poetry that has come down to us, the Theogony of Hesiod.

We all know about this medicine-king. If we like we can call him divine. On his force and his _mana_--what Hesiod, I venture to suggest, calls his κράτος τε βία τε--depends the welfare of his people, in the way of rain and thunderstorms, of abundance of game, of crops, of success in war. He also affects floods, earthquake, and pestilence. If he suffers in any way, if his _mana_ is weakened, his whole people suffers and is weakened too. Consequently he is encouraged and kept strong as long as possible; if he shows any weakness, he must be got rid of and a better man found to take his place. There seem to be three main methods. Either he is set aside periodically, at the end of five years, or nine years, or the like; or he is quietly deposed when he shows signs of age, like Peleus, Oineus, Aison, in the legends; or, and this is our main subject to-day, when some one else shows superior _mana_ by killing him. At present my _mana_ is supreme; I am king; my will carries itself out. But if your _mana_, your Kratos and Bia, conquer mine, then you are king. If you can also get my _mana_ into you, so much the better. For κράτος and βία are tricky things and may desert any one of us, or, according to Hesiod, any except Zeus: ‘No house of Zeus is without them, no seat of Zeus, there is no going forth of the god where they do not follow him, and they sit for ever beside the Thunderer.’[51] Already, in Hesiod, these _mana_ qualities have become half anthropomorphic; much more so, of course, in Aeschylus’ _Prometheus_.

Now in anthropology we are always making fresh efforts at the imaginative understanding of men far removed from us, and naturally, therefore, we are always slightly correcting and modifying our conceptions. I want here to suggest that with regard to this Divine King the ordinary classical conception is slightly wrong. We speak of deification; and this deification always remains rather a puzzle for us. It may be all very well for the mysterious Minos: but when applied to Julius Caesar or to Hadrian, in the full light and plain prose of history, it seems such an absurd and gratuitous blasphemy. I think the mistake lies in applying our highly abstract conception ‘God’, a conception rarefied and ennobled during many centuries by the philosophic and religious thought of the highest of mankind, to a stratum of human ideas to which it does not belong. In one of the presidential addresses delivered to the recent Congress of Religions, Mr. Hartland dwelt on a significant fact with regard to this idea of God, viz. that whenever this word is used our best witnesses tend to contradict one another. Among the most competent observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance, some hold that they had no conception of a God, others that they were constantly thinking about God. Much may be said about this; but one thing, I think, emerges with some clearness: that this idea of a god far away in the sky--I do not say merely a god who is ‘without body, parts, or passions’, but even a god who is very remote and is a cause behind the regular phenomena of the world--this idea is one which practically does not enter their minds at all, or, if by an effort they can reach and accept it, it has little working value and is soon forgotten. For most primitive races, I suspect, the medicine-chief, the βασιλεύς, with his immense _mana_, is Theos, and equally the Theos is the medicine-chief. The rainmaker, the bringer of game, the possessor of the power to make dead and to make alive--there he is, the visible doer of all those things which later races have delegated to higher and more shadowy beings, walking palpably before you with his medicine and perhaps his pipe, his grand manner, his fits, and his terrific dress.

The Basileus, the possessor of great _mana_, wants people to obey him, and by will-power, by force of character, aided by impressive ritual, he makes them. In the same way he makes rain; he says so vehemently ‘It shall rain’ that it cannot help itself. It does. This lies at the back of what we somewhat erroneously call mimetic magic. For the real rainmaker does not imitate rain, he just makes it. One must bear in mind always the extreme sensitiveness of savages to suggestion--to hocus-pocus, to bullying, to paroxysms of rage. When Kyknos-Ares, who presumably belonged to this class of Basileus, was waiting for Heracles to attack him in his _temenos_, he did not simply make suitable arrangements and stay on guard; no, περιμαίνετο, he ‘raged round’, working up his _mana_ and inspiring all the terror possible. Think of the scolding priests of the Middle Ages. Think even of the Bull ‘Ausculta Fili’. Think of the rages that are characteristic of ancient prophets, such as Tiresias, just as they are of modern yogis and Maroccan saints.

In the first place, then, on sociological grounds, I think we should not conceive this primitive king as a man deified, but rather as a pre-deistic medicine-man possessed of those powers which more cultured ages have relegated to the gods. In the second place, though I know that etymological arguments are often like broken reeds and pierce the hand of him who leans thereon, I cannot but remember that Curtius derived θεός from the root _thes-_ which appears in πολύθεστος, ἀπόθεστος, θέσσασθαι, perhaps θεσμός, the Latin _festus_ and _feriae_, and which has the special connotation of ‘spell’ or ‘magic prayer’. Professor Conway, who prefers another derivation (Lith. dvãse, ‘spirit, breath,’ MHG. ge-twas, ‘ghost,’ see Brugmann, _Gr. Gr._ s.v.), writes to me that the fatal objection to the _thes-_ derivation is that θεσός could not mean God; it could only mean ‘prayer’ or ‘one who prays’. Now, except that the word suggests ‘spell’ rather than ‘prayer’, that is exactly what I want it to mean. If the word θεός was originally neuter it meant magic or medicine, like φάρμακον. If masculine, it was the medicine-man or magic-man--not very far from φαρμακός.

The process of thought, if I may over-simplify it a little, seems to be like this. First the Theos or Rainmaker on earth makes his rain. Then it is found that he does not always or unconditionally make the rain, and you reach the hypothesis that a greater rainmaker lives far away, on some remote mountain, or perhaps in the sky. That is the true Theos. The Theos on earth only knows his ways, belongs to him, partly controls him; sometimes indeed he can only humbly pray to him. The so-called Theos on earth, in fact, is not Theos at all. Here comes one of the strongest antitheses between Homeric and non-Homeric, between the reformed Olympian religion and the old savage stuff from which it was made. Homer drew clear the line between mortal and immortal, between God in Olympus and man here. And most early Greek poetry rings with the antithesis. Μὴ μάτευε Ζεὺς γενέσθαι. θνητὸν ὄντα θνητὰ χρὴ φρονεῖν. By the fifth century the time was long past when ‘gods and mortal men strove in Mêkônê’, and the gods had carried the day. Yet even Sophocles makes his Thebans go with prayer and supplication to a Basileus, to stop the plague; and it seems significant that he makes the priest explain

θεοῖσι μέν νυν οὐκ ἱσούμενόν σ’ ἑγὼ οὑδ’ οἴδε παῖδες ἑζόμεσθ’ ἑφέστιοι ἁνδρῶν δὲ πρῶτον ἔν τε συμφοραῖς βίου κρίνοντες ἒν τε δαιμόνων συναλλαγαῖς (_O.T._ 31 ff.).

The suppliant comes to him not exactly as a God, but as the first of men and as holding some special intercourse with the δαίμονες.

A great collection of these medicine-kings, especially of rain and thunder-makers, is to be found in Mr. A. B. Cook’s very remarkable articles on ‘Zeus, Jupiter and the Oak’, published in the _Classical Review_ for 1903, and again in his ‘European Sky God’ in _Folk Lore_, xv, pp. 371-90. I will run briefly through a few of them.

The clearest of all is Salmoneus. His nature was explained, I believe, partly by M. Salomon Reinach and partly by Miss Jane Harrison. ‘He declared that he was Zeus,’ says Apollodorus (i. 9, 7), ‘and depriving Zeus of his sacrifices bade men offer them to himself. He attached to a chariot leather thongs with bronze caldrons and, trailing them after him, said he was thundering; he tossed blazing torches into the air and said he was lightening.’--So he was; at least, he was doing his best. Mr. Cook shows that he had also some justification for saying that he was Zeus. For he was an Olympian victor; and thereby became Basileus, or Zeus, of Olympia, and had the thunder-making as part of his official duties.

Almost exactly similar is Remulus Silvius, _Remulus ... imitator fulminis_, as Ovid calls him. ‘In contempt of the gods he contrived mock thunderbolts and noises like thunder, wherewith he thought to frighten men as though he were a god. But a storm fraught with rain and lightning falling upon his house, and the lake near which it stood swelling in an unusual manner, he was drowned with his whole family.’[52] As with Salmoneus, amid his mock thunder-storms came the real thunder-storm and slew him.

More modest and more in accord with later beliefs was Numa. No impiety was to be found in his thunder-making.[53] ‘Picus and Faunus taught Numa many things, including a charm for thunder and lightning, composed of onions, hair, and pilchards, which is used to this day.’ You may remember the story told by Livy, Ovid, and others, how Numa cheated Jupiter of his human sacrifice. He conjured Jupiter by a spell to come to him and reveal a charm for thunder. The god came, but was angry at being brought, and meant to have blood. ‘I want heads’ ... ‘Of onions,’ said Numa. ‘I want human’ ... ‘Hairs,’ said Numa. ‘I want living’ ... ‘Pilchards,’ put in the pious king, and Jupiter gave the matter up.

Minos in much the same way had the power to thunder, but only had it by means of a prayer to his father Zeus.

Now observe that most of these early Roman heroes appear both as men and as gods. The explanation is, I think, that when the celestial gods were introduced the old _Theoi_ or _Basilêes_ had to be either condemned, like Mezentius, Remulus Silvius, Salmoneus, or else deified. Numa and Romulus suggest themselves at once. Aeneas, too, while engaged in battle with Turnus, or some say Mezentius, vanished and became Jupiter Indiges. Latinus vanished while fighting Mezentius, and became Jupiter Latiaris. In later times there were numbers of these ‘_Humani Ioves_’. It is one of the most important social facts to remember about antiquity, that the spread of education was very difficult and slow, and in consequence it was almost impossible for a whole nation at once ever to rise entirely above that primitive state of superstition which Preuss describes by the pleasant word ‘Urdummheit’.

Julius Caesar was worshipped as Jupiter, with M. Antonius for his Flamen Dialis. Caligula was worshipped as Optimus Maximus and also as Jupiter Latiaris; it was perhaps in this capacity that he put to death his rival the Rex Nemorensis at Nemi. Domitian is constantly referred to as Jupiter in the poets. Coins are found inscribed =ΛΙΒΙΑ ΗΡΑ=, and =HADRIANO IOVI OLYMPIO=.

We have further the somewhat mysterious statement of Macrobius (_Sat._ iii. 7. 6) that ‘the souls of consecrated men were called by the Greeks Zânes’, and the express and frequently repeated statement of Tzetzes ‘that the ancients called all their kings Zeus and their queens goddesses’. Οἱ γὰρ πρίν τε Δίας πάντας κάλεον βασιλῆας.[54]

I will not dwell on Zeus-Agamemnon or on Zeus-Minos; nor on the number of priests of Zeus at Corycus who bear the name Zâs. But I will just draw attention to one fact. Two classes of people who are not kings, and I believe two only, are found bearing the title of Zeus. They are prophets--like Zeus-Amphiaraos and Zeus-Trophonios; and doctors--like the celebrated Menekrates, who called himself Zeus and his various attendants by other divine names. That is to say the old conception of medicine-chief has split up into those three channels, king, prophet, and doctor; and to all three the name of Zeus occasionally belongs. It was for a medical miracle at Lystra that Barnabas was hailed as Zeus and Paul as Hermes (Acts xiv. 12).

Now, as has been observed before now, the history of these _Humani Ioves_ is written in blood, and that for two special reasons. First, it is by blood that they come to the throne and by blood that they leave it. Secondly, they are always appealed to in times of great strait or danger, when ‘strong medicine’ is wanted. And the strongest and most favourite medicine in such cases is human blood, of one sort or another. The main object of the Leopard Societies is said to be the wish to obtain human fat as ‘medicine’. The same motive leads to murders in Australia.[55]

We should perhaps add a third cause for the stain of blood which lies so deep on these primitive medicine-kings. I mean, the mere wish to inspire terror and obedience and to keep off as long as possible that inevitable successor who filled their days with dread. Kyknos, Phorbas, Oinomaos, Kerkyon, Amykos, Philomeleides, Sinis, and Procrustes, all those ogres of Greek myth who race or wrestle with all comers and, having defeated them, hang their heads on trees or tear their bodies asunder or fling them to wild beasts or the like, have their parallel in many an African king, whose hut is ringed by heads stuck on poles.[56]

Now I wish to apply these conceptions, as I said, to the most obvious piece of Greek Epic poetry outside Homer, and illustrate anthropologically the main legend of the Theogony. You will remember the outlines of the story. The first possessor of the kingly office--βασιληίδα τιμήν--is Ouranos. He is afraid of his children, and ‘hides’ or imprisons them. At last his son Kronos conquers and mutilates him, and he passes out of sight. Kronos becomes king and is equally afraid of his children; he ‘swallows’ them one after another; eventually Zeus conquers and ‘binds’ him. Zeus now reigns; but Zeus took the precaution of swallowing Metis, when Metis was about to give birth to Athena.

I omit details for the moment. I refrain also from discussing the Maori parallel, first pointed out, I believe, in Mr. Lang’s _Custom and Myth_. This series of conflicts has been explained as referring to a change of religion, an early Pelasgian worship being ousted by that of the incoming Achaeans. There may be that in it: but such an explanation obviously does not explain the whole series of swallowings. There were not three, certainly not four, different religions in question.

Analysing the story I find in it the following elements.

First, the medicine-king, or Theos, is afraid of his successor. In this case the possible successors are represented as his children. That may be a mere piece of convenience in story-telling; it may be the influence of a time when kingship was hereditary.

In all three cases the motive assigned by Hesiod seems to be the fear of a successor. The motive of Ouranos, indeed, is not very clearly stated. He began by hiding his children in the earth because they were ‘the most dangerous of sons’ (155). They ‘were hated of their father’, and ‘he rejoiced in the evil work’.

Kronos arose and conquered him: the exact meaning of the mutilation I leave aside. Kronos proceeded to swallow his children ‘intending that none other of the proud sons of Ouranos should have king’s rank among the immortals; for he had heard from Gaia and Ouranos that he was destined to be vanquished by his son’ (461 ff.). Here the motive is clearly given.