Part 22

That such a rite should be found annexed to the temple and worship of a luxurious goddess causes no surprise; on the contrary, it is what might have been anticipated. Every reader will call to mind numerous examples of archaic rites which have become attached to Christian festivals, and of Christian shrines which are simply shrines of an earlier religion adapted and consecrated afresh under Christian names. The difficulty of uprooting old customs, and their consequent incorporation and adaptation by advancing culture or a new religion, are phenomena too well known to be insisted on here. Probably the Cypriote mysteries were adapted to the worship of Aphrodite from a ruder stage in which no divinity was invoked. And if this could happen once in Western Asia, it might have happened also at Babylon, at Heliopolis and elsewhere. It is possible that other practices, such as the prostitution of the Armenian girls at the temple of Anaitis, or that of the Lydian and Paphian girls to earn their dowries, are no more than the adaptation of a custom common enough in the lower {280} barbarism, by which unmarried girls have unfettered liberty in their sexual relations. The Armenian maidens, at all events, though spoken of as harlots by Strabo, do not seem to have exercised their calling for money, nor to have admitted indiscriminately to their favours all who offered. They reserved themselves for their equals in rank, and entertained them in their dwellings with more hospitality than in a spinsters’ house in the Pacific Islands. The surmise may be indulged that it was in fact originally, if not in later times, their way of choosing husbands. The Lydian girls are expressly said to have bestowed themselves in marriage.

Mannhardt contended (and his opinion is so far endorsed by Dr Frazer) that the maidens who surrendered their virginity in connection with the cult of a goddess like Aphrodite did so in imitation of their divinity, as her representatives, the human players of her part.[280.1] This may have been the mode by which the ancient custom was adapted to the newer order of things. But it is submitted that it is a very insufficient account of it. The custom must have been older than any definite belief in the goddess’s habits or any story of her various intrigues. Are we then to suppose that it was a magical rite designed to promote the fertility of animal and vegetable life? Such rites are known in both hemispheres. The great goddess worshipped under different names throughout Western Asia personified, we may concede, the reproductive energies of Nature. Many of the rites employed in her cult are in the last analysis magical, and had for their purpose to assist those energies. By a well-known mental process magical efficacy is often ascribed to acts and usages not essentially of a magical, nor indeed of a {281} ritual, character. Thus the general prostitution of young girls to earn their dowries, and that of widows--customs which are probably of quite a different origin--are among certain tribes of Morocco held to be not without their effect on the abundance of the crops.[281.1] Such a belief may have consecrated lives of habitual harlotry in Armenia, in Lydia, and in Cyprus. It by no means follows that every rite performed in the name of the goddess acquired that meaning, still less that that was its primitive meaning. Many such rites would be wholly personal. They would be intended to secure personal blessings to the worshipper, and nothing more, though everyone might have been required to perform them. It is needless to suppose without express evidence that the rite described by Herodotus as taking place at the temple of Mylitta had more than a personal reference. The most obvious personal blessing to be secured from such a goddess would be fertility. It is possible that this was the intention here. Puberty customs are doubtless performed for the good of the individual, and of the tribe or nationality through the individual. We must not infer, however, that the personal blessing of fertility was held to be the natural and direct outcome of the sacrifice of virginity. That was not the way in which it would be envisaged, however logical such an outcome may seem to us. The savage would not expect the natural result, but one that we call magical. At the stage represented by the Babylonian custom the blessing was invoked from the goddess, and was her gift. In other words, it was not that specific ritual act of coition, but future acts rendered licit and consecrated by it which were expected to bear fruit. {282} This interpretation is perhaps strengthened by a rite said to have been regularly performed in the Troad. “Every maiden on the approach of her marriage was required to go and bathe in the Skamandros, and standing in the water to pronounce the sacred formula: ‘Skamandros, take my maidenhood as a gift.’” Dr Farnell, citing the fictitious letter of Aischines on which the evidence for the custom rests, observes: “The letter narrates how a mortal assumed the human form of the god and took a treacherous advantage; but originally, we may suppose, the rite of consecration was not associated with any anthropomorphic divinity, but was performed in the hope that the spirit of the river might enter into the maiden, and that the child she might afterwards bear to her wedded husband might thus be mystically akin to the guardian of the land. The many early myths concerning heroines and princesses being made pregnant by river-gods suggest that the ritual just described was once prevalent in primitive Greece; for such myths could arise naturally from such a custom.”[282.1] But the ritual itself suggests that it is a relic of a still older rite parallel with the rite at the temple of Mylitta.

The last of the problems connected with the rite is to explain why it must be accomplished with a stranger. If, as has been alleged, the act of defloration of a maiden were held to be in itself dangerous, it is not easy to say why anyone, even a stranger, should undertake it, unless he were strangely ignorant of the risk or strangely careless. In some places, indeed, a maiden who had come to submit to the rite may have been outwardly indistinguishable from one of the _hierai_; and hence the man may have been unconscious {283} of his risk, or may have been willing to undertake a risk thus diminished. But at Babylon the women who came thus to offer themselves wore a distinctive head-dress of cords, the emblem, perhaps, of their condition of virginity. Moreover, they seem to have been penned in enclosures divided from each other by ropes, which were broken to let them out for the accomplishment of the rite. There was therefore no mistake as to their status or object.[283.1] On the other hand, if the defloration simply involved ritual impurity such as could be removed by the proper ceremonies, it must be asked why the task was left to a stranger. None of our ancient authorities have condescended to define a stranger. We are probably to understand by that term one who was not an inhabitant of the town or who was not a member of the community. The analogy of certain Australian rites already referred to, and of rites of marriage in some other parts of the world, would lead us to suppose that what was really intended in the first instance was one who was not eligible for sexual relations with the woman in the ordinary course. Thus in Peru and New Granada “the nearest relations of the bride and her most intimate friends” are said to have performed the corresponding rite[283.2]; and even her father is credited {284} with the labour among the Orang-Sakai of the Malay Peninsula, the Battas of Sumatra, the Alfoers of Celebes, and on the Island of Ceylon and the eastern Moluccas.[284.1] From this the more developed morality of the Babylonians would recoil. Mr Crawley, commenting on the Australian rite, surmises that in it “initiation” and marriage are one, and that “initiation” ceremonies (that is to say, puberty ceremonies) “of this kind are marriages to the other sex in abstract.”[284.2] The surmise follows from his theory of the danger of human contact, and especially of marriage, and the importance of ceremonies to avert the peril. The theory itself--at all events pushed to the length to which Mr Crawley pushes it--is very questionable. But defloration at puberty, whether natural or artificial, is undoubtedly (whatever else it may be) a formal introduction to sexual life. Such introduction might be the more authoritative and emphatic if given by one (or more) with whom sexual relations would not in future be sustained. It is a ritual act. Ritual acts are acts out of the ordinary course--often clean contrary to the ordinary course. Therein consists their essence, their virtue. But in the growth of civilization, with the emergence of a new religion or different customs, the real meaning of a traditional rite is obscured, the rite itself becomes decadent, and a new meaning is assigned to it. Hence a puberty rite might easily become part of the cult of a goddess like Mylitta.

Moreover, at the stage of decay which the rite had reached at Babylon and elsewhere in Western Asia, the proviso that the person with whom the act was performed must be a stranger might be intended to prevent an {285} assignation. When the act had to be performed as a sacrifice in honour of the goddess it might be regarded as a profanation to perform it as an act of inclination with a favoured lover. The best way to prevent this would be to require that it should be performed with a chance stranger, who might further be looked upon, if Mannhardt’s interpretation be correct, as a representative sent by the goddess to play Adonis to the maiden’s Aphrodite. The rite at Byblus lends countenance to this conjecture. It is supported also by the artificial defloration enacted only in symbol by Roman brides, but in grim earnest at the temples of Siva by brides in Southern India.

But we are able to carry the conjecture a step beyond this. Here I am glad to avail myself of the criticism of Professor Westermarck, who has pointed out that a semi-supernatural character is very generally ascribed to strangers, and that intercourse with a stranger would thus be productive of blessings--especially the blessing of fertility--to the woman.[285.1] From the large collections on the subject of relations with strangers brought together by Professor Frazer and Professor Westermarck himself it results that a stranger is regarded as uncanny. He is a being possessed of unknown powers for good or ill. His _orenda_, as we have seen, is incalculable.[285.2] He must therefore be either repulsed at once as a foe or received and treated with extraordinary respect. The former course is not usually adopted unless the strangers come in force or there are other circumstances that suggest hostile intent. The latter course has given birth to laws of hospitality recognized all over the world, however the exact procedure may differ among different peoples. {286} But even in this case the stranger is looked upon with suspicion until he has undergone what M. van Gennep calls rites of aggregation to the group or society to which he has come. These rites may be of the most simple character, such as spitting upon his host or drinking a cup of water or coffee from his host’s hand; or they may involve a trial of strength, an exchange of gifts, the offering of sacrifices or entry into a blood-covenant.[286.1]

The uncanny character thus attributed to a stranger includes not merely the possession of magical powers. In a society where everyone, or at least a large and unknown number of persons, is believed to be endowed more or less with magical powers, this is a matter of course. But a halo of still more mysterious possibility encircles a stranger: he may be a superhuman Power, a dead man, or even a god. Hence arise the numerous stories, many of which have been collected by Mr Gerould in his monograph on _The Grateful Dead_, published by the Folk-Lore Society in 1908. These stories usually represent the stranger as a dead man to whom the hero has rendered some service, such as that of burying his corpse. But perhaps the best known, and among the most ancient is that found in the book of Tobit, where the stranger is the angel Raphael. A tale even older and more widespread is preserved among the Hebrew traditions as that of Lot and the two angels who visited him in Sodom. Probably it was part of the common Semitic stock, and as such would have been known at Babylon. Substantially the same story is that of Baucis and Philemon reported by Ovid; and the tale of Demeter’s wanderings and many another in Greek legend rest on a common basis of belief. Continental folklore down to modern days {287} identifies the unknown beggar as Jesus Christ Himself or, if a woman, his Mother. The Bantu of South-West Africa tell of the great goddess Nzambi who begs in disguise for a little palm-wine to slake the thirst of her child. Refusal is followed in the night by punishment; the smiling valley, like that of Sodom, is covered by the waters of a lake; and the only person saved is he who had taken compassion and granted the poor old mendicant’s request.[287.1] Lest this be thought a tale imported from Europe, let me add that in Annam a similar tale is told to account for three lakes in the province of Thay Nguyen. There a beggar-woman is repulsed by all save an old widow and her son, who give of their poverty food and a night’s lodging to the miserable and unattractive creature. She turns out to be a supernatural personage. She has come down to test the hearts of the devotees who have flocked to a great religious festival periodically held in the place. The hypocrites who repulsed her are all overwhelmed in a deluge of waters; only the widow and her son are saved.[287.2]

To labour the proof is unnecessary. It is abundantly clear that a stranger may be far more than mortal, and that this possibility has deeply affected the evolution of hospitality. The stranger must be conciliated. He must be bound by sacred ties to the host--ties which he cannot break so long as he remains under the host’s protection. Among the rites of aggregation--the rites effecting this union--M. van Gennep reckons the use of the women frequently accorded to visitors in the lower culture; and he suggests that the rite at the temple of Mylitta was such a rite of aggregation. It may have been so. It may have been expected of all masculine strangers at Babylon to unite themselves with the natives by means {288} of this homage to the goddess. All that can be said is that Herodotus gives no hint of it. According to him it was only on the women that the duty lay--and that no more than once in their lives--of submitting to the rite. The mystery attaching to a stranger and involving the expectation of divine blessing is a sufficient reason for the performance of the rite with one who might be a god in person, and in any event must have been held to be divinely sent; for chance is the servant of the gods. Thence it is but a step (and the step was taken elsewhere, if not at Babylon) to the substitution of the priest for the stranger or the god; and the way is opened to the abuses of the _jus primæ noctis_.[288.1]

Before dismissing the subject reference may be made to Professor Cumont’s note on the subject of religious prostitution in _Les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain_ (Paris, 1907), pp. 143, 286, as showing the facility with which a learned and highly distinguished scholar may fail to appreciate the complexity of the problem. He makes no distinction between the three customs of sacrifice of virginity, prostitution to earn a dowry, and a life of religious prostitution in the service of the goddess. He refers them all to the primitive constitution of the Semitic tribe, and explains them as a modified form, become utilitarian, of an ancient exogamy. Mating with a virgin, he holds, resulted in defilement; therefore she was given first to a stranger; only after that could she be married to a man of her own race. I pass by the confusion between the three customs in question, to all of which his explanation will not equally {289} apply. But if the explanation be correct for any of them, either the ancient exogamy of the Semites must have been quite different from exogamy as generally understood, or it must have been not merely modified but transformed. Exogamy, as generally understood, has nothing to do with race or nationality. It is simply the savage rule corresponding to our table of prohibited degrees.[289.1] A man may not marry or have sexual relations with one who is akin to him; every member of his clan (not of his tribe or his race) is akin to him; therefore, he cannot marry or have sexual relations with any member of his clan. The origin of this rule is still disputed by anthropologists, and we need not here discuss it. But since exogamy bars a man from sexual relations with every member of his kin, it is obvious that it cannot be merely a preliminary to marriage within the kin. Where exogamy is the law, the bar is absolute; it is the law for the whole of life; it is not intended to provide for a temporary union outside the kin in order to prepare the way for a permanent union within the kin. Exogamy, therefore, I submit, cannot explain these customs.

THE VOICE OF THE STONE OF DESTINY

{290}

In the following pages I propose to consider some of the auguries which have been deemed necessary to the choice of a king. Kingship is not found in the most archaic forms of society known to us. But where the community is organized on the basis of monarchy the king tends to be regarded as something more than ordinary humanity. He has powers and privileges denied to other mortals. These very powers and privileges and the sanctity of which they are the appanage entail, however, taboos and penalties of the most burdensome description. Professor Frazer has abundantly illustrated this side of royalty, and has also fully discussed some of the means whereby pretensions to the throne are enforced. But there remain others witnessing not less than those he has described to the extraordinary position of a king. Some of these and their echoes in folk-tale and romance will repay a little attention.

The famous Coronation Stone has an authentic history of six hundred years. At the time of the conquest of Scotland by Edward I., it was the stone on which the kings of the Scots were, according to immemorial custom, installed. Regarded by the Scots as sacred, it was therefore removed by Edward’s order from Scone, where it stood, to Westminster, and was enclosed in what is now, {291} and has been ever since, the Coronation Chair. Its earlier history, as distinguished from conjecture and legend, goes no further back than the middle of the thirteenth century, or something less than half a century before its removal to Westminster, when it is recorded by Fordun that Alexander III. was solemnly placed upon it and hallowed to king by the Bishop of St. Andrews (1249). But what is wanting in authentic history has been abundantly made up in legend. The tale, of which there are two versions, is the creation of a literary age. The Irish version brings it, with the Tuatha Dé Danann, from Lochlann, or Scandinavia, to Ireland. The Scottish version traces it on the other hand from Egypt, whence it was carried by the Milesians. This was improved upon, to the extent of identifying the stone with that used by Jacob as a pillow on his journey from Beersheba to Haran. The attempt was thus made, by connecting the ruling race in Scotland with the legends of the Hebrew patriarchs, to confer upon the stone the united sanctity of religion, of antiquity, and of patriotism.

In the course of its wanderings the stone is said to have reached Tara; and it is declared to be the famous _Lia Fáil_, or Stone of Destiny, one of the two wonders of Tara celebrated in Irish sagas. We are indebted to the _Book of Lismore_, a fifteenth-century manuscript, for an enumeration of the wonderful properties of the _Lia Fáil_. The Colloquy with the Ancients, which is comprised in this precious manuscript, records a number of Irish traditions, some of which would else in all probability have perished beyond recovery. There we learn--the account is put into the mouth of no less a personage than Ossian himself--that “Anyone of all Ireland on whom an _ex parte_ imputation rested was set upon that stone: {292} then if the truth were in him he would turn pink and white; but if otherwise, it was a black spot that in some conspicuous place would appear on him. Further, when Ireland’s monarch stepped on to it the stone would cry out under him, and her three arch-waves would boom in answer: as the wave of Cleena, the wave of Ballintoy, and the wave of Loch Rury; when a provincial king went on it the flag would rumble under him; when a barren woman trod it, it was a dew of dusky blood that broke out on it; when one that would bear children tried it, it was a ‘nursing drop’”--that is, says Mr Standish O’Grady, from whose translation I quote, semblance of milk--“that it sweated.”[292.1] The Colloquy is imperfect, the legible portion of the manuscript ceasing a line or two further on, just as we are about to be told how it was that the stone left Ireland.[292.2] Its subsequent adventures are related by Keating, who says that it was sent to Feargus the Great, “to sit upon, for the purpose of being proclaimed king of Scotland.” However, it is not to the adventures of the stone, but to its properties that I wish now to direct attention. With regard to the former, all that I need add is that the legend has been subjected by Skene, and more recently by Mr P. J. O’Reilly, to an exhaustive analysis, which renders it clear that there is no trustworthy evidence that the stone of Tara is the Coronation Stone. The antecedent improbability is great; and even if it were indisputable that the stone in question was no longer at Tara in the eleventh century, the chasm between that period and Fergus, whose very existence only rested on legend, {293} would still have to be bridged, and the variants of the story would need to be reconciled.[293.1]