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upon what they have gathered.

Bathing is practised as a raincharm in some parts of Southern and Western Russia. Sometimes after service in church the priest

in his robes has been thrown down on the ground and drenched with water by his parishioners. Sometimes it is the women who,

without stripping off their clothes, bathe in crowds on the day of St. John the Baptist, while they dip in the water a figure made of

branches, grass, and herbs, which is supposed to represent the saint. In Kursk, a province of Southern Russia, when rain is much

wanted, the women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river, or souse him from head to foot. Later on we shall see that

a passing stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some natural power. It is recorded in official documents that

during a drought in 1790 the peasants of Scheroutz and Werboutz collected all the women and compelled them to bathe, in order

that rain might fall. An Armenian raincharm is to throw the wife of a priest into the water and drench her. The Arabs of North Af-

rica fling a holy man, willy-nilly, into a spring as a remedy for drought. In Minahassa, a province of North Celebes, the priest bathes

as a raincharm. In Central Celebes when there has been no rain for a long time and the rice-stalks begin to shrivel up, many of the

villagers, especially the young folk, go to a neighbouring brook and splash each other with water, shouting noisily, or squirt water

on one another through bamboo tubes. Sometimes they imitate the plump of rain by smacking the surface of the water with their

hands, or by placing an inverted gourd on it and drumming on the gourd with their fingers.

Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by ploughing, or pretending to plough. Thus the Pshaws and Chewsurs of the Caucasus have a ceremony called "ploughing the rain," which they observe in time of drought. Girls yoke themselves to a plough and drag it into a river, wading in the water up to their girdles. In the same circumstances Armenian girls and women do the same.

The oldest woman, or the priest's wife, wears the priest's dress, while the others, dressed as men, drag the plough through the water against the stream. In the Caucasian province of Georgia, when a drought has lasted long, marriageable girls are yoked in couples with an ox-yoke on their shoulders, a priest holds the reins, and thus harnessed they wade through rivers, puddles, and marshes, praying, screaming, weeping, and laughing. In a district of Transylvania when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the fields to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in the water and go home. A similar raincharm is resorted to in some parts of India; naked women drag a plough across a field by night, while the men keep carefully out of the way, for their presence would break the spell.

Sometimes the raincharm operates through the dead. Thus in New Caledonia the rain-makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the skeleton over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and showered it down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not long since the peasants of any district that chanced to be afflicted

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with drought used to dig up the corpse of some one who had drunk himself to death and sink it in the nearest swamp or lake, fully persuaded that this would ensure the fall of the needed rain. In 1868 the prospect of a bad harvest, caused by a prolonged drought, induced the inhabitants of a village in the Tarashchansk district to dig up the body of a Raskolnik, or Dissenter, who had died in

the preceding December. Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was left of it, about the head, exclaiming, "Give us rain!" while others poured water on it through a sieve. Here the pouring of water through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and reminds us of the manner in which Strepsiades in Aristophanes imagined that rain was made by Zeus. Sometimes, in order to

procure rain, the Toradjas make an appeal to the pity of the dead. Thus, in the village of Kalingooa, there is the grave of a famous

chief, the grandfather of the present ruler. When the land suffers from unseasonable drought, the people go to this grave, pour water

on it, and say, "O grandfather, have pity on us; if it is your will that this year we should eat, then give rain." After that they hang a

bamboo full of water over the grave; there is a small hole in the lower end of the bamboo, so that the water drips from it continu-

ally. The bamboo is always refilled with water until rain drenches the ground. Here, as in New Caledonia, we find religion blent with

magic, for the prayer to the dead chief, which is purely religious, is eked out with a magical imitation of rain at his grave. We have

seen that the Baronga of Delagoa Bay drench the tombs of their ancestors, especially the tombs of twins, as a raincharm. Among

some of the Indian tribes in the region of the Orinoco it was customary for the relations of a deceased person to disinter his bones

a year after burial, burn them, and scatter the ashes to the winds, because they believed that the ashes were changed into rain, which

the dead man sent in return for his obsequies. The Chinese are convinced that when human bodies remain unburied, the souls of

their late owners feel the discomfort of rain, just as living men would do if they were exposed without shelter to the inclemency of

the weather. These wretched souls, therefore, do all in their power to prevent the rain from falling, and often their efforts are only

too successful. Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities in China, because bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in

its train. Hence it has been a common practice of the Chinese authorities in time of drought to inter the dry bones of the unburied

dead for the purpose of putting an end to the scourge and conjuring down the rain.

Animals, again, often play an important part in these weather-charms. The Anula tribe of Northern Australia associate the dollar-bird with rain, and call it the rain-bird. A man who has the bird for his totem can make rain at a certain pool. He catches a snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow; sooner or later the rain will fall. They explain this procedure by saying that long ago the dollar-bird had as a mate at this spot a snake, who lived in the pool and used to make rain by spitting up into the sky till a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell. A common way of making rain in many parts of Java is to bathe a cat or two cats, a male and a female; sometimes the animals are carried in procession with music. Even in Batavia you may from time to time see children going about with a cat for this purpose; when they have ducked it in a pool, they let it go.

Among the Wambugwe of East Africa, when the sorcerer desires to make rain, he takes a black sheep and a black calf in bright sunshine, and has them placed on the roof of the common hut in which the people live together. Then he slits the stomachs of

the animals and scatters their contents in all directions. After that he pours water and medicine into a vessel; if the charm has succeeded, the water boils up and rain follows. On the other hand, if the sorcerer wishes to prevent rain from falling, he withdraws into the interior of the hut, and there heats a rock-crystal in a calabash. In order to procure rain the Wagogo sacrifice black fowls, black sheep, and black cattle at the graves of dead ancestors, and the rain-maker wears black clothes during the rainy season. Among the Matabele the raincharm employed by sorcerers was made from the blood and gall of a black ox. In a district of Sumatra, in order to procure rain, all the women of the village, scantily clad, go to the river, wade into it, and splash each other with the water. A black cat is thrown into the stream and made to swim about for a while, then allowed to escape to the bank, pursued by the splashing of the women. The Garos of Assam offer a black goat on the top of a very high mountain in time of drought. In all these cases the colour of the animal is part of the charm; being black, it will darken the sky with rain-clouds. So the Bechuanas burn the stomach of an ox

at evening, because they say, "The black smoke will gather the clouds and cause the rain to come." The Timorese sacrifice a black pig to the Earth-goddess for rain, a white or red one to the Sun-god for sunshine. The Angoni sacrifice a black ox for rain and a white one for fine weather. Among the high mountains of Japan there is a district in which, if rain has not fallen for a long time, a party

of villagers goes in procession to the bed of a mountain torrent, headed by a priest, who leads a black dog. At the chosen spot they tether the beast to a stone, and make it a target for their bullets and arrows. When its life-blood bespatters the rocks, the peasants throw down their weapons and lift up their voices in supplication to the dragon divinity of the stream, exhorting him to send down forthwith a shower to cleanse the spot from its defilement. Custom has prescribed that on these occasions the colour of the victim shall be black, as an emblem of the wished-for rain-clouds. But if fine weather is wanted, the victim must be white, without a spot.

The intimate association of frogs and toads with water has earned for these creatures a widespread reputation as custodians of rain; and hence they often play a part in charms designed to draw needed showers from the sky. Some of the Indians of the Orinoco held the toad to be the god or lord of the waters, and for that reason feared to kill the creature. They have been known to keep frogs

under a pot and to beat them with rods when there was a drought. It is said that the Aymara Indians often make little images of frogs and other aquatic animals and place them on the tops of the hills as a means of bringing down rain. The Thompson Indians

of British Columbia and some people in Europe think that to kill a frog will cause rain to fall. In order to procure rain people of low

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caste in the Central Provinces of India will tie a frog to a rod covered with green leaves and branches of the nim tree (Azadirachta

Indica) and carry it from door to door singing:

"Send soon, O frog, the jewel of water!

And ripen the wheat and millet in the field."

The Kapus or Reddis are a large caste of cultivators and landowners in the Madras Presidency. When rain fails, women of the caste will catch a frog and tie it alive to a new winnowing fan made of bamboo. On this fan they spread a few margosa leaves and go from door to door singing, "Lady frog must have her bath. Oh! rain-god, give a little water for her at least." While the Kapu women sing this song, the woman of the house pours water over the frog and gives an alms, convinced that by so doing she will soon bring rain down in torrents.

Sometimes, when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop the usual hocuspocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off at the main. In a Japanese village, when the guardian divinity

had long been deaf to the peasants' prayers for rain, they at last threw down his image and, with curses loud and long, hurled it head foremost into a stinking ricefield. "There," they said, "you may stay yourself for a while, to see how you will feel after a few days' scorching in this broiling sun that is burning the life from our cracking fields." In the like circumstances the Feloupes of Senegambia cast down their fetishes and drag them about the fields, cursing them till rain falls.

The Chinese are adepts in the art of taking the kingdom of heaven by storm. Thus, when rain is wanted they make a huge dragon of paper or wood to represent the rain-god, and carry it about in procession; but if no rain follows, the mock-dragon is execrated and torn to pieces. At other times they threaten and beat the god if he does not give rain; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of deity. On the other hand, if the wished-for rain falls, the god is promoted to a higher rank by an imperial decree. In April

1888 the mandarins of Canton prayed to the god Lung-wong to stop the incessant downpour of rain; and when he turned a deaf ear to their petitions they put him in a lock-up for five days. This had a salutary effect. The rain ceased and the god was restored to

liberty. Some years before, in time of drought, the same deity had been chained and exposed to the sun for days in the courtyard of

his temple in order that he might feel for himself the urgent need of rain. So when the Siamese need rain, they set out their idols in

the blazing sun; but if they want dry weather, they unroof the temples and let the rain pour down on the idols. They think that the

inconvenience to which the gods are thus subjected will induce them to grant the wishes of their worshippers.

The reader may smile at the meteorology of the Far East; but precisely similar modes of procuring rain have been resorted to in Christian Europe within our own lifetime. By the end of April 1893 there was great distress in Sicily for lack of water. The drought had lasted six months. Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of cloudless blue. The gardens of the Conca d'Oro, which surround Palermo with a magnificent belt of verdure, were withering. Food was becoming scarce. The people were in great alarm. All the most approved methods of procuring rain had been tried without effect. Processions had traversed the streets and the fields. Men, women, and children, telling their beads, had lain whole nights before the holy images. Consecrated candles had burned day and night in the churches. Palm branches, blessed on Palm Sunday, had been hung on the trees. At Solaparuta, in accordance with a very old custom, the dust swept from the churches on Palm Sunday had been spread on the fields. In ordinary years these holy sweepings preserve

the crops; but that year, if you will believe me, they had no effect whatever. At Nicosia the inhabitants, bareheaded and barefoot, carried the crucifixes through all the wards of the town and scourged each other with iron whips. It was all in vain. Even the great St. Francis of Paolo himself, who annually performs the miracle of rain and is carried every spring through the market-gardens, either could not or would not help. Masses, vespers, concerts, illuminations, fire-works--nothing could move him. At last the peasants

began to lose patience. Most of the saints were banished. At Palermo they dumped St. Joseph in a garden to see the state of things for himself, and they swore to leave him there in the sun till rain fell. Other saints were turned, like naughty children, with their faces to the wall. Others again, stripped of their beautiful robes, were exiled far from their parishes, threatened, grossly insulted, ducked in horse-ponds. At Caltanisetta the golden wings of St. Michael the Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with wings of pasteboard; his purple mantle was taken away and a clout wrapt about him instead. At Licata the patron saint, St. Angelo, fared even worse, for he was left without any garments at all; he was reviled, he was put in irons, he was threatened with drowning or hanging. "Rain or the rope!" roared the angry people at him, as they shook their fists in his face.

Sometimes an appeal is made to the pity of the gods. When their corn is being burnt up by the sun, the Zulus look out for a "heaven bird," kill it, and throw it into a pool. Then the heaven melts with tenderness for the death of the bird; "it wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral wail." In Zululand women sometimes bury their children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time. The sky is supposed to melt with pity at the sight. Then the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain will soon follow. They say that they call to "the lord above" and ask him to send rain. If it comes they declare that "Usondo rains." In times of drought the Guanches of Teneriffe led their sheep to sacred ground, and there they separated the lambs from their dams, that their plaintive bleating might touch the heart of the god. In Kumaon a way of stopping rain is to pour hot oil

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in the left ear of a dog. The animal howls with pain, his howls are heard by Indra, and out of pity for the beast's sufferings the god stops the rain. Sometimes the Toradjas attempt to procure rain as follows. They place the stalks of certain plants in water, saying, "Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain falls I will not plant you again, but there shall you die." Also they string some freshwa- ter snails on a cord, and hang the cord on a tree, and say to the snails, "Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain comes, I will not take you back to the water." Then the snails go and weep, and the gods take pity and send rain. However, the foregoing ceremonies are religious rather than magical, since they involve an appeal to the compassion of higher powers.

Stones are often supposed to possess the property of bringing on rain, provided they be dipped in water or sprinkled with it, or treated in some other appropriate manner. In a Samoan village a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-

making god, and in time of drought his priests carried the stone in procession and dipped it in a stream. Among the Ta-ta-thi tribe

of New South Wales, the rain-maker breaks off a piece of quartz-crystal and spits it towards the sky; the rest of the crystal he wraps

in emu feathers, soaks both crystal and feathers in water, and carefully hides them. In the Keramin tribe of New South Wales the

wizard retires to the bed of a creek, drops water on a round flat stone, then covers up and conceals it. Among some tribes of North-

western Australia the rain-maker repairs to a piece of ground which is set apart for the purpose of rain-making. There he builds

a heap of stones or sand, places on the top of it his magic stone, and walks or dances round the pile chanting his incantations for

hours, till sheer exhaustion obliges him to desist, when his place is taken by his assistant. Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge

fires are kindled. No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being performed. When the Sulka of New

Britain wish to procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits and set them out, along with certain other plants and

buds, in the sun. Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water and weighted with stones, while a spell is chanted. After that rain should

follow. In Manipur, on a lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a stone which the popular imagination likens to an umbrella.

When rain is wanted, the rajah fetches water from a spring below and sprinkles it on the stone. At Sagami in Japan there is a stone

which draws down rain whenever water is poured on it. When the Wakondyo, a tribe of Central Africa, desire rain, they send to the

Wawamba, who dwell at the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a "rain-stone." In consideration of a proper

payment, the Wawamba wash the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of water. After that the rain cannot fail to

come. In the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to make rain by carrying water from a certain spring and

throwing it on a particular point high up on a rock; after that they imagined that the clouds would soon gather, and that rain would

begin to fall.

But customs of this sort are not confined to the wilds of Africa and Asia or the torrid deserts of Australia and the New World. They

have been practised in the cool air and under the grey skies of Europe. There is a fountain called Barenton, of romantic fame, in

those "wild woods of Broceliande," where, if legend be true, the wizard Merlin still sleeps his magic slumber in the hawthorn shade.

Thither the Breton peasants used to resort when they needed rain. They caught some of the water in a tankard and threw it on a slab

near the spring. On Snowdon there is a lonely tarn called Dulyn, or the Black Lake, lying "in a dismal dingle surrounded by high and

dangerous rocks." A row of stepping-stones runs out into the lake, and if any one steps on the stones and throws water so as to wet

the farthest stone, which is called the Red Altar, "it is but a chance that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weath-

er." In these cases it appears probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded as more or less divine. This appears from the custom

sometimes observed of dipping a cross in the Fountain of Barenton to procure rain, for this is plainly a Christian substitute for the

old pagan way of throwing water on the stone. At various places in France it is, or used till lately to be, the practice to dip the image

of a saint in water as a means of procuring rain. Thus, beside the old priory of Commagny, there is a spring of St. Gervais, whither

the inhabitants go in procession to obtain rain or fine weather according to the needs of the crops. In times of great drought they

throw into the basin of the fountain an ancient stone image of the saint that stands in a sort of niche from which the fountain flows.

At Collobrieres and Carpentras a similar practice was observed with the images of St. Pons and St. Gens respectively. In several vil-

lages of Navarre prayers for rain used to be offered to St. Peter, and by way of enforcing them the villagers carried the image of the

saint in procession to the river, where they thrice invited him to reconsider his resolution and to grant their prayers; then, if he was

still obstinate, they plunged him in the water, despite the remonstrances of the clergy, who pleaded with as much truth as piety that

a simple caution or admonition administered to the image would produce an equally good effect. After this the rain was sure to fall

within twenty-four hours. Catholic countries do not enjoy a monopoly of making rain by ducking holy images in water. In Mingrelia,

when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they take a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a shower falls;

and in the Far East the Shans drench the images of Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought. In all such cases the

practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm, however it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or a threat.

Like other peoples, the Greeks and Romans sought to obtain rain by magic, when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual.

For example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain

spring on Mount Lycaeus. Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land. A similar mode

of making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera near New Guinea. The people of Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze

chariot which they kept in a temple. When they desired a shower they shook the chariot and the shower fell. Probably the rattling of

the chariot was meant to imitate thunder; we have already seen that mock thunder and lightning form part of a raincharm in Russia

and Japan. The legendary Salmoneus, King of Elis, made mock thunder by dragging bronze kettles behind his chariot, or by driving

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over a bronze bridge, while he hurled blazing torches in imitation of lightning. It was his impious wish to mimic the thundering car of Zeus as it rolled across the vault of heaven. Indeed he declared that he was actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to himself as such. Near a temple of Mars, outside the walls of Rome, there was kept a certain stone known as the lapis manalis. In time of drought the stone was dragged into Rome, and this was supposed to bring down rain immediately.

3. The Magical Control of the Sun

AS THE MAGICIAN thinks he can make rain, so he fancies he can cause the sun to shine, and can hasten or stay its going down. At an eclipse the Ojebways used to imagine that the sun was being extinguished. So they shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping thus

to rekindle his expiring light. The Sencis of Peru also shot burning arrows at the sun during an eclipse, but apparently they did this not so much to relight his lamp as to drive away a savage beast with which they supposed him to be struggling. Conversely during

an eclipse of the moon some tribes of the Orinoco used to bury lighted brands in the ground; because, said they, if the moon were to be extinguished, all fire on earth would be extinguished with her, except such as was hidden from her sight. During an eclipse

of the sun the Kamtchatkans were wont to bring out fire from their huts and pray the great luminary to shine as before. But the prayer addressed to the sun shows that this ceremony was religious rather than magical. Purely magical, on the other hand, was the ceremony observed on similar occasions by the Chilcotin Indians. Men and women tucked up their robes, as they do in travelling, and then leaning on staves, as if they were heavy laden, they continued to walk in a circle till the eclipse was over. Apparently they thought thus to support the failing steps of the sun as he trod his weary round in the sky. Similarly in ancient Egypt the king, as

the representative of the sun, walked solemnly round the walls of a temple in order to ensure that the sun should perform his daily journey round the sky without the interruption of an eclipse or other mishap. And after the autumnal equinox the ancient Egyptians held a festival called "the nativity of the sun's walking-stick," because, as the luminary declined daily in the sky, and his light and heat diminished, he was supposed to need a staff on which to lean. In New Caledonia when a wizard desires to make sunshine, he takes some plants and corals to the burial-ground, and fashions them into a bundle, adding two locks of hair cut from a living child of his family, also two teeth or an entire jawbone from the skeleton of an ancestor. He then climbs a mountain whose top catches the first rays of the morning sun. Here he deposits three sorts of plants on a flat stone, places a branch of dry coral beside them, and hangs the bundle of charms over the stone. Next morning he returns to the spot and sets fire to the bundle at the moment when the sun rises from the sea. As the smoke curls up, he rubs the stone with the dry coral, invokes his ancestors and says: "Sun! I do this that

you may be burning hot, and eat up all the clouds in the sky." The same ceremony is repeated at sunset. The New Caledonians also make a drought by means of a disc-shaped stone with a hole in it. At the moment when the sun rises, the wizard holds the stone in his hand and passes a burning brand repeatedly into the hole, while he says: "I kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up our land, so that it may produce nothing." The Banks Islanders make sunshine by means of a mock sun. They take a very round stone, called a vat loa or sunstone, wind red braid about it, and stick it with owls' feathers to represent rays, singing the proper spell in a low voice. Then they hang it on some high tree, such as a banyan or a casuarina, in a sacred place.

The offering made by the Brahman in the morning is supposed to produce the sun, and we are told that "assuredly it would not rise, were he not to make that offering." The ancient Mexicans conceived the sun as the source of all vital force; hence they named him Ipalnemohuani, "He by whom men live." But if he bestowed life on the world, he needed also to receive life from it. And as the

heart is the seat and symbol of life, bleeding hearts of men and animals were presented to the sun to maintain him in vigour and en-able him to run his course across the sky. Thus the Mexican sacrifices to the sun were magical rather than religious, being designed, not so much to please and propitiate him, as physically to renew his energies of heat, light, and motion. The constant demand for human victims to feed the solar fire was met by waging war every year on the neighbouring tribes and bringing back troops of captives to be sacrificed on the altar. Thus the ceaseless wars of the Mexicans and their cruel system of human sacrifices, the most mon-

strous on record, sprang in great measure from a mistaken theory of the solar system. No more striking illustration could be given

of the disastrous consequences that may flow in practice from a purely speculative error. The ancient Greeks believed that the sun

drove in a chariot across the sky; hence the Rhodians, who worshipped the sun as their chief deity, annually dedicated a chariot and

four horses to him, and flung them into the sea for his use. Doubtless they thought that after a year's work his old horses and chariot

would be worn out. From a like motive, probably, the idolatrous kings of Judah dedicated chariots and horses to the sun, and the

Spartans, Persians, and Massagetae sacrificed horses to him. The Spartans performed the sacrifice on the top of Mount Taygetus, the

beautiful range behind which they saw the great luminary set every night. It was as natural for the inhabitants of the valley of Sparta

to do this as it was for the islanders of Rhodes to throw the chariot and horses into the sea, into which the sun seemed to them to

sink at evening. For thus, whether on the mountain or in the sea, the fresh horses stood ready for the weary god where they would be

most welcome, at the end of his day's journey.

As some people think they can light up the sun or speed him on his way, so others fancy they can retard or stop him. In a pass of the

Peruvian Andes stand two ruined towers on opposite hills. Iron hooks are clamped into their walls for the purpose of stretching a

net from one tower to the other. The net is intended to catch the sun. Stories of men who have caught the sun in a noose are widely

spread. When the sun is going southward in the autumn, and sinking lower and lower in the Arctic sky, the Esquimaux of Iglulik play

the game of cat's cradle in order to catch him in the meshes of the string and so prevent his disappearance. On the contrary, when

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the sun is moving northward in the spring, they play the game of cup-and-ball to hasten his return. When an Australian blackfellow wishes to stay the sun from going down till he gets home, he puts a sod in the fork of a tree, exactly facing the setting sun. On the other hand, to make it go down faster, the Australians throw sand into the air and blow with their mouths towards the sun, perhaps to waft the lingering orb westward and bury it under the sands into which it appears to sink at night.

As some people imagine they can hasten the sun, so others fancy they can jog the tardy moon. The natives of New Guinea reckon months by the moon, and some of them have been known to throw stones and spears at the moon, in order to accelerate its progress and so to hasten the return of their friends, who were away from home for twelve months working on a tobacco plantation. The Malays think that a bright glow at sunset may throw a weak person into a fever. Hence they attempt to extinguish the glow by spitting out water and throwing ashes at it. The Shuswap Indians believe that they can bring on cold weather by burning the wood

of a tree that has been struck by lightning. The belief may be based on the observation that in their country cold follows a thunderstorm. Hence in spring, when these Indians are travelling over the snow on high ground, they burn splinters of such wood in the fire in order that the crust of the snow may not melt.

4. The Magical Control of the Wind

ONCE more, the savage thinks he can make the wind to blow or to be still. When the day is hot and a Yakut has a long way to go, he takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an animal or fish, winds a horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick.

He then waves the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze begins to blow. In order to procure a cool wind for nine days the stone should first be dipped in the blood of a bird or beast and then presented to the sun, while the sorcerer makes three turns contrary to the course of the luminary. If a Hottentot desires the wind to drop, he takes one of his fattest skins and hangs it on the end of a pole, in the belief that by blowing the skin down the wind will lose all its force and must itself fall. Fuegian wizards throw shells against the wind to make it drop. The natives of the island of Bibili, off New Guinea, are reputed to make wind by blowing with

their mouths. In stormy weather the Bogadjim people say, "The Bibili folk are at it again, blowing away." Another way of making

wind which is practised in New Guinea is to strike a "wind-stone" lightly with a stick; to strike it hard would bring on a hurricane. So

in Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water and beating it thrice on a stone, saying:

"I knok this rag upone this stane

To raise the wind in the divellis name,

It sall not lye till I please againe."

In Greenland a woman in childbed and for some time after delivery is supposed to possess the power of laying a storm. She has only to go out of doors, fill her mouth with air, and coming back into the house blow it out again. In antiquity there was a family at Corinth which enjoyed the reputation of being able to still the raging wind; but we do not know in what manner its members

exercised a useful function, which probably earned for them a more solid recompense than mere repute among the seafaring popula-

tion of the isthmus. Even in Christian times, under the reign of Constantine, a certain Sopater suffered death at Constantinople on

a charge of binding the winds by magic, because it happened that the corn-ships of Egypt and Syria were detained afar off by calms

or head-winds, to the rage and disappointment of the hungry Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used to sell wind to storm-stayed

mariners. The wind was enclosed in three knots; if they undid the first knot, a moderate wind sprang up; if the second, it blew half

a gale; if the third, a hurricane. Indeed the Esthonians, whose country is divided from Finland only by an arm of the sea, still believe

in the magical powers of their northern neighbours. The bitter winds that blow in spring from the north and north-east, bringing

ague and rheumatic inflammations in their train, are set down by the simple Esthonian peasantry to the machinations of the Finnish

wizards and witches. In particular they regard with special dread three days in spring to which they give the name of Days of the

Cross; one of them falls on the Eve of Ascension Day. The people in the neighbourhood of Fellin fear to go out on these days lest

the cruel winds from Lappland should smite them dead. A popular Esthonian song runs:

Wind of the Cross! rushing and mighty! Heavy the blow of thy wings sweeping past! Wild wailing wind of misfortune and sorrow,

Wizards of Finland ride by on the blast.

It is said, too, that sailors, beating up against the wind in the Gulf of Finland, sometimes see a strange sail heave in sight astern and overhaul them hand over hand. On she comes with a cloud of canvas--all her studding-sails out--right in the teeth of the wind, forging her way through the foaming billows, dashing back the spray in sheets from her cutwater, every sail swollen to bursting, every rope strained to cracking. Then the sailors know that she hails from Finland.

The art of tying up the wind in three knots, so that the more knots are loosed the stronger will blow the wind, has been attributed to wizards in Lappland and to witches in Shetland, Lewis, and the Isle of Man. Shetland seamen still buy winds in the shape of knotted

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handkerchiefs or threads from old women who claim to rule the storms. There are said to be ancient crones in Lerwick now who live by selling wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leathern bag from Aeolus, King of the Winds. The Motumotu in New Guinea think that storms are sent by an Oiabu sorcerer; for each wind he has a bamboo which he opens at pleasure. On the top of Mount Agu in Togo, a district of West Africa, resides a fetish called Bagba, who is supposed to control the wind and the rain. His priest is said to keep the winds shut up in great pots.

Often the stormy wind is regarded as an evil being who may be intimidated, driven away, or killed. When storms and bad weather have lasted long and food is scarce with the Central Esquimaux, they endeavour to conjure the tempest by making a long whip of seaweed, armed with which they go down to the beach and strike out in the direction of the wind, crying "Taba (it is enough)!" Once when north-westerly winds had kept the ice long on the coast and food was becoming scarce, the Esquimaux performed a ceremony to make a calm. A fire was kindled on the shore, and the men gathered round it and chanted. An old man then stepped up to the

fire and in a coaxing voice invited the demon of the wind to come under the fire and warm himself. When he was supposed to have arrived, a vessel of water, to which each man present had contributed, was thrown on the flames by an old man, and immediately a flight of arrows sped towards the spot where the fire had been. They thought that the demon would not stay where he had been so badly treated. To complete the effect, guns were discharged in various directions, and the captain of a European vessel was invited

to fire on the wind with cannon. On the twenty-first of February 1883 a similar ceremony was performed by the Esquimaux of

Point Barrow, Alaska, with the intention of killing the spirit of the wind. Women drove the demon from their houses with clubs and

knives, with which they made passes in the air; and the men, gathering round a fire, shot him with their rifles and crushed him under

a heavy stone the moment that steam rose in a cloud from the smouldering embers, on which a tub of water had just been thrown.

The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco ascribe the rush of a whirlwind to the passage of a spirit and they fling sticks at it to frighten it away. When the wind blows down their huts, the Payaguas of South America snatch up firebrands and run against the wind, menacing it with the blazing brands, while others beat the air with their fists to frighten the storm. When the Guaycurus are threatened by a severe storm, the men go out armed, and the women and children scream their loudest to intimidate the demon. During a tempest the inhabitants of a Batak village in Sumatra have been seen to rush from their houses armed with sword and lance. The rajah placed himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they hewed and hacked at the invisible foe. An old woman was observed to be specially active in the defence of her house, slashing the air right and left with a long sabre. In a violent thunder-

storm, the peals sounding very near, the Kayans of Borneo have been seen to draw their swords threateningly half out of their scab-

bards, as if to frighten away the demons of the storm. In Australia the huge columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert

tract are thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an athletic young black ran after one of these moving columns to

kill it with boomerangs. He was away two or three hours, and came back very weary, saying he had killed Koochee (the demon), but

that Koochee had growled at him and he must die. Of the Bedouins of Eastern Africa it is said that "no whirlwind ever sweeps

across the path without being pursued by a dozen savages with drawn creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column in order

to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast."

In the light of these examples a story told by Herodotus, which his modern critics have treated as a fable, is perfectly credible. He says, without however vouching for the truth of the tale, that once in the land of the Psylli, the modern Tripoli, the wind blowing from the Sahara had dried up all the water-tanks. So the people took counsel and marched in a body to make war on the south wind. But when they entered the desert the simoon swept down on them and buried them to a man. The story may well have been told by one who watched them disappearing, in battle array, with drums and cymbals beating, into the red cloud of whirling sand.

VI. Magicians as Kings

THE FOREGOING evidence may satisfy us that in many lands and many races magic has claimed to control the great forces of nature for the good of man. If that has been so, the practitioners of the art must necessarily be personages of importance and

influence in any society which puts faith in their extravagant pretensions, and it would be no matter for surprise if, by virtue of the

reputation which they enjoy and of the awe which they inspire, some of them should attain to the highest position of authority over

their credulous fellows. In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

Let us begin by looking at the lowest race of men as to whom we possess comparatively full and accurate information, the aborigines

of Australia. These savages are ruled neither by chiefs nor kings. So far as their tribes can be said to have a political constitution, it is

a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and influential men, who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the

practical exclusion of the younger men. Their deliberative assembly answers to the senate of later times: if we had to coin a word for

such a government of elders we might call it a gerontocracy. The elders who in aboriginal Australia thus meet and direct the affairs

of their tribe appear to be for the most part the headmen of their respective totem clans. Now in Central Australia, where the desert

nature of the country and the almost complete isolation from foreign influences have retarded progress and preserved the natives

on the whole in their most primitive state, the headmen of the various totem clans are charged with the important task of perform-

ing magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems, and as the great majority of the totems are edible animals or plants, it

48

follows that these men are commonly expected to provide the people with food by means of magic. Others have to make the rain to

fall or to render other services to the community. In short, among the tribes of Central Australia the headmen are public magicians. Further, their most important function is to take charge of the sacred storehouse, usually a cleft in the rocks or a hole in the ground,

where are kept the holy stones and sticks (churinga) with which the souls of all the people, both living and dead, are apparently

supposed to be in a manner bound up. Thus while the headmen have certainly to perform what we should call civil duties, such as to

inflict punishment for breaches of tribal custom, their principal functions are sacred or magical.

When we pass from Australia to New Guinea we find that, though the natives stand at a far higher level of culture than the Austral-

ian aborigines, the constitution of society among them is still essentially democratic or oligarchic, and chieftainship exists only in

embryo. Thus Sir William MacGregor tells us that in British New Guinea no one has ever arisen wise enough, bold enough, and

strong enough to become the despot even of a single district. "The nearest approach to this has been the very distant one of some

person becoming a renowned wizard; but that has only resulted in levying a certain amount of blackmail."

According to a native account, the origin of the power of Melanesian chiefs lies entirely in the belief that they have communication with mighty ghosts, and wield that supernatural power whereby they can bring the influence of the ghosts to bear. If a chief imposed a fine, it was paid because the people universally dreaded his ghostly power, and firmly believed that he could inflict calamity and sickness upon such as resisted him. As soon as any considerable number of his people began to disbelieve in his influence with the ghosts, his power to levy fines was shaken. Again, Dr. George Brown tells us that in New Britain "a ruling chief was always supposed to exercise priestly functions, that is, he professed to be in constant communication with the tebarans (spirits), and through

their influence he was enabled to bring rain or sunshine, fair winds or foul ones, sickness or health, success or disaster in war, and generally to procure any blessing or curse for which the applicant was willing to pay a sufficient price."

Still rising in the scale of culture we come to Africa, where both the chieftainship and the kingship are fully developed; and here the

evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the magician, and especially out of the rain-maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus

among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa, the original form of government was a family republic, but the enormous

power of the sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised them to the rank of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living

in the country in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians, and the wealth of cattle they possessed came to them almost wholly

in the shape of presents bestowed for their services in that capacity. Their principal art was that of rain-making. The chiefs of the

Wataturu, another people of East Africa, are said to be nothing but sorcerers destitute of any direct political influence. Again, among

the Wagogo of East Africa the main power of the chiefs, we are told, is derived from their art of rain-making. If a chief cannot

make rain himself, he must procure it from some one who can.

Again, among the tribes of the Upper Nile the medicine-men are generally the chiefs. Their authority rests above all upon their

supposed power of making rain, for "rain is the one thing which matters to the people in those districts, as if it does not come

down at the right time it means untold hardships for the community. It is therefore small wonder that men more cunning than their

fellows should arrogate to themselves the power of producing it, or that having gained such a reputation, they should trade on the

credulity of their simpler neighbours." Hence "most of the chiefs of these tribes are rain-makers, and enjoy a popularity in propor-

tion to their powers to give rain to their people at the proper season... . Rain-making chiefs always build their villages on the slopes

of a fairly high hill, as they no doubt know that the hills attract the clouds, and that they are, therefore, fairly safe in their weather

forecasts." Each of these rain-makers has a number of rain-stones, such as rock-crystal, aventurine, and amethyst, which he keeps

in a pot. When he wishes to produce rain he plunges the stones in water, and taking in his hand a peeled cane, which is split at the

top, he beckons with it to the clouds to come or waves them away in the way they should go, muttering an incantation the while. Or

he pours water and the entrails of a sheep or goat into a hollow in a stone and then sprinkles the water towards the sky. Though the

chief acquires wealth by the exercise of his supposed magical powers, he often, perhaps generally, comes to a violent end; for in time

of drought the angry people assemble and kill him, believing that it is he who prevents the rain from falling. Yet the office is usually

hereditary and passes from father to son. Among the tribes which cherish these beliefs and observe these customs are the Latuka,

Bari, Laluba, and Lokoiya.

In Central Africa, again, the Lendu tribe, to the west of Lake Albert, firmly believe that certain people possess the power of making

rain. Among them the rain-maker either is a chief or almost invariably becomes one. The Banyoro also have a great respect for the

dispensers of rain, whom they load with a profusion of gifts. The great dispenser, he who has absolute and uncontrollable power

over the rain, is the king; but he can depute his power to other persons, so that the benefit may be distributed and the heavenly water

laid on over the various parts of the kingdom.

In Western as well as in Eastern and Central Africa we meet with the same union of chiefly with magical functions. Thus in the Fan tribe the strict distinction between chief and medicine-man does not exist. The chief is also a medicine-man and a smith to boot; for the Fans esteem the smith's craft sacred, and none but chiefs may meddle with it.

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As to the relation between the offices of chief and rain-maker in South Africa a well-informed writer observes: "In very old days

the chief was the great Rain-maker of the tribe. Some chiefs allowed no one else to compete with them, lest a successful Rain-maker

should be chosen as chief. There was also another reason: the Rain-maker was sure to become a rich man if he gained a great reputa-

tion, and it would manifestly never do for the chief to allow any one to be too rich. The Rain-maker exerts tremendous control over

the people, and so it would be most important to keep this function connected with royalty. Tradition always places the power of

making rain as the fundamental glory of ancient chiefs and heroes, and it seems probable that it may have been the origin of chief-

tainship. The man who made the rain would naturally become the chief. In the same way Chaka [the famous Zulu despot] used to

declare that he was the only diviner in the country, for if he allowed rivals his life would be insecure." Similarly speaking of the South

African tribes in general, Dr. Moffat says that "the rain-maker is in the estimation of the people no mean personage, possessing an

influence over the minds of the people superior even to that of the king, who is likewise compelled to yield to the dictates of this

arch-official."

The foregoing evidence renders it probable that in Africa the king has often been developed out of the public magician, and espe-

cially out of the rain-maker. The unbounded fear which the magician inspires and the wealth which he amasses in the exercise of his

profession may both be supposed to have contributed to his promotion. But if the career of a magician and especially of a rain-

maker offers great rewards to the successful practitioner of the art, it is beset with many pitfalls into which the unskilful or unlucky

artist may fall. The position of the public sorcerer is indeed a very precarious one; for where the people firmly believe that he has it

in his power to make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, and the fruits of the earth to grow, they naturally impute drought and dearth

to his culpable negligence or wilful obstinacy, and they punish him accordingly. Hence in Africa the chief who fails to procure rain

is often exiled or killed. Thus, in some parts of West Africa, when prayers and offerings presented to the king have failed to procure

rain, his subjects bind him with ropes and take him by force to the grave of his forefathers that he may obtain from them the needed

rain. The Banjars in West Africa ascribe to their king the power of causing rain or fine weather. So long as the weather is fine they

load him with presents of grain and cattle. But if long drought or rain threatens to spoil the crops, they insult and beat him till the

weather changes. When the harvest fails or the surf on the coast is too heavy to allow of fishing, the people of Loango accuse their

king of a "bad heart" and depose him. On the Grain Coast the high priest or fetish king, who bears the title of Bodio, is responsible

for the health of the community, the fertility of the earth, and the abundance of fish in the sea and rivers; and if the country suffers

in any of these respects the Bodio is deposed from his office. In Ussukuma, a great district on the southern bank of the Victoria

Nyanza, "the rain and locust question is part and parcel of the Sultan's government. He, too, must know how to make rain and drive

away the locusts. If he and his medicine-men are unable to accomplish this, his whole existence is at stake in times of distress. On

a certain occasion, when the rain so greatly desired by the people did not come, the Sultan was simply driven out (in Ututwa, near

Nassa). The people, in fact, hold that rulers must have power over Nature and her phenomena." Again, we are told of the natives of

the Nyanaza region generally that "they are persuaded that rain only falls as a result of magic, and the important duty of causing it to

descend devolves on the chief of the tribe. If rain does not come at the proper time, everybody complains. More than one petty king

has been banished his country because of drought." Among the Latuka of the Upper Nile, when the crops are withering, and all the

efforts of the chief to draw down rain have proved fruitless, the people commonly attack him by night, rob him of all he possesses,

and drive him away. But often they kill him.

In many other parts of the world kings have been expected to regulate the course of nature for the good of their people and have been punished if they failed to do so. It appears that the Scythians, when food was scarce, used to put their king in bonds. In ancient Egypt the sacred kings were blamed for the failure of the crops, but the sacred beasts were also held responsible for the course of

nature. When pestilence and other calamities had fallen on the land, in consequence of a long and severe drought, the priests took

the animals by night and threatened them, but if the evil did not abate they slew the beasts. On the coral island of Niue or Savage

Island, in the South Pacific, there formerly reigned a line of kings. But as the kings were also high priests, and were supposed to

make the food grow, the people became angry with them in times of scarcity and killed them; till at last, as one after another was

killed, no one would be king, and the monarchy came to an end. Ancient Chinese writers inform us that in Corea the blame was laid

on the king whenever too much or too little rain fell and the crops did not ripen. Some said that he must be deposed, others that he

must be slain.

Among the American Indians the furthest advance towards civilisation was made under the monarchical and theocratic governments of Mexico and Peru; but we know too little of the early history of these countries to say whether the predecessors of their deified kings were medicine-men or not. Perhaps a trace of such a succession may be detected in the oath which the Mexican kings, when they mounted the throne, swore that they would make the sun to shine, the clouds to give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to

bring forth fruits in abundance. Certainly, in aboriginal America the sorcerer or medicine-man, surrounded by a halo of mystery and

an atmosphere of awe, was a personage of great influence and importance, and he may well have developed into a chief or king in

many tribes, though positive evidence of such a development appears to be lacking. Thus Catlin tells us that in North America the

medicine-men "are valued as dignitaries in the tribe, and the greatest respect is paid to them by the whole community; not only for

their skill in their materia medica, but more especially for their tact in magic and mysteries, in which they all deal to a very great ex-

tent... . In all tribes their doctors are conjurers--are magicians--are sooth-sayers, and I had like to have said highpriests, inasmuch

50

as they superintend and conduct all their religious ceremonies; they are looked upon by all as oracles of the nation. In all councils of war and peace, they have a seat with the chiefs, are regularly consulted before any public step is taken, and the greatest deference and respect is paid to their opinions." Similarly in California "the shaman was, and still is, perhaps the most important individual among the Maidu. In the absence of any definite system of government, the word of a shaman has great weight: as a class they are regarded with much awe, and as a rule are obeyed much more than the chief."

In South America also the magicians or medicine-men seem to have been on the highroad to chieftainship or kingship. One of the

earliest settlers on the coast of Brazil, the Frenchman Thevet, reports that the Indians "hold these pages (or medicine-men) in such

honour and reverence that they adore, or rather idolise them. You may see the common folk go to meet them, prostrate themselves,

and pray to them, saying, 'Grant that I be not ill, that I do not die, neither I nor my children,' or some such request. And he answers,

'You shall not die, you shall not be ill,' and such like replies. But sometimes if it happens that these pages do not tell the truth, and

things turn out otherwise than they predicted, the people make no scruple of killing them as unworthy of the title and dignity of

pages." Among the Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco every clan has its cazique or chief, but he possesses little authority. In virtue

of his office he has to make many presents, so he seldom grows rich and is generally more shabbily clad than any of his subjects. "As

a matter of fact the magician is the man who has most power in his hands, and he is accustomed to receive presents instead of to

give them." It is the magician's duty to bring down misfortune and plagues on the enemies of his tribe, and to guard his own people

against hostile magic. For these services he is well paid, and by them he acquires a position of great influence and authority.

Throughout the Malay region the rajah or king is commonly regarded with superstitious veneration as the possessor of supernatural powers, and there are grounds for thinking that he too, like apparently so many African chiefs, has been developed out of a simple magician. At the present day the Malays firmly believe that the king possesses a personal influence over the works of nature, such as the growth of the crops and the bearing of fruit-trees. The same prolific virtue is supposed to reside, though in a lesser degree, in his delegates, and even in the persons of Europeans who chance to have charge of districts. Thus in Selangor, one of the native states

of the Malay Peninsula, the success or failure of the rice-crops is often attributed to a change of district officers. The Toorateyas of Southern Celebes hold that the prosperity of the rice depends on the behaviour of their princes, and that bad government, by which they mean a government which does not conform to ancient custom, will result in a failure of the crops.

The Dyaks of Sarawak believed that their famous English ruler, Rajah Brooke, was endowed with a certain magical virtue which, if properly applied, could render the rice-crops abundant. Hence when he visited a tribe, they used to bring him the seed which

they intended to sow next year, and he fertilised it by shaking over it the women's necklaces, which had been previously dipped in a special mixture. And when he entered a village, the women would wash and bathe his feet, first with water, and then with the milk

of a young coco-nut, and lastly with water again, and all this water which had touched his person they preserved for the purpose of distributing it on their farms, believing that it ensured an abundant harvest. Tribes which were too far off for him to visit used to send him a small piece of white cloth and a little gold or silver, and when these things had been impregnated by his generative virtue they buried them in their fields, and confidently expected a heavy crop. Once when a European remarked that the rice-crops of the Samban tribe were thin, the chief immediately replied that they could not be otherwise, since Rajah Brooke had never visited them,

and he begged that Mr. Brooke might be induced to visit his tribe and remove the sterility of their land.

The belief that kings possess magical or supernatural powers by virtue of which they can fertilise the earth and confer other benefits on their subjects would seem to have been shared by the ancestors of all the Aryan races from India to Ireland, and it has left clear traces of itself in our own country down to modern times. Thus the ancient Hindoo law-book called The Laws of Manu describes

as follows the effects of a good king's reign: "In that country where the king avoids taking the property of mortal sinners, men are born in due time and are long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die not, and no misshaped offspring is born." In Homeric Greece kings and chiefs were spoken of as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine and their chariots sacred; and it was thought that the reign of a good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley, the trees to be loaded with fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the sea to yield fish. In the Middle Ages, when Waldemar I., King

of Denmark, travelled in Germany, mothers brought their infants and husbandmen their seed for him to lay his hands on, thinking

that children would both thrive the better for the royal touch, and for a like reason farmers asked him to throw the seed for them. It

was the belief of the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the customs of their ancestors, the seasons were mild, the crops

plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and the fruit trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of

their produce. A canon attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that attend the reign of a just king "fine weather,

calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit." On the other hand, dearth, dryness of cows, blight of fruit, and scarcity of

corn were regarded as infallible proofs that the reigning king was bad.

Perhaps the last relic of such superstitions which lingered about our English kings was the notion that they could heal scrofula by their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the King's Evil. Queen Elizabeth often exercised this miraculous gift of heal-

ing. On Midsummer Day 1633, Charles the First cured a hundred patients at one swoop in the chapel royal at Holyrood. But it was

under his son Charles the Second that the practice seems to have attained its highest vogue. It is said that in the course of his reign

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Charles the Second touched near a hundred thousand persons for scrofula. The press to get near him was sometimes terrific. On one occasion six or seven of those who came to be healed were trampled to death. The cool-headed William the Third contemptuously refused to lend himself to the hocuspocus; and when his palace was besieged by the usual unsavoury crowd, he ordered them to be turned away with a dole. On the only occasion when he was importuned into laying his hand on a patient, he said to him, "God give you better health and more sense." However, the practice was continued, as might have been expected, by the dull bigot James the

Second and his dull daughter Queen Anne.

The kings of France also claimed to possess the same gift of healing by touch, which they are said to have derived from Clovis or from St. Louis, while our English kings inherited it from Edward the Confessor. Similarly the savage chiefs of Tonga were believed

to heal scrofula and cases of indurated liver by the touch of their feet; and the cure was strictly homoeopathic, for the disease as well as the cure was thought to be caused by contact with the royal person or with anything that belonged to it.

On the whole, then, we seem to be justified in inferring that in many parts of the world the king is the lineal successor of the old

magician or medicine-man. When once a special class of sorcerers has been segregated from the community and entrusted by it

with the discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and

power, till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings. But the great social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in

despotism is attended by an intellectual revolution which affects both the conception and the functions of royalty. For as time goes

on, the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent to the acuter minds and is slowly displaced by religion; in other words, the

magician gives way to the priest, who, renouncing the attempt to control directly the processes of nature for the good of man, seeks

to attain the same end indirectly by appealing to the gods to do for him what he no longer fancies he can do for himself. Hence the

king, starting as a magician, tends gradually to exchange the practice of magic for the priestly functions of prayer and sacrifice. And

while the distinction between the human and the divine is still imperfectly drawn, it is often imagined that men may themselves attain

to godhead, not merely after their death, but in their lifetime, through the temporary or permanent possession of their whole nature

by a great and powerful spirit. No class of the community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the possible incarnation

of a god in human form. The doctrine of that incarnation, and with it the theory of the divinity of kings in the strict sense of the

word, will form the subject of the following chapter.

VII. Incarnate Human Gods

THE INSTANCES which in the preceding chapters I have drawn from the beliefs and practices of rude peoples all over the world, may suffice to prove that the savage fails to recognise those limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In

a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course of history. By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are not regarded as greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may be frightened and coerced by him into doing his will. At this stage of thought the world is viewed as a great democracy; all beings in it, whether natural or supernatural, are supposed to stand on a footing of tolerable equality. But with the growth of his knowledge man learns to realise more clearly the vastness of nature and his own littleness and feebleness in presence of it. The recognition of his helplessness does not, however, carry with it a corresponding belief in the impotence of those supernatural

beings with which his imagination peoples the universe. On the contrary, it enhances his conception of their power. For the idea of the world as a system of impersonal forces acting in accordance with fixed and invariable laws has not yet fully dawned or darkened

upon him. The germ of the idea he certainly has, and he acts upon it, not only in magic art, but in much of the business of daily

life. But the idea remains undeveloped, and so far as he attempts to explain the world he lives in, he pictures it as the manifestation

of conscious will and personal agency. If then he feels himself to be so frail and slight, how vast and powerful must he deem the

beings who control the gigantic machinery of nature! Thus as his old sense of equality with the gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at

the same time the hope of directing the course of nature by his own unaided resources, that is, by magic, and looks more and more

to the gods as the sole repositories of those supernatural powers which he once claimed to share with them. With the advance of

knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic, which once ranked with them as a

legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art. It is not regarded as an encroachment,

at once vain and impious, on the domain of the gods, and as such encounters the steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation

and influence rise or fall with those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period the distinction between religion and superstition has

emerged, we find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and enlightened portion of the community, while magic is

the refuge of the superstitious and ignorant. But when, still later, the conception of the elemental forces as personal agents is giving

way to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of cause

and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by investigating the

causal sequences in nature, directly prepares the way for science. Alchemy leads up to chemistry.

The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine or supernatural powers, belongs essentially to that earlier pe-

52

riod of religious history in which gods and men are still viewed as beings of much the same order, and before they are divided by the impassable gulf which, to later thought, opens out between them. Strange, therefore, as may seem to us the idea of a god incarnate

in human form, it has nothing very startling for early man, who sees in a man-god or a god-man only a higher degree of the same supernatural powers which he arrogates in perfect good faith to himself. Nor does he draw any very sharp distinction between a god and a powerful sorcerer. His gods are often merely invisible magicians who behind the veil of nature work the same sort of charms and incantations which the human magician works in a visible and bodily form among his fellows. And as the gods are commonly believed to exhibit themselves in the likeness of men to their worshippers, it is easy for the magician, with his supposed miraculous powers, to acquire the reputation of being an incarnate deity. Thus beginning as little more than a simple conjurer, the medicine-

man or magician tends to blossom out into a full-blown god and king in one. Only in speaking of him as a god we must beware of importing into the savage conception of deity those very abstract and complex ideas which we attach to the term. Our ideas on this

profound subject are the fruit of a long intellectual and moral evolution, and they are so far from being shared by the savage that he

cannot even understand them when they are explained to him. Much of the controversy which has raged as to the religion of the

lower races has sprung merely from a mutual misunderstanding. The savage does not understand the thoughts of the civilised man,

and few civilised men understand the thoughts of the savage. When the savage uses his word for god, he has in his mind a being of

a certain sort: when the civilised man uses his word for god, he has in his mind a being of a very different sort; and if, as commonly

happens, the two men are equally unable to place themselves at the other's point of view, nothing but confusion and mistakes can

result from their discussions. If we civilised men insist on limiting the name of God to that particular conception of the divine

nature which we ourselves have formed, then we must confess that the savage has no god at all. But we shall adhere more closely to

the facts of history if we allow most of the higher savages at least to possess a rudimentary notion of certain supernatural beings

who may fittingly be called gods, though not in the full sense in which we use the word. That rudimentary notion represents in all

probability the germ out of which the civilised peoples have gradually evolved their own high conceptions of deity; and if we could

trace the whole course of religious development, we might find that the chain which links our idea of the Godhead with that of the

savage is one and unbroken.

With these explanations and cautions I will now adduce some examples of gods who have been believed by their worshippers to be incarnate in living human beings, whether men or women. The persons in whom a deity is thought to reveal himself are by no means always kings or descendants of kings; the supposed incarnation may take place even in men of the humblest rank. In India, for example, one human god started in life as a cotton-bleacher and another as the son of a carpenter. I shall therefore not draw my examples exclusively from royal personages, as I wish to illustrate the general principle of the deification of living men, in other words,

the incarnation of a deity in human form. Such incarnate gods are common in rude society. The incarnation may be temporary

or permanent. In the former case, the incarnation--commonly known as inspiration or possession--reveals itself in supernatural

knowledge rather than in supernatural power. In other words, its usual manifestations are divination and prophecy rather than mira-

cles. On the other hand, when the incarnation is not merely temporary, when the divine spirit has permanently taken up its abode

in a human body, the god-man is usually expected to vindicate his character by working miracles. Only we have to remember that

by men at this stage of thought miracles are not considered as breaches of natural law. Not conceiving the existence of natural law,

primitive man cannot conceive a breach of it. A miracle is to him merely an unusually striking manifestation of a common power.

The belief in temporary incarnation or inspiration is world-wide. Certain persons are supposed to be possessed from time to time by a spirit or deity; while the possession lasts, their own personality lies in abeyance, the presence of the spirit is revealed by convul-

sive shiverings and shakings of the man's whole body, by wild gestures and excited looks, all of which are referred, not to the man

himself, but to the spirit which has entered into him; and in this abnormal state all his utterances are accepted as the voice of the

god or spirit dwelling in him and speaking through him. Thus, for example, in the Sandwich Islands, the king, personating the god,

uttered the responses of the oracle from his concealment in a frame of wickerwork. But in the southern islands of the Pacific the

god "frequently entered the priest, who, inflated as it were with the divinity, ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but moved

and spoke as entirely under supernatural influence. In this respect there was a striking resemblance between the rude oracles of the

Polynesians, and those of the celebrated nations of ancient Greece. As soon as the god was supposed to have entered the priest, the

latter became violently agitated, and worked himself up to the highest pitch of apparent frenzy, the muscles of the limbs seemed

convulsed, the body swelled, the countenance became terrific, the features distorted, and the eyes wild and strained. In this state he

often rolled on the earth, foaming at the mouth, as if labouring under the influence of the divinity by whom he was possessed, and,

in shrill cries, and violent and often indistinct sounds, revealed the will of the god. The priests, who were attending, and versed in

the mysteries, received, and reported to the people, the declarations which had been thus received. When the priest had uttered the

response of the oracle, the violent paroxysm gradually subsided, and comparative composure ensued. The god did not, however,

always leave him as soon as the communication had been made. Sometimes the same taura, or priest, continued for two or three days

possessed by the spirit or deity; a piece of a native cloth, of a peculiar kind, worn round one arm, was an indication of inspiration,

or of the indwelling of the god with the individual who wore it. The acts of the man during this period were considered as those of

the god, and hence the greatest attention was paid to his expressions, and the whole of his deportment... . When uruhia (under the

inspiration of the spirit), the priest was always considered as sacred as the god, and was called, during this period, atua, god, though

at other times only denominated taura or priest."

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But examples of such temporary inspiration are so common in every part of the world and are now so familiar through books

on ethnology that it is needless to multiply illustrations of the general principle. It may be well, however, to refer to two particular

modes of producing temporary inspiration, because they are perhaps less known than some others, and because we shall have oc-

casion to refer to them later on. One of these modes of producing inspiration is by sucking the fresh blood of a sacrificed victim.

In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a woman, who had to observe a rule of

chastity, tasted the blood of the lamb, and thus being inspired by the god she prophesied or divined. At Aegira in Achaia the priestess of Earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into the cave to prophesy. Similarly among the Kuruvikkarans, a class of bird-catchers and beggars in Southern India, the goddess Kali is believed to descend upon the priest, and he gives oracular

replies after sucking the blood which streams from the cut throat of a goat. At a festival of the Alfoors of Minahassa, in Northern

Celebes, after a pig has been killed, the priest rushes furiously at it, thrusts his head into the carcase, and drinks of the blood. Then

he is dragged away from it by force and set on a chair, whereupon he begins to prophesy how the rice-crop will turn out that year. A

second time he runs at the carcase and drinks of the blood; a second time he is forced into the chair and continues his predictions. It

is thought that there is a spirit in him which possesses the power of prophecy.

The other mode of producing temporary inspiration, to which I shall here refer, consists in the use of a sacred tree or plant. Thus in the Hindoo Koosh a fire is kindled with twigs of the sacred cedar; and the Dainyal or sibyl, with a cloth over her head, inhales

the thick pungent smoke till she is seized with convulsions and falls senseless to the ground. Soon she rises and raises a shrill chant, which is caught up and loudly repeated by her audience. So Apollo's prophetess ate the sacred laurel and was fumigated with it before she prophesied. The Bacchanals ate ivy, and their inspired fury was by some believed to be due to the exciting and intoxicating properties of the plant. In Uganda the priest, in order to be inspired by his god, smokes a pipe of tobacco fiercely till he works himself into a frenzy; the loud excited tones in which he then talks are recognised as the voice of the god speaking through him. In Madura, an island off the north coast of Java, each spirit has its regular medium, who is oftener a woman than a man. To prepare herself for the reception of the spirit she inhales the fumes of incense, sitting with her head over a smoking censer. Gradually she

falls into a sort of trance accompanied by shrieks, grimaces, and violent spasms. The spirit is now supposed to have entered into her, and when she grows calmer her words are regarded as oracular, being the utterances of the indwelling spirit, while her own soul is

temporarily absent.

The person temporarily inspired is believed to acquire, not merely divine knowledge, but also, at least occasionally, divine power. In Cambodia, when an epidemic breaks out, the inhabitants of several villages unite and go with a band of music at their head to look for the man whom the local god is supposed to have chosen for his temporary incarnation. When found, the man is conducted to the altar of the god, where the mystery of incarnation takes place. Then the man becomes an object of veneration to his fellows, who implore him to protect the village against the plague. A certain image of Apollo, which stood in a sacred cave at Hylae near

Magnesia, was thought to impart superhuman strength. Sacred men, inspired by it, leaped down precipices, tore up huge trees by the roots, and carried them on their backs along the narrowest defiles. The feats performed by inspired dervishes belong to the same

class.

Thus far we have seen that the savage, failing to discern the limits of his ability to control nature, ascribes to himself and to all men certain powers which we should now call supernatural. Further, we have seen that, over and above this general supernaturalism, some persons are supposed to be inspired for short periods by a divine spirit, and thus temporarily to enjoy the knowledge and power of

the indwelling deity. From beliefs like these it is an easy step to the conviction that certain men are permanently possessed by a deity, or in some other undefined way are endued with so high a degree of supernatural power as to be ranked as gods and to receive the homage of prayer and sacrifice. Sometimes these human gods are restricted to purely supernatural or spiritual functions. Sometimes they exercise supreme political power in addition. In the latter case they are kings as well as gods, and the government is a theocracy. Thus in the Marquesas or Washington Islands there was a class of men who were deified in their lifetime. They were supposed to wield a supernatural power over the elements: they could give abundant harvests or smite the ground with barrenness; and they

could inflict disease or death. Human sacrifices were offered to them to avert their wrath. There were not many of them, at the most one or two in each island. They lived in mystic seclusion. Their powers were sometimes, but not always, hereditary. A missionary has described one of these human gods from personal observation. The god was a very old man who lived in a large house within an enclosure. In the house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the house and on the trees round it were hung human skeletons, head down. No one entered the enclosure except the persons dedicated to the service of the god; only on days when human victims were sacrificed might ordinary people penetrate into the precinct. This human god received more sacrifices than all the other gods; often

he would sit on a sort of scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he inspired was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and offerings were sent to him from every side. Again, of the South Sea Islands in general we are told that each island had a man who represented or personified the divinity. Such men were called gods, and their substance was confounded with that of the deity. The man-god was sometimes the king himself; oftener he

was a priest or subordinate chief.

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The ancient Egyptians, far from restricting their adoration to cats and dogs and such small deer, very liberally extended it to men.

One of these human deities resided at the village of Anabis, and burnt sacrifices were offered to him on the altars; after which, says

Porphyry, he would eat his dinner just as if he were an ordinary mortal. In classical antiquity the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles

gave himself out to be not merely a wizard but a god. Addressing his fellow-citizens in verse he said:

"O friends, in this great city that climbs the yellow slope

Of Agrigentum's citadel, who make good works your scope,

Who offer to the stranger a haven quiet and fair,

All hail! Among you honoured I walk with lofty air.

With garlands, blooming garlands you crown my noble brow,

A mortal man no longer, a deathless godhead now.

Where e'er I go, the people crowd round and worship pay,

And thousands follow seeking to learn the better way.

Some crave prophetic visions, some smit with anguish sore

Would fain hear words of comfort and suffer pain no more."

He asserted that he could teach his disciples how to make the wind to blow or be still, the rain to fall and the sun to shine, how to

banish sickness and old age and to raise the dead. When Demetrius Poliorcetes restored the Athenian democracy in 307 B.C., the

Athenians decreed divine honours to him and his father Antigonus, both of them being then alive, under the title of the Saviour

Gods. Altars were set up to the Saviours, and a priest appointed to attend to their worship. The people went forth to meet their deliv-

erer with hymns and dances, with garlands and incense and libations; they lined the streets and sang that he was the only true god,

for the other gods slept, or dwelt far away, or were not. In the words of a contemporary poet, which were chanted in public and sung

in private:

"Of all the gods the greatest and the dearest

To the city are come.

For Demeter and Demetrius

Together time has brought.

She comes to hold the Maiden's awful rites,

And he joyous and fair and laughing,

As befits a god.

A glorious sight, with all his friends about him,

He in their midst,

They like to stars, and he the sun.

Son of Poseidon the mighty, Aphrodite's son,

All hail!

The other gods dwell far away,

Or have no ears,

Or are not, or pay us no heed.

But thee we present see,

No god of wood or stone, but godhead true.

Therefore to thee we pray."

The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women, and accordingly consulted them as oracles. Their sacred women, we are told, looked on the eddying rivers and listened to the murmur or the roar of the water, and from the sight and sound foretold what would come to pass. But often the veneration of the men went further, and they worshipped women as true and living goddesses. For example, in the reign of Vespasian a certain Veleda, of the tribe of the Bructeri, was commonly held to be a deity,

and in that character reigned over her people, her sway being acknowledged far and wide. She lived in a tower on the river Lippe, a tributary of the Rhine. When the people of Cologne sent to make a treaty with her, the ambassadors were not admitted to her presence; the negotiations were conducted through a minister, who acted as the mouthpiece of her divinity and reported her oracular utterances. The example shows how easily among our rude forefathers the ideas of divinity and royalty coalesced. It is said that among the Getae down to the beginning of our era there was always a man who personified a god and was called God by the people. He dwelt on a sacred mountain and acted as adviser to the king.

According to the early Portuguese historian, Dos Santos, the Zimbas, or Muzimbas, a people of South-eastern Africa, "do not adore idols or recognize any god, but instead they venerate and honour their king, whom they regard as a divinity, and they say he is the greatest and best in the world. And the said king says of himself that he alone is god of the earth, for which reason if it rains when he does not wish it to do so, or is too hot, he shoots arrows at the sky for not obeying him." The Mashona of Southern Africa

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informed their bishop that they had once had a god, but that the Matabeles had driven him away. "This last was in reference to a

curious custom in some villages of keeping a man they called their god. He seemed to be consulted by the people and had presents

given to him. There was one at a village belonging to a chief Magondi, in the old days. We were asked not to fire off any guns near

the village, or we should frighten him away." This Mashona god was formerly bound to render an annual tribute to the king of the

Matabele in the shape of four black oxen and one dance. A missionary has seen and described the deity discharging the latter part of

his duty in front of the royal hut. For three mortal hours, without a break, to the banging of a tambourine, the click of castanettes,

and the drone of a monotonous song, the swarthy god engaged in a frenzied dance, crouching on his hams like a tailor, sweating like

a pig, and bounding about with an agility which testified to the strength and elasticity of his divine legs.

The Baganda of Central Africa believed in a god of Lake Nyanza, who sometimes took up his abode in a man or woman. The incarnate god was much feared by all the people, including the king and the chiefs. When the mystery of incarnation had taken place, the man, or rather the god, removed about a mile and a half from the margin of the lake, and there awaited the appearance of the new

moon before he engaged in his sacred duties. From the moment that the crescent moon appeared faintly in the sky, the king and all

his subjects were at the command of the divine man, or Lubare (god), as he was called, who reigned supreme not only in matters of

faith and ritual, but also in questions of war and state policy. He was consulted as an oracle; by his word he could inflict or heal sick-

ness, withhold rain, and cause famine. Large presents were made him when his advice was sought. The chief of Urua, a large region

to the west of Lake Tanganyika, "arrogates to himself divine honours and power and pretends to abstain from food for days without

feeling its necessity; and, indeed, declares that as a god he is altogether above requiring food and only eats, drinks, and smokes for

the pleasure it affords him." Among the Gallas, when a woman grows tired of the cares of housekeeping, she begins to talk incoher-

ently and to demean herself extravagantly. This is a sign of the descent of the holy spirit Callo upon her. Immediately her husband

prostrates himself and adores her; she ceases to bear the humble title of wife and is called "Lord"; domestic duties have no further

claim on her, and her will is a divine law.

The king of Loango is honoured by his people "as though he were a god; and he is called Sambee and Pango, which mean god. They believe that he can let them have rain when he likes; and once a year, in December, which is the time they want rain, the people come to beg of him to grant it to them." On this occasion the king, standing on his throne, shoots an arrow into the air, which is supposed to bring on rain. Much the same is said of the king of Mombasa. Down to a few years ago, when his spiritual reign on earth was brought to an abrupt end by the carnal weapons of English marines and bluejackets, the king of Benin was the chief object of worship in his dominions. "He occupies a higher post here than the Pope does in Catholic Europe; for he is not only God's vicegerent upon earth, but a god himself, whose subjects both obey and adore him as such, although I believe their adoration to arise rather

from fear than love." The king of Iddah told the English officers of the Niger Expedition, "God made me after his own image; I am all the same as God; and he appointed me a king."

A peculiarly bloodthirsty monarch of Burma, by name Badonsachen, whose very countenance reflected the inbred ferocity of his nature, and under whose reign more victims perished by the executioner than by the common enemy, conceived the notion that he was something more than mortal, and that this high distinction had been granted him as a reward for his numerous good works. Accordingly he laid aside the title of king and aimed at making himself a god. With this view, and in imitation of Buddha, who, before being advanced to the rank of a divinity, had quitted his royal palace and seraglio and retired from the world, Badonsachen withdrew from his palace to an immense pagoda, the largest in the empire, which he had been engaged in constructing for many years. Here

he held conferences with the most learned monks, in which he sought to persuade them that the five thousand years assigned for the observance of the law of Buddha were now elapsed, and that he himself was the god who was destined to appear after that period, and to abolish the old law by substituting his own. But to his great mortification many of the monks undertook to demonstrate the contrary; and this disappointment, combined with his love of power and his impatience under the restraints of an ascetic life, quickly disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and drove him back to his palace and his harem. The king of Siam "is venerated equally

with a divinity. His subjects ought not to look him in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he passes, and appear be-fore him on their knees, their elbows resting on the ground." There is a special language devoted to his sacred person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or of him. Even the natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar vocabulary. The hairs of the monarch's head, the soles of his feet, the breath of his body, indeed every single detail of his person, both outward and inward, have particular names. When he eats or drinks, sleeps or walks, a special word indicates that these acts are being performed by the sovereign, and such words cannot possibly be applied to the acts of any other person whatever. There is no word in the Siamese language by which any creature of higher rank or greater dignity than a monarch can be described; and the missionaries, when they speak of God, are forced to use the native word for king.

But perhaps no country in the world has been so prolific of human gods as India; nowhere has the divine grace been poured out in a more liberal measure on all classes of society from kings down to milkmen. Thus amongst the Todas, a pastoral people of the Neilgherry Hills of Southern India, the dairy is a sanctuary, and the milkman who attends to it has been described as a god. On being asked whether the Todas salute the sun, one of these divine milkmen replied, "Those poor fellows do so, but I," tapping his chest,

"I, a god! why should I salute the sun?" Every one, even his own father, prostrates himself before the milkman, and no one would

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dare to refuse him anything. No human being, except another milkman, may touch him; and he gives oracles to all who consult him, speaking with the voice of a god.

Further, in India "every king is regarded as little short of a present god." The Hindoo law-book of Manu goes farther and says that "even an infant king must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere mortal; for he is a great deity in human form." There is said to have been a sect in Orissa some years ago who worshipped the late Queen Victoria in her lifetime as their chief divinity. And to

this day in India all living persons remarkable for great strength or valour or for supposed miraculous powers run the risk of being worshipped as gods. Thus, a sect in the Punjaub worshipped a deity whom they called Nikkal Sen. This Nikkal Sen was no other

than the redoubted General Nicholson, and nothing that the general could do or say damped the ardour of his adorers. The more

he punished them, the greater grew the religious awe with which they worshipped him. At Benares not many years ago a celebrated

deity was incarnate in the person of a Hindoo gentleman who rejoiced in the euphonious name of Swami Bhaskaranandaji Saraswati,

and looked uncommonly like the late Cardinal Manning, only more ingenuous. His eyes beamed with kindly human interest, and he

took what is described as an innocent pleasure in the divine honours paid him by his confiding worshippers.

At Chinchvad, a small town about ten miles from Poona in Western India, there lives a family of whom one in each generation is

believed by a large proportion of the Mahrattas to be an incarnation of the elephant-headed god Gunputty. That celebrated deity

was first made flesh about the year 1640 in the person of a Brahman of Poona, by name Mooraba Gosseyn, who sought to work out

his salvation by abstinence, mortification, and prayer. His piety had its reward. The god himself appeared to him in a vision of the

night and promised that a portion of his, that is, of Gunputty's holy spirit should abide with him and with his seed after him even to

the seventh generation. The divine promise was fulfilled. Seven successive incarnations, transmitted from father to son, manifested

the light of Gunputty to a dark world. The last of the direct line, a heavy-looking god with very weak eyes, died in the year 1810.

But the cause of truth was too sacred, and the value of the church property too considerable, to allow the Brahmans to contemplate

with equanimity the unspeakable loss that would be sustained by a world which knew not Gunputty. Accordingly they sought and

found a holy vessel in whom the divine spirit of the master had revealed itself anew, and the revelation has been happily continued

in an unbroken succession of vessels from that time to this. But a mysterious law of spiritual economy, whose operation in the his-

tory of religion we may deplore though we cannot alter, has decreed that the miracles wrought by the god-man in these degenerate

days cannot compare with those which were wrought by his predecessors in days gone by; and it is even reported that the only sign

vouchsafed by him to the present generation of vipers is the miracle of feeding the multitude whom he annually entertains to dinner

at Chinchvad.

A Hindoo sect, which has many representatives in Bombay and Central India, holds that its spiritual chiefs or Maharajas, as they are called, are representatives or even actual incarnations on earth of the god Krishna. And as Krishna looks down from heaven with most favour on such as minister to the wants of his successors and vicars on earth, a peculiar rite called Self-devotion has been instituted, whereby his faithful worshippers make over their bodies, their souls, and, what is perhaps still more important, their worldly substance to his adorable incarnations; and women are taught to believe that the highest bliss for themselves and their families is to be attained by yielding themselves to the embraces of those beings in whom the divine nature mysteriously coexists with the form

and even the appetites of true humanity.

Christianity itself has not uniformly escaped the taint of these unhappy delusions; indeed it has often been sullied by the extrava-

gances of vain pretenders to a divinity equal to or even surpassing that of its great Founder. In the second century Montanus the

Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting in his single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the present

day many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself, is incarnate in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this

belief to its logical conclusion by adoring each other. Tertullian records that this was done by his fellow-Christians at Carthage in the

second century; the disciples of St. Columba worshipped him as an embodiment of Christ; and in the eighth century Elipandus of

Toledo spoke of Christ as "a god among gods," meaning that all believers were gods just as truly as Jesus himself. The adoration of

each other was customary among the Albigenses, and is noticed hundreds of times in the records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in

the early part of the fourteenth century.

In the thirteenth century there arose a sect called the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who held that by long and assiduous contemplation any man might be united to the deity in an ineffable manner and become one with the source and parent of all things, and that he who had thus ascended to God and been absorbed in his beatific essence, actually formed part of the Godhead, was the Son of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself, and enjoyed thereby a glorious immunity from the trammels of all laws human and divine. Inwardly transported by this blissful persuasion, though outwardly presenting in their aspect and manners

a shocking air of lunacy and distraction, the sectaries roamed from place to place, attired in the most fantastic apparel and begging

their bread with wild shouts and clamour, spurning indignantly every kind of honest labour and industry as an obstacle to divine

contemplation and to the ascent of the soul towards the Father of spirits. In all their excursions they were followed by women with

whom they lived on terms of the closest familiarity. Those of them who conceived they had made the greatest proficiency in the

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higher spiritual life dispensed with the use of clothes altogether in their assemblies, looking upon decency and modesty as marks of inward corruption, characteristics of a soul that still grovelled under the dominion of the flesh and had not yet been elevated into communion with the divine spirit, its centre and source. Sometimes their progress towards this mystic communion was accelerated by the Inquisition, and they expired in the flames, not merely with unclouded serenity, but with the most triumphant feelings of

cheerfulness and joy.

About the year 1830 there appeared, in one of the States of the American Union bordering on Kentucky, an impostor who declared that he was the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind, and that he had reappeared on earth to recall the impious, the unbelieving,

and sinners to their duty. He protested that if they did not mend their ways within a certain time, he would give the signal, and in a moment the world would crumble to ruins. These extravagant pretensions were received with favour even by persons of wealth and position in society. At last a German humbly besought the new Messiah to announce the dreadful catastrophe to his fellow-country-

men in the German language, as they did not understand English, and it seemed a pity that they should be damned merely on that

account. The would-be Saviour in reply confessed with great candour that he did not know German. "What!" retorted the German,

"you the Son of God, and don't speak all languages, and don't even know German? Come, come, you are a knave, a hypocrite, and a

madman. Bedlam is the place for you." The spectators laughed, and went away ashamed of their credulity.

Sometimes, at the death of the human incarnation, the divine spirit transmigrates into another man. The Buddhist Tartars believe in

a great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as Grand Lamas at the head of the most important monasteries. When one of these

Grand Lamas dies his disciples do not sorrow, for they know that he will soon reappear, being born in the form of an infant. Their

only anxiety is to discover the place of his birth. If at this time they see a rainbow they take it as a sign sent them by the departed

Lama to guide them to his cradle. Sometimes the divine infant himself reveals his identity. "I am the Grand Lama," he says, "the

living Buddha of such and such a temple. Take me to my old monastery. I am its immortal head." In whatever way the birthplace of

the Buddha is revealed, whether by the Buddha's own avowal or by the sign in the sky, tents are struck, and the joyful pilgrims, often

headed by the king or one of the most illustrious of the royal family, set forth to find and bring home the infant god. Generally he

is born in Tibet, the holy land, and to reach him the caravan has often to traverse the most frightful deserts. When at last they find

the child they fall down and worship him. Before, however, he is acknowledged as the Grand Lama whom they seek he must satisfy

them of his identity. He is asked the name of the monastery of which he claims to be the head, how far off it is, and how many

monks live in it; he must also describe the habits of the deceased Grand Lama and the manner of his death. Then various articles,

as prayer-books, tea-pots, and cups, are placed before him, and he has to point out those used by himself in his previous life. If he

does so without a mistake his claims are admitted, and he is conducted in triumph to the monastery. At the head of all the Lamas

is the Dalai Lama of Lhasa, the Rome of Tibet. He is regarded as a living god, and at death his divine and immortal spirit is born again in a child. According to some accounts the mode of discovering the Dalai Lama is similar to the method, already described, of

discovering an ordinary Grand Lama. Other accounts speak of an election by drawing lots from a golden jar. Wherever he is born,

the trees and plants put forth green leaves; at his bidding flowers bloom and springs of water rise; and his presence diffuses heavenly

blessings.

But he is by no means the only man who poses as a god in these regions. A register of all the incarnate gods in the Chinese empire is kept in the Li fan yiian or Colonial Office at Peking. The number of gods who have thus taken out a license is one hundred and sixty. Tibet is blessed with thirty of them, Northern Mongolia rejoices in nineteen, and Southern Mongolia basks in the sunshine of no less than fifty-seven. The Chinese government, with a paternal solicitude for the welfare of its subjects, forbids the gods on the register to be reborn anywhere but in Tibet. They fear lest the birth of a god in Mongolia should have serious political consequences by stirring the dormant patriotism and warlike spirit of the Mongols, who might rally round an ambitious native deity of royal lineage and seek to win for him, at the point of the sword, a temporal as well as a spiritual kingdom. But besides these public or licensed gods there are a great many little private gods, or unlicensed practitioners of divinity, who work miracles and bless their people in holes and corners; and of late years the Chinese government has winked at the rebirth of these pettifogging deities outside of Tibet. However, once they are born, the government keeps its eye on them as well as on the regular practitioners, and if any of them misbehaves he is promptly degraded, banished to a distant monastery, and strictly forbidden ever to be born again in the flesh.

From our survey of the religious position occupied by the king in rude societies we may infer that the claim to divine and supernatural powers put forward by the monarchs of great historical empires like those of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, was not the simple outcome of inflated vanity or the empty expression of a grovelling adulation; it was merely a survival and extension of the old savage apotheosis of living kings. Thus, for example, as children of the Sun the Incas of Peru were revered like gods; they could do no wrong, and no one dreamed of offending against the person, honour, or property of the monarch or of any of the royal race.

Hence, too, the Incas did not, like most people, look on sickness as an evil. They considered it a messenger sent from their father the

Sun to call them to come and rest with him in heaven. Therefore the usual words in which an Inca announced his approaching end

were these: "My father calls me to come and rest with him." They would not oppose their father's will by offering sacrifice for recov-

ery, but openly declared that he had called them to his rest. Issuing from the sultry valleys upon the lofty tableland of the Colombian

Andes, the Spanish conquerors were astonished to find, in contrast to the savage hordes they had left in the sweltering jungles below,

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a people enjoying a fair degree of civilisation, practising agriculture, and living under a government which Humboldt has compared to the theocracies of Tibet and Japan. These were the Chibchas, Muyscas, or Mozcas, divided into two kingdoms, with capitals at

Bogota and Tunja, but united apparently in spiritual allegiance to the high pontiff of Sogamozo or Iraca. By a long and ascetic novi-

tiate, this ghostly ruler was reputed to have acquired such sanctity that the waters and the rain obeyed him, and the weather depended

on his will. The Mexican kings at their accession, as we have seen, took an oath that they would make the sun to shine, the clouds to

give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to bring forth fruits in abundance. We are told that Montezuma, the last king of Mexico,

was worshipped by his people as a god.

The early Babylonian kings, from the time of Sargon I. till the fourth dynasty of Ur or later, claimed to be gods in their lifetime. The

monarchs of the fourth dynasty of Ur in particular had temples built in their honour; they set up their statues in various sanctuaries

and commanded the people to sacrifice to them; the eighth month was especially dedicated to the kings, and sacrifices were offered

to them at the new moon and on the fifteenth of each month. Again, the Parthian monarchs of the Arsacid house styled themselves

brothers of the sun and moon and were worshipped as deities. It was esteemed sacrilege to strike even a private member of the

Arsacid family in a brawl.

The kings of Egypt were deified in their lifetime, sacrifices were offered to them, and their worship was celebrated in special temples and by special priests. Indeed the worship of the kings sometimes cast that of the gods into the shade. Thus in the reign of Merenra

a high official declared that he had built many holy places in order that the spirits of the king, the ever-living Merenra, might be invoked "more than all the gods." "It has never been doubted that the king claimed actual divinity; he was the 'great god,' the'golden Horus,' and son of Ra. He claimed authority not only over Egypt, but over'all lands and nations,''the whole world in its length and

its breadth, the east and the west,''the entire compass of the great circuit of the sun,''the sky and what is in it, the earth and all that is upon it,''every creature that walks upon two or upon four legs, all that fly or flutter, the whole world offers her productions to him.' Whatever in fact might be asserted of the Sun-god, was dogmatically predicable of the king of Egypt. His titles were directly derived from those of the Sun-god." "In the course of his existence," we are told, "the king of Egypt exhausted all the possible conceptions of divinity which the Egyptians had framed for themselves. A superhuman god by his birth and by his royal office, he became the deified man after his death. Thus all that was known of the divine was summed up in him."

We have now completed our sketch, for it is no more than a sketch, of the evolution of that sacred kingship which attained its high-

est form, its most absolute expression, in the monarchies of Peru and Egypt. Historically, the institution appears to have originated

in the order of public magicians or medicine-men; logically it rests on a mistaken deduction from the association of ideas. Men

mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over

their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things. The men who for one reason or another, because

of the strength or the weakness of their natural parts, were supposed to possess these magical powers in the highest degree, were

gradually marked off from their fellows and became a separate class, who were destined to exercise a most far-reaching influence on

the political, religious, and intellectual evolution of mankind. Social progress, as we know, consists mainly in a successive differentia-

tion of functions, or, in simpler language, a division of labour. The work which in primitive society is done by all alike and by all

equally ill, or nearly so, is gradually distributed among different classes of workers and executed more and more perfectly; and so far

as the products, material or immaterial, of this specialised labour are shared by all, the whole community benefits by the increasing

specialisation. Now magicians or medicine-men appear to constitute the oldest artificial or professional class in the evolution of soci-

ety. For sorcerers are found in every savage tribe known to us; and among the lowest savages, such as the Australian aborigines, they

are the only professional class that exists. As time goes on, and the process of differentiation continues, the order of medicine-men

is itself subdivided into such classes as the healers of disease, the makers of rain, and so forth; while the most powerful member of

the order wins for himself a position as chief and gradually develops into a sacred king, his old magical functions falling more and

more into the background and being exchanged for priestly or even divine duties, in proportion as magic is slowly ousted by religion.

Still later, a partition is effected between the civil and the religious aspect of the kingship, the temporal power being committed to

one man and the spiritual to another. Meanwhile the magicians, who may be repressed but cannot be extirpated by the predominance

of religion, still addict themselves to their old occult arts in preference to the newer ritual of sacrifice and prayer; and in time the

more sagacious of their number perceive the fallacy of magic and hit upon a more effectual mode of manipulating the forces of

nature for the good of man; in short, they abandon sorcery for science. I am far from affirming that the course of development has

everywhere rigidly followed these lines: it has doubtless varied greatly in different societies. I merely mean to indicate in the broad-

est outline what I conceive to have been its general trend. Regarded from the industrial point of view the evolution has been from

uniformity to diversity of function: regarded from the political point of view, it has been from democracy to despotism. With the

later history of monarchy, especially with the decay of despotism and its displacement by forms of government better adapted to the

higher needs of humanity, we are not concerned in this enquiry: our theme is the growth, not the decay, of a great and, in its time,

beneficent institution.

VIII. Departmental Kings of Nature

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THE PRECEDING investigation has proved that the same union of sacred functions with a royal title which meets us in the King

of the Wood at Nemi, the Sacrificial King at Rome, and the magistrate called the King at Athens, occurs frequently outside the limits

of classical antiquity and is a common feature of societies at all stages from barbarism to civilisation. Further, it appears that the

royal priest is often a king, not only in name but in fact, swaying the sceptre as well as the crosier. All this confirms the traditional

view of the origin of the titular and priestly kings in the republics of ancient Greece and Italy. At least by showing that the combina-

tion of spiritual and temporal power, of which Graeco-Italian tradition preserved the memory, has actually existed in many places,

we have obviated any suspicion of improbability that might have attached to the tradition. Therefore we may now fairly ask, May not

the King of the Wood have had an origin like that which a probable tradition assigns to the Sacrificial King of Rome and the titular

King of Athens? In other words, may not his predecessors in office have been a line of kings whom a republican revolution stripped

of their political power, leaving them only their religious functions and the shadow of a crown? There are at least two reasons for

answering this question in the negative. One reason is drawn from the abode of the priest of Nemi; the other from his title, the

King of the Wood. If his predecessors had been kings in the ordinary sense, he would surely have been found residing, like the fallen

kings of Rome and Athens, in the city of which the sceptre had passed from him. This city must have been Aricia, for there was

none nearer. But Aricia was three miles off from his forest sanctuary by the lake shore. If he reigned, it was not in the city, but in

the greenwood. Again his title, King of the Wood, hardly allows us to suppose that he had ever been a king in the common sense of

the word. More likely he was a king of nature, and of a special side of nature, namely, the woods from which he took his title. If we

could find instances of what we may call departmental kings of nature, that is of persons supposed to rule over particular elements

or aspects of nature, they would probably present a closer analogy to the King of the Wood than the divine kings we have been

hitherto considering, whose control of nature is general rather than special. Instances of such departmental kings are not wanting.

On a hill at Bomma near the mouth of the Congo dwells Namvulu Vumu, King of the Rain and Storm. Of some of the tribes on the Upper Nile we are told that they have no kings in the common sense; the only persons whom they acknowledge as such are the Kings of the Rain, Mata Kodou, who are credited with the power of giving rain at the proper time, that is, the rainy season. Before the rains begin to fall at the end of March the country is a parched and arid desert; and the cattle, which form the people's chief wealth, perish for lack of grass. So, when the end of March draws on, each householder betakes himself to the King of the Rain and offers him a cow that he may make the blessed waters of heaven to drip on the brown and withered pastures. If no shower falls, the people assemble and demand that the king shall give them rain; and if the sky still continues cloudless, they rip up his belly, in which he is believed to keep the storms. Amongst the Bari tribe one of these Rain Kings made rain by sprinkling water on the ground out

of a handbell.

Among tribes on the outskirts of Abyssinia a similar office exists and has been thus described by an observer: "The priesthood of the Alfai, as he is called by the Barea and Kunama, is a remarkable one; he is believed to be able to make rain. This office formerly existed among the Algeds and appears to be still common to the Nuba negroes. The Alfai of the Barea, who is also consulted by the northern Kunama, lives near Tembadere on a mountain alone with his family. The people bring him tribute in the form of clothes and fruits, and cultivate for him a large field of his own. He is a kind of king, and his office passes by inheritance to his brother or sister's son. He is supposed to conjure down rain and to drive away the locusts. But if he disappoints the people's expectation and a great drought arises in the land, the Alfai is stoned to death, and his nearest relations are obliged to cast the first stone at him. When we passed through the country, the office of Alfai was still held by an old man; but I heard that rain-making had proved too dangerous for him and that he had renounced his office."

In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a faint echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few years ago no European, so far as is known, had ever seen either of them; and their very existence might have passed for a

fable, were it not that till lately communications were regularly maintained between them and the King of Cambodia, who year by year exchanged presents with them. Their royal functions are of a purely mystic or spiritual order; they have no political authority; they are simple peasants, living by the sweat of their brow and the offerings of the faithful. According to one account they live in absolute solitude, never meeting each other and never seeing a human face. They inhabit successively seven towers perched upon seven mountains, and every year they pass from one tower to another. People come furtively and cast within their reach what is needful for their subsistence. The kingship lasts seven years, the time necessary to inhabit all the towers successively; but many die before their time is out. The offices are hereditary in one or (according to others) two royal families, who enjoy high consideration,

have revenues assigned to them, and are exempt from the necessity of tilling the ground. But naturally the dignity is not coveted, and

when a vacancy occurs, all eligible men (they must be strong and have children) flee and hide themselves. Another account, admitting

the reluctance of the hereditary candidates to accept the crown, does not countenance the report of their hermit-like seclusion in the

seven towers. For it represents the people as prostrating themselves before the mystic kings whenever they appear in public, it being

thought that a terrible hurricane would burst over the country if this mark of homage were omitted. Like many other sacred kings,

of whom we shall read in the sequel, the Kings of Fire and Water are not allowed to die a natural death, for that would lower their

reputation. Accordingly when one of them is seriously ill, the elders hold a consultation and if they think he cannot recover they stab

him to death. His body is burned and the ashes are piously collected and publicly honoured for five years. Part of them is given to

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the widow, and she keeps them in an urn, which she must carry on her back when she goes to weep on her husband's grave.

We are told that the Fire King, the more important of the two, whose supernatural powers have never been questioned, officiates at marriages, festivals, and sacrifices in honour of the Yan or spirit. On these occasions a special place is set apart for him; and the path by which he approaches is spread with white cotton cloths. A reason for confining the royal dignity to the same family is that this family is in possession of certain famous talismans which would lose their virtue or disappear if they passed out of the family. These talismans are three: the fruit of a creeper called Cui, gathered ages ago at the time of the last deluge, but still fresh and green;

a rattan, also very old but bearing flowers that never fade; and lastly, a sword containing a Yan or spirit, who guards it constantly and works miracles with it. The spirit is said to be that of a slave, whose blood chanced to fall upon the blade while it was being forged, and who died a voluntary death to expiate his involuntary offence. By means of the two former talismans the Water King can raise

a flood that would drown the whole earth. If the Fire King draws the magic sword a few inches from its sheath, the sun is hidden

and men and beasts fall into a profound sleep; were he to draw it quite out of the scabbard, the world would come to an end. To this

wondrous brand sacrifices of buffaloes, pigs, fowls, and ducks are offered for rain. It is kept swathed in cotton and silk; and amongst

the annual presents sent by the King of Cambodia were rich stuffs to wrap the sacred sword.

Contrary to the common usage of the country, which is to bury the dead, the bodies of both these mystic monarchs are burnt, but their nails and some of their teeth and bones are religiously preserved as amulets. It is while the corpse is being consumed on the pyre that the kinsmen of the deceased magician flee to the forest and hide themselves, for fear of being elevated to the invidious dignity which he has just vacated. The people go and search for them, and the first whose lurking place they discover is made King

of Fire or Water.

These, then, are examples of what I have called departmental kings of nature. But it is a far cry to Italy from the forests of Cambodia and the sources of the Nile. And though Kings of Rain, Water, and Fire have been found, we have still to discover a King of the Wood to match the Arician priest who bore that title. Perhaps we shall find him nearer home.

IX. The Worship of Trees

1. Tree-spirits

IN THE RELIGIOUS history of the Aryan race in Europe the worship of trees has played an important part. Nothing could be more natural. For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense primaeval forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appeared like islets in an ocean of green. Down to the first century before our era the Hercynian forest stretched eastward from the Rhine for a distance at once vast and unknown; Germans whom Caesar questioned had travelled for two months through it without reaching the end. Four centuries later it was visited by the Emperor Julian, and the solitude, the gloom, the silence of the forest appear to have made a deep impression on his sensitive nature. He declared that he knew nothing like it in the Roman empire. In our own country the wealds of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex are remnants of the great forest of Anderida, which once clothed the whole of the south-eastern portion of the island. Westward it seems to have stretched till it joined another forest that extended from Hamp-shire to Devon. In the reign of Henry II. the citizens of London still hunted the wild bull and the boar in the woods of Hampstead. Even under the later Plantagenets the royal forests were sixty-eight in number. In the forest of Arden it was said that down to mod-ern times a squirrel might leap from tree to tree for nearly the whole length of Warwickshire. The excavation of ancient pile-villages

in the valley of the Po has shown that long before the rise and probably the foundation of Rome the north of Italy was covered with dense woods of elms, chestnuts, and especially of oaks. Archaeology is here confirmed by history; for classical writers contain many references to Italian forests which have now disappeared. As late as the fourth century before our era Rome was divided from central Etruria by the dreaded Ciminian forest, which Livy compares to the woods of Germany. No merchant, if we may trust the Roman historian, had ever penetrated its pathless solitudes; and it was deemed a most daring feat when a Roman general, after sending two scouts to explore its intricacies, led his army into the forest and, making his way to a ridge of the wooded mountains, looked down

on the rich Etrurian fields spread out below. In Greece beautiful woods of pine, oak, and other trees still linger on the slopes of the high Arcadian mountains, still adorn with their verdure the deep gorge through which the Ladon hurries to join the sacred Alpheus, and were still, down to a few years ago, mirrored in the dark blue waters of the lonely lake of Pheneus; but they are mere fragments

of the forests which clothed great tracts in antiquity, and which at a more remote epoch may have spanned the Greek peninsula from

sea to sea.

From an examination of the Teutonic words for "temple" Grimm has made it probable that amongst the Germans the oldest sanctuaries were natural woods. However that may be, tree-worship is well attested for all the great European families of the Aryan stock. Amongst the Celts the oak-worship of the Druids is familiar to every one, and their old word for sanctuary seems to be identical in origin and meaning with the Latin nemus, a grove or woodland glade, which still survives in the name of Nemi. Sacred groves were common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct amongst their descendants at the present day. How serious that worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to

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peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit's navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound about its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to replace the dead bark by a living substitute taken from the culprit; it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree. At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there was a sacred grove in which every tree was regarded as divine. The heathen Slavs worshipped trees and groves. The Lithuanians were not converted to Christianity till towards the close of the fourteenth century, and amongst them at the date of their conversion the worship of trees was prominent. Some of them revered remarkable oaks and other great shady trees, from which they received oracular responses. Some maintained holy groves about their villages or houses, where even to break a twig would have been a sin. They thought that he who cut a bough in such a grove either died suddenly or was crippled in one of his limbs. Proofs of the prevalence of tree-worship in ancient Greece and Italy are abundant. In the sanctuary of Aesculapius at Cos, for example, it was forbidden to cut down the cypress-trees under a penalty of a thousand drachms. But nowhere, perhaps, in the ancient world was this antique form of religion better preserved than in the heart of the great metropolis

itself. In the Forum, the busy centre of Roman life, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was worshipped down to the days of the empire, and the withering of its trunk was enough to spread consternation through the city. Again, on the slope of the Palatine Hill grew a cornel-tree which was esteemed one of the most sacred objects in Rome. Whenever the tree appeared to a passer-by to be drooping, he set up a hue and cry which was echoed by the people in the street, and soon a crowd might be seen running helterskelter from all sides with buckets of water, as if (says Plutarch) they were hastening to put out a fire.

Among the tribes of the Finnish-Ugrian stock in Europe the heathen worship was performed for the most part in sacred groves, which were always enclosed with a fence. Such a grove often consisted merely of a glade or clearing with a few trees dotted about, upon which in former times the skins of the sacrificial victims were hung. The central point of the grove, at least among the tribes

of the Volga, was the sacred tree, beside which everything else sank into insignificance. Before it the worshippers assembled and the priest offered his prayers, at its roots the victim was sacrificed, and its boughs sometimes served as a pulpit. No wood might be hewn and no branch broken in the grove, and women were generally forbidden to enter it.

But it is necessary to examine in some detail the notions on which the worship of trees and plants is based. To the savage the world in general is animate, and trees and plants are no exception to the rule. He thinks that they have souls like his own, and he treats them accordingly. "They say," writes the ancient vegetarian Porphyry, "that primitive men led an unhappy life, for their superstition did not stop at animals but extended even to plants. For why should the slaughter of an ox or a sheep be a greater wrong than the

felling of a fir or an oak, seeing that a soul is implanted in these trees also?" Similarly, the Hidatsa Indians of North America believe

that every natural object has its spirit, or to speak more properly, its shade. To these shades some consideration or respect is due,

but not equally to all. For example, the shade of the cottonwood, the greatest tree in the valley of the Upper Missouri, is supposed

to possess an intelligence which, if properly approached, may help the Indians in certain undertakings; but the shades of shrubs

and grasses are of little account. When the Missouri, swollen by a freshet in spring, carries away part of its banks and sweeps some

tall tree into its current, it is said that the spirit of the tree cries, while the roots still cling to the land and until the trunk falls with a

splash into the stream. Formerly the Indians considered it wrong to fell one of these giants, and when large logs were needed they

made use only of trees which had fallen of themselves. Till lately some of the more credulous old men declared that many of the

misfortunes of their people were caused by this modern disregard for the rights of the living cottonwood. The Iroquois believed

that each species of tree, shrub, plant, and herb had its own spirit, and to these spirits it was their custom to return thanks. The

Wanika of Eastern Africa fancy that every tree, and especially every coco-nut tree, has its spirit; "the destruction of a cocoa-nut

tree is regarded as equivalent to matricide, because that tree gives them life and nourishment, as a mother does her child." Siamese

monks, believing that there are souls everywhere, and that to destroy anything whatever is forcibly to dispossess a soul, will not break

a branch of a tree, "as they will not break the arm of an innocent person." These monks, of course, are Buddhists. But Buddhist

animism is not a philosophical theory. It is simply a common savage dogma incorporated in the system of an historical religion. To

suppose, with Benfey and others, that the theories of animism and transmigration current among rude peoples of Asia are derived

from Buddhism, is to reverse the facts.

Sometimes it is only particular sorts of trees that are supposed to be tenanted by spirits. At Grbalj in Dalmatia it is said that among

great beeches, oaks, and other trees there are some that are endowed with shades or souls, and whoever fells one of them must die

on the spot, or at least live an invalid for the rest of his days. If a woodman fears that a tree which he has felled is one of this sort,

he must cut off the head of a live hen on the stump of the tree with the very same axe with which he cut down the tree. This will

protect him from all harm, even if the tree be one of the animated kind. The silk-cotton trees, which rear their enormous trunks

to a stupendous height, far out-topping all the other trees of the forest, are regarded with reverence throughout West Africa, from

the Senegal to the Niger, and are believed to be the abode of a god or spirit. Among the Ewespeaking peoples of the Slave Coast

the indwelling god of this giant of the forest goes by the name of Huntin. Trees in which he specially dwells--for it is not every

silk-cotton tree that he thus honours--are surrounded by a girdle of palm-leaves; and sacrifices of fowls, and occasionally of human

beings, are fastened to the trunk or laid against the foot of the tree. A tree distinguished by a girdle of palm-leaves may not be cut

down or injured in any way; and even silk-cotton trees which are not supposed to be animated by Huntin may not be felled unless

the woodman first offers a sacrifice of fowls and palmoil to purge himself of the proposed sacrilege. To omit the sacrifice is an

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offence which may be punished with death. Among the Kangra mountains of the Punjaub a girl used to be annually sacrificed to an old cedar-tree, the families of the village taking it in turn to supply the victim. The tree was cut down not very many years ago.

If trees are animate, they are necessarily sensitive and the cutting of them down becomes a delicate surgical operation, which must be performed with as tender a regard as possible for the feelings of the sufferers, who otherwise may turn and rend the careless

or bungling operator. When an oak is being felled "it gives a kind of shriekes or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq., hath heard it severall times." The Ojebways "very seldom cut down green or living trees, from the idea that it puts them to pain, and some of their medicine-men profess to have heard the wailing of the trees under the axe." Trees that bleed and utter cries of pain or indignation when they are hacked or burned occur very often in Chinese books, even in Standard Histories. Old peasants in some parts of Austria still believe that forest-trees are animate, and will not allow an incision to be made in the bark without special cause; they have heard from their fathers that the tree feels the cut not less than a wounded man his hurt. In felling a tree they beg its pardon. It is said that in the Upper Palatinate also old woodmen still secretly ask a fine, sound tree to forgive them before they cut it down. So in Jarkino the woodman craves pardon of the tree he fells. Before the Ilocanes of Luzon cut down trees in the virgin forest or on the mountains, they recite some verses to the following effect: "Be not

uneasy, my friend, though we fell what we have been ordered to fell." This they do in order not to draw down on themselves the ha-tred of the spirits who live in the trees, and who are apt to avenge themselves by visiting with grievous sickness such as injure them wantonly. The Basoga of Central Africa think that, when a tree is cut down, the angry spirit which inhabits it may cause the death of

the chief and his family. To prevent this disaster they consult a medicine-man before they fell a tree. If the man of skill gives leave to

proceed, the woodman first offers a fowl and a goat to the tree; then as soon as he has given the first blow with the axe, he applies

his mouth to the cut and sucks some of the sap. In this way he forms a brotherhood with the tree, just as two men become blood-

brothers by sucking each other's blood. After that he can cut down his tree-brother with impunity.

But the spirits of vegetation are not always treated with deference and respect. If fair words and kind treatment do not move them, stronger measures are sometimes resorted to. The durian-tree of the East Indies, whose smooth stem often shoots up to a height

of eighty or ninety feet without sending out a branch, bears a fruit of the most delicious flavour and the most disgusting stench. The Malays cultivate the tree for the sake of its fruit, and have been known to resort to a peculiar ceremony for the purpose of

stimulating its fertility. Near Jugra in Selangor there is a small grove of durian-trees, and on a specially chosen day the villagers used

to assemble in it. Thereupon one of the local sorcerers would take a hatchet and deliver several shrewd blows on the trunk of the

most barren of the trees, saying, "Will you now bear fruit or not? If you do not, I shall fell you." To this the tree replied through the

mouth of another man who had climbed a mangostin-tree hard by (the durian-tree being unclimbable), "Yes, I will now bear fruit; I

beg of you not to fell me." So in Japan to make trees bear fruit two men go into an orchard. One of them climbs up a tree and the

other stands at the foot with an axe. The man with the axe asks the tree whether it will yield a good crop next year and threatens to

cut it down if it does not. To this the man among the branches replies on behalf of the tree that it will bear abundantly. Odd as this

mode of horticulture may seem to us, it has its exact parallels in Europe. On Christmas Eve many a South Slavonian and Bulgarian

peasant swings an axe threateningly against a barren fruit-tree, while another man standing by intercedes for the menaced tree, say-

ing, "Do not cut it down; it will soon bear fruit." Thrice the axe is swung, and thrice the impending blow is arrested at the entreaty

of the intercessor. After that the frightened tree will certainly bear fruit next year.

The conception of trees and plants as animated beings naturally results in treating them as male and female, who can be married to each other in a real, and not merely a figurative or poetical, sense of the word. The notion is not purely fanciful, for plants like animals have their sexes and reproduce their kind by the union of the male and female elements. But whereas in all the higher animals the organs of the two sexes are regularly separated between different individuals, in most plants they exist together in every individual of the species. This rule, however, is by no means universal, and in many species the male plant is distinct from the female. The

distinction appears to have been observed by some savages, for we are told that the Maoris "are acquainted with the sex of trees, etc., and have distinct names for the male and female of some trees." The ancients knew the difference between the male and the female date-palm, and fertilised them artificially by shaking the pollen of the male tree over the flowers of the female. The fertilisation took place in spring. Among the heathen of Harran the month during which the palms were fertilised bore the name of the Date Month,

and at this time they celebrated the marriage festival of all the gods and goddesses. Different from this true and fruitful marriage of

the palm are the false and barren marriages of plants which play a part in Hindoo superstition. For example, if a Hindoo has planted

a grove of mangos, neither he nor his wife may taste of the fruit until he has formally married one of the trees, as a bridegroom, to a

tree of a different sort, commonly a tamarind-tree, which grows near it in the grove. If there is no tamarind to act as bride, a jasmine