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will serve the turn. The expenses of such a marriage are often considerable, for the more Brahmans are feasted at it, the greater the

glory of the owner of the grove. A family has been known to sell its golden and silver trinkets, and to borrow all the money they

could in order to marry a mango-tree to a jasmine with due pomp and ceremony. On Christmas Eve German peasants used to tie

fruit-trees together with straw ropes to make them bear fruit, saying that the trees were thus married.

In the Moluccas, when the clove-trees are in blossom, they are treated like pregnant women. No noise may be made near them;

no light or fire may be carried past them at night; no one may approach them with his hat on, all must uncover in their presence.

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These precautions are observed lest the tree should be alarmed and bear no fruit, or should drop its fruit too soon, like the untimely

delivery of a woman who has been frightened in her pregnancy. So in the East the growing rice-crop is often treated with the same

considerate regard as a breeding woman. Thus in Amboyna, when the rice is in bloom, the people say that it is pregnant and fire no

guns and make no other noises near the field, for fear lest, if the rice were thus disturbed, it would miscarry, and the crop would be

all straw and no grain.

Sometimes it is the souls of the dead which are believed to animate trees. The Dieri tribe of Central Australia regard as very sacred certain trees which are supposed to be their fathers transformed; hence they speak with reverence of these trees, and are careful that they shall not be cut down or burned. If the settlers require them to hew down the trees, they earnestly protest against it, asserting that were they to do so they would have no luck, and might be punished for not protecting their ancestors. Some of the Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their ancestors are in certain trees, which they therefore spare. If they are obliged to fell one of these trees, they excuse themselves to it by saying that it was the priest who made them do it. The spirits take up their abode, by preference, in tall and stately trees with great spreading branches. When the wind rustles the leaves, the natives fancy it is the voice

of the spirit; and they never pass near one of these trees without bowing respectfully, and asking pardon of the spirit for disturbing his repose. Among the Ignorrotes, every village has its sacred tree, in which the souls of the dead forefathers of the hamlet reside. Offerings are made to the tree, and any injury done to it is believed to entail some misfortune on the village. Were the tree cut down, the village and all its inhabitants would inevitably perish.

In Corea the souls of people who die of the plague or by the roadside, and of women who expire in childbirth, invariably take up their abode in trees. To such spirits offerings of cake, wine, and pork are made on heaps of stones piled under the trees. In China

it has been customary from time immemorial to plant trees on graves in order thereby to strengthen the soul of the deceased and

thus to save his body from corruption; and as the evergreen cypress and pine are deemed to be fuller of vitality than other trees, they

have been chosen by preference for this purpose. Hence the trees that grow on graves are sometimes identified with the souls of

the departed. Among the Miao-Kia, an aboriginal race of Southern and Western China, a sacred tree stands at the entrance of every

village, and the inhabitants believe that it is tenanted by the soul of their first ancestor and that it rules their destiny. Sometimes there

is a sacred grove near a village, where the trees are suffered to rot and die on the spot. Their fallen branches cumber the ground, and

no one may remove them unless he has first asked leave of the spirit of the tree and offered him a sacrifice. Among the Maraves of

Southern Africa the burial-ground is always regarded as a holy place where neither a tree may be felled nor a beast killed, because

everything there is supposed to be tenanted by the souls of the dead.

In most, if not all, of these cases the spirit is viewed as incorporate in the tree; it animates the tree and must suffer and die with it. But, according to another and probably later opinion, the tree is not the body, but merely the abode of the tree-spirit, which can quit it and return to it at pleasure. The inhabitants of Siaoo, an East Indian island, believe in certain sylvan spirits who dwell in forests or

in great solitary trees. At full moon the spirit comes forth from his lurking-place and roams about. He has a big head, very long arms

and legs, and a ponderous body. In order to propitiate the wood-spirits people bring offerings of food, fowls, goats, and so forth to

the places which they are supposed to haunt. The people of Nias think that, when a tree dies, its liberated spirit becomes a demon,

which can kill a coco-nut palm by merely lighting on its branches, and can cause the death of all the children in a house by perching

on one of the posts that support it. Further, they are of opinion that certain trees are at all times inhabited by roving demons who, if

the trees were damaged, would be set free to go about on errands of mischief. Hence the people respect these trees, and are careful

not to cut them down.

Not a few ceremonies observed at cutting down haunted trees are based on the belief that the spirits have it in their power to quit

the trees at pleasure or in case of need. Thus when the Pelew Islanders are felling a tree, they conjure the spirit of the tree to leave it

and settle on another. The wily negro of the Slave Coast, who wishes to fell an ashorin tree, but knows that he cannot do it so long

as the spirit remains in the tree, places a little palmoil on the ground as a bait, and then, when the unsuspecting spirit has quitted the

tree to partake of this dainty, hastens to cut down its late abode. When the Toboongkoos of Celebes are about to clear a piece of

forest in order to plant rice, they build a tiny house and furnish it with tiny clothes and some food and gold. Then they call together

all the spirits of the wood, offer them the little house with its contents, and beseech them to quit the spot. After that they may safely

cut down the wood without fearing to wound themselves in so doing. Before the Tomori, another tribe of Celebes, fell a tall tree

they lay a quid of betel at its foot, and invite the spirit who dwells in the tree to change his lodging; moreover, they set a little ladder

against the trunk to enable him to descend with safety and comfort. The Mandelings of Sumatra endeavour to lay the blame of all

such misdeeds at the door of the Dutch authorities. Thus when a man is cutting a road through a forest and has to fell a tall tree

which blocks the way, he will not begin to ply his axe until he has said: "Spirit who lodgest in this tree, take it not ill that I cut down

thy dwelling, for it is done at no wish of mine but by order of the Controller." And when he wishes to clear a piece of forest-land

for cultivation, it is necessary that he should come to a satisfactory understanding with the woodland spirits who live there before he

lays low their leafy dwellings. For this purpose he goes to the middle of the plot of ground, stoops down, and pretends to pick up a

letter. Then unfolding a bit of paper he reads aloud an imaginary letter from the Dutch Government, in which he is strictly enjoined

to set about clearing the land without delay. Having done so, he says: "You hear that, spirits. I must begin clearing at once, or I shall

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be hanged."

Even when a tree has been felled, sawn into planks, and used to build a house, it is possible that the woodland spirit may still be lurking in the timber, and accordingly some people seek to propitiate him before or after they occupy the new house. Hence, when a new dwelling is ready the Toradjas of Celebes kill a goat, a pig, or a buffalo, and smear all the woodwork with its blood. If the building is

a lobo or spirit-house, a fowl or a dog is killed on the ridge of the roof, and its blood allowed to flow down on both sides. The ruder Tonapoo in such a case sacrifice a human being on the roof. This sacrifice on the roof of a lobo or temple serves the same purpose as the smearing of blood on the woodwork of an ordinary house. The intention is to propitiate the forest-spirits who may still be in the timber; they are thus put in good humour and will do the inmates of the house no harm. For a like reason people in Celebes and the Moluccas are much afraid of planting a post upside down at the building of a house; for the forest-spirit, who might still be in

the timber, would very naturally resent the indignity and visit the inmates with sickness. The Kayans of Borneo are of opinion that tree-spirits stand very stiffly on the point of honour and visit men with their displeasure for any injury done to them. Hence after building a house, whereby they have been forced to ill-treat many trees, these people observe a period of penance for a year during which they must abstain from many things, such as the killing of bears, tiger-cats, and serpents.

2. Beneficent Powers of Tree-Spirits

WHEN a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree-spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought. Animism is passing into polytheism. In other words, instead of regarding each tree as a living and conscious being, man now sees in it merely a lifeless, inert mass, tenanted for a longer or shorter time by a

supernatural being who, as he can pass freely from tree to tree, thereby enjoys a certain right of possession or lordship over the trees,

and, ceasing to be a tree-soul, becomes a forest god. As soon as the tree-spirit is thus in a measure disengaged from each particular tree, he begins to change his shape and assume the body of a man, in virtue of a general tendency of early thought to clothe all ab-

stract spiritual beings in concrete human form. Hence in classical art the sylvan deities are depicted in human shape, their woodland

character being denoted by a branch or some equally obvious symbol. But this change of shape does not affect the essential charac-

ter of the tree-spirit. The powers which he exercised as a tree-soul incorporate in a tree, he still continues to wield as a god of trees.

This I shall now attempt to prove in detail. I shall show, first, that trees considered as animate beings are credited with the power

of making the rain to fall, the sun to shine, flocks and herds to multiply, and women to bring forth easily; and, second, that the very

same powers are attributed to tree-gods conceived as anthropomorphic beings or as actually incarnate in living men.

First, then, trees or tree-spirits are believed to give rain and sunshine. When the missionary Jerome of Prague was persuading the heathen Lithuanians to fell their sacred groves, a multitude of women besought the Prince of Lithuania to stop him, saying that with the woods he was destroying the house of god from which they had been wont to get rain and sunshine. The Mundaris in Assam think that if a tree in the sacred grove is felled the sylvan gods evince their displeasure by withholding rain. In order to procure

rain the inhabitants of Monyo, a village in the Sagaing district of Upper Burma, chose the largest tamarind-tree near the village and

named it the haunt of the spirit (nat) who controls the rain. Then they offered bread, coco-nuts, plantains, and fowls to the guardian

spirit of the village and to the spirit who gives rain, and they prayed, "O Lord nat have pity on us poor mortals, and stay not the rain.

Inasmuch as our offering is given ungrudgingly, let the rain fall day and night." Afterwards libations were made in honour of the

spirit of the tamarind-tree; and still later three elderly women, dressed in fine clothes and wearing necklaces and earrings, sang the

Rain Song.

Again, tree-spirits make the crops to grow. Amongst the Mundaris every village has its sacred grove, and "the grove deities are held responsible for the crops, and are especially honoured at all the great agricultural festivals." The negroes of the Gold Coast are in

the habit of sacrificing at the foot of certain tall trees, and they think that if one of these were felled all the fruits of the earth would perish. The Gallas dance in couples round sacred trees, praying for a good harvest. Every couple consists of a man and woman, who are linked together by a stick, of which each holds one end. Under their arms they carry green corn or grass. Swedish peasants stick

a leafy branch in each furrow of their cornfields, believing that this will ensure an abundant crop. The same idea comes out in the German and French custom of the Harvest-May. This is a large branch or a whole tree, which is decked with ears of corn, brought home on the last waggon from the harvest-field, and fastened on the roof of the farmhouse or of the barn, where it remains for a year. Mannhardt has proved that this branch or tree embodies the tree-spirit conceived as the spirit of vegetation in general, whose vivifying and fructifying influence is thus brought to bear upon the corn in particular. Hence in Swabia the Harvest-May is fastened amongst the last stalks of corn left standing on the field; in other places it is planted on the cornfield and the last sheaf cut is at-

tached to its trunk.

Again, the tree-spirit makes the herds to multiply and blesses women with offspring. In Northern India the Emblica officinalis is a sacred tree. On the eleventh of the month Phalgun (February) libations are poured at the foot of the tree, a red or yellow string is bound about the trunk, and prayers are offered to it for the fruitfulness of women, animals, and crops. Again, in Northern India the

coco-nut is esteemed one of the most sacred fruits, and is called Sriphala, or the fruit of Sri, the goddess of prosperity. It is the sym-

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bol of fertility, and all through Upper India is kept in shrines and presented by the priests to women who desire to become mothers. In the town of Qua, near Old Calabar, there used to grow a palm-tree which ensured conception to any barren woman who ate a

nut from its branches. In Europe the May-tree or May-pole is apparently supposed to possess similar powers over both women and cattle. Thus in some parts of Germany on the first of May the peasants set up May-trees or May-bushes at the doors of stables and byres, one for each horse and cow; this is thought to make the cows yield much milk. Of the Irish we are told that "they fancy a green bough of a tree, fastened on May-day against the house, will produce plenty of milk that summer."

On the second of July some of the Wends used to set up an oak-tree in the middle of the village with an iron cock fastened to its top; then they danced round it, and drove the cattle round it to make them thrive. The Circassians regard the pear-tree as the protector of cattle. So they cut down a young pear-tree in the forest, branch it, and carry it home, where it is adored as a divinity. Almost every house has one such pear-tree. In autumn, on the day of the festival, the tree is carried into the house with great ceremony to

the sound of music and amid the joyous cries of all the inmates, who compliment it on its fortunate arrival. It is covered with can-

dles, and a cheese is fastened to its top. Round about it they eat, drink, and sing. Then they bid the tree good-bye and take it back to

the courtyard, where it remains for the rest of the year, set up against the wall, without receiving any mark of respect.

In the Tuhoe tribe of Maoris "the power of making women fruitful is ascribed to trees. These trees are associated with the navel-strings of definite mythical ancestors, as indeed the navel-strings of all children used to be hung upon them down to quite recent times. A barren woman had to embrace such a tree with her arms, and she received a male or a female child according as she embraced the east or the west side." The common European custom of placing a green bush on May Day before or on the house of a beloved maiden probably originated in the belief of the fertilising power of the tree-spirit. In some parts of Bavaria such bushes are set up also at the houses of newly-married pairs, and the practice is only omitted if the wife is near her confinement; for in that case they say that the husband has "set up a May-bush for himself." Among the South Slavonians a barren woman, who desires to

have a child, places a new chemise upon a fruitful tree on the eve of St. George's Day. Next morning before sunrise she examines the garment, and if she finds that some living creature has crept on it, she hopes that her wish will be fulfilled within the year. Then she puts on the chemise, confident that she will be as fruitful as the tree on which the garment has passed the night. Among the Kara-Kirghiz barren women roll themselves on the ground under a solitary apple-tree, in order to obtain offspring. Lastly, the power of granting to women an easy delivery at childbirth is ascribed to trees both in Sweden and Africa. In some districts of Sweden there

was formerly a bardtrad or guardian-tree (lime, ash, or elm) in the neighbourhood of every farm. No one would pluck a single leaf of the sacred tree, any injury to which was punished by ill-luck or sickness. Pregnant women used to clasp the tree in their arms in order to ensure an easy delivery. In some negro tribes of the Congo region pregnant women make themselves garments out of the

bark of a certain sacred tree, because they believe that this tree delivers them from the dangers that attend child-bearing. The story

that Leto clasped a palm-tree and an olive-tree or two laurel-trees, when she was about to give birth to the divine twins Apollo and

Artemis, perhaps points to a similar Greek belief in the efficacy of certain trees to facilitate delivery.

X. Relics of Tree Worship in Modern Europe

FROM THE FOREGOING review of the beneficent qualities commonly ascribed to tree-spirits, it is easy to understand why customs like the May-tree or May-pole have prevailed so widely and figured so prominently in the popular festivals of European peasants. In spring or early summer or even on Midsummer Day, it was and still is in many parts of Europe the custom to go out to the woods, cut down a tree and bring it into the village, where it is set up amid general rejoicings; or the people cut branches in the woods, and fasten them on every house. The intention of these customs is to bring home to the village, and to each house, the blessings which the tree-spirit has in its power to bestow. Hence the custom in some places of planting a May-tree before every house, or

of carrying the village May-tree from door to door, that every household may receive its share of the blessing. Out of the mass of

evidence on this subject a few examples may be selected.

Sir Henry Piers, in his Description of Westmeath, writing in 1682 says: "On May-eve, every family sets up before their door a green bush, strewed over with yellow flowers, which the meadows yield plentifully. In countries where timber is plentiful, they erect tall slender trees, which stand high, and they continue almost the whole year; so as a stranger would go nigh to imagine that they were

all signs of ale-sellers, and that all houses were alehouses." In Northamptonshire a young tree ten or twelve feet high used to be planted before each house on May Day so as to appear growing; flowers were thrown over it and strewn about the door. "Among ancient customs still retained by the Cornish, may be reckoned that of decking their doors and porches on the first of May with green boughs of sycamore and hawthorn, and of planting trees, or rather stumps of trees, before their houses." In the north of England

it was formerly the custom for young people to rise a little after midnight on the morning of the first of May, and go out with music and the blowing of horns into the woods, where they broke branches and adorned them with nosegays and crowns of flowers. This done, they returned about sunrise and fastened the flower-decked branches over the doors and windows of their houses. At Abing-don in Berkshire young people formerly went about in groups on May morning, singing a carol of which the following are two of

the verses:

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"We've been rambling all the night, And sometime of this day;

And now returning back again,

We bring a garland gay.

A garland gay we bring you here;

And at your door we stand;

It is a sprout well budded out,

The work of our Lord's hand."

At the towns of Saffron Walden and Debden in Essex on the first of May little girls go about in parties from door to door singing

a song almost identical with the above and carrying garlands; a doll dressed in white is usually placed in the middle of each garland.

Similar customs have been and indeed are still observed in various parts of England. The garlands are generally in the form of

hoops intersecting each other at right angles. It appears that a hoop wreathed with rowan and marsh marigold, and bearing suspend-

ed within it two balls, is still carried on May Day by villagers in some parts of Ireland. The balls, which are sometimes covered with

gold and silver paper, are said to have originally represented the sun and moon.

In some villages of the Vosges Mountains on the first Sunday of May young girls go in bands from house to house, singing a song in praise of May, in which mention is made of the "bread and meal that come in May." If money is given them, they fasten a green bough to the door; if it is refused, they wish the family many children and no bread to feed them. In the French department of May-enne, boys who bore the name of Maillotins used to go about from farm to farm on the first of May singing carols, for which they received money or a drink; they planted a small tree or a branch of a tree. Near Saverne in Alsace bands of people go about carrying May-trees. Amongst them is a man dressed in a white shirt with his face blackened; in front of him is carried a large May-tree, but each member of the band also carries a smaller one. One of the company bears a huge basket, in which he collects eggs, bacon, and

so forth.

On the Thursday before Whitsunday the Russian villagers "go out into the woods, sing songs, weave garlands, and cut down a young birch-tree, which they dress up in woman's clothes, or adorn with many-coloured shreds and ribbons. After that comes a feast, at the end of which they take the dressed-up birch-tree, carry it home to their village with joyful dance and song, and set it up in one of the houses, where it remains as an honoured guest till Whitsunday. On the two intervening days they pay visits to the house where their

'guest' is; but on the third day, Whitsunday, they take her to a stream and fling her into its waters," throwing their garlands after her. In this Russian custom the dressing of the birch in woman's clothes shows how clearly the tree is personified; and the throwing it

into a stream is most probably a raincharm.

In some parts of Sweden on the eve of May Day lads go about carrying each a bunch of fresh birch twigs wholly or partly in leaf. With the village fiddler at their head, they make the round of the houses singing May songs; the burden of their songs is a prayer for fine weather, a plentiful harvest, and worldly and spiritual blessings. One of them carries a basket in which he collects gifts of

eggs and the like. If they are well received, they stick a leafy twig in the roof over the cottage door. But in Sweden midsummer is the season when these ceremonies are chiefly observed. On the Eve of St. John (the twentythird of June) the houses are thoroughly cleansed and garnished with green boughs and flowers. Young fir-trees are raised at the doorway and elsewhere about the homestead; and very often small umbrageous arbours are constructed in the garden. In Stockholm on this day a leaf-market is held at which thousands of May-poles (Maj Stanger), from six inches to twelve feet high, decorated with leaves, flowers, slips of coloured paper, gilt egg-shells strung on reeds, and so on, are exposed for sale. Bonfires are lit on the hills, and the people dance round them

and jump over them. But the chief event of the day is setting up the May-pole. This consists of a straight and tall sprucepine tree,

stripped of its branches. "At times hoops and at others pieces of wood, placed crosswise, are attached to it at intervals; whilst at

others it is provided with bows, representing, so to say, a man with his arms akimbo. From top to bottom not only the 'Maj Stang'

(May-pole) itself, but the hoops, bows, etc., are ornamented with leaves, flowers, slips of various cloth, gilt egg-shells, etc.; and on

the top of it is a large vane, or it may be a flag." The raising of the May-pole, the decoration of which is done by the village maidens,

is an affair of much ceremony; the people flock to it from all quarters, and dance round it in a great ring. Midsummer customs of

the same sort used to be observed in some parts of Germany. Thus in the towns of the Upper Harz Mountains tall fir-trees, with

the bark peeled off their lower trunks, were set up in open places and decked with flowers and eggs, which were painted yellow and

red. Round these trees the young folk danced by day and the old folk in the evening. In some parts of Bohemia also a May-pole or

midsummer-tree is erected on St. John's Eve. The lads fetch a tall fir or pine from the wood and set it up on a height, where the girls

deck it with nosegays, garlands, and red ribbons. It is afterwards burned.

It would be needless to illustrate at length the custom, which has prevailed in various parts of Europe, such as England, France, and Germany, of setting up a village May-tree or May-pole on May Day. A few examples will suffice. The puritanical writer Phillip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses, first published at London in 1583, has described with manifest disgust how they used to bring in the May-pole in the days of good Queen Bess. His description affords us a vivid glimpse of merry England in the olden time. "Against

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May, Whitsonday, or other time, all the yung men and maides, olde men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hils, and mountains, where they spend all the night in plesant pastimes; and in the morning they return, bringing with them birch and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withall. And no mervaile, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastimes and sportes, namely, Sathan, prince of hel. But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus. They have twentie or fortie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nosegay of flouers placed on the tip of his hornes, and these oxen drawe home this May-pole (this stinkyng ydol, rather), which is covered all over with floures and hearbs, bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottome, and sometime painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great devotion. And thus beeing reared up, with handkercheefs and flags hovering on the top, they straw the ground rounde about, binde green boughes about it, set up sommer haules, bowers, and arbors hard by it. And then fall they to daunce about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself. I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of

great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled."

In Swabia on the first of May a tall fir-tree used to be fetched into the village, where it was decked with ribbons and set up; then the people danced round it merrily to music. The tree stood on the village green the whole year through, until a fresh tree was brought

in next May Day. In Saxony "people were not content with bringing the summer symbolically (as king or queen) into the village; they brought the fresh green itself from the woods even into the houses: that is the May or Whitsuntide trees, which are mentioned in documents from the thirteenth century onwards. The fetching in of the May-tree was also a festival. The people went out into the woods to seek the May (majum quaerere), brought young trees, especially firs and birches, to the village and set them up before the doors of the houses or of the cattle-stalls or in the rooms. Young fellows erected such May-trees, as we have already said, before the chambers of their sweethearts. Besides these household Mays, a great May-tree or May-pole, which had also been brought in solemn procession to the village, was set up in the middle of the village or in the market-place of the town. It had been chosen by the whole community, who watched over it most carefully. Generally the tree was stripped of its branches and leaves, nothing but the crown being left, on which were displayed, in addition to many-coloured ribbons and cloths, a variety of victuals such as sausages, cakes,

and eggs. The young folk exerted themselves to obtain these prizes. In the greasy poles which are still to be seen at our fairs we have a relic of these old May-poles. Not uncommonly there was a race on foot or on horseback to the May-tree--a Whitsunday pastime which in course of time has been divested of its goal and survives as a popular custom to this day in many parts of Germany." At Bordeaux on the first of May the boys of each street used to erect in it a May-pole, which they adorned with garlands and a great crown; and every evening during the whole of the month the young people of both sexes danced singing about the pole. Down

to the present day May-trees decked with flowers and ribbons are set up on May Day in every village and hamlet of gay Provence.

Under them the young folk make merry and the old folk rest.

In all these cases, apparently, the custom is or was to bring in a new May-tree each year. However, in England the village May-pole seems as a rule, at least in later times, to have been permanent, not renewed annually. Villages of Upper Bavaria renew their May-pole once every three, four, or five years. It is a fir-tree fetched from the forest, and amid all the wreaths, flags, and inscriptions with which it is bedecked, an essential part is the bunch of dark green foliage left at the top "as a memento that in it we have to do, not with a dead pole, but with a living tree from the greenwood." We can hardly doubt that originally the practice everywhere was to

set up a new May-tree every year. As the object of the custom was to bring in the fructifying spirit of vegetation, newly awakened in spring, the end would have been defeated if, instead of a living tree, green and sappy, an old withered one had been erected year after year or allowed to stand permanently. When, however, the meaning of the custom had been forgotten, and the May-tree was regarded simply as a centre for holiday merrymaking, people saw no reason for felling a fresh tree every year, and preferred to let the same tree stand permanently, only decking it with fresh flowers on May Day. But even when the May-pole had thus become a fixture, the need of giving it the appearance of being a green tree, not a dead pole, was sometimes felt. Thus at Weverham in Cheshire "are two May-poles, which are decorated on this day (May Day) with all due attention to the ancient solemnity; the sides are hung with garlands, and the top terminated by a birch or other tall slender tree with its leaves on; the bark being peeled, and the stem spliced

to the pole, so as to give the appearance of one tree from the summit." Thus the renewal of the May-tree is like the renewal of the Harvest-May; each is intended to secure a fresh portion of the fertilising spirit of vegetation, and to preserve it throughout the year. But whereas the efficacy of the Harvest-May is restricted to promoting the growth of the crops, that of the May-tree or May-branch extends also, as we have seen, to women and cattle. Lastly, it is worth noting that the old May-tree is sometimes burned at the end of

the year. Thus in the district of Prague young people break pieces of the public May-tree and place them behind the holy pictures in

their rooms, where they remain till next May Day, and are then burned on the hearth. In Wurtemberg the bushes which are set up on

the houses on Palm Sunday are sometimes left there for a year and then burnt.

So much for the tree-spirit conceived as incorporate or immanent in the tree. We have now to show that the tree-spirit is often conceived and represented as detached from the tree and clothed in human form, and even as embodied in living men or women.

The evidence for this anthropomorphic representation of the tree-spirit is largely to be found in the popular customs of European peasantry.

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There is an instructive class of cases in which the tree-spirit is represented simultaneously in vegetable form and in human form, which are set side by side as if for the express purpose of explaining each other. In these cases the human representative of the tree-spirit is sometimes a doll or puppet, sometimes a living person, but whether a puppet or a person, it is placed beside a tree or bough;

so that together the person or puppet, and the tree or bough, form a sort of bilingual inscription, the one being, so to speak, a translation of the other. Here, therefore, there is no room left for doubt that the spirit of the tree is actually represented in human form.

Thus in Bohemia, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, young people throw a puppet called Death into the water; then the girls go into the

wood, cut down a young tree, and fasten to it a puppet dressed in white clothes to look like a woman; with this tree and puppet they

go from house to house collecting gratuities and singing songs with the refrain:

"We carry Death out of the village, We bring Summer into the village."

Here, as we shall see later on, the "Summer" is the spirit of vegetation returning or reviving in spring. In some parts of our own country children go about asking for pence with some small imitations of May-poles, and with a finely-dressed doll which they call

the Lady of the May. In these cases the tree and the puppet are obviously regarded as equivalent.

At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called the Little May Rose, dressed in white, carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and rib-

bons. Her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a song:

"Little May Rose turn round three times, Let us look at you round and round!

Rose of the May, come to the greenwood away, We will be merry all.

So we go from the May to the roses."

In the course of the song a wish is expressed that those who give nothing may lose their fowls by the marten, that their vine may bear no clusters, their tree no nuts, their field no corn; the produce of the year is supposed to depend on the gifts offered to these May singers. Here and in the cases mentioned above, where children go about with green boughs or garlands on May Day singing

and collecting money, the meaning is that with the spirit of vegetation they bring plenty and good luck to the house, and they expect to be paid for the service. In Russian Lithuania, on the first of May, they used to set up a green tree before the village. Then the

rustic swains chose the prettiest girl, crowned her, swathed her in birch branches and set her beside the May-tree, where they danced, sang, and shouted "O May! O May!" In Brie (Isle de France) a May-tree is erected in the midst of the village; its top is crowned

with flowers; lower down it is twined with leaves and twigs, still lower with huge green branches. The girls dance round it, and at the same time a lad wrapt in leaves and called Father May is led about. In the small towns of the Franken Wald mountains in Northern Bavaria, on the second of May, a Walber tree is erected before a tavern, and a man dances round it, enveloped in straw from head to foot in such a way that the ears of corn unite above his head to form a crown. He is called the Walber, and used to be led in procession through the streets, which were adorned with sprigs of birch.

Amongst the Slavs of Carinthia, on St. George's Day (the twentythird of April), the young people deck with flowers and garlands a tree which has been felled on the eve of the festival. The tree is then carried in procession, accompanied with music and joyful acclamations, the chief figure in the procession being the Green George, a young fellow clad from head to foot in green birch branches.

At the close of the ceremonies the Green George, that is an effigy of him, is thrown into the water. It is the aim of the lad who acts Green George to step out of his leafy envelope and substitute the effigy so adroitly that no one shall perceive the change. In many places, however, the lad himself who plays the part of Green George is ducked in a river or pond, with the express intention of thus ensuring rain to make the fields and meadows green in summer. In some places the cattle are crowned and driven from their stalls to

the accompaniment of a song:

"Green George we bring, Green George we accompany, May he feed our herds well.

If not, to the water with him."

Here we see that the same powers of making rain and fostering the cattle, which are ascribed to the tree-spirit regarded as incorpo-

rate in the tree, are also attributed to the tree-spirit represented by a living man.

Among the gypsies of Transylvania and Roumania the festival of Green George is the chief celebration of spring. Some of them

keep it on Easter Monday, others on St. George's Day (the twentythird of April). On the eve of the festival a young willow tree is

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cut down, adorned with garlands and leaves, and set up in the ground. Women with child place one of their garments under the tree, and leave it there over night; if next morning they find a leaf of the tree lying on the garment, they know that their delivery will be easy. Sick and old people go to the tree in the evening, spit on it thrice, and say, "You will soon die, but let us live." Next morning

the gypsies gather about the willow. The chief figure of the festival is Green George, a lad who is concealed from top to toe in green leaves and blossoms. He throws a few handfuls of grass to the beasts of the tribe, in order that they may have no lack of fodder throughout the year. Then he takes three iron nails, which have lain for three days and nights in water, and knocks them into the wil-low; after which he pulls them out and flings them into a running stream to propitiate the waterspirits. Finally, a pretence is made of throwing Green George into the water, but in fact it is only a puppet made of branches and leaves which is ducked in the stream. In this version of the custom the powers of granting an easy delivery to women and of communicating vital energy to the sick and old are clearly ascribed to the willow; while Green George, the human double of the tree, bestows food on the cattle, and further ensures the favour of the waterspirits by putting them in indirect communication with the tree.

Without citing more examples to the same effect, we may sum up the results of the preceding pages in the words of Mannhardt: "The customs quoted suffice to establish with certainty the conclusion that in these spring processions the spirit of vegetation is often represented both by the May-tree and in addition by a man dressed in green leaves or flowers or by a girl similarly adorned. It is the same spirit which animates the tree and is active in the inferior plants and which we have recognised in the May-tree and the Harvest-May. Quite consistently the spirit is also supposed to manifest his presence in the first flower of spring and reveals himself

both in a girl representing a May-rose, and also, as giver of harvest, in the person of the Walber. The procession with this representative of the divinity was supposed to produce the same beneficial effects on the fowls, the fruit-trees, and the crops as the presence of the deity himself. In other words the mummer was regarded not as an image but as an actual representative of the spirit of vegetation; hence the wish expressed by the attendants on the May-rose and the May-tree that those who refuse them gifts of eggs, bacon, and so forth, may have no share in the blessings which it is in the power of the itinerant spirit to bestow. We may conclude that these begging processions with May-trees or May-boughs from door to door ('bringing the May or the summer') had everywhere originally

a serious and, so to speak, sacramental significance; people really believed that the god of growth was present unseen in the bough; by the procession he was brought to each house to bestow his blessing. The names May, Father May, May Lady, Queen of the May, by which the anthropomorphic spirit of vegetation is often denoted, show that the idea of the spirit of vegetation is blent with a personification of the season at which his powers are most strikingly manifested."

So far we have seen that the tree-spirit or the spirit of vegetation in general is represented either in vegetable form alone, as by a tree, bough, or flower; or in vegetable and human form simultaneously, as by a tree, bough, or flower in combination with a puppet or a living person. It remains to show that the representation of him by a tree, bough, or flower is sometimes entirely dropped, while the

representation of him by a living person remains. In this case the representative character of the person is generally marked by dress-

ing him or her in leaves or flowers; sometimes, too, it is indicated by the name he or she bears.

Thus in some parts of Russia on St. George's Day (the twentythird of April) a youth is dressed out, like our Jack-in-the-Green, with leaves and flowers. The Slovenes call him the Green George. Holding a lighted torch in one hand and a pie in the other, he goes out to the cornfields, followed by girls singing appropriate songs. A circle of brushwood is next lighted, in the middle of which is set

the pie. All who take part in the ceremony then sit down around the fire and divide the pie among them. In this custom the Green George dressed in leaves and flowers is plainly identical with the similarly disguised Green George who is associated with a tree in the Carinthian, Transylvanian, and Roumanian customs observed on the same day. Again, we saw that in Russia at Whitsuntide a birch-tree is dressed in woman's clothes and set up in the house. Clearly equivalent to this is the custom observed on Whit-Monday

by Russian girls in the district of Pinsk. They choose the prettiest of their number, envelop her in a mass of foliage taken from the birch-trees and maples, and carry her about through the village.

In Ruhla as soon as the trees begin to grow green in spring, the children assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where they choose one of their playmates to be the Little Leaf Man. They break branches from the trees and twine them about the child till only his shoes peep out from the leafy mantle. Holes are made in it for him to see through, and two of the children lead the

Little Leaf Man that he may not stumble or fall. Singing and dancing they take him from house to house, asking for gifts of food

such as eggs, cream, sausages, and cakes. Lastly, they sprinkle the Leaf Man with water and feast on the food they have collected. In

the Fricktal, Switzerland, at Whitsuntide boys go out into a wood and swathe one of their number in leafy boughs. He is called the

Whitsuntide-lout, and being mounted on horseback with a green branch in his hand he is led back into the village. At the village-well

a halt is called and the leaf-clad lout is dismounted and ducked in the trough. Thereby he acquires the right of sprinkling water on

everybody, and he exercises the right specially on girls and street urchins. The urchins march before him in bands begging him to

give them a Whitsuntide wetting.

In England the best-known example of these leaf-clad mummers is the Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who walks encased in a pyramidal framework of wickerwork, which is covered with holly and ivy, and surmounted by a crown of flowers and ribbons. Thus arrayed he dances on May Day at the head of a troop of chimney-sweeps, who collect pence. In Fricktal a similar frame of

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basketwork is called the Whitsuntide Basket. As soon as the trees begin to bud, a spot is chosen in the wood, and here the village lads make the frame with all secrecy, lest others should forestall them. Leafy branches are twined round two hoops, one of which rests

on the shoulders of the wearer, the other encircles his claves; holes are made for his eyes and mouth; and a large nosegay crowns

the whole. In this guise he appears suddenly in the village at the hour of vespers, preceded by three boys blowing on horns made of

willow bark. The great object of his supporters is to set up the Whitsuntide Basket on the village well, and to keep it and him there,

despite the efforts of the lads from neighbouring villages, who seek to carry off the Whitsuntide Basket and set it up on their own

well.

In the class of cases of which the foregoing are specimens it is obvious that the leaf-clad person who is led about is equivalent to the May-tree, May-bough, or May-doll, which is carried from house to house by children begging. Both are representatives of the beneficent spirit of vegetation, whose visit to the house is recompensed by a present of money or food.

Often the leaf-clad person who represents the spirit of vegetation is known as the king or the queen; thus, for example, he or she is

called the May King, Whitsuntide King, Queen of May, and so on. These titles, as Mannhardt observes, imply that the spirit incorpo-

rate in vegetation is a ruler, whose creative power extends far and wide.

In a village near Salzwedel a May-tree is set up at Whitsuntide and the boys race to it; he who reaches it first is king; a garland of flowers is put round his neck and in his hand he carries a May-bush, with which, as the procession moves along, he sweeps away the dew. At each house they sing a song, wishing the inmates good luck, referring to the "black cow in the stall milking white milk, black hen on the nest laying white eggs," and begging a gift of eggs, bacon, and so on. At the village of Ellgoth in Silesia a ceremony called the King's Race is observed at Whitsuntide. A pole with a cloth tied to it is set up in a meadow, and the young men ride past it on horseback, each trying to snatch away the cloth as he gallops by. The one who succeeds in carrying it off and dipping it in the neighbouring Oder is proclaimed King. Here the pole is clearly a substitute for a May-tree. In some villages of Brunswick at Whitsuntide

a May King is completely enveloped in a May-bush. In some parts of Thuringen also they have a May King at Whitsuntide, but

he is dressed up rather differently. A frame of wood is made in which a man can stand; it is completely covered with birch boughs

and is surmounted by a crown of birch and flowers, in which a bell is fastened. This frame is placed in the wood and the May King

gets into it. The rest go out and look for him, and when they have found him they lead him back into the village to the magistrate,

the clergyman, and others, who have to guess who is in the verdurous frame. If they guess wrong, the May King rings his bell by

shaking his head, and a forfeit of beer or the like must be paid by the unsuccessful guesser. At Wahrstedt the boys at Whitsuntide

choose by lot a king and a high-steward. The latter is completely concealed in a May-bush, wears a wooden crown wreathen with

flowers, and carries a wooden sword. The king, on the other hand, is only distinguished by a nosegay in his cap, and a reed, with a

red ribbon tied to it, in his hand. They beg for eggs from house to house, threatening that, where none are given, none will be laid

by the hens throughout the year. In this custom the high-steward appears, for some reason, to have usurped the insignia of the

king. At Hildesheim five or six young fellows go about on the afternoon of Whit-Monday cracking long whips in measured time

and collecting eggs from the houses. The chief person of the band is the Leaf King, a lad swathed so completely in birchen twigs

that nothing of him can be seen but his feet. A huge head-dress of birchen twigs adds to his apparent stature. In his hand he carries

a long crook, with which he tries to catch stray dogs and children. In some parts of Bohemia on Whit-Monday the young fellows

disguise themselves in tall caps of birch bark adorned with flowers. One of them is dressed as a king and dragged on a sledge to the

village green, and if on the way they pass a pool the sledge is always overturned into it. Arrived at the green they gather round the

king; the crier jumps on a stone or climbs up a tree and recites lampoons about each house and its inmates. Afterwards the disguises

of bark are stripped off and they go about the village in holiday attire, carrying a May-tree and begging. Cakes, eggs, and corn are sometimes given them. At Grossvargula, near Langensalza, in the eighteenth century a Grass King used to be led about in procession

at Whitsuntide. He was encased in a pyramid of poplar branches, the top of which was adorned with a royal crown of branches and

flowers. He rode on horseback with the leafy pyramid over him, so that its lower end touched the ground, and an opening was left

in it only for his face. Surrounded by a cavalcade of young fellows, he rode in procession to the town hall, the parsonage, and so on,

where they all got a drink of beer. Then under the seven lindens of the neighbouring Sommerberg, the Grass King was stripped of

his green casing; the crown was handed to the Mayor, and the branches were stuck in the flax fields in order to make the flax grow

tall. In this last trait the fertilising influence ascribed to the representative of the tree-spirit comes out clearly. In the neighbourhood

of Pilsen (Bohemia) a conical hut of green branches, without any door, is erected at Whitsuntide in the midst of the village. To this

hut rides a troop of village lads with a king at their head. He wears a sword at his side and a sugar-loaf hat of rushes on his head. In

his train are a judge, a crier, and a personage called the Frog-flayer or Hangman. This last is a sort of ragged merryandrew, wear-

ing a rusty old sword and bestriding a sorry hack. On reaching the hut the crier dismounts and goes round it looking for a door.

Finding none, he says, "Ah, this is perhaps an enchanted castle; the witches creep through the leaves and need no door." At last he

draws his sword and hews his way into the hut, where there is a chair, on which he seats himself and proceeds to criticise in rhyme

the girls, farmers, and farm-servants of the neighbourhood. When this is over, the Frog-flayer steps forward and, after exhibiting a

cage with frogs in it, sets up a gallows on which he hangs the frogs in a row. In the neighbourhood of Plas the ceremony differs in

some points. The king and his soldiers are completely clad in bark, adorned with flowers and ribbons; they all carry swords and ride

horses, which are gay with green branches and flowers. While the village dames and girls are being criticised at the arbour, a frog is

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secretly pinched and poked by the crier till it quacks. Sentence of death is passed on the frog by the king; the hangman beheads it and flings the bleeding body among the spectators. Lastly, the king is driven from the hut and pursued by the soldiers. The pinching

and beheading of the frog are doubtless, as Mannhardt observes, a raincharm. We have seen that some Indians of the Orinoco beat frogs for the express purpose of producing rain, and that killing a frog is a European raincharm.

Often the spirit of vegetation in spring is represented by a queen instead of a king. In the neighbourhood of Libchowic (Bohemia), on the fourth Sunday in Lent, girls dressed in white and wearing the first spring flowers, as violets and daisies, in their hair, lead about the village a girl who is called the Queen and is crowned with flowers. During the procession, which is conducted with great solemnity, none of the girls may stand still, but must keep whirling round continually and singing. In every house the Queen announces the arrival of spring and wishes the inmates good luck and blessings, for which she receives presents. In German Hungary

the girls choose the prettiest girl to be their Whitsuntide Queen, fasten a towering wreath on her brow, and carry her singing through

the streets. At every house they stop, sing old ballads, and receive presents. In the south-east of Ireland on May Day the prettiest girl

used to be chosen Queen of the district for twelve months. She was crowned with wild flowers; feasting, dancing, and rustic sports

followed, and were closed by a grand procession in the evening. During her year of office she presided over rural gatherings of

young people at dances and merrymakings. If she married before next May Day, her authority was at an end, but her successor was

not elected till that day came round. The May Queen is common In France and familiar in England.

Again the spirit of vegetation is sometimes represented by a king and queen, a lord and lady, or a bridegroom and bride. Here again

the parallelism holds between the anthropomorphic and the vegetable representation of the tree-spirit, for we have seen above

that trees are sometimes married to each other. At Halford in South Warwickshire the children go from house to house on May

Day, walking two and two in procession and headed by a King and Queen. Two boys carry a May-pole some six or seven feet high,

which is covered with flowers and greenery. Fastened to it near the top are two cross-bars at right angles to each other. These are

also decked with flowers, and from the ends of the bars hang hoops similarly adorned. At the houses the children sing May songs

and receive money, which is used to provide tea for them at the schoolhouse in the afternoon. In a Bohemian village near Konig-

gratz on Whit-Monday the children play the king's game, at which a king and queen march about under a canopy, the queen wearing

a garland, and the youngest girl carrying two wreaths on a plate behind them. They are attended by boys and girls called grooms-

men and bridesmaids, and they go from house to house collecting gifts. A regular feature in the popular celebration of Whitsuntide in Silesia used to be, and to some extent still is, the contest for the kingship. This contest took various forms, but the mark or goal

was generally the May-tree or May-pole. Sometimes the youth who succeeded in climbing the smooth pole and bringing down the

prize was proclaimed the Whitsuntide King and his sweetheart the Whitsuntide Bride. Afterwards the king, carrying the May-bush,

repaired with the rest of the company to the alehouse, where a dance and a feast ended the merrymaking. Often the young farmers

and labourers raced on horseback to the May-pole, which was adorned with flowers, ribbons, and a crown. He who first reached the

pole was the Whitsuntide King, and the rest had to obey his orders for that day. The worst rider became the clown. At the May-tree

all dismounted and hoisted the king on their shoulders. He nimbly swarmed up the pole and brought down the May-bush and the

crown, which had been fastened to the top. Meanwhile the clown hurried to the alehouse and proceeded to bolt thirty rolls of bread

and to swig four quart bottles of brandy with the utmost possible despatch. He was followed by the king, who bore the May-bush

and crown at the head of the company. If on their arrival the clown had already disposed of the rolls and the brandy, and greeted

the king with a speech and a glass of beer, his score was paid by the king; otherwise he had to settle it himself. After church time the

stately procession wound through the village. At the head of it rode the king, decked with flowers and carrying the May-bush. Next

came the clown with his clothes turned inside out, a great flaxen beard on his chain, and the Whitsuntide crown on his head. Two

riders disguised as guards followed. The procession drew up before every farmyard; the two guards dismounted, shut the clown into

the house, and claimed a contribution from the housewife to buy soap with which to wash the clown's beard. Custom allowed them

to carry off any victuals which were not under lock and key. Last of all they came to the house in which the king's sweetheart lived.

She was greeted as Whitsuntide Queen and received suitable presents--to wit, a many-coloured sash, a cloth, and an apron. The king

got as a prize, a vest, a neck-cloth, and so forth, and had the right of setting up the May-bush or Whitsuntide-tree before his master's

yard, where it remained as an honourable token till the same day next year. Finally the procession took its way to the tavern, where

the king and queen opened the dance. Sometimes the Whitsuntide King and Queen succeeded to office in a different way. A man of

straw, as large as life and crowned with a red cap, was conveyed in a cart, between two men armed and disguised as guards, to a place

where a mock court was waiting to try him. A great crowd followed the cart. After a formal trial the straw man was condemned to

death and fastened to a stake on the execution ground. The young men with bandaged eyes tried to stab him with a spear. He who

succeeded became king and his sweetheart queen. The straw man was known as the Goliath.

In a parish of Denmark it used to be the custom at Whitsuntide to dress up a little girl as the Whitsun-bride and a little boy as her

groom. She was decked in all the finery of a grownup bride, and wore a crown of the freshest flowers of spring on her head. Her

groom was as gay as flowers, ribbons, and knots could make him. The other children adorned themselves as best they could with the

yellow flowers of the trollius and caltha. Then they went in great state from farmhouse to farmhouse, two little girls walking at the

head of the procession as bridesmaids, and six or eight outriders galloping ahead on hobby-horses to announce their coming. Contri-

butions of eggs, butter, loaves, cream, coffee, sugar, and tallow-candles were received and conveyed away in baskets. When they had

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made the round of the farms, some of the farmers' wives helped to arrange the wedding feast, and the children danced merrily in clogs on the stamped clay floor till the sun rose and the birds began to sing. All this is now a thing of the past. Only the old folks still

remember the little Whitsun-bride and her mimic pomp.

We have seen that in Sweden the ceremonies associated elsewhere with May Day or Whitsuntide commonly take place at Midsum-

mer. Accordingly we find that in some parts of the Swedish province of Blekinge they still choose a Midsummer's Bride, to whom

the "church coronet" is occasionally lent. The girl selects for herself a Bridegroom, and a collection is made for the pair, who for the

time being are looked on as man and wife. The other youths also choose each his bride. A similar ceremony seems to be still kept up

in Norway.

In the neighbourhood of Briancon (Dauphine) on May Day the lads wrap up in green leaves a young fellow whose sweetheart has deserted him or married another. He lies down on the ground and feigns to be asleep. Then a girl who likes him, and would marry him, comes and wakes him, and raising him up offers him her arm and a flag. So they go to the alehouse, where the pair lead off the dancing. But they must marry within the year, or they are treated as old bachelor and old maid, and are debarred the company

of the young folks. The lad is called the Bridegroom of the month of May. In the alehouse he puts off his garment of leaves, out

of which, mixed with flowers, his partner in the dance makes a nosegay, and wears it at her breast next day, when he leads her again

to the alehouse. Like this is a Russian custom observed in the district of Nerechta on the Thursday before Whitsunday. The girls go

out into a birch-wood, wind a girdle or band round a stately birch, twist its lower branches into a wreath, and kiss each other in pairs

through the wreath. The girls who kiss through the wreath call each other gossips. Then one of the girls steps forward, and mimick-

ing a drunken man, flings herself on the ground, rolls on the grass, and feigns to fall fast asleep. Another girl wakens the pretended

sleeper and kisses him; then the whole bevy trips singing through the wood to twine garlands, which they throw into the water. In

the fate of the garlands floating on the stream they read their own. Here the part of the sleeper was probably at one time played by a

lad. In these French and Russian customs we have a forsaken bridegroom, in the following a forsaken bride. On Shrove Tuesday the

Slovenes of Oberkrain drag a straw puppet with joyous cries up and down the village; then they throw it into the water or burn it,

and from the height of the flames they judge of the abundance of the next harvest. The noisy crew is followed by a female masker,

who drags a great board by a string and gives out that she is a forsaken bride.

Viewed in the light of what has gone before, the awakening of the forsaken sleeper in these ceremonies probably represents the revival of vegetation in spring. But it is not easy to assign their respective parts to the forsaken bridegroom and to the girl who wakes him from his slumber. Is the sleeper the leafless forest or the bare earth of winter? Is the girl who awakens him the fresh verdure or the genial sunshine of spring? It is hardly possible, on the evidence before us, to answer these questions.

In the Highlands of Scotland the revival of vegetation in spring used to be graphically represented on St. Bride's Day, the first of

February. Thus in the Hebrides "the mistress and servants of each family take a sheaf of oats, and dress it up in women's ap-

parel, put it in a large basket and lay a wooden club by it, and this they call Briid's bed; and then the mistress and servants cry three

times, 'Briid is come, Briid is welcome.' This they do just before going to bed, and when they rise in the morning they look among

the ashes, expecting to see the impression of Briid's club there; which if they do, they reckon it a true presage of a good crop and

prosperous year, and the contrary they take as an ill omen." The same custom is described by another witness thus: "Upon the

night before Candlemas it is usual to make a bed with corn and hay, over which some blankets are laid, in a part of the house, near

the door. When it is ready, a person goes out and repeats three times, ... 'Bridget, Bridget, come in; thy bed is ready.' One or more

candles are left burning near it all night." Similarly in the Isle of Man "on the eve of the first of February, a festival was formerly

kept, called, in the Manks language, Laa'l Breeshey, in honour of the Irish lady who went over to the Isle of Man to receive the veil

from St. Maughold. The custom was to gather a bundle of green rushes, and standing with them in the hand on the threshold of the

door, to invite the holy Saint Bridget to come and lodge with them that night. In the Manks language, the invitation ran thus: 'Brede,

Brede, tar gys my thie tar dyn thie ayms noght Foshil jee yn dorrys da Brede, as lhig da Brede e heet staigh.' In English: 'Bridget,

Bridget, come to my house, come to my house to-night. Open the door for Bridget, and let Bridget come in.' After these words

were repeated, the rushes were strewn on the floor by way of a carpet or bed for St. Bridget. A custom very similar to this was also

observed in some of the Out-Isles of the ancient Kingdom of Man." In these Manx and Highland ceremonies it is obvious that St.

Bride, or St. Bridget, is an old heathen goddess of fertility, disguised in a threadbare Christian cloak. Probably she is no other than

Brigit, the Celtic goddess of fire and apparently of the crops.

Often the marriage of the spirit of vegetation in spring, though not directly represented, is implied by naming the human representa-

tive of the spirit, "the Bride," and dressing her in wedding attire. Thus in some villages of Altmark at Whitsuntide, while the boys

go about carrying a May-tree or leading a boy enveloped in leaves and flowers, the girls lead about the May Bride, a girl dressed as a

bride with a great nosegay in her hair. They go from house to house, the May Bride singing a song in which she asks for a present

and tells the inmates of each house that if they give her something they will themselves have something the whole year through; but

if they give her nothing they will themselves have nothing. In some parts of Westphalia two girls lead a flower-crowned girl called the

Whitsuntide Bride from door to door, singing a song in which they ask for eggs.

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XI. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation

FROM THE PRECEDING examination of the spring and summer festivals of Europe we may infer that our rude forefathers personified the powers of vegetation as male and female, and attempted, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to quicken the growth of trees and plants by representing the marriage of the sylvan deities in the persons of a King and Queen of May, a Whitsun Bridegroom and Bride, and so forth. Such representations were accordingly no mere symbolic or allegorical dramas, pastoral plays designed to amuse or instruct a rustic audience. They were charms intended to make the woods to grow green, the fresh grass to sprout, the corn to shoot, and the flowers to blow. And it was natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the leaf-clad or flower-decked mummers aped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective would be the charm. Accordingly we may assume with a high degree of probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential part of the rites, and that in the opinion of those who performed

them the marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of the human sexes. At the present day it might perhaps be vain to look in civilised Europe for customs of this sort observed for the explicit purpose of promoting the growth of vegetation. But ruder races in other parts of the world have consciously employed the intercourse of the sexes as a means to ensure the fruitfulness of the earth; and some rites which are still, or were till lately, kept up in Europe can be reasonably explained only as stunted relics of a similar practice. The following facts will make this plain.

For four days before they committed the seed to the earth the Pipiles of Central America kept apart from their wives "in order that on the night before planting they might indulge their passions to the fullest extent; certain persons are even said to have been appointed to perform the sexual act at the very moment when the first seeds were deposited in the ground." The use of their wives at that time was indeed enjoined upon the people by the priests as a religious duty, in default of which it was not lawful to sow the seed. The only possible explanation of this custom seems to be that the Indians confused the process by which human beings reproduce their kind with the process by which plants discharge the same function, and fancied that by resorting to the former they were simultaneously forwarding the latter. In some parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual intercourse for the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop.

In the Leti, Sarmata, and some other groups of islands which lie between the western end of New Guinea and the northern part of Australia, the heathen population regard the sun as the male principle by whom the earth or female principle is fertilised. They call him Upu-lera or Mr. Sun, and represent him under the form of a lamp made of coco-nut leaves, which may be seen hanging everywhere in their houses and in the sacred fig-tree. Under the tree lies a large flat stone, which serves as a sacrificial table. On it the heads of slain foes were and are still placed in some of the islands. Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy season, Mr. Sun

comes down into the holy fig-tree to fertilise the earth, and to facilitate his descent a ladder with seven rungs is considerately placed at his disposal. It is set up under the tree and is adorned with carved figures of the birds whose shrill clarion heralds the approach

of the sun in the east. On this occasion pigs and dogs are sacrificed in profusion; men and women alike indulge in a saturnalia; and

the mystic union of the sun and the earth is dramatically represented in public, amid song and dance, by the real union of the sexes

under the tree. The object of the festival, we are told, is to procure rain, plenty of food and drink, abundance of cattle and children

and riches from Grandfather Sun. They pray that he may make every shegoat to cast two or three young, the people to multiply, the

dead pigs to be replaced by living pigs, the empty rice-baskets to be filled, and so on. And to induce him to grant their requests they

offer him pork and rice and liquor, and invite him to fall to. In the Babar Islands a special flag is hoisted at this festival as a symbol

of the creative energy of the sun; it is of white cotton, about nine feet high, and consists of the figure of a man in an appropriate

attitude. It would be unjust to treat these orgies as a mere outburst of unbridled passion; no doubt they are deliberately and solemnly

organised as essential to the fertility of the earth and the welfare of man.

The same means which are thus adopted to stimulate the growth of the crops are naturally employed to ensure the fruitfulness of trees. In some parts of Amboyna, when the state of the clove plantation indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men go naked to the plantations by night, and there seek to fertilise the trees precisely as they would impregnate women, while at the same time they call out for "More cloves!" This is supposed to make the trees bear fruit more abundantly.

The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the intimate relation between the intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of the ground that among them a barren wife is generally sent away, because she is supposed to prevent her husband's garden from bearing fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding power of increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish them with their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the twins a ceremony is performed, the object of which clearly is to transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to the plantains. The mother lies down on her back in the thick grass near the house and places a flower of the plantain between her legs; then her husband comes and knocks the flower away with his genital member.

Further, the parents go through the country performing dances in the gardens of favoured friends, apparently for the purpose of causing the plantain-trees to bear fruit more abundantly.

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In various parts of Europe customs have prevailed both at spring and harvest which are clearly based on the same crude notion that the relation of the human sexes to each other can be so used as to quicken the growth of plants. For example, in the Ukraine on St. George's Day (the twentythird of April) the priest in his robes, attended by his acolytes, goes out to the fields of the village, where the crops are beginning to show green above the ground, and blesses them. After that the young married people lie down in couples on the sown fields and roll several times over on them, in the belief that this will promote the growth of the crops. In some parts of Russia the priest himself is rolled by women over the sprouting crop, and that without regard to the mud and holes which he may encounter in his beneficent progress. If the shepherd resists or remonstrates, his flock murmurs, "Little Father, you do not really

wish us well, you do not wish us to have corn, although you do wish to live on our corn." In some parts of Germany at harvest the men and women, who have reaped the corn, roll together on the field. This again is probably a mitigation of an older and ruder custom designed to impart fertility to the fields by methods like those resorted to by the Pipiles of Central America long ago and by

the cultivators of rice in Java at the present time.

To the student who cares to track the devious course of the human mind in its gropings after truth, it is of some interest to observe that the same theoretical belief in the sympathetic influence of the sexes on vegetation, which has led some peoples to indulge their

passions as a means of fertilising the earth, has led others to seek the same end by directly opposite means. From the moment that

they sowed the maize till the time that they reaped it, the Indians of Nicaragua lived chastely, keeping apart from their wives and

sleeping in a separate place. They ate no salt, and drank neither cocoa nor chicha, the fermented liquor made from maize; in short

the season was for them, as the Spanish historian observes, a time of abstinence. To this day some of the Indian tribes of Central

America practise continence for the purpose of thereby promoting the growth of the crops. Thus we are told that before sowing the

maize the Kekchi Indians sleep apart from their wives, and eat no flesh for five days, while among the Lanquineros and Cajaboneros

the period of abstinence from these carnal pleasures extends to thirteen days. So amongst some of the Germans of Transylvania it

is a rule that no man may sleep with his wife during the whole of the time that he is engaged in sowing his fields. The same rule is

observed at Kalotaszeg in Hungary; the people think that if the custom were not observed the corn would be mildewed. Similarly a

Central Australian headman of the Kaitish tribe strictly abstains from marital relations with his wife all the time that he is performing

magical ceremonies to make the grass grow; for he believes that a breach of this rule would prevent the grass seed from sprouting

properly. In some of the Melanesian islands, when the yam vines are being trained, the men sleep near the gardens and never ap-

proach their wives; should they enter the garden after breaking this rule of continence the fruits of the garden would be spoilt.

If we ask why it is that similar beliefs should logically lead, among different peoples, to such opposite modes of conduct as strict

chastity and more or less open debauchery, the reason, as it presents itself to the primitive mind, is perhaps not very far to seek.

If rude man identifies himself, in a manner, with nature; if he fails to distinguish the impulses and processes in himself from the

methods which nature adopts to ensure the reproduction of plants and animals, he may leap to one of two conclusions. Either he

may infer that by yielding to his appetites he will thereby assist in the multiplication of plants and animals; or he may imagine that

the vigour which he refuses to expend in reproducing his own kind, will form as it were a store of energy whereby other creatures,

whether vegetable or animal, will somehow benefit in propagating their species. Thus from the same crude philosophy, the same

primitive notions of nature and life, the savage may derive by different channels a rule either of profligacy or of asceticism.

To readers bred in religion which is saturated with the ascetic idealism of the East, the explanation which I have given of the rule of

continence observed under certain circumstances by rude or savage peoples may seem far-fetched and improbable. They may think

that moral purity, which is so intimately associated in their minds with the observance of such a rule, furnishes a sufficient explana-

tion of it; they may hold with Milton that chastity in itself is a noble virtue, and that the restraint which it imposes on one of the

strongest impulses of our animal nature marks out those who can submit to it as men raised above the common herd, and therefore

worthy to receive the seal of the divine approbation. However natural this mode of thought may seem to us, it is utterly foreign and

indeed incomprehensible to the savage. If he resists on occasion the sexual instinct, it is from no high idealism, no ethereal aspira-

tion after moral purity, but for the sake of some ulterior yet perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which he is prepared to

sacrifice the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is or may be so, the examples I have cited are amply sufficient to prove.

They show that where the instinct of self-preservation, which manifests itself chiefly in the search for food, conflicts or appears to

conflict with the instinct which conduces to the propagation of the species, the former instinct, as the primary and more funda-

mental, is capable of overmastering the latter. In short, the savage is willing to restrain his sexual propensity for the sake of food.

Another object for the sake of which he consents to exercise the same self-restraint is victory in war. Not only the warrior in the

field but his friends at home will often bridle their sensual appetites from a belief that by so doing they will the more easily overcome

their enemies. The fallacy of such a belief, like the belief that the chastity of the sower conduces to the growth of the seed, is plain

enough to us; yet perhaps the self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain and false as they are, have imposed on mankind, has

not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists

mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for

more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till

the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of keeping or winning

for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth.

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XII. The Sacred Marriage

1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility

WE have seen that according to a widespread belief, which is not without a foundation in fact, plants reproduce their kinds through

the sexual union of male and female elements, and that on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic this reproduction

is supposed to be stimulated by the real or mock marriage of men and women, who masquerade for the time being as spirits of

vegetation. Such magical dramas have played a great part in the popular festivals of Europe, and based as they are on a very crude

conception of natural law, it is clear that they must have been handed down from a remote antiquity. We shall hardly, therefore, err in

assuming that they date from a time when the forefathers of the civilised nations of Europe were still barbarians, herding their cattle

and cultivating patches of corn in the clearings of the vast forests, which then covered the greater part of the continent, from the

Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean. But if these old spells and enchantments for the growth of leaves and blossoms, of grass and

flowers and fruit, have lingered down to our own time in the shape of pastoral plays and popular merrymakings, is it not reasonable

to suppose that they survived in less attenuated forms some two thousand years ago among the civilised peoples of antiquity? Or,

to put it otherwise, is it not likely that in certain festivals of the ancients we may be able to detect the equivalents of our May Day,

Whitsuntide, and Midsummer celebrations, with this difference, that in those days the ceremonies had not yet dwindled into mere

shows and pageants, but were still religious or magical rites, in which the actors consciously supported the high parts of gods and

goddesses? Now in the first chapter of this book we found reason to believe that the priest who bore the title of King of the Wood

at Nemi had for his mate the goddess of the grove, Diana herself. May not he and she, as King and Queen of the Wood, have been

serious counterparts of the merry mummers who play the King and Queen of May, the Whitsuntide Bridegroom and Bride in mod-

ern Europe? and may not their union have been yearly celebrated in a theogamy or divine marriage? Such dramatic weddings of gods

and goddesses, as we shall see presently, were carried out as solemn religious rites in many parts of the ancient world; hence there is

no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the sacred grove at Nemi may have been the scene of an annual ceremony of this

sort. Direct evidence that it was so there is none, but analogy pleads in favour of the view, as I shall now endeavour to show.

Diana was essentially a goddess of the woodlands, as Ceres was a goddess of the corn and Bacchus a god of the vine. Her sanctuaries were commonly in groves, indeed every grove was sacred to her, and she is often associated with the forest god Silvanus in dedications. But whatever her origin may have been, Diana was not always a mere goddess of trees. Like her Greek sister Artemis, she appears to have developed into a personification of the teeming life of nature, both animal and vegetable. As mistress of the greenwood she would naturally be thought to own the beasts, whether wild or tame, that ranged through it, lurking for their prey in

its gloomy depths, munching the fresh leaves and shoots among the boughs, or cropping the herbage in the open glades and dells.

Thus she might come to be the patron goddess both of hunters and herdsmen, just as Silvanus was the god not only of woods, but

of cattle. Similarly in Finland the wild beasts of the forest were regarded as the herds of the woodland god Tapio and of his stately

and beautiful wife. No man might slay one of these animals without the gracious permission of their divine owners. Hence the

hunter prayed to the sylvan deities, and vowed rich offerings to them if they would drive the game across his path. And cattle also

seem to have enjoyed the protection of those spirits of the woods, both when they were in their stalls and while they strayed in the

forest. Before the Gayos of Sumatra hunt deer, wild goats, or wild pigs with hounds in the woods, they deem it necessary to obtain

the leave of the unseen Lord of the forest. This is done according to a prescribed form by a man who has special skill in woodcraft.

He lays down a quid of betel before a stake which is cut in a particular way to represent the Lord of the Wood, and having done so

he prays to the spirit to signify his consent or refusal. In his treatise on hunting, Arrian tells us that the Celts used to offer an annual

sacrifice to Artemis on her birthday, purchasing the sacrificial victim with the fines which they had paid into her treasury for every

fox, hare, and roe that they had killed in the course of the year. The custom clearly implied that the wild beasts belonged to the god-

dess, and that she must be compensated for their slaughter.

But Diana was not merely a patroness of wild beasts, a mistress of woods and hills, of lonely glades and sounding rivers; conceived as the moon, and especially, it would seem, as the yellow harvest moon, she filled the farmer's grange with goodly fruits, and heard the prayers of women in travail. In her sacred grove at Nemi, as we have seen, she was especially worshipped as a goddess of childbirth, who bestowed offspring on men and women. Thus Diana, like the Greek Artemis, with whom she was constantly identified,

may be described as a goddess of nature in general and of fertility in particular. We need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law, attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a dearth; hence it would be meet that atonement for the offence

should be made to the goddess of fertility.

Now on the principle that the goddess of fertility must herself be fertile, it behoved Diana to have a male partner. Her mate, if the testimony of Servius may be trusted, was that Virbius who had his representative, or perhaps rather his embodiment, in the King of

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the Wood at Nemi. The aim of their union would be to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of animals, and of mankind; and it might naturally be thought that this object would be more surely attained if the sacred nuptials were celebrated every year, the parts

of the divine bride and bridegroom being played either by their images or by living persons. No ancient writer mentions that this was done in the grove at Nemi; but our knowledge of the Arician ritual is so scanty that the want of information on this head can hardly

count as a fatal objection to the theory. That theory, in the absence of direct evidence, must necessarily be based on the analogy of

similar customs practised elsewhere. Some modern examples of such customs, more or less degenerate, were described in the last

chapter. Here we shall consider their ancient counterparts.

2. The Marriage of the Gods

AT BABYLON the imposing sanctuary of Bel rose like a pyramid above the city in a series of eight towers or stories, planted one on the top of the other. On the highest tower, reached by an ascent which wound about all the rest, there stood a spacious temple, and in the temple a great bed, magnificently draped and cushioned, with a golden table beside it. In the temple no image was to be

seen, and no human being passed the night there, save a single woman, whom, according to the Chaldean priests, the god chose from among all the women of Babylon. They said that the deity himself came into the temple at night and slept in the great bed; and the woman, as a consort of the god, might have no intercourse with mortal man.

At Thebes in Egypt a woman slept in the temple of Ammon as the consort of the god, and, like the human wife of Bel at Babylon, she was said to have no commerce with a man. In Egyptian texts she is often mentioned as "the divine consort," and usually she was no less a personage than the Queen of Egypt herself. For, according to the Egyptians, their monarchs were actually begotten by the god Ammon, who assumed for the time being the form of the reigning king, and in that disguise had intercourse with the queen.

The divine procreation is carved and painted in great detail on the walls of two of the oldest temples in Egypt, those of Deir el

Bahari and Luxor; and the inscriptions attached to the paintings leave no doubt as to the meaning of the scenes.

At Athens the god of the vine, Dionysus, was annually married to the Queen, and it appears that the consummation of the divine union, as well as the espousals, was enacted at the ceremony; but whether the part of the god was played by a man or an image we do not know. We learn from Aristotle that the ceremony took place in the old official residence of the King, known as the Cattle-stall, which stood near the Prytaneum or Town-hall on the north-eastern slope of the Acropolis. The object of the marriage can

hardly have been any other than that of ensuring the fertility of the vines and other fruit-trees of which Dionysus was the god. Thus both in form and in meaning the ceremony would answer to the nuptials of the King and Queen of May.

In the great mysteries solemnised at Eleusis in the month of September the union of the sky-god Zeus with the corn-goddess Demeter appears to have been represented by the union of the hierophant with the priestess of Demeter, who acted the parts of god and goddess. But their intercourse was only dramatic or symbolical, for the hierophant had temporarily deprived himself of his virility by an application of hemlock. The torches having been extinguished, the pair descended into a murky place, while the

throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic congress, on which they believed their own salvation to

depend. After a time the hierophant reappeared, and in a blaze of light silently exhibited to the assembly a reaped ear of corn, the

fruit of the divine marriage. Then in a loud voice he proclaimed, "Queen Brimo has brought forth a sacred boy Brimos," by which

he meant, "The Mighty One has brought forth the Mighty." The corn-mother in fact had given birth to her child, the corn, and

her travail-pangs were enacted in the sacred drama. This revelation of the reaped corn appears to have been the crowning act of

the mysteries. Thus through the glamour shed round these rites by the poetry and philosophy of later ages there still looms, like a

distant landscape through a sunlit haze, a simple rustic festival designed to cover the wide Eleusinian plain with a plenteous harvest

by wedding the goddess of the corn to the sky-god, who fertilised the bare earth with genial showers. Every few years the people of

Plataea, in Boeotia, held a festival called the Little Daedala, at which they felled an oak-tree in an ancient oak forest. Out of the tree

they carved an image, and having dressed it as a bride, they set it on a bullock-cart with a bridesmaid beside it. The image seems then

to have been drawn to the bank of the river Asopus and back to the town, attended by a piping and dancing crowd. Every sixty years

the festival of the Great Daedala was celebrated by all the people of Boeotia; and at it all the images, fourteen in number, which had

accumulated at the lesser festivals, were dragged on wains in procession to the river Asopus and then to the top of Mount Cithaeron,

where they were burnt on a great pyre. The story told to explain the festivals suggests that they celebrated the marriage of Zeus to

Hera, represented by the oaken image in bridal array. In Sweden every year a life-size image of Frey, the god of fertility, both animal

and vegetable, was drawn about the country in a waggon attended by a beautiful girl who was called the god's wife. She acted also as

his priestess in his great temple at Upsala. Wherever the waggon came with the image of the god and his blooming young bride, the

people crowded to meet them and offered sacrifices for a fruitful year.

Thus the custom of marrying gods either to images or to human beings was widespread among the nations of antiquity. The ideas on which such a custom is based are too crude to allow us to doubt that the civilised Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks inherited

it from their barbarous or savage forefathers. This presumption is strengthened when we find rites of a similar kind in vogue among the lower races. Thus, for example, we are told that once upon a time the Wotyaks of the Malmyz district in Russia were distressed

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by a series of bad harvests. They did not know what to do, but at last concluded that their powerful but mischievious god Keremet must be angry at being unmarried. So a deputation of elders visited the Wotyaks of Cura and came to an understanding with them on the subject. Then they returned home, laid in a large stock of brandy, and having made ready a gaily decked waggon and horses, they drove in procession with bells ringing, as they do when they are fetching home a bride, to the sacred grove at Cura. There they

ate and drank merrily all night, and next morning they cut a square piece of turf in the grove and took it home with them. After that, though it fared well with the people of Malmyz, it fared ill with the people of Cura; for in Malmyz the bread was good, but in Cura it was bad. Hence the men of Cura who had consented to the marriage were blamed and roughly handled by their indignant fellow-vil- lagers. "What they meant by this marriage ceremony," says the writer who reports it, "it is not easy to imagine. Perhaps, as Bechterew thinks, they meant to marry Keremet to the kindly and fruitful Mukylcin, the Earth-wife, in order that she might influence him for good." When wells are dug in Bengal, a wooden image of a god is made and married to the goddess of water.

Often the bride destined for the god is not a log or a cloud, but a living woman of flesh and blood. The Indians of a village in Peru have been known to marry a beautiful girl, about fourteen years of age, to a stone shaped like a human being, which they regarded

as a god (huaca). All the villagers took part in the marriage ceremony, which lasted three days, and was attended with much revelry. The girl thereafter remained a virgin and sacrificed to the idol for the people. They showed her the utmost reverence and deemed her divine. Every year about the middle of March, when the season for fishing with the dragnet began, the Algonquins and Hurons married their nets to two young girls, aged six or seven. At the wedding feast the net was placed between the two maidens, and was

exhorted to take courage and catch many fish. The reason for choosing the brides so young was to make sure that they were virgins. The origin of the custom is said to have been this. One year, when the fishing season came round, the Algonquins cast their nets as usual, but took nothing. Surprised at their want of success, they did not know what to make of it, till the soul or genius (oki) of the net appeared to them in the likeness of a tall well-built man, who said to them in a great passion, "I have lost my wife and I cannot find one who has known no other man but me; that is why you do not succeed, and why you never will succeed till you give me satisfaction on this head." So the Algonquins held a council and resolved to appease the spirit of the net by marrying him to two

such very young girls that he could have no ground of complaint on that score for the future. They did so, and the fishing turned out all that could be wished. The thing got wind among their neighbours the Hurons, and they adopted the custom. A share of the catch was always given to the families of the two girls who acted as brides of the net for the year.

The Oraons of Bengal worship the Earth as a goddess, and annually celebrate her marriage with the Sun-god Dharme at the time when the sa l tree is in blossom. The ceremony is as follows. All bathe, then the men repair to the sacred grove (sarna), while the women assemble at the house of the village priest. After sacrificing some fowls to the Sun-god and the demon of the grove, the men eat and drink. "The priest is then carried back to the village on the shoulders of a strong man. Near the village the women meet the men and wash their feet. With beating of drums and singing, dancing, and jumping, all proceed to the priest's house, which has been decorated with leaves and flowers. Then the usual form of marriage is performed between the priest and his wife, symbolising the supposed union between Sun and Earth. After the ceremony all eat and drink and make merry; they dance and sing obscene songs, and finally indulge in the vilest orgies. The object is to move the mother earth to become fruitful." Thus the Sacred Marriage of the Sun and Earth, personated by the priest and his wife, is celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility of the ground; and for the same

purpose, on the principle of homoeopathic magic, the people indulge in licentious orgy.

It deserves to be remarked that the supernatural being to whom women are married is often a god or spirit of water. Thus Mukasa, the god of the Victoria Nyanza lake, who was propitiated by the Baganda every time they undertook a long voyage, had virgins provided for him to serve as his wives. Like the Vestals they were bound to chastity, but unlike the Vestals they seem to have been often unfaithful. The custom lasted until Mwanga was converted to Christianity. The Akikuyu of British East Africa worship the snake of

a certain river, and at intervals of several years they marry the snake-god to women, but especially to young girls. For this purpose huts are built by order of the medicine-men, who there consummate the sacred marriage with the credulous female devotees. If the girls do not repair to the huts of their own accord in sufficient numbers, they are seized and dragged thither to the embraces of the deity. The offspring of these mystic unions appears to be fathered on God (ngai); certainly there are children among the Akikuyu who pass for children of God. It is said that once, when the inhabitants of Cayeli in Buru--an East Indian island--were threatened with destruction by a swarm of crocodiles, they ascribed the misfortune to a passion which the prince of the crocodiles had

conceived for a certain girl. Accordingly, they compelled the damsel's father to dress her in bridal array and deliver her over to the clutches of her crocodile lover.

A usage of the same sort is reported to have prevailed in the Maldive Islands before the conversion of the inhabitants to Islam. The

famous Arab traveller Ibn Batutah has described the custom and the manner in which it came to an end. He was assured by several

trustworthy natives, whose names he gives, that when the people of the islands were idolaters there appeared to them every month

an evil spirit among the jinn, who came from across the sea in the likeness of a ship full of burning lamps. The wont of the inhabit-

ants, as soon as they perceived him, was to take a young virgin, and, having adorned her, to lead her to a heathen temple that stood

on the shore, with a window looking out to sea. There they left the damsel for the night, and when they came back in the morning

they found her a maid no more, and dead. Every month they drew lots, and he upon whom the lot fell gave up his daughter to the

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jinnee of the sea. The last of the maidens thus offered to the demon was rescued by a pious Berber, who by reciting the Koran suc-

ceeded in driving the jinnee back into the sea.

Ibn Batutah's narrative of the demon lover and his mortal brides closely resembles a well-known type of folk-tale, of which ver-

sions have been found from Japan and Annam in the East to Senegambia, Scandinavia, and Scotland in the West. The story varies in details from people to people, but as commonly told it runs thus. A certain country is infested by a many-headed serpent, dragon, or

other monster, which would destroy the whole people if a human victim, generally a virgin, were not delivered up to him periodically.

Many victims have perished, and at last it has fallen to the lot of the king's own daughter to be sacrificed. She is exposed to the mon-

ster, but the hero of the tale, generally a young man of humble birth, interposes in her behalf, slays the monster, and receives the

hand of the princess as his reward. In many of the tales the monster, who is sometimes described as a serpent, inhabits the water of

a sea, a lake, or a fountain. In other versions he is a serpent or dragon who takes possession of the springs of water, and only allows

the water to flow or the people to make use of it on condition of receiving a human victim.

It would probably be a mistake to dismiss all these tales as pure inventions of the story-teller. Rather we may suppose that they reflect a real custom of sacrificing girls or women to be the wives of waterspirits, who are very often conceived as great serpents or

dragons.

XIII. The Kings of Rome and Alba

1. Numa and Egeria

FROM THE FOREGOING survey of custom and legend we may infer that the sacred marriage of the powers both of vegeta-

tion and of water has been celebrated by many peoples for the sake of promoting the fertility of the earth, on which the life of

animals and men ultimately depends, and that in such rites the part of the divine bridegroom or bride is often sustained by a man or

woman. The evidence may, therefore, lend some countenance to the conjecture that in the sacred grove at Nemi, where the powers

of vegetation and of water manifested themselves in the fair forms of shady woods, tumbling cascades, and glassy lake, a marriage

like that of our King and Queen of May was annually celebrated between the mortal King of the Wood and the immortal Queen of

the Wood, Diana. In this connexion an important figure in the grove was the water-nymph Egeria, who was worshipped by pregnant

women because she, like Diana, could grant them an easy delivery. From this it seems fairly safe to conclude that, like many other

springs, the water of Egeria was credited with a power of facilitating conception as well as delivery. The votive offerings found on

the spot, which clearly refer to the begetting of children, may possibly have been dedicated to Egeria rather than to Diana, or per-

haps we should rather say that the water-nymph Egeria is only another form of the great nature-goddess Diana herself, the mistress

of sounding rivers as well as of umbrageous woods, who had her home by the lake and her mirror in its calm waters, and whose

Greek counterpart Artemis loved to haunt meres and springs. The identification of Egeria with Diana is confirmed by a statement

of Plutarch that Egeria was one of the oak-nymphs whom the Romans believed to preside over every green oak-grove; for, while

Diana was a goddess of the woodlands in general, she appears to have been intimately associated with oaks in particular, especially at

her sacred grove of Nemi. Perhaps, then, Egeria was the fairy of a spring that flowed from the roots of a sacred oak. Such a spring

is said to have gushed from the foot of the great oak at Dodona, and from its murmurous flow the priestess drew oracles. Among

the Greeks a draught of water from certain sacred springs or wells was supposed to confer prophetic powers. This would explain the

more than mortal wisdom with which, according to tradition, Egeria inspired her royal husband or lover Numa. When we remember

how very often in early society the king is held responsible for the fall of rain and the fruitfulness of the earth, it seems hardly rash

to conjecture that in the legend of the nuptials of Numa and Egeria we have a reminiscence of a sacred marriage which the old

Roman kings regularly contracted with a goddess of vegetation and water for the purpose of enabling him to discharge his divine

or magical functions. In such a rite the part of the goddess might be played either by an image or a woman, and if by a woman,

probably by the Queen. If there is any truth in this conjecture, we may suppose that the King and Queen of Rome masqueraded as

god and goddess at their marriage, exactly as the King and Queen of Egypt appear to have done. The legend of Numa and Egeria

points to a sacred grove rather than to a house as the scene of the nuptial union, which, like the marriage of the King and Queen of

May, or of the vine-god and the Queen of Athens, may have been annually celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility not only of

the earth but of man and beast. Now, according to some accounts, the scene of the marriage was no other than the sacred grove of

Nemi, and on quite independent grounds we have been led to suppose that in that same grove the King of the Wood was wedded

to Diana. The convergence of the two distinct lines of enquiry suggests that the legendary union of the Roman king with Egeria

may have been a reflection or duplicate of the union of the King of the Wood with Egeria or her double Diana. This does not imply

that the Roman kings ever served as Kings of the Wood in the Arician grove, but only that they may originally have been invested

with a sacred character of the same general kind, and may have held office on similar terms. To be more explicit, it is possible that

they reigned, not by right of birth, but in virtue of their supposed divinity as representatives or embodiments of a god, and that as

such they mated with a goddess, and had to prove their fitness from time to time to discharge their divine functions by engaging in a

severe bodily struggle, which may often have proved fatal to them, leaving the crown to their victorious adversary. Our knowledge of

the Roman kingship is far too scanty to allow us to affirm any one of these propositions with confidence; but at least there are some

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scattered hints or indications of a similarity in all these respects between the priests of Nemi and the kings of Rome, or perhaps rather between their remote predecessors in the dark ages which preceded the dawn of legend.

2. The King as Jupiter

IN THE FIRST place, then, it would seem that the Roman king personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself. For down to imperial times victorious generals celebrating a triumph, and magistrates presiding at the games in the Circus, wore the costume of Jupiter, which was borrowed for the occasion from his great temple on the Capitol; and it has been held with a high degree of probability

both by ancients and moderns that in so doing they copied the traditionary attire and insignia of the Roman kings. They rode a

chariot drawn by four laurel-crowned horses through the city, where every one else went on foot: they wore purple robes embroi-

dered or spangled with gold: in the right hand they bore a branch of laurel, and in the left hand an ivory sceptre topped with an

eagle: a wreath of laurel crowned their brows: their face was reddened with vermilion; and over their head a slave held a heavy crown

of massy gold fashioned in the likeness of oak leaves. In this attire the assimilation of the man to the god comes out above all in

the eagle-topped sceptre, the oaken crown, and the reddened face. For the eagle was the bird of Jove, the oak was his sacred tree,

and the face of his image standing in his four-horse chariot on the Capitol was in like manner regularly dyed red on festivals; indeed,

so important was it deemed to keep the divine features properly rouged that one of the first duties of the censors was to contract

for having this done. As the triumphal procession always ended in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, it was peculiarly appropri-

ate that the head of the victor should be graced by a crown of oak leaves, for not only was every oak consecrated to Jupiter, but the

Capitoline temple of the god was said to have been built by Romulus beside a sacred oak, venerated by shepherds, to which the king

attached the spoils won by him from the enemy's general in battle. We are expressly told that the oak crown was sacred to Capitoline

Jupiter; a passage of Ovid proves that it was regarded as the god's special emblem.

According to a tradition which we have no reason to reject, Rome was founded by settlers from Alba Longa, a city situated on

the slope of the Alban hills, overlooking the lake and the Campagna. Hence if the Roman kings claimed to be representatives or embodiments of Jupiter, the god of the sky, of the thunder, and of the oak, it is natural to suppose that the kings of Alba, from

whom the founder of Rome traced his descent, may have set up the same claim before them. Now the Alban dynasty bore the name

of Silvii or Wood, and it can hardly be without significance that in the vision of the historic glories of Rome revealed to Aeneas in

the underworld, Virgil, an antiquary as well as a poet, should represent all the line of Silvii as crowned with oak. A chaplet of oak

leaves would thus seem to have been part of the insignia of the old kings of Alba Longa as of their successors the kings of Rome;

in both cases it marked the monarch as the human representative of the oak-god. The Roman annals record that one of the kings of

Alba, Romulus, Remulus, or Amulius Silvius by name, set up for being a god in his own person, the equal or superior of Jupiter. To

support his pretensions and overawe his subjects, he constructed machines whereby he mimicked the clap of thunder and the flash

of lightning. Diodorus relates that in the season of fruitage, when thunder is loud and frequent, the king commanded his soldiers

to drown the roar of heaven's artillery by clashing their swords against their shields. But he paid the penalty of his impiety, for he

perished, he and his house, struck by a thunderbolt in the midst of a dreadful storm. Swollen by the rain, the Alban lake rose in flood

and drowned his palace. But still, says an ancient historian, when the water is low and the surface unruffled by a breeze, you may see

the ruins of the palace at the bottom of the clear lake. Taken along with the similar story of Salmoneus, king of Elis, this legend

points to a real custom observed by the early kings of Greece and Italy, who, like their fellows in Africa down to modern times, may

have been expected to produce rain and thunder for the good of the crops. The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of

drawing down lightning from the sky. Mock thunder, we know, has been made by various peoples as a raincharm in modern times;

why should it not have been made by kings in antiquity?

Thus, if the kings of Alba and Rome imitated Jupiter as god of the oak by wearing a crown of oak leaves, they seem also to have copied him in his character of a weather-god by pretending to make thunder and lightning. And if they did so, it is probable that, like Jupiter in heaven and many kings on earth, they also acted as public rain-makers, wringing showers from the dark sky by their enchantments whenever the parched earth cried out for the refreshing moisture. At Rome the sluices of heaven were opened by means of a sacred stone, and the ceremony appears to have formed part of the ritual of Jupiter Elicius, the god who elicits from the clouds the flashing lightning and the dripping rain. And who so well fitted to perform the ceremony as the king, the living representative of the sky-god?

If the kings of Rome aped Capitoline Jove, their predecessors the kings of Alba probably laid themselves out to mimic the great

Latian Jupiter, who had his seat above the city on the summit of the Alban Mountain. Latinus, the legendary ancestor of the dynasty,

was said to have been changed into Latian Jupiter after vanishing from the world in the mysterious fashion characteristic of the old

Latin kings. The sanctuary of the god on the top of the mountain was the religious centre of the Latin League, as Alba was its politi-

cal capital till Rome wrested the supremacy from its ancient rival. Apparently no temple, in our sense of the word, was ever erected

to Jupiter on this his holy mountain; as god of the sky and thunder he appropriately received the homage of his worshippers in the

open air. The massive wall, of which some remains still enclose the old garden of the Passionist monastery, seems to have been part

of the sacred precinct which Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, marked out for the solemn annual assembly of the Latin

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League. The god's oldest sanctuary on this airy mountain-top was a grove; and bearing in mind not merely the special consecration of the oak to Jupiter, but also the traditional oak crown of the Alban kings and the analogy of the Capitoline Jupiter at Rome, we may suppose that the trees in the grove were oaks. We know that in antiquity Mount Algidus, an outlying group of the Alban hills, was covered with dark forests of oak; and among the tribes who belonged to the Latin League in the earliest days, and were entitled to share the flesh of the white bull sacrificed on the Alban Mount, there was one whose members styled themselves the Men of the Oak, doubtless on account of the woods among which they dwelt.

But we should err if we pictured to ourselves the country as covered in historical times with an unbroken forest of oaks. Theo-

phrastus has left us a description of the woods of Latium as they were in the fourth century before Christ. He says: "The land of

the Latins is all moist. The plains produce laurels, myrtles, and wonderful beeches; for they fell trees of such a size that a single stem

suffices for the keel of a Tyrrhenian ship. Pines and firs grow in the mountains. What they call the land of Circe is a lofty headland

thickly wooded with oak, myrtle, and luxuriant laurels. The natives say that Circe dwelt there, and they show the grave of Elpenor,

from which grow myrtles such as wreaths are made of, whereas the other myrtle-trees are tall." Thus the prospect from the top

of the Alban Mount in the early days of Rome must have been very different in some respects from what it is to-day. The purple

Apennines, indeed, in their eternal calm on the one hand, and the shining Mediterranean in its eternal unrest on the other, no doubt

looked then much as they look now, whether bathed in sunshine, or chequered by the fleeting shadows of clouds; but instead of the

desolate brown expanse of the fever-stricken Campagna, spanned by its long lines of ruined aqueducts, like the broken arches of

the bridge in the vision of Mirza, the eye must have ranged over woodlands that stretched away, mile after mile, on all sides, till their

varied hues of green or autumnal scarlet and gold melted insensibly into the blue of the distant mountains and sea.

But Jupiter did not reign alone on the top of his holy mountain. He had his consort with him, the goddess Juno, who was worshipped here under the same title, Moneta, as on the Capitol at Rome. As the oak crown was sacred to Jupiter and Juno on the Capitol, so we may suppose it was on the Alban Mount, from which the Capitoline worship was derived. Thus the oak-god would have his oak-goddess in the sacred oak grove. So at Dodona the oak-god Zeus was coupled with Dione, whose very name is only a dialectically different form of Juno; and so on the top of Mount Cithaeron, as we have seen, he appears to have been periodically wedded to an oaken image of Hera. It is probable, though it cannot be positively proved, that the sacred marriage of Jupiter and

Juno was annually celebrated by all the peoples of the Latin stock in the month which they named after the goddess, the midsummer

month of June.

If at any time of the year the Romans celebrated the sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno, as the Greeks commonly celebrated the

corresponding marriage of Zeus and Hera, we may suppose that under the Republic the ceremony was either performed over images

of the divine pair or acted by the Flamen Dialis and his wife the Flaminica. For the Flamen Dialis was the priest of Jove; indeed,

ancient and modern writers have regarded him, with much probability, as a living image of Jupiter, a human embodiment of the sky-

god. In earlier times the Roman king, as representative of Jupiter, would naturally play the part of the heavenly bridegroom at the sa-

cred marriage, while his queen would figure as the heavenly bride, just as in Egypt the king and queen masqueraded in the character

of deities, and as at Athens the queen annually wedded the vine-god Dionysus. That the Roman king and queen should act the parts

of Jupiter and Juno would seem all the more natural because these deities themselves bore the title of King and Queen.

Whether that was so or not, the legend of Numa and Egeria appears to embody a reminiscence of a time when the priestly king himself played the part of the divine bridegroom; and as we have seen reason to suppose that the Roman kings personated the oak-god, while Egeria is expressly said to have been an oak-nymph, the story of their union in the sacred grove raises a presumption that at Rome in the regal period a ceremony was periodically performed exactly analogous to that which was annually celebrated at Ath-ens down to the time of Aristotle. The marriage of the King of Rome to the oak-goddess, like the wedding of the vine-god to the Queen of Athens, must have been intended to quicken the growth of vegetation by homoeopathic magic. Of the two forms of the rite we can hardly doubt that the Roman was the older, and that long before the northern invaders met with the vine on the shores

of the Mediterranean their forefathers had married the tree-god to the tree-goddess in the vast oak forests of Central and Northern Europe. In the England of our day the forests have mostly disappeared, yet still on many a village green and in many a country lane a faded image of the sacred marriage lingers in the rustic pageantry of May Day.

XIV. The Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium

IN REGARD to the Roman king, whose priestly functions were inherited by his successor the king of the Sacred Rites, the forego-

ing discussion has led us to the following conclusions. He represented and indeed personated Jupiter, the great god of the sky, the

thunder, and the oak, and in that character made rain, thunder, and lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more kings of

the weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not only mimicked the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of

divinity, but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria, who appears to have been merely a local form of Diana in her character of

a goddess of woods, of waters, and of childbirth. All these conclusions, which we have reached mainly by a consideration of the

Roman evidence, may with great probability be applied to the other Latin communities. They too probably had of old their divine or

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priestly kings, who transmitted their religious functions, without their civil powers, to their successors the Kings of the Sacred Rites.

But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the kingdom among the old Latin tribes? According to tradition, there were in all eight kings of Rome, and with regard to the five last of them, at all events, we can hardly doubt that they actually sat on the throne, and that the traditional history of their reigns is, in its main outlines, correct. Now it is very remarkable that though the first king of Rome, Romulus, is said to have been descended from the royal house of Alba, in which the kingship is represented as hereditary in the male line, not one of the Roman kings was immediately succeeded by his son on the throne. Yet several left sons or grandsons behind them. On the other hand, one of them was descended from a former king through his mother, not through his

father, and three of the kings, namely Tatius, the elder Tarquin, and Servius Tullius, were succeeded by their sons-in-law, who were all either foreigners or of foreign descent. This suggests that the right to the kingship was transmitted in the female line, and was actually exercised by foreigners who married the royal princesses. To put it in technical language, the succession to the kingship at Rome and probably in Latium generally would seem to have been determined by certain rules which have moulded early society in many parts of the world, namely exogamy, beena marriage, and female kinship or mother-kin. Exogamy is the rule which obliges a man to marry a woman of a different clan from his own: beena marriage is the rule that he must leave the home of his birth and live with

his wife's people; and female kinship or mother-kin is the system of tracing relationship and transmitting the family name through women instead of through men. If these principles regulated descent of the kingship among the ancient Latins, the state of things in this respect would be somewhat as follows. The political and religious centre of each community would be the perpetual fire on the king's hearth tended by Vestal Virgins of the royal clan. The king would be a man of another clan, perhaps of another town or even of another race, who had married a daughter of his predecessor and received the kingdom with her. The children whom he had by her would inherit their mother's name, not his; the daughters would remain at home; the sons, when they grew up, would go

away into the world, marry, and settle in their wives' country, whether as kings or commoners. Of the daughters who stayed at home, some or all would be dedicated as Vestal Virgins for a longer or shorter time to the service of the fire on the hearth, and one of

them would in time become the consort of her father's successor.

This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and natural way some obscure features in the traditional history of the Latin kingship. Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more intelligible. For, stripped of their fabulous element, tales of this sort mean no more than that a woman has been gotten with child

by a man unknown; and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is more easily compatible with a system of kinship which ignores paternity than with one which makes it all-important. If at the birth of the Latin kings their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women

reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution. In our

own country traces of them long survived in the practices of May Day and Whitsuntide, if not of Christmas. Children born of

more or less promiscuous intercourse which characterises festivals of this kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom the

particular festival was dedicated.

In this connexion it may be significant that a festival of jollity and drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves at Rome on Midsummer Day, and that the festival was specially associated with the fireborn King Servius Tullius, being held in honour of Fortuna, the goddess who loved Servius as Egeria loved Numa. The popular merrymakings at this season included foot-races and boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in which young folk sat quaffing wine. The festival appears to have been a sort of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which fell at Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall learn later on, the great Midsummer festival has been above all a festival of lovers and of fire; one of its principal features is the pairing of sweethearts, who leap over the bonfires hand in hand or throw flowers across the flames to each other. And many omens of love and marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this mystic season. It is the time of the roses and of love. Yet the innocence

and beauty of such festivals in modern times ought not to blind us to the likelihood that in earlier days they were marked by coarser features, which were probably of the essence of the rites. Indeed, among the rude Esthonian peasantry these features seem to have lingered down to our own generation, if not to the present day. One other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer deserves to be specially noticed. The custom of rowing in flower-decked boats on the river on this day proves that it was to some extent a wa-ter festival; and water has always, down to modern times, played a conspicuous part in the rites of Midsummer Day, which explains why the Church, in throwing its cloak over the old heathen festival, chose to dedicate it to St. John the Baptist.

The hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten at an annual festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture, though the

traditional birth of Numa at the festival of the Parilia, when shepherds leaped across the spring bonfires, as lovers leap across the

Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty as to

their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the cloudland of

fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants, stran-

gers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be natural enough that the people should forget their lineage, and forgetting it

should provide them with another, which made up in lustre what it lacked in truth. The final apotheosis, which represented the kings

not merely as sprung from gods but as themselves deities incarnate, would be much facilitated if in their lifetime, as we have seen

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reason to think, they had actually laid claim to divinity.

If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at home and received as their consorts men of another stock, and often of another country, who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage with a native princess, we can understand not only why foreigners wore the crown at Rome, but also why foreign names occur in the list of the Alban kings. In a state of society where nobility is reckoned only through women--in other words, where descent through the mother is everything, and descent through the father

is nothing--no objection will be felt to uniting girls of the highest rank to men of humble birth, even to aliens or slaves, provided that in themselves the men appear to be suitable mates. What really matters is that the royal stock, on which the prosperity and even the existence of the people is supposed to depend, should be perpetuated in a vigorous and efficient form, and for this purpose it

is necessary that the women of the royal family should bear children to men who are physically and mentally fit, according to the

standard of early society, to discharge the important duty of procreation. Thus the personal qualities of the kings at this stage of

social evolution are deemed of vital importance. If they, like their consorts, are of royal and divine descent, so much the better; but

it is not essential that they should be so.

At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the throne by marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most ancient

kings of Athens, namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to have married the daughters of their predecessors. This tradition is to a

certain extent confirmed by evidence, pointing to the conclusion that at Athens male kinship was preceded by female kinship.

Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the royal families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons

to marry princesses and reign among their wives' people, it will follow that the male descendants would reign in successive genera-

tions over different kingdoms. Now this seems to have happened both in ancient Greece and in ancient Sweden; from which we

may legitimately infer that it was a custom practised by more than one branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. Many Greek traditions

relate how a prince left his native land, and going to a far country married the king's daughter and succeeded to the kingdom. Various

reasons are assigned by ancient Greek writers for these migrations of the princes. A common one is that the king's son had been

banished for murder. This would explain very well why he fled his own land, but it is no reason at all why he should become king

of another. We may suspect that such reasons are afterthoughts devised by writers, who, accustomed to the rule that a son should

succeed to his father's property and kingdom, were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of kings' sons who quitted the

land of their birth to reign over a foreign kingdom. In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs. For we read of

daughters' husbands who received a share of the kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law, even when these fathers-in-law had sons of

their own; in particular, during the five generations which preceded Harold the Fair-haired, male members of the Ynglingar family,

which is said to have come from Sweden, are reported in the Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norwegian Kings to have obtained at

least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the daughters of the local kings.

Thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples, at a certain stage of their social evolution, it has been customary to regard women and not men as the channels in which royal blood flows, and to bestow the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of another family, and often of another country, who marries one of the princesses and reigns over his wife's people. A common type of popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a strange land, wins the hand of the king's daughter and with her the half or the whole of the kingdom, may well be a reminiscence of a real custom.

Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that the kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary queen of Scotland. "Indeed she was a queen," says Hermutrude, "and but that her sex gainsaid it, might be deemed a king; nay (and this is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her sceptre and her hand went together." The statement is all the more significant because it appears to reflect the actual practice of the Pictish kings. We know from the testimony of Bede that, whenever a doubt arose as to the succession, the Picts chose

their kings from the female rather than the male line.

The personal qualities which recommended a man for a royal alliance and succession to the throne would naturally vary according to

the popular ideas of the time and the character of the king or his substitute, but it is reasonable to suppose that among them in early

society physical strength and beauty would hold a prominent place.

Sometimes apparently the right to the hand of the princess and to the throne has been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Liby-

ans awarded the kingdom to the fleetest runner. Amongst the old Prussians, candidates for nobility raced on horseback to the king,

and the one who reached him first was ennobled. According to tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by Endymion, who

set his sons to run a race for the kingdom. His tomb was said to be at the point of the racecourse from which the runners started.

The famous story of Pelops and Hippodamia is perhaps only another version of the legend that the first races at Olympia were run

for no less a prize than a kingdom.

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These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various peoples, though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or pretence. Thus "there is one race, called the 'Love Chase,' which may be considered a part of the form of marriage among the Kirghiz. In this the bride, armed with a formidable whip, mounts a

fleet horse, and is pursued by all the young men who make any pretensions to her hand. She will be given as a prize to the one who catches her, but she has the right, besides urging on her horse to the utmost, to use her whip, often with no mean force, to keep off those lovers who are unwelcome to her, and she will probably favour the one whom she has already chosen in her heart." The race

for the bride is found also among the Koryaks of Northeastern Asia. It takes place in a large tent, round which many separate com-

partments called pologs are arranged in a continuous circle. The girl gets a start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through

all the compartments without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of the encampment place every obstacle in the man's

way, tripping him up, belabouring him with switches, and so forth, so that he has little chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes

it and waits for him. Similar customs appear to have been practised by all the Teutonic peoples; for the German, Anglo-Saxon, and

Norse languages possess in common a word for marriage which means simply bride-race. Moreover, traces of the custom survived

into modern times.

Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and especially a princess, has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic contest.

There would be no reason, therefore, for surprise if the Roman kings, before bestowing their daughters in marriage, should have

resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal qualities of their future sons-in-law and successors. If my theory is correct, the

Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine consort, and in the character of these divinities went through the annual

ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus

they did what in more northern lands we may suppose the King and Queen of May were believed to do in days of old. Now we

have seen that the right to play the part of the King of May and to wed the Queen of May has sometimes been determined by an

athletic contest, particularly by a race. This may have been a relic of an old marriage custom of the sort we have examined, a custom

designed to test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony. Such a test might reasonably be applied with peculiar rigour to the king

in order to ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate him for the performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on

which, even more than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the safety and prosperity of the community were believed to

depend. And it would be natural to require of him that from time to time he should submit himself afresh to the same ordeal for the

sake of publicly demonstrating that he was still equal to the discharge of his high calling. A relic of that test perhaps survived in the

ceremony known as the Flight of the King (regifugium), which continued to be annually observed at Rome down to imperial times.

On the twenty-fourth day of February a sacrifice used to be offered in the Comitium, and when it was over the King of the Sacred

Rites fled from the Forum. We may conjecture that the Flight of the King was originally a race for an annual kingship, which may

have been awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner. At the end of the year the king might run again for a second term of office; and

so on, until he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain. In this way what had once been a race would tend to assume the character

of a flight and a pursuit. The king would be given a start; he ran and his competitors ran after him, and if he were overtaken he had

to yield the crown and perhaps his life to the lightest of foot among them. In time a man of masterful character might succeed in

seating himself permanently on the throne and reducing the annual race or flight to the empty form which it seems always to have

been within historical times. The rite was sometimes interpreted as a commemoration of the expulsion of the kings from Rome; but

this appears to have been a mere afterthought devised to explain a ceremony of which the old meaning was forgotten. It is far more

likely that in acting thus the King of the Sacred Rites was merely keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had been

annually observed by his predecessors the kings. What the original intention of the rite may have been must probably always remain

more or less a matter of conjecture. The present explanation is suggested with a full sense of the difficulty and obscurity in which

the subject is involved.

Thus if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman king was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office award-

ed, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride as a god and

goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. If I am right in supposing that in

very early times the old Latin kings personated a god and were regularly put to death in that character, we can better understand the

mysterious or violent ends to which so many of them are said to have come. We have seen that, according to tradition, one of the

kings of Alba was killed by a thunderbolt for impiously mimicking the thunder of Jupiter. Romulus is said to have vanished mysteri-

ously like Aeneas, or to have been cut to pieces by the patricians whom he had offended, and the seventh of July, the day on which

he perished, was a festival which bore some resemblance to the Saturnalia. For on that day the female slaves were allowed to take cer-

tain remarkable liberties. They dressed up as free women in the attire of matrons and maids, and in this guise they went forth from