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