Chapter 25. Temporary Kings.
IN SOME places the modified form of the old custom of regicide
which appears to have prevailed at Babylon has been further
softened down. The king still abdicates annually for a short time
and his place is filled by a more or less nominal sovereign; but at
the close of his short reign the latter is no longer killed, though
sometimes a mock execution still survives as a memorial of the time
when he was actually put to death. To take examples. In the month
of Méac (February) the king of Cambodia annually abdicated for
three days. During this time he performed no act of authority, he did
not touch the seals, he did not even receive the revenues which
fell due. In his stead there reigned a temporary king called Sdach
Méac, that is, King February. The office of temporary king was
hereditary in a family distantly connected with the royal house, the
sons succeeding the fathers and the younger brothers the elder
brothers just as in the succession to the real sovereignty. On a
favourable day fixed by the astrologers the temporary king was
conducted by the mandarins in triumphal procession. He rode one
of the royal elephants, seated in the royal palanquin, and escorted
by soldiers who, dressed in appropriate costumes, represented the
neighbouring peoples of Siam, Annam, Laos, and so on. In place
of the golden crown he wore a peaked white cap, and his regalia,
instead of being of gold encrusted with diamonds, were of rough
wood. After paying homage to the real king, from whom he received
the sovereignty for three days, together with all the revenues
accruing during that time (though this last custom has been omitted
for some time), he moved in procession round the palace and
through the streets of the capital. On the third day, after the usual
procession, the temporary king gave orders that the elephants
should trample under foot the "mountain of rice," which was a
scaffold of bamboo surrounded by sheaves of rice. The people
gathered up the rice, each man taking home a little with him to
secure a good harvest. Some of it was also taken to the king, who
had it cooked and presented to the monks. 1
In Siam on the sixth day of the moon in the sixth month (the end of
April) a temporary king is appointed, who for three days enjoys the
royal prerogatives, the real king remaining shut up in his palace.
This temporary king sends his numerous satellites in all directions
to seize and confiscate whatever they can find in the bazaar and
open shops; even the ships and junks which arrive in harbour
during the three days are forfeited to him and must be redeemed.
He goes to a field in the middle of the city, whither they bring a
gilded plough drawn by gaily-decked oxen. After the plough has
been anointed and the oxen rubbed with incense, the mock king
traces nine furrows with the plough, followed by aged dames of the
palace scattering the first seed of the season. As soon as the nine
furrows are drawn, the crowd of spectators rushes in and scrambles
for the seed which has just been sown, believing that, mixed with
the seed-rice, it will ensure a plentiful crop. Then the oxen are
unyoked, and rice, maize, sesame, sago, bananas, sugar-cane,
melons, and so on, are set before them; whatever they eat first will,
it is thought, be dear in the year following, though some people
interpret the omen in the opposite sense. During this time the
temporary king stands leaning against a tree with his right foot
resting on his left knee. From standing thus on one foot he is
popularly known as King Hop; but his official title is Phaya
Phollathep "Lord of the Heavenly Hosts." He is a sort of Minister of
Agriculture; all disputes about fields, rice, and so forth, are referred
to him. There is moreover another ceremony in which he
personates the king. It takes place in the second month (which falls
in the cold season) and lasts three days. He is conducted in
procession to an open place opposite the Temple of the Brahmans,
where there are a number of poles dressed like May-poles, upon
which the Brahmans swing. All the while that they swing and
dance, the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has to stand on one foot
upon a seat which is made of bricks plastered over, covered with a
white cloth, and hung with tapestry. He is supported by a wooden
frame with a gilt canopy, and two Brahmans stand one on each
side of him. The dancing Brahmans carry buffalo horns with which
they draw water from a large copper caldron and sprinkle it on the
spectators; this is supposed to bring good luck, causing the people
to dwell in peace and quiet, health and prosperity. The time during
which the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has to stand on one foot is
about three hours. This is thought "to prove the dispositions of the
Devattas and spirits." If he lets his foot down "he is liable to forfeit
his property and have his family enslaved by the king, as it is
believed to be a bad omen, portending destruction to the state, and
instability to the throne. But if he stand firm he is believed to have
gained a victory over evil spirits, and he has moreover the
privilege, ostensibly at least, of seizing any ship which may enter
the harbour during these three days, and taking its contents, and
also of entering any open shop in the town and carrying away what
he chooses." 2
Such were the duties and privileges of the Siamese King Hop
down to about the middle of the nineteenth century or later. Under
the reign of the late enlightened monarch this quaint personage
was to some extent both shorn of the glories and relieved of the
burden of his office. He still watches, as of old, the Brahmans
rushing through the air in a swing suspended between two tall
masts, each some ninety feet high; but he is allowed to sit instead
of stand, and, although public opinion still expects him to keep his
right foot on his left knee during the whole of the ceremony, he
would incur no legal penalty were he, to the great chagrin of the
people, to put his weary foot to the ground. Other signs, too, tell of
the invasion of the East by the ideas and civilisation of the West.
The thoroughfares that lead to the scene of the performance are
blocked with carriages: lamp-posts and telegraph posts, to which
eager spectators cling like monkeys, rise above the dense crowd;
and, while a tatterdemalion band of the old style, in gaudy garb of
vermilion and yellow, bangs and tootles away on drums and
trumpets of an antique pattern, the procession of barefooted
soldiers in brilliant uniforms steps briskly along to the lively strains
of a modern military band playing "Marching through Georgia." 3
On the first day of the sixth month, which was regarded as the
beginning of the year, the king and people of Samarcand used to
put on new clothes and cut their hair and beards. Then they
repaired to a forest near the capital where they shot arrows on
horseback for seven days. On the last day the target was a gold
coin, and he who hit it had the right to be king for one day. In
Upper Egypt on the first day of the solar year by Coptic reckoning,
that is, on the tenth of September, when the Nile has generally
reached its highest point, the regular government is suspended for
three days and every town chooses its own ruler. This temporary
lord wears a sort of tall fool's cap and a long flaxen beard, and is
enveloped in a strange mantle. With a wand of office in his hand
and attended by men disguised as scribes, executioners, and so
forth, he proceeds to the Governor's house. The latter allows
himself to be deposed; and the mock king, mounting the throne,
holds a tribunal, to the decisions of which even the governor and
his officials must bow. After three days the mock king is condemned
to death; the envelope or shell in which he was encased is
committed to the flames, and from its ashes the Fellah creeps forth.
The custom perhaps points to an old practice of burning a real king
in grim earnest. In Uganda the brothers of the king used to be
burned, because it was not lawful to shed the royal blood. 4
The Mohammedan students of Fez, in Morocco, are allowed to
appoint a sultan of their own, who reigns for a few weeks, and is
known as Sultan t-tulba, "the Sultan of the Scribes." This brief
authority is put up for auction and knocked down to the highest
bidder. It brings some substantial privileges with it, for the holder is
freed from taxes thenceforward, and he has the right of asking a
favour from the real sultan. That favour is seldom refused; it usually
consists in the release of a prisoner. Moreover, the agents of the
student-sultan levy fines on the shopkeepers and householders,
against whom they trump up various humorous charges. The
temporary sultan is surrounded with the pomp of a real court, and
parades the streets in state with music and shouting, while a royal
umbrella is held over his head. With the so-called fines and
free-will offerings, to which the real sultan adds a liberal supply of
provisions, the students have enough to furnish forth a magnificent
banquet; and altogether they enjoy themselves thoroughly,
indulging in all kinds of games and amusements. For the first seven
days the mock sultan remains in the college; then he goes about a
mile out of the town and encamps on the bank of the river, attended
by the students and not a few of the citizens. On the seventh day
of his stay outside the town he is visited by the real sultan, who
grants him his request and gives him seven more days to reign, so
that the reign of "the Sultan of the Scribes" nominally lasts three
weeks. But when six days of the last week have passed the mock
sultan runs back to the town by night. This temporary sultanship
always falls in spring, about the beginning of April. Its origin is said
to have been as follows. When Mulai Rasheed II. was fighting for
the throne in 1664 or 1665, a certain Jew usurped the royal
authority at Taza. But the rebellion was soon suppressed through
the loyalty and devotion of the students. To effect their purpose
they resorted to an ingenious stratagem. Forty of them caused
themselves to be packed in chests which were sent as a present to
the usurper. In the dead of night, while the unsuspecting Jew was
slumbering peacefully among the packing-cases, the lids were
stealthily raised, the brave forty crept forth, slew the usurper, and
took possession of the city in the name of the real sultan, who, to
mark his gratitude for the help thus rendered him in time of need,
conferred on the students the right of annually appointing a sultan
of their own. The narrative has all the air of a fiction devised to
explain an old custom, of which the real meaning and origin had
been forgotten. 5
A custom of annually appointing a mock king for a single day was
observed at Lostwithiel in Cornwall down to the sixteenth century.
On "little Easter Sunday" the freeholders of the town and manor
assembled together, either in person or by their deputies, and one
among them, as it fell to his lot by turn, gaily attired and gallantly
mounted, with a crown on his head, a sceptre in his hand, and a
sword borne before him, rode through the principal street to the
church, dutifully attended by all the rest on horseback. The
clergyman in his best robes received him at the churchyard stile
and conducted him to hear divine service. On leaving the church
he repaired, with the same pomp, to a house provided for his
reception. Here a feast awaited him and his suite, and being set at
the head of the table he was served on bended knees, with all the
rites due to the estate of a prince. The ceremony ended with the
dinner, and every man returned home. 6
Sometimes the temporary king occupies the throne, not annually,
but once for all at the beginning of each reign. Thus in the kingdom
of Jambi in Sumatra it is the custom that at the beginning of a new
reign a man of the people should occupy the throne and exercise
the royal prerogatives for a single day. The origin of the custom is
explained by a tradition that there were once five royal brothers,
the four elder of whom all declined the throne on the ground of
various bodily defects, leaving it to their youngest brother. But the
eldest occupied the throne for one day, and reserved for his
descendants a similar privilege at the beginning of every reign.
Thus the office of temporary king is hereditary in a family akin to the
royal house. In Bilaspur it seems to be the custom, after the death
of a Rajah, for a Brahman to eat rice out of the dead Rajah's hand,
and then to occupy the throne for a year. At the end of the year the
Brahman receives presents and is dismissed from the territory,
being forbidden apparently to return. "The idea seems to be that the
spirit of the Rájá enters into the Bráhman who eats the khir (rice
and milk) out of his hand when he is dead, as the Brahman is
apparently carefully watched during the whole year, and not
allowed to go away." The same or a similar custom is believed to
obtain among the hill states about Kangra. The custom of banishing
the Brahman who represents the king may be a substitute for putting
him to death. At the installation of a prince of Carinthia a peasant,
in whose family the office was hereditary, ascended a marble stone
which stood surrounded by meadows in a spacious valley; on his
right stood a black mother-cow, on his left a lean ugly mare. A
rustic crowd gathered about him. Then the future prince, dressed as
a peasant and carrying a shepherd's staff, drew near, attended by
courtiers and magistrates. On perceiving him the peasant called
out, "Who is this whom I see coming so proudly along?" The
people answered, "The prince of the land." The peasant was then
prevailed on to surrender the marble seat to the prince on condition
of receiving sixty pence, the cow and mare, and exemption from
taxes. But before yielding his place he gave the prince a light blow
on the cheek. 7
Some points about these temporary kings deserve to be specially
noticed before we pass to the next branch of the evidence. In the
first place, the Cambodian and Siamese examples show clearly that
it is especially the divine or magical functions of the king which are
transferred to his temporary substitute. This appears from the belief
that by keeping up his foot the temporary king of Siam gained a
victory over the evil spirits, whereas by letting it down he imperilled
the existence of the state. Again, the Cambodian ceremony of
trampling down the "mountain of rice," and the Siamese ceremony
of opening the ploughing and sowing, are charms to produce a
plentiful harvest, as appears from the belief that those who carry
home some of the trampled rice, or of the seed sown, will thereby
secure a good crop. Moreover, when the Siamese representative
of the king is guiding the plough, the people watch him anxiously,
not to see whether he drives a straight furrow, but to mark the exact
point on his leg to which the skirt of his silken robe reaches; for on
that is supposed to hang the state of the weather and the crops
during the ensuing season. If the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts
hitches up his garment above his knee, the weather will be wet and
heavy rains will spoil the harvest. If he lets it trail to his ankle, a
drought will be the consequence. But fine weather and heavy
crops will follow if the hem of his robe hangs exactly half-way
down the calf of his leg. So closely is the course of nature, and
with it the weal or woe of the people, dependent on the minutest act
or gesture of the king's representative. But the task of making the
crops grow, thus deputed to the temporary kings, is one of the
magical functions regularly supposed to be discharged by kings in
primitive society. The rule that the mock king must stand on one foot
upon a raised seat in the rice-field was perhaps originally meant
as a charm to make the crop grow high; at least this was the object
of a similar ceremony observed by the old Prussians. The tallest
girl, standing on one foot upon a seat, with her lap full of cakes, a
cup of brandy in her right hand and a piece of elm-bark or
linden-bark in her left, prayed to the god Waizganthos that the flax
might grow as high as she was standing. Then, after draining the
cup, she had it refilled, and poured the brandy on the ground as an
offering to Waizganthos, and threw down the cakes for his attendant
sprites. If she remained steady on one foot throughout the
ceremony, it was an omen that the flax crop would be good; but if
she let her foot down, it was feared that the crop might fail. The
same significance perhaps attaches to the swinging of the
Brahmans, which the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts had formerly to
witness standing on one foot. On the principles of homoeopathic or
imitative magic it might be thought that the higher the priests swing
the higher will grow the rice. For the ceremony is described as a
harvest festival, and swinging is practised by the Letts of Russia
with the avowed intention of influencing the growth of the crops. In
the spring and early summer, between Easter and St. John's Day
(the summer solstice), every Lettish peasant is said to devote his
leisure hours to swinging diligently; for the higher he rises in the air
the higher will his flax grow that season. 8
In the foregoing cases the temporary king is appointed annually in
accordance with a regular custom. But in other cases the
appointment is made only to meet a special emergency, such as to
relieve the real king from some actual or threatened evil by
diverting it to a substitute, who takes his place on the throne for a
short time. The history of Persia furnishes instances of such
occasional substitutes for the Shah. Thus Shah Abbas the Great,
being warned by his astrologers in the year 1591 that a serious
danger impended over him, attempted to avert the omen by
abdicating the throne and appointing a certain unbeliever named
Yusoofee, probably a Christian, to reign in his stead. The substitute
was accordingly crowned, and for three days, if we may trust the
Persian historians, he enjoyed not only the name and the state but
the power of the king. At the end of his brief reign he was put to
death: the decree of the stars was fulfilled by this sacrifice; and
Abbas, who reascended his throne in a most propitious hour, was
promised by his astrologers a long and glorious reign. 9