Chapter 26. Sacrifice of the King's Son.
A POINT to notice about the temporary kings described in the
foregoing chapter is that in two places (Cambodia and Jambi) they
come of a stock which is believed to be akin to the royal family. If
the view here taken of the origin of these temporary kingships is
correct, we can easily understand why the king's substitute should
sometimes be of the same race as the king. When the king first
succeeded in getting the life of another accepted as a sacrifice
instead of his own, he would have to show that the death of that
other would serve the purpose quite as well as his own would have
done. Now it was as a god or demigod that the king had to die;
therefore the substitute who died for him had to be invested, at least
for the occasion, with the divine attributes of the king. This, as we
have just seen, was certainly the case with the temporary kings of
Siam and Cambodia; they were invested with the supernatural
functions, which in an earlier stage of society were the special
attributes of the king. But no one could so well represent the king in
his divine character as his son, who might be supposed to share
the divine afflatus of his father. No one, therefore, could so
appropriately die for the king and, through him, for the whole
people, as the king's son. 1
We have seen that according to tradition, Aun or On, King of
Sweden, sacrificed nine of his sons to Odin at Upsala in order that
his own life might be spared. After he had sacrificed his second
son he received from the god an answer that he should live so long
as he gave him one of his sons every ninth year. When he had
sacrificed his seventh son, he still lived, but was so feeble that he
could not walk but had to be carried in a chair. Then he offered up
his eighth son, and lived nine years more, lying in his bed. After
that he sacrificed his ninth son, and lived another nine years, but
so that he drank out of a horn like a weaned child. He now wished
to sacrifice his only remaining son to Odin, but the Swedes would
not allow him. So he died and was buried in a mound at Upsala. 2
In ancient Greece there seems to have been at least one kingly
house of great antiquity of which the eldest sons were always liable
to be sacrificed in room of their royal sires. When Xerxes was
marching through Thessaly at the head of his mighty host to attack
the Spartans at Thermopylae, he came to the town of Alus. Here he
was shown the sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, about which his
guides told him a strange tale. It ran somewhat as follows. Once
upon a time the king of the country, by name Athamas, married a
wife Nephele, and had by her a son called Phrixus and a daughter
named Helle. Afterwards he took to himself a second wife called
Ino, by whom he had two sons, Learchus and Melicertes. But his
second wife was jealous of her stepchildren, Phrixus and Helle,
and plotted their death. She went about very cunningly to compass
her bad end. First of all she persuaded the women of the country to
roast the seed corn secretly before it was committed to the ground.
So next year no crops came up and the people died of famine.
Then the king sent messengers to the oracle at Delphi to enquire
the cause of the dearth. But the wicked stepmother bribed the
messenger to give out as the answer of the god that the dearth
would never cease till the children of Athamas by his first wife had
been sacrificed to Zeus. When Athamas heard that, he sent for the
children, who were with the sheep. But a ram with a fleece of gold
opened his lips, and speaking with the voice of a man warned the
children of their danger. So they mounted the ram and fled with him
over land and sea. As they flew over the sea, the girl slipped from
the animal's back, and falling into water was drowned. But her
brother Phrixus was brought safe to the land of Colchis, where
reigned a child of the sun. Phrixus married the king's daughter, and
she bore him a son Cytisorus. And there he sacrificed the ram with
the golden fleece to Zeus the God of Flight; but some will have it
that he sacrificed the animal to Laphystian Zeus. The golden fleece
itself he gave to his wife's father, who nailed it to an oak tree,
guarded by a sleepless dragon in a sacred grove of Ares.
Meanwhile at home an oracle had commanded that King Athamas
himself should be sacrificed as an expiatory offering for the whole
country. So the people decked him with garlands like a victim and
led him to the altar, where they were just about to sacrifice him
when he was rescued either by his grandson Cytisorus, who
arrived in the nick of time from Colchis, or by Hercules, who
brought tidings that the king's son Phrixus was yet alive. Thus
Athamas was saved, but afterward he went mad, and mistaking his
son Learchus for a wild beast, shot him dead. Next he attempted
the life of his remaining son Melicertes, but the child was rescued
by his mother Ino, who ran and threw herself and him from a high
rock into the sea. Mother and son were changed into marine
divinities, and the son received special homage in the isle of
Tenedos, where babes were sacrificed to him. Thus bereft of wife
and children the unhappy Athamas quitted his country, and on
enquiring of the oracle where he should dwell was told to take up
his abode wherever he should be entertained by wild beasts. He
fell in with a pack of wolves devouring sheep, and when they saw
him they fled and left him the bleeding remnants of their prey. In this
way the oracle was fulfilled. But because King Athamas had not
been sacrificed as a sin-offering for the whole country, it was
divinely decreed that the eldest male scion of his family in each
generation should be sacrificed without fail, if ever he set foot in
the town-hall, where the offerings were made to Laphystian Zeus
by one of the house of Athamas. Many of the family, Xerxes was
informed, had fled to foreign lands to escape this doom; but some of
them had returned long afterwards, and being caught by the
sentinels in the act of entering the town-hall were wreathed as
victims, led forth in procession, and sacrificed. These instances
appear to have been notorious, if not frequent; for the writer of a
dialogue attributed to Plato, after speaking of the immolation of
human victims by the Carthaginians, adds that such practices were
not unknown among the Greeks, and he refers with horror to the
sacrifices offered on Mount Lycaeus and by the descendants of
Athamas. 3
The suspicion that this barbarous custom by no means fell into
disuse even in later days is strengthened by a case of human
sacrifice which occurred in Plutarch's time at Orchomenus, a very
ancient city of Boeotia, distant only a few miles across the plain
from the historian's birthplace. Here dwelt a family of which the men
went by the name of Psoloeis or "Sooty," and the women by the
name of Oleae or "Destructive." Every year at the festival of the
Agrionia the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn
sword, and if he overtook one of them he had the right to slay her.
In Plutarch's lifetime the right was actually exercised by a priest
Zoilus. The family thus liable to furnish at least one human victim
every year was of royal descent, for they traced their lineage to
Minyas, the famous old king of Orchomenus, the monarch of
fabulous wealth, whose stately treasury, as it is called, still stands
in ruins at the point where the long rocky hill of Orchomenus melts
into the vast level expanse of the Copaic plain. Tradition ran that
the king's three daughters long despised the other women of the
country for yielding to the Bacchic frenzy, and sat at home in the
king's house scornfully plying the distaff and the loom, while the
rest, wreathed with flowers, their dishevelled locks streaming to the
wind, roamed in ecstasy the barren mountains that rise above
Orchomenus, making the solitude of the hills to echo to the wild
music of cymbals and tambourines. But in time the divine fury
infected even the royal damsels in their quiet chamber; they were
seized with a fierce longing to partake of human flesh, and cast lots
among themselves which should give up her child to furnish a
cannibal feast. The lot fell on Leucippe, and she surrendered her
son Hippasus, who was torn limb from limb by the three. From these
misguided women sprang the Oleae and the Psoloeis, of whom the
men were said to be so called because they wore sad-coloured
raiment in token of their mourning and grief. 4
Now this practice of taking human victims from a family of royal
descent at Orchomenus is all the more significant because
Athamas himself is said to have reigned in the land of Orchomenus
even before the time of Minyas, and because over against the city
there rises Mount Laphystius, on which, as at Alus in Thessaly,
there was a sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, where, according to
tradition, Athamas purposed to sacrifice his two children Phrixus
and Helle. On the whole, comparing the traditions about Athamas
with the custom that obtained with regard to his descendants in
historical times, we may fairly infer that in Thessaly and probably in
Boeotia there reigned of old a dynasty of which the kings were
liable to be sacrificed for the good of the country to the god called
Laphystian Zeus, but that they contrived to shift the fatal
responsibility to their offspring, of whom the eldest son was
regularly destined to the altar. As time went on, the cruel custom
was so far mitigated that a ram was accepted as a vicarious
sacrifice in room of the royal victim, provided always that the
prince abstained from setting foot in the town-hall where the
sacrifices were offered to Laphystian Zeus by one of his kinsmen.
But if he were rash enough to enter the place of doom, to thrust
himself wilfully, as it were, on the notice of the god who had
good-naturedly winked at the substitution of a ram, the ancient
obligation which had been suffered to lie in abeyance recovered
all its force, and there was no help for it but he must die. The
tradition which associated the sacrifice of the king or his children
with a great dearth points clearly to the belief, so common among
primitive folk, that the king is responsible for the weather and the
crops, and that he may justly pay with his life for the inclemency of
the one or the failure of the other. Athamas and his line, in short,
appear to have united divine or magical with royal functions; and
this view is strongly supported by the claims to divinity which
Salmoneus, the brother of Athamas, is said to have set up. We
have seen that this presumptuous mortal professed to be no other
than Zeus himself, and to wield the thunder and lightning, of which
he made a trumpery imitation by the help of tinkling kettles and
blazing torches. If we may judge from analogy, his mock thunder
and lightning were no mere scenic exhibition designed to deceive
and impress the beholders; they were enchantments practised by
the royal magician for the purpose of bringing about the celestial
phenomena which they feebly mimicked. 5
Among the Semites of Western Asia the king, in a time of national
danger, sometimes gave his own son to die as a sacrifice for the
people. Thus Philo of Byblus, in his work on the Jews, says: "It was
an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger that the ruler of a city
or nation should give his beloved son to die for the whole people,
as a ransom offered to the avenging demons; and the children thus
offered were slain with mystic rites. So Cronus, whom the
Phoenicians call Israel, being king of the land and having an
only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the Phoenician tongue
Jeoud signifies `only begotten'), dressed him in royal robes and
sacrificed him upon an altar in a time of war, when the country was
in great danger from the enemy." When the king of Moab was
besieged by the Israelites and hard beset, he took his eldest son,
who should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt
offering on the wall. 6