The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)

Men roasted alive as images of the Fire-god.

In the eighteenth and last month of their year, which fell in January, the Mexicans held a festival in honour of the god of fire. Every fourth year the festival was celebrated on a grand scale by the sacrifice of a great many men and women, husbands and wives, who were dressed in the trappings of the fire-god and regarded as his living images. Bound hand and foot, they were thrown alive into a great furnace, and after roasting in it for a little were raked out of the fire before they were dead in order to allow the priest to cut the hearts out of their scorched, blistered, and still writhing bodies in the usual way.692 The intention of the sacrifice probably was to maintain the Fire-god in full vigour, lest he should grow decrepit or even die of old age, and mankind should thus be deprived of his valuable services. This important object was attained by feeding the fire with live men and women, who thus as it were poured a fresh stock of vital energy into the veins of the Fire-god and perhaps of his wife also. But they had to be raked out of the flames before they were dead; for clearly it would never do to let them die in the fire, else the Fire-god whom they personated would die also. For the same reason their hearts had to be torn from their bodies while they were still palpitating; what use could the Fire-god make of human hearts that were burnt to cinders?

Women flayed in honour of the Fire-god and their skins worn by men who personated gods.

This was the ordinary mode of sacrificing the human representatives of the Fire-god every fourth year. But in Quauhtitlan, a city distant four leagues from the city of Mexico, the custom was different. On the eve of the festival two women were beheaded on the altar of the temple and afterwards flayed, faces and all, and their thigh bones extracted. Next morning two men of high rank clothed themselves in the skins, including the skins of the women's faces, which they put over their own; and thus arrayed and carrying in their hands the thigh bones of the victims they came down the steps of the temple roaring like wild beasts. A vast crowd of people had assembled to witness the spectacle, and when they saw the two men coming down the steps in the dripping skins, brandishing the bones, and bellowing like beasts, they were filled with fear and said, “There come our gods!” Arrived at the foot of the staircase these human gods engaged in a dance, which they kept up for the rest of the day, never divesting themselves of the bloody skins till the festival was over.693

The personation of a god by a man wearing the skin of a human victim is probably intended to represent and ensure the resurrection of the deity. The idea of resurrection from the dead is suggested by the observation of snakes and other creatures that cast their skins.

The theory that the custom of wearing the skin of a flayed man or woman and personating a god in that costume is intended to represent the resurrection of the deity derives some support from the class of persons who made a vow to masquerade in the skins. They were, as we have seen, especially men who suffered from diseases of the skin and the eyes: they hoped, we are told, by wearing the skins to be cured of their ailments, and the old Spanish monk who records the belief adds dryly that some were cured and some were not.694 We may conjecture that by donning the skins of men who had acted the part of gods they expected to slough off their own diseased old skins and to acquire new and healthy skins, like those of the deities. This notion may have been suggested to them by the observation of certain animals, such as serpents and lizards, which seem to renew their youth by casting their skins and appear refreshed and renovated in new integuments. That many savages have noticed such transformations in the animal world is proved by the tales which some of them tell to account for the origin of death among mankind. For example, the Arawaks of British Guiana say that man was created by a good being whom they call Kururumany. Once on a time this kindly creator came to earth to see how his creature man was getting on. But men were so ungrateful that they tried to kill their Maker. Hence he took from them the gift of immortality and bestowed it upon animals that change their skins, such as snakes, lizards, and beetles.695 Again, the Tamanachiers, an Indian tribe of the Orinoco, tell how the creator kindly intended to make men immortal by telling them that they should change their skins. He meant to say that by so doing they should renew their youth like serpents and beetles. But the glad tidings were received with such incredulity by an old woman that the creator in a huff changed his tune and said very curtly, “Ye shall die.”696

Savage notion that men would have been immortal, if only they could have cast their skins like serpents and crabs.

In Annam they say that Ngoc hoang sent a messenger from heaven to inform men that when they reached old age they should change their skins and live for ever, but that when serpents grew old, they must die. Unfortunately for the human race the message was perverted in the transmission, so that men do not change their skins and are therefore mortal, whereas serpents do cast their old skins and accordingly live for ever.697 According to the natives of Nias the personage who was charged by the creator with the duty of putting the last touches to man broke his fast on bananas instead of on river-crabs, as he should have done; for had he only eaten river-crabs, men would have changed their skins like crabs, and like crabs would have never died. But the serpents, wiser in their generation than men, ate the crabs, and that is why they too are immortal.698 Stories of the same sort are current among the Melanesians. Thus the natives of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain account for the origin of death by a tale very like that told in Annam. The Good Spirit, they say, loved men and wished to make them immortal, but he hated serpents and wished to kill them. So he despatched his brother to mankind with this cheering message: “Go to men and take them the secret of immortality. Tell them to cast their skin every year. So will they be protected from death, for their life will be constantly renewed. But tell the serpents that they must henceforth die.” Through the carelessness or treachery of the messenger this message was reversed; so that now, as we all know, men die and serpents live for ever by annually casting their skins.699 Again, if we can trust the traditions of the Banks' Islanders and New Hebrideans, there was a time when men did really cast their skins and renew their youth. The melancholy change to mortality was brought about by an old woman, who most unfortunately resumed her old cast-off skin to please an infant, which squalled at seeing her in her new integument.700 The Gallas of East Africa say that God sent a certain bird (holawaka, “the sheep of God”) to tell men that they would not die, but that when they grew old they would slough their skins and so renew their youth. But the bird foolishly or maliciously delivered the message to serpents instead of to men, and that is why ever since men have been mortal and serpents immortal. For that evil deed God punished the bird with a painful malady from which it suffers to this day, and it sits on the tops of trees and moans and wails perpetually.701

Hence the Mexicans apparently thought that they could renew their own skins by putting on those of other people.

Thus it appears that some peoples have not only observed the curious transformations which certain animals undergo, but have imagined that by means of such transformations the animals periodically renew their youth and live for ever. From such observations and fancies it is an easy step to the conclusion that man might similarly take a fresh lease of life and renew the lease indefinitely, if only he could contrive like the animals to get a new skin. This desirable object the Mexicans apparently sought to accomplish by flaying men and wearing their bleeding skins like garments thrown over their own. By so doing persons who suffered from cutaneous diseases hoped to acquire a new and healthy skin; and by so doing the priests attempted not merely to revive the gods whom they had just slain in the persons of their human representatives, but also to restore to their wasting and decaying frames all the vigour and energy of youth.

General conclusion: the custom of putting human beings to death in the character of gods has prevailed in many parts of the world.

The rites described in the preceding pages suffice to prove that human sacrifices of the sort I suppose to have prevailed at Aricia702 were, as a matter of fact, systematically offered on a large scale by a people whose level of culture was probably not inferior, if indeed it was not distinctly superior, to that occupied by the Italian races at the early period to which the origin of the Arician priesthood must be referred. The positive and indubitable evidence of the prevalence of such sacrifices in one part of the world may reasonably be allowed to strengthen the probability of their prevalence in places for which the evidence is less full and trustworthy. Taken all together, the facts which we have passed in review seem to shew that the custom of killing men whom their worshippers regard as divine has prevailed in many parts of the world. But to clinch the argument, it is clearly desirable to prove that the custom of putting to death a human representative of a god was known and practised in ancient Italy elsewhere than in the Arician Grove. This proof I now propose to adduce.

Chapter VIII. The Saturnalia and Kindred Festivals

§ 1. The Roman Saturnalia

Annual periods of license. The Roman Saturnalia.

In an earlier part of this book we saw that many peoples have been used to observe an annual period of license, when the customary restraints of law and morality are thrown aside, when the whole population give themselves up to extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker passions find a vent which would never be allowed them in the more staid and sober course of ordinary life. Such outbursts of the pent-up forces of human nature, too often degenerating into wild orgies of lust and crime, occur most commonly at the end of the year, and are frequently associated, as I have had occasion to point out, with one or other of the agricultural seasons, especially with the time of sowing or of harvest. Now, of all these periods of license the one which is best known and which in modern languages has given its name to the rest, is the Saturnalia. This famous festival fell in December, the last month of the Roman year, and was popularly supposed to commemorate the merry reign of Saturn, the god of sowing and of husbandry, who lived on earth long ago as a righteous and beneficent king of Italy, drew the rude and scattered dwellers on the mountains together, taught them to till the ground, gave them laws, and ruled in peace. His reign was the fabled Golden Age: the earth brought forth abundantly: no sound of war or discord troubled the happy world: no baleful love of lucre worked like poison in the blood of the industrious and contented peasantry. Slavery and private property were alike unknown: all men had all things in common. At last the good god, the kindly king, vanished suddenly; but his memory was cherished to distant ages, shrines were reared in his honour, and many hills and high places in Italy bore his name.703 Yet the bright tradition of his reign was crossed by a dark shadow: his altars are said to have been stained with the blood of human victims, for whom a more merciful age afterwards substituted effigies.704 Of this gloomy side of the god's religion there is little or no trace in the descriptions which ancient writers have left us of the Saturnalia. Feasting and revelry and all the mad pursuit of pleasure are the features that seem to have especially marked this carnival of antiquity, as it went on for seven days in the streets and public squares and houses of ancient Rome from the seventeenth to the twenty-third of December.705

The license granted to slaves at the Saturnalia. The mock King of the Saturnalia.

But no feature of the festival is more remarkable, nothing in it seems to have struck the ancients themselves more than the license granted to slaves at this time. The distinction between the free and the servile classes was temporarily abolished. The slave might rail at his master, intoxicate himself like his betters, sit down at table with them, and not even a word of reproof would be administered to him for conduct which at any other season might have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death.706 Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the board cleared and dinner set for his master.707 So far was this inversion of ranks carried, that each household became for a time a mimic republic in which the high offices of state were discharged by the slaves, who gave their orders and laid down the law as if they were indeed invested with all the dignity of the consulship, the praetorship, and the bench.708 Like the pale reflection of power thus accorded to bondsmen at the Saturnalia was the mock kingship for which freemen cast lots at the same season. The person on whom the lot fell enjoyed the title of king, and issued commands of a playful and ludicrous nature to his temporary subjects. One of them he might order to mix the wine, another to drink, another to sing, another to dance, another to speak in his own dispraise, another to carry a flute-girl on his back round the house.709

Personation of Saturn at the Saturnalia by a soldier who afterwards suffered death. The sarcophagus of St. Dasius, the martyr on whom the lot fell to play the part of Saturn.

Now, when we remember that the liberty allowed to slaves at this festive season was supposed to be an imitation of the state of society in Saturn's time, and that in general the Saturnalia passed for nothing more or less than a temporary revival or restoration of the reign of that merry monarch, we are tempted to surmise that the mock king who presided over the revels may have originally represented Saturn himself. The conjecture is strongly confirmed, if not established, by a very curious and interesting account of the way in which the Saturnalia was celebrated by the Roman soldiers stationed on the Danube in the reign of Maximian and Diocletian. The account is preserved in a narrative of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, which was unearthed from a Greek manuscript in the Paris library, and published by Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent. Two briefer descriptions of the event and of the custom are contained in manuscripts at Milan and Berlin; one of them had already seen the light in an obscure volume printed at Urbino in 1727, but its importance for the history of the Roman religion, both ancient and modern, appears to have been overlooked until Professor Cumont drew the attention of scholars to all three narratives by publishing them together some years ago.710 According to these narratives, which have all the appearance of being authentic, and of which the longest is probably based on official documents, the Roman soldiers at Durostorum in Lower Moesia celebrated the Saturnalia year by year in the following manner. Thirty days before the festival they chose by lot from amongst themselves a young and handsome man, who was then clothed in royal attire to resemble Saturn. Thus arrayed and attended by a multitude of soldiers he went about in public with full license to indulge his passions and to taste of every pleasure, however base and shameful. But if his reign was merry, it was short and ended tragically; for when the thirty days were up and the festival of Saturn had come, he cut his own throat on the altar of the god whom he personated.711 In the year 303 a. d. the lot fell upon the Christian soldier Dasius, but he refused to play the part of the heathen god and soil his last days by debauchery. The threats and arguments of his commanding officer Bassus failed to shake his constancy, and accordingly he was beheaded, as the Christian martyrologist records with minute accuracy, at Durostorum by the soldier John on Friday the twentieth day of November, being the twenty-fourth day of the moon, at the fourth hour.

Since this narrative was published by Professor Cumont, its historical character, which had been doubted or denied, has received strong confirmation from an interesting discovery. In the crypt of the cathedral which crowns the promontory of Ancona there is preserved, among other remarkable antiquities, a white marble sarcophagus bearing a Greek inscription, in characters of the age of Justinian, to the following effect: “Here lies the holy martyr Dasius, brought from Durostorum.” The sarcophagus was transferred to the crypt of the cathedral in 1848 from the church of San Pellegrino, under the high altar of which, as we learn from a Latin inscription let into the masonry, the martyr's bones still repose with those of two other saints. How long the sarcophagus was deposited in the church of San Pellegrino, we do not know; but it is recorded to have been there in the year 1650. We may suppose that the saint's relics were transferred for safety to Ancona at some time in the troubled centuries which followed his martyrdom, when Moesia was occupied and ravaged by successive hordes of barbarian invaders.712 At all events it appears certain from the independent and mutually confirmatory evidence of the martyrology and the monuments that Dasius was no mythical saint, but a real man, who suffered death for his faith at Durostorum in one of the early centuries of the Christian era. Finding the narrative of the nameless martyrologist thus established as to the principal fact recorded, namely, the martyrdom of St. Dasius, we may reasonably accept his testimony as to the manner and cause of the martyrdom, all the more because his narrative is precise, circumstantial, and entirely free from the miraculous element. Accordingly I conclude that the account which he gives of the celebration of the Saturnalia among the Roman soldiers is trustworthy.

The mock King of the Saturnalia may have been the degenerate successor of a series of temporary kings who personated Saturn at the Saturnalia and were put to death in the character of the god.

This account sets in a new and lurid light the office of the King of the Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided over the winter revels at Rome in the time of Horace and of Tacitus. It seems to prove that his business had not always been that of a mere harlequin or merry-andrew whose only care was that the revelry should run high and the fun grow fast and furious, while the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, while the streets swarmed with festive crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far away to the north, Soracte shewed his coronal of snow. When we compare this comic monarch of the gay, the civilized metropolis with his grim counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and when we remember the long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic, who in other ages and in other lands, wearing mock crowns and wrapped in sceptred palls, have played their little pranks for a few brief hours or days, then passed before their time to a violent death, we can hardly doubt that in the King of the Saturnalia at Rome, as he is depicted by classical writers, we see only a feeble emasculated copy of that original, whose strong features have been fortunately preserved for us by the obscure author of the Martyrdom of St. Dasius. In other words, the martyrologist's account of the Saturnalia agrees so closely with the accounts of similar rites elsewhere, which could not possibly have been known to him, that the substantial accuracy of his description may be regarded as established; and further, since the custom of putting a mock king to death as a representative of a god cannot have grown out of a practice of appointing him to preside over a holiday revel, whereas the reverse may very well have happened, we are justified in assuming that in an earlier and more barbarous age it was the universal practice in ancient Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn prevailed, to choose a man who played the part and enjoyed all the traditionary privileges of Saturn for a season, and then died, whether by his own or another's hand, whether by the knife or the fire or on the gallows-tree, in the character of the good god who gave his life for the world. In Rome itself and other great towns the growth of civilization had probably mitigated this cruel custom long before the Augustan age, and transformed it into the innocent shape it wears in the writings of the few classical writers who bestow a passing notice on the holiday King of the Saturnalia. But in remoter districts the older and sterner practice may long have survived; and even if after the unification of Italy the barbarous usage was suppressed by the Roman government, the memory of it would be handed down by the peasants and would tend from time to time, as still happens with the lowest forms of superstition among ourselves, to lead to a recrudescence of the practice, especially among the rude soldiery on the outskirts of the empire over whom the once iron hand of Rome was beginning to relax its grasp.713

The modern Carnival perhaps the equivalent of the ancient Saturnalia.

The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and the Carnival of modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light of all the facts that have come before us, we may well ask whether the resemblance does not amount to identity. We have seen that in Italy, Spain, and France, that is, in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned grief or genuine delight of the populace.714 If the view here suggested of the Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other than a direct successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of the revels, the real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were over, suffered a real death in his assumed character. The King of the Bean on Twelfth Night and the mediaeval Bishop of Fools, Abbot of Unreason, or Lord of Misrule are figures of the same sort and may perhaps have had a similar origin. We will consider them in the following section.

§ 2. The King of the Bean and the Festival of Fools

The King of the Bean on Twelfth Night. Crosses made by the King of the Bean to protect the house against demons and witchcraft.

The custom of electing by lot a King and often also a Queen of the Bean on Twelfth Night (Epiphany, the sixth of January) or on the eve of that festival used to prevail in France, Belgium, Germany, and England, and it is still kept up in some parts of France. It may be traced back to the first half of the sixteenth century at least, and no doubt dates from a very much more remote antiquity. At the French court the Kings themselves did not disdain to countenance the mock royalty, and Louis XIV. even supported with courtly grace the shadowy dignity in his own person. Every family as a rule elected its own King. On the eve of the festival a great cake was baked with a bean in it; the cake was divided in portions, one for each member of the family, together with one for God, one for the Virgin, and sometimes one also for the poor. The person who obtained the portion containing the bean was proclaimed King of the Bean. Where a Queen of the Bean was elected as well as a King, a second bean was sometimes baked in the cake for the Queen. Thus at Blankenheim, near Neuerburg, in the Eifel, a black and a white bean were baked in the cake; he who drew the piece with the black bean was King, and she who drew the white bean was Queen. In Franche-Comté, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they used to put as many white haricot beans in a hat as there were persons present, and two coloured beans were added; the beans were drawn at haphazard from the hat by a child, and they who got the coloured beans were King and Queen. In England and perhaps elsewhere the practice was to put a bean in the cake for the King and a pea for the Queen. But in some places only the King was elected by lot, and after his election he chose his Queen for himself. Sometimes a coin was substituted for the bean in the cake; but though this usage was followed in southern Germany as early as the first half of the sixteenth century, it is probably an innovation on the older custom of employing a bean as the lot. In France the distribution of the pieces of the cake among the persons present was made in accordance with the directions of a child, the youngest boy present, who was placed under or on the table and addressed by the name of “Phoebe” or “Tébé”; he answered in Latin “Domine.” The master of the house, holding a piece of the cake in his hand, asked the child to whom he should give it, and the child named any person he pleased. Sometimes the first slice of cake was regularly assigned to “the good God” and set aside for the poor. In the name “Phoebe” or “Tébé,” by which the child was addressed, learned antiquaries have detected a reference to the oracle of Apollo; but more probably the name is a simple corruption of the Latin or French word for bean (Latin faba, French fève). Immediately on his election the King of the Bean was enthroned, saluted by all, and thrice lifted up, while he made crosses with chalk on the beams and rafters of the ceiling. Great virtue was attributed to these white crosses. They were supposed to protect the house for the whole year against