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object:1.25 - Temporary Kings
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


XXV. 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 Mac
(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 Mac, 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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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 Rj enters into the Brhman 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.

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.

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.





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