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object:1.26 - Sacrifice of the Kings Son
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


XXVI. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.





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