his dwelling, and burned him in it, “giving him to Odin as a sacrifice for good crops.”[1] In 1814, a pestilence having broken out among the reindeer of the Chukch, the Shamans declared that the beloved chief Koch must be sacrificed to the angry gods; so the chief’s own son stabbed him with a dagger.[2] On the coral island of Niuē, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, there formerly reigned a line of kings. But as the kings were also high priests, and were supposed to make the food grow, the people became angry with them in times of scarcity and killed them; till at last, as one after another was killed, no one would be king, and the monarchy came to an end.[3] As in these cases the divine kings, so in ancient Egypt the divine beasts, were responsible for the course of nature. When pestilence and other calamities had fallen on the land, in consequence of a long and severe drought, the priests took the sacred animals secretly by night, and threatened them, but if the evil did not abate they slew the beasts.[4]
From this survey of the religious position occupied by the king in rude societies we may infer that the claim to divine and supernatural powers put forward by the monarchs of great historical empires like those of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, was not the simple outcome of inflated vanity or the empty expression of a grovelling adulation; it was merely a survival and extension of the old savage apotheosis of living kings.
- ↑ Snorro Starleson, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway (trans. by S. Laing), saga i. chs. 18, 47. Cp. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 7 ; Scheffer, Upsalia, p. 137.
- ↑ C. Russwurm, “Aberglaube in Russland,” in Zeitschrift für Deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde, iv. 162; Liebrecht, op. cit., p. 15.
- ↑ Turner, Samoa, p. 304 sq.
- ↑ Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 73.
