IMAGE: EVALUAT80N TEST TARGET (MT-S) V. /. 4^ /^ ^ w.. A 1.0 I.I 1.25 •« 1^ 1 2.2 s lis IIIIIM 111= U IIIIII.6 V] tf^ ^ / V c\ :%. ^*.^ '> ^> V] /^ "^ y "i^^. ^'^^ r#^ CIHM/ICMH Microfiche Series. CIHM/ICMH Collection de microfiches. Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions Institut Canadian de microreproductions historiques 1980 M Technical Notes / Notes techniques The institute has attempted to obtain the best original copy available for filming. Physical features of this copy which may alter any of the images in the reproduction are checked below. D D n Coloured covers/ Couvertures de couleur Coloured maps/ Cartes g^ographiques en couleur Pages discoloured, stained or foxed/ Pages ddcolordes, tachetdes ou piqu6es Tight binding (may cause Shadows or distortion along interior margin)/ Reliure serrd (peut causer de t'ombre ou de la distortion le long de la marge intdrieure) L'Institut a microfilm^ le meilleur exemplaire qu'il lui a 6t6 possible de se procurer. 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The following diagrams ilkstrate the method: Les cartes ou les planches trop grandes pour dtre rep-oduites en un seul clich6 sont filmdes d partir de Tangle sup6rieure gauche, de gauche d droite et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images n^cessaire. Le diagramme suivant illustre la m^thode : 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 Catullus The Attis rTaET-a-i'jiilff^ifelK* " L I 'TP-- Only si^ty copies of t,ns Emon have been printeU, fifty of which are for sale. Tbi. •>■ <-opy is M> 2.? 'C^h^^f^~^ y^^ll right!: ,es,:r,:eedicate THIS SLIGHT MEMORIAL OF A LONG AND EVER UNBROKEN KRIENDSHIT. aa ^ k CR ■fcMfclliiiMlH'» I NTRODUCTION. I don't often "drop into poetry;" therefore, I suppose, I feel all the more keenly the neces- sity for apology and explanation on the occasion of this my first public appearance in the character of a versifier. I have a sufficient excuse, how- ever, for translating the Attis. It is now nearly twenty years ago that I read Catullus's master- piece with my class of students in an abortive little government college in Spanish Town, Jamaica. After the lads had mastered the poem from the purely linguistic and grammatical point of view, I noticed that they didn't appear to have the slightest conception of the literary merit and human interest of that mar- vellous outburst of impassioned song. In order, ix ft I {{ ■t<.Mn.^»*rtt-- ■<^^—ii l»W N X INTRODUCTION. if possible, to make them feel that this was poetry — and poetry of a very high order — I endeavoursd, crassa Minerva, to bring out the chief points of the work in j, metrical rhyming English version. My main object in my trans- lation was to preserve as far as practicable the peculiarly orgiastic dithyram])ic tone of the original Galliambics. On my return to England, a few years later, I showed my version to Mr. Robinson Ellis, the value of whose opinion on all matters aifecting Catullian literature and criticism no one will dispute. Mr. Ellis was kind enough to praise my lines, and strongly urged me to publish them in some permanent form. This I desired to do, but other avoca- tions interfered for several years. I put off publication mainly because I desired to accom- pany the translation with an Excursus on the Origin of Tree-Worship, about which I had formed certain novel opinions of a sort little likely to find favour with the school of anthro- pologists then most in fashion. The appearance. ii «p XI -tti INTRODUCTION. 11 little later, of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology, which first definitely set forth the theory of the origin of gods from the primitive ghost, made me reconsider in part my views as to tlie nature of tree-worship. Finally, Mr. Frazer's learned and conclusive treatise, The Golden Bough, compelled me to reopen the entire question after I had long considered it for ever settled. For henceforth whoever deals Avith any such questions has Mr. Frazer to reckon with. We may agree with him or we may differ from him, but wc caimot afford to ignore him. It is with the object of reconciling the appar- ently hostile views of these two great original thinkers that I have written the two Excursuses here printed, " On the Myth of Attis," and " On the Origin of Tree-Worship." When I first read The Golden Bough, I felt convinced that its author had hit upon a true explanation of many myths and religious practices which had liitherto baffled investigation. At the same time, my M I XII INTiiODUCTION. i i i faith in Jlr. Spencev's masterly demonstration of the origin of the idea of gods from the primitive ghost theory remained unshaken. Thinking the matter over in my own mind, I saw after a while that my long unwritten views on the Origin of Tree- Worship formed the exact connecting link which was still missing between Mr. Frazer's ideas and Mr. Spencer's. I determined, tliere- fore, to commit them to paper, and leave them to the judgment of competent critics. The main idea of my essays is thus briefly this — that while all gods were originally ghosts, sacred trees and tree-gods owe their sanctity to having grown in the first place on tlie tumulus or barrow of the deified ancestor. I have prefixed to my translation tlic text of the original Latin, mainly for ease and con- venience of reference. Here, I have for the most part followed Mr. Robinson Ellis's ad- mirable edition, with a few trifling variations, though in line i8 I have had the hardihood to restore the reading herce in place of cere, on I INTRODUCTION. XIII metrical grounds which I have endeavoured to justify in the Third Excursus, " On the Galli- ambic Metre." It must be remembered that Mr. Ellis does not generally attempt to reconstruct conjecturally the original text of Catullus, but merely in the most conscientious spirit of textual criticism to reach by the comparative method the probable readings of the archetypal manu- script discovered at Verona about 1320, but long since lost. From this archetypal manuscript, all our existing copies arc derived. It is perhaps allowfible, however, for less serious students, to hazard now and again a pure guess as to the words Catullus actually Avrote. Hence the atten- tive reader (if I am lucky enough to secure a specimen of that almost extinct race) will no doubt immediately perceive for himself that the translation does not always exactly correspond with the reading in the text. While anxious, as far as possible, to accept Mr. Ellis's authority — for which nobody could have a greater respect than myself — I felt at times that I failed to get I XIV INTRODUCTION. any satisfactory poetical nieauing out of his liiial readings ; and in such cases, I have ventured, in all humility and with due deference, to adoi)t one of the less authoritative but more comprehensible variants. In line 43, for example, I have even restored in the text the final m of trejndanteni, insteatl of the trepidante of the archetypal manuscript, because I feel quite sure that, no matter what the manuscript said, Catullus certainly made Sleep tremble, not Pasithca, who had no particular reason for trembhng or otherwise conducting herself. In other cases, I have adopted in the text Mr. Ellis's readings, but have employed in the translation some more poetical alternative. For instance, while keep- ing in the Latin of line 9 the austere and explanatory Typanum, tuham Cjjhelles, which is too prosaic and stiff for poetical purposes, I have " treated resolution " by allowing myself in the translation the parenthetical and exclamatory Typanum, tuham^ Cybelle, which may be far less scholarly, but is far more artistic. I have also •^yJSw^ ^ f iji»« ^ v^5iiyii"-*'^.-,^^ >' XV INTRODUCTION. conceded to modern prejudice distinctive typos for i and j, for u and v ; anil 1 have assimilated tlie spelling to ordinary classical usage. Further- more, in the English version, I have preferred the form Cybebe to CijheUe as more euphonious and less open to distracting modern associations For all these divergences from the strict rules of textual criticism, I humbly beg pardon of my learned reader* As for line 5, it seems to me so hopelessly corrupt that we can't now even arrive at a plausible guess as to what Catullus reaUy wrote. Fortunately, however, the context renders the drift of it perfectly clear, so that, though we don't know what Catullus ivroie, we do know perfectly just about what he meant, which, after all, is a vast deal more important. The AUis is, in my opinion, the greatest poem m the Latin language : its spirit is the profound- est, its tone tlie most modern. We get in it the finest flower of the Celtic genius, infiltrated by the mystic and mysterious charm of the Oriental imagination. No poem is worthier of the closest f '»11 m «■ > - XV INTRODUCTION. rending ; no poem so great has received on the whole such scanty attention. As a work of art, it is supreme and well-nigh perfect ; as a speci- men of a peculiar mode of thought and feeling, it deserves the deepest and most sympathetic study. c. V A L l: R J C A r U L L I ATTIS. Super alta vecliis Attis ccleri rate maria, Phtygium nt nemits citato cupide pcdc tetigit, Adtitque opacafihis rcdimita loca dece, Stimulattis ibi furcnti rabie, vagus animis, Devolvit He acuto fibi ponderc filkis. Itaque ut reliaa /"nCit fibi membra /lite viro, Etiam recentc terrce fola /anguine maeulans, Niveis citata cepit manibus /eve typamim {Typanum, tubam Cybelles, tua, mater, initia !), Quatiensquc terga tauri teneris cava digitis, Canere hcccfuis adorta ejl tremebunda comi- tibus. "Agite, ••n 3 IHR ATTIS. " A^i/e, iteadalta, Gallts, Cybelcs neviom ftiititl ; Svnid ite, Dimiwtena domime vaga pecorii, Aliena quie petentes veliit exulcs loca, Scilam iiieani excitta, duce me, mihicomitcs, „ RiipidHin faluvi tulijlis trucnlentivjiu' pelagi, Et corpus, tiiyajlis Veneris nimio odio ; JJUaratc hcrw citatis erroribus animtun : Mora tarda luetitc ccdat : fimiil itc, ftujui- mini riirygiavi ad domuvi Cybellcs, Phrygia ad ao neniora dcie, Ubi cyvibaluvi fonat vox, tdn tympana re- boant, Tibicen ubi canit Phryx curvo grave calaino, Ubi capita Mtenades vi jaciunt hedcrigcrce, Ubi facra fan6la acutis tdulatibus agitant, Ubifucvit ilia divce volitare vaga cohors ; ,5 Quo nos dccet citatis cekrare tripudiis." \ Sinml h(Pc comitibus Attis cerinit, notha viulier, Thiafiis rcpcntc Unguis tnpidantibus ulidat, Levc I I ! ■i lllli .11 I IS. \ Lcvc tympaninn rcmugit, cava cy»ibala ri- crepantf Viridem citus adit hfam propcrante pcde v< chonis. Fnribundafimul, anhelans, vaga vadtt, atii- II in III agcns, Comitata tympaiio Attis per apnea neiuora dux, Veluti juvciica ritans onus indomila juf;i. Rapidie duccm feqinintiir Gallce properi- pcde III. liaqite, lit doviwn Cybelles tctigerc /aJjCula, js Niinio e laborc fouinum capiunt fine Cenrc. Piger his labante langore ociilos fopoi operit : A bit ill qh'cte violii rabidiis furor aitimi. Sed tibi oris aurei fiil radiaiitibus ocitlis Lnfiravit ivtiura album, fola dura, mare 4^ fcium, PepuUtquc tto£lis umbras vegetis fonipedibus, Ibi Somnus cxeitiim At tin fugiens citus abiit : Trepidantem cum rccepit dea Pafitliea fiiiu. Ita 4 run ATTIS. Ita de quiete violli rapida fme rabie Sim id ipfc peclore A ttis ftta faaa recoluit, 45 Liquidaque mcntc vidit fine quels ubique ford, Anvno tcjliuxnte rurfnm rcditiun ad vada tetulit. fid maria vajia vifcns lacrumantibiis oculis, Patriaiii alloaiia vtcejla ejl ita voce miferiter. ^*Patriao7neicreatrix,patriaomcage7tetrix, 50 I'^go qiiam mifer rdinqiuns, domiiios itt herifugie luwiuli/oh-nt, ad Idic tctidi ncmora pedan, Ut apiid )nvem et ferarmn gdida Jiabula forein, Etearum omnia adiran fnnbunda laiibida, Ubinain aut quibus locis tc po/itain, patria, 5, fcor P Cupit ipja pupula ad te fibi dirigerc aa'cm, Rabie f era careiis dum breve tempus animus eji. hgone a mca reinota hcec ferar in ncmora dome ? Patria, T THE ATTIS. 5 Patria, bonis, amr'ris, genitoribtis abero ? A bcro foro, palcejlra, Jladio et g)'mnafiis ? 6.. Mifcr, ah, mifer, querendum ejl etiam atqne ctiam, aniine. Quod enim genus figiirce eft ego non quod obicrini ? Ego miilicr, ego adolefcens, ego ephebus, ego p.er; Egogyiiinnftfiiiflos, ego erain dccus olci. Mihi jamtic frcqnentes, mild liviina tepida, «s Mihifloridis corollis redirnita donius erat, Linqjicnduin nbi effet or to mihi fole cubi- ciilum. Ego mine deum miniftra et Cyheles famula fcrar? Ego Mienas, ego met pars, ego vir fterilis ero ? Ego viridis algida Idee nive amicla loca '° CO lam ? Ego vitam ngam fub altis Phrygiie colii- iniiiibiis, Ubi cervafilvicultrix, ubi aper ncmorivagns? J am jam dolet quod cgi,jamjamqHe pcenUct. " Rofeis , .^^'««MUMWWHI. 6 77//: .■17'77.V. Rfl/eis lit hide labellis fotiitus citus abiit, Geminns dconim ad aures nova niintia t-. reft reus, Ibijunnajnga refolvcns Cybcle leonibus, Leevumque pecoris hojicm Jliviulans ita lo- quitur. " Agedum," inquit, " age ferox, i, face ut hunc furor agitet ; Face uti furoris i6lu reditum in nemora ferat, Mea libere nimis quifugerc imperia cupit. &. Age, ccede terga cauda, tua verbera paterc, Face cu7ifta mugicnti frcniitu loca rctonent, Rutilain fcrox torofa cervicc quale jiibam." ii Ait hcec iiiinax Cybelle, religatque jiiga vianu. Ferns ipfe fefe adhorlans rapidum incitat sj anivio ; Vadit,f remit, refringit virgulta pede vago. At ubi humida albicantis loca litoris adiit, Tcnerumque vidit Attin propc marniora pelagi, Facit ■« THE Arris 7 Faa'f iwpetum. Ilk demens fiigit in nemora /era: Ibi feviper omne vitce fpatium fanmla fuit. 9.. Dea, magna dca, Cyhclle, dca doiiiina Dindimi, Procul a mea tuns fit furor ovinis, hera, dovio. Alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos. The THE ATT IS OF Caius Valerius Catullus. Acrofs the roaring ocean, ivith heart and with eye of flame. To the Phrygian fore/I Attis in an eager frenzy came : Ami he leapt from his lofty ve(]el, and he flood in the groves of fine That circled round with Jhadows Cybebe's myflic Jhrine : And there in a frantic fury , as otic whofe fcnfe hasfloivn, He robbed himfelf of his manhood loith an edge ofjh arpencd flone. But asfoon as he felt his body bereft of its manly ivorth, And f aw the red blood trickle on the virgin foil of earth, With 1 I HMHP THE ATTIS. 9 lVi//t his blanched and womanijh fingers a timbrel he gan to f mite (A timbre/, a Jhawm, Cybebe, thine, mother, O lo thine the rite !), And he beat the hollo7o ox-hide with a furious feminine hand. As he cried in trembling accents to the liflening Gallic band: — ^'■Arife, a7vay,ye Gallcel to Cybeb^s lofty grove! Together away, ye flraylings of our Lady of Dindymds drove ! Who have fought with vie, like exiles, afar and 15 a foreign home : Who have borne with me the buffets of the fea and the fleeting foam : Who have followed me, your leader, through the favage florins of night : Who have robbed your frames of manhood in dainty love's defpite. Make glad the foul of our Lady with the rapid mazy dance. Away with ^flothful loitering. Together arife, ^^ advance To I lo THE ATTIS. To Cybebe's Phrygian foreji, to the Goddeff's Phrygian home, Where ring the clanging cymbals, where echoes the bellowing drum, Where Jlow the Phrygian minjlrel on his reed drones deep and dread, Where the Mcenad toffes wildly her ivy-encinctured head. Where the myjlic rites of the goddefs with piercing 25 Jhrieks they greet, Where our Lady's vagrant votaries together are wont to meet — Thither mujl 7ve betake us with triply. twinkling feet." As thus to his eager comrades the unfexed Attis cries. In a fudden Jhriek the chorus with quivering tongue replies : The hollotv timbrel bellows, the tinkling cymbals ring. Up Ida's Jlopes the Gallm with feveriPi footftef>s fpring. At 30 rfmmmmmmmmm THE ATTIS. II Ai their head goes frantic, panting^ as one whofe fenfes rm'e. With his timbrel, fragile Attis, their guide through the glimmering grove, Like a heifer that Jliuns, unbroken, tlu yoke's utiaccuftomed weight : And zvith hurrying feet impetuous the Gallce 35 folloiu firaight. So, whett Cybebe's precinSl they reached in the inmofl wood. With over- travail tvearied they Jlept without tqfte of food. On their eyelids eafy Slumber with gliding languor crept. And their fpirit' s fanatic ecjlafy went from them as they Jlept. But when golden-vifaged Phmbus with radiant 40 eyes again Surveyed the fleecy cet/ier, folid land, and roaring viain, And with mettkfome chargers fcattered the murky ^fliades of night. Then Attis fwift awakened, and Sleep fled fajl from hisjight. {In 12 THE ATTIS. I (/« /ter bofovi divine Pajithea received the trem- bling fprite.) So, aroufed from gentle Jlumher and of feverijli „ frenzy freed. As foon as Attis pondered in heart on his paQhnate deed. And with mind undimmed bethought him where he flood and ho7v unmanned^ Seething in foul he hurried back to the feaward flrand ; And he gazed on the wafle of waters, and the tears brimmed full in his eye ; And he thus befpake his fatherland with a plain- so live, womanijh cry — " O fatherland that bare met O fatherland my home / In an evil hour I left thee on the boundlefs deep to roam. As a Jlave who flees his mafler I fled from thy nurfmg brcaji. To dwell in the dcfolate forefl upon Ida's rugged crefl : To THE ATTIS. '3 To lurk in the fnoivs of Ida, by the wild beaJVi 55 frozen lair: To haunt the lonely thickets in the icy upper air. Oh, where dofl thou lie, my fatherland, in the ocean's broad expanfe ? For my very eyeball hungers upon thee to turn its glance, While my foul for a little moment is free from its frenzied trance. Shall I from my home be hurried to this grove fo 60 far away ? So far from my goods and my country, from my kith and tny kin Jh all Iflray ? From the games and the cro7vded market, from the courfe atid the wreflling-plain ? Ah, haplefs, haplefs Attis, thou mufl mourn it again and again. For what form orfafliion is there, what fex that I have not known ? I was a child and a f tripling, a youth, and a man 65 full groiun : J was theflotver of the athletes, the pride of the wtefllers' zone. My M THE ATTIS. My f;ates were thronged ivith comrades, my thref- hold warm with feet ; My home was fair encircled 7vith flowery garlands fweet, When Irofefrom my couch atfunrife thefmiling day to greet. Shall I be our Lady's bondmaid? a Jlave at J° Cybebe's hand ? Shall I be a fexlefs Manad, a tninion, a thing unmanned ? Shall I dwell on the icy ridges under Ida's chilly blafl? Shall I pafs my days in the Jliadows that the Phrygian fummits cafl, With the flag that haunts the forefl, with the boar that roams the glade 1 Even no7v my foul repents me: even now is my 75 furyflayed." From the rofy lips of Attis juch plaint forth iffuing flowed, Andflraight the rebellious mejjage rofe up to the Gods' abode. From «« THE ATTIS. »5 From the brawny neck of her lions Cybebe loofed the yoke, And, goading on his fury, to the favage beajljhe fpoke: " Up, up/" Jhe cried ; " dajh onward! Drive ro back with a panic fear. Drive back to the lonely wildernefs the wretch who lingers here I Who dares to flee fo lightly from the doom that I impofe / Lajli, lajh thy Jide in anger with thine own im- petuous blows I Let tlie din of thy favage bello^ving roar loud on theflartled plain, And thick on thy tawny Jhoulders Jhake fierce thy 85 Jliaggy mane I " So threatening fpake Cybebe and loofed from his neck the yoke ; And the brute, himfelf inciting, with a roar through the thicket broke : And he la Iked his fide in anger, and lie ruflied to the hoary main. Till ^ i6 THE ATTIS. Till he found the fragile Atlis by thej}wre of the watery plain ; Then he gave one bound. Hut Attis fled back to 90 the grove aghafl. There all the days of his lifetime as Cybebe's thrall he paQed. II Goddefs! mighty Goddefs t Cybebe I rvho rule/l Dindyma's height^ Far from my home, O Lady, let thy maddening wrath alight ! Upon others rain thy frenzy ! Upon others wreak thy might I EXCURSUS I. ON THE MYTH OF ATTIS. The Atiia of Catullus is in one respect unique among the literary heirlooms which anticiuity has beqnoathod to us. Alone ef CJreck or Roman poems it preserves for us some tinctun) of that orgiastic si)irit wliich strikes the keynote of Asiatic, and esix^cially of Plirygian and Syrian, religion. IJy its aid, and by tlie aid of no other ancient document, we are able faintly to reinstate for ourselves the jiiussionate mourning of Eastern maidens over Adonis dead, the wild rites of Thammuz, *' Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer's day," and that strange threnody in which, as Herodotus informs us, the Egyptians bewailed the untimely end of Maneros. The Bacciife of Euripides, indeed, reaches at times to almost the same '' c ^■■-^ . I i8 THE ATTIS. height of dithyrambic abandonment ; but then the Bacchae hviks that peculiarly plaintive and sympathetic air which is characteristic both of the Attis and of the whole religious thought of the Nile and the Orontes. The creeds and myths of the entire region between the Libyan desert and the Euxino coast have for their main, one might almost say their sole, theme the death and resurrection of the dearly beloved man-god. Hence they display a singular depth of reality and earnestness in their passion, which raises them in some respects far above the common level of religious thought. And in his poem of Attis, Catullus, a Celt of Gallia Cisalpina, fired and inspired with all the perfervid fancy of the Celtic race, has enshrined for us nobly in im- mortal verse his own transcript of the weird Oriental dirges he had heard himself during his Asiatic wanderings. It is this specially oifjiastic tone of CatuUus's masterjiiece which I have at- tempted to the best of my ability to preserve in the English version here presented to the public; and it is because I believe I have perhaps suc- ceeded in catching this particular keynote of my author's work to some slight degree better than many jirevious translators, that I venture to add I THE ATT IS. 19 another experiment to the already large number of Enghsh paraphrases. Except for the very perfect way in which Catullus has diunk in the inner spirit and tone of the Syrian or Phrygian religions, he is not, one must fain confess, an important authority for the myth of Attis. On the contrary, the version of the story he gives us, being a purely poetical one, intended rather " to purify the soul by fear and pity" than to convey to us any dis- tinct or historical idea of the nature of the legend, would hardly by itself enable us to form a rough conception of the chief points in the myth of Attis. It is only when we look away to other and more prosaic informants that we begin to understand the true bearings of the tale and its relation to others of like import elsewhere. From Hippolytus, Pausaniiis, Arnobius, and Dio- dorus we are able, however, to piece together the story in a fuller form, which, as Mr. Fra^er has pointed out,' leaves no doubt on any candid and reasoning mind of its kinship with the other Oriental myths of Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and Lityerses. The able author of Tlw Golden. Bough has treated this point so fully indeed, ' The Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 296. I ii »1 ao THE ATTIS. in his profound and epoch-making work, that I will not waste time by going over the same ground again here in full, but will simply refer the curious reader to Mr. Frazer's weighty and admirable discussion of the question under con- sideration. What Adonis was to S3Tia, that was Attis to Phrygia. " Like Adonis," says Mr. Frazer, " he appears to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and resurrection were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring." Ac- cording to the most received account, Attis was a young man beloved by Cybele, the great mystic goddess of the Phrygian groves. Like his equivalent Adonis, he was killed by a wild boar, or, as a variant legend asserted, he muti- lated himself under a pine-tree, and died from effusion of blood from the wound thus caused. This last version, aa Mr. Frazer jurstly remarks, has a character of rudeness and savagery which seems to betoken a very remote antiquity ; and furthermore, it has the merit for our present purpose of bringing into close connection with the hero or demi-god that peculiar property, the pine-tree, which, as we shall hereafter see, plays so prominent and so profoundly important a part I THE ATTIS. 31 ii: the story of Attis. For after his death Attis is said to have been changed into a pine-tree. As we continue our investigation, I think we shall see reason gradually to conclude that this pine-tree is not only an essential part of the r.yth, but is even its very corj and kernel. It is not Attis that makes the pine-tree ; it is the pine-tree that makes the story of Attis. "The ceremonies observed at his festival," says Mr. Frazcr (whom I follow implicitly here, having nothing better of my own — nor as good — to offer), " are not very fully known, but their general order appears to have been as follows : — At the spring equinox (22nd March) a pine-tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cyb^le, where it was treated as a divinity. It was adorned with woollen bands and wreaths of violets, for violets Avere said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as anemones from the blood of Adoi:is ; and the effigy of a young man was attached to the middle of the tree. On the second day (23rd March) the chief ceremony seems to have been a blowing of trumpetc. The third day (i'4th March) was known as the Day of Blood: the high priest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an ^'r 22 THE ATTIS. offering. It was perhaps on this day or night that the mourning for Attis took place over an effigy, which was afterwards solemnly buried. The fourth day (25th March) was the Festival of Joy (Hilaria), at which the resurrection of Attis was probably celebrated — at least the cele- bration of his resurrection seems to have followed closely upon that of his death. The Roman festival closed on the 27th of March with a jirocession to the brook Almo, in which the bullock-cart of the goddess, her image, and other sacred objects were bathed. But this bath of the goddess is known to have also formed part of her festival in her Asiatic homo. On return- ing from the water the cart and oxen were strewn with fresh spring flowers." ^ Now the full meaning of all this ceremonial, every portion of which has its parallels elsewhere, both in the rites of savage tribes and in the surviving superstitions of modern European peasants, can only be fully imderstood after reading what Mr. Frazer has to say on each of these points and its underlying reason ; and I must once more refer readers for further parti- culars to his profoundly learned discussion of * The Qolden Bough, vol. i. p. 297. ■P THE ATTIS. 23 the subject. But it will be advisable here just to mention that Mr. Frazer sees in the Phrygian devotee of Cybele one of those common wood- spirits, or gods of vegetation, who crop up here and there all the Avorld over, and whose true importance in the history of religion he was the first (following in part in the steps of Mann- hardt) to make clear to the minds of serious anthropologists. Attis, then, Mr. Frazor believes, was origi- nally a tree-spirit, and his character as such is plainly brouglit out by the part which the pine- tree plays in his legend and ritual. One story even represents him as a youth beloved by Cybele, and afterwards turned into a pine-tree ; and this form of the legend, which Mr. Frazer treats as a mere late attempt at rationalisation of the story, seems to me to point back rather to an earlier and very bloody form of the worship, to which I shall more than once recur hereafter. In any case, as Mr. Frazer shows, the bringing in of the pine-tree from tlie wood, decked with vio- lets and woollen bands, corresponds to the bring- ing in of tlie May-tree or Summer-tree in modern folk-custom ; while the effigy which was attached to the pine in the Phrygian rite was probably I^i 24 THE ATTIS. m m a duplicate representative of the tree-spirit of Attis. "At wliat point of the ceremony the violets and the effigy were attached to the tree is not said, but we should assume it to be done after the mimic death and burial of Attis. The fastening of his effigy to the tree would then be a representation of his coming to life again in tree-form, just as tlie placing of the shirt of the effigy of Death upon a tree " (in north-European folk-custom^), "represents the revival of the spirit of vegetation in a new form. After being attached to the tree, the effigy was kept a year and then burned. Wo have seen that this was apparently sometimes done with the May-pole ; and we shall see presently that the effigy of the corn-spirit, made at harvest, is often preserved till it is replaced by a new effigy at next year's harvest. The original intention of thus preserv- ing the effigy for a year and tlien replacing it by a new one, was doubtless to maintain the spirit of vegetation in fresh and vigorous life. The bathing of the image of Cybele was probably a rain-charm, like the throwing of the effigies of Death and of Adonis into the water." ^ Tims * See The Ooltlcn Bough, vol. i. p. 264. ' Ibid., vol. i. p. 298. w^^m THE ATTIS. 25 we see that Mr. Fnizor identificH Attis at every point with tlie other familiar instances of tree- spirits or gods of vegetation. Like tree-spirits in general, too, Attis was con- ceived as exercising power over the growth of corn, or would even appear to have been mystic- ally identified with the corn itself. How this connection between trees or tree-spirits and corn or other food-crops arose in the gradual evolution of religions will be one of the questions we must attempt to answer in the second Excursus, " On the Origin of Tree- Worship." For the present, it will be enough to point out in brief that one of the epithets of Attis was "very fruitful;" that he was addressed as the " reaped yellow ear of corn ; " and that the story of his sufferings, death, and resurrection was interpreted as sym- bolising the ripe grain wounded by the reaper, buriei in the granary, and coming to life again when sown in the ground. ^ What was the origin of this Attis myth, or to speak more correctly, of this Attis rituiil ? Well, Mr. Frazer has shown that all the world over there existed from very early times a class of divine priests or living man-gods, whose duty it ' Frnzer, uhi supra, vol. i. p. 299. iL •, ') ■ a 26 THE ATTiF. H wna pacli year to die for their jioople and the liarvest. These gods wore reganUMl as spcscial'y connected with agriculture and the fruits of the earth ; and it was because vegetation requires to be annually renewed, and because it undergoes a yearly sleep during the leafless period of winter, that the divine jniost-kings were called upon to sacrifice themselves once a year for the benefit of their subjects. I shall explain in the next Excursus what seems to mo the origin and meaning of this strange form of faith and prac- tice ; it must suffice here for the moment to show in rough outline how it immediately affects the myth of Attis. Mr. Fi-azer h.xzards on this subject the very pregnant and brilliant guess that in these curious Attis ceremonies we have to deal with a late mitigation and modification of some such early self-immolating custom. In this, I think, he is perfectly right. It appeare that both at Pessinus and at Rome the high priest of Cybele bore habitually the name of Attis. It is therefore a reasonable conjecture that he represented and carried on the succession of the original Attis, whom we may take to have been one of these annual self - immolating deities. Mr. Frazer Mi m mmfmsm ^ THE ATTIS. 87 believes, indeed, that at the yearly festival the high priest actually played the part of the legeiul- Rry Attis. On the Day of Blood, he bled himself frf)ni the anns : was not this an iniitjition of the self-inflicted death of Attis under the pine-tree ? i Or rather, if wo may free ourselves from the domination of the old and probably incorrect mythological idea, which sees in all these things a story of what waa believed to have once liappened, instead of a practice whicli was always happening, may we not regard this blood-lotting as a mitigation of some older ritual in accordance with which the Attis for the current year had to offer himself up by self-immolation or self-mutila- tion to the mother of the godsl Professor Ramsay says definitely that in Phrygia "the representative of the god was probably slain each year by a cruel death, just as the god himself had died." 2 Eut indeed may we not rather conclude, after all we have learned from Mr. Frtvzcr, that the so-called " representative of the god " was in very fact the god himself— the actual Attis wlio died each year of his own free ' Compare the Obr.ravimiryau and other Passioii plays. " In Encydopttdia Britannica, art. " Phrygia," vol. xviii. p. 853. t ^ 38 THE ATTIS. n. will for the crops and the harvest? In that case, I think, wc may look upon the effigy on the pine-treo as a substitute for the real body itself which would once have been affixed to it ; while I believe we may reganl tlie drawing of blood from the priest's arms as a similar substitute for the genuine self-immolation of earlier Attises. " We know from Strabo," says Mr. Frazer, " that the priests of Pessinus were at one time potent- ates as well a» priests ; they may, therefore, have belonged to that class of divine kings or popes whoso duty it was to die each year for their people and the world." So far, I have for the most part implicitly followed Mr. Frazer's lead. He is a leader whom nobody need be ashamed to follow. When wc come to consider the origin of all these beliefs, liowover, aa well as that of the tree-worship or corn-worship which underlies them, I shall strike out to some extent a line of my own. But before proceeding to this central point of our subject, I should like to note in passing that the Attis of Catullus does not bear any very great re- semblance in his principal lineaments, either to the Attis of the myth or to the Attis of the ritual. As Sir Theodore Martin rightly puts it, the Attis «■1« wemmmmR THE ATTIS. 39 of mythology is a Plirygian flliopliord beloved by Cybele and «lain on her account; the Attis of tlie poet is her votary merely, and the foolish victim of his own religious frenzy.» Indeed, I think Catullus envisaged his hero to himself as a Hellenic youth, who crosses the sea from Greece to Phrygia, and there emasculates himself in a fit of passing superstitious madness. Still, through all disguises, one catches here and there to the end some faint echoes of the older and more savage conception, perhaps borrowed by the Celtic poet from Greek sources, and half un- consciously incorporated by him in his vivid work without the slightest suspicion of their real moaning. Thus the key-note of the whole com- position is the self-immolation of Attis— a self- immolation bitterly regretted afterwards, it is true, but still duly performed, as the myth demands, by the hero of the story. Then, again, is not the wail of the mutilated Attis itself a reminiscence of the mourning of the women and of Cybele, the mother of the gods, over the pros- trate body of the self-slain deity 1 Nay, may not even Cybele herself, the great goddess, once have been the mere mother of the human victim? ' I'he Poems of CatuUui, p. 253. (« 30 THE AT VIS. All)! have wc not hUII the cDiineclioii with thn forest, the trees, wild nature f,'enerally, to wliieli Mr. RoliinHon KlliH mo py the Jews, and for various sacrificial purpoaes by the Roman priests. Even the very phrase, dominos ut herifuif(K famuloi solenf, it seems to me, may convfiy to ua some dim and uncertain reminiscence of tiio idea, mentioned by Mr. Frazer, tliat the self-immolat- ing king-god should bo a fugitive slave l)y origin. Thus the Rex Nemorensis of the Arician C'rove wa« always a runaway ; and it is at least iK)snil)lo that Catulhis's lines may enshrine some similar doctrine and practice with regard to the mysteri- ous priest-king of Pessinus. But however this may be, it must suffice for the present to riimem- ber that Attis is essentially a tree-god, and that his rites are most intimately and inextricably bound up with the worship of a pine-tree. ' A CommciUary on CatuUu», p. 204. EXCURSUS II. ON THE ORIGIN OK TREE-WORSHIP. Fin)M tho myth of Attis itself, with its strango old-world iinplicutioiiH, let us turn our !itt('ntion next to tho more general subject of jjlant and troc-worship, of which tho special case of tho Phrygian god would appear to he only a par- ticular exiuui)le. It will be evident at once from what has gone before that I accept on tho whole, without reservation of any kind, Mr. Frazer's main view as to the importance of tree-spirits and tho soul of vegetation in early religions. But, then, I also accept as proved almost beyond the possi- bility of doubt Mr. Herljert Spencer's luminous theory of the origin of polytheism from ghost woi-ship and ancestor-worship. Not only do I believe that Mr. Spencer has adequately made good his main thesis of the derivation of god.-? from heroic ancestors, but I have also received 3« 32 THE ATT IS. considerable encouragement in my faith to this effect from Mr. William Simpson's brilliant and admirabb paper on "The Worship of Death," a paper much less widely known among thinkers on this subject than it deserves to be. Mr. Simpson, who is the well-known special artist of the Illustrated London News, has lx>en led by hib direct observations in the many lands he has visited ii. the performance of his duties to form indepen^' ^t.b; a theory identical in every essential resjject with Mr. Herbert Spencer's. Examination of temples, or their equivalents, in endless lands, from China to I'eru, has convmced him at last that in almost every case the temple begins as a tomb or shrine of a dead person, and the worship is primarily offered to the actual ghost of the man or woman interred within it. I cannot suHiciently commend to the attention of anthropologists, archaeologists, and folklorists this able, original, and very philosophic pamphlet. Now, between these two views — Mr. Spencer's and !Mr. Frazer's — I am aware there would ap- pear at first sight to be an immense discrepancy. I believe Mr. Frazer himself, in particular, would regard them as nothing short of absolutely irre- concilable. To judge from one pregnant passage THE ATTIS. 33 in The Golden Bouyh (vol. i. p. 253), Mr. Frazer would appear to hold that the earliest gods of mankind in the hunting and pastoral stage of society took the form of animals, and that in the agricultural stage, gods were envisaged rather as com or fruit-trees, or assumed the siiape of a human being representing the corn or fruit- spirit. I can find nowhere in any part of his epoch-making work a single phrase which would lead me to sui)pose lie would willingly accept the theory of the affiliation of tree-gods and spirits generally upon the ghosts of dead ancestoi-s. Nevertheless, I l)elieve such an affiliation to be not only possible, but natural and provable. It is the object of the present Jlxcursus, indeed, to show in brief outline that the tree-spirit and the corn-spirit, like most other deities, originate in the ghost of the deified ancestor. Let us begin by examining and endeavouring to understand a few cases of tree-spirits in various mythologies. Virgil tells us in the Third .^:neid how, on a certain occasion, ylilneas was offering a sacrifice on a tumulus crowne.l with dogwood and myrtle bu.shes. He en- deavoured to pluck up some of these by the roots, in order to cover the altir, as was pus- 34 THE ATTIS. I I tomary, with leaf-clad branches. As he did so, the first bush which he tore up astounded hina by exuding drops of licpiid blood, which trickled and fell upon the soil beneath. He tried again, and again the tree bled human gore. On the third trial, a groan was heard proceeding from the tumulus, and a voice assured ^neas that the barrow on which he stood covered the mur- dered remains of his friend Polydorus. Now, in this typical and highly illustrative myth — no doubt an ancient and well-known story incorporated by Virgil in his great poem — we see that the tree which grows upon a barrow is itself regarded as the representative and em- bodiment of the dead man's soul, just as else- where the snake which glides from the tomb of Anchises is regarded as the embodied spirit of the liero, and just as the owls and bats which haunt sepulchral caves are often identified in all parts of the world with the souls of the departed. Similar stories of bleeding or speaking trees or bushes occur abundantly elsewhere. " Wheu tlie oak is being felled," says Aubrey, in his liemaines of Gentilisme, p. 247, "it gives a kind of shriekes and groanes that may be heard *< ^ N ' i THE A'^TIS. 35 a mile off, (us if it were the genius of the oak lamenting. E. Wyld, Esqr., hath heard it severall times." Certain Indians, says Bastian, dare not cut a particular plant; because there comes out of it a red juice which they take for its Wood. I myself remember hearing as a boy in Canada that wherever Sanguinaria Canadensis, the common American bloodroot, grew in the woods, iin Indian liad once been buried, and that the red drops of juice which exuded from the stem Avhen one picked the flowers were the dead man's blood. In Samoa, says Mr. Turner,^ the special a1)ode of Tuifiti, King of Fiji, was a grove of large and durable afzelia trees. " No one dared to cut tliat timber. A str-ry is told of a party from Upolu who once attempted it, and the consequence was that blood flowed from the tree, and that the sacrilegious strangers all took ill and died." Till 1855, says Mannhardt, there was a sacred larch tree at Nauders in the Tyrol, which was thought to bleed whenever it was cut. In some of these cases, it is true, we do not know that the trees grew on tumuli, but this point is s' cially noticed about Polydorus's dogwood, and i.s probably implied in the Samoan ' Turner's Samoa, p. 63. \ 36 THE ATTIS. case, as I gather I'roiu the title given to the spirit as King o. Fiji. In other ina'^ances, however, this doubt does not exist ; we are expressly told it is the souls of the dead which are believed to animate the bleeding or speaking trees. " The Dieyerie tribe of South Australia," says Mr. Frazer, " regard as very sacred certain trees which are supposed to be their fathei-s transformed ; hence they will not cut the trees down, and protest against settlers doing so." Some of th? Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their forefathers are in certain trees, which they therefore spare. If obliged to fell one of these trees they excuse themselves by saying that it was the priest who made them fell it. In an Annamite story an old fisherman makes an incision in the trunk of a tree which has drifted ashore; but blood flows from the cut, and it appears that an empress with her tliree daughters, who had been cast into the sea, are embodied in the tree.^ Again, we must remember that most early worship is offered directly to the spirits of an- cestors in the expectation of definite benefits to ' The Oolden Bough, vol. i. p. 62. tv I wtm iPiimpi P i)\ THE ATTIS. 37 bo derived from their aid. In New Guinea, for example, where religion has hardly pro- gressed at all beyond the most primitive stage of direct ancestor-worship, Mr. Chalmers tells us " when the natives begin planting, they first take a bunch of bananas and sugar-cane, and go to the centre of the plantation and call over the names of the dead belonging to their family, adding, ' There is your food, your bananas and sugar-cane ; let our food grow well and let it be plentiful. If it does not grow well and plentifully you all will be full of shame, and so shall we.' " i Similarly in Tana, one of the New Hebrides, where the stage of religious culture is about the same, Mr. Turner tells us, "the general name for God seemed to heAremha; that means 'a dead man,' and hints alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship. The spirits of their departed ancestors were among their gods. Those who reached an advanced age were after death deified, addressed by name, and prayed to on various occasions. They were supposed specially to preside over the growth of the yams and the difl'erent fruit trees. The first fruits were presented to them ; and in doing this, they * Chalmers : Work and Adventure in New Guinea, p. 85. I Ml ,i. 38 THE ATTIS. I I I ( laid a little of the fruit on some stoiiR or fihclv- iiig branch oi the tree, or still more temporary altar of a few rough sticks from the bush, lashed together with strips of hark, in the form of a table yrith its four feet stuck in the ground. All being quiet, the chief who acted as high priest, prayed aloud thus ; ' Compassionate Father. Here is some food for you ; cat it. Be kind to us on account of it.' And instead of Amen all united in a shout." Abundant other evidence could be forthcom- ing, were it necessary, to show that the ancestral spirits arc regarded by the most primitive types of men as causing the earth to bring forth fruit in due season. But I hardly think further formal proof of this proposition necessary. It is familiar to all those who have studied anthropo- logical literature, and comes out abundantly in the works of Herbert Spencer, Tylor, and Frazcr. Later on, as the ancestral ghost developes, by slow degrees, into the tribal god, these functions of producing and guarding the crops are naturally transferred to the greater deities. But how did the ancestral ghosts acquire in the first instance this peculiivr power of causing growth in vegetation 1 The explanation, it seems n THE ATTIS. 39 to me, though crude and barbaric, is a very simple and natural one. In the first place, in many of the earlier and more native forms of sepulture, the dead are buried under a tumulus or barrow. Such tumuli, of course, go back in time to a remote antiquity. Now, many circum- stances would make vegetation upon the turf of the barrows exceptionally luxuriant. In tlie first place, the soil there has been largely piled up and laboured ; it consists for the most part of an accumulation of deep vegetable mould, gathered together from all the surrounding sur- face ; and at an age when cultivation was wholly unknown — for tumuli, we have reason to kn(jw from the example of Oliio, began in the hunting stage of humanity— tlie burial mound would bo almost certainly conspicuous, from tliis cause alone, for its exceptional greenness. In the second place, again, the body within would add to its fertility, the more so as a great chief was seldom committed to the tomb alone, but was usually accompanied to the grave, whose mega- lithic stone chamber was to serve as his future palace, by his slaves, his wives, and his other belongings. In the third place, too, animals would bo slaughtered, and feasts would take t 40 THE ATT IS. i \ place at the nowly made barrow. The blood of the victims on such occasions is habitually poured out on the grave, or on the surface of the altar- stone; offerings of meatj of fruit, of milk, of oil, are made there in abundance by trembling worshippers. These offerings would act, of course, as rich manures, and would encourage on the barrows an unusual wealth and luxuriance of vegetation. But primitive man knows nothing of the nature and action of manure. To him, the fact that grass grew greener and bushes spread faster on the tumulus of the dead would almost inevitably appear aa an elfect immediately due to the supernatural power of the ghost or spirit who dwelt within it. In all probability, the savage would envisage to himself the actual herbs and shrubs which so sprang upon the tumulus as the direct embodinu-nt of the soul of his ancestor, or his departed chieftain. Now, it could hardly be expected that any direct evidence of so abstruse a point as this would be forthcoming from books or the accounts of travellers. Yet, fortunately, however, I have been lucky enough to hit in an unexpected place upon one curious little bit of actual con- firmation of this a prion suggestion. In his il I 1 I I il THE ATTIS. 41 excellent work on Nether Lochaher, the Rov. Alexander Stewiirt, of Ballachulish, quotes and translates a Gaelic MS. poem, collected by Mr. Macdoimld, the minister of the pariah of Fortin- gall, in Perthshire, one stanza of which runs as follows : — " And ever he saw that his maidens paid To the fairies their due on the Fairy Knoiw, Till the emerald sward was under the tread As velvet soft and all aglow With wild flowers, such as fairies cull, Weaving their garhinds and wreaths for the dance when the moon is full ! " Upon this suj^gestive verse Mr. Stewart makes a curious and important comment. " The aUusion to paying — ' The fairies their due on the fairy kuowe," haa reference to tlie custom, common enough on the western mainland and in some of the Hebrides some fifty years ago, and not altogetlicr unknown perhaps even at the present day, of each maiden's pouring from her cumanbleoghain, or milking-pail, evening and morning, on the fairy knowe, a httle of the new-drawn milk from the cow, by way of propitiating the favour of tiio good people, and a i'i d$^. ; wLjn-i' I» I I 43 THE ATTIS. OS a tribute the wisost, it wua deemed, and most nccu'ptaltlc tliat could be rendered, and sooner or later sure to bo repaid a thousand-fold. Tlie consequence was that these fairy knolls wore clothed with a richer and more ''^' ..iiiul verdure than any other ajmt, howo or knowe, in the country, and tho lacteal riches imbibed by the Boil through this custimi is even now visible in tho vivid emerald green of a shian or fairy kiioU whenever it is pointed out to you. This custom of pouring lacteal libations to the fairies on a particular spot deemed sacred to them, was known and practised at some of the summer shielings in Lochaber within tho memory of tho people now living." * Fully to appreciate the importance of this evidence we must remember that in almost every case, all over Britain, the "fairy knowe" is a chambered barrow, and that the fairies who emerge from it are the last fading relics in popular memory of tho ghosts of stone age chiefs and chioftainosses. This idea, which I long ago put forward in an article in the ComJiill Magazine, entitled, "Who are the Fairies?" has been proved to demonstration by Mr. Joseph Jacobs ' Rev. A. Stewart, Nether Ixyehaher, pp. 20, 21. h M m PV THE ATTJS. 43 in the note» on the story of Childo Roland in his vfthiiiMo collection of Engliah Fairi/ Tale». There is yet another way, however, in which the idea of special fertility must hecome neces- sarily connected in the 8av endowed with a magical or physical iwwcr of fertilising the land. Again, intrinsic sujier- ' Th^ Golden Boxujh, vol. i. p. J85. ill »'■? ■m~ 52 THE ATT IS. natural powor as an attribute of the moriih appears in tlic sovereign virtue believed to reside in anything that came from his person, as his hair or spittle. Tlw. asprii)ti()n of such power to the meriah indicates that he was much more than a m(>re man sacrificed to jiropitiate an angry deity. Once more, the extreme nsvercnco paid him would point to the same conclusion. Major Camphell speaks of the meriah as "hcing regarded as something more than mortal ; " and Major Macpherson says that "a species of rever- ence wliich it is not easy to distinguish from adoration is paid to liim." In short, l)y connnou consent of our authorities, the meriah appears to have been regarded as himself divine. To a certain extent, then, I would venture to differ, with all deference and humility, as of a scholar towards his master, from Mr. Frazer, in the explanation which he gives of this and sundry khidred ceremonies. To him the human goil, who is so frequently sacrificed for the benefit of the crops, is envisaged as primarily the embodi- ment of vegetation : 1 would make bold to suggest, on the contrary, that the corn or other crop is rather itself regarded as the emliodiment or ghost of the divine personage. ■ 1^- m\ wm wmmmm mmmm .1 THE ATTir. 53 Hero are some more very striking cases tliat look that way, extracted once more from Mr, Frazer's vast repertory :— « A West African queen useil to sacrifice a man ami woman in the month of March. 'They were killed with spades and hoes, and their bodies buried in tlie middle of a field which had just been tilled. At Lagos, in Guinea, it was tlie custom annually to impale a young girl alive, soon after tlie spring equinox, in order to secure good crops. Along witli her were sacrificed slieep and goats, wliich with yams, heads of maize, and plantains, were hung on stakes on each side of lier. Tlie victims were bred up for tlie purpose in the king's seraglio, and their minds had been so powerfully wrouglit upon by the fetish men that they went cheerfully to their fate. A similar sacrifice is still annually offered at Benin, Guinea. The Marimos, a Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a luuuan being for the crops. Tlie victim chosen is gene- rally a short stout man. He is seized Ijy violence, or intoxicateil, and taken to the fields, wliere ho is killed among.st the wheat to serve as 'seed' (so tlipy phrase it). After liis blood has coagu- lated in tlie sun, it is liurnod along witli the frontal bone, the flesh attaclied to it, and the i m r. 54 THE Arris. I, brain ; the ashos aro then HcattcrcMl over tlio. grouiul U) fertilise it. The rest of the body is eaten." ^ Now it is true that in any case the identifica- tion of gliost and crop is very comph^te, for, a.s Mr. FnuEcr remarks, the Mexicans killed young victims for the young corn and old ones for the ripe corn. The Marimos thus sacriliced lus "seed" a short fat man, tho shortness of his stature corresponding to that of the young corn, hi.s fat- ness to the condition which it is desired that the crops may attain. Again, says the same high authority, the identification of the victim with tlie corn comes out in the African custom of killing him with sj)adcs and hoes, and the Mexican custom of grinding him like corn be- tween two stones. Still the point which I wish here jjarticularly to suggest as imporUnit is, that cultivation may liave begun on the actual tumuli of the dead, and that the animal god who was sj^icrificed for the fertility cf tlie crops may have been, as it were, a deliberately designed an. 3S_5. W mmmm THE ATTIS. 55 Ki(.w on tlio gmvo of a divino chinftaiii : let us make such a grave in every field, and tlie spirit we put in it will ensure fertility." Just as cul- tivation itself is a sulmtitution of urtilicial fui natural growth, so the annual slain g,.d is, J believe, an artiHciid substitute for the natund dead chieftain in his sacrificial Iwirrow. Mr. Gonune's recent work on Ethm/of/;, in Folk-lore contains some interesting facts in the same direction. The festival of the village goddess in Southern India, including Wnm- and Alysoro, is signalised by rites which recall in many respects the sacrifice of the Kandhs, though here, as so often hai)i)ens, an animal has been substitute.1 for tlie human victim of primitive antiquity. This festival has always l)een under the management of the Pariahs, who act as sacrificial priests— a significant fact, which proves the rites to belong to an early stratum of alwri- ginal religion. The high-priost, known as the Potraj, was armed, accoi-ding to Sir William Elliot, with a long whip. A sacred buffalo, the representative of the original human victim, was turned loose when a calf, and allowed to feed and roam at will about the village. On the second day of the feast, this animal was tlirowi iJ ■A .^J-t'^ I t 56 THE ATT IS. I down iM'foro an iinslinpcly stone, stained red witli vermilion ; its liead was .struck off li,v a sinj^^lo blow, and its foot was placed in its mouth in front of tlu! altar. Around were laid vessels containing various cereals, wliile hard liy stood a lieaji of mixed grains, with a drill-plough in the centre. The earca.se was then cut uj) into small pieces, and each cultivator received a por- tion to liury in his own fields. Other ceremonies followed, immaterial, so far as I can .see, to our present incjuiry ; hut, on the fifth day, the heap of grain deftosited l)eforehand wa.s divided among all the cultivators, to Ijc liuried hy each one in his Held, together with the l)it of sacred llesh.' In all this we cannot fail to soo a ceremony essentially identical witli the sacritico of the nieriah, except that an animal god or ghost has hero heen substituted for th(! earlier human one. More interesting still is the curious fact that Mr. Gomme has traced survivals of the self-.same practice in Jjigland itself, a point which shows that the custom of making these artificial pro- tective gods of vegetation must have been fairly world-wide. At llolne in Devonshire, a village; ' Gomine, Ethnoloyy in Folk-lore, pp. 22-25. THE ATTIS. J7 on th(> slopes of Duitiiioor, is a fieltl of two iicros, tlio property of tlio parisli, aud known iia tljo Ploy-Field. Ill the eentro Htiinds an ancient granite pillur or nienliir. On May morning, before l)reakfjist, tlie yoiuij,' men of the vil]aj,'o used to assemble at this spot and sacrifice a lamb, for pieces of whoso body they afterwards struggled, attributing to them supernatural powers. 1 As bearing onc(( more on the supi^jscd con- nection between ghosts and crops, wliich wo shall presently see resolves itself later on into a connection between trees and croj)s, we might bring up the curious ceremony of the gardens of Adonis, which would seem to bo a survival of the same idea that vegetatioji sprin-s directly from the body of the divine person. The death of the Syrian god was annually lamenteil with bitter wailing l)y the women of the country. Images of Adonis, dressed to resemble corpses, and, no doubt, replacing the actual corpse of the original annual Adonis victim, as the Attis effigies replaced the original slain Attis, were carried out to burial, and then tlirown into the sea or into springs of water. Wliat is more ' Gomme, Elhnologi/ in Folk-lore, p. 32. H '^!^ $8 THE ATTIS. noteworthy, Ijowcvcr, in the fiict Umt hiiskots or potH woro fiUiul with (>artli in which whisat, barley, lettiicoa, and varioim liowors — presuniably auenmnes among tlio number — were sown luid tended for eight days, chiefly by women. Fos- tered by the sun's heat the plants shot up rapidly, but, having no depth of rout, withered as rapidly away, and at the end of eight days were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis, and Hung with them into the sea or into springs. Wo do not know whether these gardens were actually grown on the top of the effigies, but this would seem probable, says Mr. Frazcr, from analogies elsewhere ; for in Sicily the womon, at the apitruuch of Easter, sow wheat, lentils, and canary seed in plates, which are kept in the dark, and watered every second day. The plants shoot up quickly. The stalks are then tied together with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are placed on the sepulchres, which with effigies of the dead Christ are made up in Roman Catholic and Greek Churches on Good Friday. In both these cases the plants would seem to be envisaged as spring- ing from the actual Ixjdy of the dead god. Indeed, Eustathius speaks of the erardens of THE ATT IS. 59 Adonis U8 boing placod un the giavu of thu licro.' Very similar is the nature of the evidonco derived from the myth of Osiria. And in this roHpect it ia well to remcmlxir that more than one competent Egyptologist has of late regarded Osiris 08 on early king, the founder of the dynasty of I lor in Upper F)gypt. "I have myself no doubt whatever," says Mr. Loftie, " that the names of Osiris and Horus an; those of ancient ndors. I think that, long l)eforo authentic history begins, Asar and Aset his wife reigned in Egypt, probably in that wide valley of the Upper Nile which is now the site of Gir- geh and IJorb^. Their son was Hor or Horus, the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt ; and the ' Hor seshoo,' the successors of Horus, are not obscurely mentioned by later chroniclers. I know that this view is not shared by all students of the subject, and much learning and ingenuity have been spent to {)rovo that Asar and Aset, and Hor, anil I'tah, an.,, ,,. ^c, I :j1 'i li ■■PV 66 THE ATTIS. tromoly open hoathy country) that not only werp the Scotch firs deliberately planted on the tinnnli, hut also that they were carefully pro- tected hy fences till a relatively late or even historical jteriod. A particularly tine example of a round barrow overgrown with ancient Scotch firs is to be found near St. Martha's Chapel at Guild- ford. Another, a little less striking, but equally characteristic, stands on the summit of Milton Heath, near Dorking. It is faced on the opposite side of the road by a second and extremely degraded barrow, also marked by a conspicuous clump of pine trees. A group of very ancient and gnarled Scotch firs, known as the (Hory, on the liill just behind Dorking to tlie south, forms another and still more noble example of the same rumbination. But I need not labour the iwi'.it. Whoever knows our southern comities knows that barrows and Scotch tirs go together almost universally. Indeed, I believe there are no very old firs in Surrey, Kent, or Hampshire that do not so stand on antique tumuli. Now, as these trees are not indigenous to southern England, and as they c< '1 only have grown under the protection of a fence, I conclude that the ancestors of the 'xisting firs were planted < THE ATTIS. 67 tlion; wiion the Itunows wero liist foiiiuil, were long secured from harm hy a belief in their sanctity, and have kept up their race ever since, either by seeds or shoots, under cover of the old trees, to the present day. The Scotch fir is in England tlu^ sacred tree of the barrows. Klsewhere, other evergreens are planted over graves. I ilo not kno^v when the yew first acquired its present funereal significance ; but as it is oftenest found in P^ngland in connection witli Christian cluirchyards, and as it is also our one large indigenous conifer, I would venture to suggest that it was probal)ly adopted in early Cliristian times by way of a compromise. TIic pine which grew on the barrows of tlic deified deod woidd thus, no d()ul)t, lia\e acquired in tin- eyes of missionaries a heatlicn siguilicance. But the yew might naturally be employed by early Cliristian teachers as a symlxtl of everla-sting life, not only because it more nearly resembled the southern cypress, with whose use in a similar way they were familiar, Init also bi'cause it was free from any superstitious association in tlu; minds of the natives. In southern Kurope, other evergreen trees take the place of the Scotch fir on graves and barrows. I !i< C8 Tilt: ATTIS. In Provonco, wliere my oi)portuiutiea of obaerva- tion Imvc been most frequent, it is tlio great umbrella pine which oftcnest crowns tlio tumuli of the (U'ml ; though tlic smaHer Pinun niaritima frequently serves the same function. On the peninsula of Antibes, tliat loveliest spot on the Riviera, the most sacred site is an old roun70Tship is still the principal cult. The great tumuli of the early Chinese kings near Piikin, it seems, are conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves of pine wood. Have we here, then, I would venture to ask, the origin of the sacred pine tree of Attis? I incline to believe that we have. As the pine- tree is phuued upon tumuli in many parts of the world, and is often proLccted by walls or hedges, THE ATTIS. (H) It would .s..oni t.) he naturally assnniatc.l with the gh..Rt, ftu.l t.. hecomc, iu the expressive phrase u8.hI hy Mr. MacdoruUd, the «'prayer- tvw. " of tlie departed. Thi.s then, T takc^ it, is tlie true explanation of the prominent part which the pino tree play.s in tlio myth and ritual of Attis. Nor is it any objeetion to our view that Attis is also apj-arently envisaged in an alternative form both as a man nr f((.d, and as an eml)odied corn-spirit. Such frank inconsistencies, which to us would seem fatal to tlie success of any theory, apjiear per- fectly natural to the easy-going mind of primitive man. To him, the ghost may reasonably appear in any one of many alternative forms. He recognises it erp.ally in the snake that glides from under tlie stones of the tumulus, in the beast or bird that crosses his path after the offering of prayer to his deified ancestor, in the shadowy form that eludes his prying gaze amid the dense shades of the primeval forest, and in the vague human shai)e that stands beside him in his dreams, and whispers into his ear un- certaiji warnings or dim promises for the future. So, too, with plants. From (jue point of view, Attis is the corn that springs directly from the '( I 'I -*^- -•■* II «.WWi^»-^»- 70 THE A IT IS. il(>iul hckI'k iMnly; IniL from imothcr iioiiil of view lio is tho pine; tree that gidws with waviii}^ IxnifjhH al)OV(! the grnssy liarrow (if the. sclf-sliiiii or wtilf-ilcvottHl hero. Whatever «niics frnni iIk- dead body, whatever fleonis to stand in close relation to it, ia rc>,'arded in the simple philosophy of these nai(^ worshipiK-rs as an embodinuint or representative of the multiform deity. Thus in the extant descriptions of the ceremonies of the Attis festival, we g(*t tract's or (flimpsos of every one in turn anion}{ these alternative ccmceptions. Attis is first (jf all envisaged as a hinnan being — a young man who dies a violent deatli in a particular fashion. This death by self-mutilation seems to point to a furtlKir develojiment of tlu! s<'ime idea which li(!S at the bottom of the Kandh practice of 1)uying the victim and paying for him with a price — namely, it implies a certain obvious element of conae:,(; and self-sacrifice - a realisation of the principle that " it ia expedient that one man should die for the peoj)le." So the West African victims, we are told, went gladly to their doom ; and so, too, in Phoenician and Carthaginian hislnry wo often find that in great crises of the state young men f)f good family volunteered to devote themselves as vic- \, Tim ATT IS. 7» tiius to Baal on hA\i\[i of tins fiitliorlund. Onco more, after his death, Attin is clmiiK«!tl iiit(. ii piiio tro«; ami his fostival is iimiiguratt'd Ijy (tutting down juHt siidi a pini; trc- in tlio W(.(m1s, whiili JH iuiccptcd as in a certain sonso the •■nibodinieiit and ropreaontative of tlw! dead Attis. But still the human endMxIiiiient re- mains si(h. hy side to the ond with the vejfe- ta])lo one; for tlie effigy of u young man is «Is., attached to the middle (.f the tree, as the young man himself was no doubt attaclied in still oarIi<.r practice. All this is c.)mpreliensil)le enough when we recollect that the original corn and tlie original pine tree may actually have grown out of the body or barrow of the self- de voted man-god in earlier times, and that the ceremonies tlescribed for us by late classical writera represent very mitigated and modified forms of extremely ancient and savage rites. There is also an interesting transitional stage, it seems to me, l)etw(!en tree-worship pure and simi)lo and its offspring, grove-worship. This transition from the special cult of the single tree to the general cult of the wood or forest, comes about, I take it, through the medium of th(! fevi'iias. And what is the temenim 1 Well, i: ..*^.. ^^5i. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I 1.25 l^|2£ 12.5 1^ 140 2.0 U II 1.6 'V' y ^% '^ 7 !?>• '^^"*"<<*.i;* v,!.^ Wp > w 72 THE A TTIS. I think, we got the first clue towards an answer to tliat question in Mr. William Simpson's l)rilliant identification of tlie temple and the tomb, already so well foreshadowed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. For if the temple is only a magnified loml) where offerings on a large scale are habitually made to the sainted ghost or tlie deified ancestor, then clearly the temenos is just the representative of the enclosed space sur- rounded by a wall about the primitive barrow. In the centre stands the temple — tliat is to say, tlie actual tomli itself; all round it stand the sacred trees planted U[)on or about the holy grave, and regarded as the actual representatives of the deified hero. These trees form, I think, the great link of transition to the sacred grove. For when once pt-ople had grown accustomed to the prime idea that certain trees were to be consiilered as sacred from their close connection with a deified ancestor, it would be but a slight luid natural step to regard other trees as sacred because they stood near a holy site, or even to manufacture an artificial sanctity l)y planting trees about a cenotaph temple. Thus, wIksu Xenophon, for instance, built a temple t(j Artemis, and planted around it a grove of many V THE ATTIS. 73 kinds of fruit trees, and placed in it an altar and an imago of the goddess, noliody for one moment would pretend to suppose that he erected it over the body of an actual dead Artemis. But the point is, that men would never J-.ave begun building temples and consecrating groves at all, if they had not first built houses for the dead god-chief, and planted trees and shrubs and flowers and gardens upon his venerated tumulus. Nay, even the naive inscription on Xenophon's siirine— " He who lives here and enjoys the fruits of the ground must every year offer the tenth part of the produce to the goddess, and out of the residue keep the temple in lepair"— does it not carry us back implicitly, by its wording and its sense, from civilised Hellas to the very earliest level of savage religion ? And this point leads me up to an important qualification. It is not necessarily true— nay, it is demonstrably false— that every individual god was originally a dead man. In late stages of culture, gods are quite unmistakably manu- factured out of abstractions, r^ when the Roman Senate decreed in due fovm the erection of a temple to the purely factitious goddess Con- cordia. But nob.K'y could ever have thought of K i< ; 74 THE A TTIS. making Concordia or any other like abstraction into a deity, nnless tliey liad been first tlioroughly famih"arised with tlie idea of many gods, derived originally from the deified ancestor or chief, and imloss also those gods had already been envisaged as " departmental," tliat is to say, as possessing certain definitely distributed functions and pre- rogatives over certain particular actions or iwr- tions of nature. The possession of such special prerogatives, however, does not in the least militate against the primitive humanity of such departmental gods ; for the Christian saints have often similar prerogatives, and we know with certainty that most at least of the Christian saints were originally ordinary men and women. In other words, after the idea of the god has been thiroughly formed and differentiated from that of the mere ghost, it is easy enough to manu- factiu-e new gods ad libitum out of any material that happens to come handy. But so far as I am aware, nobody has ever even suggested as yet any conceivable way in which the idea of a god could be formed ah origine, except from the magnification of the ancestral ghost, his powers and prerogatives. Still less has anybody ever suggested as yet any conceivable way in rf"S«St' mmmm rcji THE ATT IS. 75 which tlic habit of worship— a habit that lies, as I believe, at the very root of all rtiligion <;ould possibly have originated except from the propitiatory offerings of food and drink at the grave of the revered and deeply feared ancestor. To put it briefly, though there are individual gods who need not necessarily once have been individual men, there could be no such thing as the idea of a god except as the reflex of tlie ghost of man in general. So, too, with temples. "While it is almost ccrtaiidy true that temples as a whole originate, as Mr. William Simpson has so abundantly proved, from the tomb of the deified chief or hero, it is also undoubtedly true that certain temples exist in later stages of culture which are, to use once more the phrase I employed above, cenotapl:. shrines. But these cenotaph shrines could never have c mie into existence at all unless men's minds had already long been habituated to the idea of worship at the actual tomb-shrine. Nobody could ever have invented, all out of his own head, the notion of offering up prayers or food to an empty building, unless he had first been long accustomed to make similar offerings at the grave or barrow of 1(^ THE AT lis. hi.s dcifiod ancestors or of hi, deceased cliicf- tain. It is the sajue, again, with sacrec stones. These, as I have endeavoured to shoAv else- where, owe their sanctity at first to the standing- stones erected over the remains and tumuli of Hie dead. But in course of time prayer offered at the grave comes readily to he regarded as prayer offered to the visible and tangible object then and there present-the stone that crowns and tops the barrow. Ghee or oil poured out for the ghost comes readily to be regarded as offered rather to the stone itself than to the person whose grave it marks and commemorates. Especially will this confusion exist in the mind of the worshipper when the worship is of old date, and the personality of the deceased has been long forgotten. It is very early ancestors who become the great gods of later generations. StiU no one could ever have dreamt of offering up food or preferring requests to a lifeless stone, unless he and his predecessors had long been accustomed to look upon similar stones as the dwelling-places of his ancestors. But nowadays, when the sanctity of certain stones is already a well-established article of belief, the people of t WPVBi ^SPWB^^WP q^Wi" ■^mp m^mn THE ATTIS. 77 f- .southom India— to take a particular instance- artificially manufacture sacred stones by setting them up in their fields, painting them red (a substitute for blood-libations), and pouring oller- ings of oil or ghte on top of them. That is to say, they treat certain casual stones, which have no rational connection at all with their ancestral spirits, in exactly the same way in which they or their predecessors have been in the habit of treating the graves of their forefathers. A like evolution has taken place, I believe, in the case of sacred trees and sacred groves. I do not mean for a moment to assert, or even to sugg' 3t, that every individual sacred tree grows or ever grew on the grave of a dead person. But I do mean to say that, so far as I can see, the notion of the sanctity of trees or plants could only have arisen in the first place from the reverence paid to trees or plants which actually sprang from the remains of the dead, and so were regarded, like everything else that came out of the tomb, as embodiments or avatars of the dead man's spirit. Once such sanctity camo to be generally recognised, however, it could bo readily transferred to other conspicuous or re- markable trees, or even to trees in general, and ml /«.V m- ''^ THE ATT IS. l-ticularly to the special groves or plantat.ms that surrounded temples, whether mortuary or ccnotai)hic. •' Yet in every case, when wo go back far enough in time, or, what comes practically to the same thing, when we go down low enough 1" culture towards the savage level of primitive man, we find always that we stand nearer face to face with these the earliest naked realities of rehgion-that the ghost counts for most; that the temple has not progressed beyond he stoge of the hut or underground dwelHng; that the sacred stone is still the actual tomb- stone ; that the altar is still the actual grave- «lab; that the sacred tree is still directly and intimately connected with the ghost or the tumulus. Thus, as Mr. Loftie tells us, it is the carhest Egyptians with whom the divinity of Iharaoh, a god and the son of a god, is most of all a prime article of belief, and with whom he worship of the actual munnny pkys the argesfc part in tlie religious ideas.' Only in later times do the great gods come to usurp the clnef importance, and the cult of the family dead falls into a place of secondary considera- ' ^n Essay of Scarabs, p. vi. rt^ .^» ^M ^^«P «^*!! THE ATTIS. 7g tion. So, too, it is among Mr Duff Macdonahl's Central African savages tliat tho only known g<-cls are tlie S])irit8 of the dead ; it is in very primitive Tana that the one word for a deity is the same that is applied to the corpse of a man. Similarly, Mr. Duff Macdonald has not the slightest hesitation in connecting tho "prayer- tree," as Ik, graphically calls it, with the spirit of the dead, or in recojr,iisi„g the worship offered at it rather than to it as distinctly intended for the deified ancestor. Whenever, in short, we go back far enough, or go down low enough, we always find the self-same result— the gods are nearest ghosts; the temples are nearest tombs; the sacred stones are nearest gravo-slabs or menhirs ; the sacred trees are closest connected with the original ancestor-worshiji. Provided with this universal master-key, then, we can now proceed to unloc'- ,y intricate puzzles of tree and plant-worshi- which have hitherto baffled us. How f uU of m a .. .g from our present standpoint, for example, is Mr. Turner's statement that at a certain spot in the island of Savaii there was "an old tree inland of tho village which was a place of refuge for mur- derers ami other capital offenders. If that tree ijl i* 1 ' i ■ i i 80 THE ATTIS. was reacliod by the criminal ho was safo, ami tho avenger of blood could pursue no farther, but wait investigation and trial. It is said that tho king of a division of Upolu, called Atua, once lived at that spot. After he died, tho house fell into decay ; but the tree wfis fixed on aa rejjresenting the departed king, and out of respect for his memory it was made tho sub- stitute of a living and royal protector."' Equally significant in its own way is the same writer's mention of the sweet-scented tree {Conancja odorata), which in one place " was suppose 1 to bo the habitat of a household god, and anything aromatic or sweet-scented which the family happened to get was presented to it as an offering." - Not less striking is the case of the large tree, Hernandia 2>eltata, in which " a family god of the same name " (as tho native one of the tree) " was supposed to live ; and hence no one dared to pluck a leaf or break a branch." In all these relatively primitive cases it is notice- able that it is a family god who is believed to inhabit the tree. We stand as yet quite close to the original form of worship which is almost ' Turner, Samoa, p. 65. '^ Ibid., p. 71. IM \ THE ATTIS. 8i oxcIuHivoly domestic and directed straight at the lieada of the family Khosts. After all this, it is interesting to read that on the closely related Savage Island the kings— who would of conrao be the descendants of such divine ancestors, and therefore themselves both gods and priests — "were supposed to cause the food to grow;" and that "the people got angry with them in times of scarcity, and killed them ; and as one after another was killed, the enuicl superstitious practices. In Galam, in Africa, a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of the city to make it im- pregnable; while in Great Bassam and Yarriba such sacrifices wore usual at the foundation of a house or village. Clearly, the idea was to supply the site with an artificial tutelary deity ; and I would ask, is not this also the rationale of the stone and tree employed, as we saw, to make the local gods of a new settlement ? May we not conclude that originally at least such a human sacrifice took place in every case; that the stone and tree had their primitive meaning as marking the place of the ghost or god ; and that, as manners grew milder, they remained at last as mere symbols or imitations of the genuine slaughter? For Mr. Tylor speaks of substitutes for the human victim in many places, and these sub- stitutes are uU f^f the familiar kind — a lamb, a live THE ATT IS. i2r horso, a cock, m empty coffin. The stone and the tree would answer in many ways the same cere- monial pvirpose; they would remain as symbols of the ritual sacrifice after the reality itself had faded or even been forgotten. In Polynesia, where we always stand nearer to the roots and beginning of things, Ellis heard that tlie central pillar of one of the temples at Maeva was planted upon the body of a human victim. Among the Dyaks of Borneo, a slave girl was crushed to death under the first post of a house. Even in Japan, a couple of centuries since, when a great wall was to be built, " some wretched slave would offer himself as a founda- tion." Observe here, too, the further important fact that the immolation in this case was appa- rently quite voluntary. Mr. Tylor, indeed, treats all these instances as though the victim were offered up to appease the earth-demons ; but one of his own authorities, Mason, was told by an eye-witness that at the building of the new city of Tavoy in Tennasserim, "a criminal was put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon." Here we have, I think, the more probable ex- planation, an explanation which exactly accords in every point with the principles and practice Q 1 122 run ATT IS. of tlie KautUiH imd the other hunian-8ncrifi(;iiij,' wavagea. In Octob(>r 1881, the king of Ashanti put fifty girls to death, that their blood might bo mixed with the mud used to repair the royal l)alace, injured by an earthquake. " Some yours ago, the i)icrH of a railway bridge under con- struction in Central India were twice washed away, when nearly finished, by the floods, and a rumour spread abroad among the Blieels of the neighbouring jungles that one of them was t<> be seized and sacrificed by tlie engineers, who had received such manifest proof of myste- rious opposition to their work." ' Schrader says that when the great railway bridge over the Ganges was begun, every mother in India trembled for her child.''' Mr. Baring Gould has contributed a striking article on this sub- ject to Murray's Magazine for March 1887 ; and he differs from Mr. Tylor in attributing the practice of immolation (rightly, as I be- lieve) to the desire to produce a protecting spirit for the edifice to be erected.' Ubicini * Sir A. Lyall, Atiatic Studio, p. 19. " Clodd, Childhood of Religion, p. 268. ' See also Orimm, Teutonic Mythology, il. p. 844, and Polkluri Jiecord, iii. p. 282. rilE A 7775. >»3 well (IcfiricH 11 dfa/tic an "the glitwt of a \)cmm who has been immured in the walls of u building in order to make it more solid."' It is not houses alone, however, that are thus protected by an artificially made guardian. The vikings used to "redden their rollers" with human blood. That is to say, when a warsliip was launclied, human victims were bound to the rollers over which the galley was run down to the sea, so that the stem waa sprinkled with their blood.^ The last trace of such consecra- tion among ourselves is the ])reaking of a wine- bottle over the ship's bows. Captain Cook found the South Sea Islanders similarly christened their war-canoes with the blood of human victims. Furthermore, as the position of protecting spirit is rather a dignified and beatified one than otherwise, it is kept reasonably enough in the family of the king, the founder, or the master builder. This is a common trait in all stories of these human sacrifices, and it helps to bring ' Ballades et Chants Populaires de la Rovmanie, p. 198. * Vigfusson and Powell, Vor^ms Poelkum Boreale, i. 410. fl ^"^*^ w^^^ 134 THE ATTIS. tlicin intu line with the Hiniiiiir Htorittu uf corn- hj»irit8 and aelf-inunohitcd gcMls. F(jr it is tlie ' Mirly beloved son that is especiully chosen for Mch self-ininiolrttion. Thus, wo read in the Book of Kings that when Hiel the Bethelito Imilt Jericho, " he laid the foundation th(*rv>of in Abiram his firstborn, ami set uj) the gates thereof in his youngest son- Segub." And may we not put ilown in the same cat(^gory the case of Remus, re])re8ented in legend as brother of Romulus, the founder of Rome? At the risk of seeming to descend beneath the dignity of so great a subject, I cannot resist the temptation of quoting from Mr. William Simp- son a very good story which well illustrates the Burvival to the present day of the type of mind that thinks a god or saint far more useful in the ther world than in this, and so doesn't scruple to take measures for sending him there. The tale go-^3 that Sir Richard Burton was exploring in 80L ^ut of the way place in Afghanistan, and had adoj)ted for that purpose the disguise of a Mahommedan fakir, in which alone would ho have dared to penetrate so dangerous a region. At one village where he stopped, he played his part so well that the people soon formed a very mmmm w THE ATTIS. 125 lii^'li idea of thoir vinitor's sanctity. He whh congnitulatini,' liiiiiHclf greatly, imloofl, on the improHsion he had pHxhiced, when, one night, to hi» immense surprise, tlie elders of the villago came to him privately and earnestly advised him to go away at once. Burton asked in astonish- ment whether the people didn't like him ; and was answered, oh ! ym ; that was just tlie trouble. They were all enchanted with his great holines.s ; and considering what a splendid thing it would bo for their village to possess the ziaret or tomb- shrine of so good a man, thoy were debating among themselves as to whether they would not kill him. This story is in the very spirit of the Kandli theology, and if it isn't true, it is at least very " ben trovato." ^ To sum up, then, I would say in one word, while I accept in all their main residts Mr. Frazer'a remarkaljle conclusions, I believe that in order to understand to the very bottom the origin of tree-worsliip, we must directly affiliate it upon primitive ancestor or ghost-worship, of which it is an aberrant and highly specialised offshoot * William Simpson, The Worship of Death, p. 17, foot- note. II li W^i EXCURSUS III. ON THE GALLIAMBIC METRIC. if. No mciisure in wliich any great poet has written has been the subject of so mucl> misconception, I believe, as the metre of the Attia. Not only in the minds of casual readers, but even in those of classical scholars, a general impression seems to prevail that the Galliambic verse, or. Catullus wrote it, is a rather lawless, irregidar, uncertain rhythm, and that any amount of variation from line to line is both tolerated and encouraged. I find this erroneous idea so widespread and so general, even among those whose business it is to instruct youth in such high and abstruse matters, that 1 think it may bo worth while, with very great diffidence, to go into the ques- tion once for all, and to ohow (if I can) that the Galliambic, though a very rapid and hurrying metre, is far more definite, regular, and invari- able than either the hexameter or the iambic ia6 fi i I h ij Ml mmmmmm THE ATTIS. 127 senarius. At tlie same time, I slmll endeavour to make it clear that a great deal of miscon- ception has actually existed, even in the ideas of real scholars and real poets, on the subject of this particular measure. I shall try to point out that it has been doubtfully explained by many able commentators, and often incorrectly or inadequately imitated by modern verse-writers. To begin with, let us clear our heads at once of all preconceptions derived from writers on metrical doctrine, ancient or modern, and inquire for ourselves, de novo, with an unprejudiced mind, what is the nature and character of the Galliambic measure as Catullus wrote it. After that, we may come back to examine the figments of grammarians, and to see how far, if at all, they accord with the facts and probabilities of the case, as regards Catullus h'mself and his Greek predecessors. In the first place, then, the very first lino of the Attis runs thus- Super alta vectus Attis celeri rate maria. Now, if we start clear of any preconception in the matter, we shall naturally read and divide thif verse as follows : — I f i I ^rvwirtm wmPBOlM 128 THE ATTIS. SQpfir ftl I ta vCc I ttis At , tis II cSler! | r&tC m& | rUl ; that is to say, we sliall treat it as an essentially iambic-anapaestic rhythm, with resolution of tlie last fooi/ but one into a tribrach. More definitely we might say, the measure consists of two halves, divided by a caesura ; the first half being com- posed of an anapaest, two iambi, and a long syllable, while the second consists of an ana- paesi;, a tribrach, and again an iambus. Graphi- cally thus — -w-lv-U-l-llvv-Uvvlww Now, if we examine all the other lines in the poem, one by one, we shall find that out of a total of ninety-three lines, no less than sixty- eight, or more than two-thirds, absolutely accord vnth. this standard, syllable for syllable. Of the remaining twenty-five, the greater number only tliffer from it in unimportant and so to speak inevit- able ways — that is to say, the variations consist merely of resolutions or compressions of feet of a sort to which all iambic-anapaestic measures are always liable. We will examine them one ])y one in detad. The opening anapaest of the first half of the verse is compres-sed into a spondop in ninp lines, THE ATTIS. 139 namely, 5, 15, 17, 22, 26, 40, 67, 73, 77, and 86, which run thus — DBvSl I vit ile acuto sibi pondere silicis ; Sectam I meam executae, duce me, mihi comites ; Et cOr I pus evirastis Veneris nimio odio ; Tibi I cen ubi canit Phryx curvo grave calamo ; . Quo nos I decet citatis celerare tripudiis ; Lustra | vit aethera album, sola dura, mare ferum ; Linquendum | ubi esset orto mihi sole cubiculum ; .Tarn jam | dolet quod egi, jam jamque poenitet ; LSvum I que pecoris hostem stimulans ita loquitur ; Vadit, I fremit, refringit virgulta pede vago. In three of these lines, Tibi I cen ubi canit Phryx |1 cilrvo \ grave calamo, Vadit, I fremit, refringit ll virgfil | ta pede vago, and Jam jam | dolet quod egi, || jam jam | que poenitet, the opening anapaest of the second half is also compressed into a dactyl ; but this is obviously done for the sake of the fine slow metrical effect, in accordance with the emotion or idea expressed by the lines. In the first of the three cases, the long-drawn syllables admirably represent the grating drawl of the tibicen, contrasted with the quick and tripping measure of the next line, Ubi capl j ta Maenades vi jaciunt hederigcrae ; K Ji ■i 130 THE ATTIS. ■ i •> '! in the second case, the measure expresses the crackling of the brushwood beneath tlie lion's feet; in the third, the deep spondaic rhythm adds profound effect to the mournful nature of the wild cry of regret for an irrevocable act of fanatical folly. This effect is deliberately still further heightened in the last instance by the rare substitution of an iambus for the regular tribrach in the second foot after the caesura. It is this tribrach, as we shall soon see, that gives the measure as a rule its remarkable rapidity and lilt ; and the alteration of so dis- tinctive and pecuUar a feature in the metre, we may feel sure, would never be countenanced by so great a niiister of music in rhythm as Catullus, except for some very good and sufficient reason. In three other lines, namely, i8, 34, and 83, the opening anapaest of the second half-line is also compressed into a spondee, ajjparently for the sake of strengthening the effect — adding weight and dignity ; thus — Hilarate herae citatis || errur | ibus animnm ; Rapidae ducem sequuntur || GallSo | properipedem ; Rutilam ferox torosa || cervi | ce quate jubam. These compressions are of so purely normal a character, that I would beg the reader's pardon > mmm THE ATTIS. 131 for calling attention to them at all, wore it not for the light they incidentally throw upon the very beautiful metrical effects Catullus was able to obtain within such rigid limits by ringing the changes upon so comparatively small a number of possible variations. Again, in four lines, namely, 23, 48, 63, and 70, the opening anapaest is resolved into four short syllables, always with the object of adding rapidity and a sense of breathless hurry-scurry to the verse. I Ubl capl I ta Maenades vi jaciunt hederigerae ; Egft mQll I er, ego adolescens, ego ephebus, ego puer ; ,'bJ mftrl I a vasta visena lacrimantibus oculis ; llgO viri I dis algida Idae nive amicta loca colam ? I.i the first of these cases, the marked contrast with the preceding line — one slow and drawling, the oihor hasty and orgiastic — must have struck the ear of even the most careless reader — Tibi I cen ubi canit Phryx || cQrvo | grave calamo ; Ubl cipl I ta Maenades vi |1 jaciunt | hederigerae. These two verses form, perhaps, the very finest example of the adaptation of sound to sense to be found anywhere in the whole range of poetry ancient or modern. ■ .f ii ■■■■«■ 132 THE ATTIS. In one line only is the opening anapaest of the second half similarly resolved into four short syllables, namely, in 91 — Dea, magna dea, Cybelle, || dSA, d&ml | na Dindimi ; and here, again, the rapidity of the supplicatory emotion aufticiently accounts for the more rapid and gaajiing run of the measure. Most of the other variations are more unim- portant, and at least equally normal in character. In eight lines, for example, the second foot, which is usually an iambus, has been resolved into a tribrach, namely, in 4, 22, 31, 63, 69, 76, 77, 78, and 91 : Stimula | ttls Ibt | furenti rabie, vagus animiii ; Tibic I 8n ttbl | canit Phryx curvo grave calamo ; Furibnn | dli,8Tmal, | anhelans, vaga vadit animam agens; Ego muli I Cr Sgo ad | olescens, ego ephebus, ego puer ; Ego Mae | nis, 6g6 | mei pars, ego vir sterilis ero ; Ibi June I til jtt^ I resolvens Cybele leonibus Laevum | qu8 p5c5 | ris hostem stimnlans ita loquitur ; Agedum.iD | qutt.ftgS, | ferox, i.face ut hunc furor agitet. Dea, mag I na dCa, | Cybelle, dea domina Dindimi. These very simple and ordinary substitutions hardly call for further comment ; they are in every case due to the desire for a more rapid movement in correspondence with the I THE ATTIS. U3 feeling of the poet. It may be noticed, too, that in many cases several irregularities occur in a single line, to heighten the effect, as in 63, which begins with the astonishing number of eight short syllables, one after another. In line 76, on the other hand, the almost invariable tribrach of the second foot after the caesura suffers compression into an iambus, as we already saw was the case in line 73 ; thus — Ibi juncta juga resolvens Cybele | I60 I nibus ; Jam jam dolet quod egi, jam jam | qu6 poo | nitet. The classical scholar who does me the honour to peruse these notes, however, has no doubt long been murmuring impatiently to himself, " Well, but the fellow is shirking all the real difficulties and hard places of the metre. How about those awkward lines 18, 54, and 60 1 He hardly mentions them. And yet they form the actual crux and test of the situation." Quite so. Those lines are among the most corrupt and the most uncertain of the poem ; and according to the view we take of the Galliambic metre in its pure form, will be the view we are most likely to adopt in the end as to the proper reading and interpretation of such doubtful m ^"«WVWII 134 THE ATTIS. j)asHage8. Therefore, it would surely bo best to learn what wo can directly of our measure firHt, and then to con.c back again and see in what way our conclusions affect those more abstruse and difficult problems. Looking the metre fairly and squarely in the face, then, as Catullus writes it, and neglecting for the present all hearsay evidence, the first thing that strikes a humble inquirer is the fact that this is essentially an iambic -anapaestic rhythm. So far, we have come across nothing but iambi and anapaests, or their common equivalents, spondees and tribrachs, very spar- ingly varied by the still more rapid and elusive amphibrach. As yet, no trace of any trochaic or dactylic ictus, which would clearly interfere with the general iambic ring and swing of the measure — a ring and swing which goes from the short or unemphatic to the long or emphatic syllable. In essence, the verse as we get it in the Attis is of iambic or quasi-iambic character. Again, the variations on this prime model, which wo found excellently exemplified for us in the first line, are mostly in the direction of resolutions — that is to say, of still more rapid and hurrying rhythm. Comparatively few of 5 ' THE ATT IS. »35 them consist of compressions, ami those few are almost all obviously due to the desire for greater weight in particular circumstances. Nov, if we had only the Attis of Catullus before us, and were in no way prejudiced by any- body's statements as to the origin and develop- ment of the Galliarabic measure, what should wo naturally judge it at first sight to be? Why, clearly, we should say, the crude form or origin of this measure is as follows — - - 1 - - U - 1 - II . - k - u „ In other words, it takes its rise from two iambic dimeters catalectic, the second of which lacks always its last syllable. Or, to put it a trifle less technically, the measure seems to consist of two half-verses, separated by a quite invariable caesura, whereof the first half-verse is made up of three pure iambi and a hypermetrical syl- lable, always long, while the second half- verse is made up of three pure iambi alone, without the addition of the hypermetrical syllable. In point of fact, this hypothetical crude form is just the double of our old friend — di\t>i \iy€u> 'ArptlSas, d4\u Se KdS/xov ifSeiv, ii r -mrwwvnt mmm ma 136 THE ATTIS. I I repeated bo as to luiikc a single verso, and with its final syllable cut otf in the second half. Now, how do we get from this crude form to the typical Galliambic, as Catullus writes it? Well, there is a second variety of the same metro, which the same paoud-Aiiacreon gives us, namely — MeaoniKriott iroB' upatt CTpiiptrat 6t' "Ap/cros ^817, Here, for the sake of greater rapidity of action in the line, wo have an anapaest substituted for the opening iambus in each verso. Make tho same substitution in our hypothetical crude form of Galliambic, and you got this schema — ww-|w-|w~l~IIww~Iw-|ww That is almost the Galliambic as we actually find it in our existing AUis ; and the change from the opening iambus to an opening anapaest is clearl. due to the desire for greater rapidity of swing and lilt to suit so quick a style of subject. For the same reason, too, the pen- ultimate foot is almost invariably resolved from an iambus into a tribrach, which is the peculiar feature that gives the Attia its very remarkable swiftness and its torrent energy. For the sake W*. JHli ATTIS. 137 i>f theso tribracliB, it is oasy to nee, Catullus has invented nil those strange and sonoioua oE»ro^ y^tyo/ttva, such as heri/w/m, hetleri(/e)-a>, 2^10- peripedem, and nemorimijm, to which the poem owes so ''^"[,. ., shun! of its peculiar charm and its sweeping eirectivenesa. With this additional elpiucnt of rapidity thrown in, our schema now becomes — U - I - - I - II .. - 1 i ^ _. and this is the metre as Catullus writes it. Only, still further to increase the hurrying scurrying character of the penultimate tribrach, the last syllable of the verse, common of course by general usage of prosody, is very often allowed to be short, so that the line ends with five unemphatic syllables all in a row, row, row ; an effect which, as I need scarcely say, can hardly be imitated or represented in any modern language. Still, as if to sliow us what were the real stages by which the fully evolved metre was gradually arrived at, Catullus kindly leaves us a few stray traces of the earlier forms, such as the heavier iambi in the tribrach places of lines 73 and 76. Thowe are prociou.s rolic.i^ — fossils, i ^^fim —"■—— —■— »38 THE ATTIS. .. t ns it wore, of ixn older mIii^'c of tlio iiiotre, embedded in the perfect work of a Inter char- netor. Now, wliy has anybody ever doubtiMl this simple, obvious, and, as it seems to me, perfectly natural derivation of the Galliambic, whose very name proclaims it of iambic 8tery one of these unexpected dissonances pulls mo up short with a disagreeable jerk, as against a sudden stone wall. I cannot believe that so gi-eat and so musical a poet as Catullus could ever have per- petrated discords which make even an English ear recoil with horror, as from the grating of a slate-pencil upon a slate, or the rubbing of wet cloths over a pane of glass in a window. Two great Jlnglish poets of our own day have also given us what apparently purport to be reproductions of the metre of the Attis, as far at lejist as is consistent with the genius and nature of English prosody. The first is Lord Tennyson, in his curious and interesting " Ex- periment " of Boadicea. I take tliis poem to be an excellent gauge of the amount of mis- ap])rehension which exists to this day even in scholarly minds as to the measure of the Attis. For fine and dasliing and hurrying and eager as are the Laureate's lines, they are not assuredly the Galliambics of Catullus, on any theory of 148 THE ATTIS. the metre, ionic or iambic. Indeed, it would bo unfair not to add that Lord Tennyson himself does not claim the name for them, and that it is merely by guesswork that I affiliate his experiment upon the Catullian model. I observe, however, that Sir Theodore Martin does the same tiling,^ as does also Mr. George Meredith.^ Seeing then that we all three instinctively set down Boadicea as an attempt in something supposed to be the Galliambic metre, I think we can hardly all three be mistaken in believing tliat Lord Tennyson meant at least to reproduce as far as possible the Catullian effects in English verse. Here are the first few lines of this interesting experiment : — "While about the shores of Mona those Neronian legionaries Burnt and broki the grove and altar of the Druid and Druidess, Far in the east, Boiidicda, standing loftily charioted, Mad and maddening all that heard her, in her fierce volubility. Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Cdmuloddne, Yell'd and shriek'd betv^een her daughters o'er a wild confederacy." ' 7'Ae Poems of Catullus, p. 234. * Ballads and Poons, p. 159. J'"l,.-.. mmmm THE ATTIS. • 49 Now, it must be frankly admitted at onco that tlio motro of this beautiful and rushing poem (which, as a work of art, I admire im- mensely) is not on any hypothesis Galliambic. It has not an iambic-anapaestic ring and swing, nor has it an ionic one. What is it, then? Why, as I read it, simply and imdisguisedly trochaic, with just enough tinge of dactylic intermixture to give it something the same air of haste and rush that the tribrachs and anapaests give in their way to the Galliambics of Catullus. The crude form of the measure, I take it, is to be found in the Laureate's own trochaic poem of LocMey Hall — " Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn ; Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn." This is simply what, in the technical language of ancient prosody, we should call a trochaic tetra- meter catalectic ; and the metro of the Boadirea only differs from it in the frequency with which dactyls replace the trochees, especially in the second half of the verse — a peculiarity evidently designed to imitate the effect of the Catullian tribrachs, which, of course, cannot bo actually I ISO THE ATT IS. rcj)ro(luced in uny modern language. The acun- sion I take to bo thus : — While a I boiU the | sh6rea of | Muna || thdse Ne | rdnian | Idgiona | rics Bdrnt and | bruko the | gr6ve and | itltar || 6i the | Drtiid and | Or\er, I have freely introduced anapaests into the other pliujes, I'specially in the sec nd half ; but I have not other- wise attenrpted to reproduce the efl'ect of the im- possible tribrachs. And for all I have done, and nil I have left undone, I humbly crave the pardon of those who know better, seeing I have done it all for pure love of our beloved poet, whom others, I know, may understand more critically, but whom no one, 1 am sure, could love more ilearly or admire more devotedly. PriHiat by iiai.i.antyne. Hanson & Co. lidinbitrgh and London .^ " '.^ I ■^y'^pif— wp^i^iiipiiny m^m BIBLIOTHEQUE DE CARABAS. Crown avo Volumes, Printed on Hand-made Paper, with Wide Margins mid Uncut Edges, done »P in Japanese Vellum Wrappers. Issued under the general Editorship of Mr. ANDREW LANG. THESE yOLUAIES WILL fiEyi'.K HE REPRISTED. '■ CUPID AND PSYCHE r The Most Pleasant and Delectable Tale of the Marriage of Ciipid and Psyche. Done into English by William Adlington, of Uni- versity College in Oxford. With a Discourse on the Fable by Andrew Lang, late of Merton College in Oxford. Frontispiece by W. B. Richmond, and Verses by the Editor, May Kendall, J. W. Maciail, F. Locker-Lam psoN, and W. H. Pollock. (Ixxxvi! 66 pp.) 1887. Out 0/ print. II. EUTERPE : Tl Second Bor' . the Famous History of Herodotus. Englished by B. R. 1334. Edited by Andrew Lang, with Introductory Essays on the Reli- gion and the Good Faith of Herodotus. Frontispiece by A. W. Tomson ; and Verses by the Editor and ■3" Graham K. Tomso.n. (xlviii. 174 pp.) 18S8. lo.c Oil/)' ajcvj copies left. '' Mr Lang deserves no sm.iU thanks from all who love the quaint and delightful stories of Kings and their tombs, of go.is and their temples, told to Herodotus by the priests of Kgypl, and by him to the world." — The Spectator. " It is not necessary to quote or point out the best of the many good things which will be found in ' B. K.'s' translation of ' Euterpe.' To begin it is to read it to the end. ■ ' — T/ic Satunlay Review. III. THE FABLES OF BIDPAI ; or, The ^*oralI Philosophie of Doni : Drawne out of the auncicnt writers, a work first compiled in the Indian toni^ue. Englished out of Italian by Thomas North, Brother to the Right Honorable Sir Ror.iCR Ndrth, Knight, Lord Nor lli of Kyrtheling, 1570. Now again edited and indue» d by Joseph Jacobs, together with a Chronologico ■ Biographical Chart of the transl.ntions and adaplalion.s of the Sanskrit Original, anil an Analytical Concordance of the Stories. With a full- page Illustration by Edward Burne Jones, A.R.A., Frontispiece from a i6lh century MS, of the Anvari Suhaili, and facsimiles of Woodcuts in the Italian Doni of 1532. (Ixxxii. 264 pp.) 1S88. 12s. 1 \ THE FABLES OF iESOP, as first printed by W. C.AXfON in 1484. Now again edited and induced by (. Jacobs. With Introductory Verse by Mr. Andrew Lang. 2 VqIs. 1890. £1, \s. i\^ dtiiiMiliiiiliiii -fw wm mmmmm