To take a particular instance, the mode of initiation in the Sherbro leopard society strongly recalls certain pre-Hellenic myths. The society chooses some stranger and asks him to a dinner at which human flesh is secretly mixed among the other food. At the end of the meal they reveal to him what he has eaten, and in proof (I think) show him the hands, and sometimes the head, of the murdered human being. He has shared the leopard feast, and is now a leopard.[49]
Was it not exactly like this that Atreus kept the hands and feet of the murdered children apart, hidden with a cloth, and at the end of the feast removed the cloth to show Thyestes what he had eaten? Lykaon too, though his name can scarcely be derived from λύκος, turned into a wolf because he had ‘sacrificed a child on the altar of Zeus Lykaios’. As he himself can scarcely be different from Zeus Lykaios, this must originally have implied some cannibal act. And you will remember that ever afterwards in the ritual of Zeus Lykaios legend said that one piece of human flesh was mixed up with the rest of the sacrificial meat, and the man who unknowingly tasted that bit was doomed to turn into a wolf.[50]
There are the burning questions of totems and of matriarchy; there is Earth-magic, there is Purification, there is Fetichism: there are many other marks of ‘the Religions of the Lower Culture’ to be found in the ancient pre-Hellenic myths. But I must turn to the special point which I wish to illustrate in the remainder of this lecture.
I wish to deal with a most familiar part of the subject, the Divine King, or, as I prefer to call him, the Medicine-King, and then to apply the results which we reach to the most obvious remnant of non-Homeric poetry that has come down to us, the Theogony of Hesiod.
We all know about this medicine-king. If we like we can call him divine. On his force and his _mana_--what Hesiod, I venture to suggest, calls his κράτος τε βία τε--depends the welfare of his people, in the way of rain and thunderstorms, of abundance of game, of crops, of success in war. He also affects floods, earthquake, and pestilence. If he suffers in any way, if his _mana_ is weakened, his whole people suffers and is weakened too. Consequently he is encouraged and kept strong as long as possible; if he shows any weakness, he must be got rid of and a better man found to take his place. There seem to be three main methods. Either he is set aside periodically, at the end of five years, or nine years, or the like; or he is quietly deposed when he shows signs of age, like Peleus, Oineus, Aison, in the legends; or, and this is our main subject to-day, when some one else shows superior _mana_ by killing him. At present my _mana_ is supreme; I am king; my will carries itself out. But if your _mana_, your Kratos and Bia, conquer mine, then you are king. If you can also get my _mana_ into you, so much the better. For κράτος and βία are tricky things and may desert any one of us, or, according to Hesiod, any except Zeus: ‘No house of Zeus is without them, no seat of Zeus, there is no going forth of the god where they do not follow him, and they sit for ever beside the Thunderer.’[51] Already, in Hesiod, these _mana_ qualities have become half anthropomorphic; much more so, of course, in Aeschylus’ _Prometheus_.