Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/438

 4o8 The European Sky -god.

to the upper sun in the ninth year {kvcni^ erei avSiSol \jyvxag naXti'). From these grow up glorious kings and men of swift strength and men surpassing in poetic skill ; and for all future time they are called holy heroes among men.'

This resurrection of heroes after an interval of eight years can hardly be other than the resurrection represented at the eight-year Hcro'is. On that showing, the heroes in question must have been kings and victors in gymnastic and musical contests — in short, the whole dynasty of priestly kings, who were apparently regarded as re-incar- nations of their predecessors. -^'-

Lastly, as to the third and concluding portion of the festival, it is not difficult from our present point of view to see that Charila was a human scape-goat, -^'^ to whom the guilt of the community in general, and of the king in particular, was transferred. This implies that at the end of everv eight years the king was thought unfit to reign without a definite act of expiation : probably in the far past the king had himself been put to death as one who was no longer vigorous enough to produce satisfactory crops.-^'*

At one time this eight-year festival seems to have been observed over a wider area. The Delians, for example,

-'- This idea of reincarnation recurs in connection with the nine-year cycle of the Arcadians. Plin. nat. hist., 8. 82, cites from Scopas Olympionica the statement that Demgenetus the Parrhasian at the human sacrifice offered to Zeus KvKcuQq by the Arcadians tasted the entrails of a boy-victim and was thereupon transformed into a wolf, but that nine years later he returned to human shape and won a victory in boxing at Olympia. In the same context (8. 81) Pliny quotes from Euanthes another Arcadian tale to the effect that the family of a certain Anthus cast lots, and that the man on whom the lot fell was taken to a lake and, after hanging his clothes on an oak-tree, swam across the lake to a desert place, where he was transformed into a wolf; that he associated with other such wolves for the space of nine years, and, if he had during that time abstained from attacking men, he was restored to his original shape, resumed his cast-off clothing, and had an additional nine years' lease of life granted him.

^'^ Cp. the examples given by Frazer, Golden Bottgh^- iii., 124 ff.

■■"•' Supra, p. 392 f., cp. p. 3S3.