Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/392

 2,7^ Reviews.

this does not seem to tell us whether kings or priests came first. Men would not have wanted a king unless they feared human foes, or a priest unless they feared the gods. Which fear was the earlier and more pressing ? It does not appear likely that there is a single uniform answer to this question. We do not know that all early civilisations were alike ; our information is still a long way from anything really primitive. Neither do we know that the practical motives of expediency which no historian could neglect in such a case as Henry VIII. 's were not operative before the beginning of our records, or that men were not shrewd enough to act on them quite consciously. The conflict of the two swords was there before the Schoolmen set their wits to reconciling it by theories of imperial or papal supremacy.

Many kings, again, have claimed a divine parentage. King Edward VII. goes back to Cerdic of Wessex, and Cerdic, in the Saxon Chronicle, goes back to Woden. This, however, is not of necessity connected with any sacerdotal function. The Rajput princes deduce their pedigrees from the sun and the moon, but do not belong to the priestly caste. Also kings may become gods without any pedigree at all. There was no fixed order of succession in the Roman empire, but the emperors were regularly deified by virtue of their office. Even an official character is not necessary. There are, in truth, two kinds of deification. It may be that a particular god is supposed to need a human tabernacle, and some mortal has to be found for him to inhabit. This, as the more difficult case, is the delight of anthropologists. But it oftener happens that a man of superior holiness or valour or accomplishment is deemed a god because there is something about him that seems to exceed human faculty. Thus, within the memory and witness of men who are not very old, John Nicholson was deified by his Sikhs altogether against his own will. His dissent, not confined to words, failed to check the cult, and it is said to be still continued. And Mr. Holman Hunt relates how he danced himself, so far as his Bedouin hosts were concerned, into a chieftainship which he politely refused. Hence another question — Is this or that heaven-born king the descendant, in fact or