Eat The King - The Myths Behind The Ancient Sacrificial Rites Of Spring

 Did early humans really sacrifice and eat their King at this time of year? Ann Marcadia asked me this question last year and I becames so absorbed in revisiting the myths, the areticle was not finished until about August. So here we are a year later ...

Around this time of year, well OK - around the time of the vernal equinox but I've been busy - people will ask me is it true that pagan tribes used to sacrifice and sometimes eat their King for real or is it a ritual sacrifice?

There is no hard evidence of human sacrifice among pagans in the period for which we have written records, i.e. from about 2000 BC, with the exception of the Aztecs. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence however and while we can say fairly surely that by the time Rome dominated the known world human sacrifice in honour of the gods had died out, nobody can know whether in isolated instances it continued among remote tribes.

Rumours of human sacrifice among the Druids of western Europe are greatly exaggerated but there will always be people who will stretch and distort evidence in order to back up their preconceptions. Many resoected and respectable authors have made the mistake of interpreting references to "The Sacred Groves Of The Druids" as references to places where the Druids conducted human sacrifice. It is completely wrong. Contrary to the Christian calumny that Druidic culture was primitive and savage and had no written language they had a form of writing called Ogham for everyday business and two coded alphabets, the tre alphabets Beth-Luis-Nion and Boibel - Loth for liturgical communications. These worked by assigning a tree to each phonic and using the symbol of that tree. Full details are found in The White Goddess by Robert Graves, Practical Celtic Magic by Murry Hope (available UK only) and The Golden Bough by Sir James Fraser ( big book but free to read online)

. The sacred groves were actually an obfuscatory reference to the vowels of the Druidic alphabets.

In answer to the specific question "Did primitive tribes realy sacrifice and eat their King at this time of years, the first thing to do is remind readers that a myth containes a symbolic or mataphorical truth, not a literal trugth. Neolithic and Bronze age sacrifice myths and traditions are usually calendar myths making the passage of seasons and they involve ritual (pretend) sacrifice or the substitution of an animal for the ritual King, a stunt usually achieved by the priests with the aid of trickery.

There are many legends in The Bible and other ancient texts hinting that the Gods of the Axial age, as German philosopher Karl Jaspers dubbed the period from about 2,500 to 500 BC, rejected human sacrifice having demanded it as a test of their followers' devotion.

Abraham's Sacrifice of Isaaac tells of God demanding the sacrifice of Abraham's firstborn son, only to relent and accept the sacrifice of a Ram.
Pantheon.org Agamemnon's Sacrifice Of Iphigenia to Artemis involves a similar switch. Artemis relents and snatches Iphigenia from under her father's knife, substituting a stag, the animal sacred to the goddess.

The best known illustration of the King sacrifice myth is to be found in the folk song John Barleycorn. Obviously this is a harvest myth concerning the death and rebirth of The Green Man and not related to the spring equinox which is when the new Childe Of Light, born a moment after the sun passes it's lowest point, gains the ascendancy over the Childe of Darkness who is reborn each year at the summer solstice, as the sun begins to wane. The mythical tradition on which it is based however can be traced back to the Hellenic and Pelasgian societies and perhaps origniates with the Minoans. In the regions these people inhabit the growing season is different. The Mediterranean summer is too hot and dry for grains like barley to be successful. Selective breeding has produced different strains over the millenia but we are dealing with the origins of myths. Here's John Barleycorn, a murderous take of a man being tortured, slaughtered and finally consumed ... or is it.

 

John Barleycorn

 

link to lyric and midi download

There was three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head,
And these three man made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn was dead.

Then they let him lie for a very long time
Till the rain from heaven did fall,
Then little Sir John sprung up his head,
And soon amazed them all.
They let him stand till midsummer
Till he looked both pale and wan,
And little Sir John he growed a long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with the scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee,
They rolled him and tied him by the waist,
And served him most barbarously.
They hired men with the sharp pitchforks
Who pricked him to the heart,
And the loader he served him worse than that,
For he bound him to the cart.

They wheeled him round and round the field
Till they came unto a barn,
And there they made a solemn mow
of poor John Barleycorn.
They hired men with the crab-tree sticks
To cut him skin from bone,
And the miller he served him worse than that,
For he ground him between two stones.

Here's little Sir John in a nut-brown bowl,
And brandy in a glass;
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the stronger man at last.
And the huntsman he can't hunt the fox,
Nor so loudly blow his horn,
And the tinker he can't mend kettles or pots
Without a little of Barleycorn.

A perfect description of the farmer's yearly cycle. A true myth is more than a story. Some say myths are stories of things that happened long ago that contain a grain of truth though the telling has become fanciful. Really however to be a myth, a story relates something that happened once but is in fact happening all the time, just as the death, burial and resurrection of John Barleycorn happens every year, even though it has become more mechanised and less jolly.

 

Nature Worship has been regarded as the foundation of all religions. Aristotle left this remarkable saying, "When we try to reach the Infinite and the Divine by means of mere abstract terms, are we even now better than children trying to place a ladder against the sky?" Early man could not avoid anthropomorphizing the Deity. The god could show himself. He could walk, talk, come down, go up. Earlier still, man saw the reflection of the godhead in the sun, the storm, or the reproductive forces.

Boscawen writes:"The religion of Assyria was in constitution essentially a Nature worship; its Pantheon was composed of deifications of Nature powers. In this opinion I know I differ considerably from other Assyriologists, Mr. Sayce, M. Lenormant and others being of opinion that the system was one of solar worship." Another author speaks of "one great surge of voluptuous Nature worship that swept into Europe."

Many creation myths begin with a battle, a death and a resurrection. The oldest known creation myth that was recorded in written form was that of the Assyrian Baal pantheon. The Bible equates the Baal gods with Stan and evil but Baal (alternatively Bal, Bel, Beli) simply meant Lord. In the creation story Baal is not the first God. That honour goes to El ( I Am ) the Ancient of Days, the Oneness, Jah, Cronos and numerous other names most of which mean The Nameless One. El ruled a dark and formless place but eventually created two offspring, Baal, the sky god who brought light to the darkness, rain to water the crops and sunshine to ripen them but also storms that could destroy everything; and his sister / bride Anat the fertility goddess who gave fecundity to the earth and to the womb.. There was another God too, Mot, who ruled darkness and death.(Sacred Texts: The Myths Of Babylonia and Assyria)

One day Mot arose out of his dark realm, killed Baal and devoured him (summer giving way to winter). El heard of his son's death but could do nothing except weep and join the humans who mourned their god because he could no longer give the warmth to raise their crops or the rain to water them. Only Anat, the fertility Goddess could save Baal, said El.

Consumed by grief and rage Anat roamed the world looking for Mot in order to avenge her 'other half' because, as the Assyrian text puts it, "she yearned for Baal as a cow yearns for her calf or a ewe her lamb". When she finds Mot she cleaves him in two with her ritual syckle, winnows him in a seive, scorches him, grinds him to dust and scatters his remains on the earth. Them somehow (the text is incomplete) she resurrects Baal to rule the earth for half the year while Mot who has miraculously survived his rought treatment and done some plea bargaining will rule the other.

There are similar myths in most ancient cultures, notably those of Ancient Egypt where the fertility goddess Isis does not quite resurrect her hubby Osiris on account of the God of darkness Set having cut him in twelve pieces. Isis does manage to steal the penis of Osiris and impregnate herself from it (in some versions she becomes pregnant with Osiris' child by making love to the corpse which so angers Set he then dismembers his rival's body) The child of Isis and Osiris is named Horus and rules the earth while Osiris becomes ruler of Duat, the world of the dead and also ruler of the harvest (the death of the crop is part of the harvest, the plants must be sacrificed).

In all versions of those myths the battle betwen light and dark is repeated annually, the gods being immortal and therefore incapable of dying other than a ritual death. The myth is not a history but a story that is happening eternally.

Mircea Eliade defined “myth” as “’living’ in the sense that it supplies models for human behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life.” It was only with the predominance of Christian thinking that myth came to mean “fiction” and “illusion”, and worse as “falsehood”. Eliade noted that myth came “to denote ‘what cannot really exist’” in our contemporary society. The mythology of the Green Man is a living mythology. The “meaning and value” it gives to our lives continues to unfold and evolve for us.

Just as the people of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic eras (old stone age and middle stone age) had based their rituals around hunting and the worship of animal spirits so the early farmers saw divine mystery in the annual cycle of tilling, planting and harvesting. When they prepared the field, scratching the soil with tools made of wood, bone or antler and saw their seeds descenting into the earth to be covered and abandoned in the damp darkness, only to rise as green shoots a few weeks later is it any wonder they saw a mystical and divine force at work.

When the crop started to flourish it was an epiphany, a divine revelation, a manifestation of the strength of their earth Gods and Goddesses.

Rituals were devised to celebrate the various stages of this process, to help the deities replenlish themselves in the hope that their energy would not be exhausted. The old crop had to die, to be buried before it could rise again. And even the ancients knew there was no such thing as a free lunch, in fact back then when life was a precarious balancing act, any lunch was valued more that it is now and people knew that a gift had to be reciprocated. Something of value had to be given back. Celtic tales in ancient texts like The Red Book Of Hergest tell many stories of sacrifice, not bloody sacrifice on the altar but self sacrifice, devotion of a life to the service of a God.

Such myths occur everywhere. Take a look at this tradional celebration of the annual harvest cycle from the ancient Hellenic world. It may seem quite familiar.

The cycle begins with a ritual King being chosen or anointed. The anointed one is a Hellenic concept related to the great spring festival of the sun god, variously named, Hermes, Ormazd, Marduk, Jove, Saturn, Dis, Beli, Helios and many more local variations. For convenience he will be referred to here as Hermes.)

Cristos, the anointned one is a yearly manifestation of Hercules, semi-divine son of the god Hermes and a mortal woman (see Genesis chapter 6 verse 1 - 4.) Zeus, who is cited as the superhero's father in later Greek myths is simply a manifestation of the sun god for an era in which the jealous patriarch rather than Hermes the healer and giver of lanugage and communication reigns supreme.

The sacrifice of Cristos, the annual saviour, the deliverer of his people, is ritual, representing the solar year in which the new king (year) is born at the winter solstice when the sun passes its lowest point, gains the ascendency over the King of Darkness. At the summer solstice the Sun King, the earthy manifestation of Hermes (Hercules, Arthur, Cuchulainn, Seigfried etc.) meets the Dark King and defeats him (as depicted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), holding the ascendency until the winter solstice when by convention they meet again and the Dark King wins. As the Dark Kings beats last years child of light (who you notice is born out of the darkness of winter) a new King is born. To make way for the new child of light to be anointed the old King must die the day before the equinox so that his spirit can be resurrected three days later.

The newly proclaimed King will then vanquish the darkness on the summer solstice and rule over the harvest before his powers start to wane at the autumnal equinox when nights once more become longer than days.

Throughout his reign the King is accompanied by twelve companions and on the penultimate day of his life they all join him for a final feast where he is made drunk with the local brew; wine, mead, cider or beer. He is then ritually betrayed by one of his companions, hooded by the priests, bound with sacred bonds and led into the centre of a circle of wooden or stone pillars (the universe - wheel), where he is laid out on a symbolic of the earth -wheel which represents the yearly cycle. The cross is this wheel in the Christianised version)

In a well recorded British ritual, at this point the king is spirited away and goes to live with a another tribe or joins the priesthood, he must never return to his own village because the people have seen him miraculously transformed into a young white bull. The bull is bound, rendered unconscious and impaled on an oak stake and its blood is caught in a vessel (which may or may not be called a grail.) The flesh of the "god" who has willingly sacrificed himself for the good of his people is then roasted on an oak fire and shared out among the members of the tribe while each adult is marked with the blood (a cross, symbol of the universe wheel, on the forehead) and then allowed to take a sip of the liquid and so, symbolically the tribe have eaten the flesh and drunk the blood of their god - king.

After the feast the twelve companions are touched by the sacred fire (usually by jumping through the flames - there were no health and safety regulations then) before they lead a wild dance accompanied by frenzied drumming and the singing of ecstatic, nonsensical songs. Thirteen, probable representing the thirteen lunal cycles in a soal years) was an important number in myth. Jesus had his twelve apostles, King Arthur his twelve Kinghts of the Round Table, Jason was accompanied by twelve Argonauts, Odin had his Twelve Berserkers, Roland and his twelve companions held back the Moorish army at Roncevalles and the body of Osiris was cut into twelve pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Cerne Abbas Giant - an English Man figure. To see him in all his glory click the image)

Nobody can be certain why the hare (easter bunny is sacred to the Greek goddess of renewal Artemis, also named in other cultures Diana, Isis, Astoreth, Brigid, Hecate)some people suggest maybe it is because the triangular face over a cleft lip resembles the females public delta over the cleft of the vagina (similar the face of a Beaver!), maybe it is because the hare is three toed and the goddess has three aspects, hares usually litter three young or perhaps the symbolic importance is because of its fecundity; the females can conceive while already pregnant with a litter. Any way you look at it the Easter Bunny is a potent fertility symbol and a link from Easter to another calendar cycle tradition.

The Easter Bunny comes into the picture once the old King is done away with and the new one takes his place. The goddess sends the hare to lead him to his appointed ritual coupling with her on the summer solstice. There was symbolic sexual intercourse between the Queen of the Mai, the traditional May Queen who is chosen as queen of the woods, queen of life and youth, and crowned with a garland of hawthorn (or mai tree in old English) flowers in on her hair. The May Queen, Maypole dancing and Well Dressing customes survive today to celebrate this phase of the calendar.

The Greek Goddess Artemis, as a moon goddess, was the eternal virgin, inviolate, untouchable. And a prissy cow she is too. When she is seen by Actaeon hunter naked while bathing in her sacred pool which has the power to renew her virginity, she turns the unfortunate man into a stag and he is chased and killed by his own hounds.

Maybe the Goddess was afraid the hunter would have exposed the secret of her sacred pool because it is where she came every year on Imbolc (Feb 2nd) to renew her virginity at the time when the first flowers bloom, the first buds start to swell, early lambs are born and the ewes and she goats come into milk. Each year after renewing her virginity she would take a new lover from among mortals. As these guys usually came to a sticky end the myth is perhaps a warning to mortal men not to have love affairs with Goddesses. A similar fate befall Tammuz the shepherd boy when the Babylonaian goddess Innana falls for him while men who love the sultry Irish redhead Morrigan tend to get vapourised by the power of her orgasm. What a way to go.

But just as Artemis renews her virginity so her earthly manifestation, the Mai (May) Queen, is renewed each year and thus last year's symbolic queen is freed to marry.

The pont of all thse myths and legends is continuity, death and renewal. All things must die if new life is to begin.

Another calendar myth cycle that is very significant at this time of year is The Green Man. This relates to the Winter King and the Summer Queen or Lady who must find a champion to assert for her the right to rule the period of growing, blooming and putting down seed.

The king and queen of summer are earthly representations of the sun god and the earth goddess but for the actual coupling in the astral plane the gods both take the form of serpents. The caduceus, the staff of Hermes, his symbol of power, is in the form of two serpents you may be aware.

The familiar image of The Green Man, a jovial giant with twigs and leaves for his hair and beard and vines growing out of the corners of his mouth is probably based on the Celtic woodland god Taranis or the Greco - Roman Dionysus / Bacchus. He is older than the harvest King ritual / myths, being a god of the hunt and the wild harvest. The green man was easily adapted to the springtime myths of later pagan societies but is more appropriately associated with Beltain (Mayday) than Easter.

Many Green Man celebrations are still observed in western Europe. One of the best known is the Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance for which records date back to the 1226 AD. Although not a spring sacrifice festival as it is held near the autumn equinox, the ritual celebrates they cycle of seasons and eternal renewal.

One of the best-known stories of Mallory's Morte d'Arthur written in the 14th century is that of the nephew of King Arthur, Sir Gawain. Mallory took his version from an older poem whose author is unknown but is believed to have been a resident of north-western England. The poetic story is very stylised and uses many unfamiliar terms. This version is translated to modern English by Richard Cavendish.

“At Camelot on New Year’s Day there rode into Arthur’s hall a gigantic green warrior on a towering horse, holding a holly branch in one hand and an immense battle-axe in the other. His skin was green, his hair was green, and even his horse was green. He had come to play what he called a game. Any champion who dared could strike him one blow with the axe, on condition that a year later the champion submit to a return blow from the green knight. Gawain took up the challenge and struck the green knight a blow that cut his head clean off his shoulders and sent it rolling to the floor. The green knight calmly picked up his head by the hair and turned the face towards Gawain. The eyelids opened and the mouth spoke, telling Gawain to meet him for the return blow a year later at the Green Chapel.”

Eventually the year passed and Gawain set out on his journey to the Green Chapel to meet the gigantic green knight. (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - A moden telling)

“After a long journey he came to a noble castle, where he was welcomed by the jovial Sir Bercilak and his lovely young wife. He stayed there until New Year’s Day, royally entertained by Bercilak and, though sorely tempted, resisting the persistent attempts of Bercilak’s wife to seduce him.

On New Years Day Gawain went as he said he would to the Green Chapel. There “the green knight appeared and Gawain bravely bared his neck for a stroke of the axe. The green knight raised the axe high, but struck Gawain only a glancing blow, which nicked his skin. He then explained that he was Sir Bercilak, transformed into the green knight by the magic of Morgan le Fay, who had planned the whole adventure in the hope of discrediting the Round Table. Gawain had been spared because he had honorably refrained from making love to Bercilak’s wife and had shown himself to be the most faultless knight in the world.”

How do we associate the green knight to the Green Man? This was obviously a test for Gawain, and one he passed, but this is also a story of “truth-bringing” through a mixture of pagan ritual and the confused teachings of medieval Christianity. The poem also is an alliterative telling of the turning of the year, taking place at a time between two winters, which signifies a time of death of vibrant vegetation, and then a changing back to life through renewed growth, and then again, returns to death. The green knight is beheaded and through his sacrifice he shows that life still goes on and challenges us to honor the sacrifice he makes every winter. In addition, the poem tells us that “one of the gifts of the Green Man is that he instructs us in how to face our deepest fears and conquer them. In this way he becomes a companion as well as a challenger, a dual role that is present in the archetype in virtually all of its manifestations.”

These are the ritual spring sacrifices then, mythical representations of the annual renewal. Eat the old King if you like, I prefer a hot cross bun and my grandchildren are loking forward to a chocfest.

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