The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

to arise rather

       from fear than love." The king of Iddah told the English officers of the Niger Expedition, "God made me after his own image; I am all the same as God; and he appointed me a king."

       A peculiarly bloodthirsty monarch of Burma, by name Badonsachen, whose very countenance reflected the inbred ferocity of his nature, and under whose reign more victims perished by the executioner than by the common enemy, conceived the notion that he was something more than mortal, and that this high distinction had been granted him as a reward for his numerous good works. Accordingly he laid aside the title of king and aimed at making himself a god. With this view, and in imitation of Buddha, who, before being advanced to the rank of a divinity, had quitted his royal palace and seraglio and retired from the world, Badonsachen withdrew from his palace to an immense pagoda, the largest in the empire, which he had been engaged in constructing for many years. Here

       he held conferences with the most learned monks, in which he sought to persuade them that the five thousand years assigned for the observance of the law of Buddha were now elapsed, and that he himself was the god who was destined to appear after that period, and to abolish the old law by substituting his own. But to his great mortification many of the monks undertook to demonstrate the contrary; and this disappointment, combined with his love of power and his impatience under the restraints of an ascetic life, quickly disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and drove him back to his palace and his harem. The king of Siam "is venerated equally

       with a divinity. His subjects ought not to look him in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he passes, and appear be-fore him on their knees, their elbows resting on the ground." There is a special language devoted to his sacred person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or of him. Even the natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar vocabulary. The hairs of the monarch's head, the soles of his feet, the breath of his body, indeed every single detail of his person, both outward and inward, have particular names. When he eats or drinks, sleeps or walks, a special word indicates that these acts are being performed by the sovereign, and such words cannot possibly be applied to the acts of any other person whatever. There is no word in the Siamese language by which any creature of higher rank or greater dignity than a monarch can be described; and the missionaries, when they speak of God, are forced to use the native word for king.

       But perhaps no country in the world has been so prolific of human gods as India; nowhere has the divine grace been poured out in a more liberal measure on all classes of society from kings down to milkmen. Thus amongst the Todas, a pastoral people of the Neilgherry Hills of Southern India, the dairy is a sanctuary, and the milkman who attends to it has been described as a god. On being asked whether the Todas salute the sun, one of these divine milkmen replied, "Those poor fellows do so, but I," tapping his chest,

       "I, a god! why should I salute the sun?" Every one, even his own father, prostrates himself before the milkman, and no one would

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       dare to refuse him anything. No human being, except another milkman, may touch him; and he gives oracles to all who consult him, speaking with the voice of a god.

       Further, in India "every king is regarded as little short of a present god." The Hindoo law-book of Manu goes farther and says that "even an infant king must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere mortal; for he is a great deity in human form." There is said to have been a sect in Orissa some years ago who worshipped the late Queen Victoria in her lifetime as their chief divinity. And to

       this day in India all living persons remarkable for great strength or valour or for supposed miraculous powers run the risk of being worshipped as gods. Thus, a sect in the Punjaub worshipped a deity whom they called Nikkal Sen. This Nikkal Sen was no other

       than the redoubted General Nicholson, and nothing that the general could do or say damped the ardour of his adorers. The more

       he punished them, the greater grew the religious awe with which they worshipped him. At Benares not many years ago a celebrated

       deity was incarnate in the person of a Hindoo gentleman who rejoiced in the euphonious name of Swami Bhaskaranandaji Saraswati,

       and looked uncommonly like the late Cardinal Manning, only more ingenuous. His eyes beamed with kindly human interest, and he

       took what is described as an innocent pleasure in the divine honours paid him by his confiding worshippers.

       At Chinchvad, a small town about ten miles from Poona in Western India, there lives a family of whom one in each generation is

       believed by a large proportion of the Mahrattas to be an incarnation of the elephant-headed god Gunputty. That celebrated deity

       was first made flesh about the year 1640 in the person of a Brahman of Poona, by name Mooraba Gosseyn, who sought to work out

       his salvation by abstinence, mortification, and prayer. His piety had its reward. The god himself appeared to him in a vision of the

       night and promised that a portion of his, that is, of Gunputty's holy spirit should abide with him and with his seed after him even to

       the seventh generation. The divine promise was fulfilled. Seven successive incarnations, transmitted from father to son, manifested

       the light of Gunputty to a dark world. The last of the direct line, a heavy-looking god with very weak eyes, died in the year 1810.

       But the cause of truth was too sacred, and the value of the church property too considerable, to allow the Brahmans to contemplate

       with equanimity the unspeakable loss that would be sustained by a world which knew not Gunputty. Accordingly they sought and

       found a holy vessel in whom the divine spirit of the master had revealed itself anew, and the revelation has been happily continued

       in an unbroken succession of vessels from that time to this. But a mysterious law of spiritual economy, whose operation in the his-

       tory of religion we may deplore though we cannot alter, has decreed that the miracles wrought by the god-man in these degenerate

       days cannot compare with those which were wrought by his predecessors in days gone by; and it is even reported that the only sign

       vouchsafed by him to the present generation of vipers is the miracle of feeding the multitude whom he annually entertains to dinner

       at Chinchvad.

       A Hindoo sect, which has many representatives in Bombay and Central India, holds that its spiritual chiefs or Maharajas, as they are called, are representatives or even actual incarnations on earth of the god Krishna. And as Krishna looks down from heaven with most favour on such as minister to the wants of his successors and vicars on earth, a peculiar rite called Self-devotion has been instituted, whereby his faithful worshippers make over their bodies, their souls, and, what is perhaps still more important, their worldly substance to his adorable incarnations; and women are taught to believe that the highest bliss for themselves and their families is to be attained by yielding themselves to the embraces of those beings in whom the divine nature mysteriously coexists with the form

       and even the appetites of true humanity.

       Christianity itself has not uniformly escaped the taint of these unhappy delusions; indeed it has often been sullied by the extrava-

       gances of vain pretenders to a divinity equal to or even surpassing that of its great Founder. In the second century Montanus the

       Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting in his single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

       Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the present

       day many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself, is incarnate in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this

       belief to its logical conclusion by adoring each other. Tertullian records that this was done by his fellow-Christians at Carthage in the

       second century; the disciples of St. Columba worshipped him as an embodiment of Christ; and in the eighth century Elipandus of