Further than that, certain tribes have even killed their kings in times of scarcity. In the days of the Swedish king Domalde, a mighty famine broke out, which lasted several years, and could not be stayed by human or animal sacrifices. So, in a great popular assembly held at Upsala, the chiefs decided that King Domalde himself was the cause of the scarcity, and must be sacrificed for good seasons. Then they slew him, and smeared with his blood the altars of the gods. Here we must recollect that the divine king is himself a god, the descendant of gods, and he is sacrificed to the offended spirits of his own forefathers. We shall see hereafter how often similar episodes occur--how the god is sacrificed, himself to himself; how the Son is sacrificed to the Father, both being gods; and how the Father sacrifices his Son, to make a god of him. To take another Scandinavian example from Mr. Frazer’s collection: in the reign of King Olaf, there came a great dearth, and the people thought that the fault was the king’s, because he was sparing in sacrifices. So they mustered an army and marched against him; then they surrounded his palace and burnt it, with him within it, “giving him to Odin as a sacrifice for good crops.” Many points must here be noted. Olaf himself was of divine stock, a descendant of Odin. He is burnt as an offering to his father, much as the Carthaginians burnt their sons, or the king of Moab his first-born, as sacrifices to Melcarth and to Chemosh. The royal and divine person is here offered up to his own fathers, just as on the cross of the founder of Christendom the inscription ran, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,” and just as in Christian {236}theology God offers his Son as a sacrifice to his own offended justice. Other instances elsewhere point to the same analogies. In 1814, a pestilence broke out among the reindeer of the Chukches (a Siberian tribe); and the shamans declared that the beloved chief Koch must be sacrificed to the angry gods (probably his ancestors); so the chief’s own son stabbed him with a dagger. On the coral island of Niue in the South Pacific there once reigned a line of kings; but they were also “high-priests” (that is to say, divine representatives of divine ancestors); and they were supposed to make the crops grow, for a reason which will come out more fully in the sequel. In times of scarcity, the people “grew angry with them and killed them,” or more probably, as I would interpret the facts, sacrificed them for crops to their own deified ancestors. So in time there were no kings left, and the monarchy ceased altogether on the island.