Let us return from these divine and symbolic queens to the human one. So
far as we can make out, she played no part in the king’s ordinary discharge of
his duties, but she had an important role in certain religious ceremonies.
Classical Athens provides a notorious example. The Athenian king (basileus)
had long ceased to have any political significance, but he survived as a
religious functionary. In the Choes festival of early spring his wife, attended
by fourteen holy matrons, underwent a ritual marriage to Dionysus, god of
growth and fertility, for the good of the community. As we shall see, the Indo-
European king was held responsible for the fertility of land and livestock. In
this Athenian rite his wife’s mating with a god is somehow an essential
contribution to his success. How it was enacted has long been a subject for
speculation. It has been supposed either that the basileus himself stood in
for the god or that the lady gratified herself with a statue or herm. It is also
possible that the ritual involved, or had once involved, an animal representing
the deity, a goat or a bull.^22
A parallel detail may be discerned in the Indian royal ritual known as the
As ́vamedha, utterly different though it is in other respects from the Greek
ceremony. Jaan Puhvel has described it as a ‘production with a cast of thou-
sands, incorporating many adjutory rites and representing in a sense the sum
of Ancient Indic sacrificial pageantry’.^23 Its preparation took a year. The cen-
tral act was the sacrifice of a prize white or grey stallion which had had no
contact with mares during that time and which had drawn the king’s chariot.
After it was killed and before it was dismembered, the principal queen lay
down and passed the night with it under covers, and verses were chanted
encouraging it to impregnate her. So here too the king’s consort was required
to enact a kind of supernatural coupling or hieros gamos.
King and horseScholars have noted an analogy between the As ́vamedha and a disgusting
ritual recorded from twelfth-century Donegal. When a new king was
consecrated, the people assembled and he, declaring himself to be a horse,
copulated with a white mare in front of them. The animal was at once
sacrificed and dismembered and the meat was boiled. A large barrel was filled
(^22) We recall the myth of Minos’ queen Pasiphae enclosing herself in a model cow in order to
be impregnated by a bull. Obviously the Athenian rite featured nothing of this sort in historical
times.
(^23) In Jaan Puhvel (ed.), Myth and Law among the Indo-Europeans (Berkeley–Los Angeles
1970), 160–2; id. (1987), 269–72; cf. MBh. 14. 70–2. 74, 83 f., 86–91; Rm. 1. 11–13; A. B. Keith,
The Veda of the Black Yajus School entitled Taittirı ̄ya San ̇hita ̄, i (Cambridge Mass. 1914),
cxxxii–cxxxvii; Watkins (1995), 265–76.
- King and Hero 417