The King's Evil

Abstract

THE history of the king's evil and the royal touch, whether as a picture in detail of a certain stream of a very ancient tradition, or as a particular instance of something more than a tradition or symbol, of a mystic interpretation of man's relation to the unseen powers which encompass him, is a deeply interesting study. We are far from imputing it as a fault to Dr. Raymond Crawfurd if, in his scholarly decision to keep to his own part of a great subject, and to do thoroughly what he undertook, he has averted' his eye from the ancient sources of the mystery, or even neglected the facts and fables which linked up the modern and the ancient modes of miraculous healing. Still, has not Dr. Crawfurd almost dissembled these sources of the far past and the ancient myth? He remarks, for instance, that the gods “have transmitted the gift “(of healing) to mortal man-especially to conspicuous individuals such as kings; to Pyrrhus, for example, or Vespasian. And a few sentences farther on (p. 10) he says that, with the spread of Christianity, the priest “usurped” for a while the prerogative of healing. This seems scarcely the right colour to put upon the past. Samuel looked upon Saul as the usurper of intercessory functions. And the gift of healing was not so much a “transmission” from gods to men as that in this function the priest-king originally was the organ rather than the agent of the supernatural; originally the potency was not so much a delegation as a continuity. The King's Evil. By Dr. Raymond Crawfurd. Pp. 187. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1911.) Price 8s. 6d. net.