I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist, some way from
the astronomical thread of Chapters II and III, and now it would appear
that in order to understand religious origins we must wander still
farther. The chapters mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and
astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an earlier period
when there were no definite forms of gods, and when none but the vaguest
astronomical knowledge existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is
best and safest to move thus backwards in Time, from the things recent
and fairly well known to things more ancient and less known. In this way
we approach more securely to some understanding of the dim and remote
past.
It is clear that before any definite speculations on heaven-dwelling
gods or divine beings had arisen in the human mind--or any clear
theories of how the sun and moon and stars might be connected with the
changes of the seasons on the earth--there were still certain obvious
things which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned alike. One of
these was the return of Vegetation, bringing with it the fruits or the
promise of the fruits of the earth, for human food, and also bringing
with it increase of animal life, for food in another form; and the other
was the return of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food
delivering from the fear of starvation; Light and Warmth delivering from
the fear of danger and of cold. These were three glorious things which
returned together and brought salvation and renewed life to man. The
period of their return was 'Spring,' and though Spring and its benefits
might fade away in time, still there was always the HOPE of its
return--though even so it may have been a long time in human evolution
before man discovered that it really did always return, and (with
certain allowances) at equal intervals of time.
Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in, the return of
the Vegetation must have enthralled man's attention, and filled him with
hope and joy. Yet since its return was somewhat variable and uncertain
the question, What could man do to assist that return? naturally
became a pressing one. It is now generally held that the use of
Magic--sympathetic magic--arose in this way. Sympathetic magic seems to
have been generated by a belief that your own actions cause a similar
response in things and persons around you. Yet this belief did not rest
on any philosophy or argument, but was purely instinctive and sometimes
of the nature of a mere corporeal reaction. Every schoolboy knows how
in watching a comrade's high jump at the Sports he often finds himself
lifting a knee at the moment 'to help him over'; at football matches
quarrels sometimes arise among the spectators by reason of an
ill-placed kick coming from a too enthusiastic on-looker, behind one;
undergraduates running on the tow-path beside their College boat in
the races will hurry even faster than the boat in order to increase its
speed; there is in each case an automatic bodily response increased
by one's own desire. A person ACTS the part which he desires to be
successful. He thinks to transfer his energy in that way. Again, if by
chance one witnesses a painful accident, a crushed foot or what-not,
it commonly happens that one feels a pain in the same part oneself--a
sympathetic pain. What more natural than to suppose that the pain
really is transferred from the one person to the other? and how easy the
inference that by tormenting a wretched scape-goat or crucifying a human
victim in some cases the sufferings of people may be relieved or their
sins atoned for?
Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of Theocritus,
curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she melts his waxen image she
prays that HE TOO MAY MELT. All this is of the nature of Magic, and is
independent of and generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy.
Yet it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in early
man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct of his unity and
continuity with the rest of creation, and of a common life so close
that his lightest actions may cause a far-reaching reaction in the world
outside.
Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist the arrival
of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you want the Vegetation to appear you
must have rain; and the rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has
been a MOST important personage. Generally he based his rites on quite
fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among the Mandans wore a
raven's skin on his head (bird of the storm) or painted his shield with
red zigzags of lightning (1); but partly, no doubt, he had observed
actual facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to him--as,
for instance that when rain is impending loud noises will bring about
its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on
battlefields. He had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud
clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased downpour
of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which I have often verified in
the vicinity of Sheffield) that the copious smoke of fires will generate
rain-clouds--and so quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking
SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was on the track
of elementary Science. And so he made "bull-roarers" to imitate the
sound of wind and the blessed rain-bringing thunder, or clashed
great bronze cymbals together with the same object. Bull-voices and
thunder-drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this connection
by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus (2); but the bull-roarer,
in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the end of a string, seems
to be known, or to have been known, all over the world. It is described
with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and Myth (pp. 29-44),
where he says "it is found always as a sacred instrument employed in
religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient
Greece, and Africa."
(1) See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.
(2) Themis, p. 61.
Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner
causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than
we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that
the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and
cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew
Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as
the manifestation of a spirit. (1) To make sounds like thunder would
therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the
rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known
in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds
or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or
sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible, (2) he would cut
himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops
suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the rain god was
propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed
abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that
rain would also be abundant." (3) Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would
WHISTLE for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets for
the same purpose.
(1) See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said
to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up
green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe
(Australian).
(2) I Kings xviii.
(3) Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and
Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.
In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which has been adopted by
so many peoples under so many forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her
daughter Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation), carried
down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness and Winter.
And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial and ritual of magic for the
purpose of restoring the lost one and bringing her back to the world
again. Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and unnamable
objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there was a sacrifice of
pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains
afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields."
(1) Fir-cones and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male
fertility; snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their own
skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive of resurrection
and re-vivification; pigs and sows by their exceeding fruitfulness would
in their hour of sacrifice remind old mother Earth of what was expected
from her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that the scattering of
dead flesh over the ground or mixed with the seed, did bless the
ground to a greater fertility; and so by a strange mixture of primitive
observation with a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols
and suggestions Nature could be appealed to and induced to answer to the
desires and needs for her children this sort of ceremonial Magic arose.
It was not exactly Science, and it was not exactly Religion; but it was
a naive, and perhaps not altogether mistaken, sense of the bond between
Nature and Man.
(1) See Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
For we can perceive that earliest man was not yet consciously
differentiated from Nature. Not only do we see that the tribal life was
so strong that the individual seldom regarded himself as different or
separate or opposed to the rest of the tribe; but that something of the
same kind was true with regard to his relation to the Animals and to
Nature at large. This outer world was part of himself, was also himself.
His sub-conscious sense of unity was so great that it largely dominated
his life. That brain-cleverness and brain-activity which causes modern
man to perceive such a gulf between him and the animals, or between
himself and Nature, did not exist in the early man. Hence it was
no difficulty to him to believe that he was a Bear or an Emu.
Sub-consciously he was wiser than we are. He knew that he was a bear or
an emu, or any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his
mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common consent existed
between primitive man and many of his companion animals such as has
been lost or much attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very
interesting paper La Grande Famille (1) gives support to the idea that
the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any
forcible subjugation of them by man, but from a natural amity with
them which grew up in the beginning from common interests, pursuits and
affections. Thus the chetah of India (and probably the puma of Brazil)
from far-back times took to hunting in the company of his two-legged and
bow-and-arrow-armed friend, with whom he divided the spoil. W. H. Hudson
(2) declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and capable
of killing the largest game, will never even to-day attack man, but
when maltreated by the latter submits to the outrage, unresisting, with
mournful cries and every sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated
in a sense, has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit,
but may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian peasant
and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud companionship. The mutual
relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and the Horse (3) (also the
Elephant) reach so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced.
The Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves and
still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good fortune. Elisee
Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile calls to certain snakes
by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.
(1) Published originally in Le Magazine International, January
1896.
(2) See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.
(3) "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves
of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before
it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to
Hist. Religion, p. 119).
And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception,
which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their
tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought
them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees,
the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their
bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set
in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like
noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground,
you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons
it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to
leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow
tall." (1) Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly
yet died out--even in this most civilized England. The bower of green
boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping and the twirling, were all an
encouragement to the arrival of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic
Magic. When you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself
you naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically do
this for the energizing of the crops? In every country of the world
the vernal season and the resurrection of the Sun has been greeted with
dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting
or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances suggesting the
successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children do to-day,
and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in human
thought.
(1) See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.
Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our
academical and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and
to understand the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification
with the world around which characterized the primitive man--or to look
upon Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE
know so well from our botany and natural history books what these things
are. Why should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as
to our perfect comprehension of them?
And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really
ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most
superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D.
Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a
certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he
does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree
near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and
graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and
throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could
walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually
once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around
VERY CURIOUSLY." (1) Once the present writer seemed to have a partial
vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and
still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its
skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life
(or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of
heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same
energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement
in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or
separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing
and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing
activity.
(1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.
The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences.
Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in
half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little
twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy
and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two
visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge
sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the
steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known
that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and
deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like
himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.
It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations
like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is
incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with
their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere
book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like
the animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain
effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course
they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion
with them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally
protoplasmic; and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form
of Magic. When at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and
its observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling,
took clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually
emerged into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific
laws and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also
are the gods and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these
things, with their set and angular outlines, have served in the past
and will serve in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of
knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead us on to
a renewed power of perception which again will not be the laborious
product of thought but a direct and instantaneous intuition like that of
the animals--and the angels.
To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not speculate in modern
style on these things, I yet have no reasonable doubt that he felt (and
FEELS, in those cases where we can still trace the workings of his
mind) his essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more
intimately, if less analytically, than we do to-day. If the animals with
all their wonderful gifts are (as we readily admit) a veritable part
of Nature--so that they live and move and have their being more or less
submerged in the spirit of the great world around them--then Man, when
he first began to differentiate himself from them, must for a long
time have remained in this SUBconscious unity, becoming only distinctly
CONSCIOUS of it when he was already beginning to lose it. That early
dawn of distinct consciousness corresponded to the period of belief
in Magic. In that first mystic illumination almost every object was
invested with a halo of mystery or terror or adoration. Things were
either tabu, in which case they were dangerous, and often not to be
touched or even looked upon--or they were overflowing with magic grace
and influence, in which case they were holy, and any rite which released
their influence was also holy. William Blake, that modern prophetic
child, beheld a Tree full of angels; the Central Australian native
believes bushes to be the abode of spirits which leap into the bodies of
passing women and are the cause of the conception of children; Moses
saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the mimosa) like a flame of fire, with
Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it, and he put off his shoes for
he felt that the place was holy; Osiris was at times regarded as a
Tree-spirit (1); and in inscriptions is referred to as "the solitary one
in the acacia"--which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The
same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse mythology Ygdrasil
was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the soul of the universe;
the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and must on no account be
cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches. It is
of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical use, (2) but so
holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb it. The Burmese believe
the things of nature, but especially the trees, to be the abode of
spirits. "To the Burman of to-day, not less than to the Greek of long
ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains
are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of
Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round
about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge figtree
that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like
fronds of the tamarind." (3)
(1) The Golden Bough, iv, 339.
(2) Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.
(3) The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.
There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of MARRIAGE of women
(and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very
near akin to human beings! The Golden Bough (1) mentions many of these,
including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The
well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to
a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the
Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god
Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down
to the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant
women--the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those
who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are
benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the
Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to
fertilize them. (2)
(1) Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.
(2) Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.
One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite
indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate--what was
instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day
who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the
world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is
not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and
intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction
of our essential unity with the whole of creation, which lay from the
first at the base of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was
hardly a conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became more
conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms of the gods and
the creeds--but of that process I will speak more in detail presently.
The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in
the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which
his tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and
assimilations. Attractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its
many gifts to mankind--its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its
timber, and other invaluable products--why should it not become the
natural emblem of the female, to whom through sex man's worship is ever
drawn? If the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male organ in
its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is equally remindful
of the female. What more clear than that the conjunction of Tree and
Serpent is the fulfilment in nature of that sex-mystery which is so
potent in the life of man and the animals? and that the magic ritual
most obviously fitted to induce fertility in the tribe or the herds
(or even the crops) is to set up an image of the Tree and the Serpent
combined, and for all the tribe-folk in common to worship and pay it
reverence. In the Bible with more or less veiled sexual significance
we have this combination in the Eden-garden, and again in the brazen
Serpent and Pole which Moses set up in the wilderness (as a cure for the
fiery serpents of lust); illustrations of the same are said to be found
in the temples of Egypt and of South India, and even in the ancient
temples of Central America. (1) In the myth of Hercules the golden
apples of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans,
the Persians and the Babylonians had also legends of the Fall of man
through a serpent tempting him to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And
De Gubernatis, (2) pointing out the phallic meaning of these stories,
says "the legends concerning the tree of golden apples or figs which
yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in which the life, the
fortune, the glory, the strength and the riches of the hero have their
beginning, are numerous among every people of Aryan origin: in India,
Persia, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and Italy."
(1) See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas
Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.
(2) Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.
Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting
itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case
of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away
and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in
the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a
primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or
semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake--the fascination
of its mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its
glittering eye, its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of
Death--is a thing felt even more by women than by men--and for a reason
(from what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who
in the story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions.
No wonder that, as Professor Murray says, (1) the Greeks worshiped a
gigantic snake (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies
of appeasement, and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship
of Zeus and the Olympian gods.
(1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people
wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a
Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any human beings could have been so
foolish. But probably the good people who wonder thus have never REALLY
LOOKED (with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. (1) Of
all the wonderful things in Nature I hardly know any that thrills one
more with a sense of wizardry than just this very thing--to observe,
each year, this disclosure of the Ear within the Blade--first a swelling
of the sheath, then a transparency and a whitey-green face within a
hooded shroud, and then the perfect spike of grain disengaging itself
and spiring upward towards the sky--"the resurrection of the wheat with
pale visage appearing out of the ground."
(1) Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with
approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks of the
Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to
the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect
revelation--in solemn silence--a CUT CORNSTALK ([gr teqerismenon] [gr
stacon])."--Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.
If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have
aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world
was so much more direct than ours--more 'animistic' if you like! What
wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation),
what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and
sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior
of men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as
an acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would
no doubt be graciously accepted!--(for was it not well known that where
blood had been spilt on the ground the future crop was so much more
generous?)--what readiness to adopt some magic ritual likely to
propitiate the unseen power--even though the outline and form of the
latter were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer, speaking of
the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many corn-gods of the above character,
says (1): "The primitive conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly
out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated
the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a
festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman
actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of
the corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites
in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again
with the new crops. The ceremony was in fact a charm to ensure the
growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as
such it was practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his
fields long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the
stately ritual of the temple." (2)
(1) The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.
(2) See ch. xv.
The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of
Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically
poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also
common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been
offered at the grave of Osiris. We hear that the Indians in Ecuador used
to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out human blood on their fields
when they sowed them; the Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same,
allowing his blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that in Mexico
girls were sacrificed, and that the Mexicans would sometimes GRIND their
(male) victim, like corn, between two stones. ("I'll grind his bones to
make me bread.") Among the Khonds of East India--who were particularly
given to this kind of ritual--the very TEARS of the sufferer were an
incitement to more cruelties, for tears of course were magic for Rain.
(1)
(1) The Golden Bough, vol. vii, "The Corn-Spirit," pp. 236 sq.
And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times, both in his
astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-Sun, and in his more direct
role as plougher of the fields, and provider of food from his own body.
"The tremendous mana of the wild bull," says Gilbert Murray, "occupies
almost half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual." (1) Even to us there is
something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of this animal's
glory of strength and fury and sexual power. No wonder the primitives
worshiped him, or that they devised rituals which should convey his
power and vitality by mere contact, or that in sacramental feasts
they ate his flesh and drank his blood as a magic symbol and means of
salvation.
(1) Four Stages, p. 34.