|BY {272}far the most interesting in the curious group of
artifically-made gods are those which are sacrificed in connexion with
agriculture. These deities appeal to us from several points of view.
In the first place, they form, among agricultural races as a whole, the
most important and venerated objects of worship. In the second place,
it is largely through their influence or on their analogy, as I believe,
that so many other artificial gods came to be renewed or sacrificed
annually. In the third place, it is the gods of agriculture who are most
of all slain sacramentally, whose bodies are eaten by their votaries
in the shape of cakes of bread or other foodstuffs, and whose blood is
drunk in the form of wine. _The immediate connexion of these sacramental
ceremonies with the sacrifice of the mass, and the identification of
the Christ with bread and wine, give to this branch of our enquiry
a peculiar importance from the point of view of the evolution of
Christianity_. We must therefore enter at some little length into the
genesis of these peculiar and departmental gods, who stand so directly
in the main line of evolution of the central divine figure in the
Christian religion.
All over the world, wherever cultivation exists, a special class of
corn-gods or grain-gods is found, deities of the chief foodstuff,--be
it maize, or dates, or plantain, or rice--and it is a common feature
of all these gods that they are represented by human or quasi-human
victims, who are annually slain at the time of sowing. These human gods
{273}are believed to reappear once more in the form of the crop that
rises from their sacred bodies; their death and resurrection are
celebrated in festivals; and they are eaten and drunk sacramentally by
their votaries, in the shape of first-fruits, or of cakes and wine,
or of some other embodiment of the divine being. We have therefore to
enquire into the origin of this curious superstition, which involves, as
it seems to me, the very origin of cultivation itself as a human custom.
And I must accordingly bespeak my readers’ indulgence if I diverge for
a while into what may seem at first a purely botanical digression.
Most people must have been struck by the paradox of cultivation. A
particular plant in a state of nature, let us say, grows and thrives
only in water, or in some exceedingly moist and damp situation. You
take up this waterside plant with a trowel one day, and transfer
it incontinently to a dry bed in a sun-baked garden; when lo! the
moisture-loving creature, instead of withering and dying, as one might
naturally expect of it, begins to grow apace, and to thrive to all
appearance even better and more lustily than in its native habitat. Or
you remove some parched desert weed from its arid rock to a moist and
rainy climate; and instead of dwindling, as one imagines it ought to do
under the altered conditions, it spreads abroad in the deep rich mould
of a shrubbery bed, and attains a stature impossible to its kind in its
original surroundings. Our gardens, in fact, show us side by side
plants which, in the wild state, demand the most varied and dissimilar
habitats. Siberian squills blossom amicably in the same bed with Italian
tulips; the alpine saxifrage spreads its purple rosettes in friendly
rivalry with the bog-loving marsh-marigold or the dry Spanish iris. The
question, therefore, sooner or later occurs to the enquiring mind: How
can they all live together so well here in man’s domain, when in
the outside world each demands and exacts so extremely different and
specialised a situation?
Of {274}course it is only an inexperienced biologist who could long be
puzzled by this apparent paradox. He must soon see the true solution of
the riddle, if he has read and digested the teachings of Darwin. For the
real fact is, in a garden or out of it, most of these plants could get
on very well in a great variety of climates or situations--if only they
were protected against outside competition. There we have the actual
crux of the problem. It is not that the moisture-loving plants cannot
live in dry situations, but that the dry-loving plants, specialised
and adapted for the post, can compete with them there at an immense
advantage, and so, in a very short time, live them down altogether.
Every species in a state of nature is continually exposed to the
ceaseless competition of every other; and each on its own ground can
beat its competitors. But in a garden, the very thing we aim at is just
to restrict and prevent competition; to give each species a fair chance
for life, even in conditions where other and better-adapted species can
usually outlive it. This, in fact, is really at bottom all that we ever
mean by a garden--a space of ground cleared, and kept clear, of its
natural vegetation (commonly called in this connexion weeds), and
deliberately stocked with other plants, most or all of which the weeds
would live down if not artificially prevented.
We see the truth of this point of view the moment the garden is, as
we say, abandoned--that is to say, left once more to the operation of
unaided nature. The plants with which we have stocked it loiter on for
a while in a feeble and uncertain fashion, but are ultimately choked
out by the stronger and better-adapted weeds which compose the natural
vegetation of the locality. The dock and nettle live down in time the
larkspur and the peony. The essential thing in the garden is, in short,
the clearing of the ground from the weeds--that is, in other words, from
the native vegetation. A few minor things may or may not be added, such
as manuring, turning the soil, protecting with {275}shelter, and so
forth; but the clearing is itself the one thing needful.
Slight as this point seems at first sight, I believe it includes the
whole secret of the origin of tillage, and therefore, by implication,
of the gods of agriculture. For, looked at in essence, cultivation is
weeding, and weeding is cultivation. When we say that a certain race
cultivates a certain plant-staple, we mean no more in the last resort
than that it sows or sets it in soil artificially cleared of competing
species. Sowing without clearing is absolutely useless. So the question
of the origin of cultivation resolves itself at last simply into
this--how did certain men come first to know that by clearing ground
of weeds and keeping it clear of them they could promote the growth of
certain desirable human foodstuffs?
To begin with, it may be as well to premise that the problem of the
origin of cultivation is a far more complex one than appears at first
sight. For we have not only to ask, as might seem to the enquirer
unaccustomed to such investigations, “How did the early savage first
find out that seeds would grow better when planted in open soil, already
freed from weeds or natural competitors?” but also the other and far
more difficult question, “How did the early savage ever find out that
plants would grow from seeds at all?” That, I take it, is the real
riddle of the situation, and it is one which, so far as I know, has
hitherto escaped all enquirers into the history and origin of human
progress.
Fully to grasp the profound nature of this difficulty we must throw
ourselves back mentally into the condition and position of primitive
man. We ourselves have known so long and so familiarly the fact that
plants grow from seeds--that the seed is the essential reproductive part
of the vegetable organism--that we find it hard to unthink that piece
of commonplace knowledge, and to realise that what to us is an almost
self-evident truth is to the primitive savage a long and difficult
inference. Our own common and {276}certain acquaintance with the fact,
indeed, is entirely-derived from the practice of agriculture. We have
seen seeds sown from our earliest childhood. But before agriculture grew
up, the connexion between seed and seedling could not possibly be known
or even suspected by primitive man, who was by no means prone to make
abstract investigations into the botanical nature or physiological
object of the various organs in the herbs about him. That the seed is
the reproductive part of the plant was a fact as little likely in itself
to strike him as that the stamens were the male organs, or that the
leaves were the assimilative and digestive surfaces. He could only have
found out that plants grew from seeds by the experimental process of
sowing and growing them. Such an experiment he was far from likely ever
to try for its own sake. He must have been led to it by some other and
accidental coincidence.
Now what was primitive man likely to know and observe about the plants
around him? Primarily one thing only: that some of them were edible, and
some were not. There you have a distinction of immediate interest to all
humanity. And what parts of plants were most likely to be useful to him
in this respect as foodstuffs? Those parts which the plant had
specially filled up with rich material for its own use or the use of its
offspring. The first are the roots, stocks, bulbs, corms, or tubers in
which it lays by foodstuffs for its future growth; the second are the
seeds which it produces and enriches in order to continue its kind to
succeeding generations.
Primitive man, then, knows the fruits, seeds, and tubers, just as
the squirrel, the monkey, and the parrot know them, as so much good
foodstuff, suitable to his purpose. But why should he ever dream of
saving or preserving some of these fruits or seeds, when he has found
them, and of burying them in the soil, on the bare off-chance that by
pure magic, as it were, they might give rise to others? No idea could
be more foreign to the nature and {277}habits of early man. In the first
place, he is far from provident; his way is to eat up at once what he
has killed or picked; and in the second place, how could he ever come
to conceive that seeds buried in the ground could possibly produce
more seeds in future? Nay, even if he did know it--which is well-nigh
impossible--would he be likely, feckless creature that he is, to save or
spare a handful of seeds to-day in order that other seeds might spring
from their burial-place in another twelvemonth? The difficulty is so
enormous when one fairly faces it that it positively staggers one;
we begin to wonder whether really, after all, the first steps in
cultivation’ could ever have been taken.
The savage, when he has killed a deer or a game-bird, does not bury a
part of it or an egg of it in the ground, in the expectation that it
will grow into more deer or more bird hereafter. Why, then, should he,
when he has picked a peck of fruits or wild cereals, bury some of
them in the ground, and expect a harvest? The savage is a simple and
superstitious person; but I do not think he is quite such a fool as
this proceeding would make him out to be. He is not likely ever to have
noticed that plants in the wild state grow from seeds--at least prior to
the rise of agriculture, from which, as I believe, he first and slowly
gained that useful knowledge. And he certainly is not likely ever to
have tried deliberate experiments upon the properties of plants, as
if he were a Fellow of the Royal Society. These two roads being thus
effectually blocked to us, we have to enquire, “Was there ever any way
in which primitive man could have blundered blindfold upon a knowledge
of the truth, and could have discovered incidentally to some other
function of his life the two essential facts that plants grow from
seeds, and that the growth and supply of useful food-plants can be
artificially increased by burying or sowing such seeds in ground cleared
of weeds, that is to say of the natural competing vegetation?”
I {278}believe there is one way, and one way only, in which primitive
man was at all likely to become familiar with these facts. I shall try
to show that all the operations of primitive agriculture very forcibly
point to this strange and almost magical origin of cultivation; that all
savage agriculture retains to the last many traces of its origin; and
that the sowing of the seed itself is hardly considered so important and
essential a part of the complex process as certain purely superstitious
and bloodthirsty practices that long accompany it. In one word, not
to keep the reader in doubt any longer, I am inclined to believe that
cultivation and the sowing of seeds for crops had their beginning as an
adjunct of the primitive burial system.
Up to the present time, so far as I know, only one origin for
cultivation has ever been even conjecturally suggested; and that is a
hard one. It has been said that the first hint of cultivation may
have come from the observation that seeds accidentally cast out on the
kitchen-middens, or on the cleared space about huts, caves, or other
human dwelling-places, germinated and produced more seeds in succeeding
seasons. Very probably many savages have observed the fact that
food-plants frequently grow on such heaps of refuse. But that
observation alone does not bring us much nearer to the origin of
cultivation. For why should early man connect such a fact with the seeds
more than with the bones, the shells, or the mere accident of proximity?
We must rid our minds of all the preconceptions of inductive and
experimental science, and throw ourselves mentally back into the
position of the savage to whom nature is one vast field of unrelated
events, without fixed sequence or physical causation. Moreover, a
kitchen-midden is not a cleared space: on the contrary, it is a weed-bed
of extraordinary luxuriance. It brings us no nearer the origin of
clearing.
There is, however, one set of functions in which primitive men do
actually perform all the essential acts of agriculture, without in the
least intending it; and that is the almost {279}universal act of the
burial of the dead. Burial is, so far as I can see, the only object for
which early races, or, what comes to the same thing, very low savages,
ever turn or dig the ground. We have seen already that the original idea
of burial was to confine the ghost or corpse of the dead man by putting
a weight of earth on top of him; and lest this should be insufficient
to keep him from troublesome reappearances, a big stone was frequently
rolled above his mound or tumulus, which is the origin of all our
monuments, now diverted to the honour and commemoration of the deceased.
But the point to which I wish just now to direct attention is this--that
in the act of burial, and in that act alone, we get a first beginning of
turning the soil, exposing fresh earth, and so incidentally eradicating
the weeds. We have here, in short, the first necessary prelude to the
evolution of agriculture.
The next step, of course, must be the sowing of the seed. And here, I
venture to think, funeral customs supply us with the only conceivable
way in which such sowing could ever have begun. For early men would
certainly not waste the precious seeds which it took them so much time
and trouble to collect from the wild plants around them, in mere otiose
scientific experiments on vegetable development. But we have seen that
it is the custom of all savages to offer at the tombs of their ancestors
food and drink of the same kind as they themselves are in the habit of
using. Now, with people in the hunting stage, such offerings would no
doubt most frequently consist of meat, the flesh of the hunted beasts or
game-birds; but they would also include fish, fruits, seeds, tubers,
and berries, and in particular such rich grains as those of the native
pulses and cereals. Evidence of such things being offered at the graves
of the dead has been collected in such abundance by Dr. Tylor, Mr.
Frazer, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, that I need not here adduce any further
examples of so familiar a practice.
What must be the obvious result? Here, and here alone, {280}the savage
quite unconsciously sows seeds upon newly-turned ground, deprived of
its weeds, and further manured by the blood and meat of the frequent
sacrificial offerings. These seeds must often spring up and grow
apace, with a rapidity and luxuriance which cannot fail to strike the
imagination of the primitive hunter. Especially will this be the case
with that class of plants which ultimately develop into the food-crops
of civilised society. For the peculiarity of these plants is that they
are one and all--maize, corn, or rice, pease, beans, or millet--annuals
of rapid growth and portentous stature; plants which have thriven in the
struggle for existence by laying up large stores of utilisable material
in their seeds for the use of the seedling; and this peculiarity enables
them to start in life in each generation exceptionally well endowed, and
so to compete at an advantage with all their fellows. Seeds of such a
sort would thrive exceedingly in the newly-turned and well-manured soil
of a grave or barrow; and producing there a quantity of rich and edible
grain, would certainly attract the attention of that practical and
observant man, the savage. For though he is so incurious about what are
non-essentials, your savage is a peculiarly longheaded person about all
that concerns his own immediate advantage.
What conclusion would at once be forced upon him? That seeds planted in
freshly-turned and richly-manured soil produce threefold and fourfold?
Nothing of the sort. He knows naught of seeds and manures and soils; he
would at once conclude, after his kind, that the dreaded and powerful
ghost in the barrow, pleased with the gifts of meat and seeds offered
to him, had repaid those gifts in kind by returning grain for grain a
hundredfold out of his own body. This original connexion of ideas seems
to me fully to explain that curious identification of the ghost
or spirit with the corn or other foodstuff which Mr. Frazer has so
wonderfully and conclusively elaborated in _The Golden Bough_.
Some {281}little evidence is even forthcoming that vegetation actually
_does_ show exceptional luxuriance on graves and barrows. The Rev.
Alexander Stewart of Ballachulish mentions that the milkmaids in
Lochaber and elsewhere in the Scotch highlands used to pour a little
milk daily from the pail on the “fairy knowes,” or prehistoric
barrows; and the consequence was that “these fairy knolls were clothed
with a more beautiful verdure than any other spot in the country.”
In Fiji, Mr. Fison remarks that yam-plants spring luxuriantly from
the heaps of yam presented to ancestral spirits in the sacred stone
enclosure or _temenos_; and two or three recent correspondents (since
this chapter was first printed in a monthly review) have obligingly
communicated to me analogous facts from Madagascar, Central Africa, and
the Malay Archipelago. It is clear from their accounts that graves do
often give rise to crops of foodstuffs, accidentally springing from the
food laid upon them.
Just at first, under such circumstances, the savage would no doubt be
content merely to pick and eat the seeds that thus grew casually, as it
were, on the graves or barrows of his kings and kinsfolk. But in
process of time it would almost certainly come about that the area
of cultivation would be widened somewhat. The first step toward such
widening, I take it, would arise from the observation that cereals and
other seeds only throve exceptionally upon newly-made graves, not on
graves in general. For as soon as the natural vegetation reasserted
itself, the quickening power of the ghost would seem to be used up.
Thus it might be found well to keep fresh ghosts always going for
agricultural purposes. Hence might gradually arise a habit of making a
new grave annually, at the most favourable sowing-time, which last would
come to be recognised by half-unconscious experiment and observation.
And this new grave, as I shall show reason for believing a little later,
would be the grave, not of a person who happened to die then and there
accidentally, but {282}of a deliberate victim, slain in order to provide
a spirit of vegetation,--an artificial god,--and to make the corn grow
with vigour and luxuriance. Step by step, I believe, it would at length
be discovered that if only you dug wide enough, the corn would grow well
_around_ as well as _upon_ the actual grave of the divine victim. Thus
slowly there would develop the cultivated field, the wider clearing,
dug up or laboured by hand, and finally the ploughed field, which yet
remains a grave in theory and in all essentials.
I have ventured to give this long and apparently unessential preamble,
because I wish to make it clear that the manufactured or artificial god
of the corn-field or other cultivated plot really dates back to the very
origin of cultivation. Without a god, there would be no corn-field at
all; and the corn-field, I believe, is long conceived merely as the
embodiment of his vegetative spirit. Nay, the tilled field is often at
our own day, and even in our own country, a grave in theory.
It is a mere commonplace at the present time to say that among early men
and savages every act of life has a sacred significance; and agriculture
especially is everywhere and always invested with a special sanctity. To
us, it would seem natural that the act of sowing seed should be regarded
as purely practical and physiological; that the seed should be looked
upon merely as the part of the plant intended for reproduction, and
that its germination should be accepted as a natural and normal process.
Savages and early men, however, have no such conceptions. To them the
whole thing is a piece of natural magic; you sow seeds, or, to be more
accurate, you bury certain grains of foodstuff in the freshly-turned
soil, with certain magical rites and ceremonies; and then, after the
lapse of a certain time, plants begin to grow upon this soil, from which
you finally obtain a crop of maize or wheat or barley. The burial of
the seeds or grains is only one part of the {283}magical cycle, no more
necessarily important for the realisation of the desired end than many
others.
And what are the other magical acts necessary in order that
grain-bearing plants may grow upon the soil prepared for their
reception? Mr. Frazer has collected abundant evidence for answering
that question, a small part of which I shall recapitulate here for
the benefit of those who have not read his remarkable work, referring
students to The Golden Bough itself for fuller details and collateral
developments. At the same time I should like to make it clearly
understood that Mr. Frazer is personally in no way responsible for the
use I here make of his admirable materials.
All the world over, savages and semi-civilised people are in the habit
of sacrificing human victims, whose bodies are buried in the field with
the seed of corn or other bread-stuffs. Often enough the victim’s
blood is mixed with the grain in order to fertilise it. The most famous
instance is that of the Khonds of Orissa, who chose special victims,
known as Meriahs, and offered them up to ensure good harvests. The
Meriah was often kept for years before being sacrificed. He was regarded
as a consecrated being, and treated with extreme affection, mingled with
deference. A Meriah youth, on reaching manhood, was given a wife who was
herself a Meriah; their offspring were all brought up as victims. “The
periodical sacrifices,” says Mr. Frazer, “were generally so arranged
by tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a family was
enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh for his
fields, generally about the time when his chief crop was laid down.”
On the day of the sacrifice, which was horrible beyond description in
its details, the body was cut to pieces, and the flesh hacked from it
was instantly taken home by the persons whom each village had deputed to
bring it. On arriving at its destination, it was divided by the priest
into two portions, one of which he buried in a hole in the ground, with
his back turned and without looking {284}at it. Then each man in the
village added a little earth to cover it, and the priest poured water
over the mimic tumulus. The other portion of the flesh the priest
divided into as many shares as there were heads of houses present. Each
head of a house buried his shred in his own field, placing it in the
earth behind his back without looking. The other remains of the human
victim--the head, the bones, and the intestines--were burned on a
funeral-pile, and the ashes were scattered over the fields, or mixed
with the new corn to preserve it from injury. Every one of these details
should be carefully noted.
Now, in this case, it is quite clear to me that every field is regarded
as essentially a grave; portions of the divine victim are buried in it;
his ashes are mixed with the seed; and from the ground thus treated he
springs again in the form of corn, or rice, or turmeric. These customs,
as Mr. Frazer rightly notes, “imply that to the body of the Meriah
there was ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of making the crops to
grow. In other words, the flesh and ashes of the victim were believed to
be endowed with a magical or physical power of fertilising the land.”
More than that, it seems to me that the seed itself is not regarded as
sufficient to produce a crop: it is the seed buried in the sacred
grave with the divine flesh which germinates at last into next year’s
foodstuffs.
A few other points must be noticed about this essential case, which is
one of the most typical instances of manufactured godhead. The Meriah
was only satisfactory if he had been purchased--“bought with a
price,” like the children who were built as foundation-gods into
walls; or else was the child of a previous Meriah--in other words, was
of divine stock by descent and inheritance. Khonds in distress often
sold their children as Meriahs, “considering the beatification”
(apotheosis, I would rather say) “of their souls certain, and _their
death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible_.”
This sense of the sacrifice as a case of “one man dying for the
people” is most {285}marked in our accounts, and is especially
interesting from its analogy to Christian reasoning. A man of the Panua
tribe was once known to upbraid a Khond because he had sold for a Meriah
his daughter whom the Panuâ wished to marry; the Khonds around at once
comforted the insulted father, exclaiming, “Your child died that all
the world may live.” Here and elsewhere we have the additional idea
of a piacular value attached to the sacrifice, about which more must be
said in a subsequent chapter. The death of the Meriah was supposed to
ensure not only good crops, but also “immunity from all disease and
accident.” The Khonds shouted in his dying ear, “We bought you with
a price; no sin rests with us.” It is also worthy of notice that the
victim was anointed with oil, a point which recalls the very name of
Christus. Once more, the victim might not be bound or make any show of
resistance; but the bones of his arms and his legs were often broken to
render struggling impossible. Sometimes, however, he was stupefied with
opium, one of the ordinary features in the manufacture of gods, as
we have already seen, being such preliminary stupefaction. Among the
various ways in which the Meriah was slain I would particularly specify
the mode of execution by squeezing him to death in the cleft of a tree.
I mention these points here, though they somewhat interrupt the general
course of our argument, because of their great importance as antecedents
of the Christian theory. In fact, _I believe the Christian legend to
have been mainly constructed out of the details of such early god-making
sacrifices; I hold that Christ is essentially one such artificial god;
and I trust the reader will carefully observe for himself as we proceed
how many small details (such as the breaking of the bones) recall in
many ways the incidents of the passion and the crucifixion_.
The Khonds, however, have somewhat etherealised the conception of
artificial god-making by allowing one victim to do for many fields
together. Other savages are more prodigal {286}of divine crop-raisers.
To draw once more from Mr. Frazer’s storehouse--the Indians of
Guayaquil, in South America, used to sacrifice human blood and the
hearts of men when they sowed their fields. The ancient Mexicans,
conceiving the maize as a personal being who went through the whole
course of life between seed-time and harvest, sacrificed new-born babes
when the maize was sown, older children when it had sprouted, and so
on till it was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men. May we not
parallel with this instance the singular fact that the Romans had as
their chief agricultural deity Saturnus, the god of sowing, but had also
several other subsidiary crop-deities, such as Seia, who has to do
with the corn when it sprouts, Segetia, with the corn when shot up, and
Tutilina with the corn stored in the granary? (An obvious objection
based on the numerous gods of childhood and practical arts at Rome will
be answered in a later chapter.) The Pawnees, again, annually sacrificed
a human victim in spring, when they sowed their fields. They thought
that an omission of this sacrifice would be followed by the total
failure of the crops of maize, beans, and pumpkins. In the account of
one such sacrifice of a girl in 1837 or 1838, we are told: “While her
flesh was still warm, it was cut in small pieces from the bones, put in
little baskets, and taken to a neighbouring corn-field. Here the head
chief took a piece of the flesh from a basket, and squeezed a drop of
blood upon the newly-deposited grains of corn. His example was followed
by the rest, till all the seed had been sprinkled with the blood; it
was then covered up with earth.” Many other cases might be quoted from
America.
In West Africa, once more, a tribal queen used to sacrifice a man and
woman in the month of March. They were killed with spades and hoes, and
their bodies buried in the middle of a field which had just been tilled.
At Lagos, in Guinea, it was the custom annually to impale a young girl
alive soon after the spring equinox in order to {287}secure good crops.
A similar sacrifice is still annually offered at Benin. The Marimos, a
Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a human being for the crops. The victim chosen
is generally a short stout man. He is seized by violence or intoxicated
(note that detail) and taken to the fields, where he is killed amongst
the wheat “to serve as seed.” After his blood has coagulated in the
sun, it is burned, along with that peculiarly sacred part, the frontal
bone, the flesh attached to it, and the brain; the ashes are then
scattered over the ground to fertilise it. Such scattering of the ashes
occurs in many instances, and will meet us again in the case of Osiris.
In India, once more, the Gonds, like the Khonds, kidnapped Brahman
boys, and kept them as victims to be sacrificed on various occasions.
At sowing and reaping, after a triumphal procession, one of the lads
was killed by being punctured with a poisoned arrow. His blood was then
sprinkled over the ploughed field or the ripe crop, and his flesh was
sacramentally devoured. The last point again will call at a later stage
for further examination.
I will detail no more such instances (out of the thousands that exist)
for fear of seeming tedious. But the interpretation I put upon the facts
is this. Originally, men noticed that food-plants grew abundantly from
the laboured and well-manured soil of graves. They observed that this
richness sprang from a coincidence of three factors--digging, a sacred
dead body, and seeds of foodstuffs. In time, they noted that if you dug
wide enough and scattered seed far enough, a single corpse was capable
of fertilising a considerable area. The grave grew into the field or
garden. But they still thought it necessary to bury some one in the
field; and most of the evidence shows that they regarded this victim as
a divine personage; that they considered him the main source of growth
or fertility; and that they endeavoured to deserve his favour by
treating him well during the greater part of his lifetime. For in many
of the accounts it is expressly stated {288}that the intended victim was
treated as a god or as a divine king, and was supplied with every sort
of luxury up to the moment of his immolation. In process of time, the
conception of the field as differing from the grave grew more defined,
and the large part borne by seed in the procedure was more fully
recognised. Even so, however, nobody dreamed of sowing the seed alone
without the body of a victim. Both grain and flesh or blood came to be
regarded alike as “seed”: that is to say, the concurrence of the two
was considered necessary to produce the desired effect of germination
and fertility. Till a very late period, either the actual sacrifice or
some vague remnant of it remained as an essential part of cultivation.
Mr. Frazer’s pages teem with such survivals in modern folk-custom.
From his work and from other sources, I will give a few instances of
these last dying relics of the primitive superstition.
Mr. Gomme, in his _Ethnology in Folklore_, supplies an account of a
singular village festival in Southern India. In this feast, a priest,
known as the Potraj, and specially armed with a divine whip, like the
scourge of Osiris, sacrifices a sacred buffalo, which is turned loose
when a calf, and allowed to feed and roam about the village. In that
case, we have the common substitution of an animal for a human victim,
which almost always accompanies advancing civilisation. At the high
festival, the head of the buffalo was struck off at a single blow, and
placed in front of the shrine of the village goddess. Around were placed
vessels containing the different cereals, and hard by a heap of mixed
grains with a drill-plough in the centre. The carcase was then cut up
into small pieces, and each cultivator received a portion to bury in his
field. The heap of grain was finally divided among all the cultivators,
to be buried by each one in his field with the bit of flesh. At last,
the head, that very sacred part, was buried before a little temple,
sacred to the goddess of boundaries. The goddess is represented by a
shapeless stone--no doubt a Terminus, {289}or rather the tombstone of an
artificial goddess, a girl buried under an ancient boundary-mark. Here
we have evidently a last stage of the same ritual which in the case of
the Khonds was performed with a human victim. It is worth while noting
that, as part of this ceremony, a struggle took place for portions of
the victim.
A still more attenuated form of the same ceremony is mentioned by
Captain Harkness and others, as occurring among the Badagas of the
Nilgiri Hills. I condense their accounts, taking out of each such
elements as are most cognate to our purpose. Among these barbarians,
the first furrow is ploughed by a low-caste Kurrumbar, who gives his
benediction to the field, without which there would be no harvest. Here,
the member of the aboriginal race is clearly looked upon as a priest or
kinsman of the local gods, whose cooperation must be obtained by later
intrusive races. But the Kurrumbar does not merely bless the field; he
also sets up a stone in its midst; and then, prostrating himself before
the stone, he sacrifices a goat, the head of which he keeps as his
perquisite. This peculiar value of the oracular head retained by the
priest is also significant. When harvest-time comes, the same Kurrumbar
is summoned once more, in order that he may reap the first handful of
corn, an episode the full importance of which will only be apparent to
those who have read Mr. Frazer’s analysis of harvest customs. But
in this case also, the appearance of the sacred stone is pregnant with
meaning. We can hardly resist the inference that we have here to do with
the animal substitute for a human sacrifice of the god-making order, in
which the victim was slaughtered, a stone set up to mark the site of
the sacrifice, and the head preserved as a god to give oracles, in the
fashion with which we are already familiar. Comparing this instance with
the previous one of the sacred buffalo and the still earlier cases of
ancestral heads preserved as gods for oracular purposes, I think the
affiliation is too clear to be disregarded.
Evidence {290}of similar customs elsewhere exists in such abundance that
I can only give a very small part of it at present, lest I should assign
too much space to a subordinate question; I hope to detail the whole of
it hereafter in a subsequent volume. Here is a striking example from Mr.
Gomme’s _Ethnology in Folklore_, the analogy of which with preceding
instances will at once be apparent.
“At the village of Holne, situated on one of the spurs of Dartmoor, is
a field of about two acres, the property of the parish, and called the
Ploy Field. In the centre of this field stands a granite pillar (Menhir)
six or seven feet high. On May-morning, before daybreak, the young men
of the village used to assemble there, and then proceed to the moor,
where they selected a ram lamb, and, after running it down, brought it
in triumph to the Ploy Field, fastened it to the pillar, cut its throat,
and then roasted it whole, skin, wool, etc. At midday a struggle took
place, at the risk of cut hands, for a slice, it being supposed to
confer luck for the ensuing year on the fortunate devourer. As an act of
gallantry the young men sometimes fought their way through the crowd
to get a slice for the chosen amongst the young women, all of whom, in
their best dresses, attended the Ram Feast, as it was called. Dancing,
wrestling, and other games, assisted by copious libations of cider
during the afternoon, prolonged the festivity till midnight.”
Here again we get several interesting features of the primitive ritual
preserved for us. The connexion with the stone which enshrines
the original village deity is perfectly clear. This stone no doubt
represents the place where the local foundation-god was slain in very
remote ages; and it is therefore the proper place for the annual renewal
sacrifices to be offered. The selection of Maymorning for the rite;
the slaughter at the stone pillar; the roasting of the beast whole; the
struggle for the pieces; and the idea that they would confer luck,
all show survival of primitive feeling. So does the cider, sacramental
{291}intoxication being an integral part of all these proceedings.
Every detail, indeed, has its meaning for those who look close; for the
struggle at midday is itself significant, as is also the prolongation
of the feast till midnight. But we miss the burial of the pieces in the
fields; in so far, the primitive object of the rite seems to have been
forgotten or overlooked in Devonshire.
A still more attenuated survival is quoted by Mr. Gomme from another
English village. “A Whitsuntide custom in the parish of King’s
Teignton, Devonshire, is thus described: A lamb is drawn about the
parish on Whitsun Monday in a cart covered with garlands of lilac,
laburnum, and other flowers, when persons are requested to give
something towards the animal and attendant expenses; on Tuesday it is
killed and roasted whole in the middle of the village. The lamb is then
sold in slices to the poor at a cheap rate. The origin of the custom is
forgotten, but a tradition, supposed to trace back to heathen days, is
to this effect: The village suffered from a dearth of water, when the
inhabitants were advised by their priests to pray to the gods for water;
whereupon the water sprang up spontaneously in a meadow about a third of
a mile above the river, in an estate now called Rydon, amply sufficient
to supply the wants of the place, and at present adequate, even in a
dry summer, to work three mills. A lamb, it is said, has ever since that
time been sacrificed as a votive thank-offering at Whitsuntide in the
manner before mentioned. The said water appears like a large pond, from
which in rainy weather may be seen jets springing up some inches
above the surface in many parts. It has ever had the name of ‘Fair
Water.’”
I mention this curious instance here, because it well illustrates the
elusive way in which such divine customs of various origins merge into
one another; and also the manner in which different ideas are attached
in different places to very similar ceremonies. For Mr. Frazer has shown
that the notion of a rain-charm is also closely bound up with {292}the
gods of agriculture; the Khond Meriah must weep, or there will be
no rain that year; his red blood must flow, or the turmeric will not
produce its proper red colour. (Compare the red blood that flowed from
Poly-dorus’s cornel, and the Indian’s blood that drops from the
Canadian bloodroot.) In this last instance of the King’s Teignton
ceremony, it is the rain-charm that has most clearly survived to our
days: and there are obvious references to a human sacrifice offered up
to make a river-god in times long gone, and now replaced by an animal
victim. The garlands of lilac, laburnum, and other flowers are, however,
common adornments of the artificial god of cultivation; they occurred in
the Dionvsiac rites and the Attis festival, and are still preserved in
many European customs.
Very closely bound up with the artificial gods of cultivation are the
terminal gods with whom I dealt in the last chapter; so closely that
it is sometimes impossible to separate them. We have already seen some
instances of this connexion; the procession of the sacred victim usually
ends with a perlustration of the boundaries. This perlustration is
often preceded by the head of the thean-thropic victim. Such a ceremony
extends all over India; in France and other European countries it
survives in the shape of the rite known as Blessing the Fields, where
the priest plays the same part as is played among the Nilgiri hillsmen
by the low-caste Kurrumbar. In this rite, the Host is carried round the
bounds of the parish, as the head of the sacred buffalo is carried round
at the Indian festival. In some cases every field is separately visited.
I was told as a boy in Normandy that a portion of the Host (stolen or
concealed, I imagine) was sometimes buried in each field, but of this
curious detail I can now obtain no confirmatory evidence, and I do not
insist upon it. _We must remember, however, that the Host is the body of
Christ, and that its presence in such cases is the exact analogue of the
carrying round the pieces of the Meriah_.
In {293}England, the ceremony merges into that of Beating the Bounds,
already described; though I believe the significance of the boy-victims,
and the necessity for whipping them as a rain-charm, will now be more
apparent than when we last met with it.
In many cases, all the world over, various animals come to replace the
human victim-god. Thus we learn from Festus that the Romans sacrificed
red-haired puppies in spring, in the belief that the crops would thus
grow ripe and ruddy; and there can be little doubt that these puppies,
like the lamb sacrifice at Holne and King’s Teignton, were a
substitute for an original human victim. Even so, the Egyptians, as we
shall see, sacrificed red-haired men as the representatives of Osiris,
envisaged as a corn-god. In some cases, indeed, we have historical
evidence of the human god being replaced at recent dates by a divine
animal-victim; for example, in Chinna Kimedy, after the British had
suppressed human sacrifices, a goat took the place of the sacred Meriah.
Mannhardt has collected much evidence of the curious customs still (or
lately) existing in modern Europe, which look like survivals in a very
mitigated form of the same superstition. These are generally known by
the name of “Carrying out Death,” or “Burying the Carnival.”
They are practised in almost every country of Europe, and relics of them
survive even in England. The essence of these ceremonies consists in an
effigy being substituted for the human victim. This effigy is treated
much as the victim used to be. Sometimes it is burned, sometimes thrown
into a river, and sometimes buried piecemeal. In Austrian Silesia,
for example, the effigy is burned, and while it is burning a general
struggle takes place for the pieces, which are pulled out of the flames
with bare hands. (Compare the struggle among the Khonds, and also at
the Potraj festival and the Holne sacrifice.) Each person who secures
a fragment of the figure ties it to a branch of the largest tree in his
garden, or buries it in his field, in the {294}belief that this causes
the crops to grow better. Sometimes a sheaf of corn does duty for the
victim, and portions of it are buried in each field as fertilisers. In
the Hartz Mountains, at similar ceremonies, a living man is laid on a
baking-trough and carried with dirges to a grave; but a glass of brandy
is substituted for him at the last moment. Here the spirit is the
equivalent of a god. In other cases the man is actually covered with
straw, and so lightly buried. In Italy and Spain, a similar custom bore
the name of “Sawing the Old Woman.” In Palermo, a real old woman was
drawn through the streets on a cart, and made to mount a scaffold, where
two mock executioners proceeded to saw through a bladder of blood which
had been fitted to her neck. The blood gushed out, and the old woman
pretended to swoon and die. This is obviously a mitigation of a human
sacrifice. At Florence, an effigy stuffed with walnuts and dried figs
represented the Old Woman. At mid-Lent, this figure was sawn through the
middle in the Mercato Nuovo, and when the dried fruits tumbled out they
were scrambled for by the crowd, as savages scrambled for fragments of
the human victim or his animal representative. Upon all this subject a
mass of material has been collected by Mannhardt and Mr. Frazer. Perhaps
the most interesting case of all is the Russian ceremony of the Funeral
of Yarilo. In this instance, the people chose an old man and gave him
a small coffin containing a figure representing Yarilo. This he carried
out of the town, followed by women chanting dirges, as the Syrian women
mourned for Adonis, and the Egyptians for Osiris. In the open fields
a grave was dug, and into it the figure was lowered amid weeping and
wailing.
Myth and folk-lore also retain many traces of the primitive connexion.
Thus, in the genuine American legend of Hiawatha, the hero wrestles with
and vanquishes Mon-damin, and where he buries him springs up for the
first time the maize, or Indian-corn plant. Similar episodes occur
{295}in the Finnish Kalevala and other barbaric epics. According to Mr.
Chalmers, the Motu tribe in New Guinea say that yams sprang first from
the bones of a murdered man, which were buried in a grave. After some
time, the grave was opened, and the bones were found to be no longer
bones, but large and small yams of different colours.
In order to complete our preliminary survey of these artificial gods
of cultivation, before we proceed to the consideration of the great
corn-gods and wine-gods, it may be well to premise that in theory at
least the original victim seems to have been a king or chief, himself
divine, or else at least a king’s son or daughter, one of the divine
stock, in whose veins flowed the blood of the earlier deities. Later on,
it would seem, the temporary king was often allowed to do duty for the
real king; and for this purpose he seems frequently to have been clad in
royal robes, and treated with divine and royal honours. Examples of this
complication will crop up in the sequel. For the present I will only
refer to the interesting set of survivals, collected by Mr. Gomme, where
temporary kings or mayors in England are annually elected, apparently
for the sake of being sacrificed only. In many of these cases we get
mere fragmentary portions of the original rite; but by piecing them all
together, we obtain on the whole a tolerably complete picture of the
original ceremonial observance. At St. Germans in Cornwall, the mock
mayor was chosen under the large walnut-tree at the May-fair; he was
made drunk overnight, in order to fit him for office, and was in that
state drawn round the nut-tree, much as we saw the mayor of Bovey rode
round the Bovey stone on his accession to the mayoralty. The mayor of
St. Germans also displayed his royal character by being mounted on the
wain or cart of old Teutonic and Celtic sovereignty. At Lostwithiel, the
mock mayor was dressed with a crown on his head, and a sceptre in
his hand, and had a sword borne before him. At Penrhyn, the mayor was
preceded by torch-bearers and town sergeants, and though he was not
{296}actually burnt, either in play or in effigy, bonfires were
lighted, and fireworks discharged, which connect the ceremony with such
pyre-sacrifices of cremationists as the festival of the Tyrian Melcarth
and the Baal of Tarsus. On Halgaver Moor, near Bodmin, a stranger was
arrested, solemnly tried in sport, and then trained in the mire or
otherwise ill-treated. At Polperro, the mayor was gen-rally “some
half-witted or drunken fellow,” in either case, according to early
ideas, divine; he was treated with ale, and, “having completed the
perambulation of the town,” was wheeled by his attendants into the
sea. There, he was allowed to scramble out again, as the mock victim
does in many European ceremonies; but originally, I do not doubt, he was
drowned as a rain-charm.
These ceremonies, at the time when our authorities learnt of them, had
all degenerated to the level of mere childish pastimes; but they contain
in them, none the less, persistent elements of most tragic significance,
and they point back to hideous and sanguinary god-making festivals.
In most of them we see still preserved the choice of the willing or
unconscious victim; the preference for a stranger, a fool, or an idiot;
the habit of intoxicating the chosen person; the treatment of the victim
as king, mayor, or governor; his scourging or mocking; his final death;
and his burning on a pyre, or his drowning as a rain-charm. All these
points are still more clearly noticeable in the other form of survival
where the king or divine victim is represented, not by a mock or
temporary king, but by an image or effigy. Such is the common case of
King Carnival, who is at last burnt in all his regalia, or thrown into
a river. Our own Guy Fawkes, though fastened upon the personality of a
particular unpopular historical character, seems to be the last feeble
English representative of such a human victim. I will not elaborate this
point any further (considerations of space forbid), but will refer
the reader for additional examples to Mr. Gomme’s {297}_Village
Community_, and Mr. Frazer’s wonderful collection of examples in _The
Golden Bough_.
The general conclusion I would incline to draw from all these instances
is briefly this. Cultivation probably began with the accidental sowing
of grains upon the tumuli of the dead. Gradually it was found that by
extending the dug or tilled area and sowing it all over, a crop would
grow upon it, provided always a corpse was buried in the centre. In
process of time divine corpses were annually provided for the purpose,
and buried with great ceremony in each field. By-and-bye it was found
sufficient to offer up a single victim for a whole tribe or village, and
to divide his body piecemeal among the fields of the community. But the
crops that grew in such fields were still regarded as the direct gifts
of the dead and deified victims, whose soul was supposed to animate and
fertilize them. As cultivation spread, men became familiarised at
last with the conception of the seed and the ploughing as the really
essential elements in the process; but they still continued to attach
to the victim a religious importance, and to believe in the necessity of
his presence for good luck in the harvest. With the gradual mitigation
of savagery an animal sacrifice was often substituted for a human one;
but the fragments of the animal were still distributed through the
fields with a mimic or symbolical burial, just as the fragments of the
man-god had formerly been distributed. Finally, under the influence of
Christianity and other civilised religions, an effigy was substituted
for a human victim, though an animal sacrifice was often retained
side by side with it, and a real human being was playfully killed in
pantomime.
In early stages, however, I note that the field or garden sometimes
retains the form of a tumulus. Thus Mr. Turner, the Samoan missionary,
writes of the people of Tana, in the New Hebrides:
“They bestow a great deal of labour on their yam plantations, and keep
them in fine order. You look over a reed {298}fence, and there you see
ten or twenty mounds of earth, some of them seven feet high and sixty
in circumference. These are heaps of loose earth without a single stone,
all thrown up by the hand. In the centre they plant one of the largest
yams whole, and round the sides some smaller ones.”
This looks very much like a tumulus in its _temenos_. I should greatly
like to know whether a victim is buried in it.
I may add that the idea of the crop being a gift from the deified
ancestor or the divine-human victim is kept up in the common habit of
offering the first-fruits to the dead, or to the gods, or to the living
chief, their representative and descendant. Of the equivalence of these
three ceremonies, I have given some evidence in my essay on Tree-Worship
appended to my translation of the _Attis_ of Catullus. For example, Mr.
Turner says of these same Tanese in the New Hebrides:
“The spirits of their departed ancestors were among their gods. Chiefs
who reached an advanced age were, after death, deified, addressed by
name, and prayed to on various occasions. They were supposed especially
to preside over the growth of the yams and the different fruit-trees.
The first-fruits were presented to them, and in doing this they laid
a little of the fruit on some stone or shelving branch of the tree, or
some more temporary altar.., in the form of a table.... All being quiet,
the chief acted as high priest and prayed aloud thus: ‘Compassionate
father, here is some food for you; eat it; be kind to us on account of
it.’ And instead of an Amen, all united in a loud shout.”
Similar evidence is abundant elsewhere. I summarise a little of it.
Every year the Kochs of Assam, when they gather their first-fruits,
offer some to their ancestors, calling them even by name, and clapping
their hands to summon them. The people of Kobi and Sariputi, two
villages in Ceram, “offer the first-fruits of the paddy in the form
of cooked rice to their ancestors as a token of gratitude.” {299}The
ceremony is called “Feeding the Dead.” In the Tenimber and Timorlaut
Islands, the first-fruits of the paddy are offered to the spirits of the
ancestors, who are worshipped as guardian gods or household lares. The
people of Luzon worship chiefly the souls of their ancestors, and offer
to them the first-fruits of the harvest. In Fiji the earliest of
the yams are presented to the ancestral ghosts in the sacred stone
enclosure; and no man may taste of the new crop till after this
presentation.
In other cases it is gods rather than ghosts to whom the offering is
made, though among savages the distinction is for the most part an
elusive one. But in not a few instances the first-fruits are offered,
not to spirits or gods at all, but to the divine king himself, who
is the living representative and earthly counterpart of his deified
ancestors. Thus in Ashantee a harvest festival is held in September,
when the yams are ripe. During the festival the king eats the new yams,
but none of the people may eat them till the close of the festival,
which lasts a fortnight. The Hovas, of Madagascar, present the first
sheaves of the new grain to the sovereign. The sheaves are carried in
procession to the palace from time to time as the grain ripens. So, in
Burmah, when the pangati fruits ripen, some of them used to be taken to
the king’s palace that he might eat of them; no one might partake
of them before the king. In short, what is offered in one place to the
living chief is offered in another place to his dead predecessor, and is
offered in a third place to the great deity who has grown slowly out of
them. The god is the dead king; the king, as in ancient Egypt, is the
living god, and the descendant of gods, his deified ancestors. Indeed,
the first-fruits seem sometimes to be offered to the human victim
himself, in his deified capacity, and sometimes to the Adonis, or
Osiris, who is his crystallised embodiment. Our own harvest festival
seems to preserve the offering in a Christianised form.
Finally, I will add that in many cases it looks as though the
{300}divine agriculture-victim were regarded as the king in person, the
embodiment of the village or tribal god, and were offered up, himself
to himself, at the stone which forms the monument and altar of the
primitive deity. Of this idea we shall see examples when we go on to
examine the great corn-gods and wine-gods of the Mediterranean region.