|IN {301}advanced communities, the agricultural gods with whom we dealt
in the last chapter come to acquire specific class-names, such as
Attis and Adonis; are specialised as corn-gods, wine-gods, gods of the
date-palm, or gods of the harvest; and rise to great distinction in the
various religions.
I propose to examine at some length the more important of these in the
Mediterranean civilisations, where Christianity was first evolved. And I
begin with Dionysus.
One of the notable features of the Potraj festival of southern India,
which Sir Walter Elliot has minutely described for us, and of which
I gave a brief abstract in the previous chapter, is its orgiastic
character. As type of the orgiastic god-making ceremonies, with their
five-day festival, it well deserves some fuller description. The feast
takes place near the temple of the village goddess, who is worshipped
in the form of an unshapely stone, stained red with vermillion, the
probable representative of the first human foundation-victim. An altar
was erected behind this temple to the god who bears the name of Potraj.
He is a deity of cultivation. The festival itself was under the charge
of the Pariahs, or aboriginal outcasts; it was attended by all the
lowest classes, including the dancing girls of the temple and the
shepherds or other “non-Aryan” castes. During the festival, these
people took temporarily the first place in the village; they appeared
to {302}form the court of the temporary king, and to represent the early
local worship, whose gods the conquering races are afraid of offending.
For since the dead of the conquered race are in possession of the soil,
immigrant conquerors everywhere have a superstitious dread of incurring
their displeasure. On the first day of the orgy, the low-caste people
chose one of themselves as priest or Potraj.
On the second day of the feast, the sacred buffalo, already described
as having the character of a theanthropic victim, was thrown down before
the goddess; its head was struck off at a single blow, and was placed in
front of the shrine, with one leg in its mouth. The carcase, as we saw
already, was then cut up, and delivered to the cultivators to bury in
their fields. The blood and offal were afterwards collected into a large
basket; and the officiating priest, a low-caste man, who bore (like the
god) the name of Potraj, taking a live kid, hewed it in pieces over
the mess. The basket was then placed on the head of a naked man, of the
leather-dresser class, who ran with it round the circuit of the village
boundaries, scattering the fragments right and left as he went. The
Potraj was armed with a sacred whip, like Osiris; and this whip was
itself the object of profound veneration.
On the third and fourth days, many buffaloes and sheep were slaughtered;
and on the fourth day, women walked naked to the temple, clad in boughs
of trees alone; a common religious exercise of which I have only space
here to suggest that St. Elizabeth of Hungary and the Godiva procession
at Coventry are surviving relics. (These relations have well been
elucidated by Mr. Sidney Hartland.)
On the fifth and last day, the whole community marched with music to the
village temple, and offered a concluding sacrifice at the Potraj altar.
A lamb was concealed close by. The Potraj, having found it after a
pretended search, rendered it insensible by a blow of his whip, or by
mesmeric passes--a survival of the idea of the voluntary victim. Then
the assistants tied the Potraj’s hands behind his {303}back, and the
whole party began to dance round him with orgiastic joy. Potraj joined
in the excitement, and soon came under the present influence of the
deity. He was led up, bound, to the place where the lamb lay motionless.
Carried away with divine frenzy, he rushed at it, seized it with his
teeth, tore through the skin, and eat into its throat. When it was quite
dead, he was lifted up; a dishful of the meat-offering was presented to
him; he thrust his blood-stained face into it, and it was then buried
with the remains of the lamb beside the altar. After that, his arms were
untied, and he fled the place. I may add that as a rule the slaughterer
of the god everywhere has to fly from the vengeance of his worshippers,
who, after participating in the attack, pretend indignation as soon as
the sacrifice is completed.
The rest of the party now adjourned to the front of the temple, where
a heap of grain deposited on the first day was divided among all the
cultivators, to be sown by each one in the field with his piece of
flesh. After this, a distribution was made of the piled-up heads of the
buffaloes and sheep slaughtered on the third and fourth days. These
were evidently considered as sacred as divine heads generally in all
countries and ages. About forty of the sheeps’ heads were divided
among certain privileged persons; for the remainder, a general scramble
took place, men of all castes soon rolling together on the ground in
a mess of putrid gore. For the buffaloes’ heads, only the Pariahs
contended. Whoever was fortunate enough to secure one of either kind
carried it off and buried it in his field. Of the special importance of
the head in all such sacrifices, Mr. Gomme has collected many apposite
examples.
The proceedings were terminated by a procession round the boundaries;
the burial of the head of the sacred buffalo close to the shrine of
the village goddess; and the outbreak of a perfect orgy, a “rule of
misrule,” during which the chief musician indulged in unbridled abuse
of all the authorities, native or British.
I {304}have given at such length an account of this singular festival,
partly because it sheds light upon much that has gone before, but partly
also because it helps to explain many elements in the worship of the
great corn- and wine-gods. One point of cardinal importance to be
noticed here is that the officiating priest, who was at one time also
both god and victim, is called Potraj like the deity whom he represents.
So, too, in Phrygia the combined Attis-victim and Attis-priest bore the
name of Attis; and so in Egypt the annual Osiris-offering bore the name
of Osiris, whom he represented.
If I am right, therefore, in the analogy of the two feasts Dionysus
was in his origin a corn-god, and later a vine-god, annually slain
and buried in order that his blood might fertilise the field or
the vineyard. In the Homeric period, he was still a general god of
cultivation: only later did he become distinctively the grape-god
and wine-deity. There was originally, I believe, a Dionysus in every
village; and this divine victim was annually offered, himself to
himself, with orgiastic rites like those of Potraj. Mr. Laurence Gomme
has already in part pointed out this equation of the Hellenic and
the Indian custom. The earliest form of Dionysus-worship, on this
hypothesis, would be the one which survived in Chios and Tenedos, where
a living human being was orgiastically torn to pieces at the feast of
Dionysus. At Orchomenus, the human victim was by custom a woman of the
family of the Oleiæ (so that there were women Dionysi): at the annual
festival, the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn
sword, and if he caught one, he had the right to slay her. (This is the
sacred-chance victim.) In other places, the ceremony had been altered in
historical times; thus at Potnice, in Boeotia, it was once the custom
to slay a child as Dionysus; but later on, a goat, which was identified
with the god, was substituted for the original human victim. The
equivalence of the animal victim with the human god is shown by the fact
that at Tenedos the newborn {305}calf sacrificed to Dionysus--or _as_
Dionysus--was shod in buskins, while the mother cow was tended like a
woman in childbed.
Elsewhere we find other orgiastic rites still more closely resembling
the Indian pattern. Among the Cretans, a Dionysus was sacrificed
biennially under the form of a bull; and the worshippers tore the living
animal to pieces wildly with their teeth. Indeed, says Mr. Frazer, the
rending and devouring of live bulls and calves seems to have been a
regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. In some cities, again, the
animal that took the place of the human victim was a kid. When the
followers of Dionysus tore in pieces a live goat and drank its blood,
they believed they were devouring the actual body and blood of the god.
_This eating and drinking the god is an important point_, which will
detain us again at a later stage of our enquiry.
I do not desire to dwell too long upon any one deity, or rather class of
deities; therefore I will say briefly here that when Dionysus became
the annual or biennial vine-god victim, it was inevitable that his
worshippers should have seen his resurrection and embodiment in the
vine, and should have regarded the wine it yielded as the blood of the
god. In this case, the identification was particularly natural, for
could not every worshipper feel the god in the wine? and did not the
divine spirit within it inspire and intoxicate him? To be “full of the
god” was the natural expression for the resulting exhilaration; the
cult of the wine-spirit is thus one of those which stands on the surest
and most intimate personal basis.
The death and resurrection of Dionysus are accordingly a physical
reality. The god is annually killed in the flesh, as man, bull, or goat;
and he rises again in the vine, to give his blood once more for the good
of his votaries. Moreover, he may be used as a fertiliser for many
other trees; and so we find Dionysus has many functions. He is variously
adored as Dionysus of the tree, and more particularly {306}of the
fruit-bearing fig and apple. His image, like those of other tree-gods
already encountered, was often an upright post, without arms, but draped
(like the _ashera_) in a mantle, and with a bearded mask to represent
the head, while green boughs projecting from it marked his vegetable
character. He was the patron of cultivated trees; prayers were offered
to him to make trees grow; he was honoured by fruit-growers, who set up
an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in the midst of
their orchards. (Compare that last degraded and utilitarian relic, the
modern scarecrow.) For other equally interesting facts, I would refer
the reader once more to Mr. Frazer, whose rich store I must not further
rifle. It seems to me obvious from his collection of facts that there
was originally everywhere a separate local Dionysus, an annual man-god
or woman-god victim (for which a beast was later substituted), and that
only slowly did the worship of the individual Dionysi pass into the
general worship of one great idealised god Dionysus. The great gods are
at first classes, not individuals.
Mr. Gomme has further pointed out three interesting points of
resemblance between the Dionysiac rites and the Indian Potraj festival.
In the first place, Dionysus is sometimes represented to his worshippers
by his head only--no doubt a preserved oracular head; and in any case
a parallel to the importance of the head in the Indian ceremony. In the
second place, the sacrificer of the calf at Tenedos was driven out and
stoned after the fulfilment of the rite--a counterpart of the Potraj
fleeing from the place after the slaughter of the lamb. And in the
third place, the women worshippers of Dionysus attended the rites nude,
crowned with garlands, and daubed over with dirt--a counterpart of the
naked female votaries surrounded with branches of trees in the Indian
festival. All three of these points recur abundantly in similar
ceremonies elsewhere.
As a rule, I severely disregard mere myths, as darkeners of
{307}counsel, confining my attention to the purely religious and
practical elements of custom and worship. But it is worth while noting
here for its illustrative value the Cretan Dionysus-myth, preserved
for us in a Romanised form by Firmicus Maternus. Dionysus is there
represented as the son of Zeus, a Cretan king; and this legend,
dismissed cavalierly by Mr. Frazer as “Euhemeristic,” at least
encloses the old idea that the Dionysus-victim was at first himself a
divine god-king, connected by blood with the supreme god or founder of
the community. Hera, the wife of Zeus, was jealous of the child, and
lured him into an ambush, where he was set upon by her satellites the
Titans, who cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs,
and ate it. Other forms of the myth tell us how his mother Demeter
pieced together his mangled remains, and made him young again. More
often, however, Dionysus is the son of Semele, and various other
versions are given of the mode of his resurrection. It is enough for our
purpose that in all of them _the wine-god, after having been slain and
torn limb from limb, rises again from the dead, and often ascends to
his father Zeus in heaven_. The resurrection, visibly enacted, formed
in many places a part of the rite; though I cannot agree with Mr.
Frazer’s apparent and (for him) unusual suggestion that the rite grew
out of the myth; I hold the exact opposite to have been the order of
evolution.
On the whole, then, though I do not deny that the later Greeks envisaged
Dionysus as a single supreme god of vegetation, nor that many abstract
ideas were finally fathered upon the worship--especially those which
identified the death and resurrection of the god with the annual winter
sleep and spring revival--I maintain that in his origin the Dionysus was
nothing more than the annual corn-victim, afterwards extended into the
tree and vine victim, from whose grave sprang the pomegranate, that
blood-red fruit, and whose life-juice was expressed as the god-giving
wine. At first a yearly human victim, he was afterwards personated
{308}by a goat or a bull; and was therefore represented in art as a
bull, or a bull-horned man. Gradually identified with vegetation in
general, he was regarded at last as the Flowery Dionysus, the Fig
Dionysus, or even, like Attis, the god of the pine-tree. But all these,
I believe, were later syncretic additions; and I consider that in such
primitive forms as the orgiastic crop-god of the Indian corn-festival we
get the prime original of the Hellenic vine-deity.
I pass on to Osiris, in his secondary or acquired character as corn-god.
I have already expressed the belief, in which I am backed up by Mr.
Loftie, that the original Osiris was a real historical early king of
This by Abydos. But in the later Egyptian religion, after mystic ideas
had begun to be evolved, he came to be regarded as the god of the dead,
and every mummy or every justified soul was looked upon as an Osiris.
Moreover, it seems probable that in Egypt the name of Osiris was also
fitted to the annual slain corn-victim or corn-god. Thus all over Egypt
there were many duplicates of Osiris; notably at Busiris, where the
name was attached to an early tomb like the one at Abydos. This
identification of the new-made god with the historic ancestor, the
dead king, or the tribal deity is quite habitual; it is parallel to the
identification of the officiating Potraj with the Potraj god, of the
Attis-priest with Attis, of the Dionysus-victim with the son of Zeus:
and it will meet us hereafter in savage parallels. Let us look at the
evidence.
As in India, the Osiris festival lasted for five days. (The period is
worth noting.) The ceremonies began with ploughing the earth. We do
not know for certain that a human victim was immolated; but many
side-analogies would lead us to that conclusion, and suggest that as
elsewhere the sacred victim was torn to pieces in the eagerness of the
cultivators and worshippers to obtain a fragment of his fertilising
body. For in the myth, Typhon cuts up the corpse of the god into
fourteen pieces, which he {309}scatters abroad (as the naked
leather-dresser scatters the sacred buffalo): and we know that in the
Egyptian ceremonies one chief element was the search for the mangled
portions of Osiris, the rejoicings at their discovery, and their solemn
burial. On one of the days of the feast, a procession of priests went
the round of the temples--or beat the bounds: and the festival closed
with the erection of a pillar or stone monument to the Osiris, which, in
a bas-relief, the king himself is represented as assisting in raising.
I think it is impossible to overlook the general resemblance of these
rites to the rites of Potraj.
I ought to add, though I cannot go into that matter fully here, that the
many allusions to the flinging of the coffer containing the Osiris into
the Nile are clear indications of the rain-charm obtained by throwing
the human victim into a spring or river. In this case, however, it must
of course be regarded locally as a charm to make the Nile rise in due
season.
The character of the later Osiris, or the god-victim identified with
him, as a corn and vegetable god, is amply borne out by several other
pieces of evidence. Osiris, it is said, was the first to teach men the
use of corn. He also introduced the cultivation of the vine. Mr. Frazer
notes that in one of the chambers dedicated to Osiris in the great
temple of Isis at Philæ, the dead body of Osiris is represented with
stalks of corn springing from it, and a priest is watering the stalks
from a pitcher which he holds in his hand. That human corn-victims
were at least not unknown in Egypt we have on the direct authority of
Manetho, who tells us that red-haired men used to be burned, and their
ashes scattered with winnowing fans. (Similar cases elsewhere have been
previously mentioned.) So, too, the legend tells us that Isis placed
the severed limbs of Osiris on a corn-sieve. Red-haired oxen were also
sacrificed in Egypt, apparently in order to produce red wheat. This is
the analogue of the bull sacrificed as Dionysus.
Again, {310}in the legend of Busiris, and the glosses or comments upon
it, we get important evidence, the value of which has not fully been
noted, I believe, by Mr. Frazer. The story comes to us in a Greek form;
but we can see through it that it represents the myth which accounted
for the Osiris sacrifice. The name Busiris means the city of Osiris,
which was so called because the grave of an ancient Osiris (either a
mummy, or a local chief identified with the great god of Abydos) was
situated there. Human sacrifices were said to have been offered at
his tomb; just as the Potraj sacrifice is offered at the shrine of the
village goddess, and just as the annual victim elsewhere was sacrificed
at the Terminus stone or the sacred stone of the foundation-god or
goddess. The victims were redhaired men, and strangers. Their ashes
were scattered abroad with winnowing fans. They were slain on the
harvest-field, and mourned by the reapers (like Adonis and Attis) in the
song which through a Greek mistake is known to us as the Maneros. The
reapers prayed at the same time that Osiris might revive and return with
renewed vigour in the following year. The most interesting point in this
account, pieced together from Apollodorus, Diodorus, and Plutarch, is
the fact that it shows us how the annual Osiris was identified with the
old divine king who lay in his grave hard by; and so brings the
case into line with others we have already considered and must still
consider. As for the hunting after the pieces of Osiris’s body,
that is just like the hunting after the mangled pieces of Dionysus by
Demeter. I interpret both the resurrection of Osiris, and the story of
the fragments being pieced together and growing young again, told of
Dionysus, as meaning that the scattered pieces, buried like those of
the Khond Meriah, grow up again next year into the living corn for the
harvest.
Furthermore, there exists to this day in Egypt an apparent survival of
the ancient Osiris rite, in an attenuated form (like the mock mayors in
England), which distinctly suggests {311}the identification I am here
attempting. In Upper Egypt, Klunzinger tells us, on the first day of
the (Egyptian) solar year, when the Nile has usually reached its highest
point, the regular government is suspended for three days in each
district, and every town chooses its own temporary ruler. This temporary
king (a local Osiris, as I believe) wears a conical cap, and a
long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in a strange mantle. I say
unhesitatingly, the dress of an Osiris, wearing the old royal cap of
Upper Egypt. With a wand of office in his hands--like the crook which
Osiris carries on the monuments--and attended by men disguised as
scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds to the governor’s
house. The governor allows himself to be deposed; the mock king,
mounting the throne, holds a tribunal, to whose decisions even the
governor himself must bow. In short, like other temporary kings, he
really enjoys royal authority for the moment. After three days, however,
the mock king is condemned to death; the envelope or shell in which he
is encased is committed to the flames; and from its ashes creeps forth
the Fellah who impersonated him. I do not doubt that the case here
represents the antique coffer or mummy-case of Osiris.
In this graphic ceremonial, then, I see a survival, with the customary
mitigations, of the annual Osiris sacrifice, once actually performed on
a human victim. I do not doubt that in Egypt as elsewhere a mock
king was formerly chosen in place of the real king to personate the
descendant of Osiris, an Osiris himself; and that this substitute was
put to death, and torn to pieces or burnt, while his ashes were winnowed
and scattered over the land. It may also be worth while to enquire
whether the scourge which Osiris holds in the bas-reliefs is not the
equivalent of the divine whip of the Potraj, and the other whips which
Mr. Gomme has so ingeniously correlated with that very venerable and
mystic attribute.
I would suggest, then, that Osiris in his later embodiment {312}was
annually renewed as a corn and vine victim. Originally a king of Upper
Egypt, or part of it, he was envisaged in later myth as a general
culture-god. Isis, his sister and wife, discovered wheat and barley
growing wild; and Osiris introduced these grains among his people, who
thereupon abandoned cannibalism, and took to grain-growing. An annual
victim, most often a stranger, identified with the racial god, was torn
to pieces in his place; and Osiris himself was finally merged with the
abstract spirit of vegetation, and supposed to be the parent of all
trees. Just as the Corinthians, when ordered by an oracle to worship a
certain pine tree “equally with the god,” cut it down and made two
images of Dionysus out of it, with gilt bodies and red-stained faces; so
the Egyptians cut down a pine-tree, took out the heart, made an image of
Osiris, and then buried it in the hollow of the tree from which it had
been taken. Similar rites obtained in Attis-worship and all alike bear
witness to that late and abstract stage of thought where the primitive
cultivation-victim has been sublimated and elevated into a generalised
god of vegetation in the abstract. But this, which for Mr. Frazer is the
starting-point, is for me the goal of the evolution of Osiris.
Let us next look very briefly at the case of Adonis.
The Adon or Lord commonly known as Thammuz was one of the chief elements
in Syrian religion. He was closely connected with the namesake river
Adonis, which rose by his grave at the sacred spring of Aphaca. We do
not actually know, I believe, of a human Adonis-victim; but his death
was annually lamented with a bitter wailing, chiefly by women. Images
of him were dressed like corpses, and carried out as if for burial,
and then thrown into the sea or into springs. This was evidently a rain
charm, such as is particularly natural in a dry country like Syria. And
I will add incidentally that I attribute to similar circumstances also
some portion at least of the sanctity of rivers. In certain places, the
resurrection of the Adonis was {313}celebrated on the succeeding day.
At Byblos, he also ascended into heaven before the eyes of his
worshippers--a point worth notice from its Christian analogies.
The blood-red hue of the river Adonis in spring--really due to
the discoloration of the tributary torrents by red earth from the
mountains--was set down to the blood of the god Adonis; the scarlet
anemone sprang from his wounds. But the scholiast on Theocritus
expressly explains the Adonis as “the sown corn;” and that he was
“seed,” like the common corn-victims in India and elsewhere, we can
hardly doubt from the repeated stories of his death and resurrection.
The so-called “gardens of Adonis,” which were mimic representations
of a tumulus planted with corn, formed a most noticeable part of the
god’s ritual. They consisted of baskets or pots, filled with earth,
in which wheat, barley, flowers, and so forth were sown and tended
by women; and at the end of eight days they were carried out with the
images of the dead Adonis, and flung into the sea or into springs. This
was no doubt another case of a rain-charm. Mr. Frazer has collected
several interesting examples of similar rites the whole world over.
A few other embodiments of the corn-god may be more hastily treated.
What Adonis was to Syria, Attis was to Phrygia. Originally he seems,
according to Professor Ramsay, to have been represented by an annual
priest-victim, who slew himself for the people to ensure fertility. This
priest-victim himself bore the name of Attis, and was identified with
the god whose worship he performed. In later days, instead of killing
himself, he merely drew his own blood; and there is reason to think that
a pig was also substituted as duplicate victim, and that this pig was
itself regarded as an Attis. Analogies exist with the Paschal lamb;
while the self-mutilation of Attis-worship has also features in
common with Jewish circumcision. Moreover, the ceremonies were closely
connected, at Pessinus at least, with the ancient sacred stone which
bore the name of Cybele, and which was {314}described as the Mother of
the Gods; this connexion exactly recalls that of the Potraj-god in India
with the cult of the local village goddess. As I believe the village
goddess to be the permanent form of the foundation human sacrifice, I
also believe Cybele (gross Euhemerism as it may seem) to be the sacred
stone of the original virgin who was sacrificed at the first foundation
of Pessinus.
When the sacred stone of Cybele and the cult of Attis were removed to
Rome (under circumstances to which I shall refer in a later chapter) the
festival consisted of a five days’ rite, like that of the Potraj. It
took place at the spring equinox, as does our own equivalent festival of
Easter. On the first day, a pine-tree was cut down in the woods, and the
effigy of a young man was tied to it. This effigy no doubt represented
the primitive human sacrifice, and its crucifixion answers exactly to
the slaughter of the sacred buffalo in India. The second day yields
nothing of importance; on the third day, the Attis-priest drew blood
from his own arms and presented it as an offering; I would conjecture
that this was a substitute for self-immolation, and that the
self-immolation was originally performed by mutilation of the genitals.
It was perhaps on this night that a mourning took place over the body of
Attis, represented by an effigy, which was afterwards solemnly buried.
On the fourth day came the Festival of Joy, on which, as Mr. Frazer
believes, the resurrection of the god was celebrated. The fifth day
closed with a procession to the brook Almo, in which the sacred stone
of the goddess and her bullock-cart were bathed as a rain-charm. On the
return, the cart was strewn with flowers. I think the close parallelism
to the Indian usage is here fairly evident. Indeed, out of consideration
for brevity, I have suppressed several other most curious resemblances.
Attis was thus essentially a corn-god. His death and resurrection were
annually celebrated at Rome and at Pessinus. An Attis of some sort died
yearly. The Attis of Pessinus was both priest and king; it was perhaps
at one time {315}his duty to die at the end of his yearly reign as a
corn-god for his people. One epithet of Attis was “very fruitful”;
he was addressed as “the reaped yellow ear of corn”; and when an
effigy took the place of the annual slain priest-king, this effigy
itself was kept for a year, and then burnt as the priest-king himself
would have been at an earlier period. It seems to me impossible to
resist the cumulative weight of this singular evidence.
For the very curious customs and myths regarding Demeter, Persephone,
and other female corn-victims, I must refer the reader once more to Mr.
Frazer. It is true, the enquirer will there find the subject treated
from the opposite standpoint; he will see the goddesses regarded as
first corn-spirits, then animal, finally human: but after the examples
I have here given of my own mode of envisaging the facts, I think the
reader will see for himself what corrections to make for Mr. Frazer’s
animism and personal equation. I will only say here that in many
countries, from Peru to Africa, a girl or woman seems to have been
offered up as a corn-goddess; that this corn-goddess seems to have been
sown with the seed, and believed to come to life again with the corn;
and that several European harvest customs appear to be mitigations
of the old ceremonial, with the usual substitution of an animal or an
effigy for the human victim. Regarded in this light, Mr. Frazer’s
collection of facts about the Corn Baby affords an excellent groundwork
for research; but though I could say much on the subject, I will refrain
from it here, as I desire only at present to give such an outline as
will enable the reader to understand my general principles. The half is
often more than the whole; and I fear if I flesh out the framework too
much, it may be difficult to follow the main line of my argument.
I cannot, however, refrain from mentioning that the ceremonies of
“Carrying out Death” and “Burying the Carnival,” which prevail
all over Europe, retain many interesting features of the Potraj,
Dionysus, and Attis-Adonis {316}festivals. The figure of Death--that is
to say, as I understand it, the image of the dead human god--is often
torn to pieces, and the fragments are then buried in the fields to make
the crops grow well. But the Death is also drowned or burned; in the
first case, like Adonis, in the second, like the Osiris in the modern
Egyptian custom. And the analogies of the festivals to those of India
and Western Asia must strike every attentive reader of Mr. Frazer’s
masterwork.
Two or three typical instances must suffice as examples. In Bohemia,
the children carry a straw man out of the village, calling it Death, and
then burn it, singing,=
```Now carry we Death out of the village,
```The new summer into the village;
```Welcome, dear summer,
```Green little corn.=
Here the relation of the ceremony to the primitive corn-sacrifice
is immediately evident. And the making of the effigy out of straw is
significant. At Tabor in Bohemia the image of Death is flung from a high
rock into the water, evidently as a rain-charm, with a similar song,
praying for “good wheat and rye.” (Compare the ceremony of the
Tarpeian rock, where the victim was at last a condemned criminal: as
also the myths of immolation by jumping into the sea.) In Lower Bavaria
the pantomime was more realistic; the _Pfingstl_, as the victim was
called, was clad in leaves and flowers, and drenched with water. He
waded into a brook up to his middle, while a boy pretended to cut off
his head. In Saxony and Thüringen, the Wild Man, who represents the
god, is killed in dumb show at Whitsuntide. His captors pretend to
shoot him, and he falls as if dead, but is afterwards revived, as in the
resurrection of Adonis and Dionysus. Such resurrections form a common
episode in the popular corn-drama. I have found a case in Sussex. At
Semic in Bohemia we have the further graphic point that the victim is
actually described as the King, wears a crown of bark, and carries a
wand as a {317}sceptre, like the mock Osiris. Other kings are frequent
elsewhere. In the Koniggratz district, the King is tried, and, if
condemned, is beheaded in pantomime. Near Schomberg, the mock victim
used to be known as the Fool, another significant name, and was finally
buried under straw and dung, a conjunction of obvious agricultural
import. In Rottweil, the Fool is made drunk, and interred in straw amid
Adonis-like lamentations. Elsewhere, the Fool, either in person or by a
straw effigy, is flung into water. At Schluckenau, realism goes a stage
further: the Wild Man wears a bladder filled with blood round his neck;
this the executioner stabs, and the blood gushes forth on the ground.
Next day, a straw man, made to look as like him as possible, is laid on
a bier, and taken to a pool into which it is flung. In all these antique
ceremonies it is impossible not to see a now playful survival of the
primitive corn-sacrifice. Our own April Fool shows the last stage of
degradation in such world-wide customs. Originally sent on a fool’s
errand to the place of sacrifice, so that he might go voluntarily, he is
now merely sent in meaningless derision.
I will only add here that while corn-gods and wine-gods are the most
notable members of this strange group of artificial deities, the sacred
date-palm has its importance as well in the religions of Mesopotamia;
and elsewhere the gods of the maize, the plantain, and the cocoanut rise
into special or local prominence.’ So do the Rice-Spirit, the Oats-Wife,
the Mother of the Rye, and the Mother of the Barley (or Demeter). All
seem to be modifications of the primitive victim, sacrificed to make
a spirit for the crop, or to act as “seed” for the date or the
plantain.