And all the choir, a joyful company,
Attend it, and with shouts bid Ceres come
To be their house-mate; and let no man dare
Put sickle to the ripened ears until,
With woven oak his temples chapleted,
He foot the rugged dance and chant the lay.[[739]]
There can be no question of borrowing in these songs and dances, even in the simpler forms of ritual, which are found wherever rudest agriculture has begun. Doubtless only a change of religion deprives us of those songs, or some echo of them, which were sung in the famous procession of Nerthus,[[740]] the terra mater, goddess of fertility and peace among the Germanic tribes who lived by the northern oceans two thousand years ago. These people, so Tacitus[[741]] records the rite, “believe that she enters into human activity, and travels among them.” Drawn by cows, she is accompanied in her mysterious wagon by a priest; “those are joyful times and places which the goddess honours with her presence, and her visit makes holiday.”[[742]]
Tacitus was interested in the mysteries of the rite; would that he had heard and transmitted the songs that rang out in honour of this German Demeter, and had described the dances of the folk about their fields![[743]] For, as Kögel points out, the later procession to bless crops and to ban all things hostile to their thriving, a custom still common in certain parts of Europe, is only a repetition of this old progress. Half-way between the time of Nerthus and the present occurs that Anglo-Saxon charm for making barren or bewitched land bear fruit; amid its excrescences of ritual, and under the alien matter, still lingers a hint of the old communal procession, the old communal song and dance; and perhaps Nerthus is dimly remembered in the cries of,—
Erce, Erce, Erce, earth’s mother,
which has a repetition familiar from many survivals,[[744]] and in the lines:—