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 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 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 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 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 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 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.