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 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 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 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 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 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 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.”