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.” 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 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.
CHAPTER XIV.—CORN- AND WINE-GODS.
IN 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.