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 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 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.