The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions

by Grant Allen

As a whole, then, we may venture to say not perhaps that all, but that a great number of sacrifices, and certainly the best-known among historic nations, are slaughters of animal substitutes for human victims; and that the flesh is sacramentally consumed by the worshippers.

There is one special form of this animal sacrifice, however, which I cannot here pass over in complete silence. It is the one of which the harvest-feast is the final relic. Mr. Frazer has fully worked out this theme in his fascinating essay: to detail it here at length would occupy too much space; I can only give the barest outline of his instances. Originally, it would seem, the corn-god or corn-spirit was conceived during the reaping as taking refuge in the last sheaf left standing. Whoever cut that wisp of corn slew the corn-spirit, and was therefore, on the analogy of the slayer of the divine king, himself the corn-spirit. Mr. Frazer does not absolutely assert that this human representative was originally killed and eaten, though all analogy would seem to suggest it; but that he was at least killed is abundantly certain; and killed he still is, in dumb show at any rate, on many modern European corn-fields. More often, however, the corn-spirit is supposed to be embodied in any animal which happens to be found in the last sheaf, where even now small creatures like mice and hedgehogs often take refuge. In earlier times, however, wolves, wild boars, and other large animals seem to have been frequently met with under similar circumstances. However that may be, a great many beasts—generally sacred beasts—are or have been sacramentally eaten as representatives of the corn-god; while, conversely, the last sheaf is often made up into the image of a man or still more often of a woman, and preserved religiously for a year, like the annual king, till the next harvest. Sometimes a cock is beheaded and eaten at the harvest feast, special importance being here attached to its head, as to the head of the human victim in so many other cases. Sometimes, as with the ancient Prussians, it was the corn-goat whose body was sacramentally eaten. Sometimes, as at Chambéry, an ox is slaughtered, and eaten with special rites by the reapers at supper. Sometimes, it is the old sacred Teutonic animal, the horse, that is believed to inhabit the last wisp of corn. I will add parenthetically here (what I trust in some future work to show) that we have probably in this and kindred ideas the origin of the sacred and oracular heads of horses and oxen attached to temples or built into churches. Sometimes, again, it is a pig that represents the god, and is ceremonially eaten at the harvest festival.

I need hardly mention that all these sacred animals, substitutes for the original human god, find their parallels in the festivals of Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, Demeter, Adonis, Lityerses, and the other great corn and wine gods of the historic civilisations.

But there is yet another and more sublimated form of sacramental feast. Since the corn-god and the wine-god, when slain, undergo resurrection in the corn and the vine, may we not also eat their bodies as bread, and drink their blood as wine or soma?

To people already familiar, first with the honorific cannibal form of god-eating, and then with its gentler animal-victim modification, nothing could be more natural than this slight transference of feeling. Nay, more: whoever eat bread and drank wine from the beginning must have known it was the body and blood of a god he was eating and drinking. Still, there is a certain difference between mere ordinary every-day food and the sacramental feast, to which sacred cannibalism and animal-sacrifice had now familiarised men’s minds. Accordingly, we find in many cases that there exists a special sacramental eating and drinking of bread and wine, which is more especially regarded as eating the body and drinking the blood of the deity.

Some curious illustrative facts may here be cited. Since straw and corn grow from the slaughtered corn-god, they may be regarded as one of his natural embodiments. Hence, when human sacrifices are prohibited, people sometimes make a straw god do duty for a human one. The Gonds, we saw, used once to kidnap sacred Brahman boys—gods by race, as it were, yet strangers and children—scatter their blood over the fields, and eat their bodies sacramentally. But when the unsympathetic British government interfered with the god-making habits of the Gond people, they took, says Col. Dalton, to making an image of straw instead, which they now similarly sacrifice. So it may be noted in many of the ceremonies of “Burying the Carnival” and the like, which I have already cited, that a straw man is substituted symbolically for the human victim. Indeed, in that singular set of survivals we have every possible substitute—the mock king, the imbecile, the pretended killing, the ceremonial shedding of blood, the animal victim, and the straw man or effigy. I may add that even the making of our modern Guy Fawkes as “a man of straw” is thus no mere accident. But we get a very similar use of corn in the curious practice of fashioning the corn-wife and the corn-baby, so fully detailed by Mr. Frazer. In this attenuated survival of human sacrifice, a sheaf of corn does duty for a human victim, and represents the life of the corn-god or corn-spirit from one year to another. All the existing evidence goes to suggest the idea that at harvest a corn-maiden or corn-wife, after a year of deification, was slain in former times, and that the human victim is now represented by her vegetable analogue or equivalent, the corn in the ear, a sheaf of which does duty in her place, and reigns as corn-queen till the next year’s harvest. The corn-baby is thus a temporary queen, made of corn, not of human flesh and blood. We may compare with this case the account of the Sioux girl who was sacrificed by the Pawnees, by being burned over a slow fire, and then shot (like St. Sebastian) with arrows. The chief sacrificer tore out her heart and devoured it, thus eating the goddess in true cannibal fashion. While her flesh was still warm, it was cut up into small pieces and taken to the corn-field. Drops of blood were squeezed from it upon the grains of seed-corn; after which it was all covered up in the ground to form a crop-raiser. Of such a ghastly goddess-making ceremony, our seemingly innocent harvest comedy of the corn-baby is probably the last surviving relic. Mr. Frazer rightly connects it with the cult of the Athenian Korê, Persephone. I think, indeed, the double form of the name, “the Old Woman” and “the Corn-baby,” makes it probable that the pair are the vegetable equivalents of both Demeter and her ravished daughter.

In other cases, however, it is the actual bread and wine themselves, not the straw or the corn in the ear, that represent the god and are sacramentally eaten. We owe to Mr. Frazer most of our existing knowledge of the wide prevalence and religious importance of this singular ritual.

We have seen already that in many countries the first-fruits of the crops are presented either to ancestral ghosts, or to the great gods, or else to the king, who is the living god and present representative of the divine ancestors. Till this is done, it would be unsafe to eat of the new harvest. The god within it would kill you. But in addition to the ceremonial offering of first-fruits to the spirits, many races also “eat the god” in the new corn or rice sacramentally. In Wermland, in Sweden, the farmer’s wife uses the grain of the last sheaf (in which, as we saw, the corn-god or corn-spirit is supposed specially to reside), in order to bake a loaf in the shape of a little girl. Here we have the maiden, who was previously sacrificed as a corn-goddess or Persephone, reappearing once more in a bread image. This loaf is divided among all the household and eaten by them. So at La Palisse in France, a man made of dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is carried home to the granary on the last harvest-waggon. The dough man and the tree are taken to the mayor’s house till the vintage is over; then a feast takes place, at which the mayor breaks the dough man in pieces, and gives the fragments to the people to eat. Here, the mayor clearly represents the king or chief, while the feast of first-fruits and the sacramental eating are combined, as was perhaps originally the case, in one and the same sacrificial ceremony. No particular mention is made of wine; but as the feast is deferred so as to take place after the vintage, it is probable that the blood of the wine-god as well as the body of the corn-god entered once at least into the primitive ritual.

Many similar feasts survive in Europe; but for the rite of eating the corn-god in its fullest form we must go once more to Mexico, which also supplied us with the best and most thoroughly characteristic examples of the cannibal god-eating. Twice a year, in May and December, an image of the great Mexican god Huitzilopochtli was made of dough, then broken in pieces, and solemnly eaten by his assembled worshippers. Two days before the May feast, says Acosta, the virgins of the temple kneaded beet-seeds with roasted maize, and moulded them with honey into a paste idol, as big as the permanent wooden idol which represented the god, putting in glass beads for eyes, and grains of Indian corn in the place of teeth. The nobles then brought the vegetable god an exquisite and rich garment, like that worn by the wooden idol, and dressed the image up in it. This done, the carried the effigy on a litter on their shoulders, no doubt to mark its royal authority. On the morning of the feast, the virgins of the god dressed themselves in garlands of maize and other festal attire. Young men, similarly caparisoned, carried the image in its ark or litter to the foot of the great pyramid temple. It was drawn up the steps with clanging music of flutes and trumpets—a common accompaniment of god-slaying ceremonies. Flowers were strewed on it, as was usual with all the gods of vegetation, and it was lodged in a little chapel of roses. Certain ceremonies of singing and dancing then took place, by means of which the paste was consecrated into the actual body and bones of the god. Finally, the image was broken up and distributed to the people, first the nobles, and then the commonalty, who received it, men, women, and children, “with such tears, fear, and reverence as if it were sacred, saying they did eat the flesh and bones of God, wherewith they were grieved.” I need not point out the close resemblance here to the mourning over the bodies of Attis and Adonis, nor to the rites of Dionysus.

Still more closely does the December feast (which took place, like Christmas, at the winter solstice) recall the cannibal practice; for here an image of the god was made of seeds, kneaded into dough with the blood of children. Such a Massacre of the Innocents occurs often elsewhere in similar connexions: we shall meet with it again on a subsequent occasion. The image was placed on the chief altar of the temple, and on the day of its Epiphany, the king of Mexico offered incense to it. Bambino gods like this are well known in other countries. Next day it was taken down, and a priest flung at it a flint-tipped arrow. This was called “killing the god so that his body might be eaten.” One of the priests then cut out the heart of the image and gave it to the actual king to eat, just as in other sacrifices the priest cut out the throbbing heart of the human victim and placed it in the mouth of the cannibal god. The rest of the image was divided into small pieces, which were distributed to all the males of the community, adults or children. The ceremony was called “God is Eaten.”