I will not multiply examples of the main principle of eating the corn-god in the shape of little cakes or human images, which have been collected in abundance all the world over. Mr. Frazer’s work is a perfect thesaurus of analogous customs. I will rather call attention to one or two special parallels with similar god-eating rites, cannibal or animal, which occur elsewhere. At the close of the rice harvest in Boeroe, in the East Indies, each clan meets at a common sacrificial meal, to which every member of the clan is bound to contribute a little of his new rice from the current season. This is called “eating the soul of the rice.” But some of the rice is also set apart and offered to the spirits—that is, I take it, to the ghosts of ancestors. This combination is like the common case of the human victim being offered on the altar-stone of earlier ancestral deities. Amongst the Alfoers of Celebes, again, it is the priest who sows the first rice-seeds, and plucks the first ripe rice in each field. This he roasts and grinds into meal, giving some of it to each member of the family. Here the priest no doubt represents the old tribal priest-king. Several similar practices are reported from India, only one of which need at present detain us. Among the Hindoos of the Deccan there is a magical and sacramental eating of the new rice; but the special point of interest to be noted here is the fact that some of it is offered to the god Ganesa, after which the whole family partake of the produce. Among the Kafirs of Natal and Zululand, however, it is at the king’s kraal that the people assemble for their sacramental feast of new fruits, where they dance and perform certain sacred ceremonies. In this case, the king, the living god, seems to take the place of the god, the dead king, in the Indian festival. Various grains are mixed with the flesh of a sacrificed animal, in whom we shall now have perhaps little difficulty in recognising the representative of a human corn-god victim; and a portion of this mess is placed in the mouth of each man by the king himself, here officiating in his capacity of ancestral priest. By the light of such analogies, I think we need have no hesitation in reconstructing the primitive sacramental feast, where a man was sacrificed as an annual manufactured corn-god; seeds were mixed with his blood; his flesh was eaten sacramentally by the people, fed by the king; a part of his body was also eaten by the king himself, and a part was offered to the great gods, or to the tribal god, or the foundation god or goddess of the village or city. After putting together the various survivals already cited, I do not think this is too large an exercise of the constructive faculty.
An interesting mixed case of god-eating, in which the cake was baked, not in the form of a man, but of a divine animal, I have seen myself in the house of Irish emigrants in Canada. The new corn was there made into loaves or buns in the shape of little pigs, with currants for eyes; and one of these was given to each of the children. Though merely regarded as a playful custom, this instance, I venture to think, has still its own illustrative value.
The practice of kneading sacramental cakes from the blood of infants, which we saw to prevail in the case of a Mexican god, is parallelled in the practice of mixing them with shreds of the flesh from an animal victim in the Zulu ceremony. The cannibal form of the rite must, however, have been very widespread; as we gather from the fact that a Christian sect, the Paulicians, were accused of it as late as the eighth century. John of Osun, Patriarch of Armenia, wrote a diatribe against these sectaries, in which he mentions the fact that they moulded an image of wheaten flower with the blood of children, and eat therewith their unholy communion. Of course, there could have been no direct intercourse in the ninth century between Armenia and Mexico; but the accusation shows at least that similar ceremonies were known or remembered in Asia as actual practices. Indeed, the Harranians in the middle ages annually sacrificed an infant, and boiling down its flesh, baked it into cakes, of which every freeman was allowed to partake. In both these cases, we have the two extremes of eating the god combined in one practice—the cannibal rite and the sacramental corn-cake.
Mr. Frazer calls attention to another interesting transitional instance. Loaves made in the shape of men were called at Rome Maniæ; and it appears that such loaves were specially made at Aricia. Now Aricia was also the one place in Italy where a divine priest-king, the Rex Nemoralis, lived on well recognised into the full blaze of the historic period, on the old savage tenure of killing his predecessor. Again, Mania was the name of the Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts. Woollen images, dedicated to this Latin Cybele, were hung out in Rome at the feast of the Compitalia, and were said to be substitutes for human victims. Mr. Frazer suggests that the loaves in human form which were baked at Aricia were sacramental bread; and that in old days, when the Rex Nemoralis was annually slain, loaves were also made in his image as in Mexico, and were eaten sacramentally by his worshippers. I do not hesitate myself to suggest still further that the gingerbread cakes, shaped like a man, and still richly gilt, which are sold at so many fairs in France and Italy, and also sometimes in England, are last dying relics of similar early sacramental images. For fairs are for the most part diminished survivals of religious festivals.
As the theanthropic animal victim represents a man and a god, it is reasonable that a cake shaped as an animal and baked of flour should sometimes do as well as the animal victim. For the corn is after all the embodiment of the corn-god. Hence bakers in the antique world used to keep in stock representations in dough of the various sacrificial animals, for people who were too poor to afford the originals. Oxen and sheep were regularly so represented. When Mithridates besieged Cyzicus, and the people could not get a black cow to sacrifice to Persephone, they made a dough cow and placed it at the altar. At the Athenian festival of the Diasia, cakes shaped like animals were similarly sacrificed; and at the Osiris festival in Egypt, when the rich offered a real pig, the poor used to present a dough pig as a substitute, like the dough pig of the Irish Canadians.
But in many other rites, the sacramental and sacrificial cake has entirely lost all semblance of a man or animal. The god is then eaten either in the shapeless form of a boiled mess of rice or porridge, or in a round cake or loaf, without image of any sort, or in a wafer stamped with the solar or Christian cross. Instances of this type are familiar to everyone.
More closely related still to primitive cannibalism is the curious ritual of the Sin-Eater, so well elaborated by Mr. Sidney Hartland. In Upper Bavaria, what is called a corpse-cake is kneaded from flour, and placed on the breast of a dead person, in order to absorb the virtues of the departed. This cake is then eaten by the nearest relation. In the Balkan peninsula, a small image of the dead person was made in bread and eaten by the survivors of the family. These are intermediate stages between cannibalism and the well-known practice of sin-eating.
I hope I have now made clear the general affiliation which I am seeking to suggest, if not to establish. My idea is that in the beginning certain races devoured their own parents, or parts of them, so as to absorb the divine souls of their forebears into their own bodies. Later, when artificial god-making became a frequent usage, especially in connexion with agriculture, men eat the god, or part of him, for a similar reason. But they likewise eat him as the corn or yam or rice, sacramentally. When thean-thropic victims were substituted for the man-god, they eat the theanthropic victim in like manner. Also they made images in paste of both man and beast, and, treating these as compounded of the god, similarly sacrificed and eat them. And they drank his blood, in the south as wine, in the north as beer, in India as soma. If this line of reconstruction be approximately correct, then sacraments as a whole are in the last resort based upon survival from the cannibal god-feast.
It is a significant fact that in many cases, as at the Potraj festival, the officiating priest drinks the blood of the divine victim, while the laity are only permitted to eat of its body.