Higgins says: "The flour of wheat was the sacrifice offered to the Χρης or Ceres in the Εὐχᾰριστία."[323]
What relation these powders have had to the "carnestolendas" of the Spanish and Portuguese, already alluded to, and the throwing of "confetti" by the Italians, which is a modification, it would be hard to say. Some relation would appear to be suggested.
USE OF POLLEN BY THE ISRAELITES AND EGYPTIANS.
There are some suggestions of a former use of pollen among the Israelites and Egyptians.
Manna, which we are assured was at one time a source of food to the Hebrews, was afterward retained as an offering in the temples. Forlong, however, denies that it ever could have entered into general consumption. He says:
Manna, as food, is an absurdity, but we have the well-known produce of the desert oak or ash—Fraxinus.... An omer of this was precious, and in this quantity, at the spring season, not difficult to get; it was a specially fit tribute to be "laid up" before any Phallic Jah, as it was the pollen of the tree of Jove and of Life, and in this sense the tribe lived spiritually on such "spiritual manna" as this god supplied or was supplied with.[324]
The detestation in which the bean was held by the high-caste people of Egypt does not demonstrate that the bean was not an article of food to a large part of the population, any more than the equal detestation of the occupation of swineherd would prove that none of the poor made use of swine's flesh. The priesthood of Egypt were evidently exerting themselves to stamp out the use of a food once very common among their people, and to supersede it with wheat or some other cereal. They held a man accursed who in passing through a field planted with beans had his clothing soiled with their pollen. Speke must have encountered a survival of this idea when he observed in equatorial Africa, near the sources of the Nile, and among people whose features proclaimed their Abyssinian origin, the very same aversion. He was unable to buy food, simply because he and some of his followers had eaten "the bean called maharagŭé." Such a man, the natives believed, "if he tasted the products of their cows, would destroy their cattle."[325]
One other point should be dwelt upon in describing the kunque of the Zuñi, Tusayan, and other Pueblos. It is placed upon one of the sacred flat baskets and packed down in such a manner that it takes the form of one of the old-fashioned elongated cylindro-conical cheeses. It should be noted also that by something more than a coincidence this form was adhered to by the peoples farther to the south when they arranged their sacred meal upon baskets.
At the festival of the god Teutleco the Aztecs made "de harina de maiz un montecillo muy tupido de la forma de un queso."[326] This closely resembles the corn meal heaps seen at the snake dance of the Tusayan.
The Zuñi, in preparing kunque or sacred meal for their religious festivals, invariably made it in the form of a pyramid resting upon one of their flat baskets. It then bore a striking resemblance to the pyramids or phalli which the Egyptians offered to their deities, and which Forlong thinks must have been "just such Lingham-like sweet-bread as we still see in Indian Sivaic temples."[327] Again, "the orthodox Hislop, in his Two Babylons, tells us that 'bouns,' buns, or bread offered to the gods from the most ancient times were similar to our 'hotcross' buns of Good Friday, that ... the buns known by that identical name were used in the worship of the Queen of Heaven, the goddess Easter (Ishtar or Astarti) as early as the days of Kekrops, the founder of Athens, 1500 years B. C."[328]