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.

i propose to examine at some length the more important of these in the mediterranean civilisations, where christianity was first evolved. and i begin with dionysus.

one of the notable features of the potraj festival of southern india, which sir walter elliot has minutely described for us, and of which i gave a brief abstract in the previous chapter, is its orgiastic character. as type of the orgiastic god-making ceremonies, with their five-day festival, it well deserves some fuller description. the feast takes place near the temple of the village goddess, who is worshipped in the form of an unshapely stone, stained red with vermillion, the probable representative of the first human foundation-victim. an altar was erected behind this temple to the god who bears the name of potraj. he is a deity of cultivation. the festival itself was under the charge of the pariahs, or aboriginal outcasts; it was attended by all the lowest classes, including the dancing girls of the temple and the shepherds or other “non-aryan” castes. during the festival, these people took temporarily the first place in the village; they appeared to 302form the court of the temporary king, and to represent the early local worship, whose gods the conquering races are afraid of offending. for since the dead of the conquered race are in possession of the soil, immigrant conquerors everywhere have a superstitious dread of incurring their displeasure. on the first day of the orgy, the low-caste people chose one of themselves as priest or potraj.

on the second day of the feast, the sacred buffalo, already described as having the character of a theanthropic victim, was thrown down before the goddess; its head was struck off at a single blow, and was placed in front of the shrine, with one leg in its mouth. the carcase, as we saw already, was then cut up, and delivered to the cultivators to bury in their fields. the blood and offal were afterwards collected into a large basket; and the officiating priest, a low-caste man, who bore (like the god) the name of potraj, taking a live kid, hewed it in pieces over the mess. the basket was then placed on the head of a naked man, of the leather-dresser class, who ran with it round the circuit of the village boundaries, scattering the fragments right and left as he went. the potraj was armed with a sacred whip, like osiris; and this whip was itself the object of profound veneration.

on the third and fourth days, many buffaloes and sheep were slaughtered; and on the fourth day, women walked naked to the temple, clad in boughs of trees alone; a common religious exercise of which i have only space here to suggest that st. elizabeth of hungary and the godiva procession at coventry are surviving relics. (these relations have well been elucidated by mr. sidney hartland.)

on the fifth and last day, the whole community marched with music to the village temple, and offered a concluding sacrifice at the potraj altar. a lamb was concealed close by. the potraj, having found it after a pretended search, rendered it insensible by a blow of his whip, or by mesmeric passes—a survival of the idea of the voluntary victim. then the assistants tied the potraj’s hands behind his 303back, and the whole party began to dance round him with orgiastic joy. potraj joined in the excitement, and soon came under the present influence of the deity. he was led up, bound, to the place where the lamb lay motionless. carried away with divine frenzy, he rushed at it, seized it with his teeth, tore through the skin, and eat into its throat. when it was quite dead, he was lifted up; a dishful of the meat-offering was presented to him; he thrust his blood-stained face into it, and it was then buried with the remains of the lamb beside the altar. after that, his arms were untied, and he fled the place. i may add that as a rule the slaughterer of the god everywhere has to fly from the vengeance of his worshippers, who, after participating in the attack, pretend indignation as soon as the sacrifice is completed.

the rest of the party now adjourned to the front of the temple, where a heap of grain deposited on the first day was divided among all the cultivators, to be sown by each one in the field with his piece of flesh. after this, a distribution was made of the piled-up heads of the buffaloes and sheep slaughtered on the third and fourth days. these were evidently considered as sacred as divine heads generally in all countries and ages. about forty of the sheeps’ heads were divided among certain privileged persons; for the remainder, a general scramble took place, men of all castes soon rolling together on the ground in a mess of putrid gore. for the buffaloes’ heads, only the pariahs contended. whoever was fortunate enough to secure one of either kind carried it off and buried it in his field. of the special importance of the head in all such sacrifices, mr. gomme has collected many apposite examples.

the proceedings were terminated by a procession round the boundaries; the burial of the head of the sacred buffalo close to the shrine of the village goddess; and the outbreak of a perfect orgy, a “rule of misrule,” during which the chief musician indulged in unbridled abuse of all the authorities, native or british.

i 304have given at such length an account of this singular festival, partly because it sheds light upon much that has gone before, but partly also because it helps to explain many elements in the worship of the great corn- and wine-gods. one point of cardinal importance to be noticed here is that the officiating priest, who was at one time also both god and victim, is called potraj like the deity whom he represents. so, too, in phrygia the combined attis-victim and attis-priest bore the name of attis; and so in egypt the annual osiris-offering bore the name of osiris, whom he represented.

if i am right, therefore, in the analogy of the two feasts dionysus was in his origin a corn-god, and later a vine-god, annually slain and buried in order that his blood might fertilise the field or the vineyard. in the homeric period, he was still a general god of cultivation: only later did he become distinctively the grape-god and wine-deity. there was originally, i believe, a dionysus in every village; and this divine victim was annually offered, himself to himself, with orgiastic rites like those of potraj. mr. laurence gomme has already in part pointed out this equation of the hellenic and the indian custom. the earliest form of dionysus-worship, on this hypothesis, would be the one which survived in chios and tenedos, where a living human being was orgiastically torn to pieces at the feast of dionysus. at orchomenus, the human victim was by custom a woman of the family of the olei忙 (so that there were women dionysi): at the annual festival, the priest of dionysus pursued these women with a drawn sword, and if he caught one, he had the right to slay her. (this is the sacred-chance victim.) in other places, the ceremony had been altered in historical times; thus at potnice, in boeotia, it was once the custom to slay a child as dionysus; but later on, a goat, which was identified with the god, was substituted for the original human victim. the equivalence of the animal victim with the human god is shown by the fact that at tenedos the newborn 305calf sacrificed to dionysus—or as dionysus—was shod in buskins, while the mother cow was tended like a woman in childbed.

elsewhere we find other orgiastic rites still more closely resembling the indian pattern. among the cretans, a dionysus was sacrificed biennially under the form of a bull; and the worshippers tore the living animal to pieces wildly with their teeth. indeed, says mr. frazer, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves seems to have been a regular feature of the dionysiac rites. in some cities, again, the animal that took the place of the human victim was a kid. when the followers of dionysus tore in pieces a live goat and drank its blood, they believed they were devouring the actual body and blood of the god. this eating and drinking the god is an important point, which will detain us again at a later stage of our enquiry.

i do not desire to dwell too long upon any one deity, or rather class of deities; therefore i will say briefly here that when dionysus became the annual or biennial vine-god victim, it was inevitable that his worshippers should have seen his resurrection and embodiment in the vine, and should have regarded the wine it yielded as the blood of the god. in this case, the identification was particularly natural, for could not every worshipper feel the god in the wine? and did not the divine spirit within it inspire and intoxicate him? to be “full of the god” was the natural expression for the resulting exhilaration; the cult of the wine-spirit is thus one of those which stands on the surest and most intimate personal basis.

the death and resurrection of dionysus are accordingly a physical reality. the god is annually killed in the flesh, as man, bull, or goat; and he rises again in the vine, to give his blood once more for the good of his votaries. moreover, he may be used as a fertiliser for many other trees; and so we find dionysus has many functions. he is variously adored as dionysus of the tree, and more particularly 306of the fruit-bearing fig and apple. his image, like those of other tree-gods already encountered, was often an upright post, without arms, but draped (like the ashera) in a mantle, and with a bearded mask to represent the head, while green boughs projecting from it marked his vegetable character. he was the patron of cultivated trees; prayers were offered to him to make trees grow; he was honoured by fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in the midst of their orchards. (compare that last degraded and utilitarian relic, the modern scarecrow.) for other equally interesting facts, i would refer the reader once more to mr. frazer, whose rich store i must not further rifle. it seems to me obvious from his collection of facts that there was originally everywhere a separate local dionysus, an annual man-god or woman-god victim (for which a beast was later substituted), and that only slowly did the worship of the individual dionysi pass into the general worship of one great idealised god dionysus. the great gods are at first classes, not individuals.

mr. gomme has further pointed out three interesting points of resemblance between the dionysiac rites and the indian potraj festival. in the first place, dionysus is sometimes represented to his worshippers by his head only—no doubt a preserved oracular head; and in any case a parallel to the importance of the head in the indian ceremony. in the second place, the sacrificer of the calf at tenedos was driven out and stoned after the fulfilment of the rite—a counterpart of the potraj fleeing from the place after the slaughter of the lamb. and in the third place, the women worshippers of dionysus attended the rites nude, crowned with garlands, and daubed over with dirt—a counterpart of the naked female votaries surrounded with branches of trees in the indian festival. all three of these points recur abundantly in similar ceremonies elsewhere.

as a rule, i severely disregard mere myths, as darkeners of 307counsel, confining my attention to the purely religious and practical elements of custom and worship. but it is worth while noting here for its illustrative value the cretan dionysus-myth, preserved for us in a romanised form by firmicus maternus. dionysus is there represented as the son of zeus, a cretan king; and this legend, dismissed cavalierly by mr. frazer as “euhemeristic,” at least encloses the old idea that the dionysus-victim was at first himself a divine god-king, connected by blood with the supreme god or founder of the community. hera, the wife of zeus, was jealous of the child, and lured him into an ambush, where he was set upon by her satellites the titans, who cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it. other forms of the myth tell us how his mother demeter pieced together his mangled remains, and made him young again. more often, however, dionysus is the son of semele, and various other versions are given of the mode of his resurrection. it is enough for our purpose that in all of them the wine-god, after having been slain and torn limb from limb, rises again from the dead, and often ascends to his father zeus in heaven. the resurrection, visibly enacted, formed in many places a part of the rite; though i cannot agree with mr. frazer’s apparent and (for him) unusual suggestion that the rite grew out of the myth; i hold the exact opposite to have been the order of evolution.

on the whole, then, though i do not deny that the later greeks envisaged dionysus as a single supreme god of vegetation, nor that many abstract ideas were finally fathered upon the worship—especially those which identified the death and resurrection of the god with the annual winter sleep and spring revival—i maintain that in his origin the dionysus was nothing more than the annual corn-victim, afterwards extended into the tree and vine victim, from whose grave sprang the pomegranate, that blood-red fruit, and whose life-juice was expressed as the god-giving wine. at first a yearly human victim, he was afterwards personated 308by a goat or a bull; and was therefore represented in art as a bull, or a bull-horned man. gradually identified with vegetation in general, he was regarded at last as the flowery dionysus, the fig dionysus, or even, like attis, the god of the pine-tree. but all these, i believe, were later syncretic additions; and i consider that in such primitive forms as the orgiastic crop-god of the indian corn-festival we get the prime original of the hellenic vine-deity.

i pass on to osiris, in his secondary or acquired character as corn-god.

i have already expressed the belief, in which i am backed up by mr. loftie, that the original osiris was a real historical early king of this by abydos. but in the later egyptian religion, after mystic ideas had begun to be evolved, he came to be regarded as the god of the dead, and every mummy or every justified soul was looked upon as an osiris. moreover, it seems probable that in egypt the name of osiris was also fitted to the annual slain corn-victim or corn-god. thus all over egypt there were many duplicates of osiris; notably at busiris, where the name was attached to an early tomb like the one at abydos. this identification of the new-made god with the historic ancestor, the dead king, or the tribal deity is quite habitual; it is parallel to the identification of the officiating potraj with the potraj god, of the attis-priest with attis, of the dionysus-victim with the son of zeus: and it will meet us hereafter in savage parallels. let us look at the evidence.

as in india, the osiris festival lasted for five days. (the period is worth noting.) the ceremonies began with ploughing the earth. we do not know for certain that a human victim was immolated; but many side-analogies would lead us to that conclusion, and suggest that as elsewhere the sacred victim was torn to pieces in the eagerness of the cultivators and worshippers to obtain a fragment of his fertilising body. for in the myth, typhon cuts up the corpse of the god into fourteen pieces, which he 309scatters abroad (as the naked leather-dresser scatters the sacred buffalo): and we know that in the egyptian ceremonies one chief element was the search for the mangled portions of osiris, the rejoicings at their discovery, and their solemn burial. on one of the days of the feast, a procession of priests went the round of the temples—or beat the bounds: and the festival closed with the erection of a pillar or stone monument to the osiris, which, in a bas-relief, the king himself is represented as assisting in raising. i think it is impossible to overlook the general resemblance of these rites to the rites of potraj.

i ought to add, though i cannot go into that matter fully here, that the many allusions to the flinging of the coffer containing the osiris into the nile are clear indications of the rain-charm obtained by throwing the human victim into a spring or river. in this case, however, it must of course be regarded locally as a charm to make the nile rise in due season.

the character of the later osiris, or the god-victim identified with him, as a corn and vegetable god, is amply borne out by several other pieces of evidence. osiris, it is said, was the first to teach men the use of corn. he also introduced the cultivation of the vine. mr. frazer notes that in one of the chambers dedicated to osiris in the great temple of isis at phil忙, the dead body of osiris is represented with stalks of corn springing from it, and a priest is watering the stalks from a pitcher which he holds in his hand. that human corn-victims were at least not unknown in egypt we have on the direct authority of manetho, who tells us that red-haired men used to be burned, and their ashes scattered with winnowing fans. (similar cases elsewhere have been previously mentioned.) so, too, the legend tells us that isis placed the severed limbs of osiris on a corn-sieve. red-haired oxen were also sacrificed in egypt, apparently in order to produce red wheat. this is the analogue of the bull sacrificed as dionysus.

again, 310in the legend of busiris, and the glosses or comments upon it, we get important evidence, the value of which has not fully been noted, i believe, by mr. frazer. the story comes to us in a greek form; but we can see through it that it represents the myth which accounted for the osiris sacrifice. the name busiris means the city of osiris, which was so called because the grave of an ancient osiris (either a mummy, or a local chief identified with the great god of abydos) was situated there. human sacrifices were said to have been offered at his tomb; just as the potraj sacrifice is offered at the shrine of the village goddess, and just as the annual victim elsewhere was sacrificed at the terminus stone or the sacred stone of the foundation-god or goddess. the victims were redhaired men, and strangers. their ashes were scattered abroad with winnowing fans. they were slain on the harvest-field, and mourned by the reapers (like adonis and attis) in the song which through a greek mistake is known to us as the maneros. the reapers prayed at the same time that osiris might revive and return with renewed vigour in the following year. the most interesting point in this account, pieced together from apollodorus, diodorus, and plutarch, is the fact that it shows us how the annual osiris was identified with the old divine king who lay in his grave hard by; and so brings the case into line with others we have already considered and must still consider. as for the hunting after the pieces of osiris’s body, that is just like the hunting after the mangled pieces of dionysus by demeter. i interpret both the resurrection of osiris, and the story of the fragments being pieced together and growing young again, told of dionysus, as meaning that the scattered pieces, buried like those of the khond meriah, grow up again next year into the living corn for the harvest.

furthermore, there exists to this day in egypt an apparent survival of the ancient osiris rite, in an attenuated form (like the mock mayors in england), which distinctly suggests 311the identification i am here attempting. in upper egypt, klunzinger tells us, on the first day of the (egyptian) solar year, when the nile has usually reached its highest point, the regular government is suspended for three days in each district, and every town chooses its own temporary ruler. this temporary king (a local osiris, as i believe) wears a conical cap, and a long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in a strange mantle. i say unhesitatingly, the dress of an osiris, wearing the old royal cap of upper egypt. with a wand of office in his hands—like the crook which osiris carries on the monuments—and attended by men disguised as scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds to the governor’s house. the governor allows himself to be deposed; the mock king, mounting the throne, holds a tribunal, to whose decisions even the governor himself must bow. in short, like other temporary kings, he really enjoys royal authority for the moment. after three days, however, the mock king is condemned to death; the envelope or shell in which he is encased is committed to the flames; and from its ashes creeps forth the fellah who impersonated him. i do not doubt that the case here represents the antique coffer or mummy-case of osiris.

in this graphic ceremonial, then, i see a survival, with the customary mitigations, of the annual osiris sacrifice, once actually performed on a human victim. i do not doubt that in egypt as elsewhere a mock king was formerly chosen in place of the real king to personate the descendant of osiris, an osiris himself; and that this substitute was put to death, and torn to pieces or burnt, while his ashes were winnowed and scattered over the land. it may also be worth while to enquire whether the scourge which osiris holds in the bas-reliefs is not the equivalent of the divine whip of the potraj, and the other whips which mr. gomme has so ingeniously correlated with that very venerable and mystic attribute.

i would suggest, then, that osiris in his later embodiment 312was annually renewed as a corn and vine victim. originally a king of upper egypt, or part of it, he was envisaged in later myth as a general culture-god. isis, his sister and wife, discovered wheat and barley growing wild; and osiris introduced these grains among his people, who thereupon abandoned cannibalism, and took to grain-growing. an annual victim, most often a stranger, identified with the racial god, was torn to pieces in his place; and osiris himself was finally merged with the abstract spirit of vegetation, and supposed to be the parent of all trees. just as the corinthians, when ordered by an oracle to worship a certain pine tree “equally with the god,” cut it down and made two images of dionysus out of it, with gilt bodies and red-stained faces; so the egyptians cut down a pine-tree, took out the heart, made an image of osiris, and then buried it in the hollow of the tree from which it had been taken. similar rites obtained in attis-worship and all alike bear witness to that late and abstract stage of thought where the primitive cultivation-victim has been sublimated and elevated into a generalised god of vegetation in the abstract. but this, which for mr. frazer is the starting-point, is for me the goal of the evolution of osiris.

let us next look very briefly at the case of adonis.

the adon or lord commonly known as thammuz was one of the chief elements in syrian religion. he was closely connected with the namesake river adonis, which rose by his grave at the sacred spring of aphaca. we do not actually know, i believe, of a human adonis-victim; but his death was annually lamented with a bitter wailing, chiefly by women. images of him were dressed like corpses, and carried out as if for burial, and then thrown into the sea or into springs. this was evidently a rain charm, such as is particularly natural in a dry country like syria. and i will add incidentally that i attribute to similar circumstances also some portion at least of the sanctity of rivers. in certain places, the resurrection of the adonis was 313celebrated on the succeeding day. at byblos, he also ascended into heaven before the eyes of his worshippers—a point worth notice from its christian analogies. the blood-red hue of the river adonis in spring—really due to the discoloration of the tributary torrents by red earth from the mountains—was set down to the blood of the god adonis; the scarlet anemone sprang from his wounds. but the scholiast on theocritus expressly explains the adonis as “the sown corn;” and that he was “seed,” like the common corn-victims in india and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt from the repeated stories of his death and resurrection. the so-called “gardens of adonis,” which were mimic representations of a tumulus planted with corn, formed a most noticeable part of the god’s ritual. they consisted of baskets or pots, filled with earth, in which wheat, barley, flowers, and so forth were sown and tended by women; and at the end of eight days they were carried out with the images of the dead adonis, and flung into the sea or into springs. this was no doubt another case of a rain-charm. mr. frazer has collected several interesting examples of similar rites the whole world over.

a few other embodiments of the corn-god may be more hastily treated.

what adonis was to syria, attis was to phrygia. originally he seems, according to professor ramsay, to have been represented by an annual priest-victim, who slew himself for the people to ensure fertility. this priest-victim himself bore the name of attis, and was identified with the god whose worship he performed. in later days, instead of killing himself, he merely drew his own blood; and there is reason to think that a pig was also substituted as duplicate victim, and that this pig was itself regarded as an attis. analogies exist with the paschal lamb; while the self-mutilation of attis-worship has also features in common with jewish circumcision. moreover, the ceremonies were closely connected, at pessinus at least, with the ancient sacred stone which bore the name of cybele, and which was 314described as the mother of the gods; this connexion exactly recalls that of the potraj-god in india with the cult of the local village goddess. as i believe the village goddess to be the permanent form of the foundation human sacrifice, i also believe cybele (gross euhemerism as it may seem) to be the sacred stone of the original virgin who was sacrificed at the first foundation of pessinus.

when the sacred stone of cybele and the cult of attis were removed to rome (under circumstances to which i shall refer in a later chapter) the festival consisted of a five days’ rite, like that of the potraj. it took place at the spring equinox, as does our own equivalent festival of easter. on the first day, a pine-tree was cut down in the woods, and the effigy of a young man was tied to it. this effigy no doubt represented the primitive human sacrifice, and its crucifixion answers exactly to the slaughter of the sacred buffalo in india. the second day yields nothing of importance; on the third day, the attis-priest drew blood from his own arms and presented it as an offering; i would conjecture that this was a substitute for self-immolation, and that the self-immolation was originally performed by mutilation of the genitals. it was perhaps on this night that a mourning took place over the body of attis, represented by an effigy, which was afterwards solemnly buried. on the fourth day came the festival of joy, on which, as mr. frazer believes, the resurrection of the god was celebrated. the fifth day closed with a procession to the brook almo, in which the sacred stone of the goddess and her bullock-cart were bathed as a rain-charm. on the return, the cart was strewn with flowers. i think the close parallelism to the indian usage is here fairly evident. indeed, out of consideration for brevity, i have suppressed several other most curious resemblances.

attis was thus essentially a corn-god. his death and resurrection were annually celebrated at rome and at pessinus. an attis of some sort died yearly. the attis of pessinus was both priest and king; it was perhaps at one time 315his duty to die at the end of his yearly reign as a corn-god for his people. one epithet of attis was “very fruitful”; he was addressed as “the reaped yellow ear of corn”; and when an effigy took the place of the annual slain priest-king, this effigy itself was kept for a year, and then burnt as the priest-king himself would have been at an earlier period. it seems to me impossible to resist the cumulative weight of this singular evidence.

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 316festivals. 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 th眉ringen, 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 317sceptre, 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.