Pagan and Christian Creeds: V. Food And Vegetation Magic

V.

FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC

I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist, some way from the astronomical thread of Chapters II and III, and now it would appear that in order to understand religious origins we must wander still farther. The chapters mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an earlier period when there were no definite forms of gods, and when none but the vaguest astronomical knowledge existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is best and safest to move thus backwards in Time, from the things recent and fairly well known to things more ancient and less known. In this way we approach more securely to some understanding of the dim and remote past.

It is clear that before any definite speculations on heaven-dwelling gods or divine beings had arisen in the human mind--or any clear theories of how the sun and moon and stars might be connected with the changes of the seasons on the earth--there were still certain obvious things which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned alike. One of these was the return of Vegetation, bringing with it the fruits or the promise of the fruits of the earth, for human food, and also bringing with it increase of animal life, for food in another form; and the other was the return of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food

1 but partly, no doubt, he had observed actual facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to him--as, for instance that when rain is impending loud noises will bring about its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on battlefields. He had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased downpour of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which I have often verified in the vicinity of Sheffield) that the copious smoke of fires will generate rain-clouds--and so quite naturally h concluded that it was his smoking

1 but the bull-roarer, in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the end of a string, seems to be known, or to have been known, all over the world. It is described with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and Myth (pp. 29-44), where he says "it is found always as a sacred instrument employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient Greece, and Africa."

Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that the sound itself would appeal to the spirits of rain and thunder and cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as the manifestation of a spirit. 2 To make sounds like thunder would therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible, 3 he would cut himself with knives

1 Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would whistle for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets for the same purpose.

 

In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which has been adopted by so many peoples under so many forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her daughter Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation), carried down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness and Winter. And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial and ritual of magic for the purpose of restoring the lost one and bringing her back to the world again. Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and unnamable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there was a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields." 2 Fir-cones and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male fertility; snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their own skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive of resurrection and re-vivification; pigs and sows by their exceeding fruitfulness would in their hour of sacrifice remind old mother Earth of what was expected from her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that the scattering of dead flesh over the ground or mixed with the seed, did bless the ground to a greater fertility; and so by a strange mixture of primitive observation with a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols and

1 gives support to the idea that the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any forcible subjugation of them by man, but from a natural amity with them which grew up in the beginning from common interests, pursuits and affections. Thus the chetah of India (and probably the puma of Brazil) from far-back times took to hunting in the company of his two-legged and bow-and-arrow-armed

1 declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and capable of killing the largest game, will never even to-day attack man, but when maltreated by the latter submits to the outrage, unresisting, with mournful cries and every sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated in a sense, has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit, but may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian peasant and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud companionship. The mutual relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and the Horse 2 (also the Elephant) reach so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced. The Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves and still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good fortune. Elisée Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile calls to certain snakes by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.

And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception, which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees, the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground, you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow tall." 3

very curiously." 1 Once the present writer seemed to have a partial vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing activity.

The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences. Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.

It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is incontrovertible, I think, that in some ways the primitive peoples, with their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere

1 and in inscriptions is referred to as "the solitary one in the acacia"--which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse mythology Ygdrasil was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the soul of the universe; the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and must on no account be cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches. It is of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical use, 2 but so holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb it. The Burmese believe the things of nature, but especially the trees, to be the abode of spirits. "To the Burman of to-day, not less than to the Greek of long ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round about us. Some of them live

1

There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of marriage of women (and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very near akin to human beings! The Golden Bough 2 mentions many of these, including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down to the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant women--the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to fertilize them. 3

One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate--what was instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction of our essential unity with the whole of creation, which lay from the first at the base of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was hardly a conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became

1 In the myth of Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans, the Persians and the Babylonians had also legends of the Fall of man through a serpent tempting him to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And De Gubernatis, 2

Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake--the fascination of its mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its glittering eye, its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of Death--is a thing felt even more by women than by men--and for a reason (from what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who in the story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions. No wonder that, as Professor Murray says, 1 the Greeks worshiped a gigantic snake (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies of appeasement, and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship of Zeus and the Olympian gods.

 

Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any human beings could have been so foolish. But probably the good people who wonder thus have never really looked (with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. 2

If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world was so much more direct than ours--more 'animistic' if you like! What wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation), what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior of men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as an acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would no doubt be graciously accepted!--(for was it not well known that where blood had been spilt on the ground the future crop was so much more generous?)--what readiness to adopt some magic ritual likely to propitiate the unseen power--even though the outline and form of the latter were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many corn-gods of the above character, says: 1 "The primitive conception of him as he corn-god comes clearly out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman actually committed the seed

1

The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been offered at the grave of Osiris. We bear that the Indians in Ecuador used to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out human blood on their fields when they sowed them; the Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same, allowing his blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that in Mexico girls were sacrificed, and that the Mexicans would sometimes grind their (male) victim, like corn, between two stones. ("I'll grind his bones to make me bread.") Among the Khonds of East India--who were particularly given to this kind of ritual--the very tears of the sufferer were an incitement to more cruelties, for tears of course were magic for Rain. 2

And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times, both in his astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-Sun, and in his more direct rôle as plougher of the fields, and provider of food from his own body. "The tremendous mana of the wild bull," says Gilbert Murray, "occupies almost half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual." 3 Even to us there is something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of

Footnotes

71:1 See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.

72:1 Themis, p. 61.

72:2 See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe (Australian).

72:3 1 Kings xviii.

73:1 Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.

73:2 See Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.

74:1 Published originally in Le Magazine International, January 1896.

75:1 See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.

75:2 "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Hist. Religion, p. 119).

75:3 See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.

77:1 Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.

79:1 The Golden Bough, iv, 339.

79:2 Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.

80:1 The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.

80:2 Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.

80:3 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.

81:1 See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas Inman (Trübner, 1874), p. 55.

81:2 Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.

82:1 Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.

82:2 Even the thrice-learned Dr. Farnell quotes apparently with approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks of the Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to the epoptæ (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect revelation--in solemn silence--a cut cornstalk (τεθερισμένον στάχον)."--Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.

83:1 The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.

84:1 See ch. xv infra, p. 5.

84:2 The Golden Bough, vol. vii, "The Corn-Spirit," pp. 236 sq.

84:3 Four Stages, p. 34.