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on the way or, on being haled thither, were condemned to be thrown into the volcano.1 In Loango the negroes think that drought and dearth result from the intercourse of a man with an immature girl, unless the offender repairs to court, and there in the presence of the king and a large audience expiates his guilt by dances and other ceremonies, in return for which he receives absolution from the king.2

When we observe how widely diffused is the belief in the sympathetic influence of human conduct, and especially of the relations of the sexes, on the fruits of the earth, we may perhaps be allowed to conjecture that the Lenten fast, with the rule of continence which is still, I understand, enjoined on strict Catholics during that season, was in its origin intended, not so much to commemorate the sufferings of a dying God, as to foster the growth of the seed, which in the bleak days of early spring the husbandman commits, with anxious care and misgiving, to the bosom of the naked earth. But to this topic we shall recur later on.

If we ask why it is that similar beliefs should logically lead, among different peoples, to such opposite modes of conduct as strict chastity and more or less open debauchery, the reason, as it presents itself to the primitive mind, is perhaps not very far to seek. If rude man identifies himself, in a manner, with nature; if he fails to distinguish the impulses and processes in himself from the methods which nature adopts to ensure the reproduction of plants and animals, he may jump to one of two conclusions. Either he may infer that by yielding to his appetites he will thereby assist in the multiplication of plants and animals; or he may imagine that the vigour which he refuses to expend in reproducing his own kind, will form as it were a store of energy whereby other creatures, whether vegetable or animal, will somehow benefit in propagating their species. Thus from the

1 M. J. van Baarda, "Fabelen, Verhalen en Overleveringen der Galelareezen," Bijdragen tot de Taal. Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië, xlv. (1895), p. 514. In the Banggai Archipelago, to the east of Celebes, earthquakes are ex

plained as punishments inflicted by evil spirits for indulgence in illicit love (F. S. A. de Clercq, Bijdragen tot de Kennis der Residentie Ternate (Leyden, 1890), p. 132).

2 Dapper, Description de l'Afrique,

p. 326.

same crude philosophy, the same primitive notions of nature and life, the savage may derive by different channels a rule either of profligacy or of asceticism.

To readers bred in a religion which is saturated with the ascetic idealism of the East, the explanation which I have given of the rule of continence observed under certain circumstances by rude or savage peoples may seem farfetched and improbable. They may think that the idea of moral purity, which is so intimately associated in their minds with the observance of such a rule, furnishes a sufficient explanation of it; they may hold with Milton' that chastity in itself is a noble virtue, and that the restraint which it imposes on one of the strongest impulses of our animal nature marks out those who can submit to it as men raised above the common herd, and therefore worthy to receive the seal of the divine approbation. However natural this mode of thought may seem to us, it is utterly foreign and indeed incomprehensible to the savage. If he resists on occasion the sexual instinct, it is from no high idealism, no ethereal aspiration after moral purity, but for the sake of some ulterior yet perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which he is prepared to sacrifice the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is or may be so, the examples I have cited are amply sufficient to establish. They show that where the instinct of self-preservation, which manifests itself chiefly in the search for food, conflicts or appears to conflict with the instinct which conduces to the propagation of the species, the former instinct, as the primary and more fundamental, is capable of overmastering the latter. In other words, primitive man is willing to restrain his sexual propensity for the sake of food. Another object for the sake of which the savage consents to exercise the same self-restraint

1 "Next (for hear me out now, readers) that I may tell ye whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the

expense of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron; from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn" (Milton, Apology for Smectymnuus).

is victory in war. In an earlier part of this work1 we saw that not only the warrior in the field but his friends at home will often bridle their sensual appetites from a belief that by so doing they will the more easily overcome their enemies. The fallacy of such a belief, like the belief that the chastity of the sower conduces to the growth of the seed, is plain enough to us; yet perhaps the self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain and false as they are, have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who sacrifice the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of keeping or winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth.

Compared with the Corn-mother of Germany and the harvest - Maiden of Scotland, the Demeter and Proserpine of Greece are late products of religious growth. But, as Aryans, the Greeks must at one time or another have observed harvest customs like those which are still practised by Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, and which, far beyond the limits of the Aryan world, have been practised by the Incas of Peru, the Dyaks of Borneo, and the Malays of Java, of Sumatra, and of the Peninsula-a sufficient proof that the ideas on which these customs rest are not confined to any one race, but naturally suggest themselves to all untutored peoples engaged in agriculture. It is probable, therefore, that Demeter and Proserpine, those stately and beautiful figures of Greek mythology, grew out of the same simple beliefs and practices which still prevail among our modern peasantry, and that they were represented by rude dolls made out of the yellow sheaves on many a harvestfield long before their breathing images were wrought in bronze and marble by the master hands of Phidias and 1 Vol. i. pp. 29, 31 sq., 328.

Praxiteles. A reminiscence of that olden time-a scent, so to say, of the harvest-field-lingered to the last in the title of the Maiden (Kore) by which Proserpine was commonly known. Thus if the prototype of Demeter is the Cornmother of Germany, the prototype of Proserpine is the harvestMaiden, which, autumn after autumn, is still made from the last sheaf on the Braes of Balquhidder. Indeed if we knew more about the peasant-farmers of ancient Greece we should probably find that even in classical times they continued annually to fashion their Corn-mothers (Demeters) and Maidens (Proserpines) out of the ripe corn on the harvestfields.1 But unfortunately the Demeter and Proserpine whom we know are the denizens of towns, the majestic inhabitants of lordly temples; it was for such divinities alone that the refined writers of antiquity had eyes; the uncouth rites performed by rustics amongst the corn were beneath their notice. Even if they noticed them, they probably never dreamed of any connection between the puppet of corn-stalks on the sunny stubble-field and the marble divinity in the shady coolness of the temple. Still the writings even of these town-bred and cultured persons afford us an occasional glimpse of a Demeter as rude as the rudest that a remote German village can show. Thus the story that Iasion begat a child Plutus ("wealth," " abundance") by Demeter on a thrice-ploughed field,2 may be compared with the West Prussian custom of the mock birth of a child on the harvest-field. In this Prussian custom the pretended mother represents the Corn-mother (Żytniamatka); the pretended child represents the Cornbaby, and the whole ceremony is a charm to ensure a crop next year.* The custom and the legend alike point to an

1 In Theocritus (vii. 155 sqq.) mention is made of a Demeter of the Threshing-floor with a heap of corn beside her and sheaves and poppies in her hands. Mr. W. H. D. Rouse suggested to me that this description perhaps applied to a Corn-mother or Corn-maiden of the kind referred to in the text. In modern times an image of Demeter at her old sanctuary of Eleusis was regarded by the peasants as essential to the prosperity of the crops;

it stood in the middle of a threshingfloor, and after it had been removed by Dr. Clarke in 1802 the people lamented that their abundant harvests had disappeared with it. See E. Dodwell, Tour through Greece, i. 583; compare R. Chandler, Travels in Greece, p. 191.

2 Homer, Od. v. 125 sqq.; Hesiod, Theog. 969 sqq.

3 See above, p. 182 sq.

It is possible that a ceremony per

older practice of performing, among the sprouting crops in spring or the stubble in autumn, one of those real or mimic acts of procreation by which, as we have seen, primitive man often seeks to infuse his own vigorous life into the languid or decaying energies of nature. Another glimpse of the savage under the civilised Demeter will be afforded farther on, when we come to deal with another aspect of these agricultural divinities.

The reader may have observed that in modern folkcustoms the corn-spirit is generally represented either by a Corn-mother (Old Woman, etc.) or by a Maiden (Harvestchild, etc.), not both by a Corn-mother and by a Maiden. Why then did the Greeks represent the corn both as a mother and a daughter?

In the Breton custom the mother-sheaf-a large figure made out of the last sheaf with a small corn-doll inside of it clearly represents both the Corn-mother and the Corndaughter, the latter still unborn. Again, in the Prussian custom just referred to, the woman who plays the part of Corn-mother represents the ripe grain; the child appears to represent next year's corn, which may be regarded, naturally enough, as the child of this year's corn, since it is from the seed of this year's harvest that next year's crop will spring. Further, we have seen that among the Malays of the Peninsula and sometimes among the Highlanders of Scotland the spirit of the grain is represented in double female form, both as old and young, by means of ears taken alike from the ripe crop : in Scotland the old spirit of the corn appears as the Carline or Cailleach, the young spirit as the Maiden; while among the Malays of the Peninsula the two spirits of the rice are

formed in a Cyprian worship of Ariadne may have been of this nature. See Plutarch, Theseus, 20: év dǹ Tĥ Ovσia Toû Γορπιαίου μηνὸς ἱσταμενου δευτέρᾳ κατακλινόμενόν τινα τῶν νεανίσκων φθέγγεσθαι καὶ ποιεῖν ἅπερ ὠδινοῦσαι γυναίκες. We have already seen grounds for regarding Ariadne as a goddess or spirit of vegetation (vol. i. p. 229). If, however, the reference is to the Syro-Macedonian calendar, in which Gorpiaeus corre. sponds to September (Daremberg et Saglio, Dict. des Antiquités, i. 831), the

ceremony could not have been a harvest celebration, but may have been a vintage one. Amongst the Minnitarees in North America, the Prince of Neuwied saw a tall strong woman pretend to bring up a stalk of maize out of her stomach; the object of the ceremony was to secure a good crop of maize in the following year. See Maximilian, Prinz zu Wied, Reise in das innere Nord-America, ii. 269.

1 See above, p. 173.

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