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object:1.11 - The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


XI. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation

FROM THE PRECEDING examination of the spring and summer festivals of
Europe we may infer that our rude forefathers personified the powers
of vegetation as male and female, and attempted, on the principle of
homoeopathic or imitative magic, to quicken the growth of trees and
plants by representing the marriage of the sylvan deities in the
persons of a King and Queen of May, a Whitsun Bridegroom and Bride,
and so forth. Such representations were accordingly no mere symbolic
or allegorical dramas, pastoral plays designed to amuse or instruct
a rustic audience. They were charms intended to make the woods to
grow green, the fresh grass to sprout, the corn to shoot, and the
flowers to blow. And it was natural to suppose that the more closely
the mock marriage of the leaf-clad or flower-decked mummers aped the
real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective would be
the charm. Accordingly we may assume with a high degree of
probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these
ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential
part of the rites, and that in the opinion of those who performed
them the marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without
the real union of the human sexes. At the present day it might
perhaps be vain to look in civilised Europe for customs of this sort
observed for the explicit purpose of promoting the growth of
vegetation. But ruder races in other parts of the world have
consciously employed the intercourse of the sexes as a means to
ensure the fruitfulness of the earth; and some rites which are
still, or were till lately, kept up in Europe can be reasonably
explained only as stunted relics of a similar practice. The
following facts will make this plain.

For four days before they committed the seed to the earth the
Pipiles of Central America kept apart from their wives "in order
that on the night before planting they might indulge their passions
to the fullest extent; certain persons are even said to have been
appointed to perform the sexual act at the very moment when the
first seeds were deposited in the ground." The use of their wives at
that time was indeed enjoined upon the people by the priests as a
religious duty, in default of which it was not lawful to sow the
seed. The only possible explanation of this custom seems to be that
the Indians confused the process by which human beings reproduce
their kind with the process by which plants discharge the same
function, and fancied that by resorting to the former they were
simultaneously forwarding the latter. In some parts of Java, at the
season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and
his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual
intercourse for the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop. In
the Leti, Sarmata, and some other groups of islands which lie
between the western end of New Guinea and the northern part of
Australia, the heathen population regard the sun as the male
principle by whom the earth or female prnciple is fertilised. They
call him Upu-lera or Mr. Sun, and represent him under the form of a
lamp made of coco-nut leaves, which may be seen hanging everywhere
in their houses and in the sacred fig-tree. Under the tree lies a
large flat stone, which serves as a sacrificial table. On it the
heads of slain foes were and are still placed in some of the
islands. Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy season, Mr. Sun
comes down into the holy fig-tree to fertilise the earth, and to
facilitate his descent a ladder with seven rungs is considerately
placed at his disposal. It is set up under the tree and is adorned
with carved figures of the birds whose shrill clarion heralds the
approach of the sun in the east. On this occasion pigs and dogs are
sacrificed in profusion; men and women alike indulge in a
saturnalia; and the mystic union of the sun and the earth is
dramatically represented in public, amid song and dance, by the real
union of the sexes under the tree. The object of the festival, we
are told, is to procure rain, plenty of food and drink, abundance of
cattle and children and riches from Grandfather Sun. They pray that
he may make every she-goat to cast two or three young, the people to
multiply, the dead pigs to be replaced by living pigs, the empty
rice-baskets to be filled, and so on. And to induce him to grant
their requests they offer him pork and rice and liquor, and invite
him to fall to. In the Babar Islands a special flag is hoisted at
this festival as a symbol of the creative energy of the sun; it is
of white cotton, about nine feet high, and consists of the figure of
a man in an appropriate attitude. It would be unjust to treat these
orgies as a mere outburst of unbridled passion; no doubt they are
deliberately and solemnly organised as essential to the fertility of
the earth and the welfare of man.

The same means which are thus adopted to stimulate the growth of the
crops are naturally employed to ensure the fruitfulness of trees. In
some parts of Amboyna, when the state of the clove plantation
indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men go naked to
the plantations by night, and there seek to fertilise the trees
precisely as they would impregnate women, while at the same time
they call out for "More cloves!" This is supposed to make the trees
bear fruit more abundantly.

The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the intimate
relation between the intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of
the ground that among them a barren wife is generally sent away,
because she is supposed to prevent her husband's garden from bearing
fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of
extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins are
believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding power of
increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish
them with their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the
twins a ceremony is performed, the object of which clearly is to
transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to the plantains.
The mother lies down on her back in the thick grass near the house
and places a flower of the plantain between her legs; then her
husband comes and knocks the flower away with his genital member.
Further, the parents go through the country performing dances in the
gardens of favoured friends, apparently for the purpose of causing
the plantain-trees to bear fruit more abundantly.

In various parts of Europe customs have prevailed both at spring and
harvest which are clearly based on the same crude notion that the
relation of the human sexes to each other can be so used as to
quicken the growth of plants. For example, in the Ukraine on St.
George's Day (the twenty-third of April) the priest in his robes,
attended by his acolytes, goes out to the fields of the village,
where the crops are beginning to show green above the ground, and
blesses them. After that the young married people lie down in
couples on the sown fields and roll several times over on them, in
the belief that this will promote the growth of the crops. In some
parts of Russia the priest himself is rolled by women over the
sprouting crop, and that without regard to the mud and holes which
he may encounter in his beneficent progress. If the shepherd resists
or remonstrates, his flock murmurs, "Little Father, you do not
really wish us well, you do not wish us to have corn, although you
do wish to live on our corn." In some parts of Germany at harvest
the men and women, who have reaped the corn, roll together on the
field. This again is probably a mitigation of an older and ruder
custom designed to impart fertility to the fields by methods like
those resorted to by the Pipiles of Central America long ago and by
the cultivators of rice in Java at the present time.

To the student who cares to track the devious course of the human
mind in its gropings after truth, it is of some interest to observe
that the same theoretical belief in the sympathetic influence of the
sexes on vegetation, which has led some peoples to indulge their
passions as a means of fertilising the earth, has led others to seek
the same end by directly opposite means. From the moment that they
sowed the maize till the time that they reaped it, the Indians of
Nicaragua lived chastely, keeping apart from their wives and
sleeping in a separate place. They ate no salt, and drank neither
cocoa nor _chicha,_ the fermented liquor made from maize; in short
the season was for them, as the Spanish historian observes, a time
of abstinence. To this day some of the Indian tribes of Central
America practise continence for the purpose of thereby promoting the
growth of the crops. Thus we are told that before sowing the maize
the Kekchi Indians sleep apart from their wives, and eat no flesh
for five days, while among the Lanquineros and Cajaboneros the
period of abstinence from these carnal pleasures extends to thirteen
days. So amongst some of the Germans of Transylvania it is a rule
that no man may sleep with his wife during the whole of the time
that he is engaged in sowing his fields. The same rule is observed
at Kalotaszeg in Hungary; the people think that if the custom were
not observed the corn would be mildewed. Similarly a Central
Australian headman of the Kaitish tribe strictly abstains from
marital relations with his wife all the time that he is performing
magical ceremonies to make the grass grow; for he believes that a
breach of this rule would prevent the grass seed from sprouting
properly. In some of the Melanesian islands, when the yam vines are
being trained, the men sleep near the gardens and never approach
their wives; should they enter the garden after breaking this rule
of continence the fruits of the garden would be spoilt.

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 leap 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 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 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 far-fetched and improbable. They may think that
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
prove. 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 short,
the savage is willing to restrain his sexual propensity for the sake
of food. Another object for the sake of which he consents to
exercise the same self-restraint is victory in war. 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 renounce 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.





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