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object:1.46 - The Corn-Mother in Many Lands
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


XLVI. The Corn-Mother in Many Lands



1. The Corn-mother in America

EUROPEAN peoples, ancient and modern, have not been singular in
personifying the corn as a mother goddess. The same simple idea has
suggested itself to other agricultural races in distant parts of the
world, and has been applied by them to other indigenous cereals than
barley and wheat. If Europe has its Wheat-mother and its
Barley-mother, America has its Maize-mother and the East Indies
their Rice-mother. These personifications I will now illustrate,
beginning with the American personification of the maize.

We have seen that among European peoples it is a common custom to
keep the plaited corn-stalks of the last sheaf, or the puppet which
is formed out of them, in the farm-house from harvest to harvest.
The intention no doubt is, or rather originally was, by preserving
the representative of the corn-spirit to maintain the spirit itself
in life and activity throughout the year, in order that the corn may
grow and the crops be good. This interpretation of the custom is at
all events rendered highly probable by a similar custom observed by
the ancient Peruvians, and thus described by the old Spanish
historian Acosta: "They take a certain portion of the most fruitful
of the maize that grows in their farms, the which they put in a
certain granary which they do call _Pirua,_ with certain ceremonies,
watching three nights; they put this maize in the richest garments
they have, and being thus wrapped and dressed, they worship this
_Pirua,_ and hold it in great veneration, saying it is the mother of
the maize of their inheritances, and that by this means the maize
augments and is preserved. In this month [the sixth month, answering
to May] they make a particular sacrifice, and the witches demand of
this _Pirua_ if it hath strength sufficient to continue until the
next year; and if it answers no, then they carry this maize to the
farm to burn, whence they brought it, according to every man's
power; then they make another _Pirua,_ with the same ceremonies,
saying that they renew it, to the end the seed of maize may not
perish, and if it answers that it hath force sufficient to last
longer, they leave it until the next year. This foolish vanity
continueth to this day, and it is very common amongst the Indians to
have these _Piruas._"

In this description of the custom there seems to be some error.
Probably it was the dressed-up bunch of maize, not the granary
(_Pirua_), which was worshipped by the Peruvians and regarded as the
Mother of the Maize. This is confirmed by what we know of the
Peruvian custom from another source. The Peruvians, we are told,
believed all useful plants to be animated by a divine being who
causes their growth. According to the particular plant, these divine
beings were called the Maize-mother (_Zara-mama_), the Quinoa-mother
(_Quinoa-mama_), the Coca-mother (_Coca-mama_), and the
Potato-mother (_Axo-mama_). Figures of these divine mothers were
made respectively of ears of maize and leaves of the quinoa and coca
plants; they were dressed in women's clothes and worshipped. Thus
the Maize-mother was represented by a puppet made of stalks of maize
dressed in full female attire; and the Indians believed that "as
mother, it had the power of producing and giving birth to much
maize." Probably, therefore, Acosta misunderstood his informant, and
the Mother of the Maize which he describes was not the granary
(_Pirua_), but the bunch of maize dressed in rich vestments. The
Peruvian Mother of the Maize, like the harvest-Maiden at
Balquhidder, was kept for a year in order that by her means the corn
might grow and multiply. But lest her strength might not suffice to
last till the next harvest, she was asked in the course of the year
how she felt, and if she answered that she felt weak, she was burned
and a fresh Mother of the Maize made, "to the end the seed of maize
may not perish." Here, it may be observed, we have a strong
confirmation of the explanation already given of the custom of
killing the god, both periodically and occasionally. The Mother of
the maize was allowed, as a rule, to live through a year, that being
the period during which her strength might reasonably be supposed to
last unimpaired; but on any symptom of her strength failing she was
put to death, and a fresh and vigorous Mother of the Maize took her
place, lest the maize which depended on her for its existence should
languish and decay.



2. The Rice-mother in the East Indies

IF THE READER still feels any doubts as to the meaning of the
harvest customs which have been practised within living memory by
European peasants, these doubts may perhaps be dispelled by
comparing the customs observed at the rice-harvest by the Malays and
Dyaks of the East Indies. For these Eastern peoples have not, like
our peasantry, advanced beyond the intellectual stage at which the
customs originated; their theory and their practice are still in
unison; for them the quaint rites which in Europe have long dwindled
into mere fossils, the pastime of clowns and the puzzle of the
learned, are still living realities of which they can render an
intelligible and truthful account. Hence a study of their beliefs
and usages concerning the rice may throw some light on the true
meaning of the ritual of the corn in ancient Greece and modern
Europe.

Now the whole of the ritual which the Malays and Dyaks observe in
connexion with the rice is founded on the simple conception of the
rice as animated by a soul like that which these people attribute to
mankind. They explain the phenomena of reproduction, growth, decay,
and death in the rice on the same principles on which they explain
the corresponding phenomena in human beings. They imagine that in
the fibres of the plant, as in the body of a man, there is a certain
vital element, which is so far independent of the plant that it may
for a time be completely separated from it without fatal effects,
though if its absence be prolonged beyond certain limits the plant
will wither and die. This vital yet separable element is what, for
the want of a better word, we must call the soul of a plant, just as
a similar vital and separable element is commonly supposed to
constitute the soul of man; and on this theory or myth of the
plant-soul is built the whole worship of the cereals, just as on the
theory or myth of the human soul is built the whole worship of the
dead,--a towering superstructure reared on a slender and precarious
foundation.

Believing the rice to be animated by a soul like that of a man, the
Indonesians naturally treat it with the deference and the
consideration which they show to their fellows. Thus they behave
towards the rice in bloom as they behave towards a pregnant woman;
they abstain from firing guns or making loud noises in the field,
lest they should so frighten the soul of the rice that it would
miscarry and bear no grain; and for the same reason they will not
talk of corpses or demons in the rice-fields. Moreover, they feed
the blooming rice with foods of various kinds which are believed to
be wholesome for women with child; but when the rice-ears are just
beginning to form, they are looked upon as infants, and women go
through the fields feeding them with rice-pap as if they were human
babes. In such natural and obvious comparisons of the breeding plant
to a breeding woman, and of the young grain to a young child, is to
be sought the origin of the kindred Greek conception of the
Corn-mother and the Corn-daughter, Demeter and Persephone. But if
the timorous feminine soul of the rice can be frightened into a
miscarriage even by loud noises, it is easy to imagine what her
feelings must be at harvest, when people are under the sad necessity
of cutting down the rice with the knife. At so critical a season
every precaution must be used to render the necessary surgical
operation of reaping as inconspicuous and as painless as possible.
For that reason the reaping of the seed-rice is done with knives of
a peculiar pattern, such that the blades are hidden in the reapers'
hands and do not frighten the rice-spirit till the very last moment,
when her head is swept off almost before she is aware; and from a
like delicate motive the reapers at work in the fields employ a
special form of speech, which the rice-spirit cannot be expected to
understand, so that she has no warning or inkling of what is going
forward till the heads of rice are safely deposited in the basket.

Among the Indonesian peoples who thus personify the rice we may take
the Kayans or Bahaus of Central Borneo as typical. In order to
secure and detain the volatile soul of the rice the Kayans resort to
a number of devices. Among the instruments employed for this purpose
are a miniature ladder, a spatula, and a basket containing hooks,
thorns, and cords. With the spatula the priestess strokes the soul
of the rice down the little ladder into the basket, where it is
naturally held fast by the hooks, the thorn, and the cord; and
having thus captured and imprisoned the soul she conveys it into the
rice-granary. Sometimes a bamboo box and a net are used for the same
purpose. And in order to ensure a good harvest for the following
year it is necessary not only to detain the soul of all the grains
of rice which are safely stored in the granary, but also to attract
and recover the soul of all the rice that has been lost through
falling to the earth or being eaten by deer, apes, and pigs. For
this purpose instruments of various sorts have been invented by the
priests. One, for example, is a bamboo vessel provided with four
hooks made from the wood of a fruit-tree, by means of which the
absent rice-soul may be hooked and drawn back into the vessel, which
is then hung up in the house. Sometimes two hands carved out of the
wood of a fruit-tree are used for the same purpose. And every time
that a Kayan housewife fetches rice from the granary for the use of
her household, she must propitiate the souls of the rice in the
granary, lest they should be angry at being robbed of their
substance.

The same need of securing the soul of the rice, if the crop is to
thrive, is keenly felt by the Karens of Burma. When a rice-field
does not flourish, they suppose that the soul (_kelah_) of the rice
is in some way detained from the rice. If the soul cannot be called
back, the crop will fail. The following formula is used in recalling
the _kelah_ (soul) of the rice: "O come, rice-_kelah,_ come! Come to
the field. Come to the rice. With seed of each gender, come. Come
from the river Kho, come from the river Kaw; from the place where
they meet, come. Come from the West, come from the East. From the
throat of the bird, from the maw of the ape, from the throat of the
elephant. Come from the sources of rivers and their mouths. Come
from the country of the Shan and Burman. From the distant kingdoms
come. From all granaries come. O rice-_kelah,_ come to the rice."

The Corn-mother of our European peasants has her match in the
Rice-mother of the Minangkabauers of Sumatra. The Minangkabauers
definitely attribute a soul to rice, and will sometimes assert that
rice pounded in the usual way tastes better than rice ground in a
mill, because in the mill the body of the rice was so bruised and
battered that the soul has fled from it. Like the Javanese they
think that the rice is under the special guardianship of a female
spirit called Saning Sari, who is conceived as so closely knit up
with the plant that the rice often goes by her name, as with the
Romans the corn might be called Ceres. In particular Saning Sari is
represented by certain stalks or grains called _indoea padi,_ that
is, literally, "Mother of Rice," a name that is often given to the
guardian spirit herself. This so-called Mother of Rice is the
occasion of a number of ceremonies observed at the planting and
harvesting of the rice as well as during its preservation in the
barn. When the seed of the rice is about to be sown in the nursery
or bedding-out ground, where under the wet system of cultivation it
is regularly allowed to sprout before being transplanted to the
fields, the best grains are picked out to form the Rice-mother.
These are then sown in the middle of the bed, and the common seed is
planted round about them. The state of the Rice-mother is supposed
to exert the greatest influence on the growth of the rice; if she
droops or pines away, the harvest will be bad in consequence. The
woman who sows the Rice-mother in the nursery lets her hair hang
loose and afterwards bathes, as a means of ensuring an abundant
harvest. When the time comes to transplant the rice from the nursery
to the field, the Rice-mother receives a special place either in the
middle or in a corner of the field, and a prayer or charm is uttered
as follows: "Saning Sari, may a measure of rice come from a stalk of
rice and a basketful from a root; may you be frightened neither by
lightning nor by passers-by! Sunshine make you glad; with the storm
may you be at peace; and may rain serve to wash your face!" While
the rice is growing, the particular plant which was thus treated as
the Rice-mother is lost sight of; but before harvest another
Rice-mother is found. When the crop is ripe for cutting, the oldest
woman of the family or a sorcerer goes out to look for her. The
first stalks seen to bend under a passing breeze are the
Rice-mother, and they are tied together but not cut until the
first-fruits of the field have been carried home to serve as a
festal meal for the family and their friends, nay even for the
domestic animals; since it is Saning Sari's pleasure that the beasts
also should partake of her good gifts. After the meal has been
eaten, the Rice-mother is fetched home by persons in gay attire, who
carry her very carefully under an umbrella in a neatly worked bag to
the barn, where a place in the middle is assigned to her. Every one
believes that she takes care of the rice in the barn and even
multiplies it not uncommonly.

When the Tomori of Central Celebes are about to plant the rice, they
bury in the field some betel as an offering to the spirits who cause
the rice to grow. The rice that is planted round this spot is the
last to be reaped at harvest. At the commencement of the reaping the
stalks of this patch of rice are tied together into a sheaf, which
is called "the Mother of the Rice" (_ineno pae_), and offerings in
the shape of rice, fowl's liver, eggs, and other things are laid
down before it. When all the rest of the rice in the field has been
reaped, "the Mother of the Rice" is cut down and carried with due
honour to the rice-barn, where it is laid on the floor, and all the
other sheaves are piled upon it. The Tomori, we are told, regard the
Mother of the Rice as a special offering made to the rice-spirit
Omonga, who dwells in the moon. If that spirit is not treated with
proper respect, for example if the people who fetch rice from the
barn are not decently clad, he is angry and punishes the offenders
by eating up twice as much rice in the barn as they have taken out
of it; some people have heard him smacking his lips in the barn, as
he devoured the rice. On the other hand the Toradjas of Central
Celebes, who also practice the custom of the Rice-mother at harvest,
regard her as the actual mother of the whole harvest, and therefore
keep her carefully, lest in her absence the garnered store of rice
should all melt away and disappear.

Again, just as in Scotland the old and the young spirit of the corn
are represented as an Old Wife (_Cailleach_) and a Maiden
respectively, so in the Malay Peninsula we find both the Rice-mother
and her child represented by different sheaves or bundles of ears on
the harvest-field. The ceremony of cutting and bringing home the
Soul of the Rice was witnessed by Mr. W. W. Skeat at Chodoi in
Selangor on the twenty-eighth of January 1897. The particular bunch
or sheaf which was to serve as the Mother of the Rice-soul had
previously been sought and identified by means of the markings or
shape of the ears. From this sheaf an aged sorceress, with much
solemnity, cut a little bundle of seven ears, anointed them with
oil, tied them round with parti-coloured thread, fumigated them with
incense, and having wrapt them in a white cloth deposited them in a
little oval-shaped basket. These seven ears were the infant Soul of
the Rice and the little basket was its cradle. It was carried home
to the farmer's house by another woman, who held up an umbrella to
screen the tender infant from the hot rays of the sun. Arrived at
the house the Rice-child was welcomed by the women of the family,
and laid, cradle and all, on a new sleepingmat with pillows at the
head. After that the farmer's wife was instructed to observe certain
rules of taboo for three days, the rules being in many respects
identical with those which have to be observed for three days after
the birth of a real child. Something of the same tender care which
is thus bestowed on the newly-born Rice-child is naturally extended
also to its parent, the sheaf from whose body it was taken. This
sheaf, which remains standing in the field after the Rice-soul has
been carried home and put to bed, is treated as a newly-made mother;
that is to say, young shoots of trees are pounded together and
scattered broadcast every evening for three successive days, and
when the three days are up you take the pulp of a coco-nut and what
are called "goat-flowers," mix them up, eat them with a little
sugar, and spit some of the mixture out among the rice. So after a
real birth the young shoots of the jack-fruit, the rose-apple,
certain kinds of banana, and the thin pulp of young coco-nuts are
mixed with dried fish, salt, acid, prawn-condiment, and the like
dainties to form a sort of salad, which is administered to mother
and child for three successive days. The last sheaf is reaped by the
farmer's wife, who carries it back to the house, where it is
threshed and mixed with the Rice-soul. The farmer then takes the
Rice-soul and its basket and deposits it, together with the product
of the last sheaf, in the big circular rice-bin used by the Malays.
Some grains from the Rice-soul are mixed with the seed which is to
be sown in the following year. In this Rice-mother and Rice-child of
the Malay Peninsula we may see the counterpart and in a sense the
prototype of the Demeter and Persephone of ancient Greece.

Once more, the European custom of representing the corn-spirit in
the double form of bride and bridegroom has its parallel in a
ceremony observed at the rice-harvest in Java. Before the reapers
begin to cut the rice, the priest or sorcerer picks out a number of
ears of rice, which are tied together, smeared with ointment, and
adorned with flowers. Thus decked out, the ears are called the
_padi-peengantn,_ that is, the Rice-bride and the Rice-bridegroom;
their wedding feast is celebrated, and the cutting of the rice
begins immediately afterwards. Later on, when the rice is being got
in, a bridal chamber is partitioned off in the barn, and furnished
with a new mat, a lamp, and all kinds of toilet articles. Sheaves of
rice, to represent the wedding guests, are placed beside the
Rice-bride and the Rice-bridegroom. Not till this has been done may
the whole harvest be housed in the barn. And for the first forty
days after the rice has been housed, no one may enter the barn, for
fear of disturbing the newly-wedded pair.

In the islands of Bali and Lombok, when the time of harvest has
come, the owner of the field himself makes a beginning by cutting
"the principal rice" with his own hands and binding it into two
sheaves, each composed of one hundred and eight stalks with their
leaves attached to them. One of the sheaves represents a man and the
other a woman, and they are called "husband and wife." The male
sheaf is wound about with thread so that none of the leaves are
visible, whereas the female sheaf has its leaves bent over and tied
so as to resemble the roll of a woman's hair. Sometimes, for further
distinction, a necklace of rice-straw is tied round the female
sheaf. When the rice is brought home from the field, the two sheaves
representing the husband and wife are carried by a woman on her
head, and are the last of all to be deposited in the barn. There
they are laid to rest on a small erection or on a cushion of
rice-straw. The whole arrangement, we are informed, has for its
object to induce the rice to increase and multiply in the granary,
so that the owner may get more out of it than he put in. Hence when
the people of Bali bring the two sheaves, the husband and wife, into
the barn, they say, "Increase ye and multiply without ceasing." When
all the rice in the barn has been used up, the two sheaves
representing the husband and wife remain in the empty building till
they have gradually disappeared or been devoured by mice. The pinch
of hunger sometimes drives individuals to eat up the rice of these
two sheaves, but the wretches who do so are viewed with disgust by
their fellows and branded as pigs and dogs. Nobody would ever sell
these holy sheaves with the rest of their profane brethren.

The same notion of the propagation of the rice by a male and female
power finds expression amongst the Szis of Upper Burma. When the
paddy, that is, the rice with the husks still on it, has been dried
and piled in a heap for threshing, all the friends of the household
are invited to the threshing-floor, and food and drink are brought
out. The heap of paddy is divided and one half spread out for
threshing, while the other half is left piled up. On the pile food
and spirits are set, and one of the elders, addressing "the father
and mother of the paddy-plant," prays for plenteous harvests in
future, and begs that the seed may bear many fold. Then the whole
party eat, drink, and make merry. This ceremony at the
threshing-floor is the only occasion when these people invoke "the
father and mother of the paddy."



3. The Spirit of the Corn embodied in Human Beings

THUS the theory which recognises in the European Corn-mother,
Corn-maiden, and so forth, the embodiment in vegetable form of the
animating spirit of the crops is amply confirmed by the evidence of
peoples in other parts of the world, who, because they have lagged
behind the European races in mental development, retain for that
very reason a keener sense of the original motives for observing
those rustic rites which among ourselves have sunk to the level of
meaningless survivals. The reader may, however, remember that
according to Mannhardt, whose theory I am expounding, the spirit of
the corn manifests itself not merely in vegetable but also in human
form; the person who cuts the last sheaf or gives the last stroke at
threshing passes for a temporary embodiment of the corn-spirit, just
as much as the bunch of corn which he reaps or threshes. Now in the
parallels which have been hitherto adduced from the customs of
peoples outside Europe the spirit of the crops appears only in
vegetable form. It remains, therefore, to prove that other races
besides our European peasantry have conceived the spirit of the
crops as incorporate in or represented by living men and women. Such
a proof, I may remind the reader, is germane to the theme of this
book; for the more instances we discover of human beings
representing in themselves the life or animating spirit of plants,
the less difficulty will be felt at classing amongst them the King
of the Wood at Nemi.

The Mandans and Minnitarees of North America used to hold a festival
in spring which they called the corn-medicine festival of the women.
They thought that a certain Old Woman who Never Dies made the crops
to grow, and that, living somewhere in the south, she sent the
migratory waterfowl in spring as her tokens and representatives.
Each sort of bird represented a special kind of crop cultivated by
the Indians: the wild goose stood for the maize, the wild swan for
the gourds, and the wild duck for the beans. So when the feathered
messengers of the Old Woman began to arrive in spring the Indians
celebrated the corn-medicine festival of the women. Scaffolds were
set up, on which the people hung dried meat and other things by way
of offerings to the Old Woman; and on a certain day the old women of
the tribe, as representatives of the Old Woman who Never Dies,
assembled at the scaffolds each bearing in her hand an ear of maize
fastened to a stick. They first planted these sticks in the ground,
then danced round the scaffolds, and finally took up the sticks
again in their arms. Meanwhile old men beat drums and shook rattles
as a musical accompaniment to the performance of the old women.
Further, young women came and put dried flesh into the mouths of the
old women, for which they received in return a grain of the
consecrated maize to eat. Three or four grains of the holy corn were
also placed in the dishes of the young women, to be afterwards
carefully mixed with the seed-corn, which they were supposed to
fertilise. The dried flesh hung on the scaffold belonged to the old
women, because they represented the Old Woman who Never Dies. A
similar corn-medicine festival was held in autumn for the purpose of
attracting the herds of buffaloes and securing a supply of meat. At
that time every woman carried in her arms an uprooted plant of
maize. They gave the name of the Old Woman who Never Dies both to
the maize and to those birds which they regarded as symbols of the
fruits of the earth, and they prayed to them in autumn saying,
"Mother, have pity on us! send us not the bitter cold too soon, lest
we have not meat enough! let not all the game depart, that we may
have something for the winter!" In autumn, when the birds were
flying south, the Indians thought that they were going home to the
Old Woman and taking to her the offerings that had been hung up on
the scaffolds, especially the dried meat, which she ate. Here then
we have the spirit or divinity of the corn conceived as an Old Woman
and represented in bodily form by old women, who in their capacity
of representatives receive some at least of the offerings which are
intended for her.

In some parts of India the harvest-goddess Gauri is represented at
once by an unmarried girl and by a bundle of wild balsam plants,
which is made up into the figure of a woman and dressed as such with
mask, garments, and ornaments. Both the human and the vegetable
representative of the goddess are worshipped, and the intention of
the whole ceremony appears to be to ensure a good crop of rice.



4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter

COMPARED with the Corn-mother of Germany and the Harvest-maiden of
Scotland, the Demeter and Persephone of Greece are late products of
religious growth. Yet as members of the Aryan family 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
Indians of Peru and many peoples of the East Indies--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 Persephone, 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
harvest-field long before their breathing images were wrought in
bronze and marble by the master hands of Phidias and 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 Persephone was commonly known. Thus if the
prototype of Demeter is the Corn-mother of Germany, the prototype of
Persephone is the Harvest-maiden 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
(Persephones) out of the ripe corn on the harvest-fields. But
unfortunately the Demeter and Persephone whom we know were 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 connexion 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, 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 (Zytniamatka_); the pretended child represents the
Corn-baby, and the whole ceremony is a charm to ensure a crop next
year. The custom and the legend alike point to an 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 those
agricultural divinities.

The reader may have observed that in modern folk-customs the
corn-spirit is generally represented either by a Corn-mother (Old
Woman, etc.) or by a Maiden (Harvest-child, 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 Corn-daughter, 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 definitely related to each
other as mother and child. Judged by these analogies Demeter would
be the ripe crop of this year; Persephone would be the seed-corn
taken from it and sown in autumn, to reappear in spring. The descent
of Persephone into the lower world would thus be a mythical
expression for the sowing of the seed; her reappearance in spring
would signify the sprouting of the young corn. In this way the
Persephone of one year becomes the Demeter of the next, and this may
very well have been the original form of the myth. But when with the
advance of religious thought the corn came to be personified no
longer as a being that went through the whole cycle of birth,
growth, reproduction, and death within a year, but as an immortal
goddess, consistency required that one of the two personifications,
the mother or the daughter, should be sacrificed. However, the
double conception of the corn as mother and daughter may have been
too old and too deeply rooted in the popular mind to be eradicated
by logic, and so room had to be found in the reformed myth both for
mother and daughter. This was done by assigning to Persephone the
character of the corn sown in autumn and sprouting in spring, while
Demeter was left to play the somewhat vague part of the heavy mother
of the corn, who laments its annual disappearance underground, and
rejoices over its reappearance in spring. Thus instead of a regular
succession of divine beings, each living a year and then giving
birth to her successor, the reformed myth exhibits the conception of
two divine and immortal beings, one of whom annually disappears into
and reappears from the ground, while the other has little to do but
to weep and rejoice at the appropriate seasons.

This theory of the double personification of the corn in Greek myth
assumes that both personifications (Demeter and Persephone) are
original. But if we suppose that the Greek myth started with a
single personification, the aftergrowth of a second personification
may perhaps be explained as follows. On looking over the harvest
customs which have been passed under review, it may be noticed that
they involve two distinct conceptions of the corn-spirit. For
whereas in some of the customs the corn-spirit is treated as
immanent in the corn, in others it is regarded as external to it.
Thus when a particular sheaf is called by the name of the
corn-spirit, and is dressed in clothes and handled with reverence,
the spirit is clearly regarded as immanent in the corn. But when the
spirit is said to make the crops grow by passing through them, or to
blight the grain of those against whom she has a grudge, she is
apparently conceived as distinct from, though exercising power over,
the corn. Conceived in the latter mode the corn-spirit is in a fair
way to become a deity of the corn, if she has not become so already.
Of these two conceptions, that of the cornspirit as immanent in the
corn is doubtless the older, since the view of nature as animated by
indwelling spirits appears to have generally preceded the view of it
as controlled by external deities; to put it shortly, animism
precedes deism. In the harvest customs of our European peasantry the
corn-spirit seems to be conceived now as immanent in the corn and
now as external to it. In Greek mythology, on the other hand,
Demeter is viewed rather as the deity of the corn than as the spirit
immanent in it. The process of thought which leads to the change
from the one mode of conception to the other is anthropomorphism, or
the gradual investment of the immanent spirits with more and more of
the attributes of humanity. As men emerge from savagery the tendency
to humanise their divinities gains strength; and the more human
these become the wider is the breach which severs them from the
natural objects of which they were at first merely the animating
spirits or souls. But in the progress upwards from savagery men of
the same generation do not march abreast; and though the new
anthropomorphic gods may satisfy the religious wants of the more
developed intelligences, the backward members of the community will
cling by preference to the old animistic notions. Now when the
spirit of any natural object such as the corn has been invested with
human qualities, detached from the object, and converted into a
deity controlling it, the object itself is, by the withdrawal of its
spirit, left inanimate; it becomes, so to say, a spiritual vacuum.
But the popular fancy, intolerant of such a vacuum, in other words,
unable to conceive anything as inanimate, immediately creates a
fresh mythical being, with which it peoples the vacant object. Thus
the same natural object comes to be represented in mythology by two
distinct beings: first by the old spirit now separated from it and
raised to the rank of a deity; second, by the new spirit, freshly
created by the popular fancy to supply the place vacated by the old
spirit on its elevation to a higher sphere. In such cases the
problem for mythology is, having got two distinct personifications
of the same object, what to do with them? How are their relations to
each other to be adjusted, and room found for both in the
mythological system? When the old spirit or new deity is conceived
as creating or producing the object in question, the problem is
easily solved. Since the object is believed to be produced by the
old spirit, and animated by the new one, the latter, as the soul of
the object, must also owe its existence to the former; thus the old
spirit will stand to the new one as producer to produced, that is,
in mythology, as parent to child, and if both spirits are conceived
as female, their relation will be that of mother and daughter. In
this way, starting from a single personification of the corn as
female, mythic fancy might in time reach a double personification of
it as mother and daughter. It would be very rash to affirm that this
was the way in which the myth of Demeter and Persephone actually
took shape; but it seems a legitimate conjecture that the
reduplication of deities, of which Demeter and Persephone furnish an
example, may sometimes have arisen in the way indicated. For
example, among the pairs of deities dealt with in a former part of
this work, it has been shown that there are grounds for regarding
both Isis and her companion god Osiris as personifications of the
corn. On the hypothesis just suggested, Isis would be the old
corn-spirit, and Osiris would be the newer one, whose relationship
to the old spirit was variously explained as that of brother,
husband, and son; for of course mythology would always be free to
account for the coexistence of the two divinities in more ways than
one. It must not, however, be forgotten that this proposed
explanation of such pairs of deities as Demeter and Persephone or
Isis and Osiris is purely conjectural, and is only given for what it
is worth.






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1.46 - The Corn-Mother in Many Lands
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