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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.1 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.

Again, we have seen that in some parts of Germany the spirit of the crops is represented simultaneously in male and female form by a man and a woman cased in straw at harvest, just as the spirit of trees or of vegetation in general is represented by a Lord and Lady of the May dressed in leaves and flowers in spring. Such personifications of the powers of vegetation occur naturally to primitive man, who is apt to conceive that plants, like animals, propagate their kind through the intercourse of the sexes. The conception is far from being wholly erroneous, but an entirely false extension is given to it by the savage who fancies that the process of procreation is not merely similar but identical in plants and animals, so that, on the one hand, men and animals can be fertilised by trees, and on the other hand the earth can be quickened and crops made to grow by the intercourse of the human sexes. In the first chapter examples were given of the fertilising influence supposed to be exerted by trees on women and cattle; here I propose to illustrate the converse process, by which men think they can promote or retard the growth of plants. How far in acting thus they consciously personate the powers of vegetation is a question which we can hardly in every case decide; a belief in the efficacy of sympathetic magic, which is the base of all these ceremonies, seems sufficient to account for some at least of the following customs without resorting to the hypothesis that the persons who practise them deliberately masquerade as spirits of vegetation.

1 Maximilian, Prinz zu Wied, Reise in das innere Nord-America, ii. 182 sq.

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.1 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. The same confusion has been made by other races of men. 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.2 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 principle is fertilised. They call him Upu-lera or Mr. Sun, and represent him under the form of a lamp made of cocoa-nut leaves, which may be seen hanging everywhere in their houses and in the sacred fig-tree. 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,

1 Brasseur de Bourbourg, Histoire des Nations civilisées du Mexique et de Amérique Centrale, ii. 565; Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, ii. 719 sq., iii. 507; O. Stoll, Die Ethno

logie der Indianerstämme von Guatemala, p. 47.

2 G. A. Wilken, "Het animisme bij de volken van den Indischen Archipel," De Indische Gids, June 1884, p. 958.

amid song and dance, by the real union of the sexes under the tree. 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. The ancient work which bore the title of The Agriculture of the Nabataeans, but which seems to have been written at Babylon and to describe Babylonian usages, contained apparently a direction that the grafting of a tree upon another tree of a different sort should be done by a damsel, who at the very moment of inserting the graft in the bough should herself be subjected to treatment which can only be regarded as a direct copy of the operation she was performing on the tree. 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 women, while at the same time they call out for "More cloves!" This is supposed to make the trees bear fruit more abundantly. In Java when a palm tree is to be tapped for wine, the man who proposes to relieve the tree of its superfluous juices deems it necessary

1 G. W. W. C. Baron van Hoëvell, in Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Landen Volkenkunde, xxxiii. (1898), pp. 204 sq., 206 sq.; id., in Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, viii. (1895), P. 134. In the island of Timor the marriage of the Sun-god with Mother Earth is deemed the source of all fertility and growth. See J. S. G. Gramberg, "Eene maand in de Binnenlanden van Timor," Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, xxxvi. 206 sq.; H. Sondervan, "Timor en de Timoreezen," Tijdschrift van het Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, Tweede Serie, dl. v. (1888), Afdeeling, meer

uitgebreide artikelen, p. 397.

Maimonides, translated by Chwolsohn, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, ii. 475. It is not quite clear whether the direction, which Maimonides here attributes to the Sabaeans, is taken by him from the beginning of The Agriculture of the Nabataeans, which he had referred to a few lines before. The first part of that work appears to be lost, though other parts of it exist in manuscript at Paris, Oxford, and elsewhere. See Chwolsohn, op. cit. i. 697 sqq.

3 G. W. W. C. Baron van Hoëvell, Ambon en meer bepaaldelijk de Oeliasers (Dordrecht, 1875), p. 62 sq.

to approach the palm in the character of a lover and a husband, as well as of a son. When he comes upon a palm which he thinks suitable, he will not begin cutting at the trunk until he has intimated as delicately as he can the reasons which lead him to perform that surgical operation, and the ardent affection which he cherishes for the tree. For this purpose he holds a dialogue with the palm, in which he naturally speaks in the character of the tree as well as in his own. "O mother endang-reni!" he begins, "for the sake of you I have let myself be drenched by the rain and scorched by the sun; long have I sought you! Now at last have I found you. How ardently have I longed for you! Often before have you given me the breast. Yet I still thirst. Therefore now I ask for four potfuls more." "Well, fair youth," replies the tree, "I have always been here. What is the reason that you have sought me?" "The reason I have sought you is that I have heard you suffer from incontinentia urinae." "So I do," says the tree. "Will you marry me?" says the man. "That I will,” says the tree, “but first you must plight your troth and recite the usual confession of faith." On that the man takes a rattan leaf and wraps it round the palm as a pledge of betrothal, after which he says the creed: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." The maidenly and orthodox scruples of the tree having thus been satisfied, he embraces it as his bride. At first he attaches only a small dish to the trunk to receive the juices which exude from the cut in the bark; a large dish might frighten the tree. In fastening the dish to the palm he says, "Bok-endang-reni! your child is languishing away for thirst. He asks you for a drink." The tree replies, "Let him slake his thirst! Mother's breasts are full to overflowing." We have already seen that in some parts of Northern India a mock marriage between two actors is performed in honour of a newly-planted orchard, no doubt for the purpose of making it bear fruit. In the Nicobar

1

1 J. Kreemer, "Tiang-dèrès," Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap, xxvi. (1882), pp. 128-132. This and the preceding custom have been already quoted by G. A. Wilken ("Het animisme bij de

volken van den Indischen Archipel," De Indische Gids, June 1884, p. 962 sq.; and Handleiding voor de vorgelijkende Volkenkunde (Leyden, 1893), p. 550).

Vol. i. p. 177.

Islands a pregnant woman is taken into the gardens in order to impart the blessing of fertility to the plants.1 In various parts of Europe customs have prevailed both at spring and harvest which are clearly based on the same primitive 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." 2 In England it used to be customary for young couples to roll down a slope together on May Day; on Greenwich-hill the custom was practised at Easter and Whitsuntide, as it still is, or was within the present generation, practised near Dublin at Whitsuntide. When we consider how closely these seasons, especially May Day and Whitsuntide, are associated with ceremonies for the revival of plant life in spring, we shall scarcely doubt that the custom of rolling in couples at such times had originally the same significance which it still has in Russia; and when further we compare this particular custom with the practice of representing the vernal powers of vegetation by a bridal pair, and remember the traditions which even in our own country attach to May-Day,3 we shall probably do no injustice to our forefathers if we conclude that they once celebrated the return of spring with grosser

1 W. Svoboda, "Die Bewohner des Nikobaren - Archipels," Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, v. (1892), p. 193 sq. For other examples of a fruitful woman making trees fruitful, see vol. i. p. 38 sq.

2 Mannhardt, Baumkultus, p. 480 sq.; id., Mythologische Forschungen, P. 341.

3 Brand, Popular Antiquities, i. 213, quoting Stubbs, Anatomie of Abuses (1585), p. 94.

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