his life depends on and terminates with that of the tree; he grows or withers as his tree grows or withers. To return, however, to the clan totem. We may expect to find the history of the tree totem passing through much the same stages as that of the animal totem: thus an individual tree or some few individuals may come to enjoy the whole of the worship which was originally bestowed upon all the members of the species; and this was the case with the sacred olive of Athênê at Athens, and with the maypole of the Teutons, which was to the village what the "birthtree" was to the individual, "it was the genius tutelaris, the alter ego of the whole community," which afforded an asylum to every member of the village community, protected the villagers from all harm,3 and brought them all blessings.* Or, again, the species may continue to be worshipped; but, owing to the relaxation of the blood-tie consequent upon settled life and political development, the worship may be thrown open to all and not confined to the clan: thus in Greece and Rome the laurel and the ivy, in Assyria the palm-tree, were species of plants whose worship was general and not in historic times restricted to any one tribe; in India," among the sacred trees the various varieties of the fig hold a conspicuous place . . . the various fig-trees hold an important part in the domestic ritual. . . . The pipal is worshipped by moving round it in the course of the sun this regard for the pipal (Ficus religiosa) extends through Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Sumatra, and Java.” 5 As the animal totem eventually in some cases assumes human form, and, after passing through various intermediate shapes, becomes an anthropomorphic god, so we may expect the tree totem to be anthropomorphised; and this is often the case. The Dryads or tree-nymphs of the Greeks will occur to the reader at once; and amongst the Aryans of Northern Europe, Mannhardt has shown conclusively that the tree-spirit was represented by a human being or a human figure tied to a tree or set on a tree-top, or enveloped in tree-leaves ("Jack in the green"), or otherwise associated with the tree. When, then, we find a Zevs evdevdpos or a 1 Mannhardt, B. K. 182. 15 Crooke, op. cit. 247-9. 2 Loc. cit. 3 Ibid. 53. 4 Ibid. 37. Acóvvσos evdevopos, and that in Greece "images of the gods were set on trees," and that the Ephesian Artemis was believed to dwell within the stem of an oak, we are justified in believing that these deities were either originally tree totems or that their worship has absorbed that of some tree totem; and the same conclusion holds good, when we find that a species of tree or plant is "associated " with some god, e.g. the laurel with Apollo or the ivy with Dionysus. On As totem tribes name themselves after their animal totem, and continue to be designated by the name even when they have left the totem stage behind, so with plant totems. the Gold Coast, the Abradzi-fo or Plantain family still abstain from the plantain, as the Leopard, Dog, and Parrot families abstain from leopards, dogs, and parrots respectively.2 We can therefore hardly refuse to believe that the Corn-stalk family and the Palm-oil Grove family had the corn-stalk and palm-tree for totems originally, though we do not happen to have evidence to show that they continue to show respect to the plants from which they take their name. Amongst the Greeks and Romans tree and plant worship may probably account for such names as nyaieîs3 and Fabius; and in North Europe there are instances which may possibly be remote survivals of this practice.1 3 As the animal totem was at certain seasons taken round the settlement in order to fortify the inhabitants with supernatural powers against supernatural dangers, e.g. the python procession in Whydah, so in North Europe "the begging processions with May-trees or May-boughs from door to door had everywhere originally a serious and, so to speak, sacramental significance; people really believed that the god of growth" [rather the tree totem] "was present unseen in the bough; by the procession he was brought to each house to bestow his blessing."5 So, too, the god presumably was originally present in the switch of rowan with which the Scottish milkmaid protects her cattle from evil spirits; and, 1 Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, 278. 2 Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 206–7. 3 Corp. Inscrip. Att. ii. 108, 435, etc. * Mannhardt, B. K. 51. 5 Frazer, G. B. i. 86, translating B. K. 315. on the same principle, in India "most Vaishnava sects wear necklaces and carry rosaries made of holy basil.” 1 As in death the clansman was believed to rejoin the animal totem, so "the Oráons of Bengal revere the tamarind and bury their dead under its branches." 2 This is probably a contributing cause to the practice of suspension burial mentioned in a previous chapter.3 "Some of the semiHinduised Bengal Ghonds have the remarkable custom of tying the corpses of adult males by a cord to the mahua tree in an upright position previous to burial." 4 Finally, tree totems, like animal totems, make their appearance in the marriage rite. Amongst some of the Dravidian races a branch of the sacred mahua tree "is placed in the hands of the bride and bridegroom during the ceremony," 5 evidently to bring them under the immediate protection of the totem-god, and by way of worship "they also revolve round a branch of the tree planted in the ground," just as in Northern Europe amongst the Wends the bride had to worship the "life-tree" of her new home. Or the bride and bridegroom are married first to trees and then to each other.7 6 Much more important, however, than tree totems for the history of religion and of civilisation in general are plant totems, for it was through plant-worship that cereals and food-plants came to be cultivated, and it was in consequence of their cultivation that the act of worship received a remarkable extension. With regard to the origin of cultivation, "it has usually been held that cultivation must have taken its rise from the accident of chance seeds being scattered about in the neighbourhood of the hut or of the domestic manure heap-the barbaric kitchen-midden."8 But something more, considerably more, than this is necessary to account for the origin of cultivation : seeds must be retained from one year to the next for the purpose of sowing them, and such retention implies, first, that primitive man was aware of the necessity of saving seeds, and, second, that he had the self-control to save them instead of eating them. To account 1 Crooke, op. cit. 257. 4 Crooke, 251. 2 lbid. 256. 5 Loc. cit. 7 For examples, Crooke, 258 ff. 3 Supra, p. 204. B. K. 161, 174, 182. 8 Grant Allen, The Attis, 45. for such self-control in the savage, whose habit is "to eat and destroy with lavish prodigality whatever he possesses in the pure recklessness of the moment," we must suppose some exceptionally powerful motive. Without some such stimulus, "primitive man, careless of the future as he is, would scarcely be likely deliberately to retain seeds from one year to the next for the purpose of sowing them."1 That motive could only have been religious. Our argument therefore in outline will be to show, first, that cereals and food-plants are actually totems amongst savages; next, that the treatment of totemplants generally is such that the seeds are necessarily preserved from one year to the next, simply because the plants are totems, and without any view to their cultivation; third, that amongst civilised peoples the rites and worship connected with cereals and agriculture are exactly what they would have been if the cereals had been totems. That savages do adopt food-plants and cereals as totems, we have already seen. We need only mention the Red Maize clan of the Omahas in North America, and the Plantain and Corn-stalk clans of the Gold Coast. We have also seen that the tree-spirit or totem-god was supposed to be actually present, not only in the tree, but in any branch of it, and that the presence of the god in the branch brought blessing and protection to his worshippers. We have next to note that amongst the European Aryans it was customary not only to carry such branches in procession, as already described, but also to plant them on the roof or in front of the door of a house, in order to secure the permanent presence and supernatural protection of the tree-spirit. Planting the branch in this position was an annual ceremony, and the branch was preserved from one year to the next, and then a fresh one was substituted with the same ceremonies. We may infer, therefore, that those savages whose totems were plants adopted much the same means for obtaining the constant protection of their god as those whose totems. were trees. Just as in the case of animal totems the god was supposed to dwell or manifest himself in any and every individual of the species, and consequently the death of any individual is not the death of the god, so, according to the belief of the North European Aryans, a vegetation spirit inhabited not a single plant, but several individuals or the whole species, and consequently did not perish in the autumn with the individual.1 Hence any sheaf would, like any branch, contain the god; and if preserved in the house or tent from one year to the next, it would secure the presence and protection of the god in the interval between the autumn and the spring, during which there was no growth or life of plants in the field. But the preservation of the sheaf would also teach primitive man the fact of which in the beginning he must have been ignorant-that food-plants are produced from seeds, and can be produced from seeds which have been kept from one year to the next. It would also form in him the habit of preserving seeds to sow them. That our Aryan forefathers in Europe were in the habit of thus preserving a sheaf and worshipping it, has been conclusively proved by Mannhardt 2 from an examination of harvest customs still surviving. Several ears of corn are bound together, worshipped, preserved for the year, and supposed to influence the next harvest. In Great Britain the ears are still sometimes bound together, made into the rude form of a female doll, clad in a paper dress, and called the Corn Baby, Kern Baby, or the Maiden,3 sometimes also, in England and elsewhere in Europe, the Old Woman or Corn Mother.1 That the practice is not peculiar to the Aryan peoples, and that its explanation must be sought in some world-wide belief, is shown by the existence of the custom in the New World, both in Central and in South America. Thus in Peru" they take a certaine portion of the most fruitefull of the Mays [maize] that growes in their farmes . . . they put this Mays 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 Mays of their inheritances, and that by this means the Mays augments and is preserved"; and in Mexico "the damsels that served Chicomecoatl carried each one on her shoulders seven ears of 1 B. K. 4. 5 3 Frazer, G. B. i. 344. 2 B. K. 209 note, 212, 213. 5 Lang, Custom and Myth,2 19, quoting Grimston's translation of Acosta. |