BY  far the most interesting in the curious group of artifically-made gods are those which are sacrificed in connexion with agriculture. These deities appeal to us from several points of view. In the first place, they form, among agricultural races as a whole, the most important and venerated objects of worship. In the second place, it is largely through their influence or on their analogy, as I believe, that so many other artificial gods came to be renewed or sacrificed annually. In the third place, it is the gods of agriculture who are most of all slain sacramentally, whose bodies are eaten by their votaries in the shape of cakes of bread or other foodstuffs, and whose blood is drunk in the form of wine. The immediate connexion of these sacramental ceremonies with the sacrifice of the mass, and the identification of the Christ with bread and wine, give to this branch of our enquiry a peculiar importance from the point of view of the evolution of Christianity. We must therefore enter at some little length into the genesis of these peculiar and departmental gods, who stand so directly in the main line of evolution of the central divine figure in the Christian religion.

All over the world, wherever cultivation exists, a special class of corn-gods or grain-gods is found, deities of the chief foodstuff,—be it maize, or dates, or plantain, or rice—and it is a common feature of all these gods that they are represented by human or quasi-human victims, who are annually slain at the time of sowing. These human gods 273are believed to reappear once more in the form of the crop that rises from their sacred bodies; their death and resurrection are celebrated in festivals; and they are eaten and drunk sacramentally by their votaries, in the shape of first-fruits, or of cakes and wine, or of some other embodiment of the divine being. We have therefore to enquire into the origin of this curious superstition, which involves, as it seems to me, the very origin of cultivation itself as a human custom. And I must accordingly bespeak my readers’ indulgence if I diverge for a while into what may seem at first a purely botanical digression.

Most people must have been struck by the paradox of cultivation. A particular plant in a state of nature, let us say, grows and thrives only in water, or in some exceedingly moist and damp situation. You take up this waterside plant with a trowel one day, and transfer it incontinently to a dry bed in a sun-baked garden; when lo! the moisture-loving creature, instead of withering and dying, as one might naturally expect of it, begins to grow apace, and to thrive to all appearance even better and more lustily than in its native habitat. Or you remove some parched desert weed from its arid rock to a moist and rainy climate; and instead of dwindling, as one imagines it ought to do under the altered conditions, it spreads abroad in the deep rich mould of a shrubbery bed, and attains a stature impossible to its kind in its original surroundings. Our gardens, in fact, show us side by side plants which, in the wild state, demand the most varied and dissimilar habitats. Siberian squills blossom amicably in the same bed with Italian tulips; the alpine saxifrage spreads its purple rosettes in friendly rivalry with the bog-loving marsh-marigold or the dry Spanish iris. The question, therefore, sooner or later occurs to the enquiring mind: How can they all live together so well here in man’s domain, when in the outside world each demands and exacts so extremely different and specialised a situation?

Of 274course it is only an inexperienced biologist who could long be puzzled by this apparent paradox. He must soon see the true solution of the riddle, if he has read and digested the teachings of Darwin. For the real fact is, in a garden or out of it, most of these plants could get on very well in a great variety of climates or situations—if only they were protected against outside competition. There we have the actual crux of the problem. It is not that the moisture-loving plants cannot live in dry situations, but that the dry-loving plants, specialised and adapted for the post, can compete with them there at an immense advantage, and so, in a very short time, live them down altogether. Every species in a state of nature is continually exposed to the ceaseless competition of every other; and each on its own ground can beat its competitors. But in a garden, the very thing we aim at is just to restrict and prevent competition; to give each species a fair chance for life, even in conditions where other and better-adapted species can usually outlive it. This, in fact, is really at bottom all that we ever mean by a garden—a space of ground cleared, and kept clear, of its natural vegetation (commonly called in this connexion weeds), and deliberately stocked with other plants, most or all of which the weeds would live down if not artificially prevented.

We see the truth of this point of view the moment the garden is, as we say, abandoned—that is to say, left once more to the operation of unaided nature. The plants with which we have stocked it loiter on for a while in a feeble and uncertain fashion, but are ultimately choked out by the stronger and better-adapted weeds which compose the natural vegetation of the locality. The dock and nettle live down in time the larkspur and the peony. The essential thing in the garden is, in short, the clearing of the ground from the weeds—that is, in other words, from the native vegetation. A few minor things may or may not be added, such as manuring, turning the soil, protecting with 275shelter, and so forth; but the clearing is itself the one thing needful.

Slight as this point seems at first sight, I believe it includes the whole secret of the origin of tillage, and therefore, by implication, of the gods of agriculture. For, looked at in essence, cultivation is weeding, and weeding is cultivation. When we say that a certain race cultivates a certain plant-staple, we mean no more in the last resort than that it sows or sets it in soil artificially cleared of competing species. Sowing without clearing is absolutely useless. So the question of the origin of cultivation resolves itself at last simply into this—how did certain men come first to know that by clearing ground of weeds and keeping it clear of them they could promote the growth of certain desirable human foodstuffs?

To begin with, it may be as well to premise that the problem of the origin of cultivation is a far more complex one than appears at first sight. For we have not only to ask, as might seem to the enquirer unaccustomed to such investigations, “How did the early savage first find out that seeds would grow better when planted in open soil, already freed from weeds or natural competitors?” but also the other and far more difficult question, “How did the early savage ever find out that plants would grow from seeds at all?” That, I take it, is the real riddle of the situation, and it is one which, so far as I know, has hitherto escaped all enquirers into the history and origin of human progress.

Fully to grasp the profound nature of this difficulty we must throw ourselves back mentally into the condition and position of primitive man. We ourselves have known so long and so familiarly the fact that plants grow from seeds—that the seed is the essential reproductive part of the vegetable organism—that we find it hard to unthink that piece of commonplace knowledge, and to realise that what to us is an almost self-evident truth is to the primitive savage a long and difficult inference. Our own common and 276certain acquaintance with the fact, indeed, is entirely-derived from the practice of agriculture. We have seen seeds sown from our earliest childhood. But before agriculture grew up, the connexion between seed and seedling could not possibly be known or even suspected by primitive man, who was by no means prone to make abstract investigations into the botanical nature or physiological object of the various organs in the herbs about him. That the seed is the reproductive part of the plant was a fact as little likely in itself to strike him as that the stamens were the male organs, or that the leaves were the assimilative and digestive surfaces. He could only have found out that plants grew from seeds by the experimental process of sowing and growing them. Such an experiment he was far from likely ever to try for its own sake. He must have been led to it by some other and accidental coincidence.

Now what was primitive man likely to know and observe about the plants around him? Primarily one thing only: that some of them were edible, and some were not. There you have a distinction of immediate interest to all humanity. And what parts of plants were most likely to be useful to him in this respect as foodstuffs? Those parts which the plant had specially filled up with rich material for its own use or the use of its offspring. The first are the roots, stocks, bulbs, corms, or tubers in which it lays by foodstuffs for its future growth; the second are the seeds which it produces and enriches in order to continue its kind to succeeding generations.

Primitive man, then, knows the fruits, seeds, and tubers, just as the squirrel, the monkey, and the parrot know them, as so much good foodstuff, suitable to his purpose. But why should he ever dream of saving or preserving some of these fruits or seeds, when he has found them, and of burying them in the soil, on the bare off-chance that by pure magic, as it were, they might give rise to others? No idea could be more foreign to the nature and 277habits of early man. In the first place, he is far from provident; his way is to eat up at once what he has killed or picked; and in the second place, how could he ever come to conceive that seeds buried in the ground could possibly produce more seeds in future? Nay, even if he did know it—which is well-nigh impossible—would he be likely, feckless creature that he is, to save or spare a handful of seeds to-day in order that other seeds might spring from their burial-place in another twelvemonth? The difficulty is so enormous when one fairly faces it that it positively staggers one; we begin to wonder whether really, after all, the first steps in cultivation’ could ever have been taken.

The savage, when he has killed a deer or a game-bird, does not bury a part of it or an egg of it in the ground, in the expectation that it will grow into more deer or more bird hereafter. Why, then, should he, when he has picked a peck of fruits or wild cereals, bury some of them in the ground, and expect a harvest? The savage is a simple and superstitious person; but I do not think he is quite such a fool as this proceeding would make him out to be. He is not likely ever to have noticed that plants in the wild state grow from seeds—at least prior to the rise of agriculture, from which, as I believe, he first and slowly gained that useful knowledge. And he certainly is not likely ever to have tried deliberate experiments upon the properties of plants, as if he were a Fellow of the Royal Society. These two roads being thus effectually blocked to us, we have to enquire, “Was there ever any way in which primitive man could have blundered blindfold upon a knowledge of the truth, and could have discovered incidentally to some other function of his life the two essential facts that plants grow from seeds, and that the growth and supply of useful food-plants can be artificially increased by burying or sowing such seeds in ground cleared of weeds, that is to say of the natural competing vegetation?”

I 278believe there is one way, and one way only, in which primitive man was at all likely to become familiar with these facts. I shall try to show that all the operations of primitive agriculture very forcibly point to this strange and almost magical origin of cultivation; that all savage agriculture retains to the last many traces of its origin; and that the sowing of the seed itself is hardly considered so important and essential a part of the complex process as certain purely superstitious and bloodthirsty practices that long accompany it. In one word, not to keep the reader in doubt any longer, I am inclined to believe that cultivation and the sowing of seeds for crops had their beginning as an adjunct of the primitive burial system.

Up to the present time, so far as I know, only one origin for cultivation has ever been even conjecturally suggested; and that is a hard one. It has been said that the first hint of cultivation may have come from the observation that seeds accidentally cast out on the kitchen-middens, or on the cleared space about huts, caves, or other human dwelling-places, germinated and produced more seeds in succeeding seasons. Very probably many savages have observed the fact that food-plants frequently grow on such heaps of refuse. But that observation alone does not bring us much nearer to the origin of cultivation. For why should early man connect such a fact with the seeds more than with the bones, the shells, or the mere accident of proximity? We must rid our minds of all the preconceptions of inductive and experimental science, and throw ourselves mentally back into the position of the savage to whom nature is one vast field of unrelated events, without fixed sequence or physical causation. Moreover, a kitchen-midden is not a cleared space: on the contrary, it is a weed-bed of extraordinary luxuriance. It brings us no nearer the origin of clearing.

There is, however, one set of functions in which primitive men do actually perform all the essential acts of agriculture, without in the least intending it; and that is the almost 279universal act of the burial of the dead. Burial is, so far as I can see, the only object for which early races, or, what comes to the same thing, very low savages, ever turn or dig the ground. We have seen already that the original idea of burial was to confine the ghost or corpse of the dead man by putting a weight of earth on top of him; and lest this should be insufficient to keep him from troublesome reappearances, a big stone was frequently rolled above his mound or tumulus, which is the origin of all our monuments, now diverted to the honour and commemoration of the deceased. But the point to which I wish just now to direct attention is this—that in the act of burial, and in that act alone, we get a first beginning of turning the soil, exposing fresh earth, and so incidentally eradicating the weeds. We have here, in short, the first necessary prelude to the evolution of agriculture.

The next step, of course, must be the sowing of the seed. And here, I venture to think, funeral customs supply us with the only conceivable way in which such sowing could ever have begun. For early men would certainly not waste the precious seeds which it took them so much time and trouble to collect from the wild plants around them, in mere otiose scientific experiments on vegetable development. But we have seen that it is the custom of all savages to offer at the tombs of their ancestors food and drink of the same kind as they themselves are in the habit of using. Now, with people in the hunting stage, such offerings would no doubt most frequently consist of meat, the flesh of the hunted beasts or game-birds; but they would also include fish, fruits, seeds, tubers, and berries, and in particular such rich grains as those of the native pulses and cereals. Evidence of such things being offered at the graves of the dead has been collected in such abundance by Dr. Tylor, Mr. Frazer, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, that I need not here adduce any further examples of so familiar a practice.

What must be the obvious result? Here, and here alone, 280the savage quite unconsciously sows seeds upon newly-turned ground, deprived of its weeds, and further manured by the blood and meat of the frequent sacrificial offerings. These seeds must often spring up and grow apace, with a rapidity and luxuriance which cannot fail to strike the imagination of the primitive hunter. Especially will this be the case with that class of plants which ultimately develop into the food-crops of civilised society. For the peculiarity of these plants is that they are one and all—maize, corn, or rice, pease, beans, or millet—annuals of rapid growth and portentous stature; plants which have thriven in the struggle for existence by laying up large stores of utilisable material in their seeds for the use of the seedling; and this peculiarity enables them to start in life in each generation exceptionally well endowed, and so to compete at an advantage with all their fellows. Seeds of such a sort would thrive exceedingly in the newly-turned and well-manured soil of a grave or barrow; and producing there a quantity of rich and edible grain, would certainly attract the attention of that practical and observant man, the savage. For though he is so incurious about what are non-essentials, your savage is a peculiarly longheaded person about all that concerns his own immediate advantage.

What conclusion would at once be forced upon him? That seeds planted in freshly-turned and richly-manured soil produce threefold and fourfold? Nothing of the sort. He knows naught of seeds and manures and soils; he would at once conclude, after his kind, that the dreaded and powerful ghost in the barrow, pleased with the gifts of meat and seeds offered to him, had repaid those gifts in kind by returning grain for grain a hundredfold out of his own body. This original connexion of ideas seems to me fully to explain that curious identification of the ghost or spirit with the corn or other foodstuff which Mr. Frazer has so wonderfully and conclusively elaborated in The Golden Bough.

Some 281little evidence is even forthcoming that vegetation actually does show exceptional luxuriance on graves and barrows. The Rev. Alexander Stewart of Ballachulish mentions that the milkmaids in Lochaber and elsewhere in the Scotch highlands used to pour a little milk daily from the pail on the “fairy knowes,” or prehistoric barrows; and the consequence was that “these fairy knolls were clothed with a more beautiful verdure than any other spot in the country.” In Fiji, Mr. Fison remarks that yam-plants spring luxuriantly from the heaps of yam presented to ancestral spirits in the sacred stone enclosure or temenos; and two or three recent correspondents (since this chapter was first printed in a monthly review) have obligingly communicated to me analogous facts from Madagascar, Central Africa, and the Malay Archipelago. It is clear from their accounts that graves do often give rise to crops of foodstuffs, accidentally springing from the food laid upon them.

Just at first, under such circumstances, the savage would no doubt be content merely to pick and eat the seeds that thus grew casually, as it were, on the graves or barrows of his kings and kinsfolk. But in process of time it would almost certainly come about that the area of cultivation would be widened somewhat. The first step toward such widening, I take it, would arise from the observation that cereals and other seeds only throve exceptionally upon newly-made graves, not on graves in general. For as soon as the natural vegetation reasserted itself, the quickening power of the ghost would seem to be used up. Thus it might be found well to keep fresh ghosts always going for agricultural purposes. Hence might gradually arise a habit of making a new grave annually, at the most favourable sowing-time, which last would come to be recognised by half-unconscious experiment and observation. And this new grave, as I shall show reason for believing a little later, would be the grave, not of a person who happened to die then and there accidentally, but 282of a deliberate victim, slain in order to provide a spirit of vegetation,—an artificial god,—and to make the corn grow with vigour and luxuriance. Step by step, I believe, it would at length be discovered that if only you dug wide enough, the corn would grow well around as well as upon the actual grave of the divine victim. Thus slowly there would develop the cultivated field, the wider clearing, dug up or laboured by hand, and finally the ploughed field, which yet remains a grave in theory and in all essentials.

I have ventured to give this long and apparently unessential preamble, because I wish to make it clear that the manufactured or artificial god of the corn-field or other cultivated plot really dates back to the very origin of cultivation. Without a god, there would be no corn-field at all; and the corn-field, I believe, is long conceived merely as the embodiment of his vegetative spirit. Nay, the tilled field is often at our own day, and even in our own country, a grave in theory.

It is a mere commonplace at the present time to say that among early men and savages every act of life has a sacred significance; and agriculture especially is everywhere and always invested with a special sanctity. To us, it would seem natural that the act of sowing seed should be regarded as purely practical and physiological; that the seed should be looked upon merely as the part of the plant intended for reproduction, and that its germination should be accepted as a natural and normal process. Savages and early men, however, have no such conceptions. To them the whole thing is a piece of natural magic; you sow seeds, or, to be more accurate, you bury certain grains of foodstuff in the freshly-turned soil, with certain magical rites and ceremonies; and then, after the lapse of a certain time, plants begin to grow upon this soil, from which you finally obtain a crop of maize or wheat or barley. The burial of the seeds or grains is only one part of the 283magical cycle, no more necessarily important for the realisation of the desired end than many others.

And what are the other magical acts necessary in order that grain-bearing plants may grow upon the soil prepared for their reception? Mr. Frazer has collected abundant evidence for answering that question, a small part of which I shall recapitulate here for the benefit of those who have not read his remarkable work, referring students to The Golden Bough itself for fuller details and collateral developments. At the same time I should like to make it clearly understood that Mr. Frazer is personally in no way responsible for the use I here make of his admirable materials.

All the world over, savages and semi-civilised people are in the habit of sacrificing human victims, whose bodies are buried in the field with the seed of corn or other bread-stuffs. Often enough the victim’s blood is mixed with the grain in order to fertilise it. The most famous instance is that of the Khonds of Orissa, who chose special victims, known as Meriahs, and offered them up to ensure good harvests. The Meriah was often kept for years before being sacrificed. He was regarded as a consecrated being, and treated with extreme affection, mingled with deference. A Meriah youth, on reaching manhood, was given a wife who was herself a Meriah; their offspring were all brought up as victims. “The periodical sacrifices,” says Mr. Frazer, “were generally so arranged by tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a family was enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh for his fields, generally about the time when his chief crop was laid down.” On the day of the sacrifice, which was horrible beyond description in its details, the body was cut to pieces, and the flesh hacked from it was instantly taken home by the persons whom each village had deputed to bring it. On arriving at its destination, it was divided by the priest into two portions, one of which he buried in a hole in the ground, with his back turned and without looking 284at it. Then each man in the village added a little earth to cover it, and the priest poured water over the mimic tumulus. The other portion of the flesh the priest divided into as many shares as there were heads of houses present. Each head of a house buried his shred in his own field, placing it in the earth behind his back without looking. The other remains of the human victim—the head, the bones, and the intestines—were burned on a funeral-pile, and the ashes were scattered over the fields, or mixed with the new corn to preserve it from injury. Every one of these details should be carefully noted.

Now, in this case, it is quite clear to me that every field is regarded as essentially a grave; portions of the divine victim are buried in it; his ashes are mixed with the seed; and from the ground thus treated he springs again in the form of corn, or rice, or turmeric. These customs, as Mr. Frazer rightly notes, “imply that to the body of the Meriah there was ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of making the crops to grow. In other words, the flesh and ashes of the victim were believed to be endowed with a magical or physical power of fertilising the land.” More than that, it seems to me that the seed itself is not regarded as sufficient to produce a crop: it is the seed buried in the sacred grave with the divine flesh which germinates at last into next year’s foodstuffs.

A few other points must be noticed about this essential case, which is one of the most typical instances of manufactured godhead. The Meriah was only satisfactory if he had been purchased—“bought with a price,” like the children who were built as foundation-gods into walls; or else was the child of a previous Meriah—in other words, was of divine stock by descent and inheritance. Khonds in distress often sold their children as Meriahs, “considering the beatification” (apotheosis, I would rather say) “of their souls certain, and their death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible.” This sense of the sacrifice as a case of “one man dying for the people” is most 285marked in our accounts, and is especially interesting from its analogy to Christian reasoning. A man of the Panua tribe was once known to upbraid a Khond because he had sold for a Meriah his daughter whom the Panu芒 wished to marry; the Khonds around at once comforted the insulted father, exclaiming, “Your child died that all the world may live.” Here and elsewhere we have the additional idea of a piacular value attached to the sacrifice, about which more must be said in a subsequent chapter. The death of the Meriah was supposed to ensure not only good crops, but also “immunity from all disease and accident.” The Khonds shouted in his dying ear, “We bought you with a price; no sin rests with us.” It is also worthy of notice that the victim was anointed with oil, a point which recalls the very name of Christus. Once more, the victim might not be bound or make any show of resistance; but the bones of his arms and his legs were often broken to render struggling impossible. Sometimes, however, he was stupefied with opium, one of the ordinary features in the manufacture of gods, as we have already seen, being such preliminary stupefaction. Among the various ways in which the Meriah was slain I would particularly specify the mode of execution by squeezing him to death in the cleft of a tree. I mention these points here, though they somewhat interrupt the general course of our argument, because of their great importance as antecedents of the Christian theory. In fact, I believe the Christian legend to have been mainly constructed out of the details of such early god-making sacrifices; I hold that Christ is essentially one such artificial god; and I trust the reader will carefully observe for himself as we proceed how many small details (such as the breaking of the bones) recall in many ways the incidents of the passion and the crucifixion.

The Khonds, however, have somewhat etherealised the conception of artificial god-making by allowing one victim to do for many fields together. Other savages are more prodigal 286of divine crop-raisers. To draw once more from Mr. Frazer’s storehouse—the Indians of Guayaquil, in South America, used to sacrifice human blood and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields. The ancient Mexicans, conceiving the maize as a personal being who went through the whole course of life between seed-time and harvest, sacrificed new-born babes when the maize was sown, older children when it had sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe, when ............