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194
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(MAY, 1891
confusion between uncleanness and sacredness is baked into a louf in the form of a little girl, and in animals, and shews that the abhorrence of the divided amongst the whole household. Here this Syrians, the Jews, the Egyptians, and one may loaf is the Corn-spirit in the form of a inaidon, way of Orientals generally, to the pig, is due as just as it is represented in Scotland as the Maiden much to the animal having once been a god as to or last sheaf itself. Two hundred years ago the anything else. Abhorrence of eating, touching or Lithuanian peasants held a festival called injuring of totems, that is, sacred animals or Saburios every December, at which every kind of plants, is common to most savages, in the belief grain was eaten sacramentally with prayers, and a that the eating thereof will produce disease and
cock and hen sacrificed to procure a good harvest death through the displeasure of the gods they in the ensuing year. In modern Europe similar represent. This will account for the nausea a customs have dwindled into such habits as the Muhammadan will feel if he accidentally eats pig's tasting of all new potatoes in Sutherlandshire; flesh, and it would be of interest to see how far it and trsing the grain of the first corn cut for the may account for the aversion to horse and dog's communion bread in parts of Yorkshire. In flesh in most parts of Europe. To Mr. Frazer's the wilder East we have cating the soul of the collection of evidence on this head we may add rice" at harvest and so on, and among the more that in Upper Burma towns pigs are sacred, and civilized Hindus of South India the Pongal until the advent of the British it was a serious festival, at which the way the new rise boils is offence to interfere with a pig in Mandalay. This taken as a portens of the harvest of the coming was accomted for, partly by saying they were year. The Buske festival of the first fruits, the chief public scavengers, and partly by the Buddhist annual ceremony of the Creek and Cherokee custom of jivita-dina, or the granting of life; Indians, at which the new corn and the new fruits King Mindôn Min having been supposed to have
were eaten sacramentally, proses the prevalence turned the forefathers of these piga loose in the of similar ideas in North America. The sacr&town, " to live for ever," after which ceremony if
ment of bread as the body of a good is an an. would be sacrilege to destroy thein.
cient American and European rite, chiefly in Osiris was identified with the bull Apis or
or the form of making a bread or meal image of Memphis and the bull Mnevis of Heliopoliy, and
the god and killing" him before eating him: Iels with the cow, which latter was never killed.
witness the festival of Hintzilopochtli in Mexico A 1 granting this ancient and local identification
and the maniæ of Rome. to be genuine, which however is doubtful, the The notion at the bottom of these sacraments annual sacrifice of sacred cattle and the deter- is the common savage one that by eating the mination of the life of the Apis after a certain
ffosh of an antmal or man, the physical, moral, term of years, brings is back to Osiris the
and intellectual qualities of that animal or Corn-spirit.
man are acquired. For this reason the North
and South American Indian chiefs would not eat The annual sacrifice of an animal sacred to a god
the flesh of heavy or slow moving animals, or considered as his enemy, and its preservation or
Arabs aroint theinselves with lion's fat, Zulus seclusion from that god for the rest of the year,
take the bones of very old animals, the Miris of w in the case of Osiris and many other divinities
Assam will not allow women to eat tiger's flesh, the of the ancient world and the modern savages,
Dyaks of Borneo will not eat venison, and so on can b3 shewn to lead unerringly to the inference
ad infinitum. So the Chinese eat the gall-bladders that the animal and the god were originally iden
of tigers and bears, because the gall bladder is the tical, and this leads to a conjecture that the connec.
seat of couroge; and the people of Darfur in Cen. tion or rather the special dis.connection of Virbius
tral Africa eat the liver of animals, because the with horses at the Arician Grovo points to the
liver is the seat of the soul and they wish to original identification of Virbius as a Corn-spirit
enlarge it. From the lower animals to man is a in the form of a horse. In support of this there is the very ancient custom of the October Horse
small transition, and so we find savages everywhere
killing a brave prisoner of war in order to eat at Rome, in which in pre-Republic days a horse
him and gain bis qunlities. So Maori warriors was sacrificed to the corn in precisely the same fashion as is the modern mock borse, bull, boar,
strove to slay a chief and eat his eyes because divi. and what not, all over Europe.
nity lies in the eyes. Thus by drinking the blood
of the vine-god and eating the flesh of the ooreThe harvest-suppers of the European pensant god, or in other words wine and bread, the wor. offord unmistakable evidence of the custom of shipper partakes of the real body and blood of his the momental oattng of the god of the corn. god. In this view the Buochanatinax foutival be In this way in Sweden the grain of the last shenfcome a sacrament.
