In other cases it is gods rather than ghosts to whom the offering is made, though among savages the distinction is for the most part an elusive one. But in not a few instances the first-fruits are offered, not to spirits or gods at all, but to the divine king himself, who is the living representative and earthly counterpart of his deified ancestors. Thus in Ashantee a harvest festival is held in September, when the yams are ripe. During the festival the king eats the new yams, but none of the people may eat them till the close of the festival, which lasts a fortnight. The Hovas, of Madagascar, present the first sheaves of the new grain to the sovereign. The sheaves are carried in procession to the palace from time to time as the grain ripens. So, in Burmah, when the pangati fruits ripen, some of them used to be taken to the king’s palace that he might eat of them; no one might partake of them before the king. In short, what is offered in one place to the living chief is offered in another place to his dead predecessor, and is offered in a third place to the great deity who has grown slowly out of them. The god is the dead king; the king, as in ancient Egypt, is the living god, and the descendant of gods, his deified ancestors. Indeed, the first-fruits seem sometimes to be offered to the human victim himself, in his deified capacity, and sometimes to the Adonis, or Osiris, who is his crystallised embodiment. Our own harvest festival seems to preserve the offering in a Christianised form. Finally, I will add that in many cases it looks as though the {300}divine agriculture-victim were regarded as the king in person, the embodiment of the village or tribal god, and were offered up, himself to himself, at the stone which forms the monument and altar of the primitive deity. Of this idea we shall see examples when we go on to examine the great corn-gods and wine-gods of the Mediterranean region. CHAPTER XIV.--CORN- AND WINE-GODS. |IN {301}advanced communities, the agricultural gods with whom we dealt in the last chapter come to acquire specific class-names, such as Attis and Adonis; are specialised as corn-gods, wine-gods, gods of the date-palm, or gods of the harvest; and rise to great distinction in the various religions. I propose to examine at some length the more important of these in the Mediterranean civilisations, where Christianity was first evolved. And I begin with Dionysus.