There is one special form of this animal sacrifice, however, which I cannot here pass over in complete silence. It is the one of which the harvest-feast is the final relic. Mr. Frazer has fully worked out this theme in his fascinating essay: to detail it here at length would occupy too much space; I can only give the barest outline of his instances. Originally, it would seem, the corn-god or corn-spirit was conceived during the reaping as taking refuge in the last sheaf left standing. Whoever cut that wisp of corn slew the corn-spirit, and was therefore, on the analogy of the slayer of the divine king, himself the corn-spirit. Mr. Frazer does not absolutely assert that this human representative was originally killed and eaten, though all analogy would seem to suggest it; but that he was at least killed is abundantly certain; and killed he still is, in dumb show at any rate, on many modern European corn-fields. More often, however, the corn-spirit is supposed to be embodied in any animal which happens to be found in the last sheaf, where even now small creatures like mice and hedgehogs often take refuge. In earlier times, however, wolves, wild boars, and other large animals {337}seem to have been frequently met with under similar circumstances. However that may be, a great many beasts--generally sacred beasts--are or have been sacramentally eaten as representatives of the corn-god; while, conversely, the last sheaf is often made up into the image of a man or still more often of a woman, and preserved religiously for a year, like the annual king, till the next harvest. Sometimes a cock is beheaded and eaten at the harvest feast, special importance being here attached to its head, as to the head of the human victim in so many other cases. Sometimes, as with the ancient Prussians, it was the corn-goat whose body was sacramentally eaten. Sometimes, as at Chambéry, an ox is slaughtered, and eaten with special rites by the reapers at supper. Sometimes, it is the old sacred Teutonic animal, the horse, that is believed to inhabit the last wisp of corn. I will add parenthetically here (what I trust in some future work to show) that we have probably in this and kindred ideas the origin of the sacred and oracular heads of horses and oxen attached to temples or built into churches. Sometimes, again, it is a pig that represents the god, and is ceremonially eaten at the harvest festival. I need hardly mention that all these sacred animals, substitutes for the original human god, find their parallels in the festivals of Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, Demeter, Adonis, Lityerses, and the other great corn and wine gods of the historic civilisations. But there is yet another and more sublimated form of sacramental feast. Since the corn-god and the wine-god, when slain, undergo resurrection in the corn and the vine, may we not also eat their bodies as bread, and drink their blood as wine or soma?