To people already familiar, first with the honorific cannibal form of god-eating, and then with its gentler animal-victim modification, nothing could be more natural than this slight transference of feeling. Nay, more: _whoever eat bread and drank wine from the beginning must have known {338}it was the body and blood of a god he was eating and drinking_. Still, there is a certain difference between mere ordinary every-day food and the sacramental feast, to which sacred cannibalism and animal-sacrifice had now familiarised men’s minds. Accordingly, we find in many cases that there exists a special _sacramental_ eating and drinking of bread and wine, which is more especially regarded as _eating the body and drinking the blood of the deity_. Some curious illustrative facts may here be cited. Since straw and corn grow from the slaughtered corn-god, they may be regarded as one of his natural embodiments. Hence, when human sacrifices are prohibited, people sometimes make a straw god do duty for a human one. The Gonds, we saw, used once to kidnap sacred Brahman boys--gods by race, as it were, yet strangers and children--scatter their blood over the fields, and eat their bodies sacramentally. But when the unsympathetic British government interfered with the god-making habits of the Gond people, they took, says Col. Dalton, to making an image of straw instead, which they now similarly sacrifice. So it may be noted in many of the ceremonies of “Burying the Carnival” and the like, which I have already cited, that a straw man is substituted symbolically for the human victim. Indeed, in that singular set of survivals we have every possible substitute--the mock king, the imbecile, the pretended killing, the ceremonial shedding of blood, the animal victim, and the straw man or effigy. I may add that even the making of our modern Guy Fawkes as “a man of straw” is thus no mere accident. But we get a very similar use of corn in the curious practice of fashioning the corn-wife and the corn-baby, so fully detailed by Mr. Frazer. In this attenuated survival of human sacrifice, a sheaf of corn does duty for a human victim, and represents the life of the corn-god or corn-spirit from one year to another. All the existing evidence goes to suggest the idea that at harvest a corn-maiden or corn-wife, after a year {339}of deification, was slain in former times, and that the human victim is now represented by her vegetable analogue or equivalent, the corn in the ear, a sheaf of which does duty in her place, and reigns as corn-queen till the next year’s harvest. The corn-baby is thus a temporary queen, made of corn, not of human flesh and blood. We may compare with this case the account of the Sioux girl who was sacrificed by the Pawnees, by being burned over a slow fire, and then shot (like St. Sebastian) with arrows. The chief sacrificer tore out her heart and devoured it, thus eating the goddess in true cannibal fashion. While her flesh was still warm, it