was cut up into small pieces and taken to the corn-field. Drops of blood were squeezed from it upon the grains of seed-corn; after which it was all covered up in the ground to form a crop-raiser. Of such a ghastly goddess-making ceremony, our seemingly innocent harvest comedy of the corn-baby is probably the last surviving relic. Mr. Frazer rightly connects it with the cult of the Athenian Korê, Persephone. I think, indeed, the double form of the name, “the Old Woman” and “the Corn-baby,” makes it probable that the pair are the vegetable equivalents of both Demeter and her ravished daughter. In other cases, however, it is the actual bread and wine themselves, not the straw or the corn in the ear, that represent the god and are sacramentally eaten. We owe to Mr. Frazer most of our existing knowledge of the wide prevalence and religious importance of this singular ritual. We have seen already that in many countries the first-fruits of the crops are presented either to ancestral ghosts, or to the great gods, or else to the king, who is the living god and present representative of the divine ancestors. Till this is done, it would be unsafe to eat of the new harvest. The god within it would kill you. But in addition to the ceremonial offering of first-fruits to the spirits, many races also “eat the god” in the new corn or rice sacramentally. In Wermland, in Sweden, the farmer’s wife uses {340}the grain of the last sheaf (in which, as we saw, the corn-god or corn-spirit is supposed specially to reside), in order to bake a loaf in the shape of a little girl. Here we have the maiden, who was previously sacrificed as a corn-goddess or Persephone, reappearing once more in a bread image. This loaf is divided among all the household and eaten by them. So at La Palisse in France, a man made of dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is carried home to the granary on the last harvest-waggon. The dough man and the tree are taken to the mayor’s house till the vintage is over; then a feast takes place, at which the mayor breaks the dough man in pieces, and gives the fragments to the people to eat. Here, the mayor clearly represents the king or chief, while the feast of first-fruits and the sacramental eating are combined, as was perhaps originally the case, in one and the same sacrificial ceremony. No particular mention is made of wine; but as the feast is deferred so as to take place after the vintage, it is probable that the blood of the wine-god as well as the body of the corn-god entered once at least into the primitive ritual.