It is entirely consistent with the view here taken of the primitive nature of sacrifice, that the fertilization spirit was sacrificed at the village festivals in its vegetable as well as in its animal form. There were bread-offerings as well as meat-offerings[432]. Sacramental cakes were prepared with curious rituals which attest their primitive character. Like the _tcharnican_ or Beltane cakes, they were kneaded and moulded by hand and not upon a board[433]; like the loaf in the Anglo-Saxon charm, they were compounded of all sorts of grain in order that they might be representative of every crop in the field[434]. At the harvest they would naturally be made, wholly or in part, of the last sheaf cut. The use of them corresponded closely to that made of the flesh of the sacrificial victim. Some were laid on a branch of the sacred tree[435]; others flung into the sacred well or the festival-fire; others again buried in the furrows, or crumbled up and mingled with the seed-corn[436]. And like the flesh they were solemnly eaten by the worshippers themselves at the sacrificial banquet. With the sacrificial cake went the sacrificial draught, also made out of the fruits of the earth, in the southern lands wine, but in the vineless north ale, or cider, or that mead which Pytheas described the Britons as brewing out of honey and wheat[437]. Of this, too, the trees and crops received their share, while it filled the cup for those toasts or _minnes_ to the dead and to Odin and Freyja their rulers, which were afterwards transferred by Christian Germany to St. John and St. Gertrude[438].