The Khonds, however, have somewhat etherealised the conception of artificial god-making by allowing one victim to do for many fields together. Other savages are more prodigal { 286}of divine crop-raisers. To draw once more from Mr. Frazer’s storehouse--the Indians of Guayaquil, in South America, used to sacrifice human blood and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields. The ancient Mexicans, conceiving the maize as a personal being who went through the whole course of life between seed-time and harvest, sacrificed new-born babes when the maize was sown, older children when it had sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men. May we not parallel with this instance the singular fact that the Romans had as their chief agricultural deity Saturnus, the god of sowing, but had also several other subsidiary crop-deities, such as Seia, who has to do with the corn when it sprouts, Segetia, with the corn when shot up, and Tutilina with the corn stored in the granary? (An obvious objection based on the numerous gods of childhood and practical arts at Rome will be answered in a later chapter.) The Pawnees, again, annually sacrificed a human victim in spring, when they sowed their fields. They thought that an omission of this sacrifice would be followed by the total failure of the crops of maize, beans, and pumpkins. In the account of one such sacrifice of a girl in 1837 or 1838, we are told: “While her flesh was still warm, it was cut in small pieces from the bones, put in little baskets, and taken to a neighbouring corn-field. Here the head chief took a piece of the flesh from a basket, and squeezed a drop of blood upon the newly-deposited grains of corn. His example was followed by the rest, till all the seed had been sprinkled with the blood; it was then covered up with earth.” Many other cases might be quoted from America.
In West Africa, once more, a tribal queen used to sacrifice a man and woman in the month of March. They were killed with spades and hoes, and their bodies buried in the middle of a field which had just been tilled. At Lagos, in Guinea, it was the custom annually to impale a young girl alive soon after the spring equinox in order to { 287}secure good crops. A similar sacrifice is still annually offered at Benin. The Marimos, a Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a human being for the crops. The victim chosen is generally a short stout man. He is seized by violence or intoxicated (note that detail) and taken to the fields, where he is killed amongst the wheat “to serve as seed.” After his blood has coagulated in the sun, it is burned, along with that peculiarly sacred part, the frontal bone, the flesh attached to it, and the brain; the ashes are then scattered over the ground to fertilise it. Such scattering of the ashes occurs in many instances, and will meet us again in the case of Osiris.