The
same desire to get rid of the effete Mother of the Corn by palming
her off on other people comes out clearly in some of the customs
observed at the close of threshing, particularly in the practice of
passing on a hideous straw puppet to a neighbour farmer who is still
threshing his corn.
The harvest customs just described are strikingly analogous to the
spring customs which we reviewed in an earlier part of this work.
(1) As in the spring customs the tree-spirit is represented both by
a tree and by a person, so in the harvest customs the corn-spirit is
represented both by the last sheaf and by the person who cuts or
binds or threshes it. The equivalence of the person to the sheaf is
shown by giving him or her the same name as the sheaf; by wrapping
him or her in it; and by the rule observed in some places, that when
the sheaf is called the Mother, it must be made up into human shape
by the oldest married woman, but that when it is called the Maiden,
it must be cut by the youngest girl. Here the age of the personal
representative of the corn-spirit corresponds with that of the
supposed age of the corn-spirit, just as the human victims offered
by the Mexicans to promote the growth of the maize varied with the
age of the maize.
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