Similarly in modern harvest-customs the
pretence of killing appears to be carried out quite as often on the
person of the master (farmer or squire) as on that of strangers. Now
when we remember that Lityerses was said to have been a son of the
King of Phrygia, and that in one account he is himself called a
king, and when we combine with this the tradition that he was put to
death, apparently as a representative of the corn-spirit, we are led
to conjecture that we have here another trace of the custom of
annually slaying one of those divine or priestly kings who are known
to have held ghostly sway in many parts of Western Asia and
particularly in Phrygia. The custom appears, as we have seen, to
have been so far modified in places that the king's son was slain in
the king's stead. Of the custom thus modified the story of Lityerses
would be, in one version at least, a reminiscence.
Turning now to the relation of the Phrygian Lityerses to the
Phrygian Attis, it may be remembered that at Pessinus--the seat of a
priestly kingship--the high-priest appears to have been annually
slain in the character of Attis, a god of vegetation, and that Attis
was described by an ancient authority as "a reaped ear of corn.
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