When villages did not so club
together, each village or farm may have procured its own
representative of the corn-spirit by dooming to death either a
passing stranger or the harvester who cut, bound, or threshed the
last sheaf. Perhaps in the olden time the practice of head-hunting
as a means of promoting the growth of the corn may have been as
common among the rude inhabitants of Europe and Western Asia as it
still is, or was till lately, among the primitive agricultural
tribes of Assam, Burma, the Philippine Islands, and the Indian
Archipelago. It is hardly necessary to add that in Phrygia, as in
Europe, the old barbarous custom of killing a man on the
harvest-field or the threshing-floor had doubtless passed into a
mere pretence long before the classical era, and was probably
regarded by the reapers and threshers themselves as no more than a
rough jest which the license of a harvest-home permitted them to
play off on a passing stranger, a comrade, or even on their master
himself.
I have dwelt on the Lityerses song at length because it affords so
many points of comparison with European and savage folk-custom.
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