The ceremony thus performed on the king's fields and
at his house on behalf of the whole town and of the neighbouring
village presupposes a time when each township performed a similar
ceremony on its own fields. In the rural districts of Latium the
villages may have continued to observe the custom, each on its own
land, long after the Roman hamlets had merged their separate
harvest-homes in the common celebration on the king's lands. There
is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the sacred
grove of Aricia, like the Field of Mars at Rome, may have been the
scene of a common harvest celebration, at which a horse was
sacrificed with the same rude rites on behalf of the neighbouring
villages. The horse would represent the fructifying spirit both of
the tree and of the corn, for the two ideas melt into each other, as
we see in customs like the Harvest-May.
L. Eating the God
1. The Sacrament of First-Fruits
WE have now seen that the corn-spirit is represented sometimes in
human, sometimes in animal form, and that in both cases he is killed
in the person of his representative and eaten sacramentally.
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