During the days of Greek influence in ancient Egypt, travellers were often intrigued to observe reapers huddled together in the harvest fields, lifting their heads and voices in a long melancholy and repetitive cry as they lamented the death of the corn spirit, which had fallen victim to the blades of their scythes as they cut through the final stand of corn in which it had taken refuge.
It was a practice far more widespread than is generally appreciated. In Devonshire until comparatively recent times harvesters would circle and chant around a straw figure being lifted towards the heavens by the oldest man present, who had fashioned the figure out of straw from the final sheaf.
Rituals such as these have been practised ever since early man discovered that certain grassses growing in the Middle East yielded fodder for his animals and food for himself. They have been passed from tribe to tribe, from nation to nation, and from religion to religion, but always they remain essentially the same. The names of the participants are all that vary - Isis, Ceres, Demeter, Earth Mother, Goddess of Fertility.
Their importance began at a time when man the hunter was completing the metamorphosis to man the farmer and finding his new way of life to be just as precarious as the old. Aware that his survival depended upon the germination of his seeds, but uncertain of the elements which meant the difference between crop failure and life-preserving harvest, he turned to the family unit for inspiration. From the knowledge that the giving of life was purely a female characteristic, the idea of as supreme female deity developed, until it culminated in the sacred festivals held at Eleusis during the first century BC, which were dedicated to Demeter and Persephone.
The oldest literary document which narrates their story is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, dated about 7 BC. It tells of the youthful Persophone, kidnapped and taken as his wife by Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, who is saved by the intervention of Zeus after her mother, the goddess Demeter, witheld the germination of all seeds until her daughter was returned to her.
Returned she was, for Zeus was supreme god and had to be obeyed, but before Persophone left Pluto tricked into eating a pomegranate - the seeds of which are a sacred symbol of faithfulness - with the result that she was compelled to return to the underworld for at least four months of the year.
The Green Festival, held before the corn had ripened, and the later Festival of the Cornstalks, included sacrifices to Demeter and Persophone, but little else is known of them.
Propitiation of the Harvest Spirit by human sacrifice was the practice of some primitive people until well into the nineteenth century, and was probably a part of the heritage of our own culture. Certainly the Bible hints at it, and the rough handling given to some of the characters in the harvest rituals in our own islands has more than a suggestion of derivation from sacrificial rites.
Less savage are the Norse legends of Frigga. One of her maidens - Fulla - was very beautiful, and symbolic of corn, for her hair was long and the golden colour of grain. It hung free from any restraint other than a circlet of gold, which represented the binding of the sheaf. In recognition of Fulla the girl chosen to be Corn Maiden at a harvest celebration often wore a yellow sash across a white dress.
Also of Norse origin was the image arrayed in great finery, crowned with flowers, a sheaf of corn under her arm, and a sickle in her hand, which was set upon a pole in the corner of the final field on the final day of reaping in many parts of Northumberland. Known locally as the Harvest Queen, the figure was undoubtedly a development of the primordial monarch 'Sheaf'.
Harvest customs practised in fields are, of course, aimed at corn spirits rather than deities, and are magical rather than propitiatory. The fashioning of a heavy female figure from the final sheaf of corn in order to get a heavy crop. Splashing or soaking it with water to ensure adequate rainfall the following year. Strewing grain from the final sheaf amongst the young crops during the following spring to induce them to grow more prolifically. Setting the oldest married woman in the village to make the final sheaf into human shape known as the Mother. Setting the youngest girl in the village over seven years of age to make the final sheaf into a human shape known as the Maiden. These and a myriad other examples of sympathetic magic are still encountered in many places at harvest time, albeit only under the guise of country crafts, folk dancing and the like these days.
It was Christianity which, as ever, was responsible for the loss of true belief in rituals as essential to a good harvest as the sowing of the seed itself. Once priests welcomed the harvest with peals of bells and blessed the corn puppet fixed above the chancel arch, but as the power of the Church grew this ceased to be the case. First the manikin straightened itself out into the shape of the cross, then the bells were silenced. Finally the tribute offered to the Earth Mother that she should smile on the coming season became a thanksgiving to the Christan God for that which had just ended. Thus a celebration of the old year was created from what had always been a preparation for that which was about to begin.
In the fields, however - at least for a while - things went on very much as before. There were counties where it was believed that the corn spirit withdrew from farm to farm before the advance of the reapers, with the result that it would be slain in the final field of the most laggard of the farmers.
The moment the last stand of corn on a farm fell a reaper would leap onto a waggon to announce the fact to the spirit and tell it to whose fields it should go next.
These, of course, were districts in which the corn spirit was considered to be an unwelcome visitor. In parts of Scotland, on the other hand, the final sheaf was held to possess curative powers because of the presence of the corn spirit within it. At the end of a year spent in a place of honour in the farmhouse or byre it would be burnt and the ashes used in ointments for various ailments. In some parts of England farmers would fashion a corn dolly from the final sheaf and in the centre of it leave a hollow in which the corn spirit could rest. Here it would remain in a place of honour until the following spring when, after being carried in procession around the fields, it would be released from the corn dolly to awaken the freshly sown seeds to life.
That was still in the future, however. Once the final stand had been cut and the corn spirit either driven off or honoured, according to local custom, the dry corn had to be loaded onto waggons and taken to the barns to be stored until winter threshing.
The final waggon, or Hock Cart as it was often called, was as important in its own way as the final sheaf which helped to decorate it in honour of the Goddess of the Corn.
The horses which drew it wore sunflowers and scarlet ribbons on their blinkers and garlands of corn around necks and ears. The children who bore it wore branches of green foliage and festoons of flowers. The captain of reapers who walked alongside it wore a crown of flowers. The corn maden who rode upon it wore a straw bonnet decorated with corn and flowers and a yellow sash around the waist of her white dress. High above all of them the 'Ivy Girl' or 'Corn Baby' - a single sheaf from the best corn in the field, dressed by the women and adorned with paper trimmings cut to resemble a cap, ruffles and handkerchief of the finest lace - was raised upon a pole set in the centre of the waggon.
A long way perhaps from the Eleusinian festivals of Demeter, or from the goddess Ceres, who gave her name to the entire range of corn crops, yet very similar to how far we have drifted from even those watered down nineteenth century versions of the festivals in modern times.
What the gradual suppression of the old beliefs by the organised church began, mechanisation, government subsidies, scientific 'advances' in agricultural practices, and EEC over-production completed. Now just the faintest echoes remain of the lost rituals and practices of ancient times, and though some of us may still remember the corn spirit, there aren't enough who lament its passing anymore.
If you want to know more, why not read Gardens of the Gods, by Brian Taylor, available from Amazon as a hardback book, or its e-book version, Sacred Plants of the World from Neolithic Times Until the Present Day, available from Amazon Kindle.
