The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 07 of 12)

 
“The men are ready,
The scythes are bent,
The corn is great and small,
The gentleman must be mowed.”
 

Then the process of whetting the scythes is repeated.⁶⁹⁴ At Ramin, in the district of Stettin, the stranger, standing encircled by the reapers, is thus addressed: —

 
“We'll stroke the gentleman
With our naked sword,
Wherewith we shear meadows and fields.
We shear princes and lords.
Labourers are often athirst;
If the gentleman will stand beer and brandy
The joke will soon be over.
But, if our prayer he does not like,
The sword has a right to strike.”⁶⁹⁵
 

That in these customs the whetting of the scythes is really meant as a preliminary to mowing appears from the following variation of the preceding customs. In the district of Lüneburg, when any one enters the harvest-field, he is asked whether he will engage a good fellow. If he says yes, the harvesters mow some swaths, yelling and screaming, and then ask him for drink-money.⁶⁹⁶

Pretence made by threshers of choking a person with their flails.

On the threshing-floor strangers are also regarded as embodiments of the corn-spirit, and are treated accordingly. At Wiedingharde in Schleswig when a stranger comes to the threshing-floor he is asked, “Shall I teach you the flail-dance?” If he says yes, they put the arms of the threshing-flail round his neck as if he were a sheaf of corn, and press them together so tight that he is nearly choked.⁶⁹⁷ In some parishes of Wermland (Sweden), when a stranger enters the threshing-floor where the threshers are at work, they say that “they will teach him the threshing-song.” Then they put a flail round his neck and a straw rope about his body. Also, as we have seen, if a stranger woman enters the threshing-floor, the threshers put a flail round her body and a wreath of corn-stalks round her neck, and call out, “See the Corn-woman! See! that is how the Corn-maiden looks!”⁶⁹⁸

Custom observed at the madder-harvest in Zealand.

In these customs, observed both on the harvest-field and on the threshing-floor, a passing stranger is regarded as a personification of the corn, in other words, as the corn-spirit; and a show is made of treating him like the corn by mowing, binding, and threshing him. If the reader still doubts whether European peasants can really regard a passing stranger in this light, the following custom should set his doubts at rest. During the madder-harvest in the Dutch province of Zealand a stranger passing by a field, where the people are digging the madder-roots, will sometimes call out to them Koortspillers (a term of reproach). Upon this, two of the fleetest runners make after him, and, if they catch him, they bring him back to the madder-field and bury him in the earth up to his middle at least, jeering at him the while; then they ease nature before his face.⁶⁹⁹

The spirit of the corn conceived as poor and robbed by the reapers. Some of the corn left on the harvest-field for the corn-spirit. Little fields or gardens cultivated for spirits or gods.

This last act is to be explained as follows. The spirit of the corn and of other cultivated plants is sometimes conceived, not as immanent in the plant, but as its owner; hence the cutting of the corn at harvest, the digging of the roots, and the gathering of fruit from the fruit-trees are each and all of them acts of spoliation, which strip him of his property and reduce him to poverty. Hence he is often known as “the Poor Man” or “the Poor Woman.” Thus in the neighbourhood of Eisenach a small sheaf is sometimes left standing on the field for “the Poor Old Woman.”⁷⁰⁰ At Marksuhl, near Eisenach, the puppet formed out of the last sheaf is itself called “the Poor Woman.” At Alt Lest in Silesia the man who binds the last sheaf is called the Beggar-man.⁷⁰¹ In a village near Roeskilde, in Zealand (Denmark), old-fashioned peasants sometimes make up the last sheaf into a rude puppet, which is called the Rye-beggar.⁷⁰² In Southern Schonen the sheaf which is bound last is called the Beggar; it is made bigger than the rest and is sometimes dressed in clothes. In the district of Olmütz the last sheaf is called the Beggar; it is given to an old woman, who must carry it home, limping on one foot.⁷⁰³ Sometimes a little of the crop is left on the field for the spirit, under other names than “the Poor Old Woman.” Thus at Szagmanten, a village of the Tilsit district, the last sheaf was left standing on the field “for the Old Rye-woman.”⁷⁰⁴ In Neftenbach (Canton of Zurich) the first three ears of corn reaped are thrown away on the field “to satisfy the Corn-mother and to make the next year's crop abundant.”⁷⁰⁵ At Kupferberg, in Bavaria, some corn is left standing on the field when the rest has been cut. Of this corn left standing they say that “it belongs to the Old Woman,” to whom it is dedicated in the following words: —

 
“We give it to the Old Woman;
She shall keep it.
Next year may she be to us
As kind as this time she has been.”⁷⁰⁶
 

These words clearly shew that the Old Woman for whom the corn is left on the field is not a real personage, poor and hungry, but the mythical Old Woman who makes the corn to grow. At Schüttarschen, in West Bohemia, after the crop has been reaped, a few stalks are left standing and a garland is attached to them. “That belongs to the Wood-woman,” they say, and offer a prayer. In this way the Wood-woman, we are told, has enough to live on through the winter and the corn will thrive the better next year. The same thing is done for all the different kinds of corn-crop.⁷⁰⁷ So in Thüringen, when the after-grass (Grummet) is being got in, a little heap is left lying on the field; it belongs to “the Little Wood-woman” in return for the blessing she has bestowed.⁷⁰⁸ In the Frankenwald of Bavaria three handfuls of flax were left on the field “for the Wood-woman.”⁷⁰⁹ At Lindau in Anhalt the reapers used to leave some stalks standing in the last corner of the last field for “the Corn-woman to eat.”⁷¹⁰ In some parts of Silesia it was till lately the custom to leave a few corn-stalks standing in the field, “in order that the next harvest should not fail.”⁷¹¹ In Russia it is customary to leave patches of unreaped corn in the fields and to place bread and salt on the ground near them. “These ears are eventually knotted together, and the ceremony is called ‘the plaiting of the beard of Volos,’ and it is supposed that after it has been performed no wizard or other evilly-disposed person will be able to hurt the produce of the fields. The unreaped patch is looked upon as tabooed; and it is believed that if any one meddles with it he will shrivel up, and become twisted like the interwoven ears. Similar customs are kept up in various parts of Russia. Near Kursk and Voroneje, for instance, a patch of rye is usually left in honour of the Prophet Elijah, and in another district one of oats is consecrated to St. Nicholas. As it is well known that both the Saint and the Prophet have succeeded to the place once held in the estimation of the Russian people by Perun, it seems probable that Volos really was, in ancient times, one of the names of the thunder-god.”⁷¹² In the north-east of Scotland a few stalks were sometimes left unreaped on the field for the benefit of “the aul' man.”⁷¹³ Here “the aul' man” is probably the equivalent of the harvest Old Man of Germany.⁷¹⁴ Among the Mohammedans of Zanzibar it is customary at sowing a field to reserve a certain portion of it for the guardian spirits, who at harvest are invited, to the tuck of drum, to come and take their share; tiny huts are also built in which food is deposited for their use.⁷¹⁵ In the island of Nias, to prevent the depredations of wandering spirits among the rice at harvest, a miniature field is dedicated to them and in it are sown all the plants that grow in the real fields.⁷¹⁶ The Hos, a Ewe tribe of negroes in Togoland, observe a similar custom for a similar reason. At the entrance to their yam-fields the traveller may see on both sides of the path small mounds on which yams, stock-yams, beans, and maize are planted and appear to flourish with more than usual luxuriance. These little gardens, tended with peculiar care, are dedicated to the “guardian gods” of the owner of the land; there he cultivates for their benefit the same plants which he cultivates for his own use in the fields; and the notion is that the “guardian gods” will content themselves with eating the fruits which grow in their little private preserves and will not poach on the crops which are destined for human use.⁷¹⁷

Hence perhaps we may explain the dedication of sacred fields and the offering of first-fruits to gods and spirits.

These customs suggest that the little sacred rice-fields on which the Kayans of Borneo perform the various operations of husbandry in mimicry before they address themselves to the real labours of the field,⁷¹⁸ may be dedicated to the spirits of the rice to compensate them for the loss they sustain by allowing men to cultivate all the rest of the land for their own benefit. Perhaps the Rarian plain at Eleusis⁷¹⁹ was a spiritual preserve of the same kind set apart for the exclusive use of the corn-goddesses Demeter and Persephone. It may even be that the law which forbade the Hebrews to reap the corners and gather the gleanings of the harvest-fields and to strip the vines of their last grapes⁷²⁰ was originally intended for the benefit, not of the human poor, but of the poor spirits of the corn and the vine, who had just been despoiled by the reapers and the vintagers, and who, if some provision were not made for their subsistence, would naturally die of hunger before another year came round. In providing for their wants the prudent husbandman was really consulting his own interests; for how could he expect to reap wheat and barley and to gather grapes next year if he suffered the spirits of the corn and of the vine to perish of famine in the meantime? This train of thought may possibly explain the wide-spread custom of offering the first-fruits of the crops to gods or spirits:⁷²¹ such offerings may have been originally not so much an expression of gratitude for benefits received as a means of enabling the benefactors to continue their benefactions in time to come. Primitive man has generally a shrewd eye to the main chance: he is more prone to provide for the future than to sentimentalise over the past.

Passing strangers treated as the spirit of the madder-roots.

Thus when the spirit of vegetation is conceived as a being who is robbed of his store and impoverished by the harvesters, it is natural that his representative – the passing stranger – should upbraid them; and it is equally natural that they should seek to disable him from pursuing them and recapturing the stolen property. Now, it is an old superstition that by easing nature on the spot where a robbery is committed, the robbers secure themselves, for a certain time, against interruption.⁷²² Hence when madder-diggers resort to this proceeding in presence of the stranger whom they have caught and buried in the field, we may infer that they consider themselves robbers and him as the person robbed. Regarded as such, he must be the natural owner of the madder-roots, that is, their spirit or demon; and this conception is carried out by burying him, like the madder-roots, in the ground.⁷²³ The Greeks, it may be observed, were quite familiar with the idea that a passing stranger may be a god. Homer says that the gods in the likeness of foreigners roam up and down cities.⁷²⁴ Once in Poso, a district of Celebes, when a new missionary entered a house where a number of people were gathered round a sick man, one of them addressed the newcomer in these words: “Well, sir, as we had never seen you before, and you came suddenly in, while we sat here by ourselves, we thought it was a spirit.”⁷²⁵

Killing of the personal representative of the corn-spirit.

Thus in these harvest-customs of modern Europe the person who cuts, binds, or threshes the last corn is treated as an embodiment of the corn-spirit by being wrapt up in sheaves, killed in mimicry by agricultural implements, and thrown into the water.⁷²⁶ These coincidences with the Lityerses story seem to prove that the latter is a genuine description of an old Phrygian harvest-custom. But since in the modern parallels the killing of the personal representative of the corn-spirit is necessarily omitted or at most enacted only in mimicry, it is desirable to shew that in rude society human beings have been commonly killed as an agricultural ceremony to promote the fertility of the fields. The following examples will make this plain.

§ 3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops

Human sacrifices for the crops in South and Central America.

The Indians of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, used to sacrifice human blood and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields.⁷²⁷ The people of Cañar (now Cuenca in Ecuador) used to sacrifice a hundred children annually at harvest. The kings of Quito, the Incas of Peru, and for a long time the Spaniards were unable to suppress the bloody rite.⁷²⁸ At a Mexican harvest-festival, when the first-fruits of the season were offered to the sun, a criminal was placed between two immense stones, balanced opposite each other, and was crushed by them as they fell together. His remains were buried, and a feast and dance followed. This sacrifice was known as “the meeting of the stones.”⁷²⁹ “Tlaloc was worshipped in Mexico as the god of the thunder and the storm which precedes the fertilising rain; elsewhere his wife Xochiquetzal, who at Tlaxcallan was called Matlalcuéyé or the Lady of the Blue Petticoats, shared these honours, and it was to her that many countries in Central America particularly paid their devotions. Every year, at the time when the cobs of the still green and milky maize are about to coagulate and ripen, they used to sacrifice to the goddess four young girls, chosen among the noblest families of the country; they were decked out in festal attire, crowned with flowers, and conveyed in rich palanquins to the brink of the hallowed waters, where the sacrifice was to be offered. The priests, clad in long floating robes, their heads encircled with feather crowns, marched in front of the litters carrying censers with burning incense. The town of Elopango, celebrated for its temple, was near the lake of the same name, the etymology of which refers to the sheaves of tender maize (elotl, ‘sheaf of tender maize’). It was dedicated to the goddess Xochiquetzal, to whom the young victims were offered by being hurled from the top of a rock into the abyss. At the moment of consummating this inhuman rite, the priests addressed themselves in turn to the four virgins in order to banish the fear of death from their minds. They drew for them a bright picture of the delights they were about to enjoy in the company of the gods, and advised them not to forget the earth which they had left behind, but to entreat the divinity, to whom they despatched them, to bless the forthcoming harvest.”⁷³⁰ We have seen that the ancient Mexicans also sacrificed human beings at all the various stages in the growth of the maize, the age of the victims corresponding to the age of the corn; for they sacrificed new-born babes at sowing, older children when the grain had sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men.⁷³¹ No doubt the correspondence between the ages of the victims and the state of the corn was supposed to enhance the efficacy of the sacrifice.

Human sacrifices for the crops among the Pawnees.

The Pawnees annually sacrificed a human victim in spring when they sowed their fields. The sacrifice was believed to have been enjoined on them by the Morning Star, or by a certain bird which the Morning Star had sent to them as its messenger. The bird was stuffed and preserved as a powerful talisman. They thought that an omission of this sacrifice would be followed by the total failure of the crops of maize, beans, and pumpkins. The victim was a captive of either sex. He was clad in the gayest and most costly attire, was fattened on the choicest food, and carefully kept in ignorance of his doom. When he was fat enough, they bound him to a cross in the presence of the multitude, danced a solemn dance, then cleft his head with a tomahawk and shot him with arrows. According to one trader, the squaws then cut pieces of flesh from the victim's body, with which they greased their hoes; but this was denied by another trader who had been present at the ceremony. Immediately after the sacrifice the people proceeded to plant their fields. A particular account has been preserved of the sacrifice of a Sioux girl by the Pawnees in April 1837 or 1838. The girl was fourteen or fifteen years old and had been kept for six months and well treated. Two days before the sacrifice she was led from wigwam to wigwam, accompanied by the whole council of chiefs and warriors. At each lodge she received a small billet of wood and a little paint, which she handed to the warrior next to her. In this way she called at every wigwam, receiving at each the same present of wood and paint. On the twenty-second of April she was taken out to be sacrificed, attended by the warriors, each of whom carried two pieces of wood which he had received from her hands. Her body having been painted half red and half black, she was attached to a sort of gibbet and roasted for some time over a slow fire, then shot to death with arrows. The chief sacrificer next tore out her heart and devoured it. While her flesh was still warm it was cut in small pieces from the bones, put in little baskets, and taken to a neighbouring corn-field. There the head chief took a piece of the flesh from a basket and squeezed a drop of blood upon the newly-deposited grains of corn. His example was followed by the rest, till all the seed had been sprinkled with the blood; it was then covered up with earth. According to one account the body of the victim was reduced to a kind of paste, which was rubbed or sprinkled not only on the maize but also on the potatoes, the beans, and other seeds to fertilise them. By this sacrifice they hoped to obtain plentiful crops.⁷³²

Human sacrifices for the crops in Africa.

A West African queen used to sacrifice a man and woman in the month of March. They were killed with spades and hoes, and their bodies buried in the middle of a field which had just been tilled.⁷³³ At Lagos in Guinea it was the custom annually to impale a young girl alive soon after the spring equinox in order to secure good crops. Along with her were sacrificed sheep and goats, which, with yams, heads of maize, and plantains, were hung on stakes on each side of her. The victims were bred up for the purpose in the king's seraglio, and their minds had been so powerfully wrought upon by the fetish men that they went cheerfully to their fate.⁷³⁴ A similar sacrifice used to be annually offered at Benin, in Guinea.⁷³⁵ The Marimos, a Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a human being for the crops. The victim chosen is generally a short, stout man. He is seized by violence or intoxicated and taken to the fields, where he is killed amongst the wheat to serve as “seed” (so they phrase it). After his blood has coagulated in the sun, it is burned along with the frontal bone, the flesh attached to it, and the brain; the ashes are then scattered over the ground to fertilise it. The rest of the body is eaten.⁷³⁶ The Wamegi of the Usagara hills in German East Africa used to offer human sacrifices of a peculiar kind once a year about the time of harvest, which was also the time of sowing; for the Wamegi have two crops annually, one in September and one in February. The festival was usually held in September or October. The victim was a girl who had attained the age of puberty. She was taken to a hill where the festival was to be celebrated, and there she was crushed to death between two branches.⁷³⁷ The sacrifice was not performed in the fields, and my informant could not ascertain its object, but we may conjecture that it was to ensure good crops in the following year.

Human sacrifices for the crops in the Philippines.

The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, offer a human sacrifice before they sow their rice. The victim is a slave, who is hewn to pieces in the forest.⁷³⁸ The natives of Bontoc, a province in the interior of Luzon, one of the Philippine Islands, are passionate head-hunters. Their principal seasons for head-hunting are the times of planting and reaping the rice. In order that the crop may turn out well, every farm must get at least one human head at planting and one at sowing. The head-hunters go out in twos or threes, lie in wait for the victim, whether man or woman, cut off his or her head, hands, and feet, and bring them back in haste to the village, where they are received with great rejoicings. The skulls are at first exposed on the branches of two or three dead trees which stand in an open space of every village surrounded by large stones which serve as seats. The people then dance round them and feast and get drunk. When the flesh has decayed from the head, the man who cut it off takes it home and preserves it as a relic, while his companions do the same with the hands and the feet.⁷³⁹ Similar customs are observed by the Apoyaos, another tribe in the interior of Luzon.⁷⁴⁰

Human sacrifices for the crops among the Wild Wa of Burma.

The Wild Wa, an agricultural tribe on the north-eastern frontier of Upper Burma, still hunt for human heads as a means of promoting the welfare of the crops. The Wa regards his skulls as a protection against the powers of evil. “Without a skull his crops would fail; without a skull his kine might die; without a skull the father and mother spirits would be shamed and might be enraged; if there were no protecting skull the other spirits who are all malignant, might gain entrance and kill the inhabitants, or drink all the liquor.” The Wa country is a series of mountain ranges shelving rapidly down to narrow valleys from two to five thousand feet deep. The villages are all perched high on the slopes, some just under the crest of the ridge, some lower down on a small projecting spur of flat ground. Industrious cultivation has cleared away the jungle, and the villages stand out conspicuously in the landscape as yellowish-brown blotches on the hillsides. Each village is fortified by an earthen rampart so thickly overgrown with cactuses and other shrubs as to be impenetrable. The only entrance is through a narrow, low and winding tunnel, the floor of which, for additional security, is thickly studded with pegs to wound the feet of enemies who might attempt to force a way in. The Wa depend for their subsistence mainly on their crops of buckwheat, beans, and maize; rice they cultivate only to distil a strong spirituous liquor from it. They had need be industrious, for no field can be reached without a climb up or down the steep mountain-side. Sometimes the rice-fields lie three thousand feet or more below the village, and they require constant attention. But the chief crop raised by the Wa is the poppy, from which they make opium. In February and March the hill-tops for miles are white with the blossom, and you may travel for days through nothing but fields of poppies. Then, too, is the proper season for head-hunting. It opens in March and lasts through April. Parties of head-hunters at that time go forth to prowl for human prey. As a rule they will not behead people of a neighbouring village nor even of any village on the same range of hills. To find victims they go to the next range or at any rate to a distance, and the farther the better, for the heads of strangers are preferred. The reason is that the ghosts of strangers, being unfamiliar with the country, are much less likely to stray away from their skulls; hence they make more vigilant sentinels than the ghosts of people better acquainted with the neighbourhood, who are apt to go off duty without waiting for the tedious formality of relieving guard. When head-hunters return to a village with human heads, the rejoicing is uproarious. Then the great drum is beaten frantically, and its deep hollow boom resounding far and wide through the hills announces to the neighbourhood the glad tidings of murder successfully perpetrated. Then the barrels, or rather the bamboos, of rice-spirit are tapped, and while the genial stream flows and the women and children dance and sing for glee, the men drink themselves blind and mad drunk. The ghastly head, which forms the centre of all this rejoicing, is first taken to the spirit-house, a small shed which usually stands on the highest point of the village site. There, wrapt in grass or leaves, it is hung up in a basket to ripen and bleach. When all the flesh and sinews have mouldered away and nothing remains but the blanched and grinning skull, it is put to rest in the village Golgotha. This is an avenue of huge old trees, whose interlacing boughs form a verdant archway overhead and, with the dense undergrowth, cast a deep shadow on the ground below. Every village has such an avenue stretching along the hillside sometimes for a long distance, or even till it meets the avenue of the neighbouring village. In the solemn gloom of this verdurous canopy is the Place of Skulls. On one side of the avenue stands a row of wooden posts, usually mere trunks of trees with the bark peeled off, but sometimes rudely carved and painted with designs in red and black. A little below the top of each post is cut a niche, and in front of the niche is a ledge. On this ledge the skull is deposited, sometimes so that it is in full view of passers-by in the avenue, sometimes so that it only grins at them through a slit. Most villages count their skulls by tens or twenties, but some of them have hundreds of these trophies, especially when the avenue forms an unbroken continuity of shade between the villages. The old skulls ensure peace to the village, but at least one new one should be taken every year, that the rice may grow green far down in the depths of the valley, that the maize may tinge with its golden hue the steep mountain-sides, and that the hilltops may be white for miles and miles with the bloom of the poppy.⁷⁴¹

Human sacrifices for the crops among the Shans of Indo-China and the Nagas and other tribes of India.

The Shans of Indo-China still believe in the efficacy of human sacrifice to procure a good harvest, though they act on the belief less than some other tribes of this region. Their practice now is to poison somebody at the state festival, which is generally held at some time between March and May.⁷⁴² Among the Lhota Naga, one of the many savage tribes who inhabit the deep rugged labyrinthine glens which wind into the mountains from the rich valley of Brahmapootra,⁷⁴³ it used to be a common custom to chop off the heads, hands, and feet of people they met with, and then to stick up the severed extremities in their fields to ensure a good crop of grain. They bore no ill-will whatever to the persons upon whom they operated in this unceremonious fashion. Once they flayed a boy alive, carved him in pieces, and distributed the flesh among all the villagers, who put it into their corn-bins to avert bad luck and ensure plentiful crops of grain. The Angami, another tribe of the same region, used also to relieve casual passers-by of their heads, hands, and feet, with the same excellent intention.⁷⁴⁴ The hill tribe Kudulu, near Vizagapatam in the Madras Presidency, offered human sacrifices to the god Jankari for the purpose of obtaining good crops. The ceremony was generally performed on the Sunday before or after the Pongal feast. For the most part the victim was purchased, and until the time for the sacrifice came he was free to wander about the village, to eat and drink what he liked, and even to lie with any woman he met. On the appointed day he was carried before the idol drunk; and when one of the villagers had cut a hole in his stomach and smeared the blood on the idol, the crowds from the neighbouring villages rushed upon him and hacked him to pieces. All who were fortunate enough to secure morsels of his flesh carried them away and presented them to their village idols.⁷⁴⁵ The Gonds of India, a Dravidian race, kidnapped Brahman boys, and kept them as victims to be sacrificed on various occasions. At sowing and reaping, after a triumphal procession, one of the lads was slain by being punctured with a poisoned arrow. His blood was then sprinkled over the ploughed field or the ripe crop, and his flesh was devoured.⁷⁴⁶ The Oraons or Uraons of Chota Nagpur worship a goddess called Anna Kuari, who can give good crops and make a man rich, but to induce her to do so it is necessary to offer human sacrifices. In spite of the vigilance of the British Government these sacrifices are said to be still secretly perpetrated. The victims are poor waifs and strays whose disappearance attracts no notice. April and May are the months when the catchpoles are out on the prowl. At that time strangers will not go about the country alone, and parents will not let their children enter the jungle or herd the cattle. When a catchpole has found a victim, he cuts his throat and carries away the upper part of the ring finger and the nose. The goddess takes up her abode in the house of any man who has offered her a sacrifice, and from that time his fields yield a double harvest. The form she assumes in the house is that of a small child. When the householder brings in his unhusked rice, he takes the goddess and rolls her over the heap to double its size. But she soon grows restless and can only be pacified with the blood of fresh human victims.⁷⁴⁷

Human sacrifices for the crops among the Khonds.

But the best known case of human sacrifices, systematically offered to ensure good crops, is supplied by the Khonds or Kandhs, another Dravidian race in Bengal. Our knowledge of them is derived from the accounts written by British officers who, about the middle of the nineteenth century, were engaged in putting them down.⁷⁴⁸ The sacrifices were offered to the Earth Goddess, Tari Pennu or Bera Pennu, and were believed to ensure good crops and immunity from all disease and accidents. In particular, they were considered necessary in the cultivation of turmeric, the Khonds arguing that the turmeric could not have a deep red colour without the shedding of blood.⁷⁴⁹ The victim or Meriah, as he was called, was acceptable to the goddess only if he had been purchased, or had been born a victim – that is, the son of a victim father, or had been devoted as a child by his father or guardian. Khonds in distress often sold their children for victims, “considering the beatification of their souls certain, and their death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible.” A man of the Panua tribe was once seen to load a Khond with curses, and finally to spit in his face, because the Khond had sold for a victim his own child, whom the Panua had wished to marry. A party of Khonds, who saw this, immediately pressed forward to comfort the seller of his child, saying, “Your child has died that all the world may live, and the Earth Goddess herself will wipe that spittle from your face.”⁷⁵⁰ The victims were often kept for years before they were sacrificed. Being regarded as consecrated beings, they were treated with extreme affection, mingled with deference, and were welcomed wherever they went. A Meriah youth, on attaining maturity, was generally given a wife, who was herself usually a Meriah or victim; and with her he received a portion of land and farm-stock. Their offspring were also victims. Human sacrifices were offered to the Earth Goddess by tribes, branches of tribes, or villages, both at periodical festivals and on extraordinary occasions. The periodical sacrifices were generally so arranged by tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a family was enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh for his fields, generally about the time when his chief crop was laid down.⁷⁵¹