Magic and husbandry, the folk-lore of agriculture; rites, ceremonies, customs, and beliefs connected with pastoral life and the cultivation of the soil; with breeding and the care of cattle; with fruit-growing, bees, and fowls

II Sfcp 2i 8905

COPV a.

*tf

Copyright, 1905,

BY

The Herald Company of Binghamton

" The oldest and most beautiful charms of all nations pass into prayers, which were repeated during sacrifice ; the simplest are found in pastoral life." — Grimm's " Teutonic Mythology ," Translation of James Steven Stally brass, p. I233>

"After all, what we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work best." — J. G. Frazer's " The Golden Bough," i. 450.

Preface

In preparing this volume the writer has endeavored to avoid such a multiplication of references as would be confusing or burdensome to the reader, and yet^at the same time sufficiently to indicate the sources of information which he has found most helpful, and to give due credit to authors from whose works quotations have been made.

He is convinced that more of the customs, beliefs, and ceremonial institutions that to so great an extent make up our social life and civilization are connected with early agriculture than has been generally acknowledged.

Some reader of the following pages will say, perchance, that many things noted therein ought to be forgotten. Other readers will find all that has, at one time or another, had some influence in the upward progress of man, of deep and absorbing interest. In all the story of human history there is surely no page that can be written truthfully just as we might wish to have it, yet who shall say that it would be wise to efface it if we could?

The author is disposed to look charitably upon all the beLiefs, however crude, which at any time have influenced human conduct, believing that the widest latitude possible should be allowed for the exercise of individual freedom, and that superstition is a word too frequently used incautiously and unwittingly to characterize whatever does not harmonize with the convictions and teachings of our own period of time and stage of development, some of which, it is possible, a few centuries hence, will have become as obsolete as others that we have now outgrown.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

I. Antiquity and Origin of Cultivation 1

II. Preparing for the Crop 14

Chapter I Antiquity And Origin Of Cultivation

" Who can see the green earth any more As she was by the sources of Time?

Who imagines her fields as they lay In the sunshine, unworn by the plow?

Who thinks as they thought, The tribes who then roam'd on her breast, Her vigorous, primitive sons ? " x

The attitude of primitive humanity in the first stages of agricultural development we cannot possibly comprehend. Some knowledge of cultivation preceded all written records, and goes back to a period when they knew nothing of cause and effect, and nothing of physical laws. In the earliest days of the oldest nations of which we have any. knowledge they were already proficient in agricultural science.

The oldest of the Greek historians describes agricultural life among the Babylonians, and their manner of artificially fertilizing the date palm, 2 a process pictured in earliest Assyrian art. The earliest Egyptian paintings were executed upon the walls of the tombs for nobles connected with the reign of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, and go back six thousand years. In these paintings are depicted agricultural scenes, — herdsmen, with their herds — men plowing, and making wine. 3 A

lu The Future," Matthew Arnold.

2 " Herodotus," i. 193.

drawing representing figs was found in the Great Pyramid. 4 In the oldest extant manuscript, itself but a copy of one a millennium older, the feudal lord, Ptah-Hotep, in the fifth Egyptian Dynasty, wrote among his precepts : " If thou art an agriculturist, gather the harvest in the field which the great God has given thee "; and the papyrus of the scribe Ani, a thousand years before the Christian Era, admonished cultivators . " to surround the tilled earth with hedges." 5 In their earliest historical times the Egyptians had carefully noted the limits of the nomes or districts, the amount of cultivated land in each, and the amount of land available for agricultural purposes after a high Nile. 6 Contract tablets have been found of the days of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, 2250 B. C, relating to the construction of irrigating ditches for overflowing and making productive the fields. 7 The oldest poetry of the Greeks tells the story of the pledge of " a fair demesne of fifty plow-gates, the half thereof vine-land and the half open plowland " to Meleagros for assisting the Aitolians, 8 and Hesiod has pictured on the shield of Hercules plowers cleaving the rich earth, and reapers with their sharp sickles cutting the thick-standing crop. Seventy kinds of grain and plants are mentioned in the old " Chinese Book of Poetry," and one of their peasant songs of early date runs:

" We rise at sunrise, We rest at sunset, Dig wells and drink, Till our fields and eat — What is the strength of the emperor to us? "

4 "Origin of Cultivated Plants," Alphonse de Candolle, p. 3. ""Oldest Books in the World," Isaac Myer, pp. 76, 151. ' " The Mummy," E. A. Wallis Budge, p. 8. '"Primitive Civilization," E. J. Simcox, i. 283. 8 Iliad, ix. 580, Lang, Leaf and Myers.

Yet for four thousands years, says Mr. Simcox, " the strength of the empire has been in the agricultural peasantry, who ask nothing from the emperor but to be let wisely alone." 9 The indebtedness of this ancient civilization to agriculture, and its importance as affecting the material and moral welfare, is expressed in the language of an imperial manifesto in a year of scarcity nearly two centuries before the Christian Era : " Crime begins in poverty; poverty in insufficiency of food; insufficiency of food in neglect of agriculture." 10

Pliny says the earliest surnames among the Romans were derived from agriculture and agricultural implements : from the pestle for pounding corn came Pilumnus, and Piso from the word expressing the act of grinding corn; leguminous plants, in the cultivation of which they excelled, supplied the names of Lentulus and Cicero; the first figure impressed on money was that of a sheep, and from pecus, a sheep, came pecunia, money. In the days of Cato the highest compliment to a man was to call him a good husbandman. 11 The poet Cowley says the first wish of Virgil was to be a good philosopher, and the second, a good husbandman; and Cicero, that the pleasures of a husbandman come very nigh to those of a philosopher.

When considerable progress has been made in civilization and the earliest efforts in agriculture have become more or less forgotten, when the literary instinct has been somewhat developed and national pride stimulated, it has then been characteristic of nations and peoples to seek to connect the origin of things specifically with their own national divinities. Loyalty and patriotism, the lack of actual knowledge, their own vanity and conceit, the ten-

* " Primitive Civilization," ii. 46.

""Natural History," xviii. 3; xxxiii. 13.

dency to attribute to the supernatural whatever they could not understand, all these prepared the way for the accepted belief that they were specially favored by God, or the gods, by whom specific revelations were made to them. In this way various peoples came to believe that it was to their own tribal deities that the world was indebted for instruction in the cultivation of certain products, and even for the products themselves at the commencement of their acquaintance with them. The more important was the part that a certain product of the earth played in their own national life, the more certain they became that it was to their own national or tribal god that they were indebted for it primarily. The ripe fruit and grain fell perfected from their hands, and by divine instruction their people were taught how to reproduce them. Sometimes to their kings, emperors, or great heroes these functions were attributed, or by them the first knowledge of plants and vegetables was said to have been communicated, but this was along the same line of thinking, and another way of expressing the same conception, as in earliest thought deities and kings were not likely to be clearly differentiated, and might be synonymous.

The Chinese attributed the introduction of grains and the establishment of husbandry to the miraculously conceived son of Kiang Yiin. The festal odes in the sacred "Book of Poetry" commemorate his beneficence; and sacrifices were offered in his honor.

" O Tsih, thou prince accomplished, Worthy to link with Heaven, Grain giver to our nation ! u

With him a hundred blessings came — The millets, the early and the late, And late and early pulse and wheat.

13 " The Shi King," William Jennings, IV. i, 10.

He set his folk to till the fields, So had they grain for sacrifice, The millets black and white, and rice." 13

The fruits of the earth are ascribed to the goodness of Buddha :

" The production of a grain of rice is as great a work as the creation of a mountain.

" Had it not been for the power of Buddha, where should we have found our food? " 14

It was the goddess Ceres who taught the Romans the cultivation o>f wheat. The production of the crop was the united duty of Ceres and Tellus. To one was traced the origin, the other contributed the environment. Partners in toil, they civilized antiquity, and replaced the acorn of the oak with a more wholesome food. 15

To the Hebrews, the fiat of Jahveh brought forth " grass and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself." 16 It was he who formed every plant of the field before it grew, while yet it had not rained upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 17

The Egyptians attributed to the goddess Isis the discovery of wheat and barley. At her festivals stalks of the grains were carried in processions in honor of her because of the great boon conferred upon men. Greek writers describe her as the mother of the ears of corn and the fruits of the earth. 18

At the advent of the Spaniard in America all the civil-

13 " The Shi King " IV. iv. 4.

u -"The Lore of Cathay," W. A. P. Martin, 255, quoting from a manuscript volume written by the abbot of a monastery in the Western Hills. 15 Ovid's "Fasti," i. 673. 18 Genesis, i. 12.

"Ibid. ii. 5. 18 " The Golden Bough," ii. 146.

ized nations had been farmers back to the limits of their traditional history. Maize, upon which was their chief dependence, was associated in their legends with the gods and the creation of man. It was the gift of the Great Spirit, brought from the terrestrial paradise by the sacred animals. It was the symbolical mother of the human race. Centeotl, the goddess of the maize, a deity of many, names and characters, because of the importance of this grain, always held an important place in their pantheon. She was the source of the power which sustained life. Children were dependent upon her for life and sustenance. In her burnt clay images she held one in her arms. In the earlier traditions she was content with offerings of flowers and bananas and the yellow maize. The quetzal bird sang its song at midnight to her, the glorious one born in Paradise, who came from the place of flowers, or as another of the ancient hymns says, from the " cerulean home of the fishes." 19

Maize was the substance out of which man was developed, in some of the native legends. In a Nahua record he was formed by God from ashes, and perfected by Quetzalcoatl, who then, in the guise of a black ant, crawled to Tonacatepetl, the mount of subsistence, where he found maize and brought it to Tamoanchan. Of it the gods ate, and put it in the mouth of man and he became strong. 20

The culture-god, Bohica, in the guise of a white man with a long beard, appeared to the Indians of Bogota and taught them to sow, and organized for them a government, after which he retired for two thousand years. Sume, of the Brazilians, a white man with a thick beard, came across the ocean from the direction of the rising sun. He

19 " Rig Veda Americanus," D. G. Brinton, p. 54. ,0 " Native Races," v. 193.

commanded the winds and storms. The trees of the forest receded before him. He introduced agriculture and taught the people to cultivate and use the maize, after which, retiring from the country, he left the prints of his feet on the rocks and sands, which are still visible. 21

According to the annals of the Quiches, the creation of man was subsequent to the gift of the maize, and dependent upon it. Yellow maize and white maize entered into the formation of his legs and arms. They were the first fathers. Nine drinks made from the ground maize gave the first nourishment and strength to man. 22

In Cherokee mythology, corn sprang from the blood of an old woman murdered by her wicked sons.

A legend of the Seneca and Iroquois Indians made the corn plant spring from the bosom of the mother of the Great Spirit after her burial. In Osage tradition, mankind came from the lower world by different ways, and with many adventures. Four buffalo bulls coming near them, the first one rolled on the ground and as he arose an ear of red corn and a pumpkin fell from his left hind leg; as the second bull rolled and came to his feet an ear of spotted corn and a spotted pumpkin fell from his left hind leg ; from the third bull came dark corn and a dark pumpkin in like manner; and from the fourth bull the corn and pumpkins were white. 23 Other Indian legends of the beginning of cultivation with them say that the Great Spirit gave to the three elder brothers, the Mohawks, the Senecas, and the Onondagas — to one corn, to one beans, and to the third squashes. Again, that all corn and beans originally came from the great god Kautantowit's field in the

31 " Native Races," v. 24.

23 J. Owen Dorsey, in Sixth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 379; " Myths of the Cherokee," James Mooney, in Nineteenth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 43a.

southwest, from which a crow first brought a grain of corn in one ear and a French or Indian bean in the other. Or again, they sprang from the great magician Masswaweinini, who, while hunting out on the wide prairie, met a small man with a red feather on his head, with whom he smoked and wrestled. On the ground where the little man fell was found, after the magician disappeared, a crooked ear of mondamin, with a red, hairy tassel, and a voice directed the little man to strip the ear and throw the fragments on the ground and scatter the broken spine near the edge of the field. In a moon the little man, returning, found the field filled with growing corn, and luxuriant pumpkin vines had sprung from the broken cob. As he returned in the autumn again to gather the ripe fruit he heard a voice saying: " Masswaweinini, you have conquered me, and thus saved your own life. Victory has crowned your efforts, and now my body shall forever nourish the human race." 24

From time immemorial the maguey plant has been of great importance in Mexican life, furnishing food, drink, and clothing; and its origin, too, legend credits to the gods, who metamorphosed Mayaguil, on account of her fruitfulness and four hundred breasts, into the divine plant. 25

In like manner natives of the Society Islands have conceived of a human origin for their principal products, those upon which they are most dependent for subsistence. The chestnut sprang from man's kidneys, and yams from his legs. In a story preserved by Ellis of the origin of the breadfruit, it is said that in the earliest times in the reign of a certain king, when the people lived on red earth, the father of a sickly son who could not eat the red earth voluntarily died that in answer to his prayers he might be

24 W. M. Beauchamp in Journal of American Folk-Lore, vols, xi., xlii. K " Native Races," iii. 351, note.

turned into food such as his invalid son might eat and live, and his wife, following his directions, planted his head in a certain place and his heart and stomach in another, and patiently waited the growth of a large and handsome tree with broad, shining leaves and loaded with breadfruit. 26

Unable to comprehend the gradual development from the rude beginnings of his earlier ancestors, primitive man, in divers ways, supernaturally accounts for the culture he has attained, and accepts the results as gifts from the beneficent gods. Not unmindful of his own hard experiences in the cultivation of the soil, he is deeply impressed with the belief, in some earlier period, of spontaneous productivity, when without toil earth teemed with abundance. Of that happy age of luxury and innocence ancient chroniclers have told and poets have sung. The ancient poet of the Greeks has written of that period of glad content which reigned with Saturn before Prometheus stole the fire from Heaven and challenged the wrath of Jove,

" Whilom on earth the sons of men abode From evil free."

It was then that

" The grain-exuberant soil Poured the full harvest, uncompell'd by toil." "

The sentiment was revoiced in the glowing numbers of the Roman poets. Virgil says that tilling the fields was impious in that happy age, for, when unsolicited, the earth brought forth more freely of all things. Streams of wine then ran in every brook.

" No walls were yet ; nor fence, nor moat, nor mound," M

28 " Polynesian Researches," William Ellis, i. 66. 2 '' Hesiod, "Works and Days," 160. 28 Ovid's " Metamorphoses," i. 89.

io MAGIC AND HUSBANDRY

wrote the Latin poet. And many centuries afterwards, in the wilderness, on the banks of the James River in Virginia, the earliest literary production in America was a new version of his " Golden Age " :

"The golden age was first; which uncompeld, And without rule, in faith and truth exceld, And then, there was nor punishment nor fear;

In firm content And harmless ease their happy days were spent, The yet free earth did of her own accord (Untorn with plows) all sorts of fruits afford;

'Twas always Spring; warm Zephyrus sweetly blew Of smiling flowers, which without setting grew. Forthwith the earth, corn unmanured bears; With milk and nectar were the rivers fill'd ; And yellow honey from green elms distilled." **

In the native American hero myths the period of this Golden Age was during the reign of the hero god Quetzalcoatl, who came in his shell canoe from the land of the sunrise. Then earth yielded all desired things in abundance. The ears of the maize grew so large that it required a strong man to carry one of them, the pumpkin girded a fathom or more, and without any dye the cotton yielded plentifully of all desired colors. 30

Cervantes has made the stout cork trees, of their Own courtesy, divest themselves of their bark to cover human habitations in this happy period when there was no toil demanded of men, and when " as yet the heavy coulter of the crooked plow had not dared to force open, and search into, the tender bowels of our first mother, who, unconstrained, offered from every part of her fertile bosom

29 George Sandys, 1826. 80 " Native Races," iii. 274.

ANTIQUITY OF CULTIVATION n

whatever might feed, sustain, and delight these, her children, who then had her in possession." 31

Milton has painted the happy rural scene wherein were beheld

" Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, Hung amiable — and of delicious taste,"

and where grew

" Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose." M

But a more modern poet has reversed the conception of Milton, and connected the origin of the rose with the shedding of blood upon the earth :

" The summer came to Paradise A thousand years and more ; But still the carrier winds that went No rose-scent up to heaven bore, Till man to Eden's garden came, And Cain his brother slew; Then where the earth drank in the blood The primal rosebush sprang and grew." 33

Does the study of the earliest beliefs of primitive humanity warrant the acceptance of the interpretation of the greater or lesser poet as the expression of the mental attitude of the primeval agriculturist? Following the traditions of the Hebrews, Milton has made the beginning of cultivation coincident with the entrance of sin into the world. When the subtle serpent entered into Paradise, the ground became accursed and brought forth only thorns and thistles, being only made productive by the labor of

31 " Don Quixote," Book ii. chapter 3, Jarvis' translation.

32 " Paradise Lost," iv. 248.

33 M. V. Moore.

man and the sweat of his brow. From the close relationship of the Babylonian creation tablets to the story of the Hebrews, it is probable that yet undeciphered records may show that similar beliefs prevailed among the Babylonians of the disobedience and fall of man. The famous cylinder discovered by George Smith, with a representation of the tree of life, gives strong coloring to this conclusion. The tree stands between the human couple whose hands reach out after its fruit, while the tempting serpent, erect, stands in an attitude of confidence close behind the female figure. One story may not have been copied from the other necessarily, yet both are evidently closely related, and may have been derived from the same source.

The Hebrew story of the two brothers and their rivalry in their sacred offerings, culminating in the tragedy of Cain, marks the transition of the Hebrew people from their more strictly pastoral to the agricultural life. It was impious to till the ground in the benign age of Saturn. The fruit offerings of Cain were less acceptable to Jahveh. The cultivation of the soil was forbidden by Abasi, the Calabar god, according to East African legends, till the temptation of the woman of the first pair, when came the beginning of agriculture as a punishment inflicted upon the race. Elsewhere 34 the author has written of the pervading animistic belief of primitive man in the necessity for the propitiation of the earth goddess before trespassing upon her domain. He stood in awe of the dangers which threatened him if the earth was disturbed, in its peaceful repose, without conciliation and atonement. Born of primitive animism, belief in traditional hostility to the cultivation of the soil in primeval times survived. Drinking up a brother's blood, the angry earth spirit, appeased, evermore consents to the harrowing of her bosom.

34 " Foundation Rites," n.

Deeply impressed with his own sad experiences, and too little appreciative of the goodness of things, man, looking across the great abyss of the past and failing to perceive his own gradual development, seeks to account for the unsatisfactory conditions of his present surroundings. He has postulated an impossible period in the ages gone, when all desired things came unsolicited. Self-conscious of his own imperfections, he charges up to his ancestors the responsibility, not yet realizing that in the loftier aspirations of his higher development are found the true sources of his increased activities and unsatisfied longings.

Chapter II

"They shall dance for the increase And strength of the corn seed, Of each grain making many — Each grain that ye nourish With new soil and water ! " *

Turn which way one will, the conviction is strengthened and deepened that the earliest efforts in cultivation of the soil were everywhere closely allied with religious beliefs. It is true that the selection of a field to be tilled might be deemed of importance enough to demand the most careful consideration. It was often attended with many elaborate ceremonies, in which the priest, perhaps, took a prominent part, but the momentous question to be determined had less to do with the adaptation of the soil to the crop to be grown, of which they knew nothing, than with its acceptability to the supernatural beings who could make or destroy their harvest. To this end, with ritualistic observances and sacrificial rites, they sought the approbation and co-operation of the spirits around and beneath, in earth and air, whose power they recognized and feared.

How did savage man just emerging from barbarism first come to learn to put seeds in the ground and look for time to bring their fruition? To speculative minds it is an ever-recurring question of absorbing interest, and one to which evermore a satisfying answer with demonstra-

1 " Zuni Myths," F. H. Cushing, in Thirteenth Annual Report of Bureau of American Ethnology.

tive proof is denied. We accept it as an evident truth, as a commonplace fact, that the seed is the essential part necessary to reproduce the plant or vegetable, and that there could have been a period or condition in the evolution of man when it could have been otherwise, seems a far-away conclusion, and almost unthinkable. Nevertheless, it is apparent on little reflection that it must have been the pivotal point between civilization and barbarism, the most vital one in the history of human progress and culture, when it first dawned upon the awakening intellect of man that the edible fruits and wild cereals which nourished him might be perpetuated in other seasons by means of germs contained within themselves.

It is suggested that primitive man may have observed the renewal of vegetation from the seeds cast out on the kitchen middens and cleared places where refuse was accidentally thrown around their huts and dwellings, but why he should have connected this fact with the seeds more than with the shells and bones and other waste products is not apparent, and the problem is left still unexplained. The subject is most ably and interestingly discussed by Mr. Grant Allen, 2 who inclines to the belief that the only way in which primitive man first became acquainted with the elementary principles of the reproduction of vegetable organisms was from his custom of making propitiatory offerings at the burial places of the dead. Fearing the malevolent influence of the spirit or ghost of the dead man, they placed his body beneath a weight of earth, and sought to prevent his troublesome reappearance. Rolling a stone upon his tumulus added to the safety of the living by adding to the difficulty of escape from the confinement, and hence the origin of monumental commemoration of the dead, and the beginning of agriculture. Believing

3 " Evolution of the Idea of God," chap. xiii.

that whatever gave pleasure to the living man will be acceptable to his ghost, offerings of food and drink such as he was accustomed to are made at his burial place by his living associates, and the seeds of fruits and native cereals germinating and taking root in the newly disturbed soil of the tomb, reproduce them. The feared and conciliated spirit of the tomb, pleased with the attention manifested and generous contributions bestowed, repays their offerings many fold in like kind. Step by step it would be discovered that vegetation would thrive around, as well as upon, the actual grave if it was dug wide and deep enough, and slowly would develop the extended cultivated field, and possibly the belief connected therewith of the necessity of fresh ghosts to make the crop grow. " Hence," says Mr. Allen, " might gradually arise a habit of making a new grave annually, at the most favorable sowing time. . . . And this new grave would be the grave, not of a person who happened to die then and there accidentally, but of a deliberate victim, slain in order to provide a spirit of vegetation, an artificial god, and to make the corn grow with vigor and luxuriance." 3

Whether this theory of the beginning of the cultivation of the soil is accepted or not, it is suggestive and stimulating, and leads to the consideration of many customs known by abundant evidence to have been practiced by many civilized and semi-civilized peoples. Fear of disturbing the soil has been characteristic of savages. Spirits of the earth were regularly invoked as a religious rite among the most ancient civilizations. That the belief in earth spirits and demons and deities is primitive, and preceded even earth-burials, is probable. That the homeless, wandering ghosts of the dead were thought fit companions for the spirits of the under world is likely, and that regions

8 " Evolution of the Idea of God," p. 282.

haunted by the latter were a desirable and safe refuge for the former, would follow.

Savages believe that the disturbance of particular localities is unusually dangerous. They are especially set apart for the dwellers invisible therein. Misfortune awaits those who encroach upon them, and the vengeance of the offended deities may be visited upon the whole tribe, manifesting itself through pestilence, violent storms, and death, or subjugation by their enemies. In describing the natives of the Gold Coast, Major Ellis relates an incident which occurred in 1690. The English African Company made preparations for opening a mine on a hill which the inhabitants had assigned to the god Bobowissi for a dwellingplace. The natives protested, and forbade them to commit such an offense, and the English were finally compelled to suspend operation and abandon the scheme. 4 To even cut down the trees on a hallowed spot was a sacrilegious act, and the offended god was believed not infrequently to slay those who committed the outrage. In 1874, while Major Ellis was at Secondee, he found it necessary to have a tract of ground cleared up. He met with great opposition from the natives, who declared it was a locality sacred to a local god. He finally succeeded, but was prostrated with fever shortly afterwards, which was considered by the natives as a punishment inflicted upon him for disturbing the precincts of the god. 5