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Chapter 11. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation
From the preceding examination of the spring and summer festivals of Europe
we may infer that our rude forefathers personified the powers of vegetation as
male and female, and attempted, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative
magic, to quicken the growth of trees and plants by representing the marriage
of the sylvan deities in the persons of a King and Queen of May, a Whitsun
Bridegroom and Bride, and so forth. Such representations were accordingly no
mere symbolic or allegorical dramas, pastoral plays designed to amuse or
instruct a rustic audience. They were charms intended to make the woods to
grow green, the fresh grass to sprout, the corn to shoot, and the flowers to
blow. And it was natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of
the leaf-clad or flower-decked mummers aped the real marriage of the woodland
sprites, the more effective would be the charm. Accordingly we may assume with
a high degree of probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended
these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential
part of the rites, and that in the opinion of those who performed them the
marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of
the human sexes. At the present day it might perhaps be vain to look in
civilised Europe for customs of this sort observed for the explicit purpose of
promoting the growth of vegetation. But ruder races in other parts of the
world have consciously employed the intercourse of the sexes as a means to
ensure the fruitfulness of the earth; and some rites which are still, or were
till lately, kept up in Europe can be reasonably explained only as stunted
relics of a similar practice. The following facts will make this plain.
For four days before they committed the seed to the earth the Pipiles of
Central America kept apart from their wives in order that on the night before
planting they might indulge their passions to the fullest extent; certain
persons are even said to have been appointed to perform the sexual act at the
very moment when the first seeds were deposited in the ground. The use of
their wives at that time was indeed enjoined upon the people by the priests as
a religious duty, in default of which it was not lawful to sow the seed. The
only possible explanation of this custom seems to be that the Indians confused
the process by which human beings reproduce their kind with the process by
which plants discharge the same function, and fancied that by resorting to the
former they were simultaneously forwarding the latter. In some parts of Java,
at the season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and his
wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual intercourse for
the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop. In the Leti, Sarmata, and
some other groups of islands which lie between the western end of New Guinea
and the northern part of Australia, the heathen population regard the sun as
the male principle by whom the earth or female prínciple is fertilised. They
call him Upu-lera or Mr. Sun, and represent him under the form of a lamp made
of coco-nut leaves, which may be seen hanging everywhere in their houses and
in the sacred fig-tree. Under the tree lies a large flat stone, which serves
as a sacrificial table. On it the heads of slain foes were and are still
placed in some of the islands. Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy
season, Mr. Sun comes down into the holy fig-tree to fertilise the earth, and
to facilitate his descent a ladder with seven rungs is considerately placed at
his disposal. It is set up under the tree and is adorned with carved figures
of the birds whose shrill clarion heralds the approach of the sun in the east.
On this occasion pigs and dogs are sacrificed in profusion; men and women
alike indulge in a saturnalia; and the mystic union of the sun and the earth
is dramatically represented in public, amid song and dance, by the real union
of the sexes under the tree. The object of the festival, we are told, is to
procure rain, plenty of food and drink, abundance of cattle and children and
riches from Grandfather Sun. They pray that he may make every she-goat to cast
two or three young, the people to multiply, the dead pigs to be replaced by
living pigs, the empty rice-baskets to be filled, and so on. And to induce him
to grant their requests they offer him pork and rice and liquor, and invite
him to fall to. In the Babar Islands a special flag is hoisted at this
festival as a symbol of the creative energy of the sun; it is of white cotton,
about nine feet high, and consists of the figure of a man in an appropriate
attitude. It would be unjust to treat these orgies as a mere outburst of
unbridled passion; no doubt they are deliberately and solemnly organised as
essential to the fertility of the earth and the welfare of man.
The same means which are thus adopted to stimulate the growth of the crops
are naturally employed to ensure the fruitfulness of trees. In some parts of
Amboyna, when the state of the clove plantation indicates that the crop is
likely to be scanty, the men go naked to the plantations by night, and there
seek to fertilise the trees precisely as they would impregnate women, while at
the same time they call out for More cloves! This is supposed to make the
trees bear fruit more abundantly.
The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the intimate relation
between the intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of the ground that
among them a barren wife is generally sent away, because she is supposed to
prevent her husband's garden from bearing fruit. On the contrary, a couple who
have given proof of extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins
are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding power of
increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish them with
their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the twins a ceremony is
performed, the object of which clearly is to transmit the reproductive virtue
of the parents to the plantains. The mother lies down on her back in the thick
grass near the house and places a flower of the plantain between her legs;
then her husband comes and knocks the flower away with his genital member.
Further, the parents go through the country performing dances in the gardens
of favoured friends, apparently for the purpose of causing the plantain-trees
to bear fruit more abundantly.
In various parts of Europe customs have prevailed both at spring and
harvest which are clearly based on the same crude notion that the relation of
the human sexes to each other can be so used as to quicken the growth of
plants. For example, in the Ukraine on St. George's Day (the twenty-third of
April) the priest in his robes, attended by his acolytes, goes out to the
fields of the village, where the crops are beginning to show green above the
ground, and blesses them. After that the young married people lie down in
couples on the sown fields and roll several times over on them, in the belief
that this will promote the growth of the crops. In some parts of Russia the
priest himself is rolled by women over the sprouting crop, and that without
regard to the mud and holes which he may encounter in his beneficent progress.
If the shepherd resists or remonstrates, his flock murmurs, Little Father,
you do not really wish us well, you do not wish us to have corn, although you
do wish to live on our corn. In some parts of Germany at harvest the men and
women, who have reaped the corn, roll together on the field. This again is
probably a mitigation of an older and ruder custom designed to impart
fertility to the fields by methods like those resorted to by the Pipiles of
Central America long ago and by the cultivators of rice in Java at the present
time.
To the student who cares to track the devious course of the human mind in
its gropings after truth, it is of some interest to observe that the same
theoretical belief in the sympathetic influence of the sexes on vegetation,
which has led some peoples to indulge their passions as a means of fertilising
the earth, has led others to seek the same end by directly opposite means.
From the moment that they sowed the maize till the time that they reaped it,
the Indians of Nicaragua lived chastely, keeping apart from their wives and
sleeping in a separate place. They ate no salt, and drank neither cocoa nor
chicha, the fermented liquor made from maize; in short the season was for
them, as the Spanish historian observes, a time of abstinence. To this day
some of the Indian tribes of Central America practise continence for the
purpose of thereby promoting the growth of the crops. Thus we are told that
before sowing the maize the Kekchi Indians sleep apart from their wives, and
eat no flesh for five days, while among the Lanquineros and Cajaboneros the
period of abstinence from these carnal pleasures extends to thirteen days. So
amongst some of the Germans of Transylvania it is a rule that no man may sleep
with his wife during the whole of the time that he is engaged in sowing his
fields. The same rule is observed at Kalotaszeg in Hungary; the people think
that if the custom were not observed the corn would be mildewed. Similarly a
Central Australian headman of the Kaitish tribe strictly abstains from marital
relations with his wife all the time that he is performing magical ceremonies
to make the grass grow; for he believes that a breach of this rule would
prevent the grass seed from sprouting properly. In some of the Melanesian
islands, when the yam vines are being trained, the men sleep near the gardens
and never approach their wives; should they enter the garden after breaking
this rule of continence the fruits of the garden would be spoilt.
If we ask why it is that similar beliefs should logically lead, among
different peoples, to such opposite modes of conduct as strict chastity and
more or less open debauchery, the reason, as it presents itself to the
primitive mind, is perhaps not very far to seek. If rude man identifies
himself, in a manner, with nature; if he fails to distinguish the impulses and
processes in himself from the methods which nature adopts to ensure the
reproduction of plants and animals, he may leap to one of two conclusions.
Either he may infer that by yielding to his appetites he will thereby assist
in the multiplication of plants and animals; or he may imagine that the vigour
which he refuses to expend in reproducing his own kind, will form as it were a
store of energy whereby other creatures, whether vegetable or animal, will
somehow benefit in propagating their species. Thus from the same crude
philosophy, the same primitive notions of nature and life, the savage may
derive by different channels a rule either of profligacy or of asceticism.
To readers bred in religion which is saturated with the ascetic idealism
of the East, the explanation which I have given of the rule of continence
observed under certain circumstances by rude or savage peoples may seem
far-fetched and improbable. They may think that moral purity, which is so
intimately associated in their minds with the observance of such a rule,
furnishes a sufficient explanation of it; they may hold with Milton that
chastity in itself is a noble virtue, and that the restraint which it imposes
on one of the strongest impulses of our animal nature marks out those who can
submit to it as men raised above the common herd, and therefore worthy to
receive the seal of the divine approbation. However natural this mode of
thought may seem to us, it is utterly foreign and indeed incomprehensible to
the savage. If he resists on occasion the sexual instinct, it is from no high
idealism, no ethereal aspiration after moral purity, but for the sake of some
ulterior yet perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which he is
prepared to sacrifice the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is
or may be so, the examples I have cited are amply sufficient to prove. They
show that where the instinct of self-preservation, which manifests itself
chiefly in the search for food, conflicts or appears to conflict with the
instinct which conduces to the propagation of the species, the former
instinct, as the primary and more fundamental, is capable of overmastering the
latter. In short, the savage is willing to restrain his sexual propensity for
the sake of food. Another object for the sake of which he consents to exercise
the same self-restraint is victory in war. Not only the warrior in the field
but his friends at home will often bridle their sensual appetites from a
belief that by so doing they will the more easily overcome their enemies. The
fallacy of such a belief, like the belief that the chastity of the sower
conduces to the growth of the seed, is plain enough to us; yet perhaps the
self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain and false as they are,
have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and
strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the
individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the
future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for
more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is
exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of
heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life
itself for the sake of keeping or winning for others, perhaps in distant ages,
the blessings of freedom and truth.
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