The Golden Bough Readalong, Part the Eighth

By -

 Wow, this is taking a long time!  We're almost to the end of summer and I am on track with my reading, which means it's going to take, I think, another three months.  Still, I think this is the best way for me to be reading it; three chapters a reasonably easy weekly assignment to fulfill and I would probably give up in despair if I tried to read it all at once.  Since I fell behind on the notes, I decided to just take two weeks off, and I'm going to start back up now.

Boy these sections had a lot of examples.  This is all about popular folk-customs of the harvest (now mostly gone), and obviously those customs varied slightly according to the region.  

XLVI.  The Corn-Mother in Many Lands.

  1. The Corn-Mother in America:  Native American customs around maize (short).
  2. The Rice-Mother in the East Indies: So many examples of customs around rice.
  3. The Spirit of the Corn Embodied in Human Beings:  That last ceremonial reaper is often considered to be the corn-spirit at that moment.
  4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter:  "The reader may have observed that in modern folk-customs the corn-spirit is generally represented either by a Corn-mother (Old Woman, etc.) or by a Maiden (Harvest-child, etc.), not both by a Corn-mother and by a Maiden. Why then did the Greeks represent the corn both as a mother and a daughter?" 

XLVII.  Lityerses.

  1. Songs of the Corn Reapers: Many peoples have sung a lament over the first or last sheaf of the harvest.
  2. Killing the Corn-Spirit: "Lityerses" was the name of a son of King Midas, whom Hercules defeated.  He would invite strangers to reap with him and then murder them.  Harvest songs were often called Lityerses after him, and folk-customs might trace back that far too.
  3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops: Some peoples have even sacrificed people to the crops/soil, to encourage fertility.
  4. The Corn-Spirit Slain in His Human Representatives: the imagined form of the corn-spirit usually accords with the 'age' of the crops -- that is, it might be thought of as an old woman, or a maiden, and then the last sheaf would be reaped by the right sort of person.  Or a passing stranger might have been pulled in, in some places.

XLVIII.  The Corn-Spirit as an Animal.

  1. Animal Embodiment of the Corn-Spirit: The crops are also often imagined as animals, which may go along with the right deity.  So here are 3 million examples (which I am not going to do more than list).
  2. The Corn-Spirit as a Wolf or Dog
  3. ...Cock
  4. ...Hare
  5. ...Cat
  6. ...Goat
  7. ...Bull, Cow, or Ox
  8. ...Horse or Mare
  9. ...Pig (Boar or Sow)
  10. On the Animal Embodiments of the Corn-Spirit: So you might even sacrifice that sort of animal, and possibly eat it (in the case of an edible animal).  The examples could go on to list every sort of creature!

OK, now it's on to "Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals"!  I've got about 300 pages to go.  This still counts as a summer book though!


Comments

  1. BronaAugust 31, 2020 at 6:31 PM

    Wow! Your dedication to this classic is admirable! You’re creating a great resource for future readers 😊

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more