Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/240

 228 to the fact that the customs and beliefs of European peasants give us a picture, incomplete perhaps, but still unmistakable, of a highly primitive form of religion. Mannhardt's researches into agricultural customs have placed this beyond question. These customs have subsisted virtually unchanged during a relatively long period, if we take the life of the individual as our standard. In another sense agriculture is modern. Our present methods of cultivation have ousted, over a large part of the old world, a more archaic mode of culture; our present cereals have supplanted millet, which most of us know only in fairy tales. This displacement of millet by cereals is, measured in years, infinitely remote, if we may judge by the slow decline of millet-cultivation in historic times. Infinitely more remote, however, is the introduction and spread of millet itself, which is found in regions that corn has never reached. Before this again, we must assume a period of uncertain duration when cultivated plants were yet unknown, and during which man spread over the world, subsisting on roots and fruits in the earlier stages, in the later on the chase and other methods of procuring food which presuppose a certain equipment; and in the seasons when wild animals were scarce, returning, perhaps, to the earlier mode of life.

The corn era is then relatively short. Compared with it the preceding periods are infinitely long. But, if the peasant has conserved his archaic agricultural religion, it does not seem hopeless to look for relics of still earlier cults in the customs of those who have shown themselves so inaccessible to the influences of civilisation. If Christianity and the corn-spirit have lived side by side for a thousand years and more, the stages which preceded agriculture will surely have left their traces, less distinctly it may be, but yet clearly enough for those who know how to read them, on the life of the European peasant of to-day.

As a natural result of the external influences to which, more than any other feature of the cult, it has been exposed, the