Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/53

 Rh critics. Now the full title of Mr. Frazer's book is, The Golden Bough: a Study in Comparative Religion. In the preface he says that its "central idea is the conception of the slain god." In the last sentence he reminds us that "the king of the wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi's woods are still green, and at evening you may hear the church bells of Albano, and, perhaps, if the air be still, of Rome itself, ringing the Angelus. Le roi est mort; vive le roi."

Could Mr. Frazer have pointed in more suggestive language the moral of all the folklore that he has crammed between his title page and these concluding words? And the sum of it is this. The god becomes incarnate in man, animal, or plant, and is slain; both the incarnation and the death being for the benefit of mankind. The god is his own sacrifice, and in perhaps the most striking form, as insisted upon by Mr. Frazer, he is, as corn-spirit, killed in the person of his representative; the passage in this mode of incarnation to the custom of eating bread sacramentally being obvious. The fundamental idea of this sacramental act, as the mass of examples collected by Mr. Frazer further goes to show, is that by eating a thing its physical and mental qualities are acquired. So the barbaric mind reasons, and extends the notion to all beings. To quote Mr. Frazer: "By eating the body of the god he shares in the god's attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry; it is a solemn sacrament." It is, perhaps, needless to point out that the same explanation applies to the rites attaching