Page:Frazer (1890) The Golden Bough (IA goldenboughstudy01fraz).djvu/379

III can show. Thus the story that Iasion begat a child Plutus (“wealth,” “abundance”) by Demeter on a thrice-ploughed field, may be compared with the West Prussian custom of the mock birth of a child on the harvest held. In this Prussian custom the pretended mother represents the Corn-mother (Žytniamatka); the pretended child represents the Corn-baby, and the whole ceremony is a charm to ensure a crop next year. There are other folk-customs, observed both in spring and at harvest, with which the legend of the begetting of the child Plutus is probably still more intimately connected. Their general purport is to impart fertility to the fields by performing, or at least mimicking, upon them the process of procreation. Another glimpse of the savage under the civilised Demeter will be afforded farther on, when we come to deal with another aspect of these agricultural divinities.

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 (Corn-baby, etc.), not both by a Corn-mother