Page:Frazer (1890) The Golden Bough (IA goldenboughstudy01fraz).djvu/424

402 ing-fans over the fields to fertilise them. Here the choice of the representative on the ground of his resemblance to the corn which he was to represent agrees with the Mexican and African customs already described. Similarly the Romans sacrificed red-haired puppies in spring, in the belief that the crops would thus grow ripe and ruddy; and to this day in sowing wheat a Bavarian sower will sometimes wear a golden ring, that the corn may grow yellow. Again, the scattering of the Egyptian victim’s ashes is identical with the Marimo and Khond custom. His identification with the corn comes out again in the fact that his ashes were winnowed; just as in Vendée a pretence is made of threshing and winnowing the farmer’s wife, regarded as an embodiment of the corn-spirit; or as in Mexico the victim was ground between stones; or as in Africa he was slain with spades and hoes. The story that the fragments of Osiris’s body were scattered up and down the land, and buried by Isis on the spots where they lay, may very well be a reminiscence of a custom, like that observed by the Khonds, of dividing the human victim in pieces and burying the pieces, often at intervals of many miles from each other, in the fields. However, it is possible that the story of the dismemberment of Osiris, like the similar story told of Thammuz, may have been simply a mythical expression for the scattering of the seed. Once more, the story that the body of Osiris enclosed in a coffer was thrown by Typhon into the