AGRICULTURE

AGRICULTURE , the cultivation of plants for food and other ends, as opposed to the use of plants as they grow naturally in man's environment, is a rather recent phenomenon if considered relative to the time scale of the development of Homo sapiens. Scholars now agree in dating the most ancient archaeological traces of plant cultivation to the eighth or seventh millennium bce and in indicating not the valleys of the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile, where the most ancient urban civilizations are attested, but the higher lands lying both west and east of Mesopotamia as the original cradles of agriculture. The Natufian culture of Palestine and other similar communities and cultural complexes in Kurdistan (Zawi Chemi Shanidar) and northern Iraq (Karim Shahir) used noncultivated (wild) wheat and barley.

The first traces of agriculture proper are found in sites such as Jericho (c. 7500 bce), Jarmo (Iraqi Kurdistan), Tepe Sarab (Iranian Kurdistan), and Çatal Hüyük (Anatolia) and can be dated to the seventh millennium at the latest; the Palestinian early agrarian culture of the Yarmuk basin and the cultures of Al-Fayyum (Egypt) and of Tepe Siyalk (Iran) probably belong to the sixth millennium. Some scholars consider the oldest agricultural communities of eastern Europe to be almost as ancient as these Asian civilizations; recently traces of very early plant cultivation (peas, beans, etc.) have been found in Thailand.

The introduction of agriculture is not an isolated phenomenon. It develops with the beginnings of animal domestication and with a growth both in the population in general and in the size of settlements (some of the early agricultural settlements of the cultures cited above, such as Jericho in Palestine, cover a wide area, are fortified, and contain towers and buildings constructed for collective, ceremonial use). The origin of agriculture is also linked to the invention of pottery and to more sophisticated techniques for making stone tools and weapons, although these last innovations are not always synchronic with the introduction of cultivation. Although the term Neolithic revolution, made popular by V. Gordon Childe, expresses well the enormous importance of this series of radical innovations, the process was a slow one, extending across several millennia. According to recent studies, the history of early forms of cultivation can be divided into three long phases: (1) the final phase of the gathering economy; (2) the beginnings of plant cultivation and of animal domestication; and (3) the era of efficient village agriculture.

Although the beginnings of cultivation must be identified with the process just described, which took place in a small area of Asia and Europe and involved the domestication of wild cereals, in premodern times the cultivation of plants had already spread to all continents, and the Neolithic revolution had taken place in most of the inhabited world. At the beginning of the modern era, cultivation was present in the indigenous cultures of all lands, with the exceptions of Australia, the Arctic (for obvious climatic reasons), a wide part of North America (the central Great Plains, inhabited only recently by the buffalo-hunting Plains Indians), and smaller, isolated parts of other continents (usually those areas covered with tropical or equatorial forests and inhabited by bands of hunter-gatherers). Scholars still debate whether the presence of plant cultivation throughout the globe should be considered the result of a process of diffusion from the most ancient cradle of agriculture in the Old World or the result of a series of independent inventions. However this question is approached, one should keep in mind that cultivation is far from uniform and is far from corresponding everywhere to the model of cerealiculture in Europe and western Asia. Indeed, if we leave aside the relatively recent modifications brought about by European colonization of other continents, six geographical, ecological, and cultural zones can be distinguished according to the types or groups of plants cultivated. The zones are as follows

1. wheat zone: from Europe to China; secondary cereals: barley, spelt, oats; instrument: the plow
2. rice zone: from India to Indonesia to southern China; instruments: plow and hoe
3. millet and sorghum zone: sub-Saharan Africa; instrument: hoe
4. yam and taro zone: New Guinea, Melanesia, Polynesia; secondary plants: coconut palm, sago palm; instruments: digging stick and hoe
5. maize zone: America, from eastern North America through Central America and the Andes to northern Chile and Argentina; secondary plants: in the north—beans and pumpkins; in the south—potato and quinoa; instruments; digging stick and spade
6. manioc (cassava) zone: Amazonian area and tropical America; secondary plants: peanuts, sweet potato; instruments: digging stick and spade

As for the problem of the origin of cultivation in areas outside the original western Asian-eastern European zone where cerealiculture began, there is increasing agreement on the common origin of the cultivation of cereals in the Old World (although older, more complex theories still have their followers). Specialists still disagree, however, on both the relationship between the origins of cultivation in the New and the Old World (a more recent, autonomous invention of cultivation in America seems more probable) and the relative ages of cereal and noncereal cultivation. According to some, the cultivation of noncereal plants (mainly tubers) is an impoverished imitation of cerealiculture, whereas other scholars consider the cultivation of noncereal plants to be older than cerealiculture. This last hypothesis seems more probably correct, at least in the case of some areas of the Americas. Excavations in Venezuela and in Colombia show that cassava was cultivated there long before maize; moreover, as mentioned earlier, very ancient traces of noncereal cultivation have been discovered in Thailand.

The importance of the slow technological and economic (Neolithic) revolution that led many societies from a hunting and gathering economy to plant cultivation and animal husbandry is indeed enormous; the only phenomenon we can compare it to is the great technological revolution of early modern times, which led many societies, in a much shorter timespan, into the modern industrial era. In transforming Homo sapiens from a mere consumer of natural goods into a producer, the development of agriculture drastically changed the role of humanity within its environment, and thus the very nature of humankind. Moreover, it permitted a vast transformation of human life and activity, involving both a demographic increase and the rise of more complex human settlements and communities. Agriculture required an increasingly greater specialization, differentiation, and stratification within societies, and made possible and indeed necessary the "urban revolution" that was to follow within three or four millennia in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The consequences of this development in the domain of religious life were far greater than can be illustrated in this article, which deals exclusively with religious phenomena directly connected to cultivation. The historical roots of complex phenomena such as polytheism, the so-called gift-sacrifice, and priesthood, to name but three examples, lie in the humus prepared by the Neolithic revolution.

Our knowledge of the religiosity of Neolithic cultures is limited not only by an obvious factor, the lack of any written evidence, but also by a less obvious one, the abundance of totally conjectural modern "reconstructions," based upon archaeological data. Even more limiting are a misconceived comparison between modern "primitive" cultivators and the peasant cultures of more complex historical societies and the generalizations of nineteenth-century scholarship. The data furnished by sites such as Jericho (Palestine) and Çatal Hüyük and Hacilar (Anatolia) point to the cult of anthropomorphic, mainly female, beings of various types and to rituals of the dead (in particular to the preservation and treatment of human skulls), as well as to the importance of animals such as birds of prey, bulls, and leopards, often depicted in wall paintings. The cult was often domestic, but shrines of various sizes and shapes have been found, richly decorated with paintings and sculptures. The first monumental sanctuaries, however, seem to belong to the later, Mesopotamian culture of Al-Ubayyid, dated from the end of the fifth to the beginning of the fourth millennium.

The Ritual Calendar and the Great Feast

Although hunter-gatherer communities also organize their lives on a seasonal basis, the yearly rhythm of labors is vital to cultivators and implies both a cyclical perception of time and the necessity of organizing the yearly sequence with a new precision. The introduction of cultivation is thus historically connected to the introduction of a calendar that responds to the technological and ritual needs of that specific form of production. The ritual aspects of cultivation and the rhythmic periodicity of that economic form, in which periods of great abundance are followed by periods of scarcity, require strong differentiations in time and the concentration of ritual actions and festive behavior in specific, recurring periods or days of the year. The yearly calendar of cultivators is thus a festive and ritual calendar.

The festive calendars of ancient societies, even though they are often connected with more complex liturgical, mythological, and even theological conceptions, as well as with "political" celebrations, easily reveal their agricultural basis. Thus, the three main Israelite feasts recorded in the Bible are a feast of the beginning of the barley harvest, a summer feast of the end of the wheat harvest (Shavuʿot), and an autumn feast of ingathering, celebrating the collecting and storing of (noncereal) cultivated fruits (Sukkot or Asif).

Likewise, the Attic calendar of Classical times included a feast preliminary to the plowing (Proerosia) immediately followed by the feast of the Boiling of Beans (Puanopsia), then by the ritual begging for gifts by children who carried a decorated branch of olive or laurel (eiresiōnē ), and by processions of people carrying bunches of grapes hanging from their branches (Oscophoria) or other, less easily identified objects (Thesmophoria). The other main agricultural feasts of the Attic calendar were the spring festival of flowers and new wine (Anthesteria), the wine festival of Dionysos (Dionusia), the feasts of purification and offerings in preparation for harvesting (Thargelia), and the sacrifice of a plow ox at the time of harvest (Bouphonia).

The Roman archaic calendar includes a series of spring feasts dedicated to the worship of agrarian deities (in March and April: Liberalia, Consualia, Vinalia Priora, Robigalia); a series of spring purification rites, connected to the return of the dead and to the gathering of broad beans (in May: purification fields, Lemuria, Kalendae Fabariae); summer festivals connected with the harvesting and with the new wine (in August: Vinalia Rustica, feast of Opeconsiva); a series of winter feasts of the plowing season (from December 15 to 21: Consualia, Saturnalia, Opalia, Divalia, Larentalia); a winter feast for the protection of sown cereals (in January: Feriae Sementivae); and a winter month of purification of people and fields (in February).

The agricultural origin of most yearly festivals in modern, as well as in ancient, cultivating societies can just as easily be demonstrated. Here it suffices to cite the great Indian festivals of Dussehra and Dīvālī; the former marks the end of the rainy season and the beginning of agricultural labors and is concluded by a ritual quest for alms by people carrying small fresh shoots of barley plants, while the latter is a New Year-like festival celebrating the sowing of the winter crops.

The agricultural and festive calendars of cultivators outside of the wheat zone are no less rich and complex. The structure of the calendar and the types of festivals vary according to the ecological and climatic conditions, the types of plants cultivated, and the cultural and social structure of the various societies, as is shown by the following three examples.

The Arapesh of northeastern New Guinea, who now cultivate a wide range of plants of various origins, are ruled by an archaic ritual calendar that is based on the cultivation of yams and reflects a time system simpler than the one now in use for cultivation. The main feast, the Abullu, is based upon the exhibition of each cultivator's yam produce, followed by the performance of special Abullu dances and songs, which center on the most recent death of an important member of the community, and by the distribution of yams to the guests by each producer. The producer may not consume the yams himself and must be ritually purified before the feast, for he is considered to be in a state similar to that of parents immediately after childbirth.

The rice-growing Ao-Naga of northeastern India have a complex festive calendar with three main feasts. The Moatsu feast, celebrated at the end of the sowing period, is preceded by a night of sexual abstinence and consists of a ritual suspension of order (the rigid rules relative to clothing and ornaments are not enforced; no Ao-Naga can be fined for transgression) and of the renewal of the belts that hold the men's dao ("daggers"). The Aobi feast precedes the beginning of the agricultural labors, and marks the end of the period during which the Ao-Naga travel and trade. Its central feature is the explusion of impurities from the village, both through the disposal of the garbage collected from the various households by a priest and by the symbolic concentration of impurities on the first stranger who enters the village area. Finally, the end of the agricultural labors is marked by a feast, called Tsungremmung, mainly dedicated to the worship of beings called tsungrem. The greatest of the tsungrem, Lichaba, a creator figure, is the main recipient of the festive offerings; pieces of pork are left out for him to consume in all the dwellings that are located at the edges of the village.

The Venda of Transvaal, in South Africa, cultivate maize and other plants (sweet potatoes, beans, pumpkins, melons) of various types and origins. Their main festivals celebrate the sowing and the harvesting. Before the sowing, each cultivator sends a small amount of mixed seeds to the lineage chief, who prepares a sacred food by cooking all the seeds together; the food is then offered to the ancestors, and a rich harvest is asked of them. A similar rite takes place in the chief's field, with the participation of the whole community; on their way to the field the young girls collect firewood to cook the offering, and beat whomever they meet with rods (the rods may be a fertility symbol). The chief announces the beginning of the harvesting. There was a time when anyone who began harvesting before the announcement would be killed. The chief celebrates a private rite; a "public" rite then takes place in the chief's field, and each lineage celebrates its own rite in the lineage chief's field. The preliminary rites consist of an offering of sugar cane to the sacred animals and of preparation of beer by women. The young people then perform a sacred dance; the sacred bull and its cow are led into the chief's kraal and asperged with beer, while the makhadzi (the sister of the former chief) recites a prayer to the ancestors, saying: "I give you the first grains of the yearly harvest; eat and be well; but what is now still in the fields, you should leave to us." Listing all the names of ancestors she can remember, the makhadzi adds that the prayer is also directed to those ancestors whose names have been forgotten. The tombs and the places where the spirits of the dead dwell are then ceremoniously visited, and offerings are left in special places for the wild animals (leopards, serpents, etc.) into which the dead are believed to be transformed.

The Venda's harvest rituals are typical of the most important and widespread agricultural feast: the feast of harvesting and of first fruits. This is first of all a feast of abundance after the long months of working and of waiting, of success after the yearly risks and dangers represented by the uncertainties of rainfall and weather. Thus, it is celebrated by more or less unrestricted license and by excessive consumption. At the same time, it is a moment of great crisis, both because it causes excessive consumption and suspends productive work and because of the risk that accompanies any liminal period as, specifically, the consumption of the first products of the year's labor. The great feast of abundance and license is thus also celebrated with "protective" rituals, such as ritual consecration of first fruits, purification and renewal of the community, and offerings and sacrifices (sometimes human sacrifice, as for example among the Aztec of Mexico or the Dravidian Khond of eastern India) to various entities.

The consumption of the first part of the new harvest involves the end of a seasonal cycle of cultivation and the beginning of a new one, and thus a renewal of time: the harvest festival is a New Year feast, and the festive sacrifice is seen as a cosmogonic act. In the great feast, the whole world starts afresh, so that order is often ritually suspended, only to be reinstated, as happened at the beginning of time.

This suspension (and reinstatement) of the social and cosmic order is the profound religious meaning of an important aspect of many seasonal festivals of cultivators and, in particular, of harvest festivals: the ritual orgy. Indeed, if envisaged in this context of periodic "rebirth," the orgy is a temporary suspension of the normal order of a given society in favor of an "excessive" collective behavior (music, dance, banqueting, sexual intercourse) that is meant to sanction the festive period and to renew and reinforce the vital energies of the social group. Orgiastic behavior on special or festive occasions is attested among all societies, but orgies have a specific importance and a particular meaning for cultivators. Alimentary orgies are extremely frequent and important; they are most often a celebration of the harvest, a ritual response to the sudden and disconcerting abundance of food after the long months of efforts and risks. Sexual orgies are also frequent (they are attested among many societies of cultivators, from the Melanesian cultivators of tuberous plants to the cerealiculturalists of the Old World), and are connected with the harvest festivals (e.g., among the Fijians during the Nanga and Mbaki feast), with (spring) festivals of the growth of vegetation (e.g., in ancient China, in India during the Holī festival or during Dīvālī), and with planting or sowing (e.g., among the Pipil of Central America). Although it maintains its fundamental quality as a ritual disruption of order and as a temporal heightening of social and individual life rhythms, the sexual orgy of cultivators also reflects the solidarity between human sexuality and fecundity and the fertility of cultivated plants that constitutes one of the central beliefs of those societies; the orgy possesses the specific function of revitalizing the forces of vegetation. In this sense, it is a collective counterpart of the "hierogamy" (ritual intercourse or marriage between humans or symbolic figures to enhance vegetal reproduction and growth during critical moments of the agrarian year).

Just as all agricultural and horticultural labors have a ritual aspect or value, the festivals of cultivators, and the harvest festivals in particular, are an integral part of agricultural activities, and are organized as an aspect of the general economic activity of the social body. This is emblematically clear, to cite but one example, among the matrilinear maize cultivators of what is today New York State, the Iroquois of the Six Nations, whose agricultural economy has recently been reconstructed. Among the Iroquois, at harvesttime labor was distributed among three different groups of women. One group collected the maize ears in baskets, a second group transported the cereal produce to the storage places, where it was buried in underground pits, and a third group prepared the harvest festival. A part of the labor force employed in the harvesting was thus devoted to the preparation of the feast, in which the men also took part before leaving the village for long hunting expeditions in the forests.

The unity of productive and ritual activity, and of the seasonal-technical and the festive-ritual calendars, was thus complete in all archaic communities of cultivators. In medieval and modern times, especially in the wheat zone, this situation was increasingly modified by the development of the liturgical calendars of the great "universal" religions (notably Christianity and Islam), which were partly independent of the seasonal pattern of agriculture, and later of the "lay" festive calendars. In this area, however, a specifically agricultural perception of time continued to exist side by side with the official calendars, and interacted with them dialectically. The new religions either accepted and transformed or rejected and tried to abolish the traditional rituals and feasts. A good example of this complex situation is the traditional festive calendar of European peasants. This calendar is the result of a complex interaction of an archaic agricultural festive system and Christian liturgy.

Figures and Deities

The offerings cited above in connection with some agrarian festivals are examples of an extremely widespread typology of sacrificial offerings, ritual acts, and propitiatory prayers directed toward extrahuman entities of various kinds that are believed to embody, or to control, the outcome of the labors of cultivation and the abundance of the harvest. Such beings or entities can be classified into four main categories: (1) nonpersonified forces or (less correctly) "spirits" that are believed to be active in the very growth and nourishing properties of cultivated plants; (2) personified beings of different kinds, believed to embody, or to cause and control, the growth of specific cultivated plants or, more generally, the produce of cultivation; (3) polytheistic gods and goddesses who, within the context of the various pantheons, are believed to control certain aspects of the agricultural economy; (4) figures who, within "universal" and "founded" (often monotheistic) religions, are believed to influence aspects of the agricultural economy or the outcome of cultivation in a context in which the total control over reality (and thus also over agriculture) is often attributed to a single principle or deity.

The last two categories are most often historically derived from the second. The polytheistic deities, however, are more completely integrated within a unified religiosity, and constitute parts of a system of specialized extrahuman personalities. They may be officially in charge of cerealiculture (e.g., the ancient Greek goddess Demeter) or of such a specific aspect as the diseases of wheat and barley plants (e.g., the Roman deity Robigo), but in all cases they are tied to all the other deities of their specific pantheon by genealogical, mythological, and ritual bonds. The entities who preside over aspects of cultivation within "founded" religions may be secondary figures of the belief system of those religions (such as angels, saints, or in some Christian contexts, the Virgin Mary), or else figures who clearly belong to a noncanonical, folkloric religiosity and resemble strikingly the entities and figures of the first and second types in our typology. Both types, however, are marginal to the central body of belief, and their diffusion is limited, both geographically (to specific rural zones within the wide diffusion areas of the "great" religions) and socially (to the peasantry).

The existence of belief in the power of cultivated vegetation (our first category) is usually deduced from a series of ritual behaviors that has been interpreted as tending to act positively upon such a power. Such is the ritual treatment of the first or last sheaf of grain among European and other cerealiculturists. In some cases, the ritually important (first or last) sheaf of the harvest is avoided by the cultivators, in others, it is eagerly sought after. In some cases, it is taken to the farm or settlement with great ritual pomp; in other cases, it is thrown away. This ambivalence, according to Mircea Eliade, is a consequence of the ambivalent meaning of the chosen sheaf, which is both dangerous and precious because it symbolically contains or embodies the power of the harvested cereal. According to peasants of northern Europe (Finland, Estonia, Germany), the ritually chosen sheaf brings good luck and blessings to the household, protects from diseases and lightning, and keeps mice away from the harvested grain. The sheaf can be used for divination of the marriages of young women (Estonia) or of the price of grain in the following year (Germany); it has magical properties in relationship to childbirth (Finland), marriage (Scotland), and next season's harvest, so that some grain from the last sheaf of the harvest is mixed with the seeds used for the next sowing (Scandinavia and Germany). The "power" of the cultivated plants is similarly enhanced by other (e.g., hierogamic) rituals.

Only very rarely, however, are beliefs and ritual behaviors of this type not connected with some specific personification of the beings believed to embody or to control the seasonal outcome of cultivation. Indeed, though the existence of the first category of our typology is generally accepted by scholars, it would be possible to reformulate that category in favor of a widened scope of and differentiation within our second category.

In any case, the second category of our typology is extremely vast and varied and includes at least three main subcategories: (a) beings connected to, and representative of, specific cultivated plants, or the growth of cultivated vegetation in general; (b) earth-mother figures; (c) spirits of the dead or ancestors.

The first subtype is the most widespread and easily recognized. It is the nearest to the first category of our typology, and the extrahuman beings classified as belonging to this subtype are often represented by harvested plants (sometimes, the first or last or most beautiful plants of the harvest), often collected and tied together in the shape of a human (most often, a female) figure, kept until the next harvesting season, and ritually treated in various ways. Figures of this type are found on all continents. One may mention the Aztec maize goddess; the Maize Mother of pre-Columbian Peruvians, represented by a female image made with the biggest maize cobs of the harvest; the analogous Quinoa Mother, Coca Mother, and Potato Mother, all similarly represented by the same Peruvians; the various maize mothers, one for each type of maize, of the Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States. The Karen of Burma invoke a personified "spirit of the rice"; the Minangkabau of Sumatra use special rice plants to represent the rice mother Indoea Padi; and rice mothers are known to the Tomori of Sulawesi and to the rice growers of the Malay Peninsula, who ritually treat the wife of the cultivator as a pregnant woman during the first three days after the storing of the rice. The agriculturalists of the Punjab fashioned a female figure from the most beautiful cotton plant of the harvest to represent the Cotton Mother. We have seen the ritual treatment and the magico-symbolic value of the last sheaf among the agriculturists of the wheat zone: the last sheaf, or a specially fashioned anthropomorphic image made of cereal stalks or straw, is identified in the same contexts as figures variously named Old Man (Denmark, Poland, Arabia Petraea), Queen of the Grain (Bulgaria), Old Woman (Germany, Scotland). The Berbers of Morocco used straw from the harvested fields to shape a female image they dressed in a woman's clothes that represented the Bride of the Barley.

Such figures, seemingly so similar, differ widely in their specific meanings and functions, as shown by the various roles they play in the ritual contexts. They may be believed to be entities responsible for growth of cultivated plants, and thus may be the recipients of offerings and prayers (Zara Mama, the maize mother of the Peruvians, for example, fashioned in the shape of a doll from cobs and dressed elegantly, was offered sacrifices and prayers). Or they may be believed to embody and to concentrate in themselves, rather than to control, that growth; in such cases they are ritually treated in various ways, the two most frequent and meaningful of which are the "death" pattern and the "wedding" pattern. The better known is the death pattern, which can be illustrated by the treatment of the last sheaf, identified as the Queen of Grain by the Bulgarians; the sheaf is dressed in a woman's clothes, carried around in a procession, and then burned and scattered in the fields or thrown into a body of water. Such rituals are usually interpreted as dramatizing the seasonal cycle of cultivated plants, and their periodic "death" followed by their return or "rebirth" before the next harvesting—a theory shaped in the nineteenth century by James G. Frazer and Wilhelm Mannhardt. The wedding pattern is exemplified by the "marriage" of two fistfuls of rice, collected before the harvesttime, practiced on the islands of Java, Bali, and Lombok; the two fistfuls were treated like a pair of spouses, a wedding ceremony between them was celebrated, and then they were brought to the storehouse and stored there so that the rice could grow. Another example is that of the Barley Bride of the Berbers of Morocco. Groups of women completed for the honor of carrying the straw figure processionally through the ripe crops; on other occasions, the male members of the community appeared on horseback to fight for her, thus imitating scenes that were normal for Berber weddings, including a simulated abduction of the bride. In other areas, the two patterns appear together: in Denmark the female harvester dances with an image formed with the last sheaves; she cries while she dances, and is considered a "widow" because she is married to a being who is going to die.

If considered together, the various ritual treatments of the mythical figures embodying or controlling the outcome of cultivation clearly form a complex, well-structured strategic system aimed at controlling the uncertainties of the specific modes of production. The death and the wedding patterns, in particular, deal with the critical economic moment represented by the harvesting. The death pattern ritually enacts, and thus controls, the very crisis represented by the final moment of the cycle, symbolically overcome through the destruction, and ritual reintegration (by throwing it in the water or by spreading it on the fields) of the first (or last or "best") part of the produce of cultivation, which represents the cultivated plant or its "mother," "queen," "spouse," and so on. The wedding pattern ritually enacts, and thus controls, the positive outcome of the efforts and risks of cultivation, and thus performs a symbolic fecundation of the cultivated plant—and not just any fecundation, but a cultural one, sanctioned by a marriage ritual, just as the fertilization of cultivated plants is felt to be a highly cultural phenomenon. The dramatic importance of the crisis ritually enacted and controlled by the death pattern is further clarified by the fact that the death and burial of the representative of cultivated plants is often a symbolic but sometimes a real animal, or even human, ritual killing.

While the belief in "mother" figures who represent or control the reproductive power of the cultivated plants is typical of cultivator societies, belief in an earth mother is not limited to those societies. Indeed, the personification of the earth as a fecund mother, based on the simple symbolic connection between female animal (human) fecundity and the fertility of the earth from which the plants grow, is not unknown to hunter-gatherer societies. On the other hand, most of the data interpreted as pointing toward that belief are derived from beliefs and cultic practices pertaining to polytheistic religions; the goddesses interpreted as earth figures are usually complex deities, whose connection with the fertile earth is only one aspect of their personalities. Nevertheless, the earth complex, often coupled with a cult of the sky or of a sky figure as a fertilizing father (dispenser of rain) and with the equation between fecund women and the cultivated earth, is present in many cultivators' religions and survives in specific rituals (e.g., in formulaic prayers such as the Anglo-Saxon invocation to Herce or the pseudo-Homeric hymn to Gaia, a polytheistic goddess whose name means "earth," and who was invoked as a dispenser of crops). Earth-mother beliefs are especially important in the "wheat zone," where they are more central in cosmogonic and anthropogenic myths than in direct connection with agriculture. The fact that in many cultivating societies, and possibly in the distant origins of cultivation, women were in charge of the domesticated plants enhanced the association between the female sphere and the cultivated earth. A variety of female figures, whose sexuality and fecundity are strongly stressed, are usually referred to the earth mother complex; they appear in the Old World from Neolithic times to later antiquity in the form of statuettes or in paintings and reliefs on pottery and elsewhere. The most ancient and important documents pertaining to such figures may be the recently discovered paintings on the walls of a ceremonial building in the early agricultural settlement of Çatal Hüyük; but the female figures depicted in those paintings and in roughly contemporary statuettes from Çatal Hüyük and Hacilar are never clearly associated with symbols pointing to agriculture, but rather with animals such as vultures, leopards, and bulls.

In examining some examples of seasonal calendars pertaining to cultivators, we have mentioned the connection between the dead and the products of cultivation. The most meaningful and widespread example of such a connection is the belief in the return of the dead during the harvest festival or great feast among Melanesian and Polynesian yam and taro growers. The hungry dead are believed to invade the territory of the living in that festive time and are offered part of the produce. Similar connections between fertility feasts of agriculturalists and the return of the dead are not unknown to other societies of cultivators (e.g., the Christmas festivities of the northern European peasants involve both the dead and a celebration of fertility and life).

The offering of first fruits, or of parts of the produce of cultivation, to the returning dead has been interpreted by Vittorio Lanternari as a response to the periodic crisis represented by the sudden abundance of food, and by the suspension of the labors of cultivation after the harvesting. The earth, sacrilegiously tilled or dug by the cultivators, is seen as the home of the dead, who belong to a sphere that, like the virgin earth that must be "treated" by the cultivators, is foreign and uncontrolled. By offering a part of the produce to the returning dead the cultivators react to and control the seasonal crisis and risk. The dead, moreover, return collectively, because the work of the cultivators is collective; they return annually, at the end of the agrarian cycle. They enter the village because during the year the village has invaded the earth, their domain, to modify it; they are menacingly hungry because, to satiate their own hunger, the living have attacked the earth and shall attack it again the following year.

Although this is probably a correct interpretation of the widespread belief in a collective and periodical return of the dead in crucial moments of the seasonal calendar of cultivators, other data point to different views of the relationship of the dead with the cultivated plants. In particular, the strong connection between funerary, agrarian, and sexual rituals shows that the dead are often seen as active forces in the positive outcome of the labors of cultivation. The Bambara of Mali, West Africa, for example, pour water over the head of the dead person and implore him or her to send them a good harvest; the Finnish cerealiculturalists mix bones or objects belonging to the dead with the seed during the sowing and return the objects to the graveyard after the harvest, whereas German peasants similarly use soil they have dug out from a tomb. The equation between the seed or tuber, buried in the ground, and the dead, whose memory continues in the life of their progeny, is probably the basic concept underlying these and similar cases. The structure of the ancient Chinese peasant house described by Marcel Granet, with the inner section containing the stored grain, and near it the marriage bed of the couple and the burial place of the family ancestors, is the best synthetic representation of such a conception.

Origin Myths

The beliefs discussed so far, which shape the ritual aspect of the activities of cultivators, are expressed just as clearly in the myths traditionally related to account for the origins of cultivated plants or of the various technical and economic activities of cultivators, as well as to validate their cultural systems.

Some myths stress the symbolic correspondence between the cultivated plants and human beings and between sexual fecundity and vegetal fertility, the similarity between the techniques of cultivation and those of childraising, and the "motherly" quality of the cultivated earth. Others give more attention to the (miraculous) origin of the cultivated plants or techniques of cultivation. Among these last myths, Adolf E. Jensen distinguished two main, widespread types, attributing to cultivators of tuberous plants the type of myth that connects cultivation and death, mostly by recounting the birth of the cultivated plants from the body of a slain primordial being (the Hainuwele type) and attributing to cerealiculturalists myths of the theft of the basic cultivated cereals by primeval humankind. Jensen called the latter the Prometheus type, using the name of the Greek mythic figure Prometheus, who stole elements of human culture from the gods. But this rigid distinction should be abandoned, not only because the origin of cereals is often connected to a mythic killing (echoes of this are to be found, e.g., in the Osirian mythology of the Egyptians) but also, or rather especially, because the central theme of both these types, that of the primeval guilt connected by origin myths to the beginnings of cultivation, can be shown to be more richly differentiated. This theme includes at least (1) the killing of the primeval figure (Hainuwele type); (2) the stealing of the original cultivated plant (Prometheus type); and (3) the spying upon, and thus the offending of, a primeval generous female figure to whom the first introduction of cultivated plants or food is attributed.

Two myths of the Kiwai of New Guinea are good examples of the first type we have mentioned; they stress the earth-mother and plant-child symbolism. One of these myths tells of a woman named Opae, who gave birth but, having no husband and no idea of what a baby was, abandoned the child. A bird took care of it and protected its body and arms with taro leaves; later the bird came back with some taro bark and a taro root, covered the baby's body with the bark, and tied the root to its head. The root penetrated the ground and started to grow, and the baby's body was transformed into the first cultivated taro plant. The other Kiwai myth recounts the origin of yam cultivation. A man who had no wife dug a hole in the ground and had intercourse with the earth. But under the earth a woman was hidden, Tshikaro by name. She became pregnant, and, as is done with women at childbirth, she was surrounded by an enclosure made of mats (the mythic prototype of the enclosures protecting the yam gardens of the Kiwai) and gave birth to many yam tubers.

The most famous myth that connects cultivation and death by recounting the origin of the cultivated plants from the body of a slain primordial being is the Hainuwele myth of the islanders of Ceram (Indonesia), studied by Adolf E. Jensen and used by him as a prototype of this category. Hainuwele, a young maid, was killed, her body was cut in pieces, and the pieces were buried; from the various parts of her body, the various cultivated plants were born. The killing of Hainuwele gave rise not just to the plants, but in different ways to sexuality, to death, and to many cultural institutions. Myths of this type are present in all continents. An American example is the Maya account of the origin of maize from the heart of the Maize Mother. An African one is the Nzima (Ghana) myth of the origin of that same plant. In the Nzima myth, two female figures appear: a mother, the ancestress responsible for the introduction of maize cultivation, and her daughter, sacrificed by the mother. An ancient Greek myth of cerealiculture also features a mother and her daughter. The goddess Demeter, angry because her young daughter Persephone has been abducted by the netherworld god, causes the vegetation (specifically, cereals) to wither and abandons the gods to travel among men. She is taken for an old woman and employed by a king and his wife as a nurse for their baby. Although she is spied upon and interrupted while trying to make the baby immortal by burning it, and then leaves the king's palace forever, condemning the baby to mortality, she teaches the king the Eleusinian mysteries. Finally, Persephone returns to the upper world, where she will periodically reside, and the vegetation is revived. In other versions, Demeter teaches the techniques of agriculture to a king who had helped her. This myth, in whatever version, sanctions mortality, agriculture, and the most famous of Greek mystery rites as fundamental and related aspects of known since primeval times human existence and presents a motherly figure as responsible for the origin of cultivation.

The correspondence between the female protagonists of myths of this kind and the second type of extrahuman entities described in the previous section is often explicit. However, as in the myth of the Cochiti Pueblo of New Mexico, the correspondence may be indirect. The Mother of the Indians, we are told, abandoned her children; when they sent messengers to her underground dwelling to ask for her help in a moment of crisis, she gave them the first maize "fetish" or doll, made of a maize plant adorned with feathers and buckskin strings, a prototype of the object used by the Cochiti in agrarian rituals. Clearly, the maize figure is a substitute for the Mother, and, as in the case of Demeter in the first version of her myth, it is ritual material connected with cultivation rather than cultivation itself that is given to humans by the disappearing female.

As for the theme (subtype 3) of the offended superhuman female, it is present in many myths of the "excretion" type. In a series of myths told by the Creek, Cherokee, and Natchez maize growers of the southeastern United States, the mythic woman, who sometimes appears in the shape of a maize plant or cob, gives maize (and sometimes beans) to humans. She takes care of orphans and other needy people, and for them she produces maize grains by rubbing her own body. The woman is murdered in some versions, and in others she offers herself in sacrifice; but in all versions of the myth, before dying, she instructs the people about the actions they must perform in order to let maize and beans spring forth from her body. Myths of this type are widespread. Two more examples will serve to indicate that the themes these myths have in common are not restricted to the "excretion" motif but include the motif typical of the third "subtype" of the classification given above.

In a myth of the Toraja of Sulawesi (Indonesia), a fisherman often left his wife to go on fishing expeditions; when he came back, he always found a large pot full of rice, but his wife would not tell him from whence it had come. One day, he spied on her through a fissure in the wall of their dwelling and saw that she rubbed her hands together over the pot and thus filled it with rice. Disgusted by this discovery, he reproached her for this unclean procedure; as a result of his reproaches the woman transformed herself into a rice plant, and he became a sago palm. The yam and taro growers of Melanesia and New Guinea have similar myths (in New Guinea, the myths are about Yam Woman, who miraculously produces yams from her own body), but a complex myth, very similar to the American and Indonesian myths, is to be found among the Maori of New Zealand and accounts for the origin of the kumara (sweet potato). The goddess Pani took care of two young orphaned nephews and nourished them with baked kumara; the two brothers, who loved this previously unknown food, kept asking where it came from, but Pani would not tell them. One day, one of the brothers spied on her and discovered that she drew the sweet potatoes from her own body while lying in the water. In another version, she obtained the kumara by rubbing her hands on her belly. The boy told his brother: "We are eating Pani's excretions." Ashamed, Pani retired to the netherworld, where one of the nephews magically reached her and found her cultivating kumara.

In America, Indonesia, and New Zealand a female figure is thus believed to have obtained the main cultivated plant from her own body and to have given it generously to the needy; it is further recounted that she was spied on while doing this, and that, ashamed or offended, she disappeared, having given rise to the cultivated plants and to the techiques of agriculture. The similarity between these myths and the ancient Greek myth about Demeter is striking, and points to connections between the origin myths of cerealiculturalists and those of other cultivators. The complexity of historical derivations and typological connections between the various origin myths can be illustrated by one last, paradoxical example. In mythical times, according to traditional Maya beliefs, the rain god hit with his lightning the rock in which the maize god was hidden, and the maize god was born, the answer to the prayers of primeval, needy mankind. The later, christianized culture of Guatemala and Yucatán, however, reinterpreted the ancient Maya maize god as a Christ-like, bread-of-life figure, thus introducing elements of the Hainuwele type into a traditional myth more similar to the Prometheus type.

As shown by many of these examples, the myths about the origin of cultivation point to crisis as well as to fertility. Many such myths present the cultivation of plants as an ambiguous, dangerous innovation, caused by a primeval mistake or sin. The attitude they reflect is similar to that expressed by the ritual "return of the dead" during crucial moments of the seasonal cycle. The costs and risks of cultivation are expressed mythically and ritually by societies whose well-being, contingent upon the outcome of cultivation, is perennially at stake, and must be continually reaffirmed both by technical and by ritual and ideological means. By relegating the nonagrarian life to a distant past, and by showing the positive consequences of the "sacrilegious" invading of uncontrolled nature by human endeavor, the founding myths of cultivators reinforce the cultural and economic systems that express them and protect the social body against a recurrent series of cyclical crises.

Religious and Social Values of Cultivators

In many origin myths the female responsible for the beginning of cultivation acted in favor of helpless or derelict children who did not belong to a system of family solidarity (e.g., orphans), or she is presented as a generous nourisher. This mythic trait corresponds well to the importance of hospitality among cultivators and to the periodic redistribution of the produce of cultivation on festive occasions that reach their peak in the alimentary orgy and in the offerings of first fruits to the returning dead on ritual occasions. The foundation of all these conceptions, beliefs, and behaviors is the economic life that cultivation makes possible, a stable way of life in which the relative abundance of food makes further economic and cultural changes possible, makes the redistribution of the yearly produce among the members of the community a vital task, and provides a surplus for ritual and even orgiastic consumption on given seasonal occasions.

A relatively egalitarian ideology of collective labor, festive consumption, generalized redistribution, and hospitable generosity is typical of the less complex societies of cultivators. It is replaced by an ideology of vertical concentration and redistribution in societies in which production, distribution, and consumption of agrarian produce become more complex, tasks and roles become more differentiated, and a privileged status is assumed by a group or a person, chief, or king. The cooperation and solidarity necessary to obtain and share a good harvest are identified with the ability of the rulers to organize, to judge, and to distribute the yearly produce. Harvest festivals, as happen in Africa in the Swazi kingdom, may become the occasion for ritual dramas of rebellion and reproach, enhancing and upholding the "rights" of the subjects and stressing the "duties" of the rulers. On the other hand, in societies such as these the sanctity of the (private) property of the land, and of its symbol, the boundary stone, is upheld by religious beliefs and sactions; the other face of kingly generosity, the periodic tribute of a part of the agrarian produce to the rulers, is also upheld by sacred sanctions.

Just as the importance of social solidarity for the very survival of agrarian communities is stressed by beliefs and rites based upon redistribution and consumption, other aspects of the ethos of cultivators are expressed by other religious complexes. Despite the importance of sexual license and festive license of various types in the religiosity of cultivators, the belief that the respect of social and religious rules and prohibitions, of ritual purity, and of sexual purity in particular is essential for the good functioning of cultivation is a worldwide feature. The ritual purity of the peasants of modern northern Europe is obtained by a bath and the donning of new or clean clothes before the main agricultural labors, such as plowing or sowing or reaping. The importance of virgins, old men and women, and even eunuchs in rituals and cults either directly agrarian (such as the ancient Egyptian rites performed by castrated men to ensure the yearly Nile inundation and the fertility of the fields) or linked to mother goddesses is an extreme aspect of this symbolic complex. In many hierarchical societies, the chief or king must live in a perpetual state of ritual purity. This purity is believed to have a direct influence upon the agrarian produce and is upheld by a complex series of norms and taboos.

The correct distribution of the yearly produce of cultivation and the correct functioning of ritual and social norms are thus no less important in the religious life of cultivators than sexual symbolism or the belief that extrahuman entities control or embody the growth of cultivated plants. Of equal importance is the religious aura surrounding the specific technical aspects of agrarian production; the sanctity of animals such as the plow ox in ancient Greece or of objects such as the plow among early modern Italian peasants and the agriculturists of Madagascar today are good examples. What is most meaningful, however, is the widespread sacrality of the general complex of technical knowledge and ritual lore necessary to cultivation.

Technical knowledge and ritual lore are often believed to have been learned from extrahuman beings in mythic times. Moreover, the acquiring of that knowledge is often connected with a primeval mistake or sin and is tied to the origins of the main cultural traits of the society that are expressed in myth, as well as to the beginnings of human mortality. The fact that the Eleusinian mysteries are mythically founded by a narrative tradition that also recounts the divine origin of agriculture may point to an intrinsic connection between the technical-ritual knowledge necessary for cultivation and the ritual and symbolic knowledge about the religious value of human life that was the object of what we call "mystery" cults. This point aside, the agrarian connections of the ancient mystery cults are beyond doubt, as are the connections between the eschatological and soteriological expectations the mystery cults express and the agriculturist's awareness of the perennial repetition of the agrarian cycle of the "death" and "rebirth" of plants.

See Also

Calendars; Culture Heroes; Neolithic Religion; Seasonal Ceremonies; Vegetation.

Bibliography

A useful treatment of agriculture and cultivation throughout the world, with special attention to primitive societies, is Vinigi Grottaneli's Etnologica: L'uomo e la civita, vol. 2, Le opere dell'uomo (Milan, 1965); see pages 573–754. On the origin of agriculture in the Neolithic period, see Sonia Cole's The Neolithic Revolution, 5th ed. (London, 1970), and other studies quoted by Grottanelli and by Mircea Eliade in A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (Chicago, 1978), chapter 1. On Neolithic religion, the most ambitious study is the volume on eastern European Neolithic religions by Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500–3500 B.C., 2d rev. ed. (Berkeley, 1982). The main works on the religiosity and cults of agriculturalists, which shaped the field for many decades, are Wilhelm Mannhardt's Wald- und Feldkulte, 2 vols. (1875–1877; reprint, Darmstadt, 1963), his Mythologische Forschungen aus dem Nachlasse (Strassburg, 1884), and James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, 3d ed., rev. and enl., 12 vols. (London, 1911–1915). Within Frazer's huge work the books treating myths and rituals of agriculture more specifically are Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 2 vols. (London, 1914), and Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, 2 vols. (London, 1912).

Other important, later contributions on agrarian rituals and beliefs, which approach the agricultural material from the viewpoint of theories based primarily on the study of cerealiculturalist peasants, include Aukusti V. Rantasalo's Der Ackerbau in Volksaberglauben der Finnen und Esten mit entsprechenden Gebrauchen der Germanen vergleichen, 5 vols. (Helsinki, 1919–1925), and Johann Jakob Meyer's Trilogie altindischer Mächte und Feste der Vegetation, 3 vols. (Zurich and Leipzig, 1937). Vladimir I. Propp's Russkie agrarnje prazdniki (Leningrad, 1963), an interesting study of Russian agrarian festivals, follows Frazer with some modifications. An Italian translation is available: Feste agrarie russe (Bari, 1978). An important criticism of the views of Mannhardt and Frazer is C. W. von Sydow's "The Mannhardtian Theories about the Last Sheaf and the Fertility Demons from a Modern Critical Point of View," Folklore 45 (1934): 291–309, reprinted in C. W. von Sydow's Selected Papers on Folklore (Copenhagen, 1948). The most important recent contribution on "agrarian" religions is Mircea Eliade's A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1 (cited above), where the central ideas expressed in his Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York, 1958), chaps. 7–9, are developed and at times modified.

Good studies of the religiosity of cultivators outside the "wheat zone" are Marcel Granet's Festivals and Songs of Ancient China (1919; New York, 1932) and Bronislaw Malinowski's Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 2 vols. (London, 1935). The ethnographical bibliography on the religiosity of primitive cultivators is huge; a most important study of the subject is the book by Vittorio Lanternari, "La Grande Festa": Vita rituale e sistemi di produzione nelle società tradizionali, 2d ed. (Bari, 1976). On the beliefs and rituals of cultivators, Angelo Brelich's Introduzione alla storia delle religioni (Rome, 1966) is also useful.

On earth-mother figures, see Albrecht Dieterich's Mutter Erde, 3d ed. (Leipzig, 1925), and the criticism by Olof Pettersson, Mother Earth: An Analysis of the Mother Earth Concepts According to Albert Dieterich (Lund, 1967). On the earth-mother figurines, see Peter J. Ucko's study Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete (London, 1968).

The following sources treat the origin myths: Adolf E. Jensen's Das religiöse Welbild einer frühen Kultur, 2d ed. (Stuttgart, 1949); Carl A. Schmitz's "Die Problematik der mytho-logeme 'Hainuwele' und 'Prometheus,'" Anthropos 55 (1960): 215–238; Atsuhiko Yoshida's "Les excrétions de la Déesse et l'origine de l'agriculture," Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 21 (July-August 1966): 717–728; and Gudmund Hatt's "The Corn Mother in America and in Indonesia," Anthropos 46 (1951): 853–914.

New Sources

Baudy, Dorothea. Römische Umgangsriten. Berlin-New York, 1998. Interpretation of Roman agrarian rituals in ethnological perspective.

Baudy, Gerhard. Adonisgärten. Studien zur antiken Samensymbolik. Frankfurt am Main, 1986. The gardens of Adonis interpreted in the frame of agrarian rituality.

Baudy, Gerhard. "Cereal Diet and the Origins of man. Myths of the Eleusinia in the Context of Ancient Mediterranean Harvest-Festivals." In Food in Antiquity, edited by John Wilkins. Exeter, U.K., 1995, pp. 177–195.

Bausinger, Hermann. Volkskultur in der technischen Welt. Stuttgart, 1961, 2d edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1986. Criticism of agrarian interpretations in German folklore.

Massenzio, "Vegetationskult." In Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, vol. 5, edited by H. Cancik, B. Gladigow and K.-H. Kohl. Stuttgart, 2001. A recent synthesis on vegetation and fertility issues in comparative religious studies, though very parochial in its perspective since the discussion is based on a selection of Italian literature.

Müller, Klaus E. Die bessere und die schlechtere Hälfte. Ethnologie des Geschlechterkonflikts. Frankfurt-New York, 1984. Gender roles and gender conflict in agrarian primal cultures.

Müller, Klaus E. "Grundzüge der agrarischen lebens- und Weltanschauung." Paideuma 19–20 (1973–1974): 54–124. The most complete and updated treatment of the relationship between religion and agriculture in a cross-cultural perspective based on a culture-historical approach.

Sabbatucci, Mistica agraria e demistificazione. Rome, 1986. Agrarian mysticism demystified in post-modern vein.

Schlatter, Gerhard. "Agrarische Riten." In Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, vol. 2, edited by H. Cancik, B. Gladigow and M. Laubscher, pp. 417–419. Stuttgart, 1988.

Weber-Kellermann. Erntebrauch in der ländlichen Arbeitswelt des 19. Jahrhunderts auf Grund der Mannhardtbefragung in Deutschland von 1865. Marburg am Lahn, Germany, 1965. A reappraisal of Mannhardt's vegetation theory.

Cristiano Grottanelli (1987)

Revised Bibliography