Chapter 11. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation.
FROM THE PRECEDING examination of the spring and summer festivals of Europe we
may infer that our rude forefathers personified the powers of vegetation as male and
female, and attempted, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to quicken the
growth of trees and plants by representing the marriage of the sylvan deities in the persons
of a King and Queen of May, a Whitsun Bridegroom and Bride, and so forth. Such
representations were accordingly no mere symbolic or allegorical dramas, pastoral plays
designed to amuse or instruct a rustic audience. They were charms intended to make the
woods to grow green, the fresh grass to sprout, the corn to shoot, and the flowers to
blow. And it was natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the
leaf-clad or flower-decked mummers aped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the
more effective would be the charm. Accordingly we may assume with a high degree of
probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time
not an accidental excess but an essential part of the rites, and that in the opinion of those
who performed them the marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without the real
union of the human sexes. At the present day it might perhaps be vain to look in civilised
Europe for customs of this sort observed for the explicit purpose of promoting the growth
of vegetation. But ruder races in other parts of the world have consciously employed the
intercourse of the sexes as a means to ensure the fruitfulness of the earth; and some rites
which are still, or were till lately, kept up in Europe can be reasonably explained only as
stunted relics of a similar practice. The following facts will make this plain. 1
For four days before they committed the seed to the earth the Pipiles of Central America
kept apart from their wives "in order that on the night before planting they might indulge
their passions to the fullest extent; certain persons are even said to have been appointed to
perform the sexual act at the very moment when the first seeds were deposited in the
ground." The use of their wives at that time was indeed enjoined upon the people by the
priests as a religious duty, in default of which it was not lawful to sow the seed. The only
possible explanation of this custom seems to be that the Indians confused the process by
which human beings reproduce their kind with the process by which plants discharge the
same function, and fancied that by resorting to the former they were simultaneously
forwarding the latter. In some parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be on
the rice, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual
intercourse for the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop. In the Leti, Sarmata, and
some other groups of islands which lie between the western end of New Guinea and the
northern part of Australia, the heathen population regard the sun as the male principle by
whom the earth or female prínciple is fertilised. They call him Upu-lera or Mr. Sun, and
represent him under the form of a lamp made of coco-nut leaves, which may be seen
hanging everywhere in their houses and in the sacred fig-tree. Under the tree lies a large
flat stone, which serves as a sacrificial table. On it the heads of slain foes were and are still
placed in some of the islands. Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy season, Mr. Sun
comes down into the holy fig-tree to fertilise the earth, and to facilitate his descent a
ladder with seven rungs is considerately placed at his disposal. It is set up under the tree
and is adorned with carved figures of the birds whose shrill clarion heralds the approach of
the sun in the east. On this occasion pigs and dogs are sacrificed in profusion; men and
women alike indulge in a saturnalia; and the mystic union of the sun and the earth is
dramatically represented in public, amid song and dance, by the real union of the sexes
under the tree. The object of the festival, we are told, is to procure rain, plenty of food and
drink, abundance of cattle and children and riches from Grandfather Sun. They pray that he
may make every she-goat to cast two or three young, the people to multiply, the dead pigs
to be replaced by living pigs, the empty rice-baskets to be filled, and so on. And to induce
him to grant their requests they offer him pork and rice and liquor, and invite him to fall to.
In the Babar Islands a special flag is hoisted at this festival as a symbol of the creative
energy of the sun; it is of white cotton, about nine feet high, and consists of the figure of a
man in an appropriate attitude. It would be unjust to treat these orgies as a mere outburst of
unbridled passion; no doubt they are deliberately and solemnly organised as essential to the
fertility of the earth and the welfare of man. 2
The same means which are thus adopted to stimulate the growth of the crops are naturally
employed to ensure the fruitfulness of trees. In some parts of Amboyna, when the state of
the clove plantation indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men go naked to the
plantations by night, and there seek to fertilise the trees precisely as they would impregnate
women, while at the same time they call out for "More cloves!" This is supposed to make the
trees bear fruit more abundantly. 3
The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the intimate relation between the
intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of the ground that among them a barren wife is
generally sent away, because she is supposed to prevent her husband's garden from
bearing fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of extraordinary fertility by
becoming the parents of twins are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a
corresponding power of increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish
them with their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the twins a ceremony is
performed, the object of which clearly is to transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents
to the plantains. The mother lies down on her back in the thick grass near the house and
places a flower of the plantain between her legs; then her husband comes and knocks the
flower away with his genital member. Further, the parents go through the country
performing dances in the gardens of favoured friends, apparently for the purpose of
causing the plantain-trees to bear fruit more abundantly. 4
In various parts of Europe customs have prevailed both at spring and harvest which are
clearly based on the same crude notion that the relation of the human sexes to each other
can be so used as to quicken the growth of plants. For example, in the Ukraine on St.
George's Day (the twenty-third of April) the priest in his robes, attended by his acolytes,
goes out to the fields of the village, where the crops are beginning to show green above
the ground, and blesses them. After that the young married people lie down in couples on
the sown fields and roll several times over on them, in the belief that this will promote the
growth of the crops. In some parts of Russia the priest himself is rolled by women over the
sprouting crop, and that without regard to the mud and holes which he may encounter in
his beneficent progress. If the shepherd resists or remonstrates, his flock murmurs, "Little
Father, you do not really wish us well, you do not wish us to have corn, although you do
wish to live on our corn." In some parts of Germany at harvest the men and women, who
have reaped the corn, roll together on the field. This again is probably a mitigation of an
older and ruder custom designed to impart fertility to the fields by methods like those
resorted to by the Pipiles of Central America long ago and by the cultivators of rice in Java
at the present time. 5
To the student who cares to track the devious course of the human mind in its gropings
after truth, it is of some interest to observe that the same theoretical belief in the
sympathetic influence of the sexes on vegetation, which has led some peoples to indulge
their passions as a means of fertilising the earth, has led others to seek the same end by
directly opposite means. From the moment that they sowed the maize till the time that they
reaped it, the Indians of Nicaragua lived chastely, keeping apart from their wives and
sleeping in a separate place. They ate no salt, and drank neither cocoa nor chicha, the
fermented liquor made from maize; in short the season was for them, as the Spanish
historian observes, a time of abstinence. To this day some of the Indian tribes of Central
America practise continence for the purpose of thereby promoting the growth of the crops.
Thus we are told that before sowing the maize the Kekchi Indians sleep apart from their
wives, and eat no flesh for five days, while among the Lanquineros and Cajaboneros the
period of abstinence from these carnal pleasures extends to thirteen days. So amongst
some of the Germans of Transylvania it is a rule that no man may sleep with his wife during
the whole of the time that he is engaged in sowing his fields. The same rule is observed at
Kalotaszeg in Hungary; the people think that if the custom were not observed the corn
would be mildewed. Similarly a Central Australian headman of the Kaitish tribe strictly
abstains from marital relations with his wife all the time that he is performing magical
ceremonies to make the grass grow; for he believes that a breach of this rule would prevent
the grass seed from sprouting properly. In some of the Melanesian islands, when the yam
vines are being trained, the men sleep near the gardens and never approach their wives;
should they enter the garden after breaking this rule of continence the fruits of the garden
would be spoilt. 6
If we ask why it is that similar beliefs should logically lead, among different peoples, to such
opposite modes of conduct as strict chastity and more or less open debauchery, the reason,
as it presents itself to the primitive mind, is perhaps not very far to seek. If rude man
identifies himself, in a manner, with nature; if he fails to distinguish the impulses and
processes in himself from the methods which nature adopts to ensure the reproduction of
plants and animals, he may leap to one of two conclusions. Either he may infer that by
yielding to his appetites he will thereby assist in the multiplication of plants and animals; or
he may imagine that the vigour which he refuses to expend in reproducing his own kind, will
form as it were a store of energy whereby other creatures, whether vegetable or animal, will
somehow benefit in propagating their species. Thus from the same crude philosophy, the
same primitive notions of nature and life, the savage may derive by different channels a rule
either of profligacy or of asceticism. 7
To readers bred in religion which is saturated with the ascetic idealism of the East, the
explanation which I have given of the rule of continence observed under certain
circumstances by rude or savage peoples may seem far-fetched and improbable. They may
think that moral purity, which is so intimately associated in their minds with the observance
of such a rule, furnishes a sufficient explanation of it; they may hold with Milton that
chastity in itself is a noble virtue, and that the restraint which it imposes on one of the
strongest impulses of our animal nature marks out those who can submit to it as men raised
above the common herd, and therefore worthy to receive the seal of the divine
approbation. However natural this mode of thought may seem to us, it is utterly foreign and
indeed incomprehensible to the savage. If he resists on occasion the sexual instinct, it is
from no high idealism, no ethereal aspiration after moral purity, but for the sake of some
ulterior yet perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which he is prepared to sacrifice
the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is or may be so, the examples I have
cited are amply sufficient to prove. They show that where the instinct of self-preservation,
which manifests itself chiefly in the search for food, conflicts or appears to conflict with the
instinct which conduces to the propagation of the species, the former instinct, as the
primary and more fundamental, is capable of overmastering the latter. In short, the savage
is willing to restrain his sexual propensity for the sake of food. Another object for the sake
of which he consents to exercise the same self-restraint is victory in war. Not only the
warrior in the field but his friends at home will often bridle their sensual appetites from a
belief that by so doing they will the more easily overcome their enemies. The fallacy of such a
belief, like the belief that the chastity of the sower conduces to the growth of the seed, is
plain enough to us; yet perhaps the self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain and
false as they are, have imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and
strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists
mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate
temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The
more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height
of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the
sake of keeping or winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom
and truth. 8