GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP. 501 



an embodied corn spirit. Such frank inconsistencies, which to us 

 would seem fatal to the success of any theory, appear perfectly 

 natural to the easy-going mind of primitive man. To him, the 

 ghost may reasonably appear in any one of many alternative 

 forms. He recognizes it equally in the snake that glides from 

 under the stones of the tumulus, in the beast or bird that crosses 

 his path after the offering of prayer to his deified ancestor, in the 

 shadowy form that eludes his prying gaze amid the dense shades 

 of the primeval forest, and in the vague human shape that stands 

 beside him in his dreams, and whispers into his ear uncertain 

 warnings or dim promises for the future. So, too, with plants. 

 From one point of view, Attis is the corn that springs directly 

 from the dead god's body ; but from another point of view he is 

 the pine tree that grows with waving boughs above the grassy 

 barrow of the self-slain or self-devoted hero. Whatever comes 

 from the dead body, whatever seems to stand in close relation to 

 it, is regarded in the simple philosophy of these naif worshipers 

 as an embodiment or representative of the multiform deity. 

 Thus, in the extant descriptions of the ceremonies of the Attis fes- 

 tival, we get traces or glimpses of every one in turn among these 

 alternative conceptions. Attis is first of all envisaged as a hu- 

 man being — a young man who dies a violent death in a particular 

 fashion. This death by self-mutilation seems to point to a further 

 development of the same idea which lies at the bottom of the 

 Kandh practice of buying the victim and paying for him with a 

 price — namely, it implies a certain obvious element of consent 

 and self-sacrifice — a realization of the principle that " it is expedi- 

 ent that one man should die for the people." So the West Afri- 

 can victims, we are told, went gladly to their doom ; and so, too, 

 in Phoenician and Carthaginian history we often find that in 

 great crises of the state young men of good family volunteered to 

 devote themselves as victims to Baal on behalf of the fatherland. 

 Once more, after his death, Attis is changed into a pine tree ; and 

 his festival is inaugurated by cutting down just such a pine tree 

 in the woods, which is accepted as in a certain sense the embodi- 

 ment and representative of the dead Attis. But still the human 

 embodiment remains side by side to the end with the vegetable 

 one ; for the effigy of a young man is also attached to the middle 

 of the tree, as the young man himself was no doubt attached in 

 still earlier practice. All this is comprehensible enough when we 

 recollect that the original corn and the original pine tree may 

 actually have grown out of the body or barrow of the self -devoted 

 man god in earlier times, and that the ceremonies described for 

 us by late classical writers represent very mitigated and modified 

 forms of extremely ancient and savage rites. 



There is also an interesting transitional stage, it seems to me, 



