Some American Corn Gods 269 



The American Mother is the last of the maize goddesses. 

 Like all who have preceded her, she demands homage to her 

 maternity. On her feast, which is celebrated annually at corn- 

 planting time, her children pay her tribute in flowers, in spe- 

 cially worded verses invented by the greeting-card manufac- 

 turer and the telegraph companies. On occasions she has 

 demanded human sacrifice. The years between 1914 and 1918 

 revealed a blood-lust in women of all the warring nations 

 which struck terror to the hearts of men. An American in- 

 fantry officer who was gravely wounded on the Meuse, told 

 me that the greatest horror the war held for him was a woman 

 who caught at his stirrup as he rode through Liverpool on his 

 way to the front. "Rip the living hearts out of them for me," 

 she shrieked. The face and the voice were those of the mother 

 of Pentheus who joyed in the dismemberment of her son. 

 But only in America did mothers who lost sons in the World 

 War adopt an emblem which proclaimed pride in their sons' 

 deaths. American Gold Star Mothers, convening in Paris to 

 go sight-seeing, shop, and visit the army cemeteries, pro- 

 foundly shocked numbers of European women whose loss by 

 the war had been far greater than that of the Americans. 



Men and women of all peoples and of all times have loved 

 the women who bore them. But no other people in world 

 history have enveloped their human mothers in the habili- 

 ments of the ancient moon and earth deities. For this we 

 have to thank the American corn. 



It is not at all improbable that this bondage to the mother- 

 image is in large measure responsible for the failure of Amer- 

 ican marriage. The case records of the psychiatrists, family 

 courts and marriage clinics all over the country reveal how 

 far-reaching is the power of the Mother. Scores of folk tales in 

 all the languages of the earth remind man that he cannot 

 achieve a realistic relationship to his mate until he is free of 

 bondage to the mother-image. Americans do not have to seek 

 confirmation of this psychological truth in Arthurian legends 



