Similar to the seeds buried in the telluric matrix, the dead are waiting to return to life in a new form. For this reason they approach the living, especially in the moments in which the vital tension of the collectivities reaches its maximum, that is in the so-called fertility festivals, when the generating forces of nature and of the human group are evoked, unleashed, exasperated by rites, by opulence. and from the orgy. The link between ancestors, crops and erotic life is so close that funeral, agricultural and genital cults interpenetrate, sometimes to the point of complete fusion.
di Mircea eliade
Adapted from Treatise on the history of religions (Β§ 134, 135, 138, 139); cover: John Anster Fitzgerald, The Death of a Faerie, 1860
The Dead and the Seeds
Agriculture, as a profane technique and as a form of worship, meets the world of the dead on two distinct levels. The first is solidarity with the land; the dead, like the seeds, are buried, they penetrate the chthonic dimension accessible to them alone. On the other hand, agriculture is par excellence a technique of fertility, of life that reproduces by multiplying, and the dead are particularly attracted to this mystery of rebirth, palingenesis and endless fertility. Similar to the seeds buried in the telluric matrix, the dead are waiting to return to life in a new form. This is why they approach the living, especially at times when the vital tension of the collectivity reaches its maximum, that is, in the so-called fertility festivals., when the generative forces of nature and of the human group are evoked, unleashed, exasperated by rites, opulence and orgy. The souls of the dead are thirsty for every biological exuberance, for every organic excess, because this overflow of life compensates for the poverty of their substance and projects them into an impetuous current of virtuality and germs.
The collective banquet represents precisely this concentration of vital energy; a banquet, with all the excesses it entails, is therefore indispensable both for agricultural feasts and for the commemoration of the dead. Once the banquets even took place next to the tombs, so that the deceased could enjoy the vital exuberance released next to him. In India, beans were par excellence the offering made to the dead, but were both considered an aphrodisiac. In China, the marriage bed was in the darkest corner of the house, where the seeds were kept, above the exact spot where the dead were buried. The link between ancestors, crops and erotic life is so close that funeral, agricultural and genital cults interpenetrate, sometimes to the point of complete fusion. Among the Nordic peoples Christmas ("Julβ) Was the feast of the dead and, at the same time, an exaltation of fertility, of life. Abundant banquets are held for Christmas, and it is often on this occasion that weddings are celebrated and graves are looked after.
In those days the dead return to take part in the fertility rites of the living. In Sweden, the wife keeps a piece of the wedding cake in the dowry cupboard, to take it with her to the grave. Likewise, both in the Nordic countries and in China, women are buried in a wedding dress. The "arch of honor" raised above the path of the spouses is identical to the one raised in the cemetery to receive a dead man. The Christmas tree (originally, in the north, a tree to which only the leaves of the top were left, a 'May') appears in weddings as in funerals. It is useless to remember the βpost mortemβ wedding, real or symbolic, which we will talk about elsewhere, and which are explained by the desire to ensure the dead man an excellent vital condition and to project him into a generative state. If the dead seek the spermatic and germinative modalities, it is equally true that the living also need the dead to defend the sown and protect the crops. The 'Earth-Mother' or the Great Goddess of fertility, dominates the fate of the seeds and that of the dead alike. But the latter, sometimes, are closer to man, and the farmer turns to them to bless and support his work (black is the color of the earth and of the dead).Β
Hippocrates tells us that the spirits of the dead make seeds grow and germinate, and the author of the "Geoponics" knows that the winds (ie the souls of the dead) give life to plants and everything.. In Arabia, the last sheaf, called 'the old one', is harvested by the owner of the field himself, placed in a tomb and buried with prayers invoking 'that the wheat be reborn from death to life'. The Bambara, pouring water on the head of the corpse lying in the pit, before filling it with earth, implore: 'May the winds be beneficial, blow from the north, south, east or west! Give us the rain! Give us a bountiful harvest! '. During sowing, the Finns bury the bones of the dead in the ground (taken from the cemetery and brought back after harvest), or objects that belonged to the dead. If they do not have any, the peasants content themselves with land from the cemetery or a crossroads through which the dead have passed. The Germans use to spread over the fields, together with the seeds, earth taken from a recent grave, or straw on which someone has died. The snake, the quintessential funeral animal, protects crops. In spring, at the beginning of sowing, sacrifices were offered to the dead to defend the harvest and take care of it.
Agricultural and funeral deities
The solidarity of the dead with fertility and agriculture can be seen even more clearly when studying festivals or deities in relation to one of these two cultic complexes. Very often a deity of telluric-vegetable fertility also becomes a funerary deity. Holika, originally represented in the aspect of a tree, later became a deity of the dead and a genius of plant fecundity. A multitude of genes of vegetation and growth, of chthonic structure and origin, are assimilated to the point of becoming unrecognizable, to the amorphous group of the dead. In archaic Greece, the dead, like cereals, were placed in clay pots. Candles were offered to the gods of the underworld, as to the gods of fertility. Feronia is called "dea agrorum, sive inferorum". Durga, great goddess of fecundity, who groups a considerable number of local cults, and especially vegetation cults, also becomes the master deity of the spirits of the dead.
As for the feasts, let us remember only that the ancient Indian commemoration of the dead fell in full harvest, and was at the same time the main harvest festival. We have seen that the same was true in the Nordic countries. In ancient times, the cult of the Mani was celebrated with the ceremonial of vegetation. The most important agrarian or fertility festivals have come to coincide with the commemorative festivals of the dead. At one time, San Michele (September 29) was both the feast of the dead and the harvest throughout northern and central Europe. And the funerary cult increasingly influences that of fertility, appropriating the rites, which it transforms into offerings or sacrifices to the souls of the ancestors. The dead are 'those who dwell underground', and their benevolence must be reconciled. The seeds thrown behind the left shoulder, as offered in homage to the 'mouse', are destined for the dead. Reconciled, fed and solicited, they protect and multiply the crops. The 'old man' or the 'old woman', seen by the peasants as personifications of the 'powers' and fertility of the field, over time begin to accentuate their mythical profile, under the influence of funerary beliefs, and appropriate the structure and attributes of the 'ancestors', of the spirits of the dead.
This phenomenon is identified with particular ease in the beliefs of the Germanic peoples. Odin, funerary deity, leader of the 'furious hunt' of souls who cannot find rest, appropriates a number of rites belonging to the complex of agrarian cults. On the occasion of Jul, the properly funerary feast of the Germans, which falls on the winter solstice, the last sheaf of the vintage harvest is pulled out to make it an effigy of a man, woman, rooster, or goat or other animal. It is significant that the animal forms under which the 'power' of vegetation is manifested are those that represent the souls of the dead. At a certain moment in the history of the two cults, it is no longer possible to specify whether a 'spirit', manifesting itself in animal form, represents the souls of the deceased, or whether it is the theriomorphic personification of the telluric-vegetable force. This symbiosis has given rise to endless confusions, and scholars' controversies are not yet over regarding, for example, the agrarian or funeral character of Odin, the origins of the Jul ceremonies, etc. In fact we are faced with complex rituals and myths, in which death and rebirth interpenetrate, becoming distinct moments of the same transhuman reality. The areas of interference between fertility cults and funerary cults are so many, and so important, that it cannot be surprising if, after symbiosis and fusion, a new religious synthesis is reached, based on the broader appreciation of human existence in the Cosmos. .
This synthesis is encountered in its definitive form in the second millennium BC in the Aegean-Asian world, and we owe it to it if the efflorescence of the mysteries was possible. The fusion of the two cults began in northern Europe and China as early as prehistoric times, but it is likely that a definitive and coherently formulated synthesis took place only later. The fact is that the winter solstice is much more important in northern Europe than in the southern Mediterranean. Jul is the pathetic feast of this decisive cosmic moment and the dead then gather around the living, because precisely then the 'resurrection of the year' is predicted, therefore of spring. The souls of the dead are attracted by what 'begins', by what 'is created': a new year (and, like every principle, a symbolic repetition of creation), a new vital explosion in the torpor of winter (interminable banquets , libations and orgies wedding parties), a new spring. The living gather to stimulate, with their biological excesses, the energy of the declining sun; their apprehensions and hopes focus on vegetation, on the fate of the next harvest. The two destinies, agrarian and funeral, intersect and merge, eventually forming a single mode of existence, the pregerminative and larval one.
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Orgy and reinstatement
The orgies are not exclusively framed in agrarian ceremonies, although they always keep precise coincidences with the rites of regeneration (the 'new year') and fertility. The metaphysical sense and the physiological function of the orgy will become clearer in other chapters of this book. However, we can see from now on a perfect analogy between the agricultural phenomenon and agrarian mysticism, on the one hand, and orgy, as a modality of collective life, on the other. Like the seeds that lose their outline in the great subterranean melt, they disintegrate and become another thing (germination), thus men lose their individuality in the orgy, merging into one living unity. Thus a pathetic and definitive confusion takes place, in which it is no longer possible to distinguish either 'form' or 'law'. The primordial, preformal, 'chaotic' state is experienced again - which corresponds, in the cosmic order, to the chaotic 'undifferentiation' prior to creation - to promote, by virtue of imitative magic, the fusion of germs in the same telluric matrix.
Man is reintegrated into a biocosmic unity, even if this unity means regression from the mode of person to that of sow. In a sense, the orgy transmutes man into an agricultural condition. The abolition of the norms of limits and individualities, the experience of all telluric and nocturnal possibilities are equivalent to the acquisition of the state of seeds that decompose in the earth, abandoning their form to give life to a new plant. Among its other functions in the spiritual and psychological economy of a community, the orgy also has the task of making possible and preparing the 'renewal', the regeneration of life. The onset of an orgy can be compared to the appearance of the green sprout in the furrow: it is a new life that begins, and for that life the orgy satisfies man with substance and momentum. Not only that, but the orgy, by reactivating the mystical chaos prior to creation, makes it possible to repeat the creation.Β
Man temporarily regresses to the amorphous, nocturnal state of chaos, in order to be reborn with greater vigor in his diurnal form. The orgy, like immersion in water (paragraph 64), cancels creation, but at the same time regenerates it; identifying himself with the undifferentiated, pre-cosmic totality, man hopes to return to himself restored and regenerated, in short 'a new man'. In the structure and function of the orgy, we identify the same desire to repeat a primordial gesture: the Creation organizing chaos. In the alternation of daily life-orgy (Saturnalia, Carnival, etc.) we identify the same rhythmic vision of life, formed of action and sleep, of birth and death, and the same cyclical intuition of the Cosmos, which arises from chaos and returns to it through a catastrophe or a "mahapralaya", a 'great dissolution'. No doubt monstrous forms are degradations of this fundamental intuition of the cosmic rhythm and of the thirst for regeneration and renewal. But we must not start from these aberrant forms, to understand the origin and function of the orgy. Each 'feast' has an orgiastic vocation in its structure.
Agrarian mysticism and soteriology
We must insist on the soteriological structure of agrarian mysticism, even in its non-orgiastic forms. The plant life that regenerates itself through its apparent disappearance (burial of the seeds) is both an example and a hope; the same thing can happen to the dead and to the souls of men. It is true that the spectacle of this rhythmic regeneration is not a 'given', it does not offer itself directly to the contemplation of man; it is nevertheless, in archaic beliefs, a fact that is produced thanks to human rituals and beliefs. Regeneration is 'obtained' through magical gestures, through the Great Goddess, thanks to the presence of the woman, through the power of Eros and with the collaboration of the entire Cosmos (rain, heat, etc.). We will say more: all this is possible only insofar as it is a repetition of the primordial gesture, obtained both by means of hierogamy, and with the regeneration of Time (the 'new year'), and by means of orgy, which reactivates the chaotic regime. archetypal.
Nothing is achieved without effort, one can earn one's life only by working, that is, by acting in conformity with the norms: by repeating the primordial gestures. Thus the experiences of man in agricultural civilization, linked to the example of vegetation, are oriented from the beginning towards the gesture, towards'atto. By proceeding in a certain way, by acting according to certain models, man can hope for regeneration. The act, the rite, is indispensable. We will have to remember this detail when we study the ancient mysteries, which not only have preserved traces of agrarian ceremonies, but could not have organized themselves as initiatory religions if they had not had behind them a long prehistoric period of agrarian mysticism, that is to say: if the spectacle of the periodic regeneration of vegetation had not revealed, many millennia earlier, the solidarity between man and the seed and the hope of a regeneration obtained after death and through death.
It is said by habit that the discovery of agriculture has radically changed the destiny of humanity, ensuring it a copious diet and thus allowing a prodigious increase in population. But it seems to us that the discovery of agriculture had decisive consequences for a completely different reason. The fate of humanity was decided neither by population increase nor by supercharging but by theory that man developed by discovering agriculture. What he has seen in cereals, what he has learned from this contact, what he has understood from the example of seeds losing their shape underground, all this represented the decisive lesson. Agriculture has revealed to man the fundamental unity of organic life; the analogy woman-field-generating-sowing act, etc., as well as the most important mental syntheses, emerged from this revelation: rhythmic life, death understood as regression, etc. These mental syntheses were essential for the evolution of humanity and were only possible after the discovery of agriculture. One of the main roots of soteriological optimism lies precisely in the prehistoric agrarian mysticism: precisely like the seed hidden in the earth, the dead can hope for a return to life in a new form. But the melancholy, sometimes skeptical vision of life also originates from the contemplation of the plant world: man is similar to the flower of the fields ...
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