that is
all over the world--it is found. But perhaps, if we can find some
other interpretation {199} of the Australian custom, we should do
better to reverse the process and explain the spring and harvest
customs which are found elsewhere by means of, and in accordance with,
the Australian custom. Now another interpretation of the Australian
custom has been put forward by Dr. Frazer. He treats the Australian
ceremony as being a piece of pure magic, the purpose of which is to
promote the growth and increase of the plants and animals which provide
the black fellows with food. But if we start from this point of view,
we must go further and say that amongst other peoples than the
Australian the killing of the representative animal of the spirit of
vegetation is, in Dr. Frazer's words, "a magical rite intended to
assure the revival of nature in spring." And if that is the nature of
the rite which appears in northern Europe as the harvest supper, it
will also be the nature of the rite as it appears both in our second
group of instances, where the corn is eaten "as the body of the
corn-spirit," and in the first group, where the dough image or paste
idol was eaten in Mexico as the flesh and bones of the god. That this
line of thought runs through Dr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_, in its second
edition, is indicated by the fact that the rite is spoken of throughout
as a {200} sacrament. That the Mexican rite as described in our first
group is sacramental, is clear. Of the rites which form our second
group of instances, Dr. Frazer says that the corn-spirit, or god, "is
killed in the person of his representative and eaten sacramentally,"
and that "the new corn is itself eaten sacramentally; that is, as the
body of the corn-spirit" (p. 318). Of the North European rites, again,
he says, "the animal is slain and its flesh and blood are partaken of
by the harvesters"--"these customs bring out clearly the sacramental
character of the harvest supper"--"as a substitute for the real flesh
of the divine being, bread or dumplings are made in his image and eaten
sacramentally." Finally, even when speaking of the Australians as men
who have no gods to worship, and with whom the rite is pure and
unadulterated magic, he yet describes the rite as a sacrament.

Now if, on the one hand, from its beginning amongst the Australians to
the form which it finally took amongst the Mexicans the rite is, as Dr.
Frazer systematically calls it, a sacram