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These grouped goddesses take us back to one of the most interesting stages in the early Celtic religion, when the earth-spirits or the corn-spirits had not yet been completely individualised. Of the individualised goddesses many are strictly local, being the names of springs or rivers.
There the souls of the dead men and women of the totem, but no others, congregate, and are born again in human form when a favorable opportunity presents itself." Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113. The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96. And what the early people believed of the human spirit, they believed of the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation spirits also.
Nobody knows so well as he that similar claims of descent from dogs and snakes are made by many savage kindreds who have no agriculture, no corn, and, of course, no corn-spirits. These remarks, I trust, are not undiscriminating, and naturally I yield the bull Dionysus and the pig Demeter to the corn-spirit, vice totem, superseded.
Instead of this number, 10,000 post-houses, at 400 horses each, would require four millions of horses. The number and proportion of horses in the text would only supply 500 inns; or would allow only 20 horses each to 10,000 inns. The text, therefore, must be here corrupted. This must allude to a species of corn-spirits or brandy, distilled from rice, fermented with water, named Arrak.
At Tettnang, in Würtemburg, the thresher who gives the last stroke to the last bundle of corn before it is turned goes by the name of the He-goat, and it is said, "He has driven the He-goat away." The person who, after the bundle has been turned, gives the last stroke of all, is called the She-goat. In this custom it is implied that the corn is inhabited by a pair of corn-spirits, male and female.
But I am not sure that the corn-spirit accounts for the Sminthian mouse in all his aspects, nor for the Arcadian and Attic bear-rites and myths of Artemis. Mouse and bear do appear in Mr. Frazer's catalogue of forms of the corn-spirits, taken from Mannhardt.
The belief in corn-spirits, and other ideas connected with the central thought of the farmer's life, show, by their persistence in Celtic as well as other folklore, how deeply they had entered into the inner tissue of the agricultural mind, so as to be linked to its keenest emotions.
Some of the Ljeschie are spirits of the corn as well as of the wood; before harvest they are as tall as the corn-stalks, but after it they shrink to the height of the stubble. This brings out what we have remarked before the close connexion between tree-spirits and corn-spirits, and shows how easily the former may melt into the latter.
The spirit, coming to be regarded as an anthropomorphic person, under peculiar circumstances assumes the character of a god. A similar development appears in the Iranian haoma, and the cultic identity of soma and haoma shows that the deification of the plant took place in the early Aryan period. +271+. Another example has been supposed to be furnished by corn-spirits.
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