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This fragment was discovered at Rome in 1778, on a tablet containing the acts of the sacred college, and was supposed to be as ancient as Romulus. The priesthood was a highly honourable office, its members were chosen for life, and emperors are mentioned among them. The yearly festival took place in May, when the fruits were ripe, and consisted in a kind of blessing of the first-fruits.
If in this life only, we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. Poor Christian! thou that lookest for the blessed hope of the resurrection of the body, at the glorious appearing of the great God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ, how wilt thou be deceived, if the dead rise not! "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept.
The Maiden. Thou makest me lie down by the water-course, defiling my fair raiment! Daphnis. Nay, see, 'neath thy raiment fair I am throwing this soft fleece. The Maiden. Ah, ah, thou hast snatched my girdle too; why hast thou loosed my girdle? Daphnis. These first-fruits I offer, a gift to the Paphian. The Maiden. Stay, wretch, hark; surely a stranger cometh; nay, I hear a sound. Daphnis.
Is it well? Thou art Abel. Thine offering of the lamb is more pleasing than the first-fruits of the harvest. On me, Cain, God frowns, and the devil grins. He is grinning through the wine. I hear his laugh amid the clink of the coin. He is in red; and I flaunt my mistress in his colors. Then we dance: first for sheer delight, with the music. Then the whips come down on our shoulders, and we go on.
For, as it happens to every one who from childhood onward has always been on his legs, and in foreign lands, I have also encountered on my path many strange and dangerous spirits; above all, however, and again and again, the one of whom I have just spoken: in fact, no less a personage than the God DIONYSUS, the great equivocator and tempter, to whom, as you know, I once offered in all secrecy and reverence my first-fruits the last, as it seems to me, who has offered a SACRIFICE to him, for I have found no one who could understand what I was then doing.
It is the particular totem group alone which is affected by the ceremony; and the inference which it seems to me preferable to draw is that the ceremonial eating of the first-fruits is, or rather has been, in Australia what it is elsewhere, viz. an instance of prayer and sacrifice in which the worshippers of a god are brought into periodic in this case annual communion with their god.
Theocritus tells how in the island of Cos, in the sweet-scented summer time, the farmer brought the first-fruits of the harvest to Demeter who had filled his threshingfloor with barley, and whose rustic image held sheaves and poppies in her hands. Many of the epithets bestowed by the ancients on Demeter mark her intimate association with the corn in the clearest manner.
"Heralds," went on Umsuka, "proclaim that the feast of the first-fruits is ended, and my command is that every regiment should seek its quarters, taking with it a double gift of cattle from the king, who has been saved alive by the magic of this white man. And now, Messenger, farewell, for my head grows weary. To-morrow I will speak with you."
I suggest, therefore, that in Australia, as elsewhere, the solemn eating of the first-fruits has been a sacramental meal of which both the god and his worshippers were partakers. The alternative is to my mind much less probable: it is to use the Australian ceremony as it now exists to explain the origin of the ceremony as we find it elsewhere.
Some of these as the New Moon and the First-Fruits of the corn, celebrated, by a part of the tribes were generally innocent, seeming to point to some Jewish origin in the dim past; others such as the feast of the dogs when the poor animals were wantonly torn to pieces were loathsome in the extreme.
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