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Stag and Earth Mother: Pagan Beliefs in Ancient Britain
Robert W. Nicholls
The timing and form of many celebrations in Britain are rooted in activities that date from the pre-Christian era.
Festivals of purification and propitiation
In the ancient Germanic and Celtic calendar,
both the first day of winter and New Year's Day were celebrated on November 1, or more
precisely (for Caesar tells us the Celtic day began at nightfall), the eve of October 31—Halloween.
Early in the Christian era a conflation occurred among three different festivals, the
arrival of winter on October 31, the midwinter solstice festival on December 22, and the
Anglo-Saxon new year on January 1.
Winter, however, still began on October 31. As a
result, ancestral animal spirits who were released from the underworld for a short period
during the seam between the old and new year, and who were associated with Halloween,
became part of the Yule festival. Yule celebrated the arrival of the new year during the
last week of December, and animal pageants featuring masqueraders in the guise of the
stag, the calf, and the horse formed part of the cycle of Yule entertainment.
The beliefs of the early European pagan were
essentially animistic, whereby the creator and the thing created represent the same
reality. Natural elements and forces—earth, fire, and water; the sun, moon, and
stars; thunder, wind, and rain—are imbued with greater or lesser amounts of spiritual
energy. The early Celts worshiped the sun, and sun symbols are found carved on ancient
Irish tombs. A bog at Trudholm in Denmark was found to contain a bronze casting of a
horse, dated to about 1500 B.C., symbolically carrying a gold-plated sun across the sky
and down into the underworld at dusk. As late as the first century A.D., when the Romans
came to Britain, the Celts under their Druid priests were still using Stonehenge as a
temple for sun worship.
Sun worship by fire occurred during the winter
and summer solstice festivals, Yule Eve and Midsummer Eve respectively. The Midsummer Eve
Bonfire Night remained an important occasion in Ireland until modern times. In the Middle
Ages, according to one observer, peasants would not weed the fields until Midsummer's Eve,
then on that day "the boys collected [sic] bones and certain other rubbish and burn
them, and … go about the fields with brands" to drive away evil spirits.
Fire used as a means of purification still
occurs during the May celebration in Celtic settlements in northern Italy, France,
Britain, and Ireland. Cattle purification ceremonies, for example, involve driving the
beasts between two fires. For the Celts the festival of Beltaine was celebrated on May 1,
in honor of the god Belenos, who encouraged the growth of crops and the health of cattle.
It was considered a springtime festival of optimism. Fertility ritual again was important,
connecting to the waxing power of the sun, symbolized by the lighting of bonfires around
which people danced in a sunwise direction.
In England, Plough Monday, which opens the
farming year after the Yule holiday, has survived until modern times. In former days
plough-charming ceremonies used the beneficial effects of fire. Henry Parker in his Dives
and Pauper (1493) speaks of "leading the plough about the fire as for good beginning
of the year, that they should fare better all the year following." Throughout Britain
in pagan times, shiny objects (such as metal and, later, mirrors) and bright colors were
thought to capture the essence of the sun and thus repel evil.
It is often suggested that the bonfires lit in
England on Guy Fawkes' Night, November 5, are a remnant of the festive fires lit on
Halloween in honor of the sun. Until quite modern times bonfires were an integral part of
Halloween celebrations held in Scotland and Wales. In fact in Scotland a great midwinter
fire is still lit at Burghead. In Allendale, Northumberland, the winter solstice period is
celebrated by a procession through the town by young men carrying trays of blazing tar on
their heads. About midnight, when their burdens become too hot to hold, they throw them
onto the bonfire and dance around it.
The early Europeans believed that a spirit of
the earth owned the land and a migrating people would have to make a pact with the land
before they could settle. The idea of a duality of the earth below and the sun above, with
man placed between two great powers, is inherent in the old English term middangeard with
its inference that the habitation of humans is a middle-dwelling. The oak with its roots
in the earth and branches in the sky was a sacred tree for the Druids (Druid translates as
"oak-wise"). Prayers were offered in a place made holy by a conjunction of
natural elements—trees, water, or rocks—typically a copse of oak trees on a
grassy knoll with a pool or small stream nearby. Certain trees, such as the ash and the
yew, and plants like holly, ivy, and a belief both in dryads (tree spirits) and naiads
(water nymphs) was common. Such animistic deities were not perceived as persons but as
amoral spirits who could help or harm according to how they were treated. Rites were
conducted to propitiate their good auspices in such a way that their powers benefit man.
The primary rite of propitiation involved a
votive offering. Offerings to the earth were placed in ritual shafts driven deep into the
ground. Eight shafts have been found in Surrey and two in Norfolk in England, and others
have been found in Scotland and on the Continent. Most of those discovered were over
twelve yards deep, while a Bavarian shaft plunged to a depth of forty yards. The contents
illustrate the kinds of objects used to solicit the favors of the underworld: brooches,
bracelets, and rings; pottery and bronze vessels; nuts, apples, and cherries; pieces of
antler and boar tusk; the unburnt bones of deer, boar, oxen, cow, sheep, and hare; and the
bones of ravens, buzzards, and starlings, birds the Celts used as portents.
Offerings were also made to lakes, springs and
wells. The remains of reindeer found lashed to boulders in pools at an ancient lakeside
camping place near Hamburg are thought to be votive offerings of the migratory hunters
that roamed Europe during the closing phases of the last ice age. A pool at the source of
the River Seine, dedicated to the local Celtic goddess Sequanna, contained a series of oak
sculptures, including entire statues. Some figures were deformed—one had a clubfoot,
others were limbless—and representations of eyes, breasts, and genitals apparently
depicted ailments the supplicant wanted a cure for. An archetypal wishing well in
Northumbria, dedicated to the goddess Coventina, contained over 13,000 coins deposited
over the four centuries of Roman occupation.
Attributing gender to seasonal changes
From the earliest times the cycle of winter and
summer was a critical consideration. Prior to the domestication of cattle, hunting
remained important to the stone-using sedentary agriculturalists of the fourth and fifth
millennia B.C. During the summer the nomadic European peoples could gather plant produce
in abundance, but in the winter, when they retreated to cave shelters, hunting became
their main source of food. The importance of seasons and the need for a rudimentary
calendar led, in the third and fourth millennia B.C., to the construction of stone
astronomical observatories such as the Grand Menhir and Carnac stones in Brittany and
Stonehenge in south England, which could locate both the winter and summer solstices. Even
New Grange, the collective tomb on the River Boyne in eastern Ireland, is oriented to the
winter solstice. By fixing the date of the solstice, the various seasonal festivals, rural
fairs, regeneration rituals, and feast days could serve to further delineate the passage
of the year.
The summer and winter seasons likely
differentiated by the ascription of gender, and the concept of an ancient male and female
bipolarity is evinced by two major figures that appear with regularity among the art that
has survived from the distant past. The female principle is evidenced in the concept of
Mother Earth, who embodies the fertility and growth of summer. The male gender betokens
winter, and is represented as a zoomorphic deity with antlers or horns, variously known as
the Lord of the Animals, Cernunnos the horned god, or Herne the Hunter.
The oldest references to these figures come from
art that is over 20,000 years old. In addition to painting game animals in the caves where
they sought refuge, the Gravettians, who populated an area from southwestern France to
southern Russia, made little statues of animals in reindeer antler, mammoth ivory, bone,
limestone, and fired clay. An engraving of a reindeer on a reindeer antler was found in
the French Pyrenees. The walls of caves at more than a hundred sites in southwestern
France and northern Spain are also adorned with paintings by the Solutreans and
Magdalenians who sheltered in the 18,000 to 10,000 ago.
Most of the drawings depict reindeer, bison,
horses, and extinct wild oxen, which were the main sources of food. Scattered among the
animal figures are dozens of therianthropes (part man, part beast). Those found in the
cavern of Teyjat in Dordogne, France, have the horns and faces of some kind of antelope,
but human legs and feet. The paintings at Les Trois Freres, Ariege, in the French
Pyrenees, however, are the most revealing. A figure of a man wrapped in an animal hide is
playing a rudimentary flute, while another figure with the head, horns, and hoofs of an ox
but the legs and lower torso of a human dominates a frieze of several hundred animals.
Another incongruous figure has become known as the Dancing Sorcerer. He is enveloped in an
animal skin and has stage antlers and a bushy tail, but the hands, feet, and bearded face
of a man are clearly visible.
There is a general consensus that these early
art galleries were in fact shrines and the art had a ritual purpose. Although the
semihuman figures could be tribal deities, the most common interpretation is that they are
shamans in animal disguise, who, through sympathetic magic are conducting rituals to bring
favor to hunting and gathering activities. Masks with animal horns may be a hunter's decoy
disguises. The hunter can be envisioned draped in animal skins with antlers, stalking a
herd of deer. During winter rites related to the migration of animals, hunters may also
have donned their animal disguises for processions or dances for general entertainment.
Stories of transformation from human to animal
form abound in folklore. For example, in the ballad "Leesome Brand" are the
lines:
Ye'll take your arrows and your bow
And ye will hunt the deer and roe
Be sure ye touch not the white hynde
For she is o the woman kind.
By adopting the animal disguise, shamans were
perhaps thought to have been metamorphosized into their quarry.
The Stag and the Earth Mother
The evidence of later finds reinforces the idea
of the stag as a cult animal. Antlers found in the third millennium B.C. burial at New
Grange suggest that the stag was the royal beast of the Irish Danaans. In the twelfth
century manuscript The Cattle of Cuailgne, a guild of deer-priests called "The fair
Lucky Harps" had their headquarters at Assaroe in Donegal. There is also evidence
that the stage was a cult animal of Anglo-Saxon kingships. In the Sutton Hoo ship burial
commemorating the death of an East Anglian king, an iron standard was found, topped by a
bronze stag with widespread antlers. The names of Celtic deities have also survived on
inscribed stone altars that became popular during Roman times, and they include an
inscription to Cernunnos, as well as various depictions of horned deities without
inscriptions.
The Gravettians also carved representations of
women. Their 20,000-year-old Venus of Laussel emphasizes the sexual features, with massive
breasts and hips, but having neither face nor feet. Other early representations reduce the
female figure to a single characteristics—for example, a pair of breasts adorn an
ivory baton found in Czechoslovakia. The ample curves of the 30,000-year-old limestone
Venus of Willendorf, carved in Austria, are now well known.
The term Terra Mater (Earth Mother) was first
documented in the first century A.D. by the Roman historian Tacitus in his description of
the workshop of Nerthus the Earth Mother of the German Anglii, ancestors of the Anglian
tribes of England. With its image of the goddess on a sacred island, the Nerthus cult was
well organized and had drawn the neighboring tribes together in a bond of common worship.
In Europe the mother goddess had many names, including the Celtic names Danu, Dana, or
Anu. In Roman times she was identified with Diana, but more as a result of linguistic
likeness than of any similarity of characteristics. The ancient Celts in Ireland called
themselves Tuatha De Dannan (the people of Danu). Finally, two small mountains in the West
of Ireland called the Paps of Anu are thought to represent the Earth Mother's breasts.
The most numerous dedications on the Roman-style
altars were made to mother goddesses, referred to simply as the matres. They are pictured
normally as a triad, and frequently carry infants, cornucopia, and baskets of fruit,
showing the links to the ancient mother goddess. The tutelary powers of the matres often
involved the protection of towns and even military camps. Celtic soldiers in the Roman
army would set up altars dedicated to the matres. The Venerable Bede (A.D. 673-735) calls
the octave corresponding to our Christmas and New Year holiday Modranect, Mother-night.
The seasonal festivals
In the Celtic calendar, the transitions from
summer to winter and winter to summer were significant times. For the Celts a new day
began at nightfall, and the New Year started at the beginning of winter, November 1, or
more precisely, the eve of October 31. This was a particularly critical time, for it
involved a metamorphosis of supernatural dimensions—a time when the goddess of the
earth turns over her reign to the horned god of the hunt, the transition form life to
death, from agrarian pursuits to hunting, from warmth to coldness, from light to darkness.
The seam between the seasons is symbolized by
images of death and resurrection or depicted as a battle, between the holly and the ivy,
for example. Is it coincidence that holly—an evergreen with a "horned" leaf—represents
the male principle against the female ivy? In eighteenth-century Kent, burning roughly
made figures of a holly boy and an ivy girl on Ash Wednesday coincided with the departure
of winter.
For Britons living at the beginning of the
Christian era, the reality of winter was severe enough. Bede describes November as
blotmonath (blood month), the month of sacrifices. Following sacrifices made by the king
for a prosperous year, those cattle and livestock that could not be maintained through the
winter were dedicated to the gods and slaughtered. For the Celts, Halloween coincided with
Samain—New Year's Eve, the greatest festival of the year. It was then that the store
laid by for winter use were declared open. During the feasting it was believed that the
souls of the departed mingled with the living. Offerings were made to tribal ancestors
lest they be angered at the site of the winter stockpiles. If they were not appeased, they
might bring famine and misery upon the land.
The Druids declared that on Halloween, Samon,
Lord of Death, freed for one night only the souls of those who had been condemned to dwell
in barren places or whose spirits had entered the bodies of animals. Even now in Ireland,
Halloween is known as Oidhche Shamhna, the Vigil of Shamhna, the Irish equivalent of
Samon. It is this aspect of Halloween, featuring an assortment of misplaced souls from the
underworld that has survived to modern times. November 1 was chosen for the Christina
feast of All Saints, while November 2 became All Souls Day, when the dead are remembered
and flowers placed on the graves of loved ones. In Cheshire, songs survive from the
"Souling" celebrations, when soul cakes were baked as a symbolic offering to the
ancestors.
Because seasonal celebrations were essentially
rituals aimed at achieving specified goals, various practices established by custom would
have been observed. Little is known of the ritual activities of the spring months in the
pagan era. Bede records that February was called Sol-monath, because cakes were offered to
the gods (probably ancestors) during that month. (In both ancient Greece and Rome, food
was prepared for returned souls in February, and when the dangerous days were over, they
were swept out). March was called Rhed-monath, with sacrifices to Eostra, apparently a
goddess of the dawn.
The Celtic pastoral feast of Imbolg on February
1 has been scantily documented, but it also seems to have been a fertility ritual
primarily concerned with the lactation of ewes. However, we may get a clue from Greek and
Latin authors who wrote of priestess motherhoods like the Daktyles on Mount Ida, and the
Korybantes and Kurates in the Dictean cave. Their job was to call in the spring. Clashing
swords against shields and making other noises were means of expelling winter. Thudding
the earth with sticks, leaping, and stamping were performed to shake Mother Earth,
skipping to make the crops grow, jumping to make the corn tall. Reportedly in the tenth
century, Goths in masks and skins, clashing staves and shields, led a procession at
Constantinople.
More is known about the May Day celebrations in
Britain, celebrating the first day of summer. The whole village joined in activities to
persuade the spirit of growth and fertility to enter their fields. They lit
"need" fires to attract the spirit of warmth and sunshine, covered themselves in
the greenery and flowers of the spring life, washed in the dew, and danced around the
garlanded and decorated tree that preceded the maypole.
Processions undertaken to bring beneficial
influences to the areas visited are exemplified by the ritual procession of Nerthus, the
Earth Mother of the Anglii in Germany. The procession of the goddess in her cow-drawn
shrine was a time of peace, and weapons were banished. Her procession, like that of Frey
later in the Scandinavian North, was a fertility rite bringing peace and plenty to the
regions visited. A processional known as "Beating the Bounds" survived in
England until modern times. It traditionally takes place in August and serves to bring
luck and dispel misfortune within a circumscribed area.
Yule-time festivals in midwinter
One of the most celebrated festivals of the year
was the midwinter Yule festival, which then as now involved great feasting and
merrymaking. At some point, the conflation of festivals occurred involving the Celtic New
Year festival the midwinter solstice festival, and the Anglo-Saxon's New Year's Day. With
Roman occupation, additional elements from Saturnalia, celebrated on December 17, were
incorporated. Saturn was the Roman god of agriculture, and his festival is known for its
unrestrained eating and drinking as well as for its carnival. The British Yule similarly
involved an adequate sampling of the fruits of the earth, and its dedication as Modranect
surely refers to the primordial fertility deity, the Earth Mother, who was banished for
the winter period by the horned god of the hunt. Possessing many of the characteristics of
the earlier New Year festival, Halloween, the Yule was a time during which the barriers
between humans and the supernatural were lowered. New Year's Day was a time for spinning,
sewing, and winding magic skeins.
Music making and dancing were important aspects
of the Yule festival. The word carol, meaning Christmas song, was derived from carole,
which described the round dances performed at this time, possibly around a decorated tree.
Folk plays were also staged during the festival. In animal pageants men would don animal
horns, heads and skins (of stags, calves, and horses, for example) while others wore masks
of straw. These figures were known across Europe and featured in the Saturnalia carnival,
and it was believed that they appeared at midwinter during their twelve-day leave from the
underworld. We first hear of a "stag" from the Bishop of Barcelona in A.D. 370;
and in A.D. 636, Saint Isidor of Seville wrote of Spanish pagans who dressed up as beasts.
Some centuries later, according to the Decretum, the "Corrector" of the Burchard
of Worms (d. A.D. 1025) asks, "Hast thou done anything like what the pagans did, and
still do on the first of January, in the guise of a stag or a calf?," with reference
to the pagan new year. Included in Shakespeare's As You Like It is the Forestor's Song:
What shall he have that killed the deer?
His leather skin, and horns to wear.
Take thou no scorn, to wear the horn;
It was a crest ere thou wast born;
Thy father's father wore it,
And thy father bore it (4.2).
The fact that the stag and his cohorts were
perceived as residents of the underworld, the habitation of departed souls, suggests that
the masqueraders probably represented ancestral spirits temporarily resurrected in animal
disguise. The repeated reference to "thy father" in the Forestor's Song would
reinforce this. By a further stretch of the imagination, they might even represent
departed hunter-shamans, adorned once again in their ritual decoy disguise, performing for
the amusement of their descendants.
All this being said, it may be surprising that
pork, not venison, was probably the meat of choice at the Yule festivals. In Scandinavia,
the greatest boar was sacrificed to the god Frey (akin to Nerthus) as an atonement
offering. Binding oaths were taken by placing hands on its head and bristles. A boar's
head procession took place at Christmas in medieval England and still does today at
Queen's College, Oxford.
During the sixth century Pope Gregory sent Saint
Augustine to England to establish a church on the continental model. To facilitate the
conversion, and attempt was made to reconcile the incoming doctrine with customs already
in existence. Any pagan symbolism that did not positively clash with Christian doctrine
was incorporated into the new faith. By building a church on a holy site, such as a
chieftain's barrow or tumulus, the missionaries attempted to discourage potential
conflict. Some temples were converted into Christian churches—for example, a temple
outside Canterbury became the Church of Saint Pancras. The terms in which the newly
converted Anglo-Saxons interpreted the Christian religion were shaped by the tribal
culture impregnated by the pagan beliefs of the old religion. Pope Gregory advised that
Christian holy days should be near in date to the replaced pagan festivals. This mingling
of Christianity and paganism is the reason why Easter is named after Eostra, an
Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn, and why Christ's birthday is celebrated on December 25—the
date of the old midwinter festival commemorating the rebirth of the sun. The Yule logs,
the woodland wreaths, the holy tree decorated with candles and shiny bright ribbons and
tinsel, the holly and the mistletoe, all are relics of a pagan past. When, later, the
Roman church was accused by the Eastern church of sun worship on December 25, we realize
how difficult was the defense againt change.
The conflation of Christian and pagan festivals
Apparently clerics danced in church as late as
the twelfth century and the "carole" tradition of round dancing continued even
later. But prevailing Christian attitudes saw dancing as incongruent spiritual activity,
and the suggestion arose that the syncretism of pagan and Christian festivals encouraged
relapse into paganism, as is evidenced by the promulgation of the Canons of Edgar against
"heathen songs and devil's games on Christian feast days." The animal pageants,
performed for public amusement, likewise did not amuse the church, which found them
particularly irritating. Thus the Bishop Caesarius of Arles angrily reported around A.D.
500 that at the New Year even baptized women disguised themseves as deer or bitches,
covered themselves with the skins of animals, or put on animal heads. The Council of
Auxerre forbade dressing up as a stag or a calf on the "calends of January" in
A.D. 578. But the old customs did not die out at once, for Theodore, Archbishop of
Canterbury (A.D. 668-690), in his Liber Poenitentialis, said, "If anyone at the
Kalends of January goes about as a stag or a bull; that is, making himself into a wild
animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts;
those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance
for three years because this is devilish." In this manner the church discriminated
against the traditional Yuletide masquerade and condemned it as devil worship. Thus,
Lucifer came to be depicted as horned. Those who persisted in going against the church's
injunctions were often persecuted as sorcerers or witches. After the coming of the
Vikings, Edward the Elder and the Dane Guthrum issued joint legislation dictating that
wizards and sorcerers were to be driven from the land or killed.
Under Christianity, the music and dance once
considered a whole experience became bifurcated. Choral elements and harmonies were
separated from the dance elements and tabor rhythms, and adopted in Christian worship.
They influenced the plainsong melodies and chants of the monasteries of the Middle Ages.
The round form, hocketing, and polyphony of the medieval mass reflect the choral style of
an earlier area. While no carols survived intact to the present, the opening lines of some
give a clue to their pagan ancestry. For example, "The Holly and the Ivy" and
"I Saw Three Ships" retain a lilt in the melody that hints at origins in round
dances. The rhythms and drive of pre-Christian music have survived to a greater degree in
Gaelic jigs and reels which are replete with percussion and often use polyrhythms. The
same is not true of folk and country dances.
Over the years folk dance in Britain and Ireland
has been sanitized. The earth orientation of ritual pagan dances gas given way to the sky
orientation of the new religion, with stamping and swaying replaced by hopping or
skipping. The posture of the dance, like Gothic steeples, aspires heavenward, while the
heel-and-toe vertical stance reflects escape from the earth's surface. The country dancer
may batter the ground with his feet and perform intricate pattern, but the arms and body
remain rigid.
Although masquerading has not been retained as a
continuous tradition, within the Plough and Mummer's plays of the nineteenth century,
survivors from the old tradition were, and in some cases still are, in evidence. Players
adorned themselves with the body parts of animals, as they did following the winter
sacrifices. The Fool for example may brandish a stick with a calf's tail on one end and a
bladder on the other. The animals killed by hunters are, however, smaller. Fox-skin caps
were worn at both Hexham and Thenford in England. At Richmond in 1814 the Fool was covered
in skins and wore a hairy cap with a foxtail hanging down his back. The Grenoside captain
still wears a cap of rabbitskin with its head still attached. Plough costumes also are
sometimes decorated with mirrors and ribbons. Like the streamers and tinsel that decorate
the Christmas tree, they are vestiges of the belief that bright things contain the essence
of the sun and repel evil.
The Bovey Tracy players featured a Giant who
wore "a wooden thing for a head with bullocks teeth." The Abingdon Morris
dancers carried a large effigy of the head and horns of an ox mounted on a pole. Every
September at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, a horn dance is performed in which six
dancers carry reindeer horns. Although the stag no longer appears as a masquerade, the
hobbyhorse has retained a place in folk carnivals. A wild horse with snapping jaws, made
from a horse's skull, carried on a pole by a youth draped with a horse cloth, was
associated with All Souls rites in Cheshire. Apparently most parishes in Cheshire used to
own a horse skull, which was prized, fought for, and stolen by rival gangs. Another animal
disguise that used to appear with the Soulers in Cheshire was Old Tup, made from a ram's
head with a skin or rug covering the holder. Within living memory the Christmas mummers of
Ballymenone in Ireland wore featureless masks and costumes made of straw, and toured the
villages performing folk plays from Christmas to the New Year.
And what of the Earth Mother? How did
Christianity, with its all-male trinity, accommodate the need of the laity for a female
deity? This matter had been virtually resolved in Europe by the time missionaries reached
British shores. In A.D. 430, amid opposition, the Greek philosopher Proclus preached a
sermon hailing the Virgin Mary as divine and a mediator between God and man. Then in 431,
Cyril of Alexandria defended Mary's divinity, insisting that she filled the void in human
affections left vacant by the departure of Isis and Diana. Finally the church inaugurated
the Feast of the Assumption as one of its holy days. Henceforth Mary was the Blessed
Mother of God, absorbing the worship of the goddesses that preceded her.
In England the Earth Mother was an ancient
figure and no longer the focus of a cult. Like Mother Nature, she fulfilled her role
through ensuring the fertility of the crops and was supplicated (along with the fertility
deities that followed her) with greenery and flower garlands. Dressing the Wells, an
ancient ceremony still performed in few English villages, dates back to pagan times as a
means of worshiping the water nymph. At Bisley in Gloucestershire, for example, the
dressing is done by placing flowers and little leaves in a well. Corn Dollies were also
derived from olden times, when they were made from the last sheaf taken from the field,
along with lanterns and spirals, to depict Mother Earth. It has been suggested that Greek
goddesses of the classical era enjoyed a Renaissance in rural England to the extent that
the green ribbon that decorates corn dollies stands for Persephone, the young goddess of
the fields and the green corn, while gold is for the mature goddess Demeter and the ripe
corn.
Robert W. Nicholls is a media specialist with the Howard University Research and Training Center in Washington, D.C.
[The World And I (New York), December, 1988]