Long Thoughts and Short Decisions

A Golden Bough quote: (Somewhere in Chapter 28):

Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we have been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in their origin the ideas which they embodied were of a more simple and concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a particular kind of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general), or even of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a basis from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider idea of a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May for the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be easy and natural. Again, the concrete notion of the dying tree or dying vegetation would by a similar process of generalisation glide into a notion of death in general; so that the practice of carrying out the dying or dead vegetation in spring, as a preliminary to its revival, would in time widen out into an attempt to banish Death in general from the village or district. The view that in these spring ceremonies Death meant originally the dying or dead vegetation of winter has the high support of W. Mannhardt; and he confirms it by the analogy of the name Death as applied to the spirit of the ripe corn. Commonly the spirit of the ripe corn is conceived, not as dead, but as old, and hence it goes by the name of the Old Man or the Old Woman. But in some places the last sheaf cut at harvest, which is generally believed to be the seat of the corn spirit, is called “the Dead One”: children are warned against entering the corn-fields because Death sits in the corn; and, in a game played by Saxon children in Transylvania at the maize harvest, Death is represented by a child completely covered with maize leaves.

I can already tell that I will have trouble quoting the Golden Bough simply because all of the text ties into one another and each sentence is just as important as the next. It's a text that has stories within stories, just like the movie, Inception. And just like Inception, the explanation to what is real and what is important may be long and confusing. I'll save my Inception rants for another post though. Back to the top quote.....

If you read the whole quote you may reach the conclusion that much of our language is inadequate. Or, more specifically, the fewer the words we try to use, the more nebulous our meaning comes across to the reader. Does corn signify birth, rebirth, death, or all three? It depends on who you ask. I'm not writing this post to deconstruct this passage, however. I believe Professor Sexson has taught too many decades of English classes for him to care THAT much about an undergraduate Literature Major perform close readings of The Golden Bough. I think instead he wants us to inject our personal lives into the readings and class. Our professor is serious when he wants us to eavesdrop on the conversations scattered throughout campus and report back to him. It's how he stays young. He gets a kick out of one of his mythology students producing a phobia with cornfields because of the discussion of Saxon children in Transylvania impersonating dead corn.

Having this knowledge given to us by The Golden Bough is useless if we don't use it. At the very least we should see corn now as "Old Men".