The Golden Bough (Third Edition, Vol. 7 of 12) - Mirrors

131occupation of their lives; who believe that the growth of thecrops, on which they depend for their subsistence, is at the mercyof two powerful spirits, a divine husband and his wife, dwellingin a subterranean world; and who accordingly offer sacrificesand perform ceremonies in order to ensure the favour of thesemighty beings and so to obtain abundant harvests. If we knewmore about the Rarian plain at Eleusis, 343 we might discover thatit was the scene of many religious ceremonies like those whichare performed on the little consecrated rice-fields (the luma lali)of the Kayans, where the various operations of the agriculturalyear are performed in miniature by members of the chief'sfamily before the corresponding operations may be performedon a larger scale by common folk on their fields. Certainly weknow that the Rarian plain witnessed one such ceremony in theyear. It was a solemn ceremony of ploughing, one of the threeSacred Ploughings which took place annually in various partsof Attica. 344 Probably the rite formed part of the Proerosiaor Festival before Ploughing, which was intended to ensure aplentiful crop. 345 Further, it appears that the priests who guidedthe sacred slow-paced oxen as they dragged the plough down thefurrows of the Rarian Plain, were drawn from the old priestlyfamily of Bouzygai or “Ox-yokers,” whose eponymous ancestoris said to have been the first man to yoke oxen and to ploughthe fields. As they performed this time-honoured ceremony, thepriests uttered many quaint curses against all churls who shouldrefuse to lend fire or water to neighbours, or to shew the wayto wanderers, or who should leave a corpse unburied. 346 If we [109]343 See above, p. 74.344 Plutarch, Praecepta Conjugalia, 42. Another of these Sacred Ploughingswas performed at Scirum, and the third at the foot of the Acropolis at Athens;for in this passage of Plutarch we must, with the latest editor, read ὑπὸ πόλινfor the ὑπὸ πέλιν of the manuscripts.345 See above, pp. 50 sqq.346 Etymologicum Magnum, s.v. Βουζυγία, p. 206, lines 47 sqq.; Im. Bekker,Anecdota Graeca (Berlin, 1814-1821), i. 221; Pliny, Nat. Hist. vii. 199;