John Barleycorn

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

John Barleycorn is an English folksong. The character "John Barleycorn" in the song is a personification of the important cereal crop barley, and of the alcoholic beverages made from it, beer and whiskey. In the song, John Barleycorn is represented as suffering attacks, death, and indignities that correspond to the various stages of barley cultivation, such as reaping and malting.

Some have interpreted the story of John Barleycorn as representing a pagan rite. It has also been suggested that John Barleycorn, or rather an early form of the song, may have been used by the early church in Saxon England to ease the conversion of pagans to Christianity. The reasoning behind this idea is that John Barleycorn represented the ideology of nature cycles, spirits and the harvest of the pagan religion(and may have represented human sacrifice also) but that the song was Christianized in order to show John Barleycorn as a Christ-like figure.

The ballad of john barleycorn relates the tale of the Corn King, or Corn-spirit. According to James George Frazier's The Golden Bough, the Corn King was selected from the men of the tribe and was embodied in the last sheaf of corn or barley and was then was made in to a human figure. It then was treated as a king for a year, then at a pre-set time, danced the corn maze and was killed. His body was then dragged through the fields so the blood would run in the furrows and make the barley grow. Afterwards, he was then hung in the house and left there until plough monday, where the seeds from the corn-dolly was separated from it, and then layed out on the freshly ploughed fields before the rest of the seeds would be sown, this would then bring back the corn-king or corn-spirit and bring with him the life of the fields aswell.

[edit]