I don’t have a funny title…

The myth of the “Corn Mother” reminded me a lot of the resurrection story from the Christian mythos. They both share a self-sacrificial hero who gives their life to save their people. The interesting thing, I think, that unites these stories is that the community is encouraged to eat the flesh of the heroes. In the Christian mythos, Jesus is symbolically eaten as the sacrament—people eat wafers to symbolize his flesh and drink wine to symbolize his blood. The Corn Mother feeds her people with the corn that grows from her grave—the kernels are her flesh.
The difference between these sacrifices displays a significant difference in their respective ideologies. The sacrifice of Jesus is symbolic one, where he gave his life for the spiritual well-being of his followers. The Corn Mother’s sacrifice is literal. Her people are starving because there are no more animals for them to hunt. She gives her life so that her people can subsist on her flesh. Although both heroes are meant to literally have sacrificed themselves, the difference in what they died for highlights the fundamental differences in each religion. While the Christian religion is concerned with life after death, the Corn Mother religion focuses on the current world that we live in.
The part of the Corn Mother story that was extremely unusual to me was the death scene. The brothers dragged their mother’s dead body over a field until all of her flesh was ripped off and only her bones were left to be buried. The event was made even more horrific by the fact that the brothers were crying while they did this. These emotional details are often left out in the re-tellings of Biblical stories—the only important emotions relayed are the character’s feelings towards God. By including these details the story connected more with me than other mythic stories.