If anything could touch and move an unawakened anthropologist it would be
the conversion of Mannhardt. My own relations with his ideas have the
interest of illustrating mental coincidences. His name does not occur, I
think, in the essay, 'The Method of Folklore,' in the first edition of my
Custom and Myth. In that essay I take, as an example of the method, the
Scottish and Northumbrian Kernababy, the puppet made out of the last
gleanings of harvest. This I compared to the Greek Demeter of the
harvest-home, with sheaves and poppies in her hands, in the immortal
Seventh Idyll of Theocritus. Our Kernababy, I said, is a stunted
survival of our older 'Maiden,' 'a regular image of the harvest goddess,'
and I compared [Greek]. Next I gave the parallel case from ancient Peru,
and the odd accidental coincidence that _there_ the maize was styled Mama
Cora ([Greek]!).

In entire ignorance of Mannhardt's corn-spirit, or corn-mother, I was
following Mannhardt's track. Indeed, Mr. Max Muller has somewhere
remarked that I popularise Mannhardt's ideas. Naturally he could not
guess that the coincidence was accidental and also inevitable. Two men,
unknown to each other, were using the same method on the same facts.



Mannhardt's Return to his old Colours


If, then, Mannhardt was re-converted, it would be a potent argument for
my conversion. But one is reminded of the re-conversion of Prince
Charles. In 1750 he 'deserted the errors of the Church of Rome for those
of the Church of England.' Later he returned, or affected to return, to
the ancient faith.