But perhaps, for our purpose, the most instructive of these mimic

executions is the following Bohemian one. In some places of the

Pilsen district (Bohemia) on Whit-Monday the King is dressed in

bark, ornamented with flowers and ribbons; he wears a crown of gilt

paper and rides a horse, which is also decked with flowers. Attended

by a judge, an executioner, and other characters, and followed by a

train of soldiers, all mounted, he rides to the village square,

where a hut or arbour of green boughs has been erected under the

May-trees, which are firs, freshly cut, peeled to the top, and

dressed with flowers and ribbons. After the dames and maidens of the

village have been criticised and a frog beheaded, the cavalcade

rides to a place previously determined upon, in a straight, broad

street. Here they draw up in two lines and the King takes to flight.

He is given a short start and rides off at full speed, pursued by

the whole troop. If they fail to catch him he remains King for

another year, and his companions must pay his score at the ale-house

in the evening. But if they overtake and catch him he is scourged

with hazel rods or beaten with the wooden swords and compelled to

dismount. Then the executioner asks, "Shall I behead this King?" The

answer is given, "Behead him"; the executioner brandishes his axe,

and with the words, "One, two, three, let the King headless be!" he

strikes off the King's crown. Amid the loud cries of the bystanders

the King sinks to the ground; then he is laid on a bier and carried

to the nearest farmhouse.

In most of the personages who are thus slain in mimicry it is

impossible not to recognise representatives of the tree-spirit or

spirit of vegetation, as he is supposed to manifest himself in

spring. The bark, leaves, and flowers in which the actors are

dressed, and the season of the year at which they appear, show that

they belong to the same class as the Grass King, King of the May,

Jack-in-the-Green, and other representatives of the vernal spirit of

vegetation which we examined in an earlier part of this work. As if

to remove any possible doubt on this head, we find that in two cases

these slain men are brought into direct connexion with May-trees,

which are the impersonal, as the May King, Grass King, and so forth,

are the personal representatives of the tree-spirit. The drenching

of the _Pfingstl_ with water and his wading up to the middle into

the brook are, therefore, no doubt rain-charms like those which have

been already described.

But if these personages represent, as they certainly do, the spirit

of vegetation in spring, the question arises, Why kill them? What is

the object of slaying the spirit of vegetation at any time and above

all in spring, when his services are most wanted? The only probable

answer to this question seems to be given in the explanation already

proposed of the custom of killing the divine king or priest. The

divine life, incarnate in a material and mortal body, is liable to

be tainted and corrupted by the weakness of the frail medium in

which it is for a time enshrined; and if it is to be saved from the

increasing enfeeblement which it must necessarily share with its

human incarnation as he advances in years, it must be detached from

him before, or at least as soon as, he exhibits signs of decay, in

order to be transferred to a vigorous successor. This is done by

killing the old representative of the god and conveying the divine

spirit from him to a new incarnation. The killing of the god, that

is, of his human incarnation, is therefore merely a necessary step

to his revival or resurrection in a better form. Far from being an

extinction of the divine spirit, it is only the beginning of a purer

and stronger manifestation of it. If this explanation holds good of

the custom of killing divine kings and priests in general, it is

still more obviously applicable to the custom of annually killing

the representative of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation in

spring. For the decay of plant life in winter is readily interpreted

by primitive man as an enfeeblement of the spirit of vegetation; the

spirit has, he thinks, grown old and weak and must therefore be

renovated by being slain and brought to life in a younger and

fresher form. Thus the killing of the representative of the

tree-spirit in spring is regarded as a means to promote and quicken

the growth of vegetation. For the killing of the tree-spirit is

associated always (we must suppose) implicitly, and sometimes

explicitly also, with a revival or resurrection of him in a more

youthful and vigorous form. So in the Saxon and Thüringen custom,

after the Wild Man has been shot he is brought to life again by a

doctor; and in the Wurmlingen ceremony there figures a Dr.

Iron-Beard, who probably once played a similar part; certainly in

another spring ceremony, which will be described presently, Dr.

Iron-Beard pretends to restore a dead man to life. But of this

revival or resurrection of the god we shall have more to say anon.

The points of similarity between these North European personages and

the subject of our enquiry--the King of the Wood or priest of

Nemi--are sufficiently striking. In these northern maskers we see

kings, whose dress of bark and leaves along with the hut of green

boughs and the fir-trees, under which they hold their court,

proclaim them unmistakably as, like their Italian counterpart, Kings

of the Wood. Like him they die a violent death, but like him they

may escape from it for a time by their bodily strength and agility;

for in several of these northern customs the flight and pursuit of

the king is a prominent part of the ceremony, and in one case at

least if the king can outrun his pursuers he retains his life and

his office for another year. In this last case the king in fact

holds office on condition of running for his life once a year, just

as the King of Calicut in later times held office on condition of

defending his life against all comers once every twelve years, and

just as the priest of Nemi held office on condition of defending

himself against any assault at any time. In every one of these

instances the life of the god-man is prolonged on condition of his

showing, in a severe physical contest of fight or flight, that his

bodily strength is not decayed, and that, therefore, the violent

death, which sooner or later is inevitable, may for the present be

postponed. With regard to flight it is noticeable that flight

figured conspicuously both in the legend and in the practice of the

King of the Wood. He had to be a runaway slave in memory of the

flight of Orestes, the traditional founder of the worship; hence the

Kings of the Wood are described by an ancient writer as "both strong

of hand and fleet of foot." Perhaps if we knew the ritual of the

Arician grove fully we might find that the king was allowed a chance

for his life by flight, like his Bohemian brother. I have already

conjectured that the annual flight of the priestly king at Rome

(_regifugium_) was at first a flight of the same kind; in other

words, that he was originally one of those divine kings who are

either put to death after a fixed period or allowed to prove by the

strong hand or the fleet foot that their divinity is vigorous and

unimpaired. One more point of resemblance may be noted between the

Italian King of the Wood and his northern counterparts. In Saxony

and Thüringen the representative of the tree-spirit, after being

killed, is brought to life again by a doctor. This is exactly what

legend affirmed to have happened to the first King of the Wood at

Nemi, Hippolytus or Virbius, who after he had been killed by his

horses was restored to life by the physician Aesculapius. Such a

legend tallies well with the theory that the slaying of the King of

the Wood was only a step to his revival or resurrection in his

successor.

2. Burying the Carnival

THUS far I have offered an explanation of the rule which required

that the priest of Nemi should be slain by his successor. The

explanation claims to be no more than probable; our scanty knowledge

of the custom and of its history forbids it to be more. But its

probability will be augmented in proportion to the extent to which

the motives and modes of thought which it assumes can be proved to

have operated in primitive society. Hitherto the god with whose

death and resurrection we have been chiefly concerned has been the

tree-god. But if I can show that the custom of killing the god and

the belief in his resurrection originated, or at least existed, in

the hunting and pastoral stage of society, when the slain god was an

animal, and that it survived into the agricultural stage, when the

slain god was the corn or a human being representing the corn, the

probability of my explanation will have been considerably increased.

This I shall attempt to do in the sequel, and in the course of the

discussion I hope to clear up some obscurities which still remain,

and to answer some objections which may have suggested themselves to

the reader.

We start from the point at which we left off--the spring customs of

European peasantry. Besides the ceremonies already described there

are two kindred sets of observances in which the simulated death of

a divine or supernatural being is a conspicuous feature. In one of

them the being whose death is dramatically represented is a

personification of the Carnival; in the other it is Death himself.

The former ceremony falls naturally at the end of the Carnival,

either on the last day of that merry season, namely Shrove Tuesday,

or on the first day of Lent, namely Ash Wednesday. The date of the

other ceremony--the Carrying or Driving out of Death, as it is

commonly called--is not so uniformly fixed. Generally it is the

fourth Sunday in Lent, which hence goes by the name of Dead Sunday;

but in some places the celebration falls a week earlier, in others,

as among the Czechs of Bohemia, a week later, while in certain

German villages of Moravia it is held on the first Sunday after

Easter. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the date may originally have

been variable, depending on the appearance of the first swallow or

some other herald of the spring. Some writers regard the ceremony as

Slavonic in its origin. Grimm thought it was a festival of the New

Year with the old Slavs, who began their year in March. We shall

first take examples, of the mimic death of the Carnival, which

always falls before the other in the calendar.

At Frosinone, in Latium, about half-way between Rome and Naples, the

dull monotony of life in a provincial Italian town is agreeably

broken on the last day of the Carnival by the ancient festival known

as the _Radica._ About four o'clock in the afternoon the town band,

playing lively tunes and followed by a great crowd, proceeds to the

Piazza del Plebiscito, where is the Sub-Prefecture as well as the

rest of the Government buildings. Here, in the middle of the square,

the eyes of the expectant multitude are greeted by the sight of an

immense car decked with many-coloured festoons and drawn by four

horses. Mounted on the car is a huge chair, on which sits enthroned

the majestic figure of the Carnival, a man of stucco about nine feet

high with a rubicund and smiling countenance. Enormous boots, a tin

helmet like those which grace the heads of officers of the Italian

marine, and a coat of many colours embellished with strange devices,

adorn the outward man of this stately personage. His left hand rests

on the arm of the chair, while with his right he gracefully salutes

the crowd, being moved to this act of civility by a string which is

pulled by a man who modestly shrinks from publicity under the

mercy-seat. And now the crowd, surging excitedly round the car,

gives vent to its feelings in wild cries of joy, gentle and simple

being mixed up together and all dancing furiously the _Saltarello._

A special feature of the festival is that every one must carry in

his hand what is called a _radica_ ( "root"), by which is meant a

huge leaf of the aloe or rather the agave. Any one who ventured into

the crowd without such a leaf would be unceremoniously hustled out

of it, unless indeed he bore as a substitute a large cabbage at the

end of a long stick or a bunch of grass curiously plaited. When the

multitude, after a short turn, has escorted the slow-moving car to

the gate of the Sub-Prefecture, they halt, and the car, jolting over

the uneven ground, rumbles into the courtyard. A hush now falls on

the crowd, their subdued voices sounding, according to the

description of one who has heard them, like the murmur of a troubled

sea. All eyes are turned anxiously to the door from which the

Sub-Prefect himself and the other representatives of the majesty of

the law are expected to issue and pay their homage to the hero of

the hour. A few moments of suspense and then a storm of cheers and

hand-clapping salutes the appearance of the dignitaries, as they

file out and, descending the staircase, take their place in the

procession. The hymn of the Carnival is now thundered out, after

which, amid a deafening roar, aloe leaves and cabbages are whirled

aloft and descend impartially on the heads of the just and the

unjust, who lend fresh zest to the proceedings by engaging in a free

fight. When these preliminaries have been concluded to the

satisfaction of all concerned, the procession gets under weigh. The

rear is brought up by a cart laden with barrels of wine and

policemen, the latter engaged in the congenial task of serving out

wine to all who ask for it, while a most internecine struggle,

accompanied by a copious discharge of yells, blows, and blasphemy,

goes on among the surging crowd at the cart's tail in their anxiety

not to miss the glorious opportunity of intoxicating themselves at

the public expense. Finally, after the procession has paraded the

principal streets in this majestic manner, the effigy of Carnival is

taken to the middle of a public square, stripped of his finery, laid

on a pile of wood, and burnt amid the cries of the multitude, who

thundering out once more the song of the Carnival fling their

so-called "roots" on the pyre and give themselves up without

restraint to the pleasures of the dance.

In the Abruzzi a pasteboard figure of the Carnival is carried by

four grave-diggers with pipes in their mouths and bottles of wine

slung at their shoulder-belts. In front walks the wife of the

Carnival, dressed in mourning and dissolved in tears. From time to

time the company halts, and while the wife addresses the

sympathising public, the grave-diggers refresh the inner man with a

pull at the bottle. In the open square the mimic corpse is laid on a

pyre, and to the roll of drums, the shrill screams of the women, and

the gruffer cries of the men a light is set to it. While the figure

burns, chestnuts are thrown about among the crowd. Sometimes the

Carnival is represented by a straw-man at the top of a pole which is

borne through the town by a troop of mummers in the course of the

afternoon. When evening comes on, four of the mummers hold out a

quilt or sheet by the corners, and the figure of the Carnival is

made to tumble into it. The procession is then resumed, the

performers weeping crocodile tears and emphasising the poignancy of

their grief by the help of saucepans and dinner bells. Sometimes,

again, in the Abruzzi the dead Carnival is personified by a living

man who lies in a coffin, attended by another who acts the priest

and dispenses holy water in great profusion from a bathing tub.

At Lerida, in Catalonia, the funeral of the Carnival was witnessed

by an English traveller in 1877. On the last Sunday of the Carnival

a grand procession of infantry, cavalry, and maskers of many sorts,

some on horseback and some in carriages, escorted the grand car of

His Grace Pau Pi, as the effigy was called, in triumph through the

principal streets. For three days the revelry ran high, and then at

midnight on the last day of the Carnival the same procession again

wound through the streets, but under a different aspect and for a

different end. The triumphal car was exchanged for a hearse, in

which reposed the effigy of his dead Grace: a troop of maskers, who

in the first procession had played the part of Students of Folly

with many a merry quip and jest, now, robed as priests and bishops,

paced slowly along holding aloft huge lighted tapers and singing a

dirge. All the mummers wore crape, and all the horsemen carried

blazing flambeaux. Down the high street, between the lofty,

many-storeyed and balconied houses, where every window, every

balcony, every housetop was crammed with a dense mass of spectators,

all dressed and masked in fantastic gorgeousness, the procession

took its melancholy way. Over the scene flashed and played the

shifting cross-lights and shadows from the moving torches: red and

blue Bengal lights flared up and died out again; and above the

trampling of the horses and the measured tread of the marching

multitude rose the voices of the priests chanting the requiem, while

the military bands struck in with the solemn roll of the muffled

drums. On reaching the principal square the procession halted, a

burlesque funeral oration was pronounced over the defunct Pau Pi,

and the lights were extinguished. Immediately the devil and his

angels darted from the crowd, seized the body and fled away with it,

hotly pursued by the whole multitude, yelling, screaming, and

cheering. Naturally the fiends were overtaken and dispersed; and the

sham corpse, rescued from their clutches, was laid in a grave that

had been made ready for its reception. Thus the Carnival of 1877 at

Lerida died and was buried.

A ceremony of the same sort is observed in Provence on Ash

Wednesday. An effigy called Caramantran, whimsically attired, is

drawn in a chariot or borne on a litter, accompanied by the populace

in grotesque costumes, who carry gourds full of wine and drain them

with all the marks, real or affected, of intoxication. At the head

of the procession are some men disguised as judges and barristers,

and a tall gaunt personage who masquerades as Lent; behind them

follow young people mounted on miserable hacks and attired as

mourners who pretend to bewail the fate that is in store for

Caramantran. In the principal square the procession halts, the

tribunal is constituted, and Caramantran placed at the bar. After a

formal trial he is sentenced to death amid the groans of the mob:

the barrister who defended him embraces his client for the last

time: the officers of justice do their duty: the condemned is set

with his back to a wall and hurried into eternity under a shower of

stones. The sea or a river receives his mangled remains. Throughout

nearly the whole of the Ardennes it was and still is customary on

Ash Wednesday to burn an effigy which is supposed to represent the

Carnival, while appropriate verses are sung round about the blazing

figure. Very often an attempt is made to fashion the effigy in the

likeness of the husband who is reputed to be least faithful to his

wife of any in the village. As might perhaps have been anticipated,

the distinction of being selected for portraiture under these

painful circumstances has a slight tendency to breed domestic jars,

especially when the portrait is burnt in front of the house of the

gay deceiver whom it represents, while a powerful chorus of

caterwauls, groans, and other melodious sounds bears public

testimony to the opinion which his friends and neighbours entertain

of his private virtues. In some villages of the Ardennes a young man

of flesh and blood, dressed up in hay and straw, used to act the

part of Shrove Tuesday (_Mardi Gras_), as the personification of the

Carnival is often called in France after the last day of the period

which he personates. He was brought before a mock tribunal, and

being condemned to death was placed with his back to a wall, like a

soldier at a military execution, and fired at with blank cartridges.

At Vrigne-aux-Bois one of these harmless buffoons, named Thierry,

was accidentally killed by a wad that had been left in a musket of

the firing-party. When poor Shrove Tuesday dropped under the fire,

the applause was loud and long, he did it so naturally; but when he

did not get up again, they ran to him and found him a corpse. Since

then there have been no more of these mock executions in the

Ardennes.

In Normandy on the evening of Ash Wednesday it used to be the custom

to hold a celebration called the Burial of Shrove Tuesday. A squalid

effigy scantily clothed in rags, a battered old hat crushed down on

his dirty face, his great round paunch stuffed with straw,

represented the disreputable old rake who, after a long course of

dissipation, was now about to suffer for his sins. Hoisted on the

shoulders of a sturdy fellow, who pretended to stagger under the

burden, this popular personification of the Carnival promenaded the

streets for the last time in a manner the reverse of triumphal.

Preceded by a drummer and accompanied by a jeering rabble, among

whom the urchins and all the tag-rag and bobtail of the town

mustered in great force, the figure was carried about by the

flickering light of torches to the discordant din of shovels and

tongs, pots and pans, horns and kettles, mingled with hootings,

groans, and hisses. From time to time the procession halted, and a

champion of morality accused the broken-down old sinner of all the

excesses he had committed and for which he was now about to be

burned alive. The culprit, having nothing to urge in his own

defence, was thrown on a heap of straw, a torch was put to it, and a

great blaze shot up, to the delight of the children who frisked

round it screaming out some old popular verses about the death of

the Carnival. Sometimes the effigy was rolled down the slope of a

hill before being burnt. At Saint-Lô the ragged effigy of Shrove

Tuesday was followed by his widow, a big burly lout dressed as a

woman with a crape veil, who emitted sounds of lamentation and woe

in a stentorian voice. After being carried about the streets on a

litter attended by a crowd of maskers, the figure was thrown into

the River Vire. The final scene has been graphically described by

Madame Octave Feuillet as she witnessed it in her childhood some

sixty years ago. "My parents invited friends to see, from the top of

the tower of Jeanne Couillard, the funeral procession passing. It

was there that, quaffing lemonade--the only refreshment allowed

because of the fast--we witnessed at nightfall a spectacle of which

I shall always preserve a lively recollection. At our feet flowed

the Vire under its old stone bridge. On the middle of the bridge lay

the figure of Shrove Tuesday on a litter of leaves, surrounded by

scores of maskers dancing, singing, and carrying torches. Some of

them in their motley costumes ran along the parapet like fiends. The

rest, worn out with their revels, sat on the posts and dozed. Soon

the dancing stopped, and some of the troop, seizing a torch, set

fire to the effigy, after which they flung it into the river with

redoubled shouts and clamour. The man of straw, soaked with resin,

floated away burning down the stream of the Vire, lighting up with

its funeral fires the woods on the bank and the battlements of the

old castle in which Louis XI. and Francis I. had slept. When the

last glimmer of the blazing phantom had vanished, like a falling

star, at the end of the valley, every one withdrew, crowd and

maskers alike, and we quitted the ramparts with our guests."

In the neighbourhood of Tübingen on Shrove Tuesday a straw-man,

called the Shrovetide Bear, is made up; he is dressed in a pair of

old trousers, and a fresh black-pudding or two squirts filled with

blood are inserted in his neck. After a formal condemnation he is

beheaded, laid in a coffin, and on Ash Wednesday is buried in the

churchyard. This is called "Burying the Carnival." Amongst some of

the Saxons of Transylvania the Carnival is hanged. Thus at Braller

on Ash Wednesday or Shrove Tuesday two white and two chestnut horses

draw a sledge on which is placed a straw-man swathed in a white

cloth; beside him is a cart-wheel which is kept turning round. Two

lads disguised as old men follow the sledge lamenting. The rest of

the village lads, mounted on horseback and decked with ribbons,

accompany the procession, which is headed by two girls crowned with

evergreen and drawn in a waggon or sledge. A trial is held under a

tree, at which lads disguised as soldiers pronounce sentence of

death. The two old men try to rescue the straw-man and to fly with

him, but to no purpose; he is caught by the two girls and handed

over to the executioner, who hangs him on a tree. In vain the old

men try to climb up the tree and take him down; they always tumble

down, and at last in despair they throw themselves on the ground and

weep and howl for the hanged man. An official then makes a speech in

which he declares that the Carnival was condemned to death because

he had done them harm, by wearing out their shoes and making them

tired and sleepy. At the "Burial of Carnival" in Lechrain, a man

dressed as a woman in black clothes is carried on a litter or bier

by four men; he is lamented over by men disguised as women in black

clothes, then thrown down before the village dung-heap, drenched

with water, buried in the dung-heap, and covered with straw. On the

evening of Shrove Tuesday the Esthonians make a straw figure called

_metsik_ or "wood-spirit"; one year it is dressed with a man's coat

and hat, next year with a hood and a petticoat. This figure is stuck

on a long pole, carried across the boundary of the village with loud

cries of joy, and fastened to the top of a tree in the wood. The

ceremony is believed to be a protection against all kinds of

misfortune.

Sometimes at these Shrovetide or Lenten ceremonies the resurrection

of the pretended dead person is enacted. Thus, in some parts of

Swabia on Shrove Tuesday Dr. Iron-Beard professes to bleed a sick

man, who thereupon falls as dead to the ground; but the doctor at

last restores him to life by blowing air into him through a tube. In

the Harz Mountains, when Carnival is over, a man is laid on a

baking-trough and carried with dirges to the grave; but in the grave

a glass of brandy is buried instead of the man. A speech is

delivered and then the people return to the village-green or

meeting-place, where they smoke the long clay pipes which are

distributed at funerals. On the morning of Shrove Tuesday in the

following year the brandy is dug up and the festival begins by every

one tasting the spirit which, as the phrase goes, has come to life

again.

3. Carrying out Death

THE CEREMONY of "Carrying out Death" presents much the same features

as "Burying the Carnival"; except that the carrying out of Death is

generally followed by a ceremony, or at least accompanied by a

profession, of bringing in Summer, Spring, or Life. Thus in Middle

Franken, a province of Bavaria, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, the

village urchins used to make a straw effigy of Death, which they

carried about with burlesque pomp through the streets, and

afterwards burned with loud cries beyond the bounds. The Frankish

custom is thus described by a writer of the sixteenth century: "At

Mid-Lent, the season when the church bids us rejoice, the young

people of my native country make a straw image of Death, and

fastening it to a pole carry it with shouts to the neighbouring

villages. By some they are kindly received, and after being

refreshed with milk, peas, and dried pears, the usual food of that

season, are sent home again. Others, however, treat them with

anything but hospitality; for, looking on them as harbingers of

misfortune, to wit of death, they drive them from their boundaries

with weapons and insults." In the villages near Erlangen, when the

fourth Sunday in Lent came around, the peasant girls used to dress

themselves in all their finery with flowers in their hair. Thus

attired they repaired to the neighbouring town, carrying puppets

which were adorned with leaves and covered with white cloths. These

they took from house to house in pairs, stopping at every door where

they expected to receive something, and singing a few lines in which

they announced that it was Mid-Lent and that they were about to

throw Death into the water. When they had collected some trifling

gratuities they went to the river Regnitz and flung the puppets

representing Death into the stream. This was done to ensure a

fruitful and prosperous year; further, it was considered a safeguard

against pestilence and sudden death. At Nuremberg girls of seven to

eighteen years of age go through the streets bearing a little open

coffin, in which is a doll hidden under a shroud. Others carry a

beech branch, with an apple fastened to it for a head, in an open

box. They sing, "We carry Death into the water, it is well," or "We

carry Death into the water, carry him in and out again." In some

parts of Bavaria down to 1780 it was believed that a fatal epidemic

would ensue if the custom of "Carrying out Death" were not observed.

In some villages of Thüringen, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, the

children used to carry a puppet of birchen twigs through the

village, and then threw it into a pool, while they sang, "We carry

the old Death out behind the herdman's old house; we have got

Summer, and Kroden's (?) power is destroyed." At Debschwitz or

Dobschwitz, near Gera, the ceremony of "Driving out Death" is or was

annually observed on the first of March. The young people make up a

figure of straw or the like materials, dress it in old clothes,

which they have begged from houses in the village, and carry it out

and throw it into the river. On returning to the village they break

the good news to the people, and receive eggs and other victuals as

a reward. The ceremony is or was supposed to purify the village and

to protect the inhabitants from sickness and plague. In other

villages of Thüringen, in which the population was originally

Slavonic, the carrying out of the puppet is accompanied with the

singing of a song, which begins, "Now we carry Death out of the

village and Spring into the village." At the end of the seventeenth

and beginning of the eighteenth century the custom was observed in

Thüringen as follows. The boys and girls made an effigy of straw or

the like materials, but the shape of the figure varied from year to

year. In one year it would represent an old man, in the next an old

woman, in the third a young man, and in the fourth a maiden, and the

dress of the figure varied with the character it personated. There

used to be a sharp contest as to where the effigy was to be made,

for the people thought that the house from which it was carried

forth would not be visited with death that year. Having been made,

the puppet was fastened to a pole and carried by a girl if it

represented an old man, but by a boy if it represented an old woman.

Thus it was borne in procession, the young people holding sticks in

their hands and singing that they were driving out Death. When they

came to water they threw the effigy into it and ran hastily back,

fearing that it might jump on their shoulders and wring their necks.

They also took care not to touch it, lest it should dry them up. On

their return they beat the cattle with the sticks, believing that

this would make the animals fat or fruitful. Afterwards they visited

the house or houses from which they had carried the image of Death;

where they received a dole of half-boiled peas. The custom of

"Carrying out Death" was practised also in Saxony. At Leipsic the

bastards and public women used to make a straw effigy of Death every

year at Mid-Lent. This they carried through all the streets with

songs and showed it to the young married women. Finally they threw

it into the river Parthe. By this ceremony they professed to make

the young wives fruitful, to purify the city, and to protect the

inhabitants for that year from plague and other epidemics.

Ceremonies of the same sort are observed at Mid-Lent in Silesia.

Thus in many places the grown girls with the help of the young men

dress up a straw figure with women's clothes and carry it out of the

village towards the setting sun. At the boundary they strip it of

its clothes, tear it in pieces, and scatter the fragments about the

fields. This is called "Burying Death." As they carry the image out,

they sing that they are about to bury Death under an oak, that he

may depart from the people. Sometimes the song runs that they are

bearing Death over hill and dale to return no more. In the Polish

neighbourhood of Gross-Strehlitz the puppet is called Goik. It is

carried on horseback and thrown into the nearest water. The people

think that the ceremony protects them from sickness of every sort in

the coming year. In the districts of Wohlau and Guhrau the image of

Death used to be thrown over the boundary of the next village. But

as the neighbours feared to receive the ill-omened figure, they were

on the look-out to repel it, and hard knocks were often exchanged

between the two parties. In some Polish parts of Upper Silesia the

effigy, representing an old woman, goes by the name of Marzana, the

goddess of death. It is made in the house where the last death

occurred, and is carried on a pole to the boundary of the village,

where it is thrown into a pond or burnt. At Polkwitz the custom of

"Carrying out Death" fell into abeyance; but an outbreak of fatal

sickness which followed the intermission of the ceremony induced the

people to resume it.

In Bohemia the children go out with a straw-man, representing Death,

to the end of the village, where they burn it, singing--

"Now carry we Death out of the village,

The new Summer into the village,

Welcome, dear Summer,

Green little corn."

At Tabor in Bohemia the figure of Death is carried out of the town

and flung from a high rock into the water, while they sing--

"Death swims on the water,

Summer will soon be here,

We carried Death away for you

We brought the Summer.

And do thou, O holy Marketa,

Give us a good year

For wheat and for rye."

In other parts of Bohemia they carry Death to the end of the

village, singing--

"We carry Death out of the village,

And the New Year into the village.

Dear Spring, we bid you welcome,

Green grass, we bid you welcome."

Behind the village they erect a pyre, on which they burn the straw

figure, reviling and scoffing at it the while. Then they return,

singing--

"We have carried away Death,

And brought Life back.

He has taken up his quarters in the village,

Therefore sing joyous songs."

In some German villages of Moravia, as in Jassnitz and Seitendorf,

the young folk assemble on the third Sunday in Lent and fashion a

straw-man, who is generally adorned with a fur cap and a pair of old

leathern hose, if such are to be had. The effigy is then hoisted on

a pole and carried by the lads and lasses out into the open fields.

On the way they sing a song, in which it is said that they are

carrying Death away and bringing dear Summer into the house, and

with Summer the May and the flowers. On reaching an appointed place

they dance in a circle round the effigy with loud shouts and

screams, then suddenly rush at it and tear it to pieces with their

hands. Lastly, the pieces are thrown together in a heap, the pole is

broken, and fire is set to the whole. While it burns the troop

dances merrily round it, rejoicing at the victory won by Spring; and

when the fire has nearly died out they go to the householders to beg

for a present of eggs wherewith to hold a feast, taking care to give

as a reason for the request that they have carried Death out and

away.

The preceding evidence shows that the effigy of Death is often

regarded with fear and treated with marks of hatred and abhorrence.

Thus the anxiety of the villagers to transfer the figure from their

own to their neighbours' land, and the reluctance of the latter to

receive the ominous guest, are proof enough of the dread which it

inspires. Further, in Lusatia and Silesia the puppet is sometimes

made to look in at the window of a house, and it is believed that

some one in the house will die within the year unless his life is

redeemed by the payment of money. Again, after throwing the effigy

away, the bearers sometimes run home lest Death should follow them,

and if one of them falls in running, it is believed that he will die

within the year. At Chrudim, in Bohemia, the figure of Death is made

out of a cross, with a head and mask stuck at the top, and a shirt

stretched out on it. On the fifth Sunday in Lent the boys take this

effigy to the nearest brook or pool, and standing in a line throw it

into the water. Then they all plunge in after it; but as soon as it

is caught no one more may enter the water. The boy who did not enter

the water or entered it last will die within the year, and he is

obliged to carry the Death back to the village. The effigy is then

burned. On the other hand, it is believed that no one will die

within the year in the house out of which the figure of Death has

been carried; and the village out of which Death has been driven is

sometimes supposed to be protected against sickness and plague. In

some villages of Austrian Silesia on the Saturday before Dead Sunday

an effigy is made of old clothes, hay, and straw, for the purpose of

driving Death out of the village. On Sunday the people, armed with

sticks and straps, assemble before the house where the figure is

lodged. Four lads then draw the effigy by cords through the village

amid exultant shouts, while all the others beat it with their sticks

and straps. On reaching a field which belongs to a neighbouring

village they lay down the figure, cudgel it soundly, and scatter the

fragments over the field. The people believe that the village from

which Death has been thus carried out will be safe from any

infectious disease for the whole year.

4. Bringing in Summer

IN THE PRECEDING ceremonies the return of Spring, Summer, or Life,

as a sequel to the expulsion of Death, is only implied or at most

announced. In the following ceremonies it is plainly enacted. Thus

in some parts of Bohemia the effigy of Death is drowned by being

thrown into the water at sunset; then the girls go out into the wood

and cut down a young tree with a green crown, hang a doll dressed as

a woman on it, deck the whole with green, red, and white ribbons,

and march in procession with their _Líto_ (Summer) into the village,

collecting gifts and singing--

"Death swims in the water,

Spring comes to visit us,

With eggs that are red,

With yellow pancakes.

We carried Death out of the village,

We are carrying Summer into the village."

In many Silesian villages the figure of Death, after being treated

with respect, is stript of its clothes and flung with curses into

the water, or torn to pieces in a field. Then the young folk repair

to a wood, cut down a small fir-tree, peel the trunk, and deck it

with festoons of evergreens, paper roses, painted egg-shells, motley

bits of cloth, and so forth. The tree thus adorned is called Summer

or May. Boys carry it from house to house singing appropriate songs

and begging for presents. Among their songs is the following:

"We have carried Death out,

We are bringing the dear Summer back,

The Summer and the May

And all the flowers gay."

Sometimes they also bring back from the wood a prettily adorned

figure, which goes by the name of Summer, May, or the Bride; in the

Polish districts it is called Dziewanna, the goddess of spring.

At Eisenach on the fourth Sunday in Lent young people used to fasten

a straw-man, representing Death, to a wheel, which they trundled to

the top of a hill. Then setting fire to the figure they allowed it

and the wheel to roll down the slope. Next day they cut a tall

fir-tree, tricked it out with ribbons, and set it up in the plain.

The men then climbed the tree to fetch down the ribbons. In Upper

Lusatia the figure of Death, made of straw and rags, is dressed in a

veil furnished by the last bride and a shirt provided by the house

in which the last death took place. Thus arrayed the figure is stuck

on the end of a long pole and carried at full speed by the tallest

and strongest girl, while the rest pelt the effigy with sticks and

stones. Whoever hits it will be sure to live through the year. In

this way Death is carried out of the village and thrown into the

water or over the boundary of the next village. On their way home

each one breaks a green branch and carries it gaily with him till he

reaches the village, when he throws it away. Sometimes the young

people of the next village, upon whose land the figure has been

thrown, run after them and hurl it back, not wishing to have Death

among them. Hence the two parties occasionally come to blows.

In these cases Death is represented by the puppet which is thrown

away, Summer or Life by the branches or trees which are brought

back. But sometimes a new potency of life seems to be attributed to

the image of Death itself, and by a kind of resurrection it becomes

the instrument of the general revival. Thus in some parts of Lusatia

women alone are concerned in carrying out Death, and suffer no male

to meddle with it. Attired in mourning, which they wear the whole

day, they make a puppet of straw, clothe it in a white shirt, and

give it a broom in one hand and a scythe in the other. Singing songs

and pursued by urchins throwing stones, they carry the puppet to the

village boundary, where they tear it in pieces. Then they cut down a

fine tree, hang the shirt on it, and carry it home singing. On the

Feast of Ascension the Saxons of Braller, a village of Transylvania,

not far from Hermannstadt, observe the ceremony of "Carrying out

Death" in the following manner. After morning service all the

school-girls repair to the house of one of their number, and there

dress up the Death. This is done by tying a threshed-out sheaf of

corn into a rough semblance of a head and body, while the arms are

simulated by a broomstick thrust through it horizontally. The figure

is dressed in the holiday attire of a young peasant woman, with a

red hood, silver brooches, and a profusion of ribbons at the arms

and breast. The girls bustle at their work, for soon the bells will

be ringing to vespers, and the Death must be ready in time to be

placed at the open window, that all the people may see it on their

way to church. When vespers are over, the longed-for moment has come

for the first procession with the Death to begin; it is a privilege

that belongs to the school-girls alone. Two of the older girls seize

the figure by the arms and walk in front: all the rest follow two

and two. Boys may take no part in the procession, but they troop

after it gazing with open-mouthed admiration at the "beautiful

Death." So the procession goes through all the streets of the

village, the girls singing the old hymn that begins--

"Gott mein Vater, deine Liebe

Reicht so weit der Himmel ist,"

to a tune that differs from the ordinary one. When the procession

has wound its way through every street, the girls go to another

house, and having shut the door against the eager prying crowd of

boys who follow at their heels, they strip the Death and pass the

naked truss of straw out of the window to the boys, who pounce on

it, run out of the village with it without singing, and fling the

dilapidated effigy into the neighbouring brook. This done, the

second scene of the little drama begins. While the boys were

carrying away the Death out of the village, the girls remained in

the house, and one of them is now dressed in all the finery which

had been worn by the effigy. Thus arrayed she is led in procession

through all the streets to the singing of the same hymn as before.

When the procession is over they all betake themselves to the house

of the girl who played the leading part. Here a feast awaits them

from which also the boys are excluded. It is a popular belief that

the children may safely begin to eat gooseberries and other fruit

after the day on which Death has thus been carried out; for Death,

which up to that time lurked especially in gooseberries, is now

destroyed. Further, they may now bathe with impunity out of doors.

Very similar is the ceremony which, down to recent years, was

observed in some of the German villages of Moravia. Boys and girls

met on the afternoon of the first Sunday after Easter, and together

fashioned a puppet of straw to represent Death. Decked with

bright-coloured ribbons and cloths, and fastened to the top of a

long pole, the effigy was then borne with singing and clamour to the

nearest height, where it was stript of its gay attire and thrown or

rolled down the slope. One of the girls was next dressed in the

gauds taken from the effigy of Death, and with her at its head the

procession moved back to the village. In some villages the practice

is to bury the effigy in the place that has the most evil reputation

of all the country-side: others throw it into running water.

In the Lusatian ceremony described above, the tree which is brought

home after the destruction of the figure of Death is plainly

equivalent to the trees or branches which, in the preceding customs,

were brought back as representatives of Summer or Life, after Death

had been thrown away or destroyed. But the transference of the shirt

worn by the effigy of Death to the tree clearly indicates that the

tree is a kind of revivification, in a new form, of the destroyed

effigy. This comes out also in the Transylvanian and Moravian

customs: the dressing of a girl in the clothes worn by the Death,

and the leading her about the village to the same song which had

been sung when the Death was being carried about, show that she is

intended to be a kind of resuscitation of the being whose effigy has

just been destroyed. These examples therefore suggest that the Death

whose demolition is represented in these ceremonies cannot be

regarded as the purely destructive agent which we understand by

Death. If the tree which is brought back as an embodiment of the

reviving vegetation of spring is clothed in the shirt worn by the

Death which has just been destroyed, the object certainly cannot be

to check and counteract the revival of vegetation: it can only be to

foster and promote it. Therefore the being which has just been

destroyed--the so-called Death--must be supposed to be endowed with

a vivifying and quickening influence, which it can communicate to

the vegetable and even the animal world. This ascription of a

life-giving virtue to the figure of Death is put beyond a doubt by

the custom, observed in some places, of taking pieces of the straw

effigy of Death and placing them in the fields to make the crops

grow, or in the manger to make the cattle thrive. Thus in

Spachendorf, a village of Austrian Silesia, the figure of Death,

made of straw, brushwood, and rags, is carried with wild songs to an

open place outside the village and there burned, and while it is

burning a general struggle takes place for the pieces, which are

pulled out of the flames with bare hands. Each one who secures a

fragment of the effigy ties it to a branch of the largest tree in

his garden, or buries it in his field, in the belief that this

causes the crops to grow better. In the Troppau district of Austrian

Silesia the straw figure which the boys make on the fourth Sunday in

Lent is dressed by the girls in woman's clothes and hung with

ribbons, necklace, and garlands. Attached to a long pole it is

carried out of the village, followed by a troop of young people of

both sexes, who alternately frolic, lament, and sing songs. Arrived

at its destination--a field outside the village--the figure is

stripped of its clothes and ornaments; then the crowd rushes at it

and tears it to bits, scuffling for the fragments. Every one tries

to get a wisp of the straw of which the effigy was made, because

such a wisp, placed in the manger, is believed to make the cattle

thrive. Or the straw is put in the hens' nest, it being supposed

that this prevents the hens from carrying away their eggs, and makes

them brood much better. The same attribution of a fertilising power

to the figure of Death appears in the belief that if the bearers of

the figure, after throwing it away, beat cattle with their sticks,

this will render the beasts fat or prolific. Perhaps the sticks had

been previously used to beat the Death, and so had acquired the

fertilising power ascribed to the effigy. We have seen, too, that at

Leipsic a straw effigy of Death was shown to young wives to make

them fruitful.

It seems hardly possible to separate from the May-trees the trees or

branches which are brought into the village after the destruction of

the Death. The bearers who bring them in profess to be bringing in

the Summer, therefore the trees obviously represent the Summer;

indeed in Silesia they are commonly called the Summer or the May,

and the doll which is sometimes attached to the Summer-tree is a

duplicate representative of the Summer, just as the May is sometimes

represented at the same time by a May-tree and a May Lady. Further,

the Summer-trees are adorned like May-trees with ribbons and so on;

like May-trees, when large, they are planted in the ground and

climbed up; and like May-trees, when small, they are carried from

door to door by boys or girls singing songs and collecting money.

And as if to demonstrate the identity of the two sets of customs the

bearers of the Summer-tree sometimes announce that they are bringing

in the Summer and the May. The customs, therefore, of bringing in

the May and bringing in the Summer are essentially the same; and the

Summer-tree is merely another form of the May-tree, the only

distinction (besides that of name) being in the time at which they

are respectively brought in; for while the May-tree is usually

fetched in on the first of May or at Whitsuntide, the Summer-tree is

fetched in on the fourth Sunday in Lent. Therefore, if the May-tree

is an embodiment of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation, the

Summer-tree must likewise be an embodiment of the tree-spirit or

spirit of vegetation. But we have seen that the Summer-tree is in

some cases a revivification of the effigy of Death. It follows,

therefore, that in these cases the effigy called Death must be an

embodiment of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation. This

inference is confirmed, first, by the vivifying and fertilising

influence which the fragments of the effigy of Death are believed to

exercise both on vegetable and on animal life; for this influence,

as we saw in an earlier part of this work, is supposed to be a

special attribute of the tree-spirit. It is confirmed, secondly, by

observing that the effigy of Death is sometimes decked with leaves

or made of twigs, branches, hemp, or a threshed-out sheaf of corn;

and that sometimes it is hung on a little tree and so carried about

by girls collecting money, just as is done with the May-tree and the

May Lady, and with the Summer-tree and the doll attached to it. In

short we are driven to regard the expulsion of Death and the

bringing in of Summer as, in some cases at least, merely another

form of that death and revival of the spirit of vegetation in spring

which we saw enacted in the killing and resurrection of the Wild

Man. The burial and resurrection of the Carnival is probably another

way of expressing the same idea. The interment of the representative

of the Carnival under a dung-heap is natural, if he is supposed to

possess a quickening and fertilising influence like that ascribed to

the effigy of Death. The Esthonians, indeed, who carry the straw

figure out of the village in the usual way on Shrove Tuesday, do not

call it the Carnival, but the Wood-spirit (_Metsik_), and they

clearly indicate the identity of the effigy with the wood-spirit by

fixing it to the top of a tree in the wood, where it remains for a

year, and is besought almost daily with prayers and offerings to

protect the herds; for like a true wood-spirit the _Metsik_ is a

patron of cattle. Sometimes the _Metsik_ is made of sheaves of corn.

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.

5. Battle of Summer and Winter

SOMETIMES in the popular customs of the peasantry the contrast

between the dormant powers of vegetation in winter and their

awakening vitality in spring takes the form of a dramatic contest

between actors who play the parts respectively of Winter and Summer.

Thus in the towns of Sweden on May Day two troops of young men on

horseback used to meet as if for mortal combat. One of them was led

by a representative of Winter clad in furs, who threw snowballs and

ice in order to prolong the cold weather. The other troop was

commanded by a representative of Summer covered with fresh leaves

and flowers. In the sham fight which followed the party of Summer

came off victorious, and the ceremony ended with a feast. Again, in

the region of the middle Rhine, a representative of Summer clad in

ivy combats a representative of Winter clad in straw or moss and

finally gains a victory over him. The vanquished foe is thrown to

the ground and stripped of his casing of straw, which is torn to

pieces and scattered about, while the youthful comrades of the two

champions sing a song to commemorate the defeat of Winter by Summer.

Afterwards they carry about a summer garland or branch and collect

gifts of eggs and bacon from house to house. Sometimes the champion

who acts the part of Summer is dressed in leaves and flowers and

wears a chaplet of flowers on his head. In the Palatinate this mimic

conflict takes place on the fourth Sunday in Lent. All over Bavaria

the same drama used to be acted on the same day, and it was still

kept up in some places down to the middle of the nineteenth century

or later. While Summer appeared clad all in green, decked with

fluttering ribbons, and carrying a branch in blossom or a little

tree hung with apples and pears, Winter was muffled up in cap and

mantle of fur and bore in his hand a snow-shovel or a flail.

Accompanied by their respective retinues dressed in corresponding

attire, they went through all the streets of the village, halting

before the houses and singing staves of old songs, for which they

received presents of bread, eggs, and fruit. Finally, after a short

struggle, Winter was beaten by Summer and ducked in the village well

or driven out of the village with shouts and laughter into the

forest.

At Goepfritz in Lower Austria, two men personating Summer and Winter

used to go from house to house on Shrove Tuesday, and were

everywhere welcomed by the children with great delight. The

representative of Summer was clad in white and bore a sickle; his

comrade, who played the part of Winter, had a fur-cap on his head,

his arms and legs were swathed in straw, and he carried a flail. In

every house they sang verses alternately. At Drömling in Brunswick,

down to the present time, the contest between Summer and Winter is

acted every year at Whitsuntide by a troop of boys and a troop of

girls. The boys rush singing, shouting, and ringing bells from house

to house to drive Winter away; after them come the girls singing

softly and led by a May Bride, all in bright dresses and decked with

flowers and garlands to represent the genial advent of spring.

Formerly the part of Winter was played by a straw-man which the boys

carried with them; now it is acted by a real man in disguise.

Among the Central Esquimaux of North America the contest between

representatives of summer and winter, which in Europe has long

degenerated into a mere dramatic performance, is still kept up as a

magical ceremony of which the avowed intention is to influence the

weather. In autumn, when storms announce the approach of the dismal

Arctic winter, the Esquimaux divide themselves into two parties

called respectively the ptarmigans and the ducks, the ptarmigans

comprising all persons born in winter, and the ducks all persons

born in summer. A long rope of sealskin is then stretched out, and

each party laying hold of one end of it seeks by tugging with might

and main to drag the other party over to its side. If the ptarmigans

get the worst of it, then summer has won the game and fine weather

may be expected to prevail through the winter.

6. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko

I RUSSIA funeral ceremonies like those of "Burying the Carnival" and

"Carrying out Death" are celebrated under the names, not of Death or

the Carnival, but of certain mythic figures, Kostrubonko, Kostroma,

Kupalo, Lada, and Yarilo. These Russian ceremonies are observed both

in spring and at midsummer. Thus "in Little Russia it used to be the

custom at Eastertide to celebrate the funeral of a being called

Kostrubonko, the deity of the spring. A circle was formed of singers

who moved slowly around a girl who lay on the ground as if dead, and

as they went they sang:

'Dead, dead is our Kostrubonko!

Dead, dead is our dear one!'

until the girl suddenly sprang up, on which the chorus joyfully

exclaimed:

'Come to life, come to life has our Kostrubonko!

Come to life, come to life has our dear one!'"

On the Eve of St. John (Midsummer Eve) a figure of Kupalo is made of

straw and "is dressed in woman's clothes, with a necklace and a

floral crown. Then a tree is felled, and, after being decked with

ribbons, is set up on some chosen spot. Near this tree, to which

they give the name of Marena [Winter or Death], the straw figure is

placed, together with a table, on which stand spirits and viands.

Afterwards a bonfire is lit, and the young men and maidens jump over

it in couples, carrying the figure with them. On the next day they

strip the tree and the figure of their ornaments, and throw them

both into a stream." On St. Peter's Day, the twenty-ninth of June,

or on the following Sunday, "the Funeral of Kostroma" or of Lada or

of Yarilo is celebrated in Russia. In the Governments of Penza and

Simbirsk the funeral used to be represented as follows. A bonfire

was kindled on the twenty-eighth of June, and on the next day the

maidens chose one of their number to play the part of Kostroma. Her

companions saluted her with deep obeisances, placed her on a board,

and carried her to the bank of a stream. There they bathed her in

the water, while the oldest girl made a basket of lime-tree bark and

beat it like a drum. Then they returned to the village and ended the

day with processions, games, and dances. In the Murom district

Kostroma was represented by a straw figure dressed in woman's

clothes and flowers. This was laid in a trough and carried with

songs to the bank of a lake or river. Here the crowd divided into

two sides, of which the one attacked and the other defended the

figure. At last the assailants gained the day, stripped the figure

of its dress and ornaments, tore it in pieces, trod the straw of

which it was made under foot, and flung it into the stream; while

the defenders of the figure hid their faces in their hands and

pretended to bewail the death of Kostroma. In the district of

Kostroma the burial of Yarilo was celebrated on the twenty-ninth or

thirtieth of June. The people chose an old man and gave him a small

coffin containing a Priapus-like figure representing Yarilo. This he

carried out of the town, followed by women chanting dirges and

expressing by their gestures grief and despair. In the open fields a

grave was dug, and into it the figure was lowered amid weeping and

wailing, after which games and dances were begun, "calling to mind

the funeral games celebrated in old times by the pagan Slavonians."

In Little Russia the figure of Yarilo was laid in a coffin and

carried through the streets after sunset surrounded by drunken

women, who kept repeating mournfully, "He is dead! he is dead!" The

men lifted and shook the figure as if they were trying to recall the

dead man to life. Then they said to the women, "Women, weep not. I

know what is sweeter than honey." But the women continued to lament

and chant, as they do at funerals. "Of what was he guilty? He was so

good. He will arise no more. O how shall we part from thee? What is

life without thee? Arise, if only for a brief hour. But he rises

not, he not." At last the Yarilo was buried in a grave.

7. Death and Revival of Vegetation

THESE Russian customs are plainly of the same nature as those which

in Austria and Germany are known as "Carrying out Death." Therefore

if the interpretation here adopted of the latter is right, the

Russian Kostrubonko, Yarilo, and the rest must also have been

originally embodiments of the spirit of vegetation, and their death

must have been regarded as a necessary preliminary to their revival.

The revival as a sequel to the death is enacted in the first of the

ceremonies described, the death and resurrection of Kostrubonko. The

reason why in some of these Russian ceremonies the death of the

spirit of vegetation is celebrated at midsummer may be that the

decline of summer is dated from Midsummer Day, after which the days

begin to shorten, and the sun sets out on his downward journey:

"To the darksome hollows

Where the frosts of winter lie."

Such a turning-point of the year, when vegetation might be thought

to share the incipient though still almost imperceptible decay of

summer, might very well be chosen by primitive man as a fit moment

for resorting to those magic rites by which he hopes to stay the

decline, or at least to ensure the revival, of plant life.

But while the death of vegetation appears to have been represented

in all, and its revival in some, of these spring and midsummer

ceremonies, there are features in some of them which can hardly be

explained on this hypothesis alone. The solemn funeral, the

lamentations, and the mourning attire, which often characterise

these rites, are indeed appropriate at the death of the beneficent

spirit of vegetation. But what shall we say of the glee with which

the effigy is often carried out, of the sticks and stones with which

it is assailed, and the taunts and curses which are hurled at it?

What shall we say of the dread of the effigy evinced by the haste

with which the bearers scamper home as soon as they have thrown it

away, and by the belief that some one must soon die in any house

into which it has looked? This dread might perhaps be explained by a

belief that there is a certain infectiousness in the dead spirit of

vegetation which renders its approach dangerous. But this

explanation, besides being rather strained, does not cover the

rejoicings which often attend the carrying out of Death. We must

therefore recognise two distinct and seemingly opposite features in

these ceremonies: on the one hand, sorrow for the death, and

affection and respect for the dead; on the other hand, fear and

hatred of the dead, and rejoicings at his death. How the former of

these features is to be explained I have attempted to show: how the

latter came to be so closely associated with the former is a

question which I shall try to answer in the sequel.

8. Analogous Rites in India

IN THE KANAGRA district of India there is a custom observed by young

girls in spring which closely resembles some of the European spring

ceremonies just described. It is called the _Ralî Ka melâ,_ or fair

of Ralî, the _Ralî_ being a small painted earthen image of Siva or

Pârvatî. The custom is in vogue all over the Kanagra district, and

its celebration, which is entirely confined to young girls, lasts

through most of Chet (March-April) up to the Sankrânt of Baisâkh

(April). On a morning in March all the young girls of the village

take small baskets of _dûb_ grass and flowers to an appointed place,

where they throw them in a heap. Round this heap they stand in a

circle and sing. This goes on every day for ten days, till the heap

of grass and flowers has reached a fair height. Then they cut in the

jungle two branches, each with three prongs at one end, and place

them, prongs downwards, over the heap of flowers, so as to make two

tripods or pyramids. On the single uppermost points of these

branches they get an image-maker to construct two clay images, one

to represent Siva, and the other Pârvatî. The girls then divide

themselves into two parties, one for Siva and one for Pârvatî, and

marry the images in the usual way, leaving out no part of the

ceremony. After the marriage they have a feast, the cost of which is

defrayed by contributions solicited from their parents. Then at the

next Sankrânt (Baisâkh) they all go together to the river-side,

throw the images into a deep pool, and weep over the place, as

though they were performing funeral obsequies. The boys of the

neighbourhood often tease them by diving after the images, bringing

them up, and waving them about while the girls are crying over them.

The object of the fair is said to be to secure a good husband.

That in this Indian ceremony the deities Siva and Pârvatî are

conceived as spirits of vegetation seems to be proved by the placing

of their images on branches over a heap of grass and flowers. Here,

as often in European folk-custom, the divinities of vegetation are

represented in duplicate, by plants and by puppets. The marriage of

these Indian deities in spring corresponds to the European

ceremonies in which the marriage of the vernal spirits of vegetation

is represented by the King and Queen of May, the May Bride,

Bridegroom of the May, and so forth. The throwing of the images into

the water, and the mourning for them, are the equivalents of the

European customs of throwing the dead spirit of vegetation under the

name of Death, Yarilo, Kostroma, and the rest, into the water and

lamenting over it. Again, in India, as often in Europe, the rite is

performed exclusively by females. The notion that the ceremony helps

to procure husbands for the girls can be explained by the quickening

and fertilising influence which the spirit of vegetation is believed

to exert upon the life of man as well as of plants.

9. The Magic Spring

THE GENERAL explanation which we have been led to adopt of these and

many similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their origin,

magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in spring.

The means by which they were supposed to effect this end were

imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the true

causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce

the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only

to imitate them, and that immediately by a secret sympathy or mystic

influence the little drama which he acted in forest glade or

mountain dell, on desert plain or wind-swept shore, would be taken

up and repeated by mightier actors on a vaster stage. He fancied

that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth

to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and

burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth

the path for the footsteps of returning spring. If we find it hard

to throw ourselves even in fancy into a mental condition in which

such things seem possible, we can more easily picture to ourselves

the anxiety which the savage, when he first began to lift his

thoughts above the satisfaction of his merely animal wants, and to

meditate on the causes of things, may have felt as to the continued

operation of what we now call the laws of nature. To us, familiar as

we are with the conception of the uniformity and regularity with

which the great cosmic phenomena succeed each other, there seems

little ground for apprehension that the causes which produce these

effects will cease to operate, at least within the near future. But

this confidence in the stability of nature is bred only by the

experience which comes of wide observation and long tradition; and

the savage, with his narrow sphere of observation and his

short-lived tradition, lacks the very elements of that experience

which alone could set his mind at rest in face of the ever-changing

and often menacing aspects of nature. No wonder, therefore, that he

is thrown into a panic by an eclipse, and thinks that the sun or the

moon would surely perish, if he did not raise a clamour and shoot

his puny shafts into the air to defend the luminaries from the

monster who threatens to devour them. No wonder he is terrified when

in the darkness of night a streak of sky is suddenly illumined by

the flash of a meteor, or the whole expanse of the celestial arch

glows with the fitful light of the Northern Streamers. Even

phenomena which recur at fixed and uniform intervals may be viewed

by him with apprehension, before he has come to recognise the

orderliness of their recurrence. The speed or slowness of his

recognition of such periodic or cyclic changes in nature will depend

largely on the length of the particular cycle. The cycle, for

example, of day and night is everywhere, except in the polar

regions, so short and hence so frequent that men probably soon

ceased to discompose themselves seriously as to the chance of its

failing to recur, though the ancient Egyptians, as we have seen,

daily wrought enchantments to bring back to the east in the morning

the fiery orb which had sunk at evening in the crimson west. But it

was far otherwise with the annual cycle of the seasons. To any man a

year is a considerable period, seeing that the number of our years

is but few at the best. To the primitive savage, with his short

memory and imperfect means of marking the flight of time, a year may

well have been so long that he failed to recognise it as a cycle at

all, and watched the changing aspects of earth and heaven with a

perpetual wonder, alternately delighted and alarmed, elated and cast

down, according as the vicissitudes of light and heat, of plant and

animal life, ministered to his comfort or threatened his existence.

In autumn when the withered leaves were whirled about the forest by

the nipping blast, and he looked up at the bare boughs, could he

feel sure that they would ever be green again? As day by day the sun

sank lower and lower in the sky, could he be certain that the

luminary would ever retrace his heavenly road? Even the waning moon,

whose pale sickle rose thinner and thinner every night over the rim

of the eastern horizon, may have excited in his mind a fear lest,

when it had wholly vanished, there should be moons no more.

These and a thousand such misgivings may have thronged the fancy and

troubled the peace of the man who first began to reflect on the

mysteries of the world he lived in, and to take thought for a more

distant future than the morrow. It was natural, therefore, that with

such thoughts and fears he should have done all that in him lay to

bring back the faded blossom to the bough, to swing the low sun of

winter up to his old place in the summer sky, and to restore its

orbed fulness to the silver lamp of the waning moon. We may smile at

his vain endeavours if we please, but it was only by making a long

series of experiments, of which some were almost inevitably doomed

to failure, that man learned from experience the futility of some of

his attempted methods and the fruitfulness of others. After all,

magical ceremonies are nothing but experiments which have failed and

which continue to be repeated merely because, for reasons which have

already been indicated, the operator is unaware of their failure.

With the advance of knowledge these ceremonies either cease to be

performed altogether or are kept up from force of habit long after

the intention with which they were instituted has been forgotten.

Thus fallen from their high estate, no longer regarded as solemn

rites on the punctual performance of which the welfare and even the

life of the community depend, they sink gradually to the level of

simple pageants, mummeries, and pastimes, till in the final stage of

degeneration they are wholly abandoned by older people, and, from

having once been the most serious occupation of the sage, become at

last the idle sport of children. It is in this final stage of decay

that most of the old magical rites of our European forefathers

linger on at the present day, and even from this their last retreat

they are fast being swept away by the rising tide of those

multitudinous forces, moral, intellectual, and social, which are

bearing mankind onward to a new and unknown goal. We may feel some

natural regret at the disappearance of quaint customs and

picturesque ceremonies, which have preserved to an age often deemed

dull and prosaic something of the flavour and freshness of the olden

time, some breath of the springtime of the world; yet our regret

will be lessened when we remember that these pretty pageants, these

now innocent diversions, had their origin in ignorance and

superstition; that if they are a record of human endeavour, they are

also a monument of fruitless ingenuity, of wasted labour, and of

blighted hopes; and that for all their gay trappings--their flowers,

their ribbons, and their music--they partake far more of tragedy

than of farce.

The interpretation which, following in the footsteps of W.

Mannhardt, I have attempted to give of these ceremonies has been not

a little confirmed by the discovery, made since this book was first

written, that the natives of Central Australia regularly practise

magical ceremonies for the purpose of awakening the dormant energies

of nature at the approach of what may be called the Australian

spring. Nowhere apparently are the alternations of the seasons more

sudden and the contrasts between them more striking than in the

deserts of Central Australia, where at the end of a long period of

drought the sandy and stony wilderness, over which the silence and

desolation of death appear to brood, is suddenly, after a few days

of torrential rain, transformed into a landscape smiling with

verdure and peopled with teeming multitudes of insects and lizards,

of frogs and birds. The marvellous change which passes over the face

of nature at such times has been compared even by European observers

to the effect of magic; no wonder, then, that the savage should

regard it as such in very deed. Now it is just when there is promise

of the approach of a good season that the natives of Central

Australia are wont especially to perform those magical ceremonies of

which the avowed intention is to multiply the plants and animals

they use as food. These ceremonies, therefore, present a close

analogy to the spring customs of our European peasantry not only in

the time of their celebration, but also in their aim; for we can

hardly doubt that in instituting rites designed to assist the

revival of plant life in spring our primitive forefathers were

moved, not by any sentimental wish to smell at early violets, or

pluck the rathe primrose, or watch yellow daffodils dancing in the

breeze, but by the very practical consideration, certainly not

formulated in abstract terms, that the life of man is inextricably

bound up with that of plants, and that if they were to perish he

could not survive. And as the faith of the Australian savage in the

efficacy of his magic rites is confirmed by observing that their

performance is invariably followed, sooner or later, by that

increase of vegetable and animal life which it is their object to

produce, so, we may suppose, it was with European savages in the

olden time. The sight of the fresh green in brake and thicket, of

vernal flowers blowing on mossy banks, of swallows arriving from the

south, and of the sun mounting daily higher in the sky, would be

welcomed by them as so many visible signs that their enchantments

were indeed taking effect, and would inspire them with a cheerful

confidence that all was well with a world which they could thus

mould to suit their wishes. Only in autumn days, as summer slowly

faded, would their confidence again be dashed by doubts and

misgivings at symptoms of decay, which told how vain were all their

efforts to stave off for ever the approach of winter and of death.

XXIX. The Myth of Adonis

THE SPECTACLE of the great changes which annually pass over the face

of the earth has powerfully impressed the minds of men in all ages,

and stirred them to meditate on the causes of transformations so

vast and wonderful. Their curiosity has not been purely

disinterested; for even the savage cannot fail to perceive how

intimately his own life is bound up with the life of nature, and how

the same processes which freeze the stream and strip the earth of

vegetation menace him with extinction. At a certain stage of

development men seem to have imagined that the means of averting the

threatened calamity were in their own hands, and that they could

hasten or retard the flight of the seasons by magic art. Accordingly

they performed ceremonies and recited spells to make the rain to

fall, the sun to shine, animals to multiply, and the fruits of the

earth to grow. In course of time the slow advance of knowledge,

which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least

the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alternations of

summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result

of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some

mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature.

They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of vegetation,

the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of the waxing or

waning strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses, who were

born and died, who married and begot children, on the pattern of

human life.

Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather

supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed

the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in

their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical

rites they could aid the god who was the principle of life, in his

struggle with the opposing principle of death. They imagined that

they could recruit his failing energies and even raise him from the

dead. The ceremonies which they observed for this purpose were in

substance a dramatic representation of the natural processes which

they wished to facilitate; for it is a familiar tenet of magic that

you can produce any desired effect by merely imitating it. And as

they now explained the fluctuations of growth and decay, of

reproduction and dissolution, by the marriage, the death, and the

rebirth or revival of the gods, their religious or rather magical

dramas turned in great measure on these themes. They set forth the

fruitful union of the powers of fertility, the sad death of one at

least of the divine partners, and his joyful resurrection. Thus a

religious theory was blended with a magical practice. The

combination is familiar in history. Indeed, few religions have ever

succeeded in wholly extricating themselves from the old trammels of

magic. The inconsistency of acting on two opposite principles,

however it may vex the soul of the philosopher, rarely troubles the

common man; indeed he is seldom even aware of it. His affair is to

act, not to analyse the motives of his action. If mankind had always

been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of

folly and crime.

Of the changes which the seasons bring with them, the most striking

within the temperate zone are those which affect vegetation. The

influence of the seasons on animals, though great, is not nearly so

manifest. Hence it is natural that in the magical dramas designed to

dispel winter and bring back spring the emphasis should be laid on

vegetation, and that trees and plants should figure in them more

prominently than beasts and birds. Yet the two sides of life, the

vegetable and the animal, were not dissociated in the minds of those

who observed the ceremonies. Indeed they commonly believed that the

tie between the animal and the vegetable world was even closer than

it really is; hence they often combined the dramatic representation

of reviving plants with a real or a dramatic union of the sexes for

the purpose of furthering at the same time and by the same act the

multiplication of fruits, of animals, and of men. To them the

principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was

one and indivisible. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and

to beget children, these were the primary wants of men in the past,

and they will be the primary wants of men in the future so long as

the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and beautify

human life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity

itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, food and

children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance

of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.

Nowhere, apparently, have these rites been more widely and solemnly

celebrated than in the lands which border the Eastern Mediterranean.

Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of

Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of

life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god

who annually died and rose again from the dead. In name and detail

the rites varied from place to place: in substance they were the

same. The supposed death and resurrection of this oriental deity, a

god of many names but of essentially one nature, is now to be

examined. We begin with Tammuz or Adonis.

The worship of Adonis was practised by the Semitic peoples of

Babylonia and Syria, and the Greeks borrowed it from them as early

as the seventh century before Christ. The true name of the deity was

Tammuz: the appellation of Adonis is merely the Semitic _Adon,_

"lord," a title of honour by which his worshippers addressed him.

But the Greeks through a misunderstanding converted the title of

honour into a proper name. In the religious literature of Babylonia

Tammuz appears as the youthful spouse or lover of Ishtar, the great

mother goddess, the embodiment of the reproductive energies of

nature. The references to their connexion with each other in myth

and ritual are both fragmentary and obscure, but we gather from them

that every year Tammuz was believed to die, passing away from the

cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean world, and that every year

his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him "to the land from

which there is no returning, to the house of darkness, where dust

lies on door and bolt." During her absence the passion of love

ceased to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their

kinds: all life was threatened with extinction. So intimately bound

up with the goddess were the sexual functions of the whole animal

kingdom that without her presence they could not be discharged. A

messenger of the great god Ea was accordingly despatched to rescue

the goddess on whom so much depended. The stern queen of the

infernal regions, Allatu or Eresh-Kigal by name, reluctantly allowed

Ishtar to be sprinkled with the Water of Life and to depart, in

company probably with her lover Tammuz, that the two might return

together to the upper world, and that with their return all nature

might revive.

Laments for the departed Tammuz are contained in several Babylonian

hymns, which liken him to plants that quickly fade. He is

"A tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water,

Whose crown in the field has brought forth no blossom.

A willow that rejoiced not by the watercourse,

A willow whose roots were torn up.

A herb that in the garden had drunk no water."

His death appears to have been annually mourned, to the shrill music

of flutes, by men and women about midsummer in the month named after

him, the month of Tammuz. The dirges were seemingly chanted over an

effigy of the dead god, which was washed with pure water, anointed

with oil, and clad in a red robe, while the fumes of incense rose

into the air, as if to stir his dormant senses by their pungent

fragrance and wake him from the sleep of death. In one of these

dirges, inscribed _Lament of the Flutes for Tammuz,_ we seem still

to hear the voices of the singers chanting the sad refrain and to

catch, like far-away music, the wailing notes of the flutes:

"At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament,

'Oh my child!' at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament;

'My Damu!' at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament.

'My enchanter and priest!' at his vanishing away

she lifts up a lament,

At the shining cedar, rooted in a spacious place,

In Eanna, above and below, she lifts up a lament.

Like the lament that a house lifts up for its master,

lifts she up a lament,

Like the lament that a city lifts up for its lord,

lifts she up a lament.

Her lament is the lament for a herb that grows not in the bed,

Her lament is the lament for the corn that grows not in the ear.

Her chamber is a possession that brings not forth a possession,

A weary woman, a weary child, forspent.

Her lament is for a great river, where no willows grow,

Her lament is for a field, where corn and herbs grow not.

Her lament is for a pool, where fishes grow not.

Her lament is for a thickest of reeds, where no reeds grow.

Her lament is for woods, where tamarisks grow not.

Her lament is for a wilderness where no cypresses (?) grow.

Her lament is for the depth of a garden of trees,

where honey and wine grow not.

Her lament is for meadows, where no plants grow.

Her lament is for a palace, where length of life grows not."

The tragical story and the melancholy rites of Adonis are better

known to us from the descriptions of Greek writers than from the

fragments of Babylonian literature or the brief reference of the

prophet Ezekiel, who saw the women of Jerusalem weeping for Tammuz

at the north gate of the temple. Mirrored in the glass of Greek

mythology, the oriental deity appears as a comely youth beloved by

Aphrodite. In his infancy the goddess hid him in a chest, which she

gave in charge to Persephone, queen of the nether world. But when

Persephone opened the chest and beheld the beauty of the babe, she

refused to give him back to Aphrodite, though the goddess of love

went down herself to hell to ransom her dear one from the power of

the grave. The dispute between the two goddesses of love and death

was settled by Zeus, who decreed that Adonis should abide with

Persephone in the under world for one part of the year, and with

Aphrodite in the upper world for another part. At last the fair

youth was killed in hunting by a wild boar, or by the jealous Ares,

who turned himself into the likeness of a boar in order to compass

the death of his rival. Bitterly did Aphrodite lament her loved and

lost Adonis. In this form of the myth, the contest between Aphrodite

and Persephone for the possession of Adonis clearly reflects the

struggle between Ishtar and Allatu in the land of the dead, while

the decision of Zeus that Adonis is to spend one part of the year

under ground and another part above ground is merely a Greek version

of the annual disappearance and reappearance of Tammuz.

XXX. Adonis in Syria

THE MYTH of Adonis was localised and his rites celebrated with much

solemnity at two places in Western Asia. One of these was Byblus on

the coast of Syria, the other was Paphos in Cyprus. Both were great

seats of the worship of Aphrodite, or rather of her Semitic

counterpart, Astarte; and of both, if we accept the legends,

Cinyras, the father of Adonis, was king. Of the two cities Byblus

was the more ancient; indeed it claimed to be the oldest city in

Phoenicia, and to have been founded in the early ages of the world

by the great god El, whom Greeks and Romans identified with Cronus

and Saturn respectively. However that may have been, in historical

times it ranked as a holy place, the religious capital of the

country, the Mecca or Jerusalem of the Phoenicians. The city stood

on a height beside the sea, and contained a great sanctuary of

Astarte, where in the midst of a spacious open court, surrounded by

cloisters and approached from below by staircases, rose a tall cone

or obelisk, the holy image of the goddess. In this sanctuary the

rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was sacred to

him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea a little

to the south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name of Adonis. This

was the kingdom of Cinyras. From the earliest to the latest times

the city appears to have been ruled by kings, assisted perhaps by a

senate or council of elders.

The last king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and was

beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses. His

legendary namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a sanctuary of

Aphrodite, that is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount Lebanon, distant

a day's journey from the capital. The spot was probably Aphaca, at

the source of the river Adonis, half-way between Byblus and Baalbec;

for at Aphaca there was a famous grove and sanctuary of Astarte

which Constantine destroyed on account of the flagitious character

of the worship. The site of the temple has been discovered by modern

travellers near the miserable village which still bears the name of

Afka at the head of the wild, romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis.

The hamlet stands among groves of noble walnut-trees on the brink of

the lyn. A little way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot

of a mighty amphitheatre of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of

cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends,

the ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from

the crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over

the roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There

is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of

these tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain

air, in the vivid green of the vegetation. The temple, of which some

massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark

the site, occupied a terrace facing the source of the river and

commanding a magnificent prospect. Across the foam and the roar of

the waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of the

sublime precipices above. So lofty is the cliff that the goats which

creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like ants to

the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward the view is especially

impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with golden light,

revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded towers of its

mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green of the

woods which clothe its depths. It was here that, according to the

legend, Adonis met Aphrodite for the first or the last time, and

here his mangled body was buried. A fairer scene could hardly be

imagined for a story of tragic love and death. Yet, sequestered as

the valley is and must always have been, it is not wholly deserted.

A convent or a village may be observed here and there standing out

against the sky on the top of some beetling crag, or clinging to the

face of a nearly perpendicular cliff high above the foam and the din

of the river; and at evening the lights that twinkle through the

gloom betray the presence of human habitations on slopes which might

seem inaccessible to man. In antiquity the whole of the lovely vale

appears to have been dedicated to Adonis, and to this day it is

haunted by his memory; for the heights which shut it in are crested

at various points by ruined monuments of his worship, some of them

overhanging dreadful abysses, down which it turns the head dizzy to

look and see the eagles wheeling about their nests far below. One

such monument exists at Ghineh. The face of a great rock, above a

roughly hewn recess, is here carved with figures of Adonis and

Aphrodite. He is portrayed with spear in rest, awaiting the attack

of a bear, while she is seated in an attitude of sorrow. Her

grief-stricken figure may well be the mourning Aphrodite of the

Lebanon described by Macrobius, and the recess in the rock is

perhaps her lover's tomb. Every year, in the belief of his

worshippers, Adonis was wounded to death on the mountains, and every

year the face of nature itself was dyed with his sacred blood. So

year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely fate, while

the red anemone, his flower, bloomed among the cedars of Lebanon,

and the river ran red to the sea, fringing the winding shores of the

blue Mediterranean, whenever the wind set inshore, with a sinuous

band of crimson.

XXXI. Adonis in Cyprus

THE ISLAND of Cyprus lies but one day's sail from the coast of

Syria. Indeed, on fine summer evenings its mountains may be descried

looming low and dark against the red fires of sunset. With its rich

mines of copper and its forests of firs and stately cedars, the

island naturally attracted a commercial and maritime people like the

Phoenicians; while the abundance of its corn, its wine, and its oil

must have rendered it in their eyes a Land of Promise by comparison

with the niggardly nature of their own rugged coast, hemmed in

between the mountains and the sea. Accordingly they settled in

Cyprus at a very early date and remained there long after the Greeks

had also established themselves on its shores; for we know from

inscriptions and coins that Phoenician kings reigned at Citium, the

Chittim of the Hebrews, down to the time of Alexander the Great.

Naturally the Semitic colonists brought their gods with them from

the mother-land. They worshipped Baal of the Lebanon, who may well

have been Adonis, and at Amathus on the south coast they instituted

the rites of Adonis and Aphrodite, or rather Astarte. Here, as at

Byblus, these rites resembled the Egyptian worship of Osiris so

closely that some people even identified the Adonis of Amathus with

Osiris.

But the great seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Adonis in Cyprus

was Paphos on the south-western side of the island. Among the petty

kingdoms into which Cyprus was divided from the earliest times until

the end of the fourth century before our era Paphos must have ranked

with the best. It is a land of hills and billowy ridges, diversified

by fields and vineyards and intersected by rivers, which in the

course of ages have carved for themselves beds of such tremendous

depth that travelling in the interior is difficult and tedious. The

lofty range of Mount Olympus (the modern Troodos), capped with snow

the greater part of the year, screens Paphos from the northerly and

easterly winds and cuts it off from the rest of the island. On the

slopes of the range the last pine-woods of Cyprus linger, sheltering

here and there monasteries in scenery not unworthy of the Apennines.

The old city of Paphos occupied the summit of a hill about a mile

from the sea; the newer city sprang up at the harbour some ten miles

off. The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos (the modern Kuklia)

was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world.

According to Herodotus, it was founded by Phoenician colonists from

Ascalon; but it is possible that a native goddess of fertility was

worshipped on the spot before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and

that the newcomers identified her with their own Baalath or Astarte,

whom she may have closely resembled. If two deities were thus fused

in one, we may suppose that they were both varieties of that great

goddess of motherhood and fertility whose worship appears to have

been spread all over Western Asia from a very early time. The

supposition is confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image

as by the licentious character of her rites; for both that shape and

those rites were shared by her with other Asiatic deities. Her image

was simply a white cone or pyramid. In like manner, a cone was the

emblem of Astarte at Byblus, of the native goddess whom the Greeks

called Artemis at Perga in Pamphylia, and of the sun-god

Heliogabalus at Emesa in Syria. Conical stones, which apparently

served as idols, have also been found at Golgi in Cyprus, and in the

Phoenician temples of Malta; and cones of sandstone came to light at

the shrine of the "Mistress of Torquoise" among the barren hills and

frowning precipices of Sinai.

In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly

obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the

sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went by the name of Aphrodite,

Astarte, or what not. Similar customs prevailed in many parts of

Western Asia. Whatever its motive, the practice was clearly

regarded, not as an orgy of lust, but as a solemn religious duty

performed in the service of that great Mother Goddess of Western

Asia whose name varied, while her type remained constant, from place

to place. Thus at Babylon every woman, whether rich or poor, had

once in her life to submit to the embraces of a stranger at the

temple of Mylitta, that is, of Ishtar or Astarte, and to dedicate to

the goddess the wages earned by this sanctified harlotry. The sacred

precinct was crowded with women waiting to observe the custom. Some

of them had to wait there for years. At Heliopolis or Baalbec in

Syria, famous for the imposing grandeur of its ruined temples, the

custom of the country required that every maiden should prostitute

herself to a stranger at the temple of Astarte, and matrons as well

as maids testified their devotion to the goddess in the same manner.

The emperor Constantine abolished the custom, destroyed the temple,

and built a church in its stead. In Phoenician temples women

prostituted themselves for hire in the service of religion,

believing that by this conduct they propitiated the goddess and won

her favour. "It was a law of the Amorites, that she who was about to

marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate." At Byblus

the people shaved their heads in the annual mourning for Adonis.

Women who refused to sacrifice their hair had to give themselves up

to strangers on a certain day of the festival, and the money which

they thus earned was devoted to the goddess. A Greek inscription

found at Tralles in Lydia proves that the practice of religious

prostitution survived in that country as late as the second century

of our era. It records of a certain woman, Aurelia Aemilia by name,

not only that she herself served the god in the capacity of a harlot

at his express command, but that her mother and other female

ancestors had done the same before her; and the publicity of the

record, engraved on a marble column which supported a votive

offering, shows that no stain attached to such a life and such a

parentage. In Armenia the noblest families dedicated their daughters

to the service of the goddess Anaitis in her temple of Acilisena,

where the damsels acted as prostitutes for a long time before they

were given in marriage. Nobody scrupled to take one of these girls

to wife when her period of service was over. Again, the goddess Ma

was served by a multitude of sacred harlots at Comana in Pontus, and

crowds of men and women flocked to her sanctuary from the

neighbouring cities and country to attend the biennial festivals or

to pay their vows to the goddess.

If we survey the whole of the evidence on this subject, some of

which has still to be laid before the reader, we may conclude that a

great Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive

energies of nature, was worshipped under different names but with a

substantial similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of Western

Asia; that associated with her was a lover, or rather series of

lovers, divine yet mortal, with whom she mated year by year, their

commerce being deemed essential to the propagation of animals and

plants, each in their several kind; and further, that the fabulous

union of the divine pair was simulated and, as it were, multiplied

on earth by the real, though temporary, union of the human sexes at

the sanctuary of the goddess for the sake of thereby ensuring the

fruitfulness of the ground and the increase of man and beast.

At Paphos the custom of religious prostitution is said to have been

instituted by King Cinyras, and to have been practised by his

daughters, the sisters of Adonis, who, having incurred the wrath of

Aphrodite, mated with strangers and ended their days in Egypt. In

this form of the tradition the wrath of Aphrodite is probably a

feature added by a later authority, who could only regard conduct

which shocked his own moral sense as a punishment inflicted by the

goddess instead of as a sacrifice regularly enjoined by her on all

her devotees. At all events the story indicates that the princesses

of Paphos had to conform to the custom as well as women of humble

birth.

Among the stories which were told of Cinyras, the ancestor of the

priestly kings of Paphos and the father of Adonis, there are some

that deserve our attention. In the first place, he is said to have

begotten his son Adonis in incestuous intercourse with his daughter

Myrrha at a festival of the corn-goddess, at which women robed in

white were wont to offer corn-wreaths as first-fruits of the harvest

and to observe strict chastity for nine days. Similar cases of

incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. It seems

unlikely that such reports are without foundation, and perhaps

equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous outbursts of

unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on a practice

actually observed for a definite reason in certain special

circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced

through women only, and where consequently the king held office

merely in virtue of his marriage with an hereditary princess, who

was the real sovereign, it appears to have often happened that a

prince married his own sister, the princess royal, in order to

obtain with her hand the crown which otherwise would have gone to

another man, perhaps to a stranger. May not the same rule of descent

have furnished a motive for incest with a daughter? For it seems a

natural corollary from such a rule that the king was bound to vacate

the throne on the death of his wife, the queen, since he occupied it

only by virtue of his marriage with her. When that marriage

terminated, his right to the throne terminated with it and passed at

once to his daughter's husband. Hence if the king desired to reign

after his wife's death, the only way in which he could legitimately

continue to do so was by marrying his daughter, and thus prolonging

through her the title which had formerly been his through her

mother.

Cinyras is said to have been famed for his exquisite beauty and to

have been wooed by Aphrodite herself. Thus it would appear, as

scholars have already observed, that Cinyras was in a sense a

duplicate of his handsome son Adonis, to whom the inflammable

goddess also lost her heart. Further, these stories of the love of

Aphrodite for two members of the royal house of Paphos can hardly be

dissociated from the corresponding legend told of Pygmalion, a

Phoenician king of Cyprus, who is said to have fallen in love with

an image of Aphrodite and taken it to his bed. When we consider that

Pygmalion was the father-in-law of Cinyras, that the son of Cinyras

was Adonis, and that all three, in successive generations, are said

to have been concerned in a love-intrigue with Aphrodite, we can

hardly help concluding that the early Phoenician kings of Paphos, or

their sons, regularly claimed to be not merely the priests of the

goddess but also her lovers, in other words, that in their official

capacity they personated Adonis. At all events Adonis is said to

have reigned in Cyprus, and it appears to be certain that the title

of Adonis was regularly borne by the sons of all the Phoenician

kings of the island. It is true that the title strictly signified no

more than "lord"; yet the legends which connect these Cyprian

princes with the goddess of love make it probable that they claimed

the divine nature as well as the human dignity of Adonis. The story

of Pygmalion points to a ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the

king wedded the image of Aphrodite, or rather of Astarte. If that

was so, the tale was in a sense true, not of a single man only, but

of a whole series of men, and it would be all the more likely to be

told of Pygmalion, if that was a common name of Semitic kings in

general, and of Cyprian kings in particular. Pygmalion, at all

events, is known as the name of the king of Tyre from whom his

sister Dido fled; and a king of Citium and Idalium in Cyprus, who

reigned in the time of Alexander the Great, was also called

Pygmalion, or rather Pumiyathon, the Phoenician name which the

Greeks corrupted into Pygmalion. Further, it deserves to be noted

that the names Pygmalion and Astarte occur together in a Punic

inscription on a gold medallion which was found in a grave at

Carthage; the characters of the inscription are of the earliest

type. As the custom of religious prostitution at Paphos is said to

have been founded by king Cinyras and observed by his daughters, we

may surmise that the kings of Paphos played the part of the divine

bridegroom in a less innocent rite than the form of marriage with a

statue; in fact, that at certain festivals each of them had to mate

with one or more of the sacred harlots of the temple, who played

Astarte to his Adonis. If that was so, there is more truth than has

commonly been supposed in the reproach cast by the Christian fathers

that the Aphrodite worshipped by Cinyras was a common whore. The

fruit of their union would rank as sons and daughters of the deity,

and would in time become the parents of gods and goddesses, like

their fathers and mothers before them. In this manner Paphos, and

perhaps all sanctuaries of the great Asiatic goddess where sacred

prostitution was practised, might be well stocked with human

deities, the offspring of the divine king by his wives, concubines,

and temple harlots. Any one of these might probably succeed his

father on the throne or be sacrificed in his stead whenever stress

of war or other grave junctures called, as they sometimes did, for

the death of a royal victim. Such a tax, levied occasionally on the

king's numerous progeny for the good of the country, would neither

extinguish the divine stock nor break the father's heart, who

divided his paternal affection among so many. At all events, if, as

there seems reason to believe, Semitic kings were often regarded at

the same time as hereditary deities, it is easy to understand the

frequency of Semitic personal names which imply that the bearers of

them were the sons or daughters, the brothers or sisters, the

fathers or mothers of a god, and we need not resort to the shifts

employed by some scholars to evade the plain sense of the words.

This interpretation is confirmed by a parallel Egyptian usage; for

in Egypt, where the kings were worshipped as divine, the queen was

called "the wife of the god" or "the mother of the god," and the

title "father of the god" was borne not only by the king's real

father but also by his father-in-law. Similarly, perhaps, among the

Semites any man who sent his daughter to swell the royal harem may

have been allowed to call himself "the father of the god."

If we may judge by his name, the Semitic king who bore the name of

Cinyras was, like King David, a harper; for the name of Cinyras is

clearly connected with the Greek _cinyra,_ "a lyre," which in its

turn comes from the Semitic _kinnor,_ "a lyre," the very word

applied to the instrument on which David played before Saul. We

shall probably not err in assuming that at Paphos as at Jerusalem

the music of the lyre or harp was not a mere pastime designed to

while away an idle hour, but formed part of the service of religion,

the moving influence of its melodies being perhaps set down, like

the effect of wine, to the direct inspiration of a deity. Certainly

at Jerusalem the regular clergy of the temple prophesied to the

music of harps, of psalteries, and of cymbals; and it appears that

the irregular clergy also, as we may call the prophets, depended on

some such stimulus for inducing the ecstatic state which they took

for immediate converse with the divinity. Thus we read of a band of

prophets coming down from a high place with a psaltery, a timbrel, a

pipe, and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went. Again,

when the united forces of Judah and Ephraim were traversing the

wilderness of Moab in pursuit of the enemy, they could find no water

for three days, and were like to die of thirst, they and the beasts

of burden. In this emergency the prophet Elisha, who was with the

army, called for a minstrel and bade him play. Under the influence

of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in the sandy

bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the line of march. They

did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the water that

had drained down into them underground from the desolate, forbidding

mountains on either hand. The prophet's success in striking water in

the wilderness resembles the reported success of modern dowsers,

though his mode of procedure was different. Incidentally he rendered

another service to his countrymen. For the skulking Moabites from

their lairs among the rocks saw the red sun of the desert reflected

in the water, and taking it for the blood, or perhaps rather for an

omen of the blood, of their enemies, they plucked up heart to attack

the camp and were defeated with great slaughter.

Again, just as the cloud of melancholy which from time to time

darkened the moody mind of Saul was viewed as an evil spirit from

the Lord vexing him, so on the other hand the solemn strains of the

harp, which soothed and composed his troubled thoughts, may well

have seemed to the hag-ridden king the very voice of God or of his

good angel whispering peace. Even in our own day a great religious

writer, himself deeply sensitive to the witchery of music, has said

that musical notes, with all their power to fire the blood and melt

the heart, cannot be mere empty sounds and nothing more; no, they

have escaped from some higher sphere, they are outpourings of

eternal harmony, the voice of angels, the Magnificat of saints. It

is thus that the rude imaginings of primitive man are transfigured

and his feeble lispings echoed with a rolling reverberation in the

musical prose of Newman. Indeed the influence of music on the

development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic

study. For we cannot doubt that this, the most intimate and

affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as to

express the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less deeply

the fabric of belief to which at first sight it seems only to

minister. The musician has done his part as well as the prophet and

the thinker in the making of religion. Every faith has its

appropriate music, and the difference between the creeds might

almost be expressed in musical notation. The interval, for example,

which divides the wild revels of Cybele from the stately ritual of

the Catholic Church is measured by the gulf which severs the

dissonant clash of cymbals and tambourines from the grave harmonies

of Palestrina and Handel. A different spirit breathes in the

difference of the music.

XXXII. The Ritual of Adonis

AT THE FESTIVALS of Adonis, which were held in Western Asia and in

Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned, with a

bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble

corpses, were carried out as to burial and then thrown into the sea

or into springs; and in some places his revival was celebrated on

the following day. But at different places the ceremonies varied

somewhat in the manner and apparently also in the season of their

celebration. At Alexandria images of Aphrodite and Adonis were

displayed on two couches; beside them were set ripe fruits of all

kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower-pots, and green bowers twined

with anise. The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and

on the morrow women attired as mourners, with streaming hair and

bared breasts, bore the image of the dead Adonis to the sea-shore

and committed it to the waves. Yet they sorrowed not without hope,

for they sang that the lost one would come back again. The date at

which this Alexandrian ceremony was observed is not expressly

stated; but from the mention of the ripe fruits it has been inferred

that it took place in late summer. In the great Phoenician sanctuary

of Astarte at Byblus the death of Adonis was annually mourned, to

the shrill wailing notes of the flute, with weeping, lamentation,

and beating of the breast; but next day he was believed to come to

life again and ascend up to heaven in the presence of his

worshippers. The disconsolate believers, left behind on earth,

shaved their heads as the Egyptians did on the death of the divine

bull Apis; women who could not bring themselves to sacrifice their

beautiful tresses had to give themselves up to strangers on a

certain day of the festival, and to dedicate to Astarte the wages of

their shame.