SEASONAL RITES: THE SPRING FESTIVAL
We have seen in the last chapter that whatever interests primitive man,
whatever makes him feel strongly, he tends to re-enact. Any one of his
manifold occupations, hunting, fighting, later ploughing and sowing,
provided it be of sufficient interest and importance, is material for a
_dromenon_ or rite. We have also seen that, weak as he is in
individuality, it is not his private and personal emotions that tend to
become ritual, but those that are public, felt and expressed officially,
that is, by the whole tribe or community. It is further obvious that
such dances, when they develop into actual rites, tend to be performed
at fixed times. We have now to consider when and why. The element of
fixity and regular repetition in rites cannot be too strongly
emphasized. It is a factor of paramount importance, essential to the
development from ritual to art, from _dromenon_ to drama.
The two great interests of primitive man are food and children. As Dr.
Frazer has well said, if man the individual is to live he must have
food; if his race is to persist he must have children. "To live and to
cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary
wants of man 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. They
are the very foundation-stones of that ritual from which art, if we are
right, took its rise. From this need for food sprang seasonal, periodic
festivals. The fact that festivals are seasonal, constantly recurrent,
solidifies, makes permanent, and as already explained (p. 42), in a
sense intellectualizes and abstracts the emotion that prompts them.
The seasons are indeed only of value to primitive man because they are
related, as he swiftly and necessarily finds out, to his food supply.
He has, it would seem, little sensitiveness to the æsthetic impulse of
the beauty of a spring morning, to the pathos of autumn. What he
realizes first and foremost is, that at certain times the animals, and
still more the plants, which form his food, appear, at certain others
they disappear. It is these times that become the central points, the
focuses of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals. These
dates will vary, of course, in different countries and in different
climates. It is, therefore, idle to attempt a study of the ritual of a
people without knowing the facts of their climate and surroundings. In
Egypt the food supply will depend on the rise and fall of the Nile, and
on this rise and fall will depend the ritual and calendar of Osiris. And
yet treatises on Egyptian religion are still to be found which begin by
recounting the rites and mythology of Osiris, as though these were
primary, and then end with a corollary to the effect that these rites
and this calendar were "associated" with the worship of Osiris, or, even
worse still, "instituted by" the religion of Osiris. The Nile regulates
the food supply of Egypt, the monsoon that of certain South Pacific
islands; the calendar of Egypt depends on the Nile, of the South
Pacific islands on the monsoon.
* * * * *
In his recent _Introduction to Mathematics_[7] Dr. Whitehead has pointed
out how the "whole life of Nature is dominated by the existence of
periodic events." The rotation of the earth produces successive days;
the path of the earth round the sun leads to the yearly recurrence of
the seasons; the phases of the moon are recurrent, and though artificial
light has made these phases pass almost unnoticed to-day, in climates
where the skies are clear, human life was largely influenced by
moonlight. Even our own bodily life, with its recurrent heart-beats and
breathings, is essentially periodic.[8] The presupposition of
periodicity is indeed fundamental to our very conception of life, and
but for periodicity the very means of measuring time as a quantity would
be absent.
Periodicity is fundamental to certain departments of mathematics, that
is evident; it is perhaps less evident that periodicity is a factor that
has gone to the making of ritual, and hence, as we shall see, of art.
And yet this is manifestly the case. All primitive calendars are ritual
calendars, successions of feast-days, a patchwork of days of different
quality and character recurring; pattern at least is based on
periodicity. But there is another and perhaps more important way in
which periodicity affects and in a sense causes ritual. We have seen
already that out of the space between an impulse and a reaction there
arises an idea or "presentation." A "presentation" is, indeed, it would
seem, in its final analysis, only a delayed, intensified desire--a
desire of which the active satisfaction is blocked, and which runs over
into a "presentation." An image conceived "presented," what we call an
_idea_ is, as it were, an act prefigured.
Ritual acts, then, which depend on the periodicity of the seasons are
acts necessarily delayed. The thing delayed, expected, waited for, is
more and more a source of value, more and more apt to precipitate into
what we call an idea, which is in reality but the projected shadow of an
unaccomplished action. More beautiful it may be, but comparatively
bloodless, yet capable in its turn of acting as an initial motor impulse
in the cycle of activity. It will later (p. 70) be seen that these
periodic festivals are the stuff of which those faded, unaccomplished
actions and desires which we call gods--Attis, Osiris, Dionysos--are
made.
* * * * *
To primitive man, as we have seen, beast and bird and plant and himself
were not sharply divided, and the periodicity of the seasons was for
all. It will depend on man's social and geographical conditions whether
he notices periodicity most in plants or animals. If he is nomadic he
will note the recurrent births of other animals and of human children,
and will connect them with the lunar year. But it is at once evident
that, at least in Mediterranean lands, and probably everywhere, it is
the periodicity of plants and vegetation generally which depends on
moisture, that is most striking. Plants die down in the heat of summer,
trees shed their leaves in autumn, all Nature sleeps or dies in winter,
and awakes in spring.
Sometimes it is the dying down that attracts most attention. This is
very clear in the rites of Adonis, which are, though he rises again,
essentially rites of lamentation. The details of the ritual show this
clearly, and specially as already seen in the cult of Osiris. For the
"gardens" of Adonis the women took baskets or pots filled with earth,
and in them, as children sow cress now-a-days, they planted wheat,
fennel, lettuce, and various kinds of flowers, which they watered and
tended for eight days. In hot countries the seeds sprang up rapidly, but
as the plants had no roots they withered quickly away. At the end of the
eight days they were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis and
thrown with them into the sea or into springs. The "gardens" of Adonis
became the type of transient loveliness and swift decay.
* * * * *
"What waste would it be," says Plutarch,[9] "what inconceivable waste,
for God to create man, had he not an immortal soul. He would be like the
women who make little gardens, not less pleasant than the gardens of
Adonis in earthen pots and pans; so would our souls blossom and flourish
but for a day in a soft and tender body of flesh without any firm and
solid root of life, and then be blasted and put out in a moment."
Celebrated at midsummer as they were, and as the "gardens" were thrown
into water, it is probable that the rites of Adonis may have been, at
least in part, a rain-charm. In the long summer droughts of Palestine
and Babylonia the longing for rain must often have been intense enough
to provoke expression, and we remember (p. 19) that the Sumerian Tammuz
was originally _Dumuzi-absu_, "True Son of the Waters." Water is the
first need for vegetation. Gardens of Adonis are still in use in the
Madras Presidency.[10] At the marriage of a Brahman "seeds of five or
nine sorts are mixed and sown in earthen pots which are made specially
for the purpose, and are filled with earth. Bride and bridegroom water
the seeds both morning and evening for four days; and on the fifth day
the seedlings are thrown, like the real gardens of Adonis, into a tank
or river."
Seasonal festivals with one and the same intent--the promotion of
fertility in plants, animals and man--may occur at almost any time of
the year. At midsummer, as we have seen, we may have rain-charms; in
autumn we shall have harvest festivals; in late autumn and early winter
among pastoral peoples we shall have festivals, like that of Martinmas,
for the blessing and purification of flocks and herds when they come in
from their summer pasture. In midwinter there will be a Christmas
festival to promote and protect the sun's heat at the winter solstice.
But in Southern Europe, to which we mainly owe our drama and our art,
the festival most widely celebrated, and that of which we know most, is
the Spring Festival, and to that we must turn. The spring is to the
Greek of to-day the "ánoixis," "the Opening," and it was in spring and
with rites of spring that both Greek and Roman originally began their
year. It was this spring festival that gave to the Greek their god
Dionysos and in part his drama.
* * * * *
In Cambridge on May Day two or three puzzled and weary little boys and
girls are still to be sometimes seen dragging round a perambulator with
a doll on it bedecked with ribbons and a flower or two. That is all that
is left in most parts of England of the Queen of the May and
Jack-in-the-Green, though here and there a maypole survives and is
resuscitated by enthusiasts about folk-dances. But in the days of "Good
Queen Bess" merry England, it would seem, was lustier. The Puritan
Stubbs, in his _Anatomie of Abuses_,[11] thus describes the festival:
"They have twentie or fortie yoke of oxen, every oxe havyng a
sweete nosegaie of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and
these oxen draw home this Maiepoole (this stinckying idoll rather),
which is covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bound round
aboute with stringes from the top to the bottome, and sometyme
painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men,
women, and children, following it with great devotion. And thus
beyng reared up, with handkerchiefes and flagges streaming on the
toppe, they strewe the ground about, binde greene boughs about it,
set up summer haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it. And then fall
they to banquet and feast, to leap and daunce aboute it, as the
heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this
is a perfect patterne or rather the thyng itself."
The stern old Puritan was right, the maypole was the perfect pattern of
a heathen "idoll, or rather the thyng itself." He would have
exterminated it root and branch, but other and perhaps wiser divines
took the maypole into the service of the Christian Church, and still[12]
on May Day in Saffron Walden the spring song is heard with its Christian
moral--
"A branch of May we have brought you,
And at your door it stands;
It is a sprout that is well budded out,
The work of our Lord's hands."
The maypole was of course at first no pole cut down and dried. The gist
of it was that it should be a "sprout, well budded out." The object of
carrying in the May was to bring the very spirit of life and greenery
into the village. When this was forgotten, idleness or economy would
prompt the villagers to use the same tree or branch year after year. In
the villages of Upper Bavaria Dr. Frazer[13] tells us the maypole is
renewed once every three, four, or five years. It is a fir-tree fetched
from the forest, and amid all the wreaths, flags, and inscriptions with
which it is bedecked, an essential part is the bunch of dark green
foliage left at the top, "as a memento that in it we have to do, not
with a dead pole, but with a living tree from the greenwood."
At the ritual of May Day not only was the fresh green bough or tree
carried into the village, but with it came a girl or a boy, the Queen or
King of the May. Sometimes the tree itself, as in Russia, is dressed up
in woman's clothes; more often a real man or maid, covered with flowers
and greenery, walks with the tree or carries the bough. Thus in
Thuringia,[14] as soon as the trees begin to be green in spring, the
children assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where they
choose one of their playmates to be Little Leaf Man. They break branches
from the trees and twine them about the child, till only his shoes are
left peeping out. Two of the other children lead him for fear he should
stumble. They take him singing and dancing from house to house, asking
for gifts of food, such as eggs, cream, sausages, cakes. Finally, they
sprinkle the Leaf Man with water and feast on the food. Such a Leaf Man
is our English Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who, as late as
1892, was seen by Dr. Rouse walking about at Cheltenham encased in a
wooden framework covered with greenery.
The bringing in of the new leafage in the form of a tree or flowers is
one, and perhaps the simplest, form of spring festival. It takes little
notice of death and winter, uttering and emphasizing only the desire for
the joy in life and spring. But in other and severer climates the
emotion is fiercer and more complex; it takes the form of a struggle or
contest, what the Greeks called an _agon_. Thus on May Day in the Isle
of Man a Queen of the May was chosen, and with her twenty maids of
honour, together with a troop of young men for escort. But there was not
only a Queen of the May, but a Queen of Winter, a man dressed as a
woman, loaded with warm clothes and wearing a woollen hood and fur
tippet. Winter, too, had attendants like the Queen of the May. The two
troops met and fought; and whichever Queen was taken prisoner had to pay
the expenses of the feast.
In the Isle of Man the real gist of the ceremony is quite forgotten, it
has become a mere play. But among the Esquimaux[15] there is still
carried on a similar rite, and its magical intent is clearly understood.
In autumn, when the storms begin and the long and dismal Arctic winter
is at hand, the central Esquimaux divide themselves into two parties
called the Ptarmigans and the Ducks. The ptarmigans are the people born
in winter, the ducks those born in summer. They stretch out a long rope
of sealskin. The ducks take hold of one end, the ptarmigans of the
other, then comes a tug-of-war. If the ducks win there will be fine
weather through the winter; if the ptarmigans, bad. This autumn festival
might, of course, with equal magical intent be performed in the spring,
but probably autumn is chosen because, with the dread of the Arctic ice
and snow upon them, the fear of winter is stronger than the hope of
spring.
* * * * *
The intense emotion towards the weather, which breaks out into these
magical _agones_, or "contests," is not very easy to realize. The
weather to us now-a-days for the most part damps a day's pleasuring or
raises the price of fruit and vegetables. But our main supplies come to
us from other lands and other weathers, and we find it hard to think
ourselves back into the state when a bad harvest meant starvation. The
intensely practical attitude of man towards the seasons, the way that
many of these magical dramatic ceremonies rose straight out of the
emotion towards the food-supply, would perhaps never have been fully
realized but for the study of the food-producing ceremonies of the
Central Australians.
The Central Australian spring is not the shift from winter to summer,
from cold to heat, but from a long, arid, and barren season to a season
short and often irregular in recurrence of torrential rain and sudden
fertility. The dry steppes of Central Australia are the scene of a
marvellous transformation. In the dry season all is hot and desolate,
the ground has only patches of wiry scrub, with an occasional parched
acacia tree, all is stones and sand; there is no sign of animal life
save for the thousand ant-hills. Then suddenly the rainy season sets in.
Torrents fill the rivers, and the sandy plain is a sheet of water.
Almost as suddenly the rain ceases, the streams dry up, sucked in by the
thirsty ground, and as though literally by magic a luxuriant vegetation
bursts forth, the desert blossoms as a rose. Insects, lizards, frogs,
birds, chirp, frisk and chatter. No plant or animal can live unless it
live quickly. The struggle for existence is keen and short.
It seems as though the change came and life was born by magic, and the
primitive Australian takes care that magic should not be wanting, and
magic of the most instructive kind. As soon as the season of fertility
approaches he begins his rites with the avowed object of making and
multiplying the plants, and chiefly the animals, by which he lives; he
paints the figure of the emu on the sand with vermilion drawn from his
own blood; he puts on emu feathers and gazes about him vacantly in
stupid fashion like an emu bird; he makes a structure of boughs like the
chrysalis of a Witchetty grub--his favourite food, and drags his body
through it in pantomime, gliding and shuffling to promote its birth.
Here, difficult and intricate though the ceremonies are, and uncertain
in meaning as many of the details must probably always remain, the main
emotional gist is clear. It is not that the Australian wonders at and
admires the miracle of his spring, the bursting of the flowers and the
singing of birds; it is not that his heart goes out in gratitude to an
All-Father who is the Giver of all good things; it is that, obedient to
the push of life within him, his impulse is towards food. He must eat
that he and his tribe may grow and multiply. It is this, his will to
live, that he _utters and represents_.
* * * * *
The savage utters his will to live, his intense desire for food; but it
should be noted, it is desire and will and longing, not certainty and
satisfaction that he utters. In this respect it is interesting to note
that his rites and ceremonies, when periodic, are of fairly long
periods. Winter and summer are not the only natural periodic cycles;
there is the cycle of day and night, and yet among primitive peoples but
little ritual centres round day and night. The reason is simple. The
cycle of day and night is so short, it recurs so frequently, that man
naturally counted upon it and had no cause to be anxious. The emotional
tension necessary to ritual was absent. A few peoples, _e.g._ the
Egyptians, have practised daily incantations to bring back the sun.
Probably they had at first felt a real tension of anxiety, and
then--being a people hidebound by custom--had gone on from mere
conservatism. Where the sun returns at a longer interval, and is even,
as among the Esquimaux, hidden for the long space of six months, ritual
inevitably arises. They play at cat's-cradle to catch the ball of the
sun lest it should sink and be lost for ever.
Round the moon, whose cycle is long, but not too long, ritual very early
centred, but probably only when its supposed influence on vegetation was
first surmised. The moon, as it were, practises magic herself; she waxes
and wanes, and with her, man thinks, all the vegetable kingdom waxes and
wanes too, all but the lawless onion. The moon, Plutarch[16] tells us,
is fertile in its light and contains moisture, it is kindly to the young
of animals and to the new shoots of plants. Even Bacon[17] held that
observations of the moon with a view to planting and sowing and the
grafting of trees were "not altogether frivolous." It cannot too often
be remembered that primitive man has but little, if any, interest in sun
and moon and heavenly bodies for their inherent beauty or wonder; he
cares for them, he holds them sacred, he performs rites in relation to
them mainly when he notes that they bring the seasons, and he cares for
the seasons mainly because they bring him food. A season is to him as a
_Hora_ was at first to the Greeks, _the fruits of a season_, what our
farmers would call "a good _year_."
* * * * *
The sun, then, had no ritual till it was seen that he led in the
seasons; but long before that was known, it was seen that the seasons
were annual, that they went round in a _ring_; and because that annual
ring was long in revolving, great was man's hope and fear in the winter,
great his relief and joy in the spring. It was literally a matter of
death and life, and it was as death and life that he sometimes
represented it, as we have seen in the figures of Adonis and Osiris.
Adonis and Osiris have their modern parallels, who leave us in no doubt
as to the meaning of their figures. Thus on the 1st of March in
Thüringen a ceremony is performed called "Driving out the Death." The
young people make up a figure of straw, dress it in old clothes, carry
it out and throw it into the river. Then they come back, tell the good
news to the village, and are given eggs and food as a reward. In Bohemia
the children carry out a straw puppet and burn it. While they are
burning it they sing--
"Now carry we Death out of the village,
The new Summer into the village,
Welcome, dear Summer,
Green little corn."
In other parts of Bohemia the song varies; it is not Summer that comes
back but Life.
"We have carried away Death,
And brought back Life."
In both these cases it is interesting to note that though Death is
dramatically carried out, the coming back of Life is only announced, not
enacted.
Often, and it would seem quite naturally, the puppet representing Death
or Winter is reviled and roughly handled, or pelted with stones, and
treated in some way as a sort of scapegoat. But in not a few cases, and
these are of special interest, it seems to be the seat of a sort of
magical potency which can be and is transferred to the figure of Summer
or Life, thus causing, as it were, a sort of Resurrection. In Lusatia
the women only carry out the Death. They are dressed in black themselves
as mourners, but the puppet of straw which they dress up as the Death
wears a white shirt. They carry it to the village boundary, followed by
boys throwing stones, and there tear it to pieces. Then they cut down a
tree and dress it in the white shirt of the Death and carry it home
singing.
So at the Feast of the Ascension in Transylvania. After morning service
the girls of the village dress up the Death; they tie a threshed-out
sheaf of corn into a rough copy of a head and body, and stick a
broomstick through the body for arms. Then they dress the figure up in
the ordinary holiday clothes of a peasant girl--a red hood, silver
brooches, and ribbons galore. They put the Death at an open window that
all the people when they go to vespers may see it. Vespers over, two
girls take the Death by the arms and walk in front; the rest follow.
They sing an ordinary church hymn. Having wound through the village they
go to another house, shut out the boys, strip the Death of its clothes,
and throw the straw body out of the window to the boys, who fling it
into a river. Then one of the girls is dressed in the Death's discarded
clothes, and the procession again winds through the village. The same
hymn is sung. Thus it is clear that the girl is a sort of resuscitated
Death. This resurrection aspect, this passing of the old into the new,
will be seen to be of great ritual importance when we come to Dionysos
and the Dithyramb.
These ceremonies of Death and Life are more complex than the simple
carrying in of green boughs or even the dancing round maypoles. When we
have these figures, these "impersonations," we are getting away from the
merely emotional dance, from the domain of simple psychological motor
discharge to something that is very like rude art, at all events to
personification. On this question of personification, in which so much
of art and religion has its roots, it is all-important to be clear.
* * * * *
In discussions on such primitive rites as "Carrying out the Death,"
"Bringing in Summer," we are often told that the puppet of the girl is
carried round, buried, burnt; brought back, because it "personifies the
Spirit of Vegetation," or it "embodies the Spirit of Summer." The
Spirit of Vegetation is "incarnate in the puppet." We are led, by this
way of speaking, to suppose that the savage or the villager first forms
an idea or conception of a Spirit of Vegetation and then later
"embodies" it. We naturally wonder that he should perform a mental act
so high and difficult as abstraction.
A very little consideration shows that he performs at first no
abstraction at all; abstraction is foreign to his mental habit. He
begins with a vague excited dance to relieve his emotion. That dance
has, probably almost from the first, a leader; the dancers choose an
actual _person_, and he is the root and ground of _personification_.
There is nothing mysterious about the process; the leader does not
"embody" a previously conceived idea, rather he begets it. From his
personality springs the personification. The abstract idea arises from
the only thing it possibly can arise from, the concrete fact. Without
_per_ception there is no _con_ception. We noted in speaking of dances
(p. 43) how the dance got generalized; how from many commemorations of
actual hunts and battles there arose the hunt dance and the war dance.
So, from many actual living personal May Queens and Deaths, from many
actual men and women decked with leaves, or trees dressed up as men and
women, arises _the_ Tree Spirit, _the_ Vegetation Spirit, _the_ Death.
At the back, then, of the fact of personification lies the fact that the
emotion is felt collectively, the rite is performed by a band or chorus
who dance together _with a common leader_. Round that leader the emotion
centres. When there is an act of Carrying-out or Bringing-in he either
is himself the puppet or he carries it. Emotion is of the whole band;
drama--doing--tends to focus on the leader. This leader, this focus, is
then remembered, thought of, imaged; from being _per_ceived year by
year, he is finally _con_ceived; but his basis is always in actual fact
of which he is but the reflection.
Had there been no periodic festivals, personification might long have
halted. But it is easy to see that a recurrent _per_ception helps to
form a permanent abstract _con_ception. The different actual recurrent
May Kings and "Deaths," _because they recur_, get a sort of permanent
life of their own and become beings apart. In this way a conception, a
kind of _daimon_, or spirit, is fashioned, who dies and lives again in a
perpetual cycle. The periodic festival begets a kind of not immortal,
but perennial, god.
Yet the faculty of conception is but dim and feeble in the mind even of
the peasant to-day; his function is to perceive the actual fact year by
year, and to feel about it. Perhaps a simple instance best makes this
clear. The Greek Church does not gladly suffer images in the round,
though she delights in picture-images, _eikons_. But at her great spring
festival of Easter she makes, in the remote villages, concession to a
strong, perhaps imperative, popular need; she allows an image, an actual
idol, of the dead Christ to be laid in the tomb that it may rise again.
A traveller in Eubœa[18] during Holy Week had been struck by the genuine
grief shown at the Good Friday services. On Easter Eve there was the
same general gloom and despondency, and he asked an old woman why it
was. She answered: "Of course I am anxious; for if Christ does not rise
to-morrow, we shall have no corn this year."
The old woman's state of mind is fairly clear. Her emotion is the old
emotion, not sorrow for the Christ the Son of Mary, but fear, imminent
fear for the failure of food. The Christ again is not the historical
Christ of Judæa, still less the incarnation of the Godhead proceeding
from the Father; he is the actual figure fashioned by his village chorus
and laid by the priests, the leaders of that chorus, in the local
sepulchre.
* * * * *
So far, then, we have seen that the vague emotional dance tends to
become a periodic rite, performed at regular intervals. The periodic
rite may occur at any date of importance to the food-supply of the
community, in summer, in winter, at the coming of the annual rains, or
the regular rising of a river. Among Mediterranean peoples, both in
ancient days and at the present time, the Spring Festival arrests
attention. Having learnt the general characteristics of this Spring
Festival, we have now to turn to one particular case, the Spring
Festival of the Greeks. This is all-important to us because, as will be
seen, from the ritual of this and kindred festivals arose, we believe, a
great form of Art, the Greek drama.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Chapter XII: "Periodicity in Nature."
[8] _Ibid._
[9] _De Ser. Num._ 17.
[10] Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, and Osiris_,^3 p. 200.
[11] Quoted by Dr. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_,^2 p. 203.
[12] E.K. Chambers, _The Mediæval Stage_, I, p. 169.
[13] _The Golden Bough_,^2 p. 205.
[14] _The Golden Bough_,^2 p. 213.
[15] Resumed from Dr. Frazer, _Golden Bough_,^2 II, p. 104.
[16] _De Is. et Os._, p. 367.
[17] _De Aug. Scient._, III, 4.
[18] J.C. Lawson, _Modern Greek Folk-lore and Ancient Religion_, p. 573.