THE RELIGION OF THE FOLK
[_Bibliographical Note._--The conversion of heathen England is
described in the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Bede (C. Plummer,
_Baedae Opera Historica_, 1896). Stress is laid on the imperfect
character of the process by L. Knappert, _Le Christianisme et le
Paganisme dans l’Histoire ecclésiastique de Bède le Vénérable_
(in _Revue de l’Histoire des Religions_, 1897, vol. xxxv). A
similar study for Gaul is E. Vacandard, _L’Idolatrie dans la
Gaule_ (in _Revue des Questions historiques_, 1899, vol. lxv).
Witness is borne to the continued presence of pre-Christian
elements in the folk-civilization of western Europe both by the
general results of folk-lore research and by the ecclesiastical
documents of the early Middle Ages. Of these the most important
in this respect are--(1) the _Decrees_ of Councils, collected
generally in P. Labbe and G. Cossart, _Sacrosancta Concilia_
(1671-2), and J. D. Mansi, _Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et
amplissima Collectio_ (1759-98), and for England in particular
in D. Wilkins, _Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae_ (1737)
and A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, _Councils and Ecclesiastical
Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland_ (1869-78).
An interesting series of extracts is given by G. Gröber, _Zur
Volkskunde aus Concilbeschlüssen und Capitularien_ (1894):--(2)
the _Penitentials_, or catalogues of sins and their penalties
drawn up for the guidance of confessors. The most important
English example is the _Penitential of Theodore_ (668-90), on
which the _Penitentials of Bede_ and _of Egbert_ are based.
Authentic texts are given by Haddan and Stubbs, vol. iii, and,
with others of continental origin, in F. W. H. Wasserschleben,
_Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche_ (1851), and H.
J. Schmitz, _Die Bussbücher und die Bussdisciplin der Kirche_
(1883). The most interesting for its heathen survivals is
the eleventh-century _Collectio Decretorum_ of Burchardus of
Worms (Migne, _P. L._ cxl, extracts in J. Grimm, _Teutonic
Mythology_, iv. 1740):--(3) _Homilies_ or _Sermons_, such as the
_Sermo_ ascribed to the seventh-century St. Eligius (_P. L._
lxxxvii. 524, transl. Grimm, iv. 1737), and the eighth-century
Frankish pseudo-Augustinian _Homilia de Sacrilegiis_ (ed.
C. P. Caspari, 1886):--(4) the _Vitae_ of the apostles of
the West, St. Boniface, St. Columban, St. Gall, and others.
A critical edition of these is looked for from M. Knappert.
The _Epistolae_ of Boniface are in _P. L._ lxxxix. 593:--(5)
_Miscellaneous Documents_, including the sixth-century _De
correctione Rusticorum_ of Bishop Martin of Braga in Spain (ed.
C. P. Caspari, 1883) and the so-called _Indiculus Superstitionum
et Paganiarum_ (ed. H. A. Saupe, 1891), a list of heathen
customs probably drawn up in eighth-century Saxony.--The view
of primitive religion taken in this book is largely, although
not altogether in detail, that of J. G. Frazer, _The Golden
Bough_ (1890, 2nd ed. 1900), which itself owes much to E. B.
Tylor, _Primitive Culture_ (1871); W. Robertson Smith, _Religion
of the Semites_ (2nd ed. 1894); W. Mannhardt, _Der Baumkultus
der Germanen_ (1875); _Antike Wald-und Feldkulte_ (1875-7). A
more systematic work on similar lines is F. B. Jevons, _An
Introduction to the History of Religion_ (1896): and amongst many
others may be mentioned A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_
(1887, 2nd ed. 1899), the conclusions of which are somewhat
modified in the same writer’s _The Making of Religion_ (1898);
Grant Allen, _The Evolution of the Idea of God_ (1897); E. S.
Hartland, _The Legend of Perseus_ (1894-6); J. Rhys, _The Origin
and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom_
(1888). The last of these deals especially with Keltic _data_,
which may be further studied in H. D’Arbois de Jubainville, _Le
Cycle mythologique irlandais et la Mythologie celtique_ (1884),
together with the chapter on _La Religion_ in the same writer’s
_La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l’Épopée homérique_
(1899) and A. Bertrand, _La Religion des Gaulois_ (1897).
Teutonic religion has been more completely investigated. Recent
works of authority are E. H. Meyer, _Germanische Mythologie_
(1891); W. Golther, _Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie_
(1895); and the article by E. Mogk on _Mythologie_ in H. Paul’s
_Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_, vol. iii (2nd ed. 1897).
The collection of material in J. Grimm’s _Teutonic Mythology_
(transl. J. S. Stallybrass, 1880-8) is still of the greatest
value. The general facts of early German civilization are
given by F. B. Gummere, _Germanic Origins_ (1892), and for the
Aryan-speaking peoples in general by O. Schräder, _Prehistoric
Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_ (transl. F. B. Jevons, 1890),
and _Reallexicon der indo-germanischen Altertumskunde_ (1901).
In dealing with the primitive calendar I have mainly, but not
wholly, followed the valuable researches of A. Tille, _Deutsche
Weihnacht_ (1893) and _Yule and Christmas_ (1899), a scholar the
loss of whom to this country is one of the lamentable results of
the recent war.]
Minstrelsy was an institution of the folk, no less than of the court
and the _bourgeoisie_. At many a village festival, one may be sure,
the taberers and buffoons played their conspicuous part, ravishing the
souls of Dorcas and Mopsa with merry and doleful ballads, and tumbling
through their amazing programme of monkey tricks before the ring of
wide-mouthed rustics on the green. Yet the soul and centre of such
revels always lay, not in these alien professional _spectacula_, but
in other entertainments, home-grown and racy of the soil, wherein the
peasants shared, not as onlookers only, but as performers, even as
their fathers and mothers, from immemorial antiquity, had done before
them. A full consideration of the village _ludi_ is important to the
scheme of the present book for more than one reason. They shared with
the _ludi_ of the minstrels the hostility of the Church. They bear
witness, at point after point, to the deep-lying dramatic instincts
of the folk. And their substantial contribution to mediaeval and
Renaissance drama and dramatic _spectacle_ is greater than has been
fully recognized.
Historically, the _ludi_ of the folk come into prominence with
the attacks made upon them by the reforming ecclesiastics of the
thirteenth century and in particular by Robert Grosseteste, bishop
of Lincoln[329]. Between 1236 and 1244 Grosseteste issued a series
of disciplinary pronouncements, in which he condemned many customs
prevalent in his diocese. Amongst these are included miracle plays,
‘scotales’ or drinking-bouts, ‘ram-raisings’ and other contests of
athletic prowess, together with ceremonies known respectively as the
_festum stultorum_ and the _Inductio Maii sive Autumni_[330]. Very
similar are the prohibitions contained in the _Constitutions_ (1240)
of Walter de Chanteloup, bishop of Worcester[331]. These particularly
specify the _ludus de Rege et Regina_, a term which may be taken as
generally applicable to the typical English folk-festival, of which
the _Inductio Maii sive Autumni_, the ‘May-game’ and ‘mell-supper,’
mentioned by Grosseteste, are varieties[332]. Both this _ludus_, in its
various forms, and the less strictly popular _festum stultorum_, will
find ample illustration in the sequel. Walter de Chanteloup also lays
stress upon an aggravation of the _ludi inhonesti_ by the performance
of them in churchyards and other holy places, and on Sundays or the
vigils and days of saints[333].
The decrees of the two bishops already cited do not stand alone. About
1250 the University of Oxford found it necessary to forbid the routs
of masked and garlanded students in the churches and open places of
the city[334]. These appear to have been held in connexion with the
feasts of the ‘nations’ into which a mediaeval university was divided.
Articles of visitation drawn up in connexion with the provisions of
Oxford in 1253 made inquiry as to several of the obnoxious _ludi_ and
as to the measures adopted to check them throughout the country[335].
Prohibitions are upon record by the synod of Exeter in 1287[336],
and during the next century by the synod of York in 1367[337], and
by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, in 1384[338]; while
the denunciations of the rulers of the church find an unofficial
echo in that handbook of ecclesiastical morality, Robert Mannyng of
Brunne’s _Handlyng Synne_[339]. There is, however, reason to suppose
that the attitude thus taken up hardly represents that of the average
ecclesiastical authority, still less that of the average parish
priest, towards the _ludi_ in question. The condemnatory decrees
should probably be looked upon as the individual pronouncements of
men of austere or reforming temper against customs which the laxer
discipline of their fellows failed to touch; perhaps it should rather
be said, which the wiser discipline of their fellows found it better to
regulate than to ban. At any rate there is evidence to show that the
village _ludi_, as distinct from the _spectacula_ of the minstrels,
were accepted, and even to some extent directed, by the Church. They
became part of the parochial organization, and were conducted through
the parochial machinery. Doubtless this was the course of practical
wisdom. But the moralist would find it difficult to deny that Robert
Grosseteste and Walter de Chanteloup had, after all, some reason on
their side. On the one hand they could point to the ethical lapses
of which the _ludi_ were undoubtedly the cause--the drunkenness, the
quarrels, the wantonings, by which they were disgraced[340]. And on
the other they could--if they were historically minded--recall the
origin of the objectionable rites in some of those obscure survivals
of heathenism in the rustic blood, which half a dozen centuries of
Christianity had failed to purge[341]. For if the comparative study
of religions proves anything it is, that the traditional beliefs and
customs of the mediaeval or modern peasant are in nine cases out of ten
but the _detritus_ of heathen mythology and heathen worship, enduring
with but little external change in the shadow of an hostile creed.
This is notably true of the village festivals and their _ludi_. Their
full significance only appears when they are regarded as fragments of
forgotten cults, the naïve cults addressed by a primitive folk to the
beneficent deities of field and wood and river, or the shadowy populace
of its own dreams. Not that when even the mediaeval peasant set up his
May-pole at the approach of summer or drove his cattle through the
bonfire on Midsummer eve, the real character of his act was at all
explicit in his consciousness. To him, as to his descendant of to-day,
the festival was at once a practice sanctioned by tradition and the
rare amusement of a strenuous life: it was not, save perhaps in some
unplumbed recesses of his being, anything more definitely sacred. At
most it was held to be ‘for luck,’ and in some vague general way, to
the interest of a fruitful year in field and fold. The scientific
anthropologist, however, from his very different point of view, cannot
regard the conversion to Christianity as a complete solution of
continuity in the spiritual and social life of western Europe. This
conversion, indeed, was clearly a much slower and more incomplete
process than the ecclesiastical chroniclers quite plainly state. It
was so even on the shores of the Mediterranean. But there the triumph
of Christianity began from below. Long before the edict of Milan, the
new religion, in spite of persecutions, had got its firm hold upon
the masses of the great cities of the Empire. And when, less than a
century later, Theodosius made the public profession of any other faith
a crime, he was but formally acknowledging a _chose jugée_. But even in
these lands of the first ardour the old beliefs and, above all, the old
rituals died hard. Lingering unacknowledged in the country, the pagan,
districts, they passed silently into the dim realm of folk-lore. How
could this but be more so when Christianity came with the missionaries
of Rome or of Iona to the peoples of the West? For with them conversion
was hardly a spontaneous, an individual thing. As a rule, the baptism
of the king was the starting-point and motive for that of his
followers: and the bulk of the people adopted wonderingly an alien cult
in an alien tongue imposed upon them by the will of their rulers. Such
a Christianity could at best be only nominal. Ancient beliefs are not
so easily surrendered: nor are habits and instincts, deep-rooted in
the lives of a folk, thus lightly laid down for ever, at the word of a
king. The churches of the West had, therefore, to dispose somehow of a
vast body of practical heathenism surviving in all essentials beneath
a new faith which was but skin-deep. The conflict which followed is
faintly adumbrated in the pages of Bede: something more may be guessed
of its fortunes by a comparison of the customs and superstitions
recorded in early documents of church discipline with those which,
after all, the peasantry long retained, or even now retain.
Two letters of Gregory the Great, written at the time of the mission of
St. Augustine, are a key to the methods adopted by the apostles of the
West. In June 601, writing to Ethelbert of Kent by the hands of abbot
Mellitus, Gregory bade the new convert show zeal in suppressing the
worship of idols, and throwing down their fanes[342]. Having written
thus, the pope changed his mind. Before Mellitus could reach England,
he received a letter instructing him to expound to Augustine a new
policy. ‘Do not, after all,’ wrote Gregory, ‘pull down the fanes.
Destroy the idols; purify the buildings with holy water; set relics
there; and let them become temples of the true God. So the people will
have no need to change their places of concourse, and where of old
they were wont to sacrifice cattle to demons, thither let them continue
to resort on the day of the saint to whom the church is dedicated, and
slay their beasts no longer as a sacrifice, but for a social meal in
honour of Him whom they now worship[343].’ There can be little doubt
that the conversion of England proceeded in the main on the lines thus
laid down by Gregory. Tradition has it that the church of Saint Pancras
outside the walls of Canterbury stands on the site of a fane at which
Ethelbert himself once worshipped[344]; and that in London St. Paul’s
replaced a temple and grove of Diana, by whom the equivalent Teutonic
wood-goddess, Freyja, is doubtless intended[345]. Gregory’s directions
were, perhaps, not always carried out quite so literally as this. When,
for instance, the priest Coifi, on horseback and sword in hand, led
the onslaught against the gods of Northumbria, he bade his followers
set fire to the fane and to all the hedges that girt it round[346]. On
the other hand, Reduald, king of East Anglia, must have kept his fane
standing, and indeed he carried the policy of amalgamation further
than its author intended, for he wavered faint-heartedly between the
old religion and the new, and maintained in one building an _altare_
for Christian worship and an _arula_ for sacrifice to demons[347].
Speaking generally, it would seem to have been the endeavour of
the Christian missionaries to effect the change of creed with as
little dislocation of popular sentiment as possible. If they could
extirpate the essentials, or what they considered as the essentials,
of heathenism, they were willing enough to leave the accidentals to be
worn away by the slow process of time. They did not, probably, quite
realize how long it would take. And what happened in England, happened
also, no doubt, on the continent, save perhaps in such districts as
Saxony, where Christianity was introduced _vi et armis_, and therefore
in a more wholesale, if not in the end a more effectual fashion[348].
The measure of surviving heathenism under Christianity must have
varied considerably from district to district. Much would depend on
the natural temper of the converts, on the tact of the clergy and on
the influence they were able to secure. Roughly speaking, the old
worships left their trace upon the new society in two ways. Certain
central practices, the deliberate invocation of the discarded gods, the
deliberate acknowledgement of their divinity by sacrifice, were bound
to be altogether proscribed[349]. And these, if they did not precisely
vanish, at least went underground, coming to light only as shameful
secrets of the confessional[350] or the witch-trial[351], or when the
dominant faith received a rude shock in times of especial distress,
famine or pestilence[352]. Others again were absorbed into the scheme
of Christianity itself. Many of the protective functions, for instance,
of the old pantheon were taken over bodily by the Virgin Mary, by St.
John, St. Michael, St. Martin, St. Nicholas, and other personages of
the new dispensation[353]. And in particular, as we have seen shadowed
forth in Pope Gregory’s policy, the festal customs of heathenism,
purified so far as might be, received a generous amount of toleration.
The chief thing required was that the outward and visible signs of the
connexion with the hostile religion should be abandoned. Nor was this
such a difficult matter. Cult, the sum of what man feels it obligatory
upon him to do in virtue of his relation to the unseen powers, is
notoriously a more enduring thing than belief, the speculative, or
mythology, the imaginative statement of those relations. And it was
of the customs themselves that the people were tenacious, not of the
meaning, so far as there was still a meaning, attached to them, or
of the names which their priests had been wont to invoke. Leave them
but their familiar revels, and the ritual so indissolubly bound up
with their hopes of fertility for their flocks and crops, they would
not stick upon the explicit consciousness that they drank or danced
in the might of Eostre or of Freyr. And in time, as the Christian
interpretation of life became an everyday thing, it passed out of sight
that the customs had been ritual at all. At the most a general sense
of their ‘lucky’ influence survived. But to stop doing them; that was
not likely to suggest itself to the rustic mind. And so the church and
the open space around the church continued to be, what the temple and
the temple precinct had been, the centre, both secular and religious,
of the village life. From the Christian point of view, the arrangement
had its obvious advantages. It had also this disadvantage, that so
far as obnoxious elements still clung to the festivals, so far as the
darker practices of heathenism still lingered, it was precisely the
most sacred spot that they defiled. Were incantations and spells still
muttered secretly for the good will of the deposed divinities? it was
the churchyard that was sure to be selected as the nocturnal scene of
the unhallowed ceremony. Were the clergy unable to cleanse the yearly
wake of wanton dance and song? it was the church itself, by Gregory’s
own decree, that became the focus of the riot.
The partial survival of the village ceremonies under Christianity will
appear less surprising when it is borne in mind that the heathenism
which Christianity combated was itself only the final term of a long
process of evolution. The worshippers of the Keltic or Teutonic deities
already practised a traditional ritual, probably without any very
clear conception of the _rationale_ on which some at least of the acts
which they performed were based. These acts had their origin far back
in the history of the religious consciousness; and it must not be
supposed, because modern scholarship, with its comparative methods, is
able to some extent to reconstruct the mental conditions out of which
they arose, that these conditions were still wholly operative in the
sixth, any more than in the thirteenth or the twentieth century. Side
by side with customs which had still their definite and intelligible
significance, religious conservatism had certainly preserved others
of a very primitive type, some of which survived as mere fossils,
while others had undergone that transformation of intention, that
pouring of new wine into old bottles, which is one of the most familiar
features in the history of institutions. The heathenism of western
Europe must be regarded, therefore, as a group of religious practices
originating in very different strata of civilization, and only fused
together in the continuity of tradition. Its permanence lay in the
law of association through which a piece of ritual originally devised
by the folk to secure their practical well-being remained, even after
the initial meaning grew obscure, irrevocably bound up with their
expectations of that well-being. Its interest to the student is that of
a development, rather than that of a system. Only the briefest outline
of the direction taken by this development can be here indicated. But
it must first be pointed out that, whether from a common derivation,
or through a similar intellectual structure reacting upon similar
conditions of life, it seems, at least up to the point of emergence
of the fully formed village cult, to have proceeded on uniform lines,
not only amongst the Teutonic and Keltic tribes who inhabited western
and northern Europe and these islands, but also amongst all the
Aryan-speaking peoples. In particular, although the Teutonic and the
Keltic priests and bards elaborated, probably in comparatively late
stages of their history, very different god-names and very different
mythologies, yet these are but the superstructure of religion; and it
is possible to infer, both from the results of folk-lore and from the
more scanty documentary evidence, a substantial identity throughout
the whole Kelto-Teutonic group, of the underlying institutions
of ritual and of the fundamental theological conceptions[354].
I am aware that it is no longer permissible to sum up all the
facts of European civilization in an Aryan formula. Ethnology has
satisfactorily established the existence on the continent of at least
two important racial strains besides that of the blonde invader from
Latham-land[355]. But I do not think that any of the attempts hitherto
made to distinguish Aryan from pre-Aryan elements in folk-lore have
met with any measure of success[356]. Nor is it quite clear that any
such distinction need have been implied by the difference of blood.
Archaeologists speak of a remarkable uniformity of material culture
throughout the whole of Europe during the neolithic period; and there
appears to be no special reason why this uniformity may not have
extended to the comparatively simple notions which man was led to form
of the not-man by his early contacts with his environment. In any case
the social amalgamation of Aryan and pre-Aryan was a process already
complete by the Middle Ages; and for the purpose of this investigation
it seems justifiable, and in the present state of knowledge even
necessary, to treat the village customs as roughly speaking homogeneous
throughout the whole of the Kelto-Teutonic area.
An analysis of these customs suggests a mental history somewhat as
follows. The first relations of man to the not-man are, it need hardly
be said, of a practical rather than a sentimental or a philosophic
character. They arise out of an endeavour to procure certain goods
which depend, in part at least, upon natural processes beyond man’s
own control. The chief of these goods is, of course, food; that is to
say, in a primitive state of civilization, success in hunting, whether
of berries, mussels and ‘witchetty grubs,’ or of more elusive and
difficult game; and later, when hunting ceases to be the mainstay of
existence, the continued fertility of the flocks and herds, which form
the support of a pastoral race, and of the cornfields and orchards
which in their turn come to supplement these, on the appearance of
agriculture. Food once supplied, the little tale of primitive man’s
limited conception of the desirable is soon completed. Fire and a
roof-tree are his already. But he asks for physical health, for
success in love and in the begetting of offspring, and for the power
to anticipate by divination that future about which he is always so
childishly curious. In the pursuit, then, of these simple goods man
endeavours to control nature. But his earliest essays in this direction
are, as Dr. Frazer has recently pointed out, not properly to be called
religion[357]. The magical charms by which he attempts to make the
sun burn, and the waters fall, and the wind blow as it pleases him,
certainly do not imply that recognition of a quasi-human personality
outside himself, which any religious definition may be supposed to
require as a minimum. They are rather to be regarded as applications of
primitive science, for they depend upon a vague general notion of the
relations of cause and effect. To assume that you can influence a thing
through what is similar to it, or through what has been in contact with
it, which, according to Dr. Frazer, are the postulates of magic in its
mimetic and its sympathetic form respectively, may be bad science, but
at least it is science of a sort, and not religion.
The magical charms play a large part in the village ritual, and will
be illustrated in the following chapter. Presently, however, the
scientific spirit is modified by that tendency of animism through
which man comes to look upon the external world not as mere more or
less resisting matter to be moved hither or thither, but rather as a
debateable land peopled with spirits in some sense alive. These spirits
are the active forces dimly discerned by human imagination as at work
behind the shifting and often mysterious natural phenomena--forces of
the moving winds and waters, of the skies now clear, now overcast, of
the animal races of hill and plain, of the growth waxing and waning
year by year in field and woodland. The control of nature now means the
control of these powers, and to this object the charms are directed. In
particular, I think, at this stage of his development, man conceives
a spirit of that food which still remains in the very forefront of his
aspirations, of his actual food-plant, or of the animal species which
he habitually hunts[358]. Of this spirit he initiates a cult, which
rests upon the old magical principle of the mastering efficacy of
direct contact. He binds the spirit literally to him by wearing it as a
garment, or absorbs it into himself in a solemn meal, hoping by either
process to acquire an influence or power over it. Naturally, at this
stage, the spirit becomes to the eye of his imagination phytomorphic or
theriomorphic in aspect. He may conceive it as especially incarnate in
a single sacred plant or animal. But the most critical moment in the
history of animism is that at which the elemental spirits come to be
looked upon as anthropomorphic, made in the likeness of man himself.
This is perhaps due to the identification of them with those other
quasi-human spirits, of whose existence man has by an independent
line of thought also become aware. These are the ghostly spirits of
departed kinsmen, still in some shadowy way inhabiting or revisiting
the house-place. The change does not merely mean that the visible
phytomorphic and theriomorphic embodiments of mental forces sink into
subordination; the plants and animals becoming no more than symbols and
appurtenances of the anthropomorphic spirit, or temporary forms with
which from time to time he invests himself. A transformation of the
whole character of the cult is involved, for man must now approach the
spirits, not merely by charms, although conservatism preserves these
as an element in ritual, but with modifications of the modes in which
he approaches his fellow man. He must beg their favour with submissive
speech or buy it with bribes. And here, with prayer and oblation,
religion in the stricter sense makes its appearance.
The next step of man is from the crowd of animistic spirits to
isolate the god. The notion of a god is much the old notion of an
anthropomorphic elemental spirit, widened, exalted, and further
removed from sense. Instead of a local and limited home, the god has
his dwelling in the whole expanse of heaven or in some distant region
of space. He transcends and as an object of cult supplants the more
bounded and more concrete personifications of natural forces out of
which he has been evolved. But he does not annul these: they survive
in popular credence as his servants and ministers. It is indeed on the
analogy of the position of the human chief amongst his _comitatus_
that, in all probability, the conception of the god is largely arrived
at. Comparative philology seems to show that the belief in gods is
common to the Aryan-speaking peoples, and that at the root of all the
cognate mythologies there lies a single fundamental divinity. This is
the Dyaus of the Indians, the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the
Romans, the Tiwaz (O.H.G. Zîu, O.N. Týr, A.-S. Tîw) of the Teutons.
He is an embodiment of the great clear sunlit heavens, the dispenser
of light to the huntsman, and of warmth and moisture to the crops.
Side by side with the conception of the heaven-god comes that of his
female counterpart, who is also, though less clearly, indicated in
all the mythologies. In her earliest aspect she is the lady of the
woods and of the blossoming fruitful earth. This primary dualism is an
extremely important factor in the explanation of early religion. The
all-father, the heaven, and the mother-goddess, the earth, are distinct
personalities from the beginning. It does not appear possible to
resolve one into a mere doublet or derivative of the other. Certainly
the marriage of earth and heaven in the showers that fertilize the
crops is one of the oldest and most natural of myths. But it is
generally admitted that myth is determined by and does not determine
the forms of cult. The heaven-god and the earth-goddess must have
already had their separate existence before the priests could hymn
their marriage. An explanation of the dualism is probably to be traced
in the merging of two cults originally distinct. These will have been
sex-cults. Tillage is, of course, little esteemed by primitive man.
It was so with the Germans, even up to the point at which they first
came into contact with the Romans[359]. Yet all the Aryan languages
show some acquaintance with the use of grains[360]. The analogy with
existing savages suggests that European agriculture in its early stages
was an affair of the women. While the men hunted or afterwards tended
their droves of cattle and horses, the women grubbed for roots, and
presently learnt to scratch the surface of the ground, to scatter the
seed, and painfully to garner and grind the scanty produce[361]. As the
avocations of the sexes were distinct, so would their magic or their
religion be. Each would develop rites of its own of a type strictly
determined by its practical ambitions, and each would stand apart from
the rites of the other. The interest of the men would centre in the
boar or stag, that of the women in the fruit-tree or the wheat-sheaf.
To the former the stone altar on the open hill-top would be holy; to
the latter the dim recesses of the impenetrable grove. Presently when
the god concept appeared, the men’s divinity would be a personification
of the illimitable and mysterious heavens beneath which they hunted
and herded, from which the pools were filled with water, and at times
the pestilence was darted in the sun rays; the women’s of the wooded
and deep-bosomed earth out of which their wealth sprang. This would
as naturally take a female as that a male form. Agriculture, however,
was not for ever left solely to the women. In time pasturage and
tillage came to be carried on as two branches of a single pursuit,
and the independent sex-cults which had sprung out of them coalesced
in the common village worship of later days. Certain features of the
primitive differentiation can still be obscurely distinguished. Here
and there one or the other sex is barred from particular ceremonies,
or a male priest must perform his mystic functions in woman’s garb.
The heaven-god perhaps remains the especial protector of the cattle,
and the earth-goddess of the corn. But generally speaking they have
all the interests of the farm in a joint tutelage. The stone altar
is set up in the sacred grove; the mystic tree is planted on the
hill-top[362]. Theriomorphic and phytomorphic symbols shadow forth a
single godhead[363]. The earth-mother becomes a divinity of light. The
heaven-father takes up his abode in the spreading oak.
The historic religions of heathenism have not preserved either the
primitive dualistic monotheism, if the phrase may be permitted, or
the simplicity of divine functions here sketched. With the advance of
civilization the objects of worship must necessarily take upon them new
responsibilities. If a tribe has its home by the sea, sooner or later
it trusts frail barks to the waters, and to its gods is committed the
charge of sea-faring. When handicrafts are invented, these also become
their care. When the pressure of tribe upon tribe leads to war, they
champion the host in battle. Moral ideas emerge and attach themselves
to their service: and ultimately they become identified with the rulers
of the dead, and reign in the shadowy world beyond the tomb. Another
set of processes combine to produce what is known as polytheism.
The constant application of fixed epithets to the godhead tends in
the long run to break up its unity. Special aspects of it begin to
take on an independent existence. Thus amongst the Teutonic peoples
Tiwaz-Thunaraz, the thunderous sky, gives rise to Thunar or Thor,
and Tiwaz-Frawiaz, the bounteous sky, to Freyr. And so the ancient
heaven-god is replaced by distinct gods of rain and sunshine, who,
with the mother-goddess, form that triad of divinities so prominent
in several European cults[364]. Again as tribes come into contact
with each other, there is a borrowing of religious conceptions, and
the tribal deities are duplicated by others who are really the same
in origin, but have different names. The mythological speculations of
priests and bards cause further elaboration. The friendly national
gods are contrasted with the dark hostile deities of foreign enemies.
A belief in the culture-hero or semi-divine man, who wrests the gifts
of civilization from the older gods, makes its appearance. Certain
cults, such as that of Druidism, become the starting-point for even
more philosophic conceptions. The personal predilection of an important
worshipper or group of worshippers for this or that deity extends his
vogue. The great event in the later history of Teutonic heathenism is
the overshadowing of earlier cults by that of Odin or Wodan, who seems
to have been originally a ruler of the dead, or perhaps a culture-hero,
and not an elemental god at all[365]. The multiplicity of forms under
which essentially the same divinity presents itself in history and
in popular belief may be illustrated by the mother-goddess of the
Teutons. As Freyja she is the female counterpart of Freyr; as Nerthus
of Freyr’s northern doublet, Njordr. When Wodan largely absorbs the
elemental functions, she becomes his wife, as Frîja or Frigg. Through
her association with the heaven-gods, she is herself a heaven-as well
as an earth-goddess[366], the Eostre of Bede[367], as well as the Erce
of the Anglo-Saxon ploughing charm[368]. She is probably the Tanfana
of Tacitus and the Nehellenia of the Romano-Germanic votive stones. If
so, she must have become a goddess of mariners, for Nehellenia seems to
be the Isis of the _interpretatio Romana_. As earth-goddess she comes
naturally into relation with the dead, and like Odin is a leader of the
rout of souls. In German peasant-lore she survives under various names,
of which Perchta is the most important; in witch-lore, as Diana, and
by a curious mediaeval identification, as Herodias[369]. And her more
primitive functions are largely inherited by the Virgin, by St. Walpurg
and by countless local saints.
Most of the imaginative and mythological superstructure so briefly
sketched in the last paragraph must be considered as subsequent in
order of development to the typical village cult. Both before and
in more fragmentary shape after the death of the old Keltic and
Teutonic gods, that continued to be in great measure an amalgam of
traditional rites of forgotten magical or pre-religious import. So
far as the consciousness of the mediaeval or modern peasant directed
it to unseen powers at all, which was but little, it was rather to
some of these more local and bounded spirits who remained in the train
of the gods, than to the gods themselves. For the purposes of the
present discussion, it is sufficient to think of it quite generally
as a cult of the spirits of fertilization, without attaching a very
precise connotation to that term. Unlike the domestic cult of the
ancestral ghosts, conducted for each household by the house-father
at the hearth, it was communal in character. Whatever the tenure of
land may have been, there seems no doubt that up to a late period
‘co-aration,’ or co-operative ploughing in open fields, remained the
normal method of tillage, while the cattle of the community roamed in
charge of a public herd over unenclosed pastures and forest lands[370].
The farm, as a self-sufficing agricultural unit, is a comparatively
recent institution, the development of which has done much to render
the village festivals obsolete. Originally the critical moments of
the agricultural year were the same for the whole village, and the
observances which they entailed were shared in by all.
The observances in question, or rather broken fragments of them, have
now attached themselves to a number of different outstanding dates in
the Christian calendar, and the reconstruction of the original year,
with its seasonal feasts, is a matter of some difficulty[371]. The
earliest year that can be traced amongst the Aryan-speaking peoples
was a bipartite one, made up of only two seasons, winter and summer.
For some reason that eludes research, winter preceded summer, just as
night, in the primitive reckoning, preceded day. The divisions seem to
have been determined by the conditions of a pastoral existence passed
in the regularly recurring seasons of central Europe. Winter began when
snow blocked the pastures and the cattle had to be brought home to
the stall: summer when the grass grew green again and there was once
more fodder in the open. Approximately these dates would correspond
to mid-November and mid-March[372]. Actually, in the absence of a
calendar, they would vary a little from year to year and would perhaps
depend on some significant annual event, such as the first snowstorm
in the one case[373], in the other the appearance of the first violet,
butterfly or cockchafer, or of one of those migratory birds which still
in popular belief bring good fortune and the summer, the swallow,
cuckoo or stork[374]. Both dates would give occasion for religious
ceremonies, together with the natural accompaniment of feasting and
revel. More especially would this be the case at mid-November, when a
great slaughtering of cattle was rendered economically necessary by
the difficulty of stall-feeding the whole herd throughout the winter.
Presently, however, new conditions established themselves. Agriculture
grew in importance, and the crops rather than the cattle became the
central interest of the village life. Fresh feasts sprang up side by
side with the primitive ones, one at the beginning of ploughing about
mid-February, another at the end of harvest, about mid-September.
At the same time the increased supply of dry fodder tended to drive
the annual slaughtering farther on into the winter. More or less
contemporaneously with these processes, the old bipartite year was
changed into a tripartite one by the growth of yet another new feast
during that dangerous period when the due succession of rain and sun
for the crops becomes a matter of the greatest moment to the farmer.
Early summer, or spring, was thus set apart from late summer, or summer
proper[375]. This development also may be traced to the influence of
agriculture, whose interest runs in a curve, while that of herding
keeps comparatively a straight course. But as too much sun or too much
wet not only spoils the crops but brings a murrain on the cattle, the
herdsmen fell into line and took their share in the high summer rites.
At first, no doubt, this last feast was a sporadic affair, held for
propitiation of the unfavourable fertilization spirits when the elders
of the village thought it called for. And to the end resort may have
been had to exceptional acts of cult in times of especial distress. But
gradually the occasional ceremony became an annual one, held as soon
as the corn was thick in the green blade and the critical days were at
hand.
So far, there has been no need to assume the existence of a calendar.
How long the actual climatic conditions continued to determine the
dates of the annual feasts can hardly be said. But when a calendar
did make its appearance, the five feasts adapted themselves without
much difficulty to it. The earliest calendar that can be inferred in
central Europe was one, either of Oriental or possibly of Mediterranean
_provenance_, which divided the year into six tides of threescore days
each[376]. The beginnings of these tides almost certainly fell at
about the middle of corresponding months of the Roman calendar[377].
The first would thus be marked by the beginning of winter feast in
mid-November; two others by the beginning of summer feast and the
harvest feast in mid-March and mid-August respectively. A little
accommodation of the seasonal feasts of the farm would be required
to adapt them to the remaining three. And here begins a process of
dislocation of the original dates of customs, now becoming traditional
rather than vital, which was afterwards extended by successive stages
to a bewildering degree. By this time, with the greater permanence of
agriculture, the system of autumn ploughing had perhaps been invented.
The spring ploughing festival was therefore of less importance, and
bore to be shifted back to mid-January instead of mid-February. Four
of the six tides are now provided with initial feasts. These are
mid-November, mid-January, mid-March, and mid-September. There are,
however, still mid-May and mid-July, and only the high summer feast
to divide between them. I am inclined to believe that a division is
precisely what took place, and that the hitherto fluctuating date of
the summer feast was determined in some localities to mid-May, in
others to mid-July[378].
The European three-score-day-tide calendar is rather an ingenious
conjecture than an ascertained fact of history. When the Germano-Keltic
peoples came under the influence of Roman civilization, they adopted
amongst other things the Roman calendar, first in its primitive form
and then in the more scientific one given to it under Julius Caesar.
The latter divided the year into four quarters and twelve months,
and carried with it a knowledge of the solstices, at which the
astronomy neither of Kelts nor of Germans seems to have previously
arrived[379]. The feasts again underwent a process of dislocation
in order to harmonize them with the new arrangement. The ceremonies
of the winter feast were pulled back to November 1 or pushed forward
to January 1. The high summer feast was attracted from mid-May and
mid-July respectively to the important Roman dates of the _Floralia_
on May 1 and the summer solstice on June 24. Last of all, to complete
the confusion, came, on the top of three-score-day-tide calendar
and Roman calendar alike, the scheme of Christianity with its host
of major and minor ecclesiastical festivals, some of them fixed,
others movable. Inevitably these in their turn began to absorb the
agricultural customs. The present distribution of the five original
feasts, therefore, is somewhat as follows. The winter feast is spread
over all the winter half of the year from All Souls day to Twelfth
night. A later chapter will illustrate its destiny more in detail. The
ploughing feast is to be sought mainly in Plough Monday, in Candlemas
and in Shrovetide or Carnival[380]; the beginning of summer feast
in Palm Sunday, Easter and St. Mark’s day; the early variety of the
high summer feast probably also in Easter, and certainly in May-day,
St. George’s day, Ascensiontide with its Rogations, Whitsuntide and
Trinity Sunday; the later variety of the same feast in Midsummer day
and Lammastide; and the harvest feast in Michaelmas. These are days
of more or less general observance. Locally, in strict accordance
with the policy of Gregory the Great as expounded to Mellitus, the
floating customs have often settled upon conveniently neighbouring
dates of wakes, rushbearings, kirmesses and other forms of vigil or
dedication festivals[381]; and even, in the utter oblivion of their
primitive significance, upon the anniversaries of historical events,
such as Royal Oak day on May 29[382], or Gunpowder day. Finally it
may be noted, that of the five feasts that of high summer is the one
most fully preserved in modern survivals. This is partly because it
comes at a convenient time of year for the out-of-door holiday-making
which serves as a preservative for the traditional rites; partly also
because, while the pastoral element in the feasts of the beginnings of
winter and summer soon became comparatively unimportant through the
subordination of pasturage to tillage, and the ploughing and harvest
feasts tended more and more to become affairs of the individual farm
carried out in close connexion with those operations themselves, the
summer feast retained its communal character and continued to be
celebrated by the whole village for the benefit of everybody’s crops
and trees, and everybody’s flocks and herds[383]. It is therefore
mainly, although not wholly, upon the summer feast that the analysis of
the agricultural ritual to be given in the next chapter will be based.