_On the Antiquity of Usages._
Who have been the greatest fools, and who the most ancient fools?
Ourselves or the Egyptians, or the Syrians or some other people? What
was signified by our mistletoe? Who first consecrated a cat? It must have
been he who was the most troubled with mice. In what nation did they
first dance under the boughs of trees in honor of the gods? Who first
made processions, and placed fools, with caps and bells, at the head of
them? Who first carried a priapus through the streets, and fixed one
like a knocker at the door? What Arab first took it into his head to
hang his wife's drawers out at the window, the day after his marriage?
All nations have formerly danced at the time of the new moon. Did they
then give one another the word? No; no more than they did to rejoice at
the birth of a son, or to mourn, or seem to mourn, at the death of a
father. Every one is very glad to see the moon again, after having lost
her for several nights. There are a hundred usages so natural to all
men, that it cannot be said the Biscayans taught them to the Phrygians,
or the Phrygians to the Biscayans.
Fire and water have been used in temples. This custom needed no
introduction. A priest did not choose always to have his hands dirty.
Fire was necessary to cook the immolated carcasses, and to burn slips of
resinous wood and spices, in order to combat the odor of the sacerdotal
shambles.
But the mysterious ceremonies which it is so difficult to understand,
the usages which nature does not teach--in what place, when, where, how,
why, were they invented? Who communicated them to other nations? It is
not likely that it should, at the same time, have entered the head of an
Arab and of an Egyptian to cut off one end of his son's prepuce; nor
that a Chinese and a Persian should, both at once, have resolved to
castrate little boys.
It can never have been that two fathers, in different countries, have,
at the same moment, formed the idea of cutting their sons' throats to
please God. Some nations must have communicated to others their follies,
serious, ridiculous, or barbarous. In this antiquity men love to search,
to discover, if possible, the first madman and the first scoundrel who
perverted human nature.
But how are we to know whether Jehu, in Phœnicia, by immolating his
son, was the inventor of sacrifices of human blood? How can we be
assured that Lycaon was the first who ate human flesh, when we do not
know who first began to eat fowls?
We seek to know the origin of ancient feasts. The most ancient and the
finest is that of the emperors of China tilling and sowing the ground,
together with their first mandarins. The second is that of the
Thesmophoria at Athens. To celebrate at once agriculture and justice, to
show men how necessary they both are, to unite the curb of law with the
art which is the source of all wealth--nothing is more wise, more pious,
or more useful.
There are old allegorical feasts to be found everywhere, as those of the
return of the seasons. It was not necessary that one nation should come
from afar off to teach another that marks of joy and friendship for
one's neighbors may be given on the first day of the year. This custom
has been that of every people. The Saturnalia of the Romans are better
known than those of the Allobroges and the Picts; because there are
many Roman writings and monuments remaining, but there are none of the
other nations of western Europe.
The feast of Saturn was the feast of Time. He had four wings; time flies
quickly--his two faces evidently signifying the concluded and the
commencing year. The Greeks said that he had devoured his father and
that he devoured his children. No allegory is more reasonable. Time
devours the past and the present, and will devour the future.
Why seek for vain and gloomy explanations of a feast so universal, so
gay, and so well known? When I look well into antiquity, I do not find a
single annual festival of a melancholy character; or, at least, if they
begin with lamentations, they end in dancing and revelry. If tears are
shed for Adoni or Adonai, whom we call Adonis, he is soon resuscitated,
and rejoicing takes place. It is the same with the feasts of Isis,
Osiris, and Horus. The Greeks, too, did as much for Ceres as for
Prosperine. The death of the serpent Python was celebrated with gayety.
A feast day and a day of joy were one and the same thing. At the feasts
of Bacchus this joy was only carried too far.
I do not find one general commemoration of an unfortunate event. The
institutors of the feasts would have shown themselves to be devoid of
common sense if they had established at Athens a celebration of the
battle lost at Chæronea, and at Rome another of the battle of Cannae.
They perpetuated the remembrance of what might encourage men, and not of
that which might fill them with cowardice or despair. This is so true
that fables were invented for the purpose of instituting feasts. Castor
and Pollux did not fight for the Romans near Lake Regillus; but, at the
end of three or four hundred years, some priests said so, and all the
people danced. Hercules did not deliver Greece from a hydra with seven
heads; but Hercules and his hydra were sung.