Mannhardt has collected much evidence of the curious customs still (or lately) existing in modern Europe, which look like survivals in a very mitigated form of the same superstition. These are generally known by the name of “Carrying out Death,” or “Burying the Carnival.” They are practised in almost every country of Europe, and relics of them survive even in England. The essence of these ceremonies consists in an effigy being substituted for the human victim. This effigy is treated much as the victim used to be. Sometimes it is burned, sometimes thrown into a river, and sometimes buried piecemeal. In Austrian Silesia, for example, the effigy is burned, and while it is burning a general struggle takes place for the pieces, which are pulled out of the flames with bare hands. (Compare the struggle among the Khonds, and also at the Potraj festival and the Holne sacrifice.) Each person who secures a fragment of the figure ties it to a branch of the largest tree in his garden, or buries it in his field, in the {294}belief that this causes the crops to grow better. Sometimes a sheaf of corn does duty for the victim, and portions of it are buried in each field as fertilisers. In the Hartz Mountains, at similar ceremonies, a living man is laid on a baking-trough and carried with dirges to a grave; but a glass of brandy is substituted for him at the last moment. Here the spirit is the equivalent of a god. In other cases the man is actually covered with straw, and so lightly buried. In Italy and Spain, a similar custom bore the name of “Sawing the Old Woman.” In Palermo, a real old woman was drawn through the streets on a cart, and made to mount a scaffold, where two mock executioners proceeded to saw through a bladder of blood which had been fitted to her neck. The blood gushed out, and the old woman pretended to swoon and die. This is obviously a mitigation of a human sacrifice. At Florence, an effigy stuffed with walnuts and dried figs represented the Old Woman. At mid-Lent, this figure was sawn through the middle in the Mercato Nuovo, and when the dried fruits tumbled out they were scrambled for by the crowd, as savages scrambled for fragments of the human victim or his animal representative. Upon all this subject a mass of material has been collected by Mannhardt and Mr. Frazer. Perhaps the most interesting case of all is the Russian ceremony of the Funeral of Yarilo. In this instance, the people chose an old man and gave him a small coffin containing a figure representing Yarilo. This he carried out of the town, followed by women chanting dirges, as the Syrian women mourned for Adonis, and the Egyptians for Osiris. In the open fields a grave was dug, and into it the figure was lowered amid weeping and wailing.