The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 1 of 2)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 1 of 2)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
Würtemberg the bushes which are set up on the houses on Palm Sunday are
sometimes left there for a year and then burnt.(295) The _eiresione_ (the
Harvest-May of Greece) was perhaps burned at the end of the year.(296)
So much for the tree-spirit conceived as incorporate or immanent in the
tree. We have now to show that the tree-spirit is often conceived and
represented as detached from the tree and clothed in human form, and even
as embodied in living men or women. The evidence for this anthropomorphic
representation of the tree-spirit is largely to be found in the popular
customs of European peasantry.
There is an instructive class of cases in which the tree-spirit is
represented simultaneously in vegetable form and in human form, which are
set side by side as if for the express purpose of explaining each other.
In these cases the human representative of the tree-spirit is sometimes a
doll or puppet, sometimes a living person; but whether a puppet or a
person, it is placed beside a tree or bough; so that together the person
or puppet, and the tree or bough, form a sort of bilingual inscription,
the one being, so to speak, a translation of the other. Here, therefore,
there is no room left for doubt that the spirit of the tree is actually
represented in human form. Thus in Bohemia, on the fourth Sunday in Lent,
young people throw a puppet called Death into the water; then the girls go
into the wood, cut down a young tree, and fasten to it a puppet dressed in
white clothes to look like a woman; with this tree and puppet they go from
house to house collecting gratuities and singing songs with the refrain—
“We carry Death out of the village,
We bring Summer into the village.”(297)
Here, as we shall see later on, the “Summer” is the spirit of vegetation
returning or reviving in spring. In some places in this country children
go about asking for pence with some small imitations of May-poles, and
with a finely dressed doll which they call the Lady of the May.(298) In
these cases the tree and the puppet are obviously regarded as equivalent.
At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called the Little May Rose, dressed in white,
carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and ribbons. Her
companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a song—
“Little May Rose turn round three times,
Let us look at you round and round!
Rose of the May, come to the greenwood away,
We will be merry all.
So we go from the May to the roses.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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