The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 04 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 04 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
sometimes it is hung on a little tree and so carried about by girls
collecting money,(693) just as is done with the May-tree and the May Lady,
and with the Summer-tree and the doll attached to it. In short we are
driven to regard the expulsion of Death and the bringing in of Summer as,
in some cases at least, merely another form of that death and revival of
the spirit of vegetation in spring which we saw enacted in the killing and
resurrection of the Wild Man.(694) The burial and resurrection of the
Carnival is probably another way of expressing the same idea. The
interment of the representative of the Carnival under a dung-heap(695) is
natural, if he is supposed to possess a quickening and fertilising
influence like that ascribed to the effigy of Death. The Esthonians,
indeed, who carry the straw figure out of the village in the usual way on
Shrove Tuesday, do not call it the Carnival, but the Wood-spirit
(_Metsik_), and they clearly indicate the identity of the effigy with the
wood-spirit by fixing it to the top of a tree in the wood, where it
remains for a year, and is besought almost daily with prayers and
offerings to protect the herds; for like a true wood-spirit the _Metsik_
is a patron of cattle. Sometimes the _Metsik_ is made of sheaves of
corn.(696)
(M199) Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and
Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the beings
personified or embodied in the customs with which we have been dealing.
The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern origin; for the
personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of
an abstract notion like death, is hardly primitive. But the ceremonies
themselves bear the stamp of a dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly
help supposing that in their origin the ideas which they embodied were of
a more simple and concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a
particular kind of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in
general), or even of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to
supply a basis from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider
idea of a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of
vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it
manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May for the
tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be easy and natural. Again, the
concrete notion of the dying tree or dying vegetation would by a similar
process of generalisation glide into a notion of death in general; so that
the practice of carrying out the dying or dead vegetation in spring, as a
preliminary to its revival, would in time widen out into an attempt to
banish Death in general from the village or district. The view that in
these spring ceremonies Death meant originally the dying or dead
vegetation of winter has the high support of W. Mannhardt; and he confirms
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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