The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and ReligionFrazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
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."
Here, as we shall see later on, the "Summer" is the spirit of
vegetation returning or reviving in spring. In some parts of our own
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. 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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