The ‘Death’ of the German and Slavonic form of the custom has clearly come to be regarded as the personification of the forces of evil within the village; and the ceremony of expulsion may be compared with other periodical rites, European and non-European, in which evil spirits are similarly expelled[628]. The effigy may even be regarded in the light of a scapegoat, bearing away the sins of the community[629]. But it is doubtful how far the notion of evil spirits warring against the good spirits which protect man and his crops is a European, or at any rate a primitive European one[630]; and it may perhaps be taken for granted that what was originally thought to be expelled in the rite was not so much either ‘Death’ or ‘Sin’ as winter. This view is confirmed by the evidence of an eighth-century homily, which speaks of the expulsion of winter in February as a relic of pagan belief[631]. Moreover, the expulsion of Death is often found in the closest relation to the more widespread custom of bringing summer, in the shape of green tree or bough, into the village. The procession which carries away the dead effigy brings back the summer tree; and the rhymes used treat the two events as connected[632]. The homily just quoted suggests that the mock funeral or expulsion of winter was no new thing in the eighth century. On the other hand, it can hardly be supposed that customs which imply such abstract ideas as death, or even as summer and winter, belong to the earliest stages of the village festival. What has happened is what happens in other forms of festival play. The instinct of play, in this case finding vent in a dramatic representation of the succession of summer to winter, has taken hold of and adapted to its own purposes elements in the celebrations which, once significant, have gradually come to be mere traditional survivals. Such are the ceremonial burial in the ground, the ceremonial burning, the ceremonial plunging into water, of the representative of the fertilization spirit. In particular, the southern term ‘the old woman’ suggests that the effigy expelled or destroyed is none other than the ‘corn mother’ or ‘harvest-May,’ fashioned to represent the fertilization spirit out of the last sheaf at harvest, and preserved until its place is taken by a new and green representative in the spring.