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OF THE HINDUS.
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and during the Holi Festival in India, have their origin in the ancient practice of celebrating, with festival rites, the period of the vernal equinox, when the new year of Persia anciently began."
There was a Festum Stultorum about this period amongst the Romans, the purport of which is not very clearly expressed, but some antiquaries have supposed that it constituted the original of the festivals of the Romish Church, the Festa Stultorum, Innocentium, and the like, the extravagances of the Abbot of Unreason, and the sleeveless errands of All Fools, or April Fool day. The periods at which these rude and boisterous manifestations of merriment took place were something different; but, as Brand observes, the crowded state of the Romish Calendar often led to the alteration of the days set apart for festivity, and in the case of the feast of Old or All Fools he quotes authority for its removal to the first of November from some other date, it being expressly stated in the calendar, Festum Stultorum veterum huc translatum est. The period, therefore, is little material — the identity of designation, and similarity of practice render it not unlikely that the day of All Fools had originally something in common with the Festum Stultorum and with the Holi".
* [See Brand's Popular Antiquities (Bohn), I, 63-102. 131-41. Still more striking coincidences between the Holi and the other above-mentioned festivals and customs will be found in the following books: Fest-Kalender aus Böhmen. Wien und Prag: 1861,
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