Indian Antiquary Vol 20

Author(s): John Faithfull Fleet, Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 59

JANUARY, 1891.]
counterparts all over the world, the strongest instance of which is in the case of the Indians of Arizona, who, when prevented by the Mexicans from continuing human sacrifices at their Feast of Fire, continued in secret a sham sacrifice in which they did not go further than drawing blood.
BOOK-NOTICE.
The killing of the god was not confined in primitive times to the human representatives of the gods of those who worshipped the vegetable kingdom; it can be shewn, by a consideration of modern folk-customs, to have existed amongst those whose gods were animals.
In German and Slavonic villages, closely connected and indeed mixed up with the customs of May-day and killing the King of the Wood, is the custom of Burying the Carnival in Lent. Straw effigies representing a man, known as the Carnival Bear or the Carnival Fool, are slain and buried or drowned in various ways, and in Swabia the custom has dwindled into ducking a live person in a stream. As in the case of the effigies or representatives of the King of the Wood, Doctor Ironbeard's services are called in to resuscitate. the slain Carnival, and the reviving of slain death is a conspicuous part of all these ceremonies. In the Harz mountains, the Carnival is finally represented by a bottle of brandy, which is buried and dug up the following year and drunk "because it has come to life again."
Closely connected with Burying the Carnival is the custom of Carrying out Death, that is, throwing him away. He is generally drowned on a Sunday in Lent, known as Dead Sunday. In the Latin Countries generally and in Spain, Italy, and Sicily, this was varied as Sawing the Old Woman, and still survives in the paper saws of Naples and the sawing and burning of wooden billets at Barcelona in Mid Lent. It remains in the most interesting manner in North Slavonia, in the expression "Sawing the Old Wife" for Mid Lent. In India, a reference to Pañjdb Notes and Queries will give several instances of the practice of carrying out death and disease from the boundaries of one village to another.
Carrying out death is always more or less directly connected with Bringing in Summer, Spring or Life, often as not in the form of death resuscitated. That the modern ceresnontes:connected with abstractions such as Death, Summer, Spring and Life are survivals of others relating to more concrete conceptions, we have a most interesting proof from Russia, where the images buried and revived represent Kostrabonko, Kostroma, Kupalo, Lada and Yarilo, unques
1 As some have taken Adonis for the sun, Mr. Frazer shews in the most interesting manner that he was a
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tionable representatives of pre-Christian gods. In Silesia, too, they bury the Deathstone, and in Albania the effigy of a malignant sprite named Kore. The drowning of Ralis or images of Siva and Pârbati in the Kângrâ district of the Himȧlayas is an instructive parallel to these burials of the gods of fertilization. In ancient Europe the marriage of Adonis and Aphrodite (the Semitic Adon and Istar) and the death and resuscitation of Adonis plainly point out the prevalence then of the modern customs just alluded to. As also do the customs connected with his Syrian prototype Thammuz or Tâuz,' while those of the closely connected Attis and Cybele of Phrygia seem in certain points to have given rise to the existing customs in connection with the Maypole, Wildman, the King of the May, and so on. Again assuming that Osiris and Isis, or at least one or some of the gods and goddesses of which these great Egyptian deities were originally compounded, were god and goddess of the corn, the death, burial, and resuscitation of Osiris point to a very ancient existence of the same class of ideas in old Egypt. Our jovial old friend Dionysus or Bacchus, in his more legitimate form of god of vegetation, by his violent death and revivification proves that similar notions were prevalent in ancient Greece. But Dionysus was also a god of the animal kingdom, and in this form was slain periodically as a bull, a goat, and even as a human being.
The myth of Proserpine and Demeter belongs daughter and mother, instead of husband and to the same category, except that this pair are wife or goddess and lover. And if we take Demeter to mean Barley-mother (and not Earth-mother as usual) there are any number of harvest customs all over Europe referring to her, chiefly connected with the reaping of the
last, but sometimes of the first, sheaf, which
appear in the Corn-mother, Rye-mother, Peamother, Wheat-mother, Oats-mother, Barleymother, varied as the Córn-woman, Rye-woman, and so on of Germany, connected with which are the Ceres (a return to classicism this) and the Mother-sheaf of France, the Harvest-mother, Great-mother and Grand-mother of Germany, aud curiously the Granny of Belfast: In Germany, too, she appears as the Old-woman, and in effigy as the Carline of Scotland and the Caley of Antrim, which. are precisely the same thing as the Baba of Poland and the Boba of Lithuania. The frequent wrapping up of a woman as the Cornmother, under her various names, in the last sheaf
"corn-spirit," using the universal custom, in one form or another, of "the Gardens of Adonis" for his purpose.