Section 2. Burying the Carnival.
THUS far I have offered an explanation of the rule which required
that the priest of Nemi should be slain by his successor. The
explanation claims to be no more than probable; our scanty
knowledge of the custom and of its history forbids it to be more. But
its probability will be augmented in proportion to the extent to which
the motives and modes of thought which it assumes can be proved
to have operated in primitive society. Hitherto the god with whose
death and resurrection we have been chiefly concerned has been
the tree-god. But if I can show that the custom of killing the god
and the belief in his resurrection originated, or at least existed, in
the hunting and pastoral stage of society, when the slain god was
an animal, and that it survived into the agricultural stage, when the
slain god was the corn or a human being representing the corn, the
probability of my explanation will have been considerably
increased. This I shall attempt to do in the sequel, and in the
course of the discussion I hope to clear up some obscurities which
still remain, and to answer some objections which may have
suggested themselves to the reader. 1
We start from the point at which we left off-the spring customs of
European peasantry. Besides the ceremonies already described
there are two kindred sets of observances in which the simulated
death of a divine or supernatural being is a conspicuous feature. In
one of them the being whose death is dramatically represented is a
personification of the Carnival; in the other it is Death himself. The
former ceremony falls naturally at the end of the Carnival, either on
the last day of that merry season, namely Shrove Tuesday, or on
the first day of Lent, namely Ash Wednesday. The date of the other
ceremony-the Carrying or Driving out of Death, as it is commonly
called-is not so uniformly fixed. Generally it is the fourth Sunday in
Lent, which hence goes by the name of Dead Sunday; but in some
places the celebration falls a week earlier, in others, as among the
Czechs of Bohemia, a week later, while in certain German villages
of Moravia it is held on the first Sunday after Easter. Perhaps, as
has been suggested, the date may originally have been variable,
depending on the appearance of the first swallow or some other
herald of the spring. Some writers regard the ceremony as Slavonic
in its origin. Grimm thought it was a festival of the New Year with
the old Slavs, who began their year in March. We shall first take
examples, of the mimic death of the Carnival, which always falls
before the other in the calendar. 2
At Frosinone, in Latium, about half-way between Rome and
Naples, the dull monotony of life in a provincial Italian town is
agreeably broken on the last day of the Carnival by the ancient
festival known as the Radica. About four o'clock in the afternoon
the town band, playing lively tunes and followed by a great crowd,
proceeds to the Piazza del Plebiscito, where is the Sub-Prefecture
as well as the rest of the Government buildings. Here, in the middle
of the square, the eyes of the expectant multitude are greeted by
the sight of an immense car decked with many-coloured festoons
and drawn by four horses. Mounted on the car is a huge chair, on
which sits enthroned the majestic figure of the Carnival, a man of
stucco about nine feet high with a rubicund and smiling
countenance. Enormous boots, a tin helmet like those which grace
the heads of officers of the Italian marine, and a coat of many
colours embellished with strange devices, adorn the outward man
of this stately personage. His left hand rests on the arm of the chair,
while with his right he gracefully salutes the crowd, being moved to
this act of civility by a string which is pulled by a man who
modestly shrinks from publicity under the mercy-seat. And now the
crowd, surging excitedly round the car, gives vent to its feelings in
wild cries of joy, gentle and simple being mixed up together and all
dancing furiously the Saltarello. A special feature of the festival is
that every one must carry in his hand what is called a radica (
"root"), by which is meant a huge leaf of the aloe or rather the
agave. Any one who ventured into the crowd without such a leaf
would be unceremoniously hustled out of it, unless indeed he bore
as a substitute a large cabbage at the end of a long stick or a
bunch of grass curiously plaited. When the multitude, after a short
turn, has escorted the slow-moving car to the gate of the
Sub-Prefecture, they halt, and the car, jolting over the uneven
ground, rumbles into the courtyard. A hush now falls on the crowd,
their subdued voices sounding, according to the description of one
who has heard them, like the murmur of a troubled sea. All eyes are
turned anxiously to the door from which the Sub-Prefect himself
and the other representatives of the majesty of the law are
expected to issue and pay their homage to the hero of the hour. A
few moments of suspense and then a storm of cheers and
hand-clapping salutes the appearance of the dignitaries, as they
file out and, descending the staircase, take their place in the
procession. The hymn of the Carnival is now thundered out, after
which, amid a deafening roar, aloe leaves and cabbages are
whirled aloft and descend impartially on the heads of the just and
the unjust, who lend fresh zest to the proceedings by engaging in a
free fight. When these preliminaries have been concluded to the
satisfaction of all concerned, the procession gets under weigh. The
rear is brought up by a cart laden with barrels of wine and
policemen, the latter engaged in the congenial task of serving out
wine to all who ask for it, while a most internecine struggle,
accompanied by a copious discharge of yells, blows, and
blasphemy, goes on among the surging crowd at the cart's tail in
their anxiety not to miss the glorious opportunity of intoxicating
themselves at the public expense. Finally, after the procession has
paraded the principal streets in this majestic manner, the effigy of
Carnival is taken to the middle of a public square, stripped of his
finery, laid on a pile of wood, and burnt amid the cries of the
multitude, who thundering out once more the song of the Carnival
fling their so-called "roots" on the pyre and give themselves up
without restraint to the pleasures of the dance. 3
In the Abruzzi a pasteboard figure of the Carnival is carried by
four grave-diggers with pipes in their mouths and bottles of wine
slung at their shoulder-belts. In front walks the wife of the Carnival,
dressed in mourning and dissolved in tears. From time to time the
company halts, and while the wife addresses the sympathising
public, the grave-diggers refresh the inner man with a pull at the
bottle. In the open square the mimic corpse is laid on a pyre, and to
the roll of drums, the shrill screams of the women, and the gruffer
cries of the men a light is set to it. While the figure burns, chestnuts
are thrown about among the crowd. Sometimes the Carnival is
represented by a straw-man at the top of a pole which is borne
through the town by a troop of mummers in the course of the
afternoon. When evening comes on, four of the mummers hold out a
quilt or sheet by the corners, and the figure of the Carnival is made
to tumble into it. The procession is then resumed, the performers
weeping crocodile tears and emphasising the poignancy of their
grief by the help of saucepans and dinner bells. Sometimes, again,
in the Abruzzi the dead Carnival is personified by a living man who
lies in a coffin, attended by another who acts the priest and
dispenses holy water in great profusion from a bathing tub. 4
At Lerida, in Catalonia, the funeral of the Carnival was witnessed
by an English traveller in 1877. On the last Sunday of the Carnival
a grand procession of infantry, cavalry, and maskers of many sorts,
some on horseback and some in carriages, escorted the grand car
of His Grace Pau Pi, as the effigy was called, in triumph through
the principal streets. For three days the revelry ran high, and then
at midnight on the last day of the Carnival the same procession
again wound through the streets, but under a different aspect and
for a different end. The triumphal car was exchanged for a hearse,
in which reposed the effigy of his dead Grace: a troop of maskers,
who in the first procession had played the part of Students of Folly
with many a merry quip and jest, now, robed as priests and
bishops, paced slowly along holding aloft huge lighted tapers and
singing a dirge. All the mummers wore crape, and all the horsemen
carried blazing flambeaux. Down the high street, between the lofty,
many-storeyed and balconied houses, where every window, every
balcony, every housetop was crammed with a dense mass of
spectators, all dressed and masked in fantastic gorgeousness, the
procession took its melancholy way. Over the scene flashed and
played the shifting cross-lights and shadows from the moving
torches: red and blue Bengal lights flared up and died out again;
and above the trampling of the horses and the measured tread of
the marching multitude rose the voices of the priests chanting the
requiem, while the military bands struck in with the solemn roll of
the muffled drums. On reaching the principal square the procession
halted, a burlesque funeral oration was pronounced over the
defunct Pau Pi, and the lights were extinguished. Immediately the
devil and his angels darted from the crowd, seized the body and
fled away with it, hotly pursued by the whole multitude, yelling,
screaming, and cheering. Naturally the fiends were overtaken and
dispersed; and the sham corpse, rescued from their clutches, was
laid in a grave that had been made ready for its reception. Thus the
Carnival of 1877 at Lerida died and was buried. 5
A ceremony of the same sort is observed in Provence on Ash
Wednesday. An effigy called Caramantran, whimsically attired, is
drawn in a chariot or borne on a litter, accompanied by the
populace in grotesque costumes, who carry gourds full of wine and
drain them with all the marks, real or affected, of intoxication. At the
head of the procession are some men disguised as judges and
barristers, and a tall gaunt personage who masquerades as Lent;
behind them follow young people mounted on miserable hacks and
attired as mourners who pretend to bewail the fate that is in store for
Caramantran. In the principal square the procession halts, the
tribunal is constituted, and Caramantran placed at the bar. After a
formal trial he is sentenced to death amid the groans of the mob: the
barrister who defended him embraces his client for the last time: the
officers of justice do their duty: the condemned is set with his back
to a wall and hurried into eternity under a shower of stones. The
sea or a river receives his mangled remains. Throughout nearly the
whole of the Ardennes it was and still is customary on Ash
Wednesday to burn an effigy which is supposed to represent the
Carnival, while appropriate verses are sung round about the
blazing figure. Very often an attempt is made to fashion the effigy in
the likeness of the husband who is reputed to be least faithful to his
wife of any in the village. As might perhaps have been anticipated,
the distinction of being selected for portraiture under these painful
circumstances has a slight tendency to breed domestic jars,
especially when the portrait is burnt in front of the house of the gay
deceiver whom it represents, while a powerful chorus of
caterwauls, groans, and other melodious sounds bears public
testimony to the opinion which his friends and neighbours entertain
of his private virtues. In some villages of the Ardennes a young
man of flesh and blood, dressed up in hay and straw, used to act
the part of Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), as the personification of
the Carnival is often called in France after the last day of the
period which he personates. He was brought before a mock
tribunal, and being condemned to death was placed with his back
to a wall, like a soldier at a military execution, and fired at with
blank cartridges. At Vrigne-aux-Bois one of these harmless
buffoons, named Thierry, was accidentally killed by a wad that had
been left in a musket of the firing-party. When poor Shrove
Tuesday dropped under the fire, the applause was loud and long,
he did it so naturally; but when he did not get up again, they ran to
him and found him a corpse. Since then there have been no more
of these mock executions in the Ardennes. 6
In Normandy on the evening of Ash Wednesday it used to be the
custom to hold a celebration called the Burial of Shrove Tuesday.
A squalid effigy scantily clothed in rags, a battered old hat crushed
down on his dirty face, his great round paunch stuffed with straw,
represented the disreputable old rake who, after a long course of
dissipation, was now about to suffer for his sins. Hoisted on the
shoulders of a sturdy fellow, who pretended to stagger under the
burden, this popular personification of the Carnival promenaded the
streets for the last time in a manner the reverse of triumphal.
Preceded by a drummer and accompanied by a jeering rabble,
among whom the urchins and all the tag-rag and bobtail of the
town mustered in great force, the figure was carried about by the
flickering light of torches to the discordant din of shovels and tongs,
pots and pans, horns and kettles, mingled with hootings, groans,
and hisses. From time to time the procession halted, and a
champion of morality accused the broken-down old sinner of all
the excesses he had committed and for which he was now about to
be burned alive. The culprit, having nothing to urge in his own
defence, was thrown on a heap of straw, a torch was put to it, and
a great blaze shot up, to the delight of the children who frisked
round it screaming out some old popular verses about the death of
the Carnival. Sometimes the effigy was rolled down the slope of a
hill before being burnt. At Saint-Lô the ragged effigy of Shrove
Tuesday was followed by his widow, a big burly lout dressed as a
woman with a crape veil, who emitted sounds of lamentation and
woe in a stentorian voice. After being carried about the streets on a
litter attended by a crowd of maskers, the figure was thrown into the
River Vire. The final scene has been graphically described by
Madame Octave Feuillet as she witnessed it in her childhood some
sixty years ago. "My parents invited friends to see, from the top of
the tower of Jeanne Couillard, the funeral procession passing. It
was there that, quaffing lemonade-the only refreshment allowed
because of the fast-we witnessed at nightfall a spectacle of which I
shall always preserve a lively recollection. At our feet flowed the
Vire under its old stone bridge. On the middle of the bridge lay the
figure of Shrove Tuesday on a litter of leaves, surrounded by
scores of maskers dancing, singing, and carrying torches. Some of
them in their motley costumes ran along the parapet like fiends. The
rest, worn out with their revels, sat on the posts and dozed. Soon
the dancing stopped, and some of the troop, seizing a torch, set fire
to the effigy, after which they flung it into the river with redoubled
shouts and clamour. The man of straw, soaked with resin, floated
away burning down the stream of the Vire, lighting up with its
funeral fires the woods on the bank and the battlements of the old
castle in which Louis XI. and Francis I. had slept. When the last
glimmer of the blazing phantom had vanished, like a falling star, at
the end of the valley, every one withdrew, crowd and maskers
alike, and we quitted the ramparts with our guests." 7
In the neighbourhood of Tübingen on Shrove Tuesday a
straw-man, called the Shrovetide Bear, is made up; he is dressed
in a pair of old trousers, and a fresh black-pudding or two squirts
filled with blood are inserted in his neck. After a formal
condemnation he is beheaded, laid in a coffin, and on Ash
Wednesday is buried in the churchyard. This is called "Burying the
Carnival." Amongst some of the Saxons of Transylvania the
Carnival is hanged. Thus at Braller on Ash Wednesday or Shrove
Tuesday two white and two chestnut horses draw a sledge on
which is placed a straw-man swathed in a white cloth; beside him
is a cart-wheel which is kept turning round. Two lads disguised as
old men follow the sledge lamenting. The rest of the village lads,
mounted on horseback and decked with ribbons, accompany the
procession, which is headed by two girls crowned with evergreen
and drawn in a waggon or sledge. A trial is held under a tree, at
which lads disguised as soldiers pronounce sentence of death. The
two old men try to rescue the straw-man and to fly with him, but to
no purpose; he is caught by the two girls and handed over to the
executioner, who hangs him on a tree. In vain the old men try to
climb up the tree and take him down; they always tumble down,
and at last in despair they throw themselves on the ground and
weep and howl for the hanged man. An official then makes a
speech in which he declares that the Carnival was condemned to
death because he had done them harm, by wearing out their shoes
and making them tired and sleepy. At the "Burial of Carnival" in
Lechrain, a man dressed as a woman in black clothes is carried on
a litter or bier by four men; he is lamented over by men disguised
as women in black clothes, then thrown down before the village
dung-heap, drenched with water, buried in the dung-heap, and
covered with straw. On the evening of Shrove Tuesday the
Esthonians make a straw figure called metsik or "wood-spirit"; one
year it is dressed with a man's coat and hat, next year with a hood
and a petticoat. This figure is stuck on a long pole, carried across
the boundary of the village with loud cries of joy, and fastened to
the top of a tree in the wood. The ceremony is believed to be a
protection against all kinds of misfortune. 8
Sometimes at these Shrovetide or Lenten ceremonies the
resurrection of the pretended dead person is enacted. Thus, in
some parts of Swabia on Shrove Tuesday Dr. Iron-Beard professes
to bleed a sick man, who thereupon falls as dead to the ground; but
the doctor at last restores him to life by blowing air into him through
a tube. In the Harz Mountains, when Carnival is over, a man is laid
on a baking-trough and carried with dirges to the grave; but in the
grave a glass of brandy is buried instead of the man. A speech is
delivered and then the people return to the village-green or
meeting-place, where they smoke the long clay pipes which are
distributed at funerals. On the morning of Shrove Tuesday in the
following year the brandy is dug up and the festival begins by
every one tasting the spirit which, as the phrase goes, has come to
life again. 9