the King, used to be carried about on Twelfth Day in a box with glass windows surmounted by a wheel, from which hung various coloured ribbons. The men and boys who carried it from house to house sang songs, in one of which they wished "joy, health, love, and peace" to the inmates of the house.1

In the first half of the nineteenth century similar customs were still observed in various parts of the south of France. Thus at Carcassone, every year on the first Sunday of December the young people of the street Saint Jean used to go out of the town armed with sticks, with which they beat the bushes, looking for wrens. The first to strike down one of these birds was proclaimed King. Then they returned to the town in procession, headed by the King, who carried the wren on a pole. On the evening of the last day of the year the King and all who had hunted the wren marched through the streets of the town to the light of torches, with drums beating and fifes playing in front of them. At the door of every house they stopped, and one of them wrote with chalk on the door vive le roi! with the number of the year which was about to begin. On the morning of Twelfth Day the King again marched in procession with great pomp, wearing a crown and a blue mantle and carrying a sceptre. In front of him was borne the wren fastened to the top of a pole, which was adorned with a verdant wreath of olive, of oak, and sometimes of mistletoe grown on an oak. After hearing high mass in the parish church of St. Vincent, surrounded by his officers and guards, the King visited the bishop, the mayor, the magistrates, and the chief inhabitants, collecting money to defray the expenses of the royal banquet which took place in the evening and wound up with a dance. At Entraigues men and boys used to hunt the wren on Christmas Eve. When they caught one alive they presented it to the priest, who, after the midnight mass, set the bird free in the church. At Mirabeau the priest blessed the bird. If the men failed

1 Swainson, op. cit. p. 40 sq.

2 Madame Clément, Histoire des Fêtes civiles et religieuses, etc., de la Belgique Méridionale (Avesnes, 1846), pp. 466-468; De Nore, Coutumes, Mythes et Traditions des provinces de

France, p. 77 sqq.; Rolland, op. cit. ii. 295 sq.; J. W. Wolf, Beiträge zur deutschen Mythologie, ii. 437 sq. The ceremony was abolished at the revolution of 1789, revived after the restoration, and suppressed again after 1830.

to catch a wren and the women succeeded in doing so, the women had the right to mock and insult the men, and to blacken their faces with mud and soot, when they caught them.1 At La Ciotat, near Marseilles, a large body of men armed with swords and pistols used to hunt the wren every year about the end of December. When a wren was caught it was hung on the middle of a pole, which two men carried, as if it were a heavy burden. Thus they paraded round the town; the bird was weighed in a great pair of scales; and then the company sat down to table and made merry.2

The parallelism between this custom of "hunting the wren" and some of those we have considered, especially the Gilyak procession with the bear, and the Indian one with the snake, seems too close to allow us to doubt that they all belong to the same circle of ideas. The worshipful animal is killed with special solemnity once a year; and before or immediately after death, he is promenaded from door to door; that each of his worshippers may receive a portion of the divine virtues that are supposed to emanate from the dead or dying god. Religious processions of this sort must have had a great place in the ritual of European peoples in prehistoric times, if we may judge from the numerous traces of them which have survived in folk-custom. A well-preserved specimen is the following, which survived in the Highlands of Scotland and in St. Kilda down to the latter half of the

1 Rolland, op. cit. ii. 296 sq.

2 C. S. Sonnini, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, translated from the French (London, 1800), p. 11 sq.; Brand's Popular Antiquities, iii. 198. The "hunting of the wren may be compared with a Swedish custom. On the 1st of May children rob the magpies' nest of both eggs and young. These they carry in a basket from house to house in the village and show them to the housewives, while one of the children sings some doggerel lines containing a threat that, if a present is not given, the hens, chickens, and eggs will fall a prey to the magpie. They receive bacon, eggs, milk, etc., upon which they afterwards feast. See L. Lloyd, Peasant Life in Sweden, p. 237 sq. The resemblance of such

customs to the "swallow song" and

crow song" of the ancient Greeks (on which see Athenaeus, viii. pp. 359, 360) is obvious and has been remarked before now. Probably the Greek swallow-singers and crow - singers carried about dead swallows and crows or effigies of them. The "crow song" is referred to in a Greek inscrip: tion found in the south of Russia ( δεκάδας λυκάβας κεκορώνικα). See Compte Rendu of the Imperial Archaological Commission, St. Petersburg, 1877, p. 276 sqq. In modern Greece it is said to be still customary for children on 1st March to go about the streets singing spring songs and carrying

a

wooden swallow, which is kept turning on a cylinder. See Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, ii. 636.

eighteenth century. "On the evening before New Year's Day, it is usual for the cowherd and the young people to meet together, and one of them is covered with a cow's hide. The rest of the company are provided with staves, to the end of which bits of raw hide are tied. The person covered with the hide runs thrice round the dwelling-house, deiseil—i.e. according to the course of the, sun; the rest pursue, beating the hide with their staves, and crying [here follows the Gaelic], Let us raise the noise louder and louder; let us beat the hide.'. They then come to the door of each dwelling-house, and one of them repeats some verses composed for the purpose. When admission is granted, one of them pronounces within the threshold the beannachadthurlair, or verses by which he pretends to draw down a blessing upon the whole family [here follows the Gaelic]; 'May God bless this house and all that belongs to it, cattle, stones, and timber! In plenty of meat, of, bed and body-clothes, and health of men, may it ever abound!' Then each burns in the fire a little bit of hide which is tied to the end of the staff. It is applied to the nose of every person and domestic animal that belongs to the house. This, they imagine, will tend much to secure them from diseases and other misfortunes during the ensuing year. The whole of the ceremony is called colluinn, from the great noise which the hide makes." From another authority, we learn that the hide of which pieces were burned in each house and applied to the inmates was the breast part of a sheep-skin. Formerly, perhaps, pieces of the cow-hide in which the man was clad were detached for this purpose, just as in the Isle of Man a feather of the wren used to be given to each household. Similarly, as we have seen, the human victim whom the Khonds slew as a divinity was taken from house to house, and every one strove to obtain a relic of his sacred person. Such customs are only another form of that communion with

1 John Ramsay, Scotland and Scotswen in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 438 sq.; cp. Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p. 166 sq.; Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, p. 228 sq. (first American edition, 1810). The custom is clearly referred to in the "Penitential of Theodore,'

quoted by Kemble, Saxons in England, i. 525; Elton, Origins of English History, p. 411: "Si quis in Kal. Januar. in cervulo vel vitula vadit, id est in ferarum habitus se communicant, et vestiuntur pellibus pecudum et assumunt capita bestiarum," etc.

2 Chambers, .c.

the deity which is attained most completely by eating the body and drinking the blood of the god.

In the "hunting of the wren," and the procession with the man clad in a cow-skin, there is nothing to show that the customs in question have any relation to agriculture. So far as appears, they may date from a time before the invention of husbandry when animals were revered as divine in themselves, not merely as divine because they embodied the corn-spirit; and the analogy of the Gilyak procession of the bear and the Indian procession of the snake is in favour of assigning the corresponding European customs to this very early date. On the other hand, there are certain European processions of animals, or of men disguised as animals, which may perhaps be purely agricultural in their origin;1 in other words, the animals which figure in them may have been from the first nothing but representatives of the corn-spirit conceived in animal shape. But it is at least equally possible that these processions took their rise before men began to till the ground, and that they only received an agricultural tinge from the environment in which they have so long survived. But the question is an obscure and difficult one, and cannot be here discussed.

1 Such are the Bohemian and Moravian processions at the Carnival when a man called the Shrovetide Bear, swathed from head to foot in peas-straw and sometimes wearing a bear's mask, is led from house to house. He dances with the women of the house, and collects money and food. Then they go to the ale-house, where all the peasants assemble with their wives. For at the Carnival, especially on Shrove Tuesday, it is necessary that every one should dance, if the flax, the corn, and the vegetables are to grow well. The higher the people leap the better will be the crops (see vol. i. p. 36 sq.). Sometimes the women pull out some of the straw in which the Shrovetide Bear is swathed, and put it in the nests of the geese and fowls, believing that this will make them lay well. See

Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Fest-Kalender aus Böhmen, pp. 49-52; Cortet, Essai sur les fêtes religieuses, p. 83; W. Müller, Beiträge zur Volkskunde der Deutschen in Mähren, p. 431. At Altstadt, in Moravia, a he-goat is led in procession once a year through the town, preceded by a band of music, and is then thrown down from the church tower. Its flesh furnishes a common meal. See W. Müller, op. cit. p. 329 sq. Bears and certain other animals were formerly promenaded about both town and country with bits of coloured cloth attached to them. Whoever got one of these bits of cloth or some of the animal's hair was supposed to be thereby protected against sickness and the evil eye. See Thiers, Traité des Superstitions (Paris, 1679), p. 315. On similar customs, see W. Mannhardt, A. W.F. pp. 183-200.

NOTE A

SWINGING AS A MAGICAL RITE

THE Custom of swinging has been practised as a religious or rather magical rite in various parts of the world, but it does not seem possible to explain all the instances of it in the same way. People appear to have resorted to the practice from different motives and with different ideas of the benefit to be derived from it. In the text we have seen that the Letts, and perhaps the Siamese, swing to make the crops grow tall.1 The same may be the intention of the ceremony whenever it is specially observed at harvest festivals. Among the Buginese and Macassars of Celebes, for example, it used to be the custom for young girls to swing one after the other on these occasions.2 At the great Dassera festival of Nepaul, which immediately precedes the cutting of the rice, swings and kites come into fashion among the young people of both sexes. The swings are sometimes hung from boughs of trees, but generally from a cross-beam supported on a framework of tall bamboos. Among the Dyaks of Sarawak a feast is held at the end of harvest, when the soul of the rice is secured to prevent the crops from rotting away. On this occasion a number of old women rock to and fro on a rude swing suspended from the rafters. A traveller in Sarawak has described how he saw many tall swings erected and Dyaks swinging to and fro on them, sometimes ten or twelve men together on one swing, while they chanted in monotonous, dirge-like tones an invocation to the spirits that they would be pleased to grant a plentiful harvest of sago and fruit and a good fishing season."

In the East Indian island of Bengkalis elaborate and costly ceremonies are performed to ensure a good catch of fish. Among the rest an hereditary priestess, who bears the royal title of Djind

1 Above, p. 32 sq.

2 B. F. Matthes, Einige Eigenthumlichkeiten in den Festen und Gewohnheiten der Makassaren und Buginesen (Leyden, 1884), p. 1.

VOL. 11

3 H. A. Oldfield, Sketches from Nipal (London, 1880), ii. 351.

Spenser St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East,2 i. 194 sq.

5 Ch. Brooke, Ten Years in Sarawak, ii. 226 sq.

2 G