| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
§ 2. The Burning
of Men and Animals in the Fires |
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IN THE POPULAR customs
connected with the fire-festivals of Europe there are certain
features which appear to point to a former practice of human
sacrifice. We have seen reasons for believing that in Europe living
persons have often acted as representatives of the tree-spirit and
corn-spirit and have suffered death as such. There is no reason,
therefore, why they should not have been burned, if any special
advantages were likely to be attained by putting them to death in
that way. The consideration of human suffering is not one which
enters into the calculations of primitive man. Now, in the
fire-festivals which we are discussing, the pretence of burning
people is sometimes carried so far that it seems reasonable to
regard it as a mitigated survival of an older custom of actually
burning them. Thus in Aachen, as we saw, the man clad in peas-straw
acts so cleverly that the children really believe he is being
burned. At Jumièges in Normandy the man clad all in green, who bore
the title of the Green Wolf, was pursued by his comrades, and when
they caught him they feigned to fling him upon the midsummer
bonfire. Similarly at the Beltane fires in Scotland the pretended
victim was seized, and a show made of throwing him into the flames,
and for some time afterwards people affected to speak of him as
dead. Again, in the Hallowe’en bonfires of Northeastern Scotland we
may perhaps detect a similar pretence in the custom observed by a
lad of lying down as close to the fire as possible and allowing the
other lads to leap over him. The titular king at Aix, who reigned
for a year and danced the first dance round the midsummer bonfire,
may perhaps in days of old have discharged the less agreeable duty
of serving as fuel for that fire which in later times he only
kindled. In the following customs Mannhardt is probably right in
recognising traces of an old custom of burning a leaf-clad
representative of the spirit of vegetation. At Wolfeck, in Austria,
on Midsummer Day, a boy completely clad in green fir branches goes from house to house, accompanied by a
noisy crew, collecting wood for the bonfire. As he gets the wood he
sings:
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| “Forest trees I want, |
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| No sour milk for me, |
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| But beer and wine, |
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| So can the wood-man be jolly and gay.” |
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1 |
| In some parts of Bavaria, also, the boys who go from
house to house collecting fuel for the midsummer bonfire envelop one
of their number from head to foot in green branches of firs, and
lead him by a rope through the whole village. At Moosheim, in
Wurtemberg, the festival of St. John’s Fire usually lasted for
fourteen days, ending on the second Sunday after Midsummer Day. On
this last day the bonfire was left in charge of the children, while
the older people retired to a wood. Here they encased a young fellow
in leaves and twigs, who, thus disguised, went to the fire,
scattered it, and trod it out. All the people present fled at the
sight of him. |
2 |
| But it seems possible to go farther than this. Of
human sacrifices offered on these occasions the most unequivocal
traces, as we have seen, are those which, about a hundred years ago,
still lingered at the Beltane fires in the Highlands of Scotland,
that is, among a Celtic people who, situated in a remote corner of
Europe and almost completely isolated from foreign influence, had
till then conserved their old heathenism better perhaps than any
other people in the West of Europe. It is significant, therefore,
that human sacrifices by fire are known, on unquestionable evidence,
to have been systematically practised by the Celts. The earliest
description of these sacrifices has been bequeathed to us by Julius
Caesar. As conqueror of the hitherto independent Celts of Gaul,
Caesar had ample opportunity of observing the national Celtic
religion and manners, while these were still fresh and crisp from
the native mint and had not yet been fused in the melting-pot of
Roman civilisation. With his own notes Caesar appears to have
incorporated the observations of a Greek explorer, by name
Posidonius, who travelled in Gaul about fifty years before Caesar
carried the Roman arms to the English Channel. The Greek geographer
Strabo and the historian Diodorus seem also to have derived their
descriptions of the Celtic sacrifices from the work of Posidonius,
but independently of each other, and of Caesar, for each of the
three derivative accounts contain some details which are not to be
found in either of the others. By combining them, therefore, we can
restore the original account of Posidonius with some probability,
and thus obtain a picture of the sacrifices offered by the Celts of
Gaul at the close of the second century before our era. The
following seem to have been the main outlines of the custom.
Condemned criminals were reserved by the Celts in order to be
sacrificed to the gods at a great festival which took place once in
every five years. The more there were of such victims, the greater
was believed to be the fertility of the land. If there were not
enough criminals to furnish victims, captives taken in war were
immolated to supply the deficiency. When the time came the victims
were sacrificed by the Druids or priests.
Some they shot down with arrows, some they impaled, and some they
burned alive in the following manner. Colossal images of wicker-work
or of wood and grass were constructed; these were filled with live
men, cattle, and animals of other kinds; fire was then applied to
the images, and they were burned with their living contents. |
3 |
| Such were the great festivals held once every five
years. But besides these quinquennial festivals, celebrated on so
grand a scale, and with, apparently, so large an expenditure of
human life, it seems reasonable to suppose that festivals of the
same sort, only on a lesser scale, were held annually, and that from
these annual festivals are lineally descended some at least of the
fire-festivals which, with their traces of human sacrifices, are
still celebrated year by year in many parts of Europe. The gigantic
images constructed of osiers or covered with grass in which the
Druids enclosed their victims remind us of the leafy framework in
which the human representative of the tree-spirit is still so often
encased. Hence, seeing that the fertility of the land was apparently
supposed to depend upon the due performance of these sacrifices,
Mannhardt interpreted the Celtic victims, cased in osiers and grass,
as representatives of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation. |
4 |
| These wicker giants of the Druids seem to have had
till lately, if not down to the present time, their representatives
at the spring and midsummer festivals of modern Europe. At Douay,
down at least to the early part of the nineteenth century, a
procession took place annually on the Sunday nearest to the seventh
of July. The great feature of the procession was a colossal figure,
some twenty or thirty feet high, made of osiers, and called “the
giant,” which was moved through the streets by means of rollers and
ropes worked by men who were enclosed within the effigy. The figure
was armed as a knight with lance and sword, helmet and shield.
Behind him marched his wife and his three children, all constructed
of osiers on the same principle, but on a smaller scale. At Dunkirk
the procession of the giants took place on Midsummer Day, the
twenty-fourth of June. The festival, which was known as the Follies
of Dunkirk, attracted multitudes of spectators. The giant was a huge
figure of wicker-work, occasionally as much as forty-five feet high,
dressed in a long blue robe with gold stripes, which reached to his
feet, concealing the dozen or more men who made it dance and bob its
head to the spectators. This colossal effigy went by the name of
Papa Reuss, and carried in its pocket a bouncing infant of
Brobdingnagian proportions. The rear was brought up by the daughter
of the giant, constructed, like her sire, of wicker-work, and
little, if at all, inferior to him in size. Most towns and even
villages of Brabant and Flanders have, or used to have, similar
wicker giants which were annually led about to the delight of the
populace, who loved these grotesque figures, spoke of them with
patriotic enthusiasm, and never wearied of gazing at them. At
Antwerp the giant was so big that no gate in the city was large
enough to let him go through; hence he could not visit his brother giants in neighbouring towns, as
the other Belgian giants used to do on solemn occasions. |
5 |
| In England artificial giants seem to have been a
standing feature of the midsummer festival. A writer of the
sixteenth century speaks of “Midsommer pageants in London, where to
make the people wonder, are set forth great and uglie gyants
marching as if they were alive, and armed at all points, but within
they are stuffed full of browne paper and tow, which the shrewd
boyes, underpeering, do guilefully discover, and turne to a greate
derision.” At Chester the annual pageant on Midsummer Eve included
the effigies of four giants, with animals, hobby-horses, and other
figures. At Coventry it appears that the giant’s wife figured beside
the giant. At Burford, in Oxfordshire, Midsummer Eve used to be
celebrated with great jollity by the carrying of a giant and a
dragon up and down the town. The last survivor of these
perambulating English giants lingered at Salisbury, where an
antiquary found him mouldering to decay in the neglected hall of the
Tailors’ Company about the year 1844. His bodily framework was a
lath and hoop, like the one which used to be worn by
Jack-in-the-Green on May Day. |
6 |
| In these cases the giants merely figured in the
processions. But sometimes they were burned in the summer bonfires.
Thus the people of the Rue aux Ours in Paris used annually to make a
great wicker-work figure, dressed as a soldier, which they
promenaded up and down the streets for several days, and solemnly
burned on the third of July, the crowd of spectators singing
Salve Regina. A personage who bore the title of king presided
over the ceremony with a lighted torch in his hand. The burning
fragments of the image were scattered among the people, who eagerly
scrambled for them. The custom was abolished in 1743. In Brie, Isle
de France, a wicker-work giant, eighteen feet high, was annually
burned on Midsummer Eve. |
7 |
| Again, the Druidical custom of burning live animals,
enclosed in wicker-work, has its counterpart at the spring and
midsummer festivals. At Luchon in the Pyrenees on Midsummer Eve “a
hollow column, composed of strong wicker-work, is raised to the
height of about sixty feet in the centre of the principal suburb,
and interlaced with green foliage up to the very top; while the most
beautiful flowers and shrubs procurable are artistically arranged in
groups below, so as to form a sort of background to the scene. The
column is then filled with combustible materials, ready for
ignition. At an appointed hour—about 8 P.M.—a
grand procession, composed of the clergy, followed by young men and
maidens in holiday attire, pour forth from the town chanting hymns,
and take up their position around the column. Meanwhile, bonfires
are lit, with beautiful effect, in the surrounding hills. As many
living serpents as could be collected are now thrown into the
column, which is set on fire at the base by means of torches, armed
with which about fifty boys and men dance around with frantic
gestures. The serpents, to avoid the flames, wriggle their way to
the top, whence they are seen lashing out laterally until finally
obliged to drop, their struggles for life
giving rise to enthusiastic delight among the surrounding
spectators. This is a favourite annual ceremony for the inhabitants
of Luchon and its neighbourhood, and local tradition assigns it to a
heathen origin.” In the midsummer fires formerly kindled on the
Place de Grève at Paris it was the custom to burn a basket, barrel,
or sack full of live cats, which was hung from a tall mast in the
midst of the bonfire; sometimes a fox was burned. The people
collected the embers and ashes of the fire and took them home,
believing that they brought good luck. The French kings often
witnessed these spectacles and even lit the bonfire with their own
hands. In 1648 Louis the Fourteenth, crowned with a wreath of roses
and carrying a bunch of roses in his hand, kindled the fire, danced
at it and partook of the banquet afterwards in the town hall. But
this was the last occasion when a monarch presided at the midsummer
bonfire in Paris. At Metz midsummer fires were lighted with great
pomp on the esplanade, and a dozen cats, enclosed in wicker cages,
were burned alive in them, to the amusement of the people. Similarly
at Gap, in the department of the High Alps, cats used to be roasted
over the midsummer bonfire. In Russia a white cock was sometimes
burned in the midsummer bonfire; in Meissen or Thuringia a horse’s
head used to be thrown into it. Sometimes animals are burned in the
spring bonfires. In the Vosges cats were burned on Shrove Tuesday;
in Alsace they were thrown into the Easter bonfire. In the
department of the Ardennes cats were flung into the bonfires kindled
on the first Sunday in Lent; sometimes, by a refinement of cruelty,
they were hung over the fire from the end of a pole and roasted
alive. “The cat, which represented the devil, could never suffer
enough.” While the creatures were perishing in the flames, the
shepherds guarded their flocks and forced them to leap over the
fire, esteeming this an infallible means of preserving them from
disease and witchcraft. We have seen that squirrels were sometimes
burned in the Easter fire. |
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| Thus it appears that the sacrificial rites of the
Celts of ancient Gaul can be traced in the popular festivals of
modern Europe. Naturally it is in France, or rather in the wider
area comprised within the limits of ancient Gaul, that these rites
have left the clearest traces in the customs of burning giants of
wicker-work and animals enclosed in wicker-work or baskets. These
customs, it will have been remarked, are generally observed at or
about midsummer. From this we may infer that the original rites of
which these are the degenerate successors were solemnised at
midsummer. This inference harmonises with the conclusion suggested
by a general survey of European folk-custom, that the midsummer
festival must on the whole have been the most widely diffused and
the most solemn of all the yearly festivals celebrated by the
primitive Aryans in Europe. At the same time we must bear in mind
that among the British Celts the chief fire-festivals of the year
appear certainly to have been those of Beltane (May Day) and
Hallowe’en (the last day of October); and this suggests a doubt
whether the Celts of Gaul also may not have celebrated their
principal rites of fire, including their
burnt sacrifices of men and animals, at the beginning of May or the
beginning of November rather than at Midsummer. |
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| We have still to ask, What is the meaning of such
sacrifices? Why were men and animals burnt to death at these
festivals? If we are right in interpreting the modern European
fire-festivals as attempts to break the power of witchcraft by
burning or banning the witches and warlocks, it seems to follow that
we must explain the human sacrifices of the Celts in the same
manner; that is, we must suppose that the men whom the Druids burnt
in wicker-work images were condemned to death on the ground that
they were witches or wizards, and that the mode of execution by fire
was chosen because burning alive is deemed the surest mode of
getting rid of these noxious and dangerous beings. The same
explanation would apply to the cattle and wild animals of many kinds
which the Celts burned along with the men. They, too, we may
conjecture, were supposed to be either under the spell of witchcraft
or actually to be the witches and wizards, who had transformed
themselves into animals for the purpose of prosecuting their
infernal plots against the welfare of their fellow-creatures. This
conjecture is confirmed by the observation that the victims most
commonly burned in modern bonfires have been cats, and that cats are
precisely the animals into which, with the possible exception of
hares, witches were most usually supposed to transform themselves.
Again, we have seen that serpents and foxes used sometimes to be
burnt in the midsummer fires; and Welsh and German witches are
reported to have assumed the form both of foxes and serpents. In
short, when we remember the great variety of animals whose forms
witches can assume at pleasure, it seems easy on this hypothesis to
account for the variety of living creatures that have been burnt at
festivals both in ancient Gaul and modern Europe; all these victims,
we may surmise, were doomed to the flames, not because they were
animals, but because they were believed to be witches who had taken
the shape of animals for their nefarious purposes. One advantage of
explaining the ancient Celtic sacrifices in this way is that it
introduces, as it were, a harmony and consistency into the treatment
which Europe has meted out to witches from the earliest times down
to about two centuries ago, when the growing influence of
rationalism discredited the belief in witchcraft and put a stop to
the custom of burning witches. Be that as it may, we can now perhaps
understand why the Druids believed that the more persons they
sentenced to death, the greater would be the fertility of the land.
To a modern reader the connexion at first sight may not be obvious
between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of the
earth. But a little reflection may satisfy him that when the
criminals who perish at the stake or on the gallows are witches,
whose delight it is to blight the crops of the farmer or to lay them
low under storms of hail, the execution of these wretches is really
calculated to ensure an abundant harvest by removing one of the principal causes which paralyse the efforts
and blast the hopes of the husbandman. |
10 |
| The Druidical sacrifices which we are considering
were explained in a different way by W. Mannhardt. He supposed that
the men whom the Druids burned in wicker-work images represented the
spirits of vegetation, and accordingly that the custom of burning
them was a magical ceremony intended to secure the necessary
sunshine for the crops. Similarly, he seems to have inclined to the
view that the animals which used to be burnt in the bonfires
represented the cornspirit, which, as we saw in an earlier part of
this work, is often supposed to assume the shape of an animal. This
theory is no doubt tenable, and the great authority of W. Mannhardt
entitles it to careful consideration. I adopted it in former
editions of this book; but on reconsideration it seems to me on the
whole to be less probable than the theory that the men and animals
burnt in the fires perished in the character of witches. This latter
view is strongly supported by the testimony of the people who
celebrate the fire-festivals, since a popular name for the custom of
kindling the fires is “burning the witches,” effigies of witches are
sometimes consumed in the flames, and the fires, their embers, or
their ashes are supposed to furnish protection against witchcraft.
On the other hand there is little to show that the effigies or the
animals burnt in the fires are regarded by the people as
representatives of the vegetation-spirit, and that the bonfires are
sun-charms. With regard to serpents in particular, which used to be
burnt in the midsummer fire at Luchon, I am not aware of any certain
evidence that in Europe snakes have been regarded as embodiments of
the tree-spirit or corn-spirit, though in other parts of the world
the conception appears to be not unknown. Whereas the popular faith
in the transformation of witches into animals is so general and
deeply rooted, and the fear of these uncanny beings is so strong,
that it seems safer to suppose that the cats and other animals which
were burnt in the fire suffered death as embodiments of witches than
that they perished as representatives of vegetation-spirits. |
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