Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/479

Rh The two patriarchs who succeeded did not venture, so we learn, to alter the ecclesiastical garb thus chosen by Zavên. This Catholicos represented a patriotic reaction against the discipline of the Greek Church, which an earlier Catholicos, Nerses, a friend of Basil of Caesarea, had striven to impose on the Armenians. It is odd that priests should equip themselves like soldiers, yet we can only accept the statement; for the writer must have been familiar with the facts. But what of the statement that the head of the church wore at the altar, ermine, sable, wolf and fox skins, and the priests the hides of wild beasts? The latter do not seem to have formed part of the military costume. The fox was a sacred animal in the old Persian religion, and in Vendidad, 6, 44, it is laid down that human corpses must be laid where dog, fox, or wolf cannot get at them, probably to save the latter from pollution.

It would seem then as if the Armenian clergy dressed in these skins in order to invest themselves with the sanctity of the animals from which they were taken. Mr. J. G. Frazer adduces numerous parallel observances. (G. B., 2nd ed., vol. ii., p. 367.)

The same author, Faustus, in his sixth book, ch. x., tells the following anecdote of an Armenian bishop, named John, son of Pharên, who flourished towards the end of the fourth century: "Whenever he came to the Armenian princes, he made himself their buffoon; and as if in sport practised himself in avarice, for he was parched with thirst for gain. But his buffoonery took this shape: he would fall down on feet and hands, and crawl about before the princes, and bellow with the voice of a camel as he thus conducted himself like a camel. And then amid his bellowings he interjected these words, also uttered in a bellow, 'I am a camel, and I bear the king's sins. Lay upon me the sins of the king, let me bear them.' Then the princes would write and seal grants of villages and farms, and lay them on the backbone of John, instead of their sins. And so he acquired villages and farms and treasures from the princes of Armenia, by becoming a camel, and, so far as words went, bearing their sins." Faustus writes as if what he describes were mere buffoonery; yet