Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/460

 426 The Chevaucht'c dc St. Michel.

nected with all our old festivals and merry-makings has always been the one known as " A mon beau Laurier," where the dancers join hands and whirl round, curtsey, and kiss a central object — in the later days either a man or a woman — but perhaps originally either a sacred stone or a primeval altar, or indeed a symbolic deity, waiting (in the person of the victim) to be sacrificed at the conclusion of the dance.

It is worth noting that each of these halting places was consecrated in later days either by a wayside cross or a Christian church, for the earliest missionaries invariably raised the symbols of their worship on spots already conse- crated to earlier divinities. From the fact that our first missionaries seem to have settled at the Vale and St. Sampson's, and there built the earliest of our chapels, it is probable that this end of the island was the centre of the primitive population, and therefore the first %o be culti- vated. That the Chevauchee was an agricultural festival in one of its origins is evident from its route — which was practically all inland — and its traditional colours of red,, white, and black — colours which are those associated with the earth but never with the sea.

The kissing, which was the recognized privilege of the pions — and is the only evidence we have of the participa- tion of women in the original rite — seems to point to a survival of some of the old orgiastic spring festivals which were conducive to the fertility, and therefore to the pros- perity, of the flocks and herds of primitive man.^^ Thus it was a festival of life and not of death, the dolmens, the abodes of the dead, were left unvisited or passed unnoticed ; for it was the month of May, of awakening life, when all northern nations tried to propitiate their deities into 'granting them good crops and fertile herds. From what stratum of symbolic ritual the rolling in of the stone at the door of Les Jenemies was derived it is impossible for me to say.

^•'' The custom at Jerbourg was probably another fertility charm.