Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/207

Rh Let us turn then to Europe, There, in the period of the Aegean culture, death-masks were buried with the deceased. In ancient Italy one mask was buried with the deceased, whilst another was carefully preserved, and the masks or imagines thus preserved were, as we have seen, worn on the occasion of the funeral of a member of the household by persons who in the funeral procession represented the deceased ancestors whose imagines they wore. The right of using imagines in this way—the jus imaginum—came to be determined and circumscribed by the lavw; but the custom of wearing masks was older than the law which limited it, and the custom was neither restricted to Italy nor confined to the wearing of masks which represented human beings, nor was it practised only on the occasion of funerals.

Here I am going to draw for my facts upon that store-house of learning, Mr. Chambers's Mediaeval Stage.

Throughout the Roman empire, on the kalends of January, at the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, processions of masked figures took place. Similar processions also took place at other times of the year, but it is those which were held on New Year's eve that were specially denounced by the Christian Church because of their proximity to and rivalry with the Church festival of Christmas day. Hence it became the policy of the Church to attempt to treat New Year's eve and day as a fast, and to forbid its being regarded as a festival. In pursuance of this policy the pagan festivities of the kalends of January are denounced, and from the denunciations we are able to constate the existence and the nature of the rites denounced continuously from the second century to the tenth.

These processions, then, as we may note to begin with, were not restricted to Italy, but were found all over the Roman Empire—in Gaul, Spain, Germany, and England, as well as in Constantinople and Asia Minor. They belong