Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/208

180 to a stage of culture less developed than that of Christianised Rome—less developed than that of civilised Rome before the Christian era. Further, it was not on the occasion of any funeral that these processions took place, and it is therefore evident that these masked figures were not held to represent the spirits of deceased persons, as the wearers of the imagines at a Roman funeral were supposed to do. We may also note that, though the processions which the Church principally denounced were those which had come to be held on New Year's eve and New Year's day, processions of masked figures were also held at other times of the year; and, if those which had come to be held on the kalends of January were specially denounced, it was because those processions clashed with the great Christian festival, and it was unseemly and undesirable that pagan festivities should be allowed to supervene and to place, as it were, a heathen crown upon it.

In Italy on the kalends of January there were processions of three different kinds; in the rest of the Roman Empire there were but two kinds of procession. The procession peculiar to Italy was one in which the members were masked to represent Roman gods—of whom Saturn, Jupiter, Hercules, Diana, and Vulcan happen to be mentioned in a prohibition ascribed to Severian. Of what place Severian was bishop and what exactly was his date there seems to be some doubt. What is clear, however, from the prohibition of the procession, is that it belongs to the period when Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire; and, consequently, that the procession prohibited was a survival from times when such processions, so far from being prohibited, were part of the religion of the State and were prescribed by authority. The continuance of the rite indicated that faith in the old gods was not yet extinct; and the prohibition of the ceremony showed that the Church was conscious of the danger latent in the survival.