Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/164

156 Devil-Doubt with his broom comes in to receive the largess of the spectators.

Now, at a first glance, that looks as if it were all made up of reminiscences of the St. George and Dragon pageant and the Crusades. People who would hail that interpretation with satisfaction, conceive all such things as having an individual origin. Some individual composed that pageant of St. George; some other individual composed a play about the Crusades; and the stupid, ignorant people mixed it all up. The other method of interpretation takes a wider view. It proceeds upon a generalization of all the past of human life, which shows collectively a faculty of continuity throughout the generations of men: a continuity which leads to the conception of the individuality of human life as a whole, and causes disbelief in sudden and arbitrary origins. It is a conception strictly in accord with the observed phenomena of nature—the seed, the tender shoot, the sapling, the tree, maturity—the seed to the ground; the process repeated; and with this identity modifications occurring with a slowness which it requires a great effort to realise. Let us look a little deeper into this Easter play, and not hastily accept an explanation because it is obvious and simple. Let us look for continuity, and not accept modification for origin.

The Pace-Egg play was performed at Easter. The Christian Easter was fastened upon the Aryan Spring festival, substituting for the celebration of the regeneration of nature the more spiritual celebration of the immortality of the soul of man, so that the egg which symbolised the one attained a higher significance in the other. But the connection between them is indisputable: there is continuity and modification. Similarly, in the Easter or Pace-Egg play the Aryan root of the matter remained under changed conditions and altered signification, as may be illustrated from the Northern mythology.

The Elder Edda thus refers to the death of Balder, the personification of summer and light: