Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/374

 344 analysed by Mr. Frazer in his Golden Bough. It is almost certain that the dead man who is revived by the doctor in the ordinary Plough-Monday play of English rural life symbolises the power of vegetation reviving after death (winter), or rather, fills a rôle which in far-past days symbolised that power. In the Haxey-hood the character who ends his career by being smoked plays the part formerly allotted to a series of actors for whom the fiery ordeal must have concluded in grim earnest. As appears from the teaching of comparative mythology, his prototypes during the darkest days of nature-worship represented the incarnation of vegetative energy. They were the earthly substitutes of the deity to whom men owed the corn which they ate, the grass devoured by their cattle, and the trees which yielded them fuel, building-timber, and countless other necessaries of life, the confederate—or perhaps the secondary aspect—of that great sun-god, whose power after waning from the joyous days of midsummer, began to wax again when midwinter was passed. As, however, these representatives of cosmic action were but mundane types of their great archetype, through the development of a natural theory abundantly illustrated by Mr. Frazer, they were sacrificed to the power which they represented while yet full of strength and vitality: it being both unseemly and dangerous that the earthly symbol of divine energy should be permitted to decline in strength and vigour. If the tatterdemalion who is finally smoked represents the spirit of fertility and growth of the past year, the hood itself stands no less certainly for the sun, and the boggans and their chief seemingly occupy the places once held by the high-priest of the sun-god and his assistants; in which case it may be maintained without much exaggeration that ministers of the old pagan worship, having succession from