Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/415

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 411 is, furthermore, a variant of the Roman Venus, 57 the Greek Aphrodite, the Phrygian Cybele, the Ishtar-Astarte-Ashtoreth of the ancient Phoenicians, and of Mylitta of the Assyrians and Babylonians. In medieval German witch-lore this goddess is known as Diana. In popular belief she is succeeded by the Virgin Mary, to whom she has also bequeathed her ship. A number of images of the Holy Virgin on ships are found in Belgium. 58 But the Virgin Mary did not find it an easy task to replace the heathen goddess in the hearts of the old Germans. A few centuries of Christianity did not suffice to make them forget their beloved Bona Dea. They continued to worship her down to the twelfth century according to Rudolfus, a monk from the Abbey of St. Trond, in his account of a Carnival festival in the district of Julich, in Lower Germany. 59 We learn from his detailed report that about the year 1133, in a forest near Inda (in Ripuaria), a ship was built, set upon wheels, and drawn by men, who were yoked to it, about the country, first to Aix-la-Chappelle, then to Maestricht, where mast and sail were added, and up the river to Tongres, Looz, and so on, everywhere with crowds of people assembling and escorting it. Wherever it halted, there were joyful shouts, songs of triumph and dancing round the ship kept up till far into the night. The approach of the ship was made known in advance to the towns; the people opened the gates and went out to meet it. J. Grimm rightly identifies this ship travelling about the country, wel- comed by streaming multitudes and honored with festive song and dance, as the car of the goddess whom Tacitus took to be Isis. "How could this pauper rusticus, he asks, "in the wood of Inden have lighted on the thought of building a ship, had there not been floating in his mind recollections of former pro- cessions, perhaps of some of his neighboring districts?" Ship-processions at the beginning of spring were continued in various parts of Germany to the end of the Middle Ages. 60 The custom of drawing a plough, the central instrument of the opening labor, as an emblem of the agricultural spirit, in the 68 Cf. J. W. Wolf, op. cit., xii. 30, 32. 89 Rudolfi Chronicon ablatiae sti. Trudonis lib. XI., quoted at length in Grimm, op. cit., i. 259-62, from which the summary here presented is taken. 60 Cf. Grimm, op. cit., i. 257; W. Golther, Handbuch d. germ. Mythologie (1895), p. 463; Usener, op. cit., p. 115; Chambers, op. cit., i. 121.