Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/417

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 413 Schembartlauf never was unoccupied. The goddess Perchta very probably was visibly represented in her ship 72, which, as we surmised, formed a part of the analogous Perchtenlauf. The fertility god on his progress through the streets and market-places of the town did not even stop short at the portals of the Church. There is a record in the sixteenth century of an instance of the combination of the Carnival ship-procession with the Church ass-procession on Palm Sunday. Thomas Naogeorgus relates that the image of the fertility god was placed on a wooden ass, which had been mounted on a platform with wheels, and drawn into the church on Palm Sunday in procession, the priests going before. 73 The reforming ecclesiastics violently declaimed against this Carnival custom. They referred to the ship as malignorum spirituum execrabile domicilium (the accursed habitation of evil spirits), and declared that maligni spiritus (evil spirits) travelled in it. 71 Small wonder that the ship-cart in the Nuremberg Schembartlauf was called Hb'lle and that it was burned together with its occupants at the end of the procession. IV. THE MYTHICAL DRAMA The Carnival customs of Europe also contained a sort of mythical drama, which was composed of a number of rites of the kind which Frazer has termed "mimetic magic." 75 This class of charms is based on the principle of similarity, which holds that a thing can be influenced through what is similar to it. It presupposes the belief that "between the imitative rite and the natural event it is intended to cause there is the bond of sympathetic mimesis, consisting in the actual likeness of the act ritually performed to the desired event." 76 As the fluctuations of growth and decay, of reproduction and dissolution were 72 Cf. V. Waschnitius, Perht. Holda und verwandte Gestalten. Ein Beitrag z. d. Religions geschichte. Sitzungsberichte d. Kais. Akad. d. Wiss. in Wien, phil-hist. Klasse. Bd. 174, Abh. 2. (1913), p. 162. 73 Cf. T. Kirchmeyer, Engl. transl. by Barnaby Googe, Reprint of the Popish Kingdome (1570). 74 Cf. Grimm, op. cit., i. 262; Simrock, op. cit., p. 372. 76 Sympathetic magic is the basis of the savage religious drama; cf. also L. Havemeyer, The Drama of Savage Peoples (1916), p. 243. 78 Cf. Cornford, op. cit., p. 19.