Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/440

 436 Rudwin the Whitsuntide mummers in Germany. The leaf-clad mum- mer in England, Jack-in-the-Green, is a chimney-sweep. 273 In the Carnival folk-plays of Northern Greece 274 and in the St. George mummers' plays of England 275 the antagonist is sometimes represented with a blackened face. The conjectural reason which Chambers 276 gives for the black face as a survival of the primitive custom gf smearing the face with the beneficent ashes of the holy festival-fire is too phantastic to be taken seriously. Ashes, moreover, do not entirely blacken the face. It is perhaps more reasonable to assume in the light of our discussion that the black face was typical of a certain type of demons. As only a part of the maskers at the fertility ceremonies had black faces, we must assume that not all demons of vegetation were black. It is, therefore, necessary to postulate different classes of demons with different functions in the train of the heathen god just as there are different kinds of angels at the court of Jahveh. The 'Sooty Ones,' we may in all likelihood assume, were the phallic demons. The black color may perhaps signify the night, out of which they have emerged, 277 or stamp them as dark and mysterious powers on whom human procreation depended. Reference has already been made to the black figures on an amphora, which represents the epiphany of Phales or Dionysus in a ship. 278 The two actors who perform an obscene panto- mime in the modern Thracian Carnival play, which is a survival of the ancient Dionysiac rites, have blackened faces. 279 The bearer of the phallus among the phallphori, the human successors to the phallic demons in the Dionysia, was, as we learn from Semos' book On Paeans, "smeared with soot." 280 His companions, who, notwithstanding their name, did not have the phallus, were not black-faced. When we turn to Kelto- Germanic customs we observe that blackened faces 273 Cf. Frazer, op. tit., ii. S2sq. 274 Cf. Cornford, op. tit., pp. 64, 153. 278 Cf. Chambers, op. tit., i. 2sqq. 276 Op. tit., i. 199. 277 Cf. Preuss, Neue Jahrbticher, xvii. 179. Supra, p. 407. 279 Cf. Frazer, op. tit., vii. 27. ?8 Quoted after Athenaeus xiv. 621Dsqq. by Cornford, op. tit., p. 43.