Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/446

 442 Rudwin their mystic functions in woman's garb. Men also dressed as women in the Dionysiac rites. 315 The witch is a degraded form of the old priestess of fertility, and the Witches' Sabbath, which was not altogether an imaginary affair, but really had a foundation in fact, 316 is but a secret survival of the ancient fertility rites. 317 The Bacchanalia, the Roman festivals of Bacchus (Dionysus) were at first celebrated by women only. A ceremony similar to our May-pole is still celebrated in Ceylon by women only. In Styria and Carinthia it was the custom down to recent times for women and girls to draw a plough through the fields in the spring. 318 The custom of hitching young unmarried women to the plough at Carnival exists down to the present day in some parts of Germany. 319 Women were often yoked to the sacred ship, which was led in procession at the Carnival festival. They often rode in the ship apparently as human representatives of the fertility demonesses. In a record of the Liibeck Carnival procession of 1458 we read that there were sixteen women and eight men in the ship-cart which accidentally turned over. Down to the middle of the eighteenth century a custom prevailed at Rome that at Carnival women rode in waggons which were shaped like ships. 320 We learn from the account of the rigoristic monk Rudolfus 321 that women with hair dishevelled and with a shirt for their only garment danced "in devilish fashion" around the ship wherever it halted on Cf. Frazer, op. cit., iv. 258. 316 Cf. Wall, op. cit., p. 367. 317 Cf. Pearson, op. cit., ii. 83. Satan was but the successor to the ancient phallic gods, whom we can recognize in all the disguises which he has assumed at the secret meetings on the Blocksberg. The vows which the ancients ad- dressed to their gods the medieval men and women addressed to Satan; cf. S. Brown, II, Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races (1916), p. 87. It is, however, probable, that the orgies connected with the sex or fertility festivals of the ancient Scandinavians and Germans were due to Roman influences; cf. Dulare, op. cit., pp. 89, 367. In all likelihood the phallic element was directly introduced into Northern Europe by the Phoenicians, who carried on commerce with the tribes of Scandinavia; cf. ibid., p. 90. The Scandinavians owe their god Thor to the Phoenicians. 318 Cf. Mannhardt, W.u.F.K., i. 553sqq.; Grimm, op. cit., i.263sq.; Rade- macher, (Hastings') EncycL, iii. 228. 319 Cf. Mannhardt, W.u.F.K., i. 556; Floger=Bauer, op. cit., ii. 218s? . 320 Cf. Usener, Religions geschtl. Untersuch. iii. 119sq. 321 Supra, p. 411.