Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/447

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 443 its way from Aix-la-Chappelle to Holland. Women also danced in the Brussles Ommeganck around the ship-cart "seminu- dae, alias simplice tantum cl amide circumtande,"&nd the dances lasted, we are told, "usque ad noctis medium* 1 In a Leipzig Mid-Lent (originally Carnival) custom which lasted down to the eighteenth century, the public women played a part which makes them appear as representatives of the vegetation demon- esses. They carried about the streets a puppet fitted with a phallus, which they showed to young married women to make them fruitful. 323 Women appear in this quality in the Mexican summer ceremonies when they dance and indulge in obscene acts with soldiers. 324 As the god of fertility was also the god of war, soldiers as well as harlots were regarded as demons. We know at least of one instance in Germany in which soldiers appear in a mummers' procession, 325 and that is in Pilsen. In Rome there was the mimad as well as the mime, and as a matter of fact she was looked upon as the same as the Greek hetaera or the Roman delicta. They were all demonesses of a low order. The Ger- manic Mother Corn was called die grosse Hure. It follows from the facts adduced that there were female counterparts of the phallic demons, 326 who in their human form evolved into mimads. We may, therefore, well assume that women had at first a share in the Carnival plays. In the medieval performances of which we have record, however, women's parts were played by men for the reason that it was considered and in certain parts of the world still is considered improper for a woman to act a part in public. The elements of vulgarity and obscenity, of nastiness and lasciviousness, which are found in abundance in the Carnival plays must be explained by their phallic origin. Harsh, indeed, 322 Cf., J. W. Wolf, op. cit., xii. 38. 328 Grimm's view (op. cit., ii. 769 n. 1) that it was an effigy of Death is erroneous, as may be seen from parallel customs in the Orient. The women of Egypt carried about at their village festivals, according to Herodotus (Raw- linson's translation, ii. 48; cf. also Cornford, op. cit., p. 48) puppets of a cubit in height, fitted with a phallus of nearly the same length, worked by means of strings. 324 Cf. Preuss, Archivf. Anthr., xxix. 169. 325 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., iv. 210. 326 Cf. Preuss, Archivf. Anthr., xxix. 179$2.