The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12). Frazer James George

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      Loaves and flowers thrown into the water on St. John's Day, perhaps as substitutes for human beings.

      At Rotenburg on the Neckar they throw a loaf of bread into the water on St. John's Day; were this offering not made, the river would grow angry and take away a man.72 Clearly, therefore, the loaf is regarded as a substitute which the spirit of the river consents to accept instead of a human victim. Elsewhere the water-sprite is content with flowers. Thus in Bohemia people sometimes cast garlands into water on Midsummer Eve; and if the water-sprite pulls one of them down, it is a sign that the person who threw the garland in will die.73 In the villages of Hesse the girl who first comes to the well early on the morning of Midsummer Day, places on the mouth of the well a gay garland composed of many sorts of flowers which she has culled from the fields and meadows. Sometimes a number of such garlands are twined together to form a crown, with which the well is decked. At Fulda, in addition to the flowery decoration of the wells, the neighbours choose a Lord of the Wells and announce his election by sending him a great nosegay of flowers; his house, too, is decorated with green boughs, and children walk in procession to it. He goes from house to house collecting materials for a feast, of which the neighbours partake on the following Sunday.74 What the other duties of the Lord of the Wells may be, we are not told. We may conjecture that in old days he had to see to it that the spirits of the water received their dues from men and maidens on that important day.

      Midsummer Day deemed unlucky and dangerous.

      The belief that the spirits of the water exact a human life on Midsummer Day may partly explain why that day is regarded by some people as unlucky. At Neuburg, in Baden, people who meet on Midsummer Day bid each other beware.75 Sicilian mothers on that ominous day warn their little sons not to go out of the house, or, if they do go out, not to stray far, not to walk on solitary unfrequented paths, to avoid horses and carriages and persons with firearms, and not to dare to swim; in short they bid them be on their guard at every turn. The Sicilian writer who tells us this adds: “This I know and sadly remember ever since the year 1848, when, not yet seven years old, I beheld in the dusk of the evening on St. John's Day some women of my acquaintance bringing back in their arms my little brother, who had gone to play in a garden near our house, and there had found his death, my poor Francesco! In their simplicity the women who strove to console my inconsolable mother, driven distracted by the dreadful blow, kept repeating that St. John must have his due, that on that day he must be appeased. ‘Who knows,’ said they, ‘how many other mothers are weeping now for other little sons forlorn!’ ”76

      In Europe people used to bathe on Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day, because water was thought to acquire wonderful medicinal virtues at that time.

      Yet curiously enough, though the water-spirits call for human victims on Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day, water in general is supposed at that season to acquire certain wonderful medicinal virtues, so that he who bathes in it then or drinks of it is not only healed of all his infirmities but will be well and hearty throughout the year. Hence in many parts of Europe, from Sweden in the north to Sicily in the south, and from Ireland and Spain in the west to Esthonia in the east it used to be customary for men, women, and children to bathe in crowds in rivers, the sea, or springs on Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day, hoping thus to fortify themselves for the next twelve months. The usual time for taking the bath was the night which intervenes between Midsummer Eve and Midsummer Day;77 but in Belgium the hour was noon on Midsummer Day. It was a curious sight, we are told, to see the banks of a river lined with naked children waiting for the first stroke of noon to plunge into the healing water. The dip was supposed to have a remarkable effect in strengthening the legs. People who were ashamed to bathe in public used to have cans of water brought to their houses from the river at midday, and then performed their ablutions in the privacy of their chambers. Nor did they throw away the precious fluid; on the contrary they bottled it up and kept it as a sort of elixir for use throughout the year. It was thought never to grow foul and to be as blessed as holy water fetched from a church, which we may well believe. Hence it served to guard the house against a thunder-storm; when the clouds were heavy and threatening, all you had to do was to take the palm branches (that is, the twigs of box-wood) which were blessed on Palm Sunday, dip them in the midsummer water, and burn them. That averted the tempest.78 In the Swiss canton of Lucerne a bath on Midsummer Eve is thought to be especially wholesome, though in other parts of Switzerland, as we saw, bathing at that season is accounted dangerous.79

      Similar customs and beliefs as to water at Midsummer in Morocco.

      Nor are such customs and beliefs confined to the Christian peoples of Europe; they are shared also by the Mohammedan peoples of Morocco. There, too, on Midsummer Day all water is thought to be endowed with such marvellous virtue that it not only heals but prevents sickness for the rest of the year; hence men, women, and children bathe in the sea, in rivers, or in their houses at that time for the sake of their health. In Fez and other places on this day people pour or squirt water over each other in the streets or from the house-tops, so that the streets become almost as muddy as after a fall of rain. More than that, in the Andjra they bathe their animals also; horses, mules, donkeys, cattle, sheep, and goats, all must participate in the miraculous benefits of midsummer water.80 The rite forms part of that old heathen celebration of Midsummer which appears to have been common to the peoples on both sides of the Mediterranean;81 and as the aim of bathing in the midsummer water is undoubtedly purification, it is reasonable to assign the same motive for the custom of leaping over the midsummer bonfire. On the other hand some people in Morocco, like some people in Europe, think that water on Midsummer Day is unclean or dangerous. A Berber told Dr. Westermarck that water is haunted on Midsummer Day, and that people therefore avoid bathing in it and keep animals from drinking of it. And among the Beni Ahsen persons who swim in the river on that day are careful, before plunging into the water, to throw burning straw into it as an offering, in order that the spirits may not harm them.82 The parallelism between the rites of water and fire at this season is certainly in favour of interpreting both in the same way;83 and the traces of human sacrifice which we have detected in the rite of water may therefore be allowed to strengthen the inference of a similar sacrifice in the rite of fire.

      Human sacrifices by fire among the ancient Gauls. Men and animals enclosed in great wicker-work images and burnt alive.

But it seems possible to go farther than this. Of human sacrifices offered on these occasions the most unequivocal traces, as we have seen, are those which, about a hundred years ago, still lingered at the Beltane fires in the Highlands of Scotland, that is, among a Celtic people who, situated in a remote corner of Europe and almost completely isolated from foreign influence, had till then conserved their old heathenism better perhaps than any other people in the West of Europe. It is significant, therefore, that human sacrifices by fire are known, on unquestionable evidence, to have been systematically practised by the Celts. The earliest description of these sacrifices has been bequeathed to us by Julius Caesar. As conqueror of the hitherto independent Celts of Gaul, Caesar had ample opportunity of observing the national Celtic religion and manners, while these were still fresh and crisp from the native mint and had not yet been fused in the melting-pot of Roman civilization. With his own notes Caesar appears to have incorporated the observations of a Greek explorer, by name Posidonius, who travelled in Gaul about fifty years before Caesar carried the Roman arms to the English Channel. The Greek geographer Strabo and the historian Diodorus seem also to have derived their descriptions of the Celtic sacrifices from the work of Posidonius, but independently of each other, and of Caesar, СКАЧАТЬ