The measure of surviving heathenism under Christianity must have varied considerably from district to district. Much would depend on the natural temper of the converts, on the tact of the clergy and on the influence they were able to secure. Roughly speaking, the old worships left their trace upon the new society in two ways. Certain central practices, the deliberate invocation of the discarded gods, the deliberate acknowledgement of their divinity by sacrifice, were bound to be altogether proscribed[349]. And these, if they did not precisely vanish, at least went underground, coming to light only as shameful secrets of the confessional[350] or the witch-trial[351], or when the dominant faith received a rude shock in times of especial distress, famine or pestilence[352]. Others again were absorbed into the scheme of Christianity itself. Many of the protective functions, for instance, of the old pantheon were taken over bodily by the Virgin Mary, by St. John, St. Michael, St. Martin, St. Nicholas, and other personages of the new dispensation[353]. And in particular, as we have seen shadowed forth in Pope Gregory’s policy, the festal customs of heathenism, purified so far as might be, received a generous amount of toleration. The chief thing required was that the outward and visible signs of the connexion with the hostile religion should be abandoned. Nor was this such a difficult matter. Cult, the sum of what man feels it obligatory upon him to do in virtue of his relation to the unseen powers, is notoriously a more enduring thing than belief, the speculative, or mythology, the imaginative statement of those relations. And it was of the customs themselves that the people were tenacious, not of the meaning, so far as there was still a meaning, attached to them, or of the names which their priests had been wont to invoke. Leave them but their familiar revels, and the ritual so indissolubly bound up with their hopes of fertility for their flocks and crops, they would not stick upon the explicit consciousness that they drank or danced in the might of Eostre or of Freyr. And in time, as the Christian interpretation of life became an everyday thing, it passed out of sight that the customs had been ritual at all. At the most a general sense of their ‘lucky’ influence survived. But to stop doing them; that was not likely to suggest itself to the rustic mind. And so the church and the open space around the church continued to be, what the temple and the temple precinct had been, the centre, both secular and religious, of the village life. From the Christian point of view, the arrangement had its obvious advantages. It had also this disadvantage, that so far as obnoxious elements still clung to the festivals, so far as the darker practices of heathenism still lingered, it was precisely the most sacred spot that they defiled. Were incantations and spells still muttered secretly for the good will of the deposed divinities? it was the churchyard that was sure to be selected as the nocturnal scene of the unhallowed ceremony. Were the clergy unable to cleanse the yearly wake of wanton dance and song? it was the church itself, by Gregory’s own decree, that became the focus of the riot.
The partial survival of the village ceremonies under Christianity will appear less surprising when it is borne in mind that the heathenism which Christianity combated was itself only the final term of a long process of evolution. The worshippers of the Keltic or Teutonic deities already practised a traditional ritual, probably without any very clear conception of the rationale on which some at least of the acts which they performed were based. These acts had their origin far back in the history of the religious consciousness; and it must not be supposed, because modern scholarship, with its comparative methods, is able to some extent to reconstruct the mental conditions out of which they arose, that these conditions were still wholly operative in the sixth, any more than in the thirteenth or the twentieth century. Side by side with customs which had still their definite and intelligible significance, religious conservatism had certainly preserved others of a very primitive type, some of which survived as mere fossils, while others had undergone that transformation of intention, that pouring of new wine into old bottles, which is one of the most familiar features in the history of institutions. The heathenism of western Europe must be regarded, therefore, as a group of religious practices originating in very different strata of civilization, and only fused together in the continuity of tradition. Its permanence lay in the law of association through which a piece of ritual originally devised by the folk to secure their practical well-being remained, even after the initial meaning grew obscure, irrevocably bound up with their expectations of that well-being. Its interest to the student is that of a development, rather than that of a system. Only the briefest outline of the direction taken by this development can be here indicated. But it must first be pointed out that, whether from a common derivation, or through a similar intellectual structure reacting upon similar conditions of life, it seems, at least up to the point of emergence of the fully formed village cult, to have proceeded on uniform lines, not only amongst the Teutonic and Keltic tribes who inhabited western and northern Europe and these islands, but also amongst all the Aryan-speaking peoples. In particular, although the Teutonic and the Keltic priests and bards elaborated, probably in comparatively late stages of their history, very different god-names and very different mythologies, yet these are but the superstructure of religion; and it is possible to infer, both from the results of folk-lore and from the more scanty documentary evidence, a substantial identity throughout the whole Kelto-Teutonic group, of the underlying institutions of ritual and of the fundamental theological conceptions[354]. I am aware that it is no longer permissible to sum up all the facts of European civilization in an Aryan formula. Ethnology has satisfactorily established the existence on the continent of at least two important racial strains besides that of the blonde invader from Latham-land[355]. But I do not think that any of the attempts hitherto made to distinguish Aryan from pre-Aryan elements in folk-lore have met with any measure of success[356]. Nor is it quite clear that any such distinction need have been implied by the difference of blood. Archaeologists speak of a remarkable uniformity of material culture throughout the whole of Europe during the neolithic period; and there appears to be no special reason why this uniformity may not have extended to the comparatively simple notions which man was led to form of the not-man by his early contacts with his environment. In any case the social amalgamation of Aryan and pre-Aryan was a process already complete by the Middle Ages; and for the purpose of this investigation it seems justifiable, and in the present state of knowledge even necessary, to treat the village customs as roughly speaking homogeneous throughout the whole of the Kelto-Teutonic area.
An analysis of these customs suggests a mental history somewhat as follows. The first relations of man to the not-man are, it need hardly be said, of a practical rather than a sentimental or a philosophic character. They arise out of an endeavour to procure certain goods which depend, in part at least, upon natural processes beyond man’s own control. The chief of these goods is, of course, food; that is to say, in a primitive state of civilization, success in hunting, whether of berries, mussels and ‘witchetty grubs,’ or of more elusive and difficult game; and later, when hunting ceases to be the mainstay of existence, the continued fertility of the flocks and herds, which form the support of a pastoral race, and of the cornfields and orchards which in their turn come to supplement these, on the appearance of agriculture. Food once supplied, the little tale of primitive man’s limited conception of the desirable is soon completed. Fire and a roof-tree are his already. But he asks for physical health, for success in love and in the begetting of offspring, and for the power to anticipate by divination that future about which he is always so childishly curious. In the pursuit, then, of these simple goods man endeavours to control nature. But his earliest essays in this direction are, as Dr. Frazer has recently pointed out, not properly to be called religion[357]. The magical charms by which he attempts to make the sun burn, and the waters fall, and the wind blow as it pleases him, certainly do not imply that recognition of a quasi-human personality outside himself, which any religious definition may be supposed to require as a minimum. They are rather to be regarded as applications of primitive science, for they depend upon a vague general notion of the relations of cause and effect. To assume that you can influence a thing through what is similar to it, or through what has been in contact with it, which, according to Dr. Frazer, are the postulates of magic in its mimetic and its sympathetic form respectively, may be bad science, but at least it is science of a sort, and not religion.
The magical charms play a large part in the village ritual, and will be illustrated in the following chapter. Presently, however, the scientific spirit is modified by that tendency of animism through which man comes to look upon the external world not as mere more or less resisting matter to be moved hither or thither, but rather as a debateable land peopled with spirits in some sense alive. These spirits are the active forces dimly discerned by human imagination as at work behind the shifting and often mysterious natural phenomena—forces of the moving winds and waters, of the skies now clear, now overcast, of the animal races of hill and plain, of the growth waxing and waning year by year in field and woodland. The control of nature now means the control of these powers, and to this object the charms are directed. In particular, I think, at this stage of his development, man conceives a spirit of that food which still remains in the very forefront of his aspirations, of his actual food-plant, or of the animal species which he habitually hunts[358]. Of this spirit he initiates a cult, which rests upon the old magical principle of the mastering efficacy of direct contact. He binds the spirit literally to him by wearing it as a garment, or absorbs it into himself in a solemn meal, hoping by either process to acquire an influence or power over it. Naturally, at this stage, the spirit becomes to the eye of his imagination phytomorphic or theriomorphic in aspect. He may conceive it as especially incarnate in a single sacred plant or animal. But the most critical moment in the history of animism is that at which the elemental spirits come to be looked upon as anthropomorphic, made in the likeness of man himself. This is perhaps due to the identification of them with those other quasi-human spirits, of whose existence man has by an independent line of thought also become aware. These are the ghostly spirits of departed kinsmen, still in some shadowy way inhabiting or revisiting the house-place. The change does not merely mean that the visible phytomorphic and theriomorphic embodiments of mental forces sink into subordination; the plants and animals becoming no more than symbols and appurtenances of the anthropomorphic spirit, or temporary forms with which from time to time he invests himself. A transformation of the whole character of the cult is involved, for man must now approach the spirits, not merely by charms, although conservatism preserves these as an element in ritual, but with modifications of the modes in which he approaches his fellow man. He must beg their favour with submissive speech or buy it with bribes. And here, with prayer and oblation, religion in the stricter sense makes its appearance.
The next step of man is from the crowd of animistic spirits to isolate the god. The notion of a god is much the old notion of an anthropomorphic elemental spirit, widened, exalted, and further removed from sense. Instead of a local and limited home, the god has his dwelling in the whole expanse of heaven or in some distant region of space. He transcends and as an object of cult supplants the more bounded and more concrete personifications of natural forces out of which he has been evolved. But he does not annul these: they survive in popular credence as his servants and ministers. It is indeed on the analogy of the position of the human chief amongst his comitatus that, in all probability, the conception of the god is largely arrived at. Comparative philology seems to show that the belief in gods is common to the Aryan-speaking peoples, and that at the root of all the cognate mythologies there lies a single fundamental divinity. This is the Dyaus of the Indians, the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans, the Tiwaz (O.H.G. Zîu, O.N. Týr, A.-S. Tîw) of the Teutons. He is an embodiment of the great clear sunlit heavens, the dispenser of light to the huntsman, and of warmth and moisture to the crops. Side by side with the conception of the heaven-god comes that of his female counterpart, who is also, though less clearly, indicated in all the mythologies. In her earliest aspect she is the lady of the woods and of the blossoming fruitful earth. This primary dualism is an extremely important factor in the explanation of early religion. The all-father, the heaven, and the mother-goddess, the earth, are distinct personalities from the beginning. It does not appear possible to resolve one into a mere doublet or derivative of the other. Certainly the marriage of earth and heaven in the showers that fertilize the crops is one of the oldest and most natural of myths. But it is generally admitted that myth is determined by and does not determine the forms of cult. The heaven-god and the earth-goddess must have already had their separate existence before the priests could hymn their marriage. An explanation of the dualism is probably to be traced in the merging of two cults originally distinct. These will have been sex-cults. Tillage is, of course, little esteemed by primitive man. It was so with the Germans, even up to the point at which they first came into contact with the Romans[359]. Yet all the Aryan languages show some acquaintance with the use of grains[360]. The analogy with existing savages suggests that European agriculture in its early stages was an affair of the women. While the men hunted or afterwards tended their droves of cattle and horses, the women grubbed for roots, and presently learnt to scratch the surface of the ground, to scatter the seed, and painfully to garner and grind the scanty produce[361]. As the avocations of the sexes were distinct, so would their magic or their religion be. Each would develop rites of its own of a type strictly determined by its practical ambitions, and each would stand apart from the rites of the other. The interest of the men would centre in the boar or stag, that of the women in the fruit-tree or the wheat-sheaf. To the former the stone altar on the open hill-top would be holy; to the latter the dim recesses of the impenetrable grove. Presently when the god concept appeared, the men’s divinity would be a personification of the illimitable and mysterious heavens beneath which they hunted and herded, from which the pools were filled with water, and at times the pestilence was darted in the sun rays; the women’s of the wooded and deep-bosomed earth out of which their wealth sprang. This would as naturally take a female as that a male form. Agriculture, however, was not for ever left solely to the women. In time pasturage and tillage came to be carried on as two branches of a single pursuit, and the independent sex-cults which had sprung out of them coalesced in the common village worship of later days. Certain features of the primitive differentiation can still be obscurely distinguished. Here and there one or the other sex is barred from particular ceremonies, or a male priest must perform his mystic functions in woman’s garb. The heaven-god perhaps remains the especial protector of the cattle, and the earth-goddess of the corn. But generally speaking they have all the interests of the farm in a joint tutelage. The stone altar is set up in the sacred grove; the mystic tree is planted on the hill-top[362]. Theriomorphic and phytomorphic symbols shadow forth a single godhead[363]. The earth-mother becomes a divinity of light. The heaven-father takes up his abode in the spreading oak.
The historic religions of heathenism have not preserved either the primitive dualistic monotheism, if the phrase may be permitted, or the simplicity of divine functions here sketched. With the advance of civilization the objects of worship must necessarily take upon them new responsibilities. If a tribe has its home by the sea, sooner or later it trusts frail barks to the waters, and to its gods is committed the charge of sea-faring. When handicrafts are invented, these also become their care. When the pressure of tribe upon tribe leads to war, they champion the host in battle. Moral ideas emerge and attach themselves to their service: and ultimately they become identified with the rulers of the dead, and reign in the shadowy world beyond the tomb. Another set of processes combine to produce what is known as polytheism. The constant application of fixed epithets to the godhead tends in the long run to break up its unity. Special aspects of it begin to take on an independent existence. Thus amongst the Teutonic peoples Tiwaz-Thunaraz, the thunderous sky, gives rise to Thunar or Thor, and Tiwaz-Frawiaz, the bounteous sky, to Freyr. And so the ancient heaven-god is replaced by distinct gods of rain and sunshine, who, with the mother-goddess, form that triad of divinities so prominent in several European cults[364]. Again as tribes come into contact with each other, there is a borrowing of religious conceptions, and the tribal deities are duplicated by others who are really the same in origin, but have different names. The mythological speculations of priests and bards cause further elaboration. The friendly national gods are contrasted with the dark hostile deities of foreign enemies. A belief in the culture-hero or semi-divine man, who wrests the gifts of civilization from the older gods, makes its appearance. Certain cults, such as that of Druidism, become the starting-point for even more philosophic conceptions. The personal predilection of an important worshipper or group of worshippers for this or that deity extends his vogue. The great event in the later history of Teutonic heathenism is the overshadowing of earlier cults by that of Odin or Wodan, who seems to have been originally a ruler of the dead, or perhaps a culture-hero, and not an elemental god at all[365]. The multiplicity of forms under which essentially the same divinity presents itself in history and in popular belief may be illustrated by the mother-goddess of the Teutons. As Freyja she is the female counterpart of Freyr; as Nerthus of Freyr’s northern doublet, Njordr. When Wodan largely absorbs the elemental functions, she becomes his wife, as Frîja or Frigg. Through her association with the heaven-gods, she is herself a heaven-as well as an earth-goddess[366], the Eostre of Bede[367], as well as the Erce of the Anglo-Saxon ploughing charm[368]. She is probably the Tanfana of Tacitus and the Nehellenia of the Romano-Germanic votive stones. If so, she must have become a goddess of mariners, for Nehellenia seems to be the Isis of the interpretatio Romana. As earth-goddess she comes naturally into relation with the dead, and like Odin is a leader of the rout of souls. In German peasant-lore she survives under various names, of which Perchta is the most important; in witch-lore, as Diana, and by a curious mediaeval identification, as Herodias[369]. And her more primitive functions are largely inherited by the Virgin, by St. Walpurg and by countless local saints.
Most of the imaginative and mythological superstructure so briefly sketched in the last paragraph must be considered as subsequent in order of development to the typical village cult. Both before and in more fragmentary shape after the death of the old Keltic and Teutonic gods, that continued to be in great measure an amalgam of traditional rites of forgotten magical or pre-religious import. So far as the consciousness of the mediaeval or modern peasant directed it to unseen powers at all, which was but little, it was rather to some of these more local and bounded spirits who remained in the train of the gods, than to the gods themselves. For the purposes of the present discussion, it is sufficient to think of it quite generally as a cult of the spirits of fertilization, without attaching a very precise connotation to that term. Unlike the domestic cult of the ancestral ghosts, conducted for each household by the house-father at the hearth, it was communal in character. Whatever the tenure of land may have been, there seems no doubt that up to a late period ‘co-aration,’ or co-operative ploughing in open fields, remained the normal method of tillage, while the cattle of the community roamed in charge of a public herd over unenclosed pastures and forest lands[370]. The farm, as a self-sufficing agricultural unit, is a comparatively recent institution, the development of which has done much to render the village festivals obsolete. Originally the critical moments of the agricultural year were the same for the whole village, and the observances which they entailed were shared in by all.
The observances in question, or rather broken fragments of them, have now attached themselves to a number of different outstanding dates in the Christian calendar, and the reconstruction of the original year, with its seasonal feasts, is a matter of some difficulty[371]. The earliest year that can be traced amongst the Aryan-speaking peoples was a bipartite one, made up of only two seasons, winter and summer. For some reason that eludes research, winter preceded summer, just as night, in the primitive reckoning, preceded day. The divisions seem to have been determined by the conditions of a pastoral existence passed in the regularly recurring seasons of central Europe. Winter began when snow blocked the pastures and the cattle had to be brought home to the stall: summer when the grass grew green again and there was once more fodder in the open. Approximately these dates would correspond to mid-November and mid-March[372]. Actually, in the absence of a calendar, they would vary a little from year to year and would perhaps depend on some significant annual event, such as the first snowstorm in the one case[373], in the other the appearance of the first violet, butterfly or cockchafer, or of one of those migratory birds which still in popular belief bring good fortune and the summer, the swallow, cuckoo or stork[374]. Both dates would give occasion for religious ceremonies, together with the natural accompaniment of feasting and revel. More especially would this be the case at mid-November, when a great slaughtering of cattle was rendered economically necessary by the difficulty of stall-feeding the whole herd throughout the winter. Presently, however, new conditions established themselves. Agriculture grew in importance, and the crops rather than the cattle became the central interest of the village life. Fresh feasts sprang up side by side with the primitive ones, one at the beginning of ploughing about mid-February, another at the end of harvest, about mid-September. At the same time the increased supply of dry fodder tended to drive the annual slaughtering farther on into the winter. More or less contemporaneously with these processes, the old bipartite year was changed into a tripartite one by the growth of yet another new feast during that dangerous period when the due succession of rain and sun for the crops becomes a matter of the greatest moment to the farmer. Early summer, or spring, was thus set apart from late summer, or summer proper[375]. This development also may be traced to the influence of agriculture, whose interest runs in a curve, while that of herding keeps comparatively a straight course. But as too much sun or too much wet not only spoils the crops but brings a murrain on the cattle, the herdsmen fell into line and took their share in the high summer rites. At first, no doubt, this last feast was a sporadic affair, held for propitiation of the unfavourable fertilization spirits when the elders of the village thought it called for. And to the end resort may have been had to exceptional acts of cult in times of especial distress. But gradually the occasional ceremony became an annual one, held as soon as the corn was thick in the green blade and the critical days were at hand.
So far, there has been no need to assume the existence of a calendar. How long the actual climatic conditions continued to determine the dates of the annual feasts can hardly be said. But when a calendar did make its appearance, the five feasts adapted themselves without much difficulty to it. The earliest calendar that can be inferred in central Europe was one, either of Oriental or possibly of Mediterranean provenance, which divided the year into six tides of threescore days each[376]. The beginnings of these tides almost certainly fell at about the middle of corresponding months of the Roman calendar[377]. The first would thus be marked by the beginning of winter feast in mid-November; two others by the beginning of summer feast and the harvest feast in mid-March and mid-August respectively. A little accommodation of the seasonal feasts of the farm would be required to adapt them to the remaining three. And here begins a process of dislocation of the original dates of customs, now becoming traditional rather than vital, which was afterwards extended by successive stages to a bewildering degree. By this time, with the greater permanence of agriculture, the system of autumn ploughing had perhaps been invented. The spring ploughing festival was therefore of less importance, and bore to be shifted back to mid-January instead of mid-February. Four of the six tides are now provided with initial feasts. These are mid-November, mid-January, mid-March, and mid-September. There are, however, still mid-May and mid-July, and only the high summer feast to divide between them. I am inclined to believe that a division is precisely what took place, and that the hitherto fluctuating date of the summer feast was determined in some localities to mid-May, in others to mid-July[378].
The European three-score-day-tide calendar is rather an ingenious conjecture than an ascertained fact of history. When the Germano-Keltic peoples came under the influence of Roman civilization, they adopted amongst other things the Roman calendar, first in its primitive form and then in the more scientific one given to it under Julius Caesar. The latter divided the year into four quarters and twelve months, and carried with it a knowledge of the solstices, at which the astronomy neither of Kelts nor of Germans seems to have previously arrived[379]. The feasts again underwent a process of dislocation in order to harmonize them with the new arrangement. The ceremonies of the winter feast were pulled back to November 1 or pushed forward to January 1. The high summer feast was attracted from mid-May and mid-July respectively to the important Roman dates of the Floralia on May 1 and the summer solstice on June 24. Last of all, to complete the confusion, came, on the top of three-score-day-tide calendar and Roman calendar alike, the scheme of Christianity with its host of major and minor ecclesiastical festivals, some of them fixed, others movable. Inevitably these in their turn began to absorb the agricultural customs. The present distribution of the five original feasts, therefore, is somewhat as follows. The winter feast is spread over all the winter half of the year from All Souls day to Twelfth night. A later chapter will illustrate its destiny more in detail. The ploughing feast is to be sought mainly in Plough Monday, in Candlemas and in Shrovetide or Carnival[380]; the beginning of summer feast in Palm Sunday, Easter and St. Mark’s day; the early variety of the high summer feast probably also in Easter, and certainly in May-day, St. George’s day, Ascensiontide with its Rogations, Whitsuntide and Trinity Sunday; the later variety of the same feast in Midsummer day and Lammastide; and the harvest feast in Michaelmas. These are days of more or less general observance. Locally, in strict accordance with the policy of Gregory the Great as expounded to Mellitus, the floating customs have often settled upon conveniently neighbouring dates of wakes, rushbearings, kirmesses and other forms of vigil or dedication festivals[381]; and even, in the utter oblivion of their primitive significance, upon the anniversaries of historical events, such as Royal Oak day on May 29[382], or Gunpowder day. Finally it may be noted, that of the five feasts that of high summer is the one most fully preserved in modern survivals. This is partly because it comes at a convenient time of year for the out-of-door holiday-making which serves as a preservative for the traditional rites; partly also because, while the pastoral element in the feasts of the beginnings of winter and summer soon became comparatively unimportant through the subordination of pasturage to tillage, and the ploughing and harvest feasts tended more and more to become affairs of the individual farm carried out in close connexion with those operations themselves, the summer feast retained its communal character and continued to be celebrated by the whole village for the benefit of everybody’s crops and trees, and everybody’s flocks and herds[383]. It is therefore mainly, although not wholly, upon the summer feast that the analysis of the agricultural ritual to be given in the next chapter will be based.