Hail to thee, Earth, all men’s mother,
Be thou growing in God’s protection,
Filled with food for feeding of men!
Again, one has the extremes of shouts, communal cadenced cries, and songs which are often quite irrelevant; thus in Brandenburg on Easter Monday girls march by long rows, hand in hand, over the young corn of each field, singing Easter songs, while the young men ring the church bells;[[745]] but one learns that Wends of the fifteenth century greeted the early corn as they ran round it in wild procession, and hailed it “with loud shouting.”[[746]]
About the year 1133, and along the lower Rhine, a procession was in vogue which may have been a survival of the worship of that goddess recorded by Tacitus and called Isis because her symbol was a ship; for in the mediæval rite such a ship was placed on wheels and carried about the country, followed by shouting bands and hailed at every halt with song and dance.[[747]] The songs, turpia cantica et religioni Christianae indigna concinentium, were condemned by clericals,[[748]] and the dances of scantily clad women, not unlike the festal dances of savage women in many places at this season of the year, were doubtless not only intrinsically objectionable, but pointed back to the heathen doings from which our Germanic folk were so slowly converted. A glimpse at this older worship is given by Gregory in his often-quoted story of the Langobards who offered a goat’s head to their “devil,” running about in a circle and singing impious songs.[[749]] A survival of some such heathen rite, with ridiculous perversion of Christian legend, is the feast of the ass, the festival of fools, on Christmas or on St. Stephen’s day, when during mass the priest brays thrice and the congregation respond in kind; here and there, as in France, a hymn is sung, with refrain from the throng:[[750]]—
Hez, Sir Ane, hez!—
and ending in what Hampson oddly calls “an imitation of the noisy Bacchanalian cry of Evohe!”—
Hez va! Hez va! Hez-va-he!
Bialz, Sire Asnes, carallez
Belle bouche car chantez,—