[49] One form of wedding among the Romans, in which the bride-cake was broken between the pair, in token of their union.—Trans.
[50] “Hither, ye spells of mine, bring Daphnis home from the city!”—Virgil, Eclogue viii.
[51] I am wrong in saying inextinguishable. Fresh philtres were often needed; and the blame of this must lie with the lady, from whom the Witch in her mocking, malignant rage exacted the most humiliating observances.
CHAPTER XI.
THE REBELS’ COMMUNION—SABBATHS—THE BLACK MASS.
We must now speak of the Sabbaths; a word which at different times clearly meant quite different things. Unhappily, we have no detailed accounts of these gatherings earlier than the reign of Henry IV.[52] By that time they were nothing more than a great lewd farce carried on under the cloak of witchcraft. But these very descriptions of a thing so greatly corrupted are marked by certain antique touches that tell of the successive periods and the different forms through which it had passed.
We may set out with this firm idea that, for many centuries, the serf led the life of a wolf or a fox; that he was an animal of the night, moving about, I may say, as little as possible in the daytime, and truly living in the night alone.
Still, up to the year 1000, so long as the people made their own saints and legends, their daily life was not to them uninteresting. Their nightly Sabbaths were only a slight relic of paganism. They held in fear and honour the Moon, so powerful over the good things of earth. Her chief worshippers, the old women, burn small candles to Dianom—the Diana of yore, whose other names were Luna and Hecate. The Lupercal (or wolf-man) is always following the women and children, disguised indeed under the dark face of ghost Hallequin (Harlequin). The Vigil of Venus was kept as a holiday precisely on the first of May. On Midsummer Day they kept the Sabaza by sacrificing the he-goat of Bacchus Sabasius. In all this there was no mockery; nothing but a harmless carnival of serfs.
But about the year 1000 the church is well-nigh shut against the peasant through the difference between his language and hers. By 1100 her services became quite unintelligible. Of the mysteries played at the church-doors, he has retained chiefly the comic side, the ox and the ass, &c. On these he makes Christmas carols, which grow ever more and more burlesque, forming a true Sabbatic literature.