Before agriculture proper with its especial pantheon was evolved the forces of fertility may have received a considerable amount of adoration and were probably in some measure connected with the spirit of earth. Rites innumerable were carried out to secure the revival of vegetation in spring, most of them having for object the rejuvenation of nature. In some instances trees, and in others human beings, were sacrificed. Such gods, for example, as Adonis, who was worshipped in Western Asia, Osiris, and Attys represented the decay and revival of vegetation. Much of their ritual is still performed by the peasantry of all parts of Europe, and has been collected by the labours of Mannhardt and Sir James Frazer. It may be interesting to give here an account of such an observance which came beneath the writer's own notice.
THE BURRY MAN
At South Queensferry, near Edinburgh, a strange annual ceremony took place, the chief actor in which was known locally as 'the Burry Man,' It was supposed to commemorate the passage of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret to and from Edinburgh and Dunfermline, but this is local surmise and nothing more. It can be traced back at least to the period of the last battle of Falkirk, for an old woman of eighty, whose mother was thirteen years of age at the date of that battle (1746), stated that the observance had been unaltered from that time till her own old age. It took place on the day preceding the annual fair, usually about the second week in August, and was long upheld by the boys of Queensferry. On the day preceding the fair the Burry Man, always a stout fellow or a robust lad, was dressed in loosely fitting flannels, and his face, arms, and legs thickly covered with burrs. He carried two staves at arm's-length, and these, as well as his hands, were beautifully adorned with flowers. Thus accoutred, he was led from door to door by two attendants, who assisted him in upholding his arms by grasping the staves. As each successive door was reached a shout was raised and the inhabitants came out to bestow greetings and money on the Burry Man, the amount collected being equally divided and spent at the fair by the youths who kept up the custom. On some occasions two persons were thus selected and led in procession from door to door—the one being styled the 'King' and the other the 'Queen,' it is thought in allusion to the passage of the royal couple through the borough. It used to be a popular belief that when this quaint custom was abandoned misfortune would befall the town.
Now what did the Burry Man represent? The custom was certainly a relic of a most ancient festival. The Burry Man of South Queensferry was as elsewhere the representation in human form of a tree- or plant-spirit, for these often are represented in anthropomorphic or man-like shape in folk festival. In Bohemia on the fourth Sunday in Lent the girls of the villages go into a wood, cut down a young tree, fasten to it a puppet dressed in white clothes to look like a woman, and with this figure go from house to house collecting gratuities and singing that they bring summer into the village, summer being represented as the spirit of vegetation, returning or reviving. At Thann in Alsace a girl called the 'Little May Rose,' dressed in white, carries a small may-tree covered with garlands and ribbons, and she and her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing as they go. In Lithuania the lads of the village choose the prettiest girl, swathe her in birch branches, and dress her as the May. In Brie, in the Île de France, a lad is wrapped in leaves and is called 'Father May.' In the Frankenwald mountains, in Northern Bavaria, on the 2nd of May a man is enveloped in straw from head to foot to personify a sheaf, and in this guise he dances round a tree erected before the local tavern, after which he is led in procession through the streets, which are adorned with sprigs of birch. In Thuringia as soon as the trees begin to grow green in spring the children choose one of their playmates, around whom they twine leaves till only his shoes peep out from the greenery. Two of them lead him about so that he may not stumble or fall, and they address him as the 'Little Leaf Man.' In Carinthia on St George's Day a young fellow called 'Green George' is clad from head to foot in green birch branches. In England, too, a good example of these leaf-clad mummers is 'Jack-in-the-Green,' who walks enshrouded in a framework of wicker covered with holly and ivy and surmounted by flowers and ribbons. Many other examples could be given.
The Burry Man, like these, is a representation of the spirit of vegetation, the festival of which has survived in South Queensferry from early times, just as it has elsewhere.
[1] Of course 'departmental' gods may possess many attributes, some of these entirely foreign to their character-in-chief, and drafted upon it by the circumstances of myth, politics, or amalgamation with other forms.
[2] Of course these deities may have an animistic origin; indeed, they certainly do have, so that the idea of sacrifice will not seem novel.
[3] As I have shown elsewhere ([p. 95]), Professor Rendel Harris has brought a good deal of proof in favour of a hypothesis that Apollo was the god of an apple cult; but it was not as such that he was known to the later Greeks, whatever he may have been originally—an instance, if such were needed, that the solar story finds its way into the myths of gods of all types.
[4] The study of these eponymous animal-gods will one day certainly throw a flood of light upon the obscure question of the origin of totemism.