Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and
Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the
beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we have
been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern
origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the
Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not
primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a
dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in
their origin the ideas which they embodied were of a more simple and
concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a particular kind
of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general), or even
of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a basis
from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider idea of
a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of
vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it
manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May
for the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be easy and
natural.
Pages:
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898