The notion that the ceremony helps
to procure husbands for the girls can be explained by the quickening
and fertilising influence which the spirit of vegetation is believed
to exert upon the life of man as well as of plants.
9. The Magic Spring
THE GENERAL explanation which we have been led to adopt of these and
many similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their origin,
magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in spring.
The means by which they were supposed to effect this end were
imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the true
causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce
the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only
to imitate them, and that immediately by a secret sympathy or mystic
influence the little drama which he acted in forest glade or
mountain dell, on desert plain or wind-swept shore, would be taken
up and repeated by mightier actors on a vaster stage. He fancied
that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth
to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and
burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth
the path for the footsteps of returning spring.
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