In some districts it was the last
married man or woman who must kindle the bonfire.
It seems hardly possible to separate from these bonfires, kindled on
the first Sunday in Lent, the fires in which, about the same season,
the effigy called Death is burned as part of the ceremony of
"carrying out Death." We have seen that at Spachendorf, in Austrian
Silesia, on the morning of Rupert's Day (Shrove Tuesday?), a
straw-man, dressed in a fur coat and a fur cap, is laid in a hole
outside the village and there burned, and that while it is blazing
every one seeks to snatch a fragment of it, which he fastens to a
branch of the highest tree in his garden or buries in his field,
believing that this will make the crops to grow better. The ceremony
is known as the "burying of Death." Even when the straw-man is not
designated as Death, the meaning of the observance is probably the
same; for the name Death, as I have tried to show, does not express
the original intention of the ceremony. At Cobern in the Eifel
Mountains the lads make up a straw-man on Shrove Tuesday.
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