Such were the great festivals held once every five years. But
besides these quinquennial festivals, celebrated on so grand a
scale, and with, apparently, so large an expenditure of human life,
it seems reasonable to suppose that festivals of the same sort, only
on a lesser scale, were held annually, and that from these annual
festivals are lineally descended some at least of the fire-festivals
which, with their traces of human sacrifices, are still celebrated
year by year in many parts of Europe. The gigantic images
constructed of osiers or covered with grass in which the Druids
enclosed their victims remind us of the leafy framework in which the
human representative of the tree-spirit is still so often encased.
Hence, seeing that the fertility of the land was apparently supposed
to depend upon the due performance of these sacrifices, Mannhardt
interpreted the Celtic victims, cased in osiers and grass, as
representatives of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation.
These wicker giants of the Druids seem to have had till lately, if
not down to the present time, their representatives at the spring
and midsummer festivals of modern Europe.
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