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Updated: May 26, 2025
In the following survey of these fire-customs I follow chiefly W. Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus, kap. vi. pp. 497 sqq. The Scapegoat, pp. 316 sqq. For the loan of this work I am indebted to Mrs. Wherry of St. Peter's Terrace, Cambridge. É. Hublard, op. cit. pp. 27 sq. The local name for these bonfires is bures. In Bresse the custom was similar.
This essay on Demeter was written by Mannhardt in the summer of 1877, a year after the letter which is given as evidence that he had 'returned to his old colours. The essay shows him using the philological string of 'variegated hypotheses' as anything but an argument in favour of the philological method.
Similarly the Fauns, though wood-spirits, were believed to foster the growth of the crops. We have already seen how often the corn-spirit is represented in folk-custom as a goat. On the whole, then, as Mannhardt argues, the Pans, Satyrs, and Fauns perhaps belong to a widely diffused class of wood-spirits conceived in goat-form.
'But we do not forget that our whole theory of the development of the rite rests on a hypothesis which the lack of materials prevents us from demonstrating. He would explain Luperci as Lupiherci 'wolf-goats. Over this we need not linger; but how does all this prove Mannhardt to have returned to the method of comparing Greek with Vedic divine names, and arriving thence at some celestial phenomenon as the basis of a terrestrial myth?
But where, all this time, is there a reference by Mannhardt to 'the general principles of comparative philology'? Where does he accept 'the omnipresent Sun and the inevitable Dawn'? Why, he says the reverse; he says in this letter that he is immeasurably removed from accepting them at all as Mr. Max Muller accepts them!
But in all this there is no 'disease of language. These are frank nature-myths, 'aetiological, giving a fabulous reason for facts of nature. Mannhardt on Marchen. But Mannhardt goes farther. Now perhaps nobody will deny that some incidents in Marchen may have been originally suggested by nature-myths.
The letters of Mannhardt, cited in proof of his exact agreement with Mr. Possibly 'philology' is here a slip of the pen, and 'mythology' may be meant. Had Mannhardt quite cashiered 'the corn-spirit, who, perhaps, had previously threatened to 'become everything'? He is still in great vigour, in Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough, and Mr. Frazer is Mannhardt's disciple.
Mannhardt has proved that this branch or tree embodies the tree-spirit conceived as the spirit of vegetation in general, whose vivifying and fructifying influence is thus brought to bear upon the corn in particular.
Philological mythologists begin with the unknown, the name of a god. The methods are each other's opposites, yet the letter in which Mannhardt illustrates this fact is cited as a proof of his return to his old colours. Irritating Conduct of Mannhardt
Sentence of death is passed on the frog by the king; the hangman beheads it and flings the bleeding body among the spectators. Lastly, the king is driven from the hut and pursued by the soldiers. The pinching and beheading of the frog are doubtless, as Mannhardt observes, a rain-charm.
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