Appendix L
 

A comparison of the festivals of Oriental vegetation-divinities with those

of southern and northern Europe.

If we compare the oriental festivals here instanced, both in antiquity and the present time,
with analogous popular ceremonies going on now in the north of Europe, the result is exceedingly
surprising. Although, in the case of many festivals, a clear connection is not yet made out, and possibly
never will be, there are others in which countless very peculiar details of ceremonial in various
places and of various dates are so absolutely identical, that to speak of a psychical unity for mankind,
as Peschel*) would have it, is now out of the question. In face of the proofs which we have already
adduced and are about to adduce, I hold it to be simply impossible that in Egypt, Asia Minor, Cyprus,
Southern and Northern Europe, the. same spring and summer customs, due to a temper of mind
substantially the same, should have originated in these various peoples independently one of the
other.**) It is just these Cyprian popular customs, which subsist to-day, which prove incontestably
that certain modern customs of Northern and Southern Europe took their rise in the ancient East.
We saw how the Cypriot of to-day, especially the orthodox Greek Christian, has preserved, in
tolerable purity, the festivals celebrated in antiquity to the Babylonian Dusi and the Hebraic Tammuz
of the Bible, to the Egyptian Osiris and the Greek Adonis, the Phrygian. Attis and the Homeric
Linos, and that through a tradition that runs unbroken through thousands of years.

We became acquainted in Cyprus with the child Lazarus covered with yellow flowers, and
raised by Christ from the dead by the water of life, as Dusi is raised by Istar in the ancient Babylonish
hymn. At Rauschenberg in Hessen it was customary to wrap a man from head to foot thickly round
in yellow flowers. At Lausitz, the Johannis-King is completely covered with blue cornflowers. At
Buschweiler a lad called the Pfingstklotzel (Whitsun fool or stock) is covered with flowers and
greenery, and led about the town.***)   In Russian Lithuania ''Green George", in the shape of a doll
 

^) "Volkerkunde", p. 22-27.

^*j Cp. Mannhardt, " Baum- und Feldculte," p. 301.

*) Cp. cit. 312, 313.