James Frazer - The Golden Bough - A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)

As the fertility of the land was supposed to depend on these sacrifices, Mannhardt interpreted the victims as representatives of tree-spirits or spirits of vegetation.

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. 86 86 The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings , ii. 80 sqq. 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.

Wicker-work giants at popular festivals in modern Europe. The giant at Douay on July the seventh. The giants at Dunkirk on Midsummer Day.

These wicker giants of the Druids seem to have had till lately their representatives at the spring and midsummer festivals of modern Europe. At Douay, down to the early part of the nineteenth century, a procession took place annually on the Sunday nearest to the seventh of July. The great feature of the procession was a colossal figure, some twenty or thirty feet high, made of osiers, and called “the giant,” which was moved through the streets by means of rollers and ropes worked by men who were enclosed within the effigy. The wooden head of the giant is said to have been carved and painted by Rubens. The figure was armed as a knight with lance and sword, helmet and shield. Behind him marched his wife and his three children, all constructed of osiers on the same principle, but on a smaller scale. 87 87 Madame Clément, Histoire des fêtes civiles et religieuses du département du Nord 2 (Cambrai, 1836), pp. 193-200; A. de Nore, Coutumes, Mythes et Traditions des Provinces de France , (Paris and Lyons, 1846), pp. 323 sq. ; F. W. Fairholt, Gog and Magog, the Giants in Guildhall, their real and legendary History (London, 1859), pp. 78-87; W. Mannhardt, Baumkultus , p. 523, note. It is said that the giantess made her first appearance in 1665, and that the children were not added to the show till the end of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century the procession took place on the third Sunday in June, which must always have been within about a week of Midsummer Day (H. Gaidoz, “Le dieu gaulois du soleil et le symbolisme de la roue,” Revue Archéologique , iii. série iv. 32 sq. ). At Dunkirk the procession of the giants took place on Midsummer Day, the twenty-fourth of June. The festival, which was known as the Follies of Dunkirk, attracted such multitudes of spectators, that the inns and private houses could not lodge them all, and many had to sleep in cellars or in the streets. In 1755 an eye-witness estimated that the number of onlookers was not less than forty thousand, without counting the inhabitants of the town. The streets through which the procession took its way were lined with double ranks of soldiers, and the houses crammed with spectators from top to bottom. High mass was celebrated in the principal church and then the procession got under weigh. First came the guilds or brotherhoods, the members walking two and two with great waxen tapers, lighted, in their hands. They were followed by the friars and the secular priests, and then came the Abbot, magnificently attired, with the Host borne before him by a venerable old man. When these were past, the real “Follies of Dunkirk” began. They consisted of pageants of various sorts wheeled through the streets in cars. These appear to have varied somewhat from year to year; but if we may judge from the processions of 1755 and 1757, both of which have been described by eye-witnesses, a standing show was a car decked with foliage and branches to imitate a wood, and carrying a number of men dressed in leaves or in green scaly skins, who squirted water on the people from pewter syringes. An English spectator has compared these maskers to the Green Men of our own country on May Day. Last of all came the giant and giantess. The giant was a huge figure of wicker-work, occasionally as much as forty-five feet high, dressed in a long blue robe with gold stripes, which reached to his feet, concealing the dozen or more men who made it dance and bob its head to the spectators. This colossal effigy went by the name of Papa Reuss, and carried in its pocket a bouncing infant of Brobdingnagian proportions, who kept bawling “Papa! papa!” in a voice of thunder, only pausing from time to time to devour the victuals which were handed out to him from the windows. The rear was brought up by the daughter of the giant, constructed, like her sire, of wicker-work, and little, if at all, inferior to him in size. She wore a rose-coloured robe, with a gold watch as large as a warming pan at her side: her breast glittered with jewels: her complexion was high, and her eyes and head turned with as easy a grace as the men inside could contrive to impart to their motions. The procession came to an end with the revolution of 1789, and has never been revived. The giant himself indeed, who had won the affections of the townspeople, survived his ancient glory for a little while and made shift to appear in public a few times more at the Carnival and other festal occasions; but his days were numbered, and within fifty years even his memory had seemingly perished. 88 88 The Gentleman's Magazine , xxix. (1759), pp. 263-265; Madame Clément, Histoire des fêtes civiles et religieuses du département du Nord , 2 pp. 169-175; A. de Nore, Coutumes, Mythes et Traditions des Provinces de France , pp. 328-332. Compare John Milner, The History, Civil and Ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester (Winchester, n. d.), i. 8 sq. note 6; John Brand, Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (London, 1882-1883), i. 325 sq. ; James Logan, The Scottish Gael or Celtic Manners , edited by Rev. Alex. Stewart (Inverness, n. d.), ii. 358. According to the writer in The Gentleman's Magazine the name of the procession was the Cor-mass.

Wicker-work giants in Brabant and Flanders.

Most towns and even villages of Brabant and Flanders have, or used to have, similar wicker giants which were annually led about to the delight of the populace, who loved these grotesque figures, spoke of them with patriotic enthusiasm, and never wearied of gazing at them. The name by which the giants went was Reuzes, and a special song called the Reuze song was sung in the Flemish dialect while they were making their triumphal progress through the streets. The most celebrated of these monstrous effigies were those of Antwerp and Wetteren. At Ypres a whole family of giants contributed to the public hilarity at the Carnival. At Cassel and Hazebrouch, in the French department of Nord, the giants made their annual appearance on Shrove Tuesday. 89 89 Madame Clément, Histoire des fêtes civiles et religieuses , etc., de la Belgique méridionale , etc. (Avesnes, 1846), p. 252; Le Baron de Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Calendrier Belge (Brussels, 1861-1862), i. 123-126. We may conjecture that the Flemish Reuze , like the Reuss of Dunkirk, is only another form of the German Riese , “giant.” At Antwerp the giant was so big that no gate in the city was large enough to let him go through; hence he could not visit his brother giants in neighbouring towns, as the other Belgian giants used to do on solemn occasions. He was designed in 1534 by Peter van Aelst, painter to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and is still preserved with other colossal figures in a large hall at Antwerp. 90 90 F. W. Fairholt, Gog and Magog, the Giants in Guildhall, their real and legendary History (London, 1859), pp. 64-78. For the loan of this work and of the one cited in the next note I have to thank Mrs. Wherry, of St. Peter's Terrace, Cambridge. At Ath, in the Belgian province of Hainaut, the popular procession of the giants took place annually in August down to the year 1869 at least. For three days the colossal effigies of Goliath and his wife, of Samson and an Archer ( Tirant ), together with a two-headed eagle, were led about the streets on the shoulders of twenty bearers concealed under the flowing drapery of the giants, to the great delight of the townspeople and a crowd of strangers who assembled to witness the pageant. The custom can be traced back by documentary evidence to the middle of the fifteenth century; but it appears that the practice of giving Goliath a wife dates only from the year 1715. Their nuptials were solemnized every year on the eve of the festival in the church of St. Julien, whither the two huge figures were escorted by the magistrates in procession. 91 91 E. Fourdin, “La foire d'Ath,” Annales du Cercle Archéologique de Mons , ix. (Mons, 1869) pp. 7, 8, 12, 36 sq. The history of the festival has been carefully investigated, with the help of documents by M. Fourdin. According to him, the procession was religious in its origin and took its rise from a pestilence which desolated Hainaut in 1215 ( op. cit. pp. 1 sqq. ). He thinks that the effigies of giants were not introduced into the procession till between 1450 and 1460 ( op. cit. p. 8).