But in Praettigau
the words uttered in launching the fiery discs referred to the abundance
which was apparently expected to follow the performance of the ceremony.
Among them were, "Grease in the pan, corn in the fan, and the plough in
the earth!"[297]
[Connexion of these bonfires with the custom of "carrying out Death;"
effigies burnt on Shrove Tuesday.]
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."[298]
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
shew, 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.
The effigy is formally tried and accused of having perpetrated all the
thefts that have been committed in the neighbourhood throughout the
year.
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