The disaster
is announced by placards posted about the streets in the evening; and
next morning the newspapers are full of gloomy prognostications.[315]
[The new fire and burning of Judas on Easter Saturday in Mexico.]
Some of these customs have been transported by the Catholic Church to
the New World. Thus in Mexico the new fire is struck from a flint early
in the morning of Easter Saturday, and a candle which has been lighted
at the sacred flame is carried through the church by a deacon shouting
"_Lumen Christi_." Meantime the whole city, we are informed, has been
converted into a vast place of execution. Ropes stretch across the
streets from house to house, and from every house dangles an effigy of
Judas, made of paper pulp. Scores or hundreds of them may adorn a single
street. They are of all shapes and sizes, grotesque in form and garbed
in strange attire, stuffed with gunpowder, squibs and crackers,
sometimes, too, with meat, bread, soap, candy, and clothing, for which
the crowd will scramble and scuffle while the effigies are burning.
There they hang grim, black, and sullen in the strong sunshine, greeted
with a roar of execration by the pious mob. A peal of bells from the
cathedral tower on the stroke of noon gives the signal for the
execution. At the sound a frenzy seizes the crowd. They throw themselves
furiously on the figures of the detested traitor, cut them down, hurl
them with curses into the fire, and fight and struggle with each other
in their efforts to tear the effigies to tatters and appropriate their
contents.
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