The two other processions were of a kind found not only in Italy, but throughout the Roman Empire. In one procession the performers wore either the heads, and often the skins also, of animals, or else masks representing the heads. In the other kind of procession the features of the performers were disguised by colouring the face with dirt and filth. This latter mode of disguise, as being the easier to effect may perhaps be the more primitive. The Fathers who denounce these processions are quite definite in declaring that the man who hangs a calf-skin on his limbs—to use the phrase which Shakespeare afterwards employed with a reference to these same processions at a much later date—thereby, according to the Fathers, sets himself up as an idol, or transfigures himself into an idol. And we may presume that the man also who coloured or blackened his face thereby identified himself with some spirit in whose worship the ceremony took place, or had taken place, until it was prohibited by the Church.
The essential, or at any rate the constant, feature in these rites was that the performers or mummers paraded the streets in their various disguises, to the sound of music, figuring as spirits of some kind—whether in jest or in earnest—and entered the houses of those who were sufficiently in sympathy to allow them to enter; but what sort of performance they gave, when allowed to enter, the Fathers do not tell us. They tell us only that the performers, by wearing their masks and disguising themselves as goats or bucks, make themselves gods or offer themselves up to demons. The disguises worn effect an identification of the wearers with the spirits as whom they figure; and the disguise most frequently mentioned is that in which the performer figures as a cervulus or as a vetula.
The prohibitions issued and repeated by the Church[1] testify to the performance of these rites from the second century to the tenth.
- ↑ See E. K. Chambers: The Mediaeval Stage, ii., 290 ff.
