and the further argument of Mr Frazer, we can trace back the Hallaton bottle-kicking to this source, we shall feel less difficulty in referring the procession and sacrifice of the hare to the same spring-ritual of old religion. Indeed, in Mr. Frazer's view, the sacrifice of the divine animal is but another version of the sacrifice of the Spirit of Vegetation: both rites have a similar object, and belong to the same order of thought. The principle which inspired the savage hunter also guided the actions of pastoral and agricultural tribes. "Death" was originally an embodiment of the spirit of a tree or corn-field—its totem, in fact—and it was carried out and destroyed in order that the spirit, the life, of the tree or field might not perish, but might pass into the fresh leaves and the new crop. The effigy was beaten and kicked, not in order to intensify its sufferings or to express contempt, but "in order to dispel any malignant influences by which, at the supreme moment, the totem might conceivably be beset".[1] Before he is slain he is promenaded from door to door, that each of his worshippers may receive a portion of the divine virtues which are supposed to emanate from the dead or dying god. "Religious processions of this sort", says Mr. Frazer, "must have had a great place in the ritual of European peoples in prehistoric times, if we may judge from the numerous traces of them which have survived in folk-custom." Among those traces may perhaps be included these two Leicestershire ceremonies of "Hunting the Hare" and "Kicking the Bottle".
The sacrifice of the hare in spring-time, whether as a tribal totem or as a Spirit of Vegetation, may thus have survived, in faint and obscure traces, amongst the Easter customs of this nineteenth century.
- ↑ Frazer, op. cit., 214-15.
