St. Eligius, St. Aldhelm, Priminius, by the Pseudo-Theodore and Regino of Priim.
This rite, in which spirits in animal shape were represented by masked performers throughout the first thousand years of the Christian era, survived in England in connexion with the Mummers' Play. Sir Lawrence Gomme[1] says: "Some of the mummers, or maskers as the name implies, formerly disguised themselves as animals—goats, oxen, deer, foxes and horses being represented at different places where details of the mumming play have been recorded."
But, though the rite, in which the performers were masked as spirits of animal form, came to be associated with the rite in which the vegetation-spirit was revived, the association was external and accidental. It merely amounted to the fact that the two rites had come to be performed at the same festival. Consequently, the performers masked as animals, though they continued to go round in procession with the performers of the Mummers' Play, never had any part in the play: they take no share in the action whereby the leading character in the play is killed and revived. In Greece also the satyrs never found their way into comedy or tragedy. But in Greece the performers who were masked as animals did what they never did in England: they developed a dramatic performance of their own. That performance had—originally, at any rate o inner connexion with the tragedies that were performed: it was given as an after-piece, simply, that had no other connexion with the tragedy except that it was performed at the same festival.
The worship of deceased ancestors, that of vegetation-spirits, and that of theriomorphic spirits, are forms of cult which existed amongst the civilised Greeks, and had been inherited by them from their uncivilised ancestors. In
- ↑ Nature, Dec. 23, 1S97, quoted by Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, i., 214, n. 1.
