by urchins, of secretly pinning paper ladders to the shoulders of women of the lower classes who happen to show themselves in the streets on the morning of Mid-Lent.[1] A similar custom is observed by urchins in Rome; and at Naples on the 1st of April boys cut strips of cloth into the shape of saws, smear them with gypsum, and strike passers-by with their “saws” on the back, thus imprinting the figure of a saw upon their clothes.[2] At Montalto in Calabria boys go about at Mid-Lent with little saws made of cane and jeer at old people, who therefore generally stay indoors on that day. The Calabrian women meet together at this time and feast on figs, chestnuts, honey, etc.; this they call “sawing the Old Woman”—a reminiscence probably of a custom like the old Florentine one.[3]
In Barcelona on the day in question boys run about the streets, some with saws, others with billets of wood, others again with cloths in which they collect gratuities. They sing a song in which it is said that they are looking for the oldest woman of the city for the purpose of sawing her in two in honour of Mid-Lent; at last, pretending to have found her, they saw something in two and burn it. A like custom is found amongst the South Slavs. In Lent the Croats tell their children that at noon an old woman is being sawn in two outside the gates; and in Carniola also the saying is current that at Mid-Lent an old woman is taken out of the village and sawn in two. The North Slavonian expression for keeping Mid-Lent is bábu rezati, that is, “sawing the Old Wife.”[4]
- ↑ Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari, iv. (1885) p. 294 sq.
- ↑ H. Usener, op. cit. p. 193.
- ↑ Vincenzo Dorsa, La tradizione greco-latina negli usi e nelle credenze popolari della Calabria citeriore (Cosenza, 1884), p. 43 sq.
- ↑ Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,4 ii. 652; H. Usener, “Italische Mythen,” in Rheinisches Museum, N. F. xxx. 1875) p. 191 sq.
