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Action

Any action scene in early art is about festival. Even if it seems to be about myth it is about festival, for myth is based on festival. It is important, then, to understand the rites of festival and the meaning that informed them.

Festival, to us, suggests feasting and rejoicing, but this is a comparatively insignificant part of it, a celebration once the main rites are over. At its core, festival is a ritual of transition, intended by mimesis to aid and ensure the orderly change of seasons on which all human life depends. It often begins, for instance, with the destruction of old household articles , the extinguishing of all fires and the solemn kindling of another;and (as at Easter) the putting on of new clothing. Off with the old and on with the new.

The festival procession, often and often boringly portrayed in both western and eastern art, is accompanied in many places (still) by the carrying of god images from one place to another, and where possible this takes place by water. This ‘crossing of water’ is also seen as a seasonal transition, and from it we get our words for ‘floats’ and ‘carnival.’ Bathing, washing one’s face in dew, foot washing, carry the same significance.

Contests: foot racing, tugs of war, ball games: have the same mimetic function, ‘urging’ the season and the sun toward an originally preordained end. The contests for the young men in spring had the additional purpose of choosing a single athletic representative of his class and season.

But the central rite of festival is sacrifice, and to understand its significance we must grasp that essentially sacrifice is meant to create a bridge between man and god. Someone, man or animal, dies and goes to the gods carrying the desired message: and if the sacrifice is in the form of a god surrogate its message will be more powerfully and more directly carried.

The Spring Festival

This celebration, which is held at the beginning of the growing or hunting season, is intended to bring sun and rain to make animal life vigorous and the crops grow. But there is a human analogy as well: it is a time when the young, too, should emerge from the underworld and take on full maturity: a sexual maturity whose exercise will also stimulate crop and animal fertility. Two special rites, then, take place in spring which do not occur in fall: the initiation of young men (and sometimes girls as well); and the Sacred Marriage.

The tests, ordeals and contests which initiates everywhere undergo to prove their worthiness of adulthood lie at the origins not only of most art, but of literature and drama. They climax in the Battle with the Wild Animal, or, since the ‘wild animal’ is in a sense the initiate himself before taming, a conflict between two initiates (the Twins),

one representing the old season and the other the new. The end of this battle is a foregone conclusion: the youth conquers the ‘lion’ or ‘dragon’, or slays the Wild Man who was just the day before his brother. The winner thus has overcome his wild self and has become a disciplined adult.

These battles, indelibly enshrined in myth, are at the outset quite real. The African initiate came up against priest in leopard skin who clawed him. Among the Hopi, Snake Society initiates are threatened and clawed by Bear and Mountain Lion. And in Turkey’s rural areas at least up to 1900 young men had to wrestle rams, colts and bull calves before they were allowed to be sexually active.

And the ‘death’ of the young loser in the duel, memorialized in Indian and Korean drama, the Irish wake play ‘Building of the Fort’, the ‘rending’ of the Dionysian cult, the accolade or mock beheading of the new knight, the death of the Fool in the sword dances of Europe, Crete and Taiwan, was not always followed as in some of these surviving rituals by a resurrection or replaced by an animal sacrifice. "He hath given the lamb’s head for the man’s head," says an old Babylonian hymn; but in Mesoamerica, for instance, the substitution never took place.

Games and Contests

marked festivals everywhere. The Olympics themselves originated as an inter-state duplicate of the earlier village contests. Below, a wrestling match from an Etruscan fresco, and a ball game scene from an Athenian statue base, ca 500 BC (National Museum, Athens). One youth is about to hit a ball with a stick and the other is hoping to catch it. See also the Mesoamerican ball game scene under Sacrifice in this section.

That these are ritual games is attested to by the nudity of the participants, and in the Etruscan scene, by the presence of the priest with his staff. Birds and flowers indicate it is a spring rite.

Initiation

As initiation is a secret rite, its rituals--particularly circumcision--are seldom portrayed. Tests of the initiates’ courage in the face of pain were however part of it, and the ‘whippings’ seen below were carried out as late as the last century in southwest Indian initiations--still, indeed, form part of Hopi and Zuni ceremonies. In the west, Spartan boys were scourged at the altar of Athena as patroness of initiation.

The roundel here, from a ca. 300 BC textile probably made in Armenia shows a ceremonial whipping by two priestly figures, the central tree (see SACRED LANDSCAPE) marking the time as festival. (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.)

The same scene is repeated, with the same meaning, on a Peter Flotner Tarot card ca 1540-45. The woman here plays the role of Athena in Sparta, as her covered head and dress indicate, and the initiate wears the God 1 single feather in his hat. The ‘church’ in the background with its standing upright atop indicates sacred site (see SACRED LANDSCAPE, Cave- Mound)

Battle

By far the most frequently portrayed initiation ceremony is the battle with the wild animal, which parallels in the physical sense the moral change which is supposed to take effect in the initiate. As a member of the training class or Wild Herd, living away from society in the wilderness, h e himself is up till this moment a wild animal (See ANIMALS) and must overcome this wild self to attain adulthood. Examples could be chosen from the art of almost any culture: and more than those shown here will be found in ANIMALS,Cat and Insect.

In this scene from the Gundestrup cauldron, ca 2nd-3rd Century AD, the wild animal is a bull and the initiate is accompanied by his familiar God 1 dog and cat. That the bull appears to have only one horn is perhaps intentional.

Hatted Mithras kills the bull, a Roman version from about the same period. Again his familiars, dog and snake, assist the hero in his transformation battle. Note, however, the Sun figure to the left indicating what he will become.

A much earlier Mycenaean battle, from a bead seal. Here the fighter again wears a tall hat.

The same scene, from an agate cylinder, created at the close of the first stage, late Minoan. However, there are interesting differences. The lion on the right is, if you look closely, not really a lion but a man in lion costume who, as priest god, is ‘taming’ the initiate at the same time the initiate tames the lion. Other such cat-priest figures will be found under ANIMALS, Feline; and the girdling of the initiate as a sign of his taming for adulthood not only has been discussed earlier, but is portrayed in other works of art. (See SACRED LANDSCAPE, Trees).

Any wild animal, provided it is fierce, may play the opponent in this battle. Here, in an illustration of Japanese myth, the hero Yagara-no fights a giant serpent. Susano-o, the original Japanese God 1, also had to fight a giant serpent, and a parallel battle of Hercules will be found under ANIMALS, Snake. (The illustration comes from a Shuntei print now in the Victoria and Albert, London.)

And the snake is, of course, brother to the dragon. Here, in one of many medieval portrayals, St. George slays the dragon. In this version, from a Swedish iron ‘safe’ from a farmhouse ca. 1700 in the Lund Kulturmuseum, we also see an angel above about to award him the ‘crown’ of adulthood. For another St. George with unicorn, see ANIMALS, Unicorn, and notice in both versions the sacred tree indicating festival site.

Sacrifice

The original sacrifice of spring is a youth chosen to represent the youthful god of the underworld, who will carry the message to his patron above that his season is over and the summer of God 2 must now begin. But he is also, in the human sense, a representative of his age class which must ‘die’ to its old self in order to enter adulthood.

In the choice of the sacrifice (at least until the period when criminals or captives were used) the will of the gods had to be given a chance to express itself. It could be by lot (as in Indochina within living memory), or by duel, or in the course of the games which accompanied festival. In China, for instance, regatta duels went on until somebody drowned. In Egypt the Pharaoh had regularly to re-justify his kingship by winning a race at the Sed festival against a ‘wild man’ figure (similar races were held at the Lupercalia in Rome and the Karneia in Greece). In Mesoamerica, as we know, the sacrifice was chosen through a ball game.

The ‘duel’ with an underworld figure, giant or wild animal, appears everywhere in initiation myth, and is often acted out at spring festivals: the Irish wake "’The Building of the Fort", the Kamsa-Krishna drama in India, the duel of two ‘giants’ at Kastri in Greece today, the black and red faced figures who duel at Korean festivals. This conflict is a frequent theme in medieval art where knight fights knight or wild man. But here is an earlier version from a rock painting from west Sweden. The boat is shorthand for transitional rite; both figures are phallic, indicating spring. In another similar rock painting from pre-Viking Sweden the participants are a man in wolfskin and another in horned helmet.

In this depiction of Apollo slaying Tityus, Tityus is portrayed in furs like the Bear or Wild Man whose mock sacrifice took place in spring in many places in Europe up to the last century. Apollo wears the God 1 animal skin and a single feather in his shoe. From a Greek amphora, early 6th A.D., now in the Louvre.

Here the winning captain in the Maya ball game decapitates the captain of the losing team: note the winner’s God 1 hat and ball club. It has been argued that it was the winner who was sacrificed, but this would scarcely have made for an exciting ball game. (From the Great Ball Court relief at Chichen Itza. ) The Aztecs, however, had various means of choosing the sacrifice. The virgin youth who was sacrificed as Tezcatlipoca, for instance, voluntarily took on the role.

Sacred Marriage

If the loser is despatched, as God 1, to the other world to tell God 1 his season is now over, the winner as God 2 takes on for his age class all their new privileges and responsibilities: as ritual king, he mates with a maiden goddess in the ceremony of the Sacred Marriage.

In art as in life, this occurs in two forms: a mass mating of all age class youths and maidens, often involving many partners and violation of incest and moiety taboos; and in a more formal, often national, setting. In Africa and Anatolia the celebrations are of the former type as to a lesser extent May Day was in historic Europe and village festivals in Japan and China. In Greece, Ireland, Egypt, Mesopotamia, however, either a religious festival ‘married’ the images of god and goddess, or the king himself (as in China) was required to mate with a Goddess 1 figure or his wife to maintain his right to rule.

In more or less decorous context it is a favorite subject in art, as shown by the versions below. One curious result of this ‘lordship by marriage’ ritual is the repeated claim by noble families like the Estes, the kings of Bohemia, Sargon of Akkad, that they are descended from a mating between a man and a priestess or water goddess: a mermaid, a ‘bathhouse girl’ or Venus herself.

Hathor, with disc as Goddess 2, presents Pharaoh Set I with the menai collar (necklace), token of her approval of his right to rule, in this painted relief from his dynasty, 1350-=1202 BC. The touching hands, however, suggest that this is a sacred marriage as well. (On the distaff side, it was always assumed in Egypt that to produce a male heir the Queen had mated with a god.)

Scene from a Minoan ring, the goddess dancing with a nude and phallic male while the Tree of Life, with mound beneath (see SACRED LANDSCAPE) mark this as festival and the lower knot, a marriage. The upper knot, however, is combined with the royal axe to suggest a royal sacred marriage.

Three sacred marriage scenes from Europe. The upper is from the silver gilt decoration of a bridle and comes from Lenitsa, Bulgaria, date ca. 4th Century BC.

The second is from the lid of a sandstone urn found in Denmark. The third portrays Zeus and Hera in youthful form and comes from Samos ca 600 BC. Note that in two of the three the festival tree appears. The Bulgarian also shows Goddess 3 as priestess to the wedding.

These figures, from the lid of a Yoruba (Nigeria) wooden bowl, repeat the sacred marriage theme, with the addition of the snake which in many parts of Africa is thought to have taught man about sex.

Here King and Spring Queen meet amid flowers under a triple festival tree to play a game of chess. Like ball games and drama, chess has its origin in festival, a contest between black and white at the end of which one king dies. Indeed, checkmate comes from shah-mat, king dead.

As festival theme chess appears elsewhere in art and myth. Lug, the Irish god, is said to have won his kingdom by a game of chess, and Greek vases show us warriors poring over a chessboard. In a somewhat different version of the game it is not two ‘armies’ but figures representing the four seasons who move around in a four person game like bridge (whose cards themselves descend from the Tarot and its festival cycle.)

Here, therefore, we see festival game and festival marriage entwined in the same theme, painted by Dirk von Delft about 1400. (Pierpont Morgan Library illustrated letter.)

The Fall Festival

"Kings killed at the end of their term" is a major theme in The Golden Bough, and needs no further discussion. As soon as there were real and powerful ‘kings’ as opposed to the God 2 surrogates who died at the end of summer or on the harvest field so that the seasons would progress normally, this custom was firmly discouraged. Thus, though the duel or death of the spring king is a common theme in art, the fall sacrifice is rarely portrayed.

It does survive, however: not only in popular Hallowe’en celebrations where ‘headless men’ and ‘pumpkinheads’ are traditional, but in ‘head’ and ‘headless’ portrayals. This is not to say that the fall sacrifice was always beheaded, but after the development of agriculture the analogy with the ‘beheading’ of grain at harvest made this death increasingly popular. In the Egyptian temple-tomb of third stage vulture goddess Nekhebt we find vultures pecking at corpses--headless corpses. Below are illustrations of the same theme from other parts of the world, where underworld animals ravage dead bodies without heads and simulate the triumph of underworld-winter over this world-summer.

In this Chalcatzingo petroglyph a monster jaguar, commonest underworld animal in Mesoamerica, mauls a dead body which appears to be headless.

Inside the north portal of the 12th Century Cathedral of Lund, Sweden, a lion mouths a human head, just as wolves sometimes eat headless corpses in Celtic art.

In this Celtic monument from Entr’aigues, however, it is the head which remains as at Lund. The theme is identical: the triumph of the ‘wild’ over the adult heads of order.

And in this seal from Crete a reversal of the spring battle seems to be intended: the ‘wild bull’ trimphs over the man, who apparently wears a crown.

Narasimha kills King Hiranyakashipu, in a painting from the north Deccan, India, ca 1800. The circumstances of the king’s death bear a curious resemblance to that of god-king Llew Llaw Gyffes in Wales. It takes place on neither land nor sea, with other riddle qualifications which refer to festival as a betwixt and between place, neither one season nor the other.

Here the death takes place on a porch over the sea foam; in Llew Llaw Gyffes’ case, while he stands by a river with one foot on a cauldron (underworld) and the other on a stag. (For the death of the king in the form of a stag hunt, see ANIMALS, Stag.) In each case the king is slain by an underworld figure.

Structurally, this Hindu scene shows a similarity to that below, from the Gallehus Goldhorn. It has been interpreted as the twins, but may indeed represent a sacrifice.

Here is a similar downfall scene, which appears in an early South American Mochica jar decoration. Note ‘sacrificial" single bladed axe and snake tail on the victor. With very little surviving written material , pre-conquest South American art can only be tentatively interpreted, but the fierce figure on the left with the serpent tail is an unmistakable underworld figure and that on the right, if not royal, is certainly a normal mature male.

And finally, here is a clear message on the subject from a Chinese (Han) pottery incense vessel. In the upper register of this ritual pot, man slays tiger (spring). In the lower, tiger eats man (fall.)

Child Sacrifice

A second sacrificial fall theme is familiar to us in the Massacre of the Innocents: child sacrifice is historically attested for Ireland, Carthage, Mesoamerica, germany, France, ancient Jericho, Britain, among the Inca and the Tiv of Africa. And to judge by the myth which has the baby hero exposed, put to sea, or otherwise threatened as a child, it was once practiced everywhere. When a time is recorded, it is fall: and in the year-life parallel, an appropriate time. At first glance, however, it seems inconsistent with the ‘end of their season’ deaths of God 1 and 2. But, since fall was emblematically at least the start of the youth training which would end in ‘spring’, it was perhaps felt that a death of one of the child entering age class must sanctify it as a youth’s death did initiation later on.

Like the death of the king, though more for pathetic than political reasons, it is far more rarely portrayed than spring events. Two early examples, one from Scandinavia and one from Mesoamerica, are shown below, along with two medieval scenes as common as the Massacre of the Innocents.

A child plunged into a cauldron by a figure possibly wearing priest emblems. From an inner plate of a sacrificial vessel, the Gundestrup cauldron, ca 3-6th AD, found in a Danish bog.

A child being ‘offered’ to the god Pachacamac, shown in cave with underworld hat; he is in myth underworld creator god opposed to the god of order. This illustration is accompanied by another showing the offering of a twelve year old boy to Cocopona, representing a spring initiatory sacrifice. Both are from Guaman Poma de Ayala’s book concerning Inca rituals.

St. Nicholas’ legends, which have him arranging marriages and ‘rescuing’ three little boys from a vat where an innkeeper (God 3) is boiling them, make his own God 3 image as clear as does his staff, hat and his other identity as Santa Claus. The ‘rescue’ illustration comes from a medieval Book of Hours.

Here, in a scene from the Apocalypse, the Virgin and her Child are being threatened by the seven-headed serpent. What makes it certain that this scene is evoking the old religion rather than merely illustrating a text is the hieroglyph of tree and mound in the right hand corner, which not only indicates ‘festival’ but, as the rabbit is hibernating in the mound, ‘winter.’

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