century. There are also Arab settlements. Fazogli, the residence of the principal mek, is a straggling town built some 800 yds. from the left bank of the Blue Nile near the Tumat confluence, 434 m. by river above Khartum and opposite Famaka, the headquarters of the Egyptians in this region between 1839 and 1883. Above Famaka and near the Abyssinian frontier is the prosperous town of Kiri, while Abu Shaneina on the Nile below Fazogli is the spot where the trade route from Beni Shangul strikes the river. The chief imports from Abyssinia are coffee, cattle, transport animals and gold. Durra and tobacco are the principal crops. The local currency includes rings of gold, specially made as a circulating medium.
FEA, CARLO (1753–1836), Italian archaeologist, was born
at Pigna in Piedmont on the 2nd of February 1753, and studied
law in Rome. He received the degree of doctor of laws from
the university of La Sapienza, but archaeology gradually absorbed
his attention, and with the view of obtaining better
opportunities for his researches in 1798 he took orders. For
political reasons he was obliged to take refuge in Florence;
on his return in 1799 he was imprisoned by the Neapolitans, at
that time in occupation of Rome, as a Jacobin, but shortly
afterwards liberated and appointed Commissario delle Antichità
and librarian to Prince Chigi. He died at Rome on the 18th of
March 1836.
Fea revised, with notes, an Italian translation of J. J. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst, and also added notes to some of G. L. Bianconi’s works. Among his original writings the principal are:—Miscellanea filologica, critica, e antiquaria; L’Integrità del Panteone rivendicata a M. Agrippa; Frammenti di fasti consolari; Iscrizioni di monumenti pubblichi; and Descrizione di Roma.
FEARNE, CHARLES (1742–1794), English jurist, son of
Charles Fearne, judge-advocate of the admiralty, was born in
London in 1742, and was educated at Westminster school.
He adopted the legal profession, but, though well fitted by his
talents to succeed as a barrister, he neglected his profession and
devoted most of his attention and his patrimony to the prosecution
of scientific experiments, with the vain hope of achieving
discoveries which would reward him for his pains and expense.
He died in 1794, leaving his widow and family in necessitous
circumstances. His Essay on the Learning of Contingent Remainders
and Executory Devises, the work which has made
his reputation as a legal authority, and which has passed through
numerous editions, was called forth by a decision of Lord Mansfield
in the case of Perrin v. Blake, and had the effect of reversing
that decision.
A volume entitled Fearne’s Posthumous Works was published by subscription in 1797 for the benefit of his widow.
FEASTS AND FESTIVALS. A festival or feast[1] is a day or
series of days specially and publicly set apart for religious observances.
Whether its occurrence be casual or periodic, whether
its ritual be grave or gay, carnal as the orgies of Baal and Astarte,
or spiritual as the worship of a Puritan Sabbath, it is to be
regarded as a festival or “holy day” as long as it is professedly
held in the name of religion.
To trace the festivals of the world through all their variations would be to trace the entire history of human religion and human civilization. Where no religion is, there can of course be no feasts; and without civilization any attempt at festival-keeping must necessarily be fitful and comparatively futile. But as religion develops, festivals develop with it, and assume their distinctive character; and an advancing civilization, at least in its earlier stages, will generally be found to increase their number, enrich their ritual, fix more precisely the time and order of their recurrence, and widen the area of their observance.
Some uncivilized tribes, such as the Juángs of Bengal, the Fuegians and the Andamanese, have been described as having no word for God, no idea of a future state, and consequently no religious ceremonies of any kind whatever. But such cases, doubtful at the best, are confessedly exceptional. In the vast majority of instances observed and recorded, the religiosity of the savage is conspicuous. Even when incapable of higher manifestations, it can at least take the form of reverence for the dead; the grave-heap can become an altar on which offerings of food for the departed may be placed, and where in acts of public and private worship the gifts of survivors may be accompanied with praises and with prayers. That the custom of ghost-propitiation by some sort of sacrifice is even now very widely diffused among the lower races at least, and that there are also many curious “survivals” of such a habit to be traced among highly civilized modern nations, has been abundantly shown of late by numerous collectors of folk-lore and students of sociology; and indications of the same phenomena can be readily pointed out in the Rig-Veda, the Zend-Avesta and the Pentateuch, as well as in the known usages of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.[2] In many cases the ceremonial observed is of the simplest; but it ever tends to become more elaborate; and above all it calls for repetition, and repetition, too, at regular intervals. Whenever this last demand has made itself felt, a calendar begins to take shape. The simplest calendar is obviously the lunar. “The Naga tribes of Assam celebrate their funeral feasts month by month, laying food and drink on the graves of the departed.” But it soon comes to be combined with the solar. Thus the Karens, “while habitually making oblations, have also annual feasts for the dead, at which they ask the spirits to eat and drink.” The natives of the Mexican valley in November lay animals, edibles and flowers on the graves of their dead relatives and friends. The common people in China have a similar custom on the arrival of the winter solstice. The ancient Peruvians had the custom of periodically assembling the embalmed bodies of their dead emperors in the great square of the capital to be feasted in company with the people. The Athenians had their annual Νεκύσια or Νεμέσεια and the Romans their Feralia and Lemuralia. The Egyptians observed their three “festivals of the seasons,” twelve “festivals of the month,” and twelve “festivals of the half month,” in honour of their dead. The Parsees, too, were required to render their afringans (blessings which were to be recited over a meal to which an angel or the spirit of a deceased person was invited) at each of the six seasons of the year, and also on certain other days.[3]
In the majority of recorded instances, the religious feeling of the savage has been found to express itself in other forms besides that of reverence towards the dead. The oldest literatures of the world, at all events, whether Aryan or Semitic, embody a religion of a much higher type than ancestor worship. The hymns of the Rig-Veda, for example, while not without traces of the other, yet indicate chiefly a worship of the powers of nature, connected with the regular recurrence of the seasons. Thus in iv. 57 we have a hymn designed for use at the commencement of the ploughing time;<[4] and in the Aitareya-Brâhmana, the earliest treatise on Hindu ceremonial, we already find a complete series of sattras or sacrificial sessions exactly following the course of the solar year. They are divided into two distinct sections, each consisting of six months of thirty days each. The sacrifices are allowed to commence only at certain lucky constellations and in certain months. So, for instance, as a rule, no great sacrifice can commence during the sun’s southern progress. The great sacrifices generally take place in spring, in the months of April and May.[5] In the Parsee Scriptures[6] the year is divided into six seasons or gahanbârs of two months each, concluding with February, the season at which “great expiatory sacrifices were offered for the growth of the whole creation in the last two months of the year.” We have no means of knowing precisely what were the arrangements of the Phoenician calendar, but it
- ↑ “To feast” is simply to keep a festum or festival. The etymology of the word is uncertain; but probably it has no connexion with the Gr. ἑστιᾶν
- ↑ See Spencer, Principles of Sociology, i. 170, 280, 306.
- ↑ Haug, Parsis, 224, 225.
- ↑ “May the heavens, the waters, the firmament, be kind to us; may the lord of the field be gracious to us.... May the oxen (draw) happily, the men labour happily; may the traces bind happily, wield the goad happily” (Wilson’s translation, iii. 224).
- ↑ See Haug’s Aitareya-brâhmanam of the Rig-Veda; Max Müller’s Chips from a German Workshop, i. 115.
- ↑ Visperad. See Haug, Parsis, 192; Richardson’s Dissertation on the Language, &c., of Eastern Nations, p. 184; Morier’s Journey through Persia.
