Or:—
Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home!
Your house is on fire! your children will burn!"
So far the quotation from the article in the "Cornhill Magazine." As to the "children" who are said to be in danger of burning, they are, according to the myth, the Unborn who dwell in the fragrant domain of the Goddess of Love, on flowery meadows, and in the foliage of her garden, until the little lady-bird, the messenger of Our Lady Freia-Holda, comes to call them into human existence.
There is, no doubt, still some beetle-lore worth collecting for the better reconstruction of these ancient poetical beliefs; and therefore I thought I might refer more fully to this subject. I may add that I have heard the above version of the Cock-chafer version in the Baden Palatinate, where it is, no doubt, still current.
I have stated elsewhere, in connection with Freia, that even such apparently silly children's songs as
Ringe, ringe Reihe!
Sind der Kinder dreie;
Sitzen auf dem Holler-Busch,
Schreien alle: husch! husch! husch!
are clearly an infantine ceremonial, of combined dance and song, in which there is not—as may seem at a first blush—any reference to the elder-tree, but rather an allusion to the bushes of the fragrant meadow in Freia-Holda's realm, on which the souls, or faint forms, of the Unborn await their incarnation on the "Holler-Busch."
The curious children's drama for which the Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco has been good enough to quote me, must once have been (as I stated in A Bavarian Passion Play and the Earliest Vestiges of a German Drama[1]) a rude theatrical representation, in heathen times, of the struggle between Life and Death; between the torpidity of Winter and the genial powers of Spring—a struggle in which a Resurrection Idea was embodied. In boyhood I have taken part, in open air, in the somewhat elaborate ceremonies of driving out Death, or Winter, and welcoming Spring with triumphal glees. It was all done by little boys who marched out of town in formal procession.
- ↑ Minerva Magazine (Rome); April, 1880.
