e welfare of the community was believed to depend,
has become mere pageantry and amusement, often a mere children's
game.{2}

Sometimes the spirit of a later age has worked upon these pagan customs,
revivifying and transforming them, giving them charm. Often, however, one
does not find in them the poetry, the warm humanity, the humour, which
mark the creations of popular Catholicism. They are fossils and their
interest is that of the fossil: they are records of a vanished world and
help us to an imaginative reconstruction of it. But further, just as on a
stratum of rock rich in fossils there may be fair meadows and gardens and
groves, depending for their life on the denudation of the rock beneath,
so have these ancient religious products largely supplied the soil in
which more spiritual and more |163| beautiful things have flourished.
Amid these, as has been well said, "they still emerge, unchanged and
unchanging, like the quaint outcrops of some ancient rock formation amid
rich vegetation and fragrant flowers."{3}

The survivals of pagan religion at Christian festivals relate not so much
to the worship of definite divinities--against this the missionaries made
their most determined efforts, and the names of the old gods have
practically disappeared--as to cults which preceded the development of
anthropomorphic gods with names and attributes. These cults, paid to less
personally conceived spirits, were of older standing and no doubt had
deeper roots in the popular mind. Fundamentally associated with
agricultural and pastoral life, they have in many cases been preserved by
the most conservative element in the population, the peasantry.

Many of the customs we shall meet with are magical, rather than religious
in the proper sense; they are not directed to the conciliation of
spiritual beings, but spring from primitive man's belief "that in order
to produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he
had only to imitate them."{4} Even when they have a definitely religious
character, and are connected with some spirit, magical elements are often
found in them.

Before we consider these customs in detail it will be necessary to survey
the pagan festivals briefly alluded to in Chapter I., to note the various
ideas and practices that characterized them, and to study the attitude of
the Church towards survivals of such practices while the conversion of
Europe was in progress, and also during the Middle Ages.