|
|
This Book List Sectory 17
Page 08
On the infrequent occasions when the dry-paintings are employed, the medicine-man in charge of the ceremony directs his assistants, at daylight, to begin the painting. When it is finished he takes his station close to the easternmost figure of the painting, on its northern side. At the right of the medicine-man sit twelve chosen singers with a drum. The four masked _gaun_, or gods, at the same time take their places at the cardinal points. The patient then enters from the east and sits down on the head of the large figure in the centre of the dry-painting. As he does so the medicine-man commences to sing, and is joined by the chorus at once. They may sing the song four times, or sing four different songs, or any multiple of four, at the pleasure of the medicine-man. When the songs are finished the four masked personages scrape the colored earths into a heap about the patient and rub them in handfuls over his body. If this ceremony proves to be ineffectual, it is believed to be the will of the gods that the patient be not cured.
There is good ground for maintaining that Easter and its accessory celebrations mark with tolerable accuracy the anniversaries of the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord, because we know that the events themselves took place at the period of the Jewish Passover; but no such precision of date can be adduced as regards Christmas. Dr. Geikie[1] says: "The _season_ at which Christ was born is inferred from the fact that He was six months younger than John, respecting the date of whose birth we have the help of knowing the time of the annunciation during his father's ministrations in Jerusalem. Still, the whole subject is very uncertain. Ewald appears to fix the date of the birth as five years earlier than our era. Petavius and Usher fix it as on the 25th of December, five years before our era; Bengel, on the 25th of December, four years before our era; Anger and Winer, four years before our era, in the spring; Scaliger, three years before our era, in October; St. Jerome, three years before our era, on December 25th; Eusebius, two years before our era, on January 6th; and Ideler, seven years before our era, in December." Milton, following the immemorial tradition of the Church, says that-- "It was the winter wild."
Walking the other day in Cheapside I saw some turtles in Mr. Sweeting's window, and was tempted to stay and look at them. As I did so I was struck not more by the defences with which they were hedged about, than by the fatuousness of trying to hedge that in at all which, if hedged thoroughly, must die of its own defencefulness. The holes for the head and feet through which the turtle leaks out, as it were, on to the exterior world, and through which it again absorbs the exterior world into itself--"catching on" through them to things that are thus both turtle and not turtle at one and the same time--these holes stultify the armour, and show it to have been designed by a creature with more of faithfulness to a fixed idea, and hence one-sidedness, than of that quick sense of relative importances and their changes, which is the main factor of good living.
|