TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

isis. 263
country, welcomed by streaming multitudes, and honoured with
festive song and dance, to be the car of the god, or rather of that
goddess whom Tacitus identifies with Isis, and who (like Nerthus)
brought peace and fertility to mortals. As the car was covered up,
so entrance to the interior of the ship seems to have been denied
to men ; there need not have been an image of the divinity inside.
Her name the people had long ago forgotten, it was only the
learned monks that still fancied something about Neptune or Mars,
Bacchus or Venus : but to the externals of the old festivity the
people s appetite kept returning from time to time. How should
that pauper rusticus in the wood at Inden have lighted on the
in his mind
thought of building a ship, had there not been floating
recollections of former processions, perhaps of some in neighbour
ing
districts ?
It is worthy of note, that the weavers, a numerous and arrogant
craft in the Netherlands, but hateful to the common herd, were
compelled to draw the ship by ropes tied to their shoulders, and to
guard it ; in return, they could keep the rest of the people from
coming too near it, and fine or take pledges from those who did so. 1
Eodulf does not say what became at last of the terrea navis,
after it had made that circuit ; it is enough for him to relate, how,
on a reception being demanded for it and refused, heats and quarrels
arose, which could only be cooled in open war. This proves the
warm interest taken by contemporaries, fanned as it was to a flame
for or against the festival by the secular and the clerical party.
There are traces to be found of similar ship-processions at the
beginning of spring in other parts of Germany, especially in Swabia,
which had then become the seat of those very Suevi of Tacitus (see
Suppl.). A minute of the town-council of Ulrn, dated St. Nicholas
eve, 1530, contains this prohibition: Item, there shall none, by day
nor night, trick or disguise him, nor put on any carnival raiment,
moreover shall keep him from the going about of the plough and
2 with ships on pain of 1 . gulden The custom of drawing the
plough about seems to have been the more widely spread, having
1 Doe3 the author imply that the favour of the peasantry, as opposed to
artizans, makes it likely that this was a relic of the worship of Earth ?
Supposing even that the procession was that of the German Isis ; Tacitus
nowhere tells us what the functions of this Isis were, or that she brought
peace and fertility . TRANS.
2 Carl Jager, Schwab, stadtewesen des MA. (Mid. Ages), 1, 525.