MOTHER-AGE CIVILISATION 105 



among human beings was either periodic or periodically 

 exercised. Such festivals would naturally result in a 

 majority of births occurring at a stated period of the 

 year, and there is some evidence to corroborate this. 1 

 However this may be, the great sex -festivals of the 

 stage of civilisation to which I am referring must be 

 kept carefully in mind. In different parts of Teutonic 

 Europe these festivals were at different dates, and 

 probably depended to a great extent on the early or late 

 arrival of spring ; their general features remain, indeed, 

 markedly alike, whether they take place in April or 

 June. 2 



There is always a common meal, followed by a 

 sacrifice, occasionally with traces of human victims, to 

 the goddess of fertility ; then the group transact their 

 judicial business, if so it may be called the kin-talk 

 whence ultimately arose the principles of the maege- 

 lagu. Then came dancing, always of a choral nature 

 and principally the function of the women ; finally, the 

 night falls on a scene of license. The meeting-place 

 for the festival is either a hilltop, a sacred tree, or 



1 It might throw some light indeed on the reason why all the males of the 

 Irish Ultonian tribe underwent their couvade at the same time. 



2 Such sex-festivals are almost universal. Robertson Smith (Kinship aiid 

 Marriage in Early Arabia, p. 294) gives an account of Arabian sex-festivals to a 

 mother-son deity, with much evidence of polyandrous customs. Schiltberger 

 in his Reisebuch of 1484 tells us that in " Chb'nig Soldan's " land sexual freedom 

 was allowed to the women on Friday, which was their feast-day ; and neither 

 husband nor any one else could hinder them " wann es also gewonhaitt ist." In 

 the Middle Ages we find many fossils of these sex-feasts in semi-heathen festivals. 

 Thus it was not till 1524 that Ferdinand abolished the bacchanalian dances of 

 the women from the public brothels with the Viennese craftsmen round the fires 

 in the great square on St. John's Eve. The same schone Frauen, always by right 

 and custom, attended the public dances on great feast-days in many mediaeval 

 towns. But to enter into this subject would carry us too far into the folklore 

 evidences for primitive group-marriage. 



