Beatty—The St. George, or Mummers?, Plays. 321 
separated geographically. In the paddy feasts of the natives 
of Sararw ! ak ; in the Island of Borneo, a ceremony is celebrated, 
in which all the people are “doctored” by a medicine man, and 
“die.” The pretended corpses are laid in a row and after a 
time they are revived. This ceremony is a preparation for 
the yearns labors. 1 2 
CONCLUSION. 
The. immediate result of our enquiries seems to be that the 
part of the St. George or Mummers’ Play which could not be 
explained by reference to literary sources may be explained by 
a reference to the people—the folk —themselves. We have 
seen that the central incident of the play is widely spread all 
over Eiurope in ceremonies practiced by the folk themselves. 
Further than this, we have seen that among the lowly Austra¬ 
lians, the Africans, the Forth American Indians, the incident 
is common; and this, by all the methods of anthropological 
reasoning, points to the certainty that in the earlier stages of 
culture these ceremonies flourished in Eiurope, and that their 
object and aim was magical. They were attempts on the part 
of man to force the powers of nature to his will, to produce 
for him abundant harvests and rich vintages, as it is the ob¬ 
ject of the Australian and Forth American Indian today. As 
the magic idea passed out of the European ceremony with ad¬ 
vancing civilization, the peasant still continued to keep it up, 
because of that vague feeling of probable efficiency in tradi¬ 
tional customs, and partly because a small portion of the magic 
efficiency still remained. Here we have the original form of 
the St. George play, in which there is the mock struggle or 
the mock death and revival, now scarcely magic, and almost 
entirely entertaining. To this village mumming came Chris¬ 
tian influence, and the mock struggle attracted to itself, and 
made an integral part of itself, the champion of Christendom 
and the patron of Ehgland—St. George. But the late Chris¬ 
tian influence was not strong enough to transform the tradi- 
i H. Ling Roth, “The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo/’ 
2 vols. Yol. 1, pp. 412-415. 
4—1S. & A. 
