Let it be noted that this general line of inquiry on which we are travelling was laid down many years ago by successive shrewd observers of the relation between past and present, among whom limits permit reference only to Burton, Hobbes, and Conyers Middleton.
Burton's various allusions in his Anatomy of Melancholy[1] indicate that he looks on pagan practices with much the same eyes that the early Roman Catholic missionaries looked on the shaven Buddhist monks of Tibet, when they saw in their rosaries, bells, holy water, and worship of relics, the wiles of the arch-deceiver who had tempted those men to mock the solemn rites of Catholicism. For he speaks of the Devil's devices in "the strange Sacraments, the goodly Temples, the Priests and Sacrifices," and "imitation of the Ark." But Hobbes, in the Leviathan, recognises the continuity of ideas under change of names; mutato nominem tantum.
"Venus and Cupid appearing as 'the Virgin Mary and her Sonne,' and the (
Greek characters) of the Heathen surviving in the Canonization of Saints. The carrying of the Popes 'by Switzers under a Canopie' is a 'Relique of the Divine Honours given to Cæsar;' the carriage of Images in Procession 'a Relique of the Greeks and Romans.' . . . 'The Heathen had also their Aqua Lustralis, that is to say, Holy Water. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their Holy Dayes. They had their Bacchanalia, and we have our Wakes answering to them; They their Saturnalia, and we our Carnevalls and Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants; They their Procession of Priapus, we our fetching-in, erection, and dancing about May-Poles; and Dancing is one kind of worship; They had their Procession called Ambarvalia, and we our Procession about the Fields in the Rogation week."[2]
To this may be added, as one of the most striking examples, the transformation of the Lupercalia into the feast of the Purification of Mary. But the subject cannot be further pursued here; enough that what Hobbes has written concerning the Kingdom of the Fairies, and what Conyers Middleton has elaborated in his parallels, or, as he calls it
