The signification of the resuscitation ceremony is obscured in cases where the same figure undergoes death and revival without any corresponding change of form.  This point did not escape Mannhardt’s acute critical eye; he remarks that, in cases where, e.g., in Swabia, the ‘King’ is described as “ein armer alter Mann,” who has lived seven years in the woods (the seven winter months), a scene of rejuvenation should follow—­“diese scheint meistenteils verloren gegangen; doch vielleicht scheint es nur so.”  He goes on to draw attention to the practice in Reideberg, bei Halle, where, after burying a straw figure, called the Old Man, the villagers dance round the May-Pole, and he suggests that the ‘Old Man’ represents the defunct Vegetation Spirit, the May Tree, that Spirit resuscitated, and refers in this connection to the “durchaus verwandten Asiatischen Gebrauchen des Attis, und Adonis-Kultus."[11]

The foregoing evidence offers, I think, sufficient proof of the, now generally admitted, relationship between Classical, Medieval, and Modern forms of Nature ritual.

But what of the relation to early Aryan practice?  Can that, also, be proved?

In this connection I would draw attention to Chapter 17 of Mysterium und Mimus, entitled, Ein Volkstümlicher Umzug beim Soma-Fest.  Here Professor von Schroeder discusses the real meaning and significance of a very curious little poem (Rig-Veda, 9. 112); the title by which it is generally known, Alles lauft nach Geld, does not, at first sight, fit the content of the verse, and the suggestion of scholars who have seen in it a humorous enumeration of different trades and handicrafts does not explain the fact that the Frog and the Horse appear in it.

To Professor von Schroeder belongs the credit of having discovered that the personnel of the poem corresponds with extraordinary exactitude to the Figures of the Spring and Summer ‘Fertility-exciting’ processions, described with such fulness of detail by Mannhardt.  Especially is this the case with the Whitsuntide procession at Värdegötzen, in Hanover, where we find the group of phallic and fertility demons, who, on Prof. von Schroeder’s hypothesis, figure in the song, in concrete, and actual form.[12] The Vegetation Spirit appears in the song as an Old Man, while his female counterpart, an Old Woman, is described as ‘filling the hand-mill.’  Prof. von Schroeder points out that in some parts of Russia the ‘Baba-jaga’ as the Corn Mother is called, is an Old Woman, who flies through the air in a hand-mill.  The Doctor, to whom we have referred above, is mentioned twice in the four verses composing the song; he was evidently regarded as an important figure; while the whole is put into the mouth of a ‘Singer’ evidently the Spokesman of the party, who proclaims their object, “Verschiednes könnend suchen wir Gute Dinge,” i.e., gifts in money and kind, as such folk processions do to-day.

The whole study is of extraordinary interest for Folk-lore students, and so far as our especial investigation is concerned it seems to me to supply the necessary proof of the identity, and persistence, of Aryan folk-custom and tradition.