Rite Of Spring Quotes

In alien lands I keep the body Of ancient native rites and things: I gladly free a little birdie At celebration of the spring. I'm now free for consolation, And thankful to almighty Lord: At least, to one of his creations I've given freedom in this world!

[Poe] started to turn away, the stopped, smiled a little, ducked his head, and reached into his back pocket. "Amy, here." He tossed me a small package. "Just in case." I looked down at my hand. Life savers.

I can't pretend this isn't important. I can't act like it doesn't exist. It's ironic, but true. There are a lot of things I'm really good at keeping secret. But I've learned I'm not too good at that with you. I can't pull it off. I don't want to just hook up. I don't want a secret relationship." "Well, that's a relief," I said, grabbing for both of his hands and holding on for dear life. Doubt started giving way to recognition, but he needed to hear it. "Why's that?" "Because I'm really sick of secrets.

Myth took the place of objectively conceived history. Myth, Michel Tournier has said, is “history everyone already knows.”2 As such, history becomes nothing but a tool of the present, with no integrity whatsoever of its own.

Early on, to arouse a sense of belonging, of “community,” the party began to emphasize the importance, above everything else, of ritual and propaganda—the flags, the insignia, the uniforms, the pageantry, the standard greetings, the declarations of loyalty, and the endless repetition of slogans. Nazism was a cult. The appeal was strictly to emotion.

P—Jamie!” I called. He waded back toward me. “I’m starting to think my name is Pajamie.” “Your name should be Pajerky. You said it wasn’t deep.” “Pajerky?” He gave me a skeptical look. “That’s Pathetic.” “We’ll see how smug you are once I’m on dry land.

One never notices how nice it is to be worshipped until one has fallen from grace,

Does P-Jamie... like me?" Malcolm blinked. This was clearly not the kind of dirt he'd been expecting. "I mean,like me, like me." I clarified quickly. "What are you? Twelve?" he asked, incredulous. "You aren't supposed to make fun of me!" I scolded. "You never said you were going to act like a teenybopper. That's a special circumstance. Any judge would agree." "Fine." I started to rise. "Like I said, forget I asked." "Wait, Amy. Sit down," he said with a sigh. Malcolm was leaning his fits against the wood, staring down at his knuckles. I sat. "What?" He didn't look up. "This is all just between us, right?" "Yeah." "I wouldn't say he likes you." "Oh." Oh. Of course not. How stupid of me. How ridiculous, really- "He's pretty much in love with you.

She took the disc in her hand, holding it by the edges. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting. ‘I just thought you should hear what you look like,’ said Elton.

Poe was standing on the border of the clearing, acting most peculiarly. He took a few steps toward the cabin, the paused, shook his head, and marched back out. He repeated the move a few times before stomping off for good. I stood at the window, confused as hell. Why in the wild... and then it hit me, way, way harder than the water when I'd fallen off the boat. Poe liked me.

The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight.

I have a question for you, but it’s kind of...um, personal.” “Yes, I’m gay.” “You really are a fan of saying that, aren’t you?” “Once you start, you just can’t stop.

I was the disastrous première of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. And Ravel’s Bolero too.

It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music.

Brandon was a natural at whatever he put his mind to. It was one of the things that made him so attractive. That and his complete lack of pretense. He was brilliant, but didn't brag, popular, but not cliquish, comfortable in his skin, and utterly forthright about his needs and desires.

Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter...to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring— these are some of the rewards of the simple life. The most precious things of life are near at hand, without money and without price. Each of you has the whole wealth of the universe at your very door. All that I ever had, and still have, may be yours by stretching forth your hand and taking it.

Do you...want to grab a slice of pizza or something?” I blurted out. He hesitated. “You want to be seen in public with...” a microsecond pause, “...your face looking like that?” I cocked my head to the side. “The real question is, do you want to be seen in public with a face like this?” “I’d consider it.” He stood, his expression still wary.

The freest people, like the freest man, is always in danger of re-lapsing into servitude. Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and consolidate their power. They spring, for the most part, from evil counsels. When the small and the base are intrusted with power, legislation and administration become but two parallel series of errors and blunders, ending in war, calamity, and the necessity for a tyrant. When the nation feels its feet sliding backward, as if it walked on the ice, the time has come for a supreme effort. The magnificent tyrants of the past are but the types of those of the future. Men and nations will always sell themselves into slavery, to gratify their passions and obtain revenge. The tyrant's plea, necessity, is always available; and the tyrant once in power, the necessity of providing for his safety makes him savage. Religion is a power, and he must control that. Independent, its sanctuaries might rebel. Then it becomes unlawful for the people to worship God in their own way, and the old spiritual despotisms revive.

But right then, one room away, there were people in love, and I’d never felt so alone in my life.

Why was he here? Why was he always, always, always around? Didn’t he have a life? Didn’t he have anything better to do?

collect   As many tripods as you think you’ll need,   Together with the other kinds of vessels   That the rites of sacrifice require: cauldrons,   Shallow basins, bowls; pour tall jugs full 8860 Of purest water from the sacred spring;   Have ready wood that’s dry and quick to catch;   And finally, be sure a sharp knife’s there.   All else I leave to you.” Those

In one study, psychologists Tim Wilson and Jonathan Schooler had participants listen to a piece of music, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Some were given no instructions before listening to the music. Others were told to monitor their happiness, and still others to “try to be happy” while listening. It was these latter two categories that derived the least amount of pleasure from the music. Those given no instructions at all found the music most enjoyable. The inevitable conclusion: Thinking about happiness makes us less happy.

In 1914... [German] history, poetry, dream and the individual moment were all combined in one exhilarating sensation...The nation was a creation of one's imagination, a poetic truth, an ethical, not a social, construct... blind obedience was the true value... the stronger a person is... the more he obeys.

Why are we still here, struggling to go on? We are now face to face with the truly Ultimate Ambiguity which is the human spirit. This is the most fascinating ambiguity of all: that as each of us grows up, the mark of our maturity is that we accept our mortality; and yet we persist in our search for immortality. We may believe it's all transient, even that it's all over; yet we believe a future. We believe. We emerge from a cinema after three hours of the most abject degeneracy in a film such as “La Dolce Vita”, and we emerge on wings, from the sheer creativity of it; we can fly on, to a future. And the same is true after witnessing the hopelessness of “Godot” in the theater, or after the aggressive violence of “The Rite of Spring” in the concert hall. Or even after listening to the bittersweet young cynicism of an album called “Revolver”, we have wings to fly on. We have to believe in that kind of creativity. I know I do. If I didn't, why would I be bothering to give these lectures? Certainly not to make a gratuitous announcement of the Apocalypse. There must be something in us, and in me, that makes me want to continue; and to teach is to believe in continuing. To share with you critical feelings about the past, to try to describe and assess the present—these actions by their very nature imply a firm belief in a future.

We are now face to face with the truly Ultimate Ambiguity which is the human spirit. This is the most fascinating ambiguity of all: that as each of us grows up, the mark of our maturity is that we accept our mortality; and yet we persist in our search for immortality. We may believe it's all transient, even that it's all over; yet we believe a future. We believe. We emerge from a cinema after three hours of the most abject degeneracy in a film such as ''La Dolce Vita,'' and we emerge on wings, from the sheer creativity of it; we can fly on, to a future. And the same is true after witnessing the hopelessness of ''Godot'' in the theater, or after the aggressive violence of ''The Rite of Spring'' in the concert hall. Or even after listening to the bittersweet young cynicism of an album called ''Revolver,'' we have wings to fly on.

I hadn’t gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I’d been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I’d figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh—truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile—who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers—but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I’d come to accept it. And I understood that it didn’t make them any better than me.

In the same quarter are other ancient temples, and not far off is the fountain now called Enneacrounos, or the Nine Conduits, from the form given to it by the tyrants, but originally, before the springs were covered in, Callirrhoe, or the Fair Stream. The water of this fountain was used by the ancient Athenians on great occasions, it being near the original city; and at marriage rites and other ceremonies the custom is still retained. To this day the Acropolis or Citadel is called by the Athenians Polis, or City, because that neighbourhood was first inhabited. (Book 2 Chapter 15.5-6)

In a remarkable book called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, the historian Modris Eksteins anatomizes the metabolism of the sentimentality that underwrites Keynes’s embrace of guilt as an instrument of policy. Eksteins shows how sentimentality and a species of extravagant mythmaking mark the points of contact between avant-garde culture and burgeoning totalitarianism. This was especially true in Germany, the country that had advanced the radical program of the avant-garde most enthusiastically. England, by contrast, was a conservative power. Where Germany started the war to transform the world, England fought the war to preserve a world and the culture that defined it. A key difference lies in the aestheticization of life: treating life, that is to say, as if it were a work of art devoid of human reality. On the continent, as the historian Carl Schorske put it in his classic study offin-de-siècle Vienna, “the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was . . . both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gef ühlskultur [sentimental culture].” This revolution in sensibility amounted to a crisis of morality—what the novelist Hermann Broch called a “value vacuum”—that quickly precipitated a crisis in liberal cultural and political life. “Narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling were the consequence,” Schorske wrote.

It was Hitler’s style, his oratorical talents and his remarkable ability to transmit emotions and feelings in his speeches, that took him to the leadership of the ragtag party of misfits and adventurers that he joined in Munich in 1919 and that called itself the German Workers’ Party. The ideas he and the party spouted were all tattered; they were nothing but jargon inherited from the paranoid Austro-German border politics of the pre-1914 era, which saw “Germanness” threatened with inundation by “subject nationalities.” Even the combination “national socialist,” which Hitler added to the party’s name when he became leader in 1920, was borrowed from the same era and same sources. It was not the substance—there was no substance to the frantic neurotic tirades—that allowed the party to survive and later to grow. It was the style and the mood. It was above all the theater, the vulgar “art,” the grand guignol productions of the beer halls and the street.

Heresy, in these remote days, always springs from a Jewish or Mosaic root. The false teachers are always teachers of the Law, advocating the Sabbath, circumcision, and other rites. But they do not teach only the Law, and are not to be confounded with the good scribes of Jerusalem, and their Pharisee disciples, absorbed in the canonical Law and its commentaries. They are real theologians, who taking advantage of the comparative indifference of their co-religionists to all but the worship of the Law, devote themselves to doctrinal speculation. And they did not stop there. To the already sufficiently minute observances of the Mosaic Law they added a very definite asceticism, celibacy, vegetarianism, and abstinence from wine. Those amongst them who accepted Christianity, combined with the new doctrines of the Gospel their "Jewish fables," and tried to impose them, together with their austere rule of life, upon new converts. They were, in fact, Judaizing gnostics, who in the primitive churches heralded the inroads of philosophic Gnosticism.

I really wish your boyfriend would stay out of my love life.” “Funny. I bet Felicity wishes her boyfriend would stay out of it, too.

So, fill me in, what’s been going on here?” “All kinds of scandal,” Clarissa said. “Amy almost drowned, Demetria is going to beat up a patriarch’s wife, our room was trashed by conspiracy theorists, Dragon’s Head broke into the tomb in Connecticut, and Jenny has a crush on Harun.” “Do not!” Jenny said. “In other words,” said Demetria. “The usual.” Odile laughed. “Man, I love this society.

The usual Form of baptism was immersion. This is inferred from the original meaning of the Greek baptivzein and baptismov";678 from the analogy of John’s baptism in the Jordan; from the apostles’ comparison of the sacred rite with the miraculous passage of the Red Sea, with the escape of the ark from the flood, with a cleansing and refreshing bath, and with burial and resurrection; finally, from the general custom of the ancient church which prevails in the East to this day.679  But sprinkling, also, or copious pouring rather, was practised at an early day with sick and dying persons, and in all such cases where total or partial immersion was impracticable. Some writers suppose that this was the case even in the first baptism of the three thousand on the day of Pentecost; for Jerusalem was poorly supplied with water and private baths; the Kedron is a small creek and dry in summer; but there are a number of pools and cisterns there. Hellenistic usage allows to the relevant expressions sometimes the wider sense of washing, bathing, sprinkling, and ceremonial cleansing.680  Unquestionably, immersion expresses the idea of baptism, as a purification and renovation of the whole man, more completely than pouring or sprinkling; but it is not in keeping with the genius of the gospel to limit the operation of the Holy Spirit by the quantity or the quality of the water or the mode of its application. Water is absolutely necessary to baptism, as an appropriate symbol of the purifying and regenerating energy of the Holy Spirit; but whether the water be in large quantity or small, cold or warm, fresh or salt, from river, cistern, or spring, is relatively immaterial, and cannot affect the validity of the ordinance.

It was a rite of passage for girls to fall madly in love with him early in the spring, love him all through the summer and forget about it by the time fall came.

By that decade, such interpretations were being made at a feverish pace, so that, in a single presidential address to the Folk-Lore Society in 1937, it could be suggested that pancake tossing on Shrove Tuesday had been a magical rite to make crops grow, team sports on that day had begun as ritual struggles representing the forces of winter dark and spring light, and Mother’s Day was a remnant of the worship of the prehistoric Corn Mother. 12 By now, some theorists were intervening in seasonal local customs and attempting to ‘correct’ them if aspects of the current performance did not fit the particular interpretation which the experts concerned were making of them as survivals of prehistoric religion. 13

20世紀初，當科學家必須面對諸如電子和原子等無法親眼見到的物體時，這些問題變得至關重要。傳統觀察世界的方式似乎有所不足，智性的浪潮──先鋒派，橫掃整個歐洲。 　　科學概念、思維和認識的方式都被重新審視。1905年，愛因斯坦發現狹義相對論時就是這麼做。這種思維上的劇變也滲透到科學以外的世界。1907年，畢加索以他的畫作《亞維農的少女》（Les Demoiselles d'Avignon）宣告立體主義的到來；1910年，瓦西里．康定斯基揭開了抽象表現主義的面紗。1913年，伊戈爾．斯特拉文斯基（Igor Stravinsky）以作品《春之祭》（Rite of Spring）打破古典芭蕾的所有傳統。戰後的1920年代催生了阿諾．荀白克（Arnold Schönberg）的十二音技法、包豪斯建築和詹姆斯．喬伊斯非凡的小說，其中包含從相對論到立體主義的所有一切。與此同時，弗洛伊德和榮格正在探索無意識。

winter turned and started the long, reluctant climb toward spring,

In depictions of the ritual slaying, grain springs from the dying bull’s tail and sometimes its wounds, features that connect the sacrificial act to ancient fertility rites and notions of rebirth grounded in the changing of the seasons.

Nesta asked into the rustling quiet, “Nymph?” Gwyn lowered her hands, noted the lack of glowing power in Nesta’s eyes, and sighed in relief. But her voice remained casual. “My grandmother was a river-nymph who seduced a High Fae male from the Autumn Court. So I’m a quarter nymph, but it’s enough for this.” Gwyn gestured to her large eyes—blue so clear it could have been the shallow sea—and her lithe body. “My bones are slightly more pliant than ordinary High Fae’s, but who cares about that?” Perhaps that was why Gwyn was so good at the balancing and movement. Gwyn went on, “My mother was unwanted by either of their people. She could not dwell in the rivers of the Spring Court, but was too untamed to endure the confinement of the forest house of Autumn. So she was given in her childhood to the temple at Sangravah, where she was raised. She partook in the Great Rite when she was of age, and I, we—my sister and I, I mean—were the result of that sacred union with a male stranger. She never found out who he was, for the magic chose him that night, and no one ever showed up to ask about twin girls. We were raised in the temple as well. I never left its grounds until … until I came here.

The Gnostics derived their leading doctrines and ideas from Plato and Philo, the Zend-avesta and the Kabalah, and the Sacred books of India and Egypt; and thus introduced into the bosom of Christianity the cosmological and theosophical speculations, which had formed the larger portion of the ancient religions of the Orient, joined to those of the Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish doctrines, which the Neo-Platonists had equally adopted in the Occident. Emanation from the Deity of all spiritual beings, progressive degeneration of these beings from emanation to emanation, redemption and return of all to the purity of the Creator; and, after the re-establishment of the primitive harmony of all, a fortunate and truly divine condition of all, in the bosom of God; such were the fundamental teachings of Gnosticism. The genius of the Orient, with its contemplations, irradiations, and intuitions, dictated its doctrines. Its language corresponded to its origin. Full of imagery, it had all the magnificence, the inconsistencies, and the mobility of the figurative style. Behold, it said, the light, which emanates from an immense centre of Light, that spreads everywhere its benevolent rays; so do the spirits of Light emanate from the Divine Light. Behold, all the springs which nourish, embellish, fertilize, and purify the Earth; they emanate from one and the same ocean; so from the bosom of the Divinity emanate so many streams, which form and fill the universe of intelligences. Behold numbers, which all emanate from one primitive number, all resemble it, all are composed of its essence, and still vary infinitely; and utterances, decomposable into so many syllables and elements, all contained in the primitive Word, and still infinitely various; so the world of Intelligences emanated from a Primary Intelligence, and they all resemble it, and yet display an infinite variety of existences. It revived and combined the old doctrines of the Orient and the Occident; and it found in many passages of the Gospels and the Pastoral letters, a warrant for doing so. Christ himself spoke in parables and allegories, John borrowed the enigmatical language of the Platonists, and Paul often indulged in incomprehensible rhapsodies, the meaning of which could have been clear to the Initiates alone.

But if you think about it, all that is beautiful in life is inextricably bound to sex. What is a flower but a device to consummate the union of the male and female parts of a plant? What is a butterfly but a go-between that unites flowers in love? What is birdsong but a call to its mate? What is the display of feathers by the peacock but a mating rite? What is a nubile woman or a virile man but an outpouring of sexuality? All that is strong and bursting with youth and vitality, all colour and song and grace, all the loveliness of nature, the spring and its rhapsody, are expressions of nature's unrelenting reproductive impulse.

possibly at the Kaitokudō, one of the most prominent of the new schools chartered by the government to provide “an appropriately practical Confucian education” to the children of the merchant and artisan classes.8 The curriculum would have included the Confucian canon—the Four Books (Lun yü [Analects] of Confucius, Da xue [The Great Learning], Zhong yong [The Doctrine of the Mean], and Mengzi [Mencius]) and the Five Classics (I jing [The Book of Changes], Shu jing [The Book of Documents], Shi jing [The Book of Songs], Li ji [The Book of Rites], and Chun qiu [Spring and Autumn Annals])—and Japanese classics, especially waka (thirty-one-syllable court poems), Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise, ca. 947), and The Tale of Genji.

Misplaced belief in the Miller-Urey experiment continues. A 2011 study of twenty-two high school textbooks found that nineteen discuss the Miller-Urey experiment as a possible explanation of the origin of life.4 I have met many people who think life began simply because lightning struck some primeval pond billions of years ago. The Disney movie Fantasia contains such a scene, set to the music of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Despite this popular perception, the Miller-Urey experiment is no longer considered good science. We

If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirt in her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs and open the lid when you visit. Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars melt and spiral into a halo over my head and I’ve stirred my death into the sky.

The readings required of every Confucian scholar. The Four Books are: The Analects, The Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Mencius. The Six Classics are: The Book of Odes, The Book of History, The Book of Rites, The Book of Changes, The Rites of Chou, and The Spring and Autumn Annals.

Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns.

if Masonry will but be true to her mission and Masons to their promises and obligations; if re-entering vigorously upon a career of beneficence, she and they will but pursue it earnestly and unfalteringly remembering that our contributions to the cause of charity and education. Then deserve the greatest credit when it costs us something the curtailing of a comfort” or the relinquishment of a luxury to make them, “if we will but give aid to what were once Masonry’s great schemes for human improvement not fitfully and spasmodically but regularly and incessantly, as the vapors rise and the springs run, and as the sun rises and the stars come up into the heavens, then we may be sure that great results will be attained and a great work done, and then it will most surely be seen that Masonry is not effete or impotent nor degenerated nor drooping to a fatal decay.

Paradise This bridge of moon on bended knee above us keening twilight and the snake that is your tongue has taught itself to sing, to sing. My hand so heavy with your hand, your eyes brimmed curve to crease with grief, and you chant Bread will be the body of a king, someday. With a voice like every nectarine, so lovely and so bruised, how I am tempted to you, famished as a rite of spring mid-winter underneath the tricky snow, broom-cold, tripping fig over foot, husky and nervous as the glassy oxen, staggering. Remember, I am but a rib. I curve into your spine and wrap about your heart, fleshless as marrow, your vitreous darling.

In California, every spring weekend, somewhere in a Portuguese community, they are dishing out free soup. It’s a deeply spiritual rite but not a Catholic one, something seldom realized.

Jason,” she whispered, breathless, and I lowered to my chair again. Tugging at my zipper, I let my erection spring free, closing it inside my fist. “What are you doing?” I demanded. “I’m lying on your bed. I just wanted to be where you were. And then I… I was thinking of you, and I’m so wet…,” “Facetime. Now.” I waited while the swirling screen connected. When it finally focused, I could make out my shadowy bedroom, and the view jostled as she propped the phone against a pillow.

Now a negro was dancing, and the faster he danced, the wilder grew the hidden music. Suddenly as it grew louder still, his limbs began to expand and he could touch the eight corners of the vast room with head, finger or toe. His white draperies, too, flowed out, unrolling from some compact centre within themselves. As he spun and somersaulted, his bones ceased to stiffen, his skin to bind, his muscles came untied; gravity was abated, space negated, volume grew fluid. But time danced on, to the tempo of the music without source; and when this music stopped, the negro shrank again to his usual size. In an underground cave, shining warmly from some hidden illumination, a line of swathed dancers began to move, springing up and down on the same spot with magnetic gesticulations. Their leader passed along the lines with an iron whip, lashing them like spinning-tops to make them dance more fiercely. Up and down the line he strode, more and more swiftly; and all at once, as his strokes grew more potent, the dancers began to glow. Then, as he reached each one in turn, they successively burst into flame. Leaping ever higher, these human torches filled the low-roofed cavern with their ardent rite; and finally left the floor, to circle, a chorus of serene fire-balloons, near the ceiling.

his desperate sale of The Rite of Spring to Walt Disney, to be used in an animated film called Fantasia.

WOW!” A GALVANIZED Igor Stravinsky reportedly exclaimed after listening to Leonard Bernstein’s astonishing recording of The Rite of Spring—a still-unsurpassed performance that Columbia Records captured more than fifty years ago in a single inspired and electrically charged recording session on January 20, 1958, in New York City.

The importance of fertility and abundance springs from two other themes formerly associated with the Wild Hunt:41 that of the night feast, about which we have already talked a great deal, and that of the resuscitated bull. During the cultic meals of these spirits, a bull was killed and eaten, then his hide was placed back over its correctly arranged bones, and the troop leader struck it with her wand, restoring the animal to life. Shamanic in origin, this rite is greatly attested in alpine legends outside those concerning the Wild Hunt. Another recurring motif reflects a third function context: that concerning the neat and tidy house and prohibitions on working. Here, the dead appear in the guise of the guarantors of a certain kind of order over which they keep watch. They never hesitate to reward or punish.

In his study of the relationship among the dawn, fairies, and Fortune, J. H. Grisward10 has shown that Morgue, Arsile, and Maglore, who emerge in Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la feuillée, and Fortune function as the two faces of fate: the first three reserve their gifts for those they have chosen, and the latter has been, since birth, blind, deaf, and dumb (verses 771ff.). They are inclined to favor those who honor them, which implies a rite. This rite happens to take place on the spring or autumn equinox, dates on which the Wild Hunt also appeared. We can accept that the rapproachment we have noted did take place, because the apparition of the Mesnie Hellequin and that of fairies that visit homes falls into the jurisdiction of the same liturgy, is based on the same belief, and shares a temporal kinship: all the dates denote a turning point and refer back to the notion of beginning.