You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The elaborate preparations made in our Western civilization for religious festivals would cause acute astonishment to a person who was educated in another culture. How strange it is to cut a fir tree, transport it into your house and erect it before Christmas, hang fruits and gifts on its branches and richly decorate it! A tree belongs to the forest, does it not, and not the home? Its transportation amounts literally to a transplantation.
Take another instance from Hebrew religion, the Feast of Booths (Sukkoth) in autumn. Observing the preparation for this festival the casual witness will see that the people build a cabin or a hut outside the house. They will, moreover, roof it with palm leaves and put all kinds of branches and fruits on and around it. Why, here are booths outside the house, and those booths standing, for instance, in the middle of Manhattan, are covered with plants and leaves! It is as though the forest has penetrated the City. Why a booth if there is a house?
An Australian aborigine who looks at these preparations would be amazed; yet at the same time he would notice something familiar in them. They would remind him somewhere of pagan customs in his native village.