The attitudes of various religious groups toward death appear to both reflect and determine attitudes of persons within the dominant culture. In primitive societies, where religion and culture were for all practical purposes the same thing, death was tied to life in a cyclical way. That is, death would lead to rebirth or resurrection in one form or another. In this connection, Frazer describes primitive rituals connected with the agricultural and seasonal cycles that in some measure sought to discover meaning in the cycles of human life as well. One such European folk festival, which is designed to ward off ill luck, involves what Frazer refers to as "Burying the Carnival."
On the evening of Shrove Tuesday, the Esthonians make a
straw figure called a metsik or "wood spirit;" one year it
is dressed with a man's coat and hat, next year with a hood
and a petticoat. This figure is stuck on a long pole,
carried across the boundary of the village with loud cries
of joy, and fastened to the top of a tree in the wood. The
ceremony is believed to be a protection against all kinds of
misfortune. Sometimes the resurrection of the pretended dead
person is enacted. Thus, in some parts of Swabia, on Shrove
Tuesday Dr. Iron Beard professes to bleed a sick man, who
thereupon falls as dead to the ground; but the doctor at
last restores him to life by blowing air into him through a
Elsewhere, Frazer notes that in Middle Eastern and some Eastern European religions, Death was not so much buried as expelled, as a scapegoat. The key element is that resurrection is implied in the death. "Death was originally the spirit of vegetation," says Frazer, "who was annually slain in the spring, in order that he might come to life again with all the vigour of youth. . . . Death was not merely the dying god of vegetation, but also a public scapegoat, upon who...