What is the Origin of Processions?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

What is the Origin of Processions?

The fine Puritan, Baxter, both scorned processions and in a sense revealed their origin. During the Commonwealth he criticized the old `processions and perambulations,' and attacked the `profane, ungodly, presumptuous multitude' which loved them and went on them whenever it could.

Processions were formed, that is to say, as soon as primitive man had reached sufficient agreement with his neighbours to be prepared to go dancing out with them. The earliest communities of which there is any record danced home behind bridegroom and bride; they also danced behind a bier, battling with the evil spirits for the retention of the living, and for an easier passage for the dead.

In such formal civilizations as those of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the pace of the processions may have decreased, but the magnificence and number of occasions had increased. Besides private observances, most great public occasions for rejoicing and lamentation were marked by processions.

Egyptians went out to greet the god Osiris or to enthrone or entomb the pharaoh; Greeks and Romans celebrated with processions the feasts of Diana and Ceres, the opening of the circus games, or a general's triumph. These peoples, too, followed some of the ways of their forefathers, and went out to sprinkle the fields with holy water for fertility, or encircled a town to fasten it against demons.

Hittites and Hebrews also knew ritual processions of this sort for calling down blessings and vanquishing enemies. It is possible that when the Israelites encircled the walls of Jericho they were conforming with ancient folk-magic as well as with the revelation of Joshua. When for century after century they celebrated the feast of Tabernacles with processions of palm-bearers round the altar, to mark Israel's deliverance and the yearly harvest, the Jews were combining in an act of religious thanksgiving both a national episode and an ancient nature feast.

It is not surprising that Christians, too, should have transformed into occasions of their own many of the ancient feasts. nor that they should have introduced into the liturgy the formal dignity of the procession. At least by the fourth century there seem to have been processions at Christian funerals; there were also the beginnings of litanies, special prayers of supplication, which tended to be used in procession on anciently venerated days. 

One such occasion was the feast of St. Mark, which fell near a primeval spring festival, and this was observed through- out the middle ages as a great day of procession. Other such days were kept at the time of the ancient harvest prayers, whose hallowed rites the Church transformed into Rogation processions, now again quite widely observed in England. With the procession of candles at the feast of the Purification, the great procession of palms of Palm Sunday, and the procession of Corpus Christi, these were the grand ceremonial occasions for processions in the mediaeval Church.

But the whole of the liturgy and the calendar of the Church became interwoven with minor processions. So in fact did courtly, social, and political life, as to some extent they are still. The Lord Mayor's show is the one survivor of many old Guild processions of the middle ages.

Thus the Church transformed the instinctive urge for ritual dancing into acts of worship. It did the same for many people's desire to go farther afield together: mediaeval pilgrimage (as also modern pilgrimage) is extended procession. All over England the shrines were visited: Chaucer's pilgrims rode to Canterbury, young Henry Tudor went barefoot to Walsingham. For those who must go still farther there was Jerusalem.

For the English pilgrim who could not hope to don the `sign of the crossed palms' to show that he was Jerusalem-bound, nor the `keys of St. Peter' for Rome, there was the Englishman's dear shrine of St. James of Compostella (Santiago), on the north-west coast of Spain.

It was the `cockle shell', the sign of St. James, that Sir Walter Raleigh remembered when he wrote in the Tower:

Give me my scallopshell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.