Crossword-Solution: CELEBRANTS 10 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

The connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the newly-flayed skins of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt and Assyria, the fawn-skin or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants.

But how could we be sure that the date, or the place of the ceremony, had not been changed at the last moment? Supposing, for instance, that it was held, not in the town, as arranged, but in the courts of the idol, and that the fearful activities of the fiery agent which we were about to wake to life should sweep the celebrants into nothingness.

The monotonous chanting of the celebrants, the responses of the people to the priest, sometimes inarticulate, sometimes thunderous, the harmonious trembling of the painted windows, the organ, bursting forth like a hundred trumpets, the three belfries, humming like hives of huge bees, that whole orchestra on which bounded a gigantic scale, ascending, descending incessantly from the voice of a throng to that of one bell, dulled her memory, her imagination, her grief.

The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, "The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!" The Egyptians even represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers.

Gloomily, Si'Wren reflected that the celebrants were to be spared the sight of the slain young woman's body.