Folklore as an Historical Science Part 13

[202] Im Thurn, _Indians of Guiana_, 335; Landtman, _Origin of Priesthood_, 117.

[203] _Primitive Manners and Customs_, cap. i. "Some Savage Myths and Beliefs," and cap. viii., "Fairy Lore of Savages."

[204] _Introd. to Hist. of Religion_, 263. Of course I do not accept Mr. J. A. Stewart's "general remarks on the ???????a or story-telling myth" in his _Myths of Plato_, 4-17. All Mr. Stewart's research is literary in object and result, though he uses the materials of anthropology.

[205] H. H. Wilson, _Rig Veda Sanhita_, i. p. xvii.

[206] H. H. Wilson, _Vishnu Purana_, i. p. iv; _Rig Veda Sanhita_, i.

p. xlv.

[207] _Religion of the Semites_, 19.

[208] Mr. Hartland pa.s.ses rapidly in his opening chapter from the myth as primitive science to the myth as fairy tale, from the savage to the Celt (_Science of Fairy Tales_, pp. 1-5), and I do not think it is possible to make this leap without using the bridge which is to be constructed out of the differing positions occupied by the myth and the fairy tale.

[209] It will be interesting, I think, to preserve here one or two instances of the actual practice of telling traditional tales in our own country. Mr. Hartland has referred to the subject in his _Science of Fairy Tales_, but the following instances are additional to those he has noted, and they refer directly back to the living custom. They are all from Scotland, and refer to the early part of last century. "In former times, when families, owing to distance and other circ.u.mstances, held little intercourse with each other through the day, numbers were in the habit of a.s.sembling together in the evening in one house, and spending the time in relating the tales of wonder which had been handed down to them by tradition" (Kiltearn in Ross and Cromarty; Sinclair, _Statistical Account of Scotland_, xiv. 323). "In the last generation every farm and hamlet possessed its oral recorder of tale and song. The pastoral habits of the people led them to seek recreation in listening to, and in rehearsing the tales of other times; and the senachie and the bard were held in high esteem" (Inverness-s.h.i.+re, _ibid._, xiv.

168). "In the winter months, many of them are in the habit of visiting and spending the evenings in each other's houses in the different hamlets, repeating the songs of their native bard or listening to the legendary tales of some venerable senachie" (Durness in Sutherlands.h.i.+re, _ibid._, xv. 95).

[210] W. H. R. Rivers, _The Todas_, 3-4.

[211] Pausanias, viii. cap. xv. -- 1.

[212] _Journ. Roy. Asiatic Soc._, ii. p. 218.

[213] _Hist. of Rome_, i. pp. 177-179. _Cf._ Gunnar Landtman, _Origin of Priesthood_, p. 77.

[214] Perhaps Mr. Lang's study of "Cinderella and the Diffusion of Tales" in _Folklore_, iv. 413 _et seq._, contains the best summary of the position.

[215] Crawley, _Tree of Life_, 5, 144.

[216] Train, _Hist. of Isle of Man_, ii. 115.

[217] The ceremony is fully described in _Relics for the Curious_, i.

31; _Gentleman's Magazine_, 1784 (see _Gent. Mag. Library_, xxiii.

209), quoting from a tract first published in 1634; and see _Proc. Soc.

Antiq. Scot._, x. 669.

[218] See _Folklore_, iii. 253-264; Rhys, _Celtic Folklore_, i.

337-341.

[219] Couch, _Hist. of Polperro_, 168.

[220] I have investigated the bee cult at some length, and it will form part of my study on _Tribal Custom_ which I am now preparing for publication.

[221] Carleton, _Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry_.

[222] Mr. Eden Phillpotts mentions in one of his Cornish stories exactly this conception. Rags were offered. "Just a rag tored off a petticoat or some such thing. They hanged 'em up around about on the thorn bushes, to shaw as they'd 'a' done more for the good saint if they'd had the power."--_Lying Prophets_, 60.

[223] I gave an example of this false cla.s.sification of folklore in accord with its apparent modern a.s.sociation in my preface to _Denham Tracts_, ii. p. ix. The left-leg stocking divination is not a.s.sociated with dress, but with the left-hand as opposed to the right-hand augury, and I pointed out that the district of the Roman wall, the _locus_ of the Denham tracts, thus preserves the luck of the left, believed in by the Romans, in opposition to the luck of the right believed in by the Teutons. See Schrader, _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_, 253-7.

[224] I elaborated this plan of comparative a.n.a.lysis in a report to the British a.s.sociation at Liverpool, in 1896 (see pp. 626-656), ill.u.s.trating it from the fire customs of Britain.

[225] _Archaeological Review_, ii. 163-166; _cf._ the Rev. J. Macdonald in _Folklore_, iii. 338.

[226] _Athenaeum_, 29th December, 1883; _Archaeologia_, vol. l. p. 213.

[227] See MacCulloch's _Childhood of Fiction_, chap. xiii., where this distinction is noted, though its significance is not pointed out.

[228] Dr. Rivers has dealt with a very similar case of dual origin in connection with bride capture, see _Journ. Roy. Asiatic Soc._, 1907, p.

624.

[229] Schrader's _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_, 422.

[230] Robertson Smith's _Religion of the Semites_, 397.

[231] Monier Williams, _Indian Wisdom_, pp. 29-31. The word-equations for sacrifice are given by Schrader, _op. cit._, 130, 415.

[232] _Journ. Asiatic Soc. Bengal_, x.x.xiv. p. 7. On the influence of the aboriginal races _cf._ Monier Williams, _Indian Wisdom_, 312-313; Steel and Temple's _Wide Awake Stories_, 395; Campbell, _Tales of West Highlands_, l. p. xcviii.

[233] Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. p. 271.

[234] H. H. Wilson, _Religion of the Hindus_, ii. 289. I compare this with the custom of the cow following the coffin mentioned by Mannhardt, _Die Gotterwelt_, 320, and the soul shot or gift of a cow at death recorded by Brand, ii. 248.

[235] _Cf._ Olaus Magnus, pp. 168, 169, for the significant Norse ceremony.

[236] Spenser, _View of the State of Ireland_, 1595 (Morley reprint), 73.

CHAPTER III

PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

Although the great ma.s.s of folklore rests upon tradition and tradition alone, an important aid to tradition comes from certain psychological conditions which we must now consider. At an early stage all students of folklore will have discovered that it is not entirely to tradition that folklore is indebted for its material. There are still people capable of thinking, capable of believing, in the primitive way and in the primitive degree. Such people are of course the descendants of long ancestors of such people--people whose minds are not attuned to the civilisation around them; people, perhaps, whose minds have been to an extent stunted and kept back by the civilisation around them.

There can be no doubt that civilisation and all it demands of mankind acts as a deterrent upon the minds of some living within the civilisation zone, and belonging apparently to the civilised society.

This is the root cause of some of the lunacy and much of the crime which apparently exists as a necessary adjunct of civilisation, and it leads to various forms of thought inconsistent with the knowledge and ideas of the age. When these forms of thought are not concentrated into a new religious sect by the operation of social laws, they become what is sometimes called mere superst.i.tion, that kind of superst.i.tion which consists of using the same power of logic to a narrow set of facts which primitive man was in the habit of using, and thus repeating in this age the methods of primitive science. We cannot quite understand this in the age of railways and schools and inventions, but it will be understood better if we go back for only a generation or two to those parts of our country which are most remote from civilising influences, and obtain some information as to their condition.

This cannot be better accomplished than by referring to a Scottish author writing, in 1835, of the superst.i.tions then prevailing in Scotland. "Our whole genuine records," says Dalyell,

"teem with the most repulsive pictures of the weakness, bigotry, turbulence, and fierce and treacherous cruelty of the populace. False and corrupt innovations of literature, a compound of facts and fiction, intermingling the old and the new in heterogeneous a.s.semblage, would persuade us to think much more of our forefathers than they thought of themselves. Scotland, until the most modern date, was an utter stranger to civilisation, presenting a sterile country with a famished people, wasted by hordes of mendicants readier to seize than to solicit--void of ingenious arts and useful manufactures, possessed of little skill and learning, plunged in constant war and rapine, full of insubordination, disturbing public rule and private peace. For waving pendants, flowing draperies, brilliant colours, eagles' feathers, herons' plumes, feasts or festivals so splendid in imagination, let naked limbs, scanty, sombre garments to elude discovery by the foe, bits of heath stuck in bonnets if they had them, precarious sustenance, abject humility and all those hards.h.i.+ps inseparable from uncultivated tribes and countries be inst.i.tuted as a juster portrait of earlier generations."[237]

This statement as to Scotland is correctly drawn from social conditions which have now pa.s.sed away, but which, down to the beginning of last century, belonged to the ordinary life of the people. Thus it is recorded that

"over all the highlands of Scotland, and in this county in common with others, the practice of building what are called head-d.y.k.es was of very remote antiquity. The head-d.y.k.e was drawn across the head of a farm, when nature had marked the boundary betwixt the green pastures and that portion of hill which was covered totally or partially with heath. Above this fence the young cattle, the horses, the sheep and goats were kept in the summer months. The milch cows were fed below, except during the time the farmer's family removed to the distant grazings called sheilings. Beyond the head-d.y.k.e little attention was paid to boundaries. These enclosures exhibit the most evident traces of extreme old age."[238]

[Ill.u.s.tration: REPRESENTATION OF AN IRISH CHIEFTAIN SEATED AT DINNER, 1581 FROM DERRICKE'S "IMAGE OF IRELAND"]