Folklore as an Historical Science Part 24

EUROPEAN CONDITIONS

There are obviously conditions attaching to European culture history which do not apply elsewhere, and as obviously the most important, perhaps the only important one, which it is necessary to consider in connection with the problems of folklore is that resulting from the introduction of a non-European religion and the adoption of this religion as part of the state machinery in the several countries. This religion is, of course, Christianity. It came into the home of a decaying, corrupt, and impossible state religion wherever the Roman Empire was established and into the homes of purer and sterner faiths, faiths that had belonged to the people through all the years of conquest and settlement, migration and resettlement, wherever the empire of Rome had not become established.

Until the advent of Christianity into Britain the Celtic peoples possessed their own customs, their own religious beliefs, their own usages. Until the Anglo-Saxons came into contact with Christianity in their new settlements in England, they also possessed their own customs, usages, and beliefs. So far as Celt and Teuton were responsible for continuing or allowing to continue the still older faiths, the faiths of savagery as we have accustomed ourselves to term them, they brought these faiths also into contact with Christianity, and Christianity dealt with the problem thus presented exactly as it dealt with the Celtic and Teutonic faiths, namely, by treating all alike as pagan, all equally to be set aside or used in any fas.h.i.+on that circ.u.mstances might demand. Let it be particularly noted that Christianity did not distinguish between the various shades of paganism. All that was not Christian was pagan.

Christianity was both antagonistic to and tolerant of pagan custom and belief. In principle and purpose it was antagonistic. In practice it was tolerant where it could tolerate safely. At the centre it aimed at purity of Christian doctrine, locally it permitted pagan practices to be continued under Christian auspices. In the earliest days it set itself against all forms of idolatry and non-Christian practices; in later days, after the fifth century, says Gibbon,[444] it accepted both pagan practice and pagan ritual.

The relations.h.i.+p of Christianity to paganism is, therefore, a very complex subject, and it would not be possible in this place to work out one t.i.the of it. Nor is it needed. The two cardinal facts with which we are now concerned are the principle of antagonism and the practice of toleration. As to the former there need not be any discussion on the fact. Everywhere throughout Europe its effect is to be seen. It formed the most solid and systematic arresting force against the natural development of pagan belief and practice, and it is this fact of arrested development in pagan belief and practice which is of great importance. We can ascertain the point of stoppage, note the stage of arrested development, and trace out the subsequent history of a custom, belief, or rite so arrested. As a survival in a state of arrested development, a custom or belief is observable throughout its later history. All it does is to decay, and decay slowly, and each stage of decay may oftentimes be discovered. On the other hand, if no arrest of development had taken place there would have been no survival and no decay. The custom or belief which is not arrested by an opposing culture becomes a part of the religion or of the inst.i.tutions of the nation, and the history of its development becomes, as a rule, lost in the general advance of religion and politics--custom develops into law, belief develops into religion, rite develops into ceremonial, and tradition ceases to be the force which keeps them alive. The two cla.s.ses of custom and belief thus contrasted are of different value to the student. The one is important because it contains the germs and goes back to the origin of existing inst.i.tutions. The other is important because, having been arrested by a strong opposing force, unable to destroy it altogether, it remains as evidence of custom and belief at the time of its arrestment. It will be seen at once how far this evidence may take us. It stretches back into the remotest past. It survives in the stage at which it was arrested, not of course in the form in which it then appeared, but in the decayed form which years of existence beneath the ever-opposing forces of the established civilisation must have brought about.

These opposing forces can be detected in working order. What can be more indicative of a dual system of belief than the cry of an old Scottish peasant when he came to wors.h.i.+p at the sacred well?--"O Lord, Thou knowest that well would it be for me this day an I had stoopit my knees and my heart before Thee in spirit and in truth as often as I have stoopit them afore this well. But we maun keep the customs of our fathers." It appears over and over again in the lives of early Christian saints who were only just parting from a living pagan faith.

Thus St. Bega was the patroness of St. Bees in c.u.mberland, where she left a holy bracelet which was long an object of profound veneration; and in a prefatory statement by the compiler of a small collection of her miracles, written in the twelfth century, we learn among other things that whosoever forswore himself upon her bracelet swiftly incurred the heaviest punishment of perjury or a speedy death. It is to be observed that Beagas, the French Bague, is the Anglo-Saxon denomination for rings, and Dr. William Bell suggests that holy St.

Bega was but a personification of one of the holy rings which, having gained great hold upon the minds of the heathen c.u.mbrians, it was not politic in their first Christian missionaries wholly to subvert.[445]

These rings are, of course, the doom rings of the Scandinavian temples which are so often referred to in the Sagas.[446]

Baptism, an essentially Christian ceremony, might off-hand be supposed to contain nothing but evidence for Christianity. It might at most be expected that the details of the ceremony would contain relics of adapted pagan rites, and this we know is the case. But we can go beyond even this, and discover in the popular conception of the rite very clear indications of the early antagonism between Christianity and paganism--an antagonism which is certainly some eighteen hundred years old in this country, and though so old is still contained in the evidence of folklore.

An a.n.a.lysis of baptismal folklore shows us that its most important section is contained under the group which deals with the effect of non-baptism. In England we have it prevailing in the border counties, in Cornwall, Devons.h.i.+re, Durham, Lancas.h.i.+re, Middles.e.x, Northumberland, and Yorks.h.i.+re, and in North-East Scotland, that children joined the ranks of the fairies if they died unchristened, or that their souls wandered about in the air, restless and unhappy, until Judgment Day. Various penalties attended the condition of non-baptism, but perhaps the most significant is the Northumberland custom of burying an unbaptised babe at the feet of an adult Christian corpse--surely a relic of the old sacrifice at a burial which is indicated so frequently in the graves of prehistoric times, particularly of the long-barrow period. In Ireland we have the effect of non-baptism in a still more grim form. In the sixteenth century the rude Irish used to leave the right arms of their male children unchristened, to the intent that they might give a more ungracious and deadly blow.[447]

[Ill.u.s.tration: RITE OF BAPTISM, ON FONT AT DARENTH, KENT]

These, and their allied and variant customs, are relics, not so much of the absorption by Christian baptism of rites belonging to early paganism as of the struggle between Christianity and paganism for the mastery, of the anathemas of Christians against pagans, and of the terrible answer of the pagan. And what are we to say to it? Is it that the struggle itself has lasted all these centuries, or only its memory? My belief is that the struggle itself has lasted in reality though not in name.

But if we have been able to look through the very portals of Christianity to the regions of paganism behind, can we not boldly pa.s.s through altogether and recover from folklore much of the lost evidence of our prehistoric ancestors? I put the question in this way purposely, because it is the way which is indicated by the methods and data of folklore, and it is a question which has much to do with the different views held of the province of folklore.

I will answer by referring to the pre-baptismal rites of was.h.i.+ng. In Northumberland we meet with the a.n.a.logue of the sixteenth-century Irish practice, for there the child's right hand is left unwashed that it may gather riches better[448]--the golden coin taking the place of the ancient weapon in this as in other phases of civilisation. Not only is the water used for this purpose heated in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way by placing red-hot irons in it (_i.e._ the modern equivalent for stone-boiling), but in Yorks.h.i.+re we have the custom that the newborn infant must be placed in the arms of a maiden before any one else touches it, two practices represented exactly in the customs of the Canary Islanders, who were in the stone age of culture and are considered to be the last remnants of a race which once included Britain among its lands of occupation.[449]

The Rev. C. O'Connor, in his third letter of Columba.n.u.s, gives a very interesting statement of Irish well-wors.h.i.+p in a letter addressed to his brother, the late Owen O'Connor Don, and which shows the living antagonism between Christian and pagan belief. He says:--

"I have often enquired of your tenants what they themselves thought of their pilgrimage to their wells of Kill Orcht, Tobbar-Brighde, Tobbar-Muire, near Elphin, and Moore, near Castlereagh, where mult.i.tudes a.s.semble annually to celebrate what they, in broken English, termed Patterns; and when I pressed a very old man--Owen Hester--to state what possible advantage he expected to derive from the singular custom of frequenting in particular such wells as were contiguous to an old blasted oak, or an upright unhewn stone, and what the meaning was of the yet more singular custom of sticking rags in the branches of such trees and spitting on them, his answer, and the answer of the oldest men, was that their ancestors always did it; that it was a preservative against Geasa-Dravideacht, _i.e._ the sorceries of Druids; that their cattle was preserved by it from infectious disorders; that the davini maithe, _i.e._ the fairies, were kept in good humour by it; and so thoroughly persuaded were they of the sanct.i.ty of these pagan practices that they would travel bareheaded and barefooted from ten to twenty miles for the purpose of crawling on their knees round these wells and upright stones and oak trees westward as the sun travels, some three times, some six, some nine, and so on, in uneven numbers until their voluntary penances were completely fulfilled. The waters of Logh-Con were deemed so sacred from ancient usage that they would throw into the lake whole rolls of b.u.t.ter as a preservation for the milk of their cows against Geasa-Dravideacht."[450]

Scarcely less important than the effect of the antagonism of the Church in the production of arrested development is the effect of the toleration of the Church for pagan custom and belief. This toleration took the shape either of allowing the continuation of pagan custom and belief as a matter not affecting Christian doctrine or of actual absorption into Church practice and ritual. The story told to the full is a long and interesting one. And it still awaits the telling.

Gibbon, in a few sentences, has told us the outline.[451] Other authorities have told us small episodes. I am, of course, not concerned here with anything more than to adduce sufficient evidence to establish the fact that Christian tolerance of paganism has been one of the a.s.sistant causes for the long continuance of pagan survivals.

I shall not hesitate to begin by quoting at length a luminous pa.s.sage from Grimm's great work. In the preface to his second edition he writes as follows:--

"Oftentimes the Church prudently permitted, or could not prevent, that heathen and Christian things should here and there run into one another; the clergy themselves would not always succeed in marking off the bounds of the two religions: their private leanings might let some things pa.s.s which they found firmly rooted in the mult.i.tude. In the language, together with a stock of newly-imported Greek and Latin terms, there still remained, even for ecclesiastical use, a number of Teutonic words previously employed in heathen services, just as the names of G.o.ds stood ineradicable in the days of the week; to such words old customs would still cling silent and unnoticed and take a new lease of life. The festivals of the people present a tough material: they are so closely bound up with its habits of life that they will put up with foreign additions if only to save a fragment of festivities long loved and tried. In this way Scandinavia, probably the Goths also for a time, and the Anglo-Saxons down to a late period, retained the heathenish Yule as all Teutonic Christians did the sanct.i.ty of Easter-tide; and from these two the Yule-boar and Yule-bread, the Easter pancake, Easter-sword, Easter-fire, and Easter-dance could not be separated. As faithfully were perpetuated the name and in many cases the observances of Midsummer. New Christian feasts, especially of saints, seem purposely, as well as accidentally, to have been made to fall on heathen holidays. Churches often rose precisely where a heathen G.o.d or his sacred tree had been pulled down, and the people trod their old paths to the accustomed site; sometimes the very walls of the heathen temple became those of the church, and cases occur in which idol images still found a place in a wall of the porch, or were set up outside the door, as at Bamberg Cathedral there lie Slavic heathen figures of animals inscribed with runes. Sacred hills and fountains were rechristened after saints, to whom their sanct.i.ty was transferred; sacred woods were handed over to the newly-founded convent or the king, and even under private owners.h.i.+p did not lose their long-accustomed homage. Law usages, particularly the ordeals and oath-takings, but also the beating of bounds, consecrations, image processions, spells and formulas, while retaining their heathen character, were simply clothed in Christian forms. In some customs there was little to change: the heathen practice of sprinkling a newborn babe with water closely resembled Christian baptism; the sign of the hammer, that of the cross; and the erection of tree crosses the irmensuls and world trees of paganism."[452]

This pa.s.sage, written in 1844, has been abundantly ill.u.s.trated by the research of specialists since that date, and, of course, Mr. Frazer's monumental work will occur to every reader. But, after all, the chief authority for the action of the Church towards paganism in this country is the famous letter of Pope Gregory to the Abbot Mellitus in A.D. 601, as preserved by the historian Beda. It is worth while quoting this once again, for it is an English historical doc.u.ment of priceless value. "We have been much concerned," writes the good St.

Gregory,

"since the departure of our congregation that is with you, because we have received no account of the success of your journey. When, therefore, Almighty G.o.d shall bring you to the most reverend Bishop Augustine our brother, tell him what I have, upon mature deliberation on the affair of the English, determined upon, namely, that the temples of the idols [fana idolorum] in that nation [gente] ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled upon the said temples, let altars be erected and relics placed. For if these temples be well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the wors.h.i.+p of devils [daemonum] to the wors.h.i.+p of the true G.o.d; that the nation seeing that their temples are not destroyed may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true G.o.d may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. And because they have been used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifices to devils some solemnity must be exchanged for them on this account, so that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs whose relics are there deposited, they may build themselves huts of the boughs of trees, about those churches which have been turned to that use from temples and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting and no more offer beasts to the devil [diabolo], but kill cattle to the praise of G.o.d in their eating, and return thanks to the giver of all things for their sustenance."[453]

The church of St. Pancras at Canterbury is claimed to be one of the temples so preserved,[454] and there have survived down to our own times examples of the animal sacrifice which in early Christian days may well have been preserved by this famous edict.[455] But beyond these ill.u.s.trations of the two stated objects of Pope Gregory's letter there are innumerable additional results from such a policy,[456]

results which prove that British pagandom was not stamped out by edict or by sword, but was rather gradually borne down before the strength of the new religion--borne down and pushed into the background out of sight of the Church and the State, relegated to the cottage homes, the cattle-sheds and the cornfields, the countryside and the denizens thereof.[457]

This is where we must search for it, and I think this important element in our studies will be better understood if we turn for one moment to the results of Christian contact with earlier belief in the one country where Christianity has set up its strongest political force, namely, Italy. Dr. Middleton wrote a series of remarkable letters which tell us much on this point, but before referring to this, I wish first to quote a hitherto buried record by an impartial observer[458] in the year 1704. It is a letter written from Venice to Sir Thomas Frankland, describing the travels and observations of a journey into Italy. The traveller writes:--

"I cannot leave Itally without making some general observations upon the country in general, and first as to their religion; it differs in name only now from what it was in the time of the ancient heathen Romans.

I know this will sound very oddly with some sort of people, but compare them together and then let any reasonable man judge of the difference. The heathen Itallians had their G.o.ds for peace and for war, for plenty and poverty, for health and sickness, riches and poverty, to whom they addressed themselves and their wants; and the Christian Itallians have their patron saints for each of these things, to whom they also address according to their wants. The heathen sacrificed bulls and other beasts, and the Christian ones after the same manner a piece of bread, which a picture in the garden of Aldobrandina at Rome, painted in the time of t.i.tus Vespasian, shews by the altar and the priests' vestments to have been the same as used now. The Pantheon at Rome was dedicated by the ancients to all the G.o.ds, and by the moderns to all the saints; the temple of Castor and Pollux at Rome is now dedicated to Cosmo and Damian, also twin brothers.

The respect they pay to the Virgin Mary is far greater than what they pay to the Son, and whatever English Roman Catholics may be made to believe by their priests or impose upon us, it is certain that the devotion to the Madonnas in Itally is something more than a bare representation of the Virgin Mary when they desire her intercession. Miracles they pretend not only to be wrought by the Madonnas themselves, but there is far greater respect paid to a Madonna in one place than another, whereas if this statue were only a bare representation of the Virgin to keep them in mind of her, the respect would be equal. I visited all the famous ones, and it would fill a volume to tell you the fopperies that's said of them. That of Loretto, being what they say is the very house where the Virgin lived, is not to be described, the riches are so great, nor the devotion that's paid to the statue....

The Lady of Saronna is another famous one and very rich; she is much handsomer than she of Loretto and a whole church-full of the legend of the miracles she hath wrought. She is in great reputation, and it's thought will at last outtop the Lady of Loretto; there is another near Leghorne that I also visited called _La Madonna della Silva Nera_, to whom all Itallian s.h.i.+ps that enter that port make a present of thanks for their happy voyage, and salute her with their cannon, and most s.h.i.+ps going out give her something for her protection during their voyage. I could tire you with she at the Annunciata at Florence, she within a mile of Bollognia, for whom the magistracy have piazza'd the road all the way from her station to the city, that she may not be enc.u.mbered with sun or rain when she makes them a visit, and hundreds more that would fill a volume of fopperies that I had the curiosity to see, but it would be imposing too much upon your patience."[459]

This only confirms Dr. Middleton's conclusions, which received the approval of Gibbon, and those of later writers. "As I descended from the Alps," writes the Rev. W. H. Blunt in 1823,

"I was admonished of my entrance into Italy by a little chapel to the Madonna, built upon a rock by the roadside, and from that time till I repa.s.sed this chain of mountains I received almost hourly proof that I was wandering amongst the descendants of that people which is described by Cicero to have been the most religious of mankind. Though the mixture of religion with all the common events of life is anything but an error, yet I could not avoid regretting that, like their heathen ancestors, the modern Italians had supplied the place of our great master mover by a countless host of inferior agents."[460]

Mr. Blunt goes on to give interesting details of the close connection between the modern religious festival, ceremony, or service, and those of cla.s.sical times, and the conclusion is obvious. In modern days Dr.

Mommsen has lent the sanction of his great authority to the identification of the birthday of Christ with that of Mithra,[461]

and Mr. Leland has given such numerous identifications not only of the cults of pagan and Christian Italy, but of the G.o.d-names of ancient Rome with the saint-names or witch-names of modern times,[462] that it seems impossible to deny a place for this evidence. "It was," says Gibbon,

"the universal sentiment both of the Church and of heretics that the daemons were the authors, the patrons, and the objects of idolatry; those rebellious spirits who had been degraded from the rank of angels were still permitted to roam upon earth, to torment the bodies and to seduce the minds of sinful men. It was confessed, or at least it was imagined, that they had distributed among themselves the most important characters of Polytheism, one daemon a.s.suming the name of Jupiter, another of aesculapius, a third of Venus, and a fourth perhaps of Apollo."[463]

This, then, is recognition and adoption of pagan beliefs, not the uprooting of them. If the Roman Jupiter was a Christian daemon, his existence at all events was recognised. But even this negative way of adopting the old beliefs gave way as the Church spread further. The tribe of daemons soon included the popular fairy, elf, and goblin. And then came the positive adoption of pagan customs. Gibbon describes how the early Christians refused to decorate their doors with garlands and lamps, and to take part in the ceremonial of lifting the bride over the threshold of the house.[464] Both these customs have survived in popular folklore, in spite of the recorded action of the early Church, and it would be curious to ascertain whether they have survived by the help of the Church. We cannot answer that question of historical evidence just now, but it is a question which, in its wider aspect, as including many other items of folklore, ought to be examined into. There is no doubt, however, that by a.n.a.logy it can be answered, because we have ample evidence, if the writings of reformers may be taken as historical facts and not polemical imaginations, that many very important customs, among the richest as well as the poorest treasures of folklore, have been, so to speak, Christianised by the Church, and that the Church has taken part in and adopted non-Christian customs, the survivors of olden-time life in Europe.[465]

Now it is clear from these considerations, and from the vast ma.s.s of information which is gradually being acc.u.mulated on the subject, that not only the arresting force of Christianity but also its toleration has a.s.sisted in the preservation of pre-Christian belief and custom.

But the preservation has been in fragments only. The system which supported the older faith and might, if it had been allowed a natural growth, have produced a newer religion of its own, was completely shattered. It left no preservative force except that of tradition, the traditional instinct to do what has always been done, to believe what has always been believed. Pre-Christian belief and custom has thus become isolated beliefs and customs in survival. It has been broken up into innumerable fragments of unequal character, and containing unequal elements. It has been forced back into secret action wherever Christianity was wholly antagonistic, and hence primitive public wors.h.i.+p has tended to become local wors.h.i.+p, or household wors.h.i.+p, or even personal wors.h.i.+p, while all such wors.h.i.+p which is not the authorised Church wors.h.i.+p has tended to become superst.i.tion. Where Christianity was not wholly antagonistic, it absorbed rites, customs, and even beliefs, and these primitive survivals have taken their place in the evolution of Christian doctrine, and thus become lost to the students of Celtic and Teutonic antiquities. But even so, there are discoverable points where the dividing line between non-Christian and Christian belief has not been obliterated by the process of absorption. In all cases it is the duty of the student to note the stage of arrested development in the primitive rite, custom, or belief, whether it be caused by antagonism or by absorption. It is at this point, indeed, that the history of the survival begins. It is here that we have to turn from the polity, the religion, or cultus of a people to the belief, practices, or superst.i.tion of that portion of our nation which has not shared its progress from tribesmen to citizens, from paganism to Christianity, from vain imaginings to science and philosophy. It is from this point we have to turn from the dignity of courts, the doings of armies, and the results of commerce, to the doings, sayings, and ideas of the peasantry who cannot read, and who have depended upon tradition for all, or almost all, they know outside the formalities of law and Church.

FOOTNOTES:

[444] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ (Bury), iii. 214-15.

[445] _Royal Irish Academy_, viii. 258; _Brit. Arch. a.s.soc._ (Gloucester volume), 62.

[446] "The Story of the Ere Dwellers," Morris, _Saga Library_, ii. 8.

[447] Camden, _Britannia_, s.v. "Ireland."

[448] Henderson, _Folklore of Northern Counties_, 16.

[449] Glas, _Canary Islands_, 148.

[450] Betham, _Gael and Cymbri_, pp. 236-8.

[451] _Decline and Fall_, iii. p. 214 (edit. Bury).

[452] Grimm, _Teutonic Mythology_, by Stallybra.s.s, iii. pp. 35, 36. A pa.s.sage from Hakon's Saga, quoted by Du Chaillu in his _Viking Age_, i.

p. 464, shows that the northern peoples adopted the same measures.

[453] Beda, lib. i. cap. 30; and consult Mr. Plummer's learned notes on this (vol. ii. 57-61).

[454] Stanley, _Memorials of Canterbury_, 37-38.

[455] _Cf._ my _Ethnology in Folklore_, 30-36, 136-140. Compare St.

Patrick's dedication of pagan sacred stones to Christian purposes.--_Tripart.i.te Life of St. Patrick_, i. 107.

[456] Thus Henry of Huntingdon records that Redwald, King of the East Angles, after his conversion to Christianity, "set up altars to Christ and the devil in the same chapel" (lib. iii.).