In the various branches of the problem which will henceforward occupy

our attention, that of determining the relation of the mental condition

of savages to that of civilized men, it is an excellent guide and

safeguard to keep before our minds the theory of development in the

material arts. Throughout all the manifestations of the human intellect,

facts will be found to fall into their places on the same general lines

of evolution. The notion of the intellectual state of savages as

resulting from decay of previous high knowledge, seems to have as little

evidence in its favour as that stone celts are the degenerate successors

of Sheffield axes, or earthen grave-mounds degraded copies of Egyptian

pyramids. The study of savage and civilized life alike avail us to trace

in the early history of the human intellect, not gifts of transcendental

wisdom, but rude shrewd sense taking up the facts of common life and

shaping from them schemes of primitive philosophy. It will be seen again

and again, by examining such topics as language, mythology, custom,

religion, that savage opinion is in a more or less rudimentary state,

while the civilized mind still bears vestiges, neither few nor slight,

of a past condition from which savages represent the least, and

civilized men the greatest advance. Throughout the whole vast range of

the history of human thought and habit, while civilization has to

contend not only with survival from lower levels, but also with

degeneration within its own borders, it yet proves capable of overcoming

both and taking its own course. History within its proper field, and

ethnography over a wider range, combine to show that the institutions

which can best hold their own in the world gradually supersede the less

fit ones, and that this incessant conflict determines the general

resultant course of culture. I will venture to set forth in mythic

fashion how progress, aberration, and retrogression in the general

course of culture contrast themselves in my own mind. We may fancy

ourselves looking on Civilization, as in personal figure she traverses

the world; we see her lingering or resting by the way, and often

deviating into paths that bring her toiling back to where she had passed

by long ago; but, direct or devious, her path lies forward, and if now

and then she tries a few backward steps, her walk soon falls into a

helpless stumbling. It is not according to her nature, her feet were not

made to plant uncertain steps behind her, for both in her forward view

and in her onward gait she is of truly human type.

Footnote 3:

G. W. Earl, ‘Papuans,’ p. 79; A. R. Wallace, ‘Eastern Archipelago.’

Footnote 4:

Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 400-480.

Footnote 5:

Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ ch. xxxviii.

Footnote 6:

De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St. Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 150.

Footnote 7:

De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 15; ‘Formation des Langues,’ vol. i.

p. 49; vol. ii. p. 32.

Footnote 8:

Goguet, ‘Origine des Lois, des Arts,’ &c., vol. i. p. 88.

Footnote 9:

Whately, ‘Essay on the Origin of Civilisation,’ in Miscellaneous

Lectures, &c. His evidence is examined in detail in my ‘Early History

of Mankind,’ ch. vii. See also W. Cooke Taylor, ‘Natural History of

Society.’

Footnote 10:

Goguet, vol. iii. p. 270.

Footnote 11:

Lecret. v. 923, &c.; see Hor. Sat. i. 3.

Footnote 12:

‘Avesta,’ trans. Spiegel & Bleeck, vol. ii. p. 50.

Footnote 13:

Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 64, 128.

Footnote 14:

Niebuhr, ‘Römische Geschichte,’ part i. p. 88: ‘Nur das haben sie

übersehen, dasz kein einziges Beyspiel von einem wirklich wilden Volk

aufzuweisen ist, welches frey zur Cultur übergegangen wäre.’

Footnote 15:

Whately, ‘Essay on Origin of Civilisation.’

Footnote 16:

Ovid. Ex Ponto, iii. 8; see Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ vol. xii. p.

641.

Footnote 17:

W. C. Taylor, ‘Nat. Hist. of Society,’ vol. i. p. 202.

Footnote 18:

Fynes Moryson, ‘Itinerary;’ London, 1617, part iii. p. 162, &c.; J.

Evans in ‘Archæologia,’ vol. xli. See description of hide-boiling,

&c., among the wild Irish, about 1550, in Andrew Boorde, ‘Introduction

of Knowledge,’ ed. by F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Soc. 1870.

Footnote 19:

Buchanan, ‘Rerum Scoticarum Historia;’ Edinburgh, 1528, p. 7. See

‘Early History of Mankind,’ 2nd ed. p. 272.

Footnote 20:

Martin, ‘Description of Western Islands,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p.

639.

Footnote 21:

Barrow, ‘Mutiny of the Bounty’; W. Brodie, ‘Pitcairn’s Island.’

Footnote 22:

Wallace, ‘Malay Archipelago,’ vol. i. pp. 42, 471; vol. ii. pp. 11,

43, 48; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.,’ vol. ii. pp. 492-5; D. and C.

Livingstone, ‘Exp. to Zambesi,’ p. 45.

Footnote 23:

Southey, ‘History of Brazil,’ vol. iii. p. 422.

Footnote 24:

J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.,’ p. 189.

Footnote 25:

Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 359, see 91; Du Chaillu,

‘Ashangoland,’ p. 116; T. H. Bent, ‘Ruined Cities of Mashonaland.’

Footnote 26:

Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 51.

Footnote 27:

Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. v.

Footnote 28:

Milton and Cheadle, ‘North West Passage by Land,’ p. 241; Waitz, vol.

iii. pp. 74-6.

Footnote 29:

‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 187.

Footnote 30:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.,’ vol. i. p. 50.

Footnote 31:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 272.

Footnote 32:

See G. Campbell, ‘Ethnology of India,’ in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 1866

part ii.

Footnote 33:

J. Bailey, ‘Veddahs,’ in Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. ii. p. 278; see vol. iii.

p. 70; Knox, ‘Historical Relation of Ceylon,’ London, 1681, part iii.

chap. i. See A. Thomson, ‘Osteology of the Veddas,’ in Journ. Anthrop.

Inst. 1889, vol. xix. p. 125; L. de Zoysa, ‘Origin of Veddas,’ in

Journ. Ceylon Branch Royal Asiatic Soc., vol. vii.; B. F. Hartshorne

in Fortnightly Rev., Mar. 1876. [Note to 3rd edition.]

Footnote 34:

Journ. Ind. Archip., vol. i. pp. 295-9; vol. ii. p. 237.

Footnote 35:

For the connexion between the Aztec language and the Sonoran family

extending N. W. toward the sources of the Missouri, see Buschmann,

‘Spuren der Aztekischen Sprache im Nördlichen Mexico,’ &c., in Abh.

der Akad. der Wissensch, 1854; Berlin, 1859; also Tr. Eth. Soc., vol.

ii. p. 130. For the connexion between the Natchez and Maya languages

see Daniel G. Brinton, in ‘American Historical Magazine,’ 1867, vol.

i. p. 16; and ‘Myths of the New World,’ p. 28.

Footnote 36:

J. H. Lamprey, in Trans. of Prehistoric Congress, Norwich, 1868, p.

60; J. Linton Palmer, in Journ. Eth. Soc., vol. i. 1869.

Footnote 37:

Squier and Davis, ‘Mon. of Mississippi Valley,’ &c., in Smithsonian

Contr., vol. i. 1848; Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ chap. vii.; Waitz,

‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 72; Bartram, ‘Creek and Cherokee Ind.,’

in Tr. Amer. Ethnol. Soc., vol. iii. part i. See Petrie, ‘Inductive

Metrology,’ 1877, p. 122. [Note to 3rd ed.]

Footnote 38:

St. John, ‘Life in Forests of Far East,’ vol. ii. p. 327.

Footnote 39:

Rafn, ‘Americas Arctiske Landes Gamle Geographic,’ pl. vii., viii.

Footnote 40:

Lubbock (Lord Avebury), in ‘Report of British Association, 1867,’ p.

121.

Footnote 41:

Lyell, ‘Antiquity of Man,’ chap. xix.

Footnote 42:

Frere, in ‘Archæologia,’ 1800.

Footnote 43:

J. Evans, in ‘Archæologia,’ 1861; Lubbock,’Prehistoric Times,’ 2nd

ed., p. 335.

Footnote 44:

See ‘Early History of Mankind,’ 2nd ed. chap. viii.

Footnote 45:

Argyll, ‘Primeval Man,’ p. 129.

Footnote 46:

Lecret. De Rerum Natura, v. 1281.

Footnote 47:

See Lyell, ‘Antiquity of Man,’ 3rd ed. 1863; Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric

Times, 2nd ed. 1870; ‘Trans. of Congress of Prehistoric Archæology’

(Norwich, 1868); Stevens, ‘Flint Chips, &c.,’ 1870; Nilsson,

‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia’ (ed. by Lubbock, 1868);

Falconer, ‘Palæontological Memoirs, &c.’; Lartet and Christy,

‘Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ’ (ed. by T. R. Jones); Keller, ‘Lake Dwellings’

(Tr. and Ed. by J. E. Lee), &c., &c.

Footnote 48:

Wallace, ‘Indian Archipelago,’ vol. i. p. 357.

Footnote 49:

‘Early History of Mankind,’ pp. 192, 243, &c., &c.

Footnote 50:

Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ p. 104.

Footnote 51:

Klemm, ‘Allg. Culturwissenschaft,’ part ii., Werkzeuge und Waffen.

Footnote 52:

Lane Fox (Pitt-Rivers), ‘Lectures on Primitive Warfare,’ Journ. United

Service Inst., 1867-9.

Footnote 53:

Evans in ‘Trans. of Congress of Prehistoric Archæology’ (Norwich,

1868), p. 191; Rau in ‘Smithsonian Reports,’ 1868; Sir E. Belcher in

Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. i. p. 129.

Footnote 54:

See details in ‘Early History of Mankind,’ chap. vii.-ix.

CHAPTER III.

SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

Survival and Superstition—Children’s games—Games of

chance—Traditional sayings—Nursery

poems—Proverbs—Riddles—Significance and survival in Customs:

sneezing-formula, rite of foundation-sacrifice, prejudice against

saving a drowning man.

When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world,

disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep

its course from generation to generation, as a stream once settled in

its bed will flow on for ages. This is mere permanence of culture; and

the special wonder about it is that the change and revolution of human

affairs should have left so many of its feeblest rivulets to run so

long. On the Tatar steppes, six hundred years ago, it was an offence to

tread on the threshold or touch the ropes in entering a tent, and so it

appears to be still.[55] Eighteen centuries ago Ovid mentions the vulgar

Roman objection to marriages in May, which he not unreasonably explains

by the occurrence in that month of the funeral rites of the Lemuralia:—

‘Nec viduæ tædis eadem nec virginis apta

Tempora. Quæ nupsit, non diuturna fuit.

Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt,

Mense malas Maio nubere volgus ait.’[56]

The saying that marriages in May are unlucky survives to this day in

England, a striking example how an idea, the meaning of which has

perished for ages, may continue to exist simply because it has existed.

Now there are thousands of cases of this kind which have become, so to

speak, landmarks in the course of culture. When in the process of time

there has come general change in the condition of a people, it is usual,

notwithstanding, to find much that manifestly had not its origin in the

new state of things, but has simply lasted on into it. On the strength

of these survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization

of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an

earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are

to be found; and thus collections of such facts are to be worked as

mines of historic knowledge. In dealing with such materials, experience

of what actually happens is the main guide, and direct history has to

teach us, first and foremost, how old habits hold their ground in the

midst of a new culture which certainly would never have brought them in,

but on the contrary presses hard to thrust them out. What this direct

information is like, a single example may show. The Dayaks of Borneo

were not accustomed to chop wood, as we do, by notching out V-shaped

cuts. Accordingly, when the white man intruded among them with this

among other novelties, they marked their disgust at the innovation by

levying a fine on any of their own people who should be caught chopping

in the European fashion; yet so well aware were the native wood-cutters

that the white man’s plan was an improvement on their own, that they

would use it surreptitiously when they could trust one another not to

tell.[57] The account is twenty years old, and very likely the foreign

chop may have ceased to be an offence against Dayak conservatism, but

its prohibition was a striking instance of survival by ancestral

authority in the very teeth of common sense. Such a proceeding as this

would be usually, and not improperly, described as a superstition; and,

indeed, this name would be given to a large proportion of survivals,

such for instance as may be collected by the hundred from books of

folk-lore and occult science. But the term superstition now implies a

reproach, and though this reproach may be often cast deservedly on

fragments of a dead lower culture embedded in a living higher one, yet

in many cases it would be harsh, and even untrue. For the ethnographer’s

purpose, at any rate, it is desirable to introduce such a term as

‘survival,’ simply to denote the historical fact which the word

‘superstition’ is now spoiled for expressing. Moreover, there have to be

included as partial survivals the mass of cases where enough of the old

habit is kept up for its origin to be recognizable, though in taking a

new form it has been so adapted to new circumstances as still to hold

its place on its own merits.

Thus it would be seldom reasonable to call the children’s games of

modern Europe superstitions, though many of them are survivals, and

indeed remarkable ones. If the games of children and of grown-up people

be examined with an eye to ethnological lessons to be gained from them,

one of the first things that strikes us is how many of them are only

sportive imitations of the serious business of life. As children in

modern civilized times play at dining and driving horses and going to

church, so a main amusement of savage children is to imitate the

occupations which they will carry on in earnest a few years later, and

thus their games are in fact their lessons. The Esquimaux children’s

sports are shooting with a tiny bow and arrow at a mark, and building

little snow-huts, which they light up with scraps of lamp-wick begged

from their mothers.[58] Miniature boomerangs and spears are among the

toys of Australian children; and even as the fathers keep up as a

recognized means of getting themselves wives the practice of carrying

them off by violence, so playing at such Sabine marriage has been

noticed as one of the regular games of the little native boys and

girls.[59] Now it is quite a usual thing in the world for a game to

outlive the serious practice of which it is an imitation. The bow and

arrow is a conspicuous instance. Ancient and widespread in savage

culture, we trace this instrument through barbaric and classic life and

onward to a high mediæval level. But now, when we look on at an archery

meeting, or go by country lanes at the season when toy bows and arrows

are ‘in’ among the children, we see, reduced to a mere sportive

survival, the ancient weapon which among a few savage tribes still keeps

its deadly place in the hunt and the battle. The cross-bow, a

comparatively late and local improvement on the longbow, has disappeared

yet more utterly from practical use; but as a toy it is in full European

service, and likely to remain so. For antiquity and wide diffusion in

the world, through savage up to classic and mediæval times, the sling

ranks with the bow and arrow. But in the middle ages it fell out of use

as a practical weapon, and it was all in vain that the 15th century poet

commended the art of slinging among the exercises of a good soldier:—

‘Use eek the cast of stone, with slynge or honde:

It falleth ofte, yf other shot there none is,

Men harneysed in steel may not withstonde,

The multitude and mighty cast of stonys;

And stonys in effecte, are every where,

And slynges are not noyous for to beare.’[60]

Perhaps as serious a use of the sling as can now be pointed out without

the limits of civilization is among the herdsmen of Spanish America, who

sling so cleverly that the saying is they can hit a beast on either horn

and turn him which way they will. But the use of the rude old weapon is

especially kept up by boys at play, who are here again the

representatives of remotely ancient culture.

As games thus keep up the record of primitive warlike arts, so they

reproduce, in what are at once sports and little children’s lessons,

early stages in the history of childlike tribes of mankind. English

children delighting in the imitations of cries of animals and so forth,

and New Zealanders playing their favourite game of imitating in chorus

the saw hissing, the adze chipping, the musket roaring, and the other

instruments making their proper noises, are alike showing at its source

the imitative element so important in the formation of language.[61]

When we look into the early development of the art of counting, and see

the evidence of tribe after tribe having obtained numerals through the

primitive stage of counting on their fingers, we find a certain

ethnographic interest in the games which teach this earliest numeration.

The New Zealand game of ‘ti’ is described as played by counting on the

fingers, a number being called by one player, and he having instantly to

touch the proper finger; while in the Samoan game one player holds out

so many fingers, and his opponent must do the same instantly or lose a

point.[62] These may be native Polynesian games, or they may be our own

children’s games borrowed. In the English nursery the child learns to

say how many fingers the nurse shows, and the appointed formula of the

game is ‘_Buck, Buck_, how many horns do I hold up?’ The game of one

holding up fingers and the others holding up fingers to match is

mentioned in Strutt. We may see small schoolboys in the lanes playing at

the guessing-game, where one gets on another’s back and holds up

fingers, the other must guess how many. It is interesting to notice the

wide distribution and long permanence of these trifles in history when

we read the following passage from Petronius Arbiter, written in the

time of Nero:—‘Trimalchio, not to seem moved by the loss, kissed the boy

and bade him get up on his back. Without delay the boy climbed on

horseback on him, and slapped him on the shoulders with his hand,

laughing and calling out ‘_bucca, bucca_, quot sunt hic?’[63] The simple

counting-games played with the fingers must not be confounded with the

addition-game, where each player throws out a hand, and the sum of all

the fingers shown has to be called, the successful caller scoring a

point; each should call the total before he sees his adversary’s hand,

so that the skill lies especially in shrewd guessing. This game affords

endless amusement to Southern Europe, where it is known in Italian as

‘morra,’ and in French as ‘mourre,’ and it is popular in China under the

name of _ts’ai mei_, or ‘guess how many!’ So peculiar a game would

hardly have been invented twice over in Europe and Asia, and as the

Chinese term does not appear to be ancient, we may take it as likely

that the Portuguese merchants introduced the game into China, as they

certainly did into Japan. The ancient Egyptians, as their sculptures

show, used to play at some kind of finger-game, and the Romans had their

finger-flashing, ‘micare digitis,’ at which butchers used to gamble with

their customers for bits of meat. It is not clear whether these were

morra or some other games.[64]

When Scotch lads, playing at the game of ‘tappie-tousie,’ take one

another by the forelock and say, ‘Will ye be my man?’[65] they know

nothing of the old symbolic manner of receiving a bondman which they are

keeping up in survival. The wooden drill for making fire by friction,

which so many rude or ancient races are known to have used as their

common household instrument, and which lasts on among the modern Hindus

as the time-honoured sacred means of lighting the pure sacrificial

flame, has been found surviving in Switzerland as a toy among the

children, who made fire with it in sport, much as Equimaux would have

done in earnest.[66] In Gothland it is on record that the ancient

sacrifice of the wild boar has actually been carried on into modern time

in sportive imitation, by lads in masquerading clothes with their faces

blackened and painted, while the victim was personated by a boy rolled

up in furs and placed upon a seat, with a tuft of pointed straws in his

mouth to imitate the bristles of the boar.[67] One innocent little

child’s sport of our own time is strangely mixed up with an ugly story

of about a thousand years ago. The game in question is thus played in

France:—The children stand in a ring, one lights a spill of paper and

passes it on to the next, saying, ‘petit bonhomme vit encore,’ and so on

round the ring, each saying the words and passing on the flame as

quickly as may be, for the one in whose hands the spill goes out has to

pay a forfeit, and it is then proclaimed that ‘petit bonhomme est mort.’

Grimm mentions a similar game in Germany, played with a burning stick,

and Halliwell gives the nursery rhyme which is said with it when it is

played in England:—

‘Jack’s alive and in very good health,

If he dies in your hand you must look to yourself.’

Now, as all readers of Church history know, it used to be a favourite

engine of controversy for the adherents of an established faith to

accuse heretical sects of celebrating hideous orgies as the mysteries of

their religion. The Pagans told these stories of the Jews, the Jews told

them of the Christians, and Christians themselves reached a bad eminence

in the art of slandering religious opponents whose moral life often

seems in fact to have been exceptionally pure. The Manichæans were an

especial mark for such aspersions, which were passed on to a sect

considered as their successors—the Paulicians, whose name reappears in

the middle ages, in connexion with the Cathari. To these latter,

apparently from an expression in one of their religious formulas, was

given the name of Boni Homines, which became a recognized term for the

Albigenses. It is clear that the early Paulicians excited the anger of

the orthodox by objecting to sacred images, and calling those who

venerated them idolaters; and about A.D. 700, John of Osun, Patriarch of

Armenia, wrote a diatribe against the sect, urging accusations of the

regular anti-Manichæan type, but with a peculiar feature which brings

his statement into the present singular connexion. He declares that they

blasphemously call the orthodox ‘image-worshippers;’ that they

themselves worship the sun; that, moreover, they mix wheaten flour with

the blood of infants and therewith celebrate their communion, and ‘when

they have slain by the worst of deaths a boy, the first-born of his

mother, thrown from hand to hand among them by turns, they venerate him

in whose hand the child expires, as having attained to the first dignity

of the sect.’ To explain the correspondence of these atrocious details

with the nursery sport, it is perhaps the most likely supposition, not

that the game of ‘Petit Bonhomme’ keeps up a recollection of a legend of

the Boni Homines, but that the game was known to the children of the

eighth century much as it is now, and that the Armenian Patriarch simply

accused the Paulicians of playing at it with live babes.[68]

It may be possible to trace another interesting group of sports as

survivals from a branch of savage philosophy, once of high rank though

now fallen into merited decay. Games of chance correspond so closely

with arts of divination belonging already to savage culture, that there

is force in applying to several such games the rule that the serious

practice comes first, and in time may dwindle to the sportive survival.

To a modern educated man, drawing lots or tossing up a coin is an appeal

to chance, that is, to ignorance; it is committing the decision of a

question to a mechanical process, itself in no way unnatural or even

extraordinary, but merely so difficult to follow that no one can say

beforehand what will come of it. But we also know that this scientific

doctrine of chance is not that of early civilization, which has little

in common with the mathematician’s theory of probabilities, but much in

common with such sacred divination as the choice of Matthias by lot as a

twelfth apostle, or, in a later age, the Moravian Brethren’s rite of

choosing wives for their young men by casting lots with prayer. It was

to no blind chance that the Maoris looked when they divined by throwing

up lots to find a thief among a suspected company;[69] or the Guinea

negroes when they went to the fetish-priest, who shuffled his bundle of

little strips of leather and gave his sacred omen.[70] The crowd with

uplifted hands pray to the gods, when the heroes cast lots in the cap of

Atreides Agamemnon, to know who shall go forth to do battle with Hektor

and help the well-greaved Greeks.[71] With prayer to the gods, and

looking up to heaven, the German priest or father, as Tacitus relates,

drew three lots from among the marked fruit-tree twigs scattered on a

pure white garment, and interpreted the answer from their signs.[72] As

in ancient Italy oracles gave responses by graven lots,[73] so the

modern Hindus decide disputes by casting lots in front of a temple,

appealing to the gods with cries of ‘Let justice be shown! Show the

innocent!’[74]

The uncivilized man thinks that lots or dice are adjusted in their fall

with reference to the meaning he may choose to attach to it, and

especially he is apt to suppose spiritual beings standing over the

diviner or the gambler, shuffling the lots or turning up the dice to

make them give their answers. This view held its place firmly in the

middle ages, and later in history we still find games of chance looked

on as results of supernatural operation. The general change from

mediæval to modern notions in this respect is well shown in a remarkable

work published in 1619, which seems to have done much toward bringing

the change about. Thomas Gataker, a Puritan minister, in his treatise

‘Of the Nature and Use of Lots,’ states, in order to combat them, the

following among the current objections made against games of

chance:—‘Lots may not be used but with great reverence, because the

disposition of them commeth immediately from God’ ... ‘the nature of a

Lot, which is affirmed to bee a worke of Gods speciall and immediate

providence, a sacred oracle, a divine judgement or sentence: the light

use of it therefore to be an abuse of Gods name; and so a sinne against

the third Commandement.’ Gataker, in opposition to this, argues that ‘to

expect the issue and event of it, as by ordinarie meanes from God, is

common to all actions: to expect it by an immediate and extraordinarie

worke is no more lawfull here than elsewhere, yea is indeed mere

superstition.’[75] It took time, however, for this opinion to become

prevalent in the educated world. After a lapse of forty years, Jeremy

Taylor could still bring out a remnant of the older notion, in the

course of a generally reasonable argument in favour of games of chance

when played for refreshment and not for money. ‘I have heard,’ he says,

‘from them that have skill in such things, there are such strange

chances, such promoting of a hand by fancy and little arts of geomancy,

such constant winning on one side, such unreasonable losses on the

other, and these strange contingencies produce such horrible effects,

that it is not improbable that God hath permitted the conduct of such

games of chance to the devil, who will order them so where he can do

most mischief; but, without the instrumentality of money, he could do

nothing at all.’[76] With what vitality the notion of supernatural

interference in games of chance even now survives in Europe, is well

shown by the still flourishing arts of gambler’s magic. The folk-lore of

our own day continues to teach that a Good Friday’s egg is to be carried

for luck in gaming, and that a turn of one’s chair will turn one’s

fortune; the Tyrolese knows the charm for getting from the devil the

gift of winning at cards and dice; there is still a great sale on the

continent for books which show how to discover, from dreams, good

numbers for the lottery; and the Lusatian peasant will even hide his

lottery-tickets under the altar-cloth that they may receive the blessing

with the sacrament, and so stand a better chance of winning.[77]

Arts of divination and games of chance are so similar in principle, that

the very same instrument passes from one use to the other. This appears

in the accounts, very suggestive from this point of view, of the

Polynesian art of divination by spinning the ‘niu’ or coco-nut. In the

Tongan Islands, in Mariner’s time, the principal purpose for which this

was solemnly performed was to enquire if a sick person would recover;

prayer was made aloud to the patron god of the family to direct the nut,

which was then spun, and its direction at rest indicated the intention

of the god. On other occasions, when the coco-nut was merely spun for

amusement, no prayer was made, and no credit given to the result. Here

the serious and the sportive use of this rudimentary teetotum are found

together. In the Samoan Islands, however, at a later date, the Rev. G.

Turner finds the practice passed into a different stage. A party sit in

a circle, the coco-nut is spun in the middle, and the oracular answer is

according to the person towards whom the monkey-face of the fruit is

turned when it stops; but whereas formerly the Samoans used this as an

art of divination to discover thieves, now they only keep it up as a way

of casting lots, and as a game of forfeits.[78] It is in favour of the

view of serious divination being the earlier use, to notice that the New

Zealanders, though they have no coco-nuts, keep up a trace of the time

when their ancestors in the tropical islands had them and divined with

them; for it is the well-known Polynesian word ‘niu,’ i.e. coco-nut,

which is still retained in use among the Maoris for other kinds of

divination, especially that performed with sticks. Mr. Taylor, who

points out this curiously neat piece of ethnological evidence, records

another case to the present purpose. A method of divination was to clap

the hands together while a proper charm was repeated; if the fingers

went clear in, it was favourable, but a check was an ill omen; on the

question of a party crossing the country in war-time, the locking of all

the fingers, or the stoppage of some or all, were naturally interpreted

to mean clear passage, meeting a travelling party, or being stopped

altogether. This quaint little symbolic art of divination seems now only

to survive as a game; it is called ‘puni-puni.’[79] A similar connexion

between divination and gambling is shown by more familiar instruments.

The hucklebones or astragali were used in divination in ancient Rome,

being converted into rude dice by numbering the four sides, and even

when the Roman gambler used the tali for gambling, he would invoke a god

or his mistress before he made his throw.[80] Such implements are now

mostly used for play, but, nevertheless, their use for divination was by

no means confined to the ancient world, for hucklebones are mentioned in

the 17th century among the fortune-telling instruments which young girls

divined for husbands with,[81] and Negro sorcerers still throw dice as a

means of detecting thieves.[82] Lots serve the two purposes equally

well. The Chinese gamble by lots for cash and sweetmeats, whilst they

also seriously take omens by solemn appeals to the lots kept ready for

the purpose in the temples, and professional diviners sit in the

market-places, thus to open the future to their customers.[83]

Playing-cards are still in European use for divination. That early sort

known as ‘tarots’ which the French dealer’s license to sell ‘cartes et

tarots’ still keeps in mind, is said to be preferred by fortune-tellers

to the common kind; for the tarot-pack, with its more numerous and

complex figures, lends itself to a greater variety of omens. In these

cases, direct history fails to tell us whether the use of the instrument

for omen or play came first. In this respect, the history of the Greek

‘kottabos’ is instructive. This art of divination consisted in flinging

wine out of a cup into a metal basin some distance off without spilling

any, the thrower saying or thinking his mistress’s name, and judging

from the clear or dull splash of the wine on the metal what his fortune

in love would be; but in time the magic passed out of the process, and

it became a mere game of dexterity played for a prize.[84] If this be a

typical case, and the rule be relied on that the serious use precedes

the playful, then games of chance may be considered survivals in

principle or detail from corresponding processes of magic—as divination

in sport made gambling in earnest.

Seeking more examples of the lasting on of fixed habits among mankind,

let us glance at a group of time-honoured traditional sayings, old saws

which have a special interest as cases of survival. Even when the real

signification of these phrases has faded out of men’s minds, and they

have sunk into sheer nonsense, or have been overlaid with some modern

superficial meaning, still the old formulas are handed on, often gaining

more in mystery than they lose in sense. We may hear people talk of

‘buying a pig in a poke,’ whose acquaintance with English does not

extend to knowing what a poke is. And certainly those who wish to say

that they have a great mind to something, and who express themselves by

declaring that they have ‘a month’s mind’ to it, can have no conception

of the hopeless nonsense they are making of the old term of the ‘month’s

mind,’ which was really the monthly service for a dead man’s soul,

whereby he was kept in mind or remembrance. The proper sense of the

phrase ‘sowing his wild oats’ seems generally lost in our modern use of

it. No doubt it once implied that these ill weeds would spring up in

later years, and how hard it would then be to root them out. Like the

enemy in the parable, the Scandinavian Loki, the mischief-maker, is

proverbially said in Jutland to sow his oats (‘nu saaer Lokken sin

havre’), and the name of ‘Loki’s oats’ (Lokeshavre) is given in Danish

to the wild oats (avena fatua).[85] Sayings which have their source in

some obsolete custom or tale, of course lie especially open to such

ill-usage. It has become mere English to talk of an ‘unlicked cub’ who

‘wants licking into shape,’ while few remember the explanation of these

phrases from Pliny’s story that bears are born as eyeless, hairless,

shapeless lumps of white flesh, and have afterwards to be licked into

form.[86]

Again, in relics of old magic and religion, we have sometimes to look

for a deeper sense in conventional phrases than they now carry on their

face, or for a real meaning in what now seems nonsense. How an

ethnographical record may become embodied in a popular saying, a Tamil

proverb now current in South India will show perfectly. On occasions

when A hits B, and C cries out at the blow, the bystanders will say,

‘’Tis like a Koravan eating asafœtida when his wife lies in!’ Now a

Koravan belongs to a low race in Madras, and is defined as ‘gipsy,

wanderer, ass-driver, thief, eater of rats, dweller in mat tents,

fortune-teller, and suspected character;’ and the explanation of the

proverb is, that whereas native women generally eat asafœtida as

strengthening medicine after childbirth, among the Koravans it is the

husband who eats it to fortify himself on the occasion. This, in fact,

is a variety of the world-wide custom of the ‘couvade,’ where at

childbirth the husband undergoes medical treatment, in many cases being

put to bed for days. It appears that the Koravans are among the races

practising this quaint custom, and that their more civilized Tamil

neighbours, struck by its oddity, but unconscious of its now-forgotten

meaning, have taken it up into a proverb.[87] Let us now apply the same

sort of ethnographical key to dark sayings in our own modern language.

The maxim, a ‘hair of the dog that bit you’ was originally neither a

metaphor nor a joke, but a matter-of-fact recipe for curing the bite of

a dog; one of the many instances of the ancient homœopathic doctrine,

that what hurts will also cure: it is mentioned in the Scandinavian

Edda, ‘Dog’s hair heals dog’s bite.’[88] The phrase ‘raising the wind’

now passes as humorous slang, but it once, in all seriousness, described

one of the most dreaded of the sorcerer’s arts, practised especially by

the Finland wizards, of whose uncanny power over the weather our sailors

have not to this day forgotten their old terror. The ancient ceremony or

ordeal of passing through a fire or leaping over burning brands has been

kept up so vigorously in the British Isles, that Jamieson’s derivation

of the phrase ‘to haul over the coals’ from this rite appears in no way

far-fetched. It is not long since an Irishwoman in New York was tried

for killing her child; she had made it stand on burning coals to find

out whether it was really her own or a changeling.[89] The English nurse

who says to a fretful child, ‘You got out of bed wrong foot foremost

this morning,’ seldom or never knows the meaning of her saying; but this

is still plain in the German folk-lore rule, that to get out of bed left

foot first will bring a bad day,[90] one of the many examples of that

simple association of ideas which connects right and left with good and

bad respectively. To conclude, the phrase ‘cheating the devil’ seems to

belong to that familiar series of legends where a man makes a compact

with the fiend, but at the last moment gets off scot-free by the

interposition of a saint, or by some absurd evasion—such as whistling

the gospel he has bound himself not to say, or refusing to complete his

bargain at the fall of the leaf, on the plea that the sculptured leaves

in the church are still on their boughs. One form of the mediæval

compact was for the demon, when he had taught his black art to a class

of scholars, to seize one of them for his professional fee, by letting

them all run for their lives and catching the last—a story obviously

connected with another popular saying: ‘devil take the hindmost.’ But

even at this game the stupid fiend may be cheated, as is told in the

folk-lore of Spain and Scotland, in the legends of the Marqués de

Villano and the Earl of Southesk, who attended the Devil’s magic schools

at Salamanca and Padua. The apt scholar only leaves the master his

shadow to clutch as following hindmost in the race, and with this

unsubstantial payment the demon must needs be satisfied, while the

new-made magician goes forth free, but ever after shadowless.[91]

It seems a fair inference to think folk-lore nearest to its source is

where it has its highest place and meaning. Thus, if some old rhyme or

saying has in one place a solemn import in philosophy or religion, while

elsewhere it lies at the level of the nursery, there is some ground for

treating the serious version as the more original, and the playful one

as its mere lingering survival. The argument is not safe, but yet is not

to be quite overlooked. For instance, there are two poems kept in

remembrance among the modern Jews, and printed at the end of their book

of Passover services in Hebrew and English. One is that known as חד גדיא

(Chad gadyâ): it begins, ‘A kid, a kid, my father bought for two pieces

of money;’ and it goes on to tell how a cat came and ate the kid, and a

dog came and bit the cat, and so on to the end.—‘Then came the Holy One,

blessed be He! and slew the angel of death, who slew the butcher, who

killed the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burnt

the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that

my father bought for two pieces of money, a kid, a kid.’ This

composition is in the ‘Sepher Haggadah,’ and is looked on by some Jews

as a parable concerning the past and future of the Holy Land. According

to one interpretation, Palestine, the kid, is devoured by Babylon the

cat; Babylon is overthrown by Persia, Persia by Greece, Greece by Rome,

till at last the Turks prevail in the land; but the Edomites (i.e. the

nations of Europe) shall drive out the Turks, the angel of death shall

destroy the enemies of Israel, and his children shall be restored under

the rule of Messiah. Irrespectively of any such particular

interpretation, the solemnity of the ending may incline us to think that

we really have the composition here in something like its first form,

and that it was written to convey a mystic meaning. If so, then it

follows that our familiar nursery tale of the old woman who couldn’t get

her kid (or pig) over the stile, and wouldn’t get home till midnight,

must be considered a broken-down adaptation of this old Jewish poem. The

other composition is a counting-poem, and begins thus:

‘Who knoweth one? I (saith Israel) know One:

One is God, who is over heaven and earth.

Who knoweth two? I (saith Israel) know two:

Two tables of the covenant; but One is our God who is over the

heavens and the earth.’

(And so forth, accumulating up to the last verse, which is—)

‘Who knoweth thirteen? I (saith Israel) know thirteen: Thirteen

divine attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ten commandments,

nine months preceding childbirth, eight days preceding circumcision,

seven days of the week, six books of the Mishnah, five books of the

Law, four matrons, three patriarchs, two tables of the covenant; but

One is our God who is over the heavens and the earth.’

This is one of a family of counting-poems, apparently held in much

favour in mediæval Christian times, for they are not yet quite forgotten

in country places. An old Latin version runs: ‘Unus est Deus,’ &c., and

one of the still-surviving English forms begins, ‘One’s One all alone,

and evermore shall be so,’ thence reckoning on as far as ‘Twelve the

twelve apostles.’ Here both the Jewish and Christian forms are or have

been serious, so it is possible that the Jew may have imitated the

Christian, but the nobler form of the Hebrew poem here again gives it a

claim to be thought the earlier.[92]

The old proverbs brought down by long inheritance into our modern talk

are far from being insignificant in themselves, for their wit is often

as fresh, and their wisdom as pertinent, as it ever was. Beyond these

practical qualities, proverbs are instructive for the place in

ethnography which they occupy. Their range in civilization is limited;

they seem scarcely to belong to the lowest tribes, but appear first in a

settled form among some of the higher savages. The Fijians, who were

found a few years since living in what archæologists might call the

upper Stone Age, have some well-marked proverbs. They laugh at want of

forethought by the saying that ‘The Nakondo people cut the mast first’

(i.e. before they had built the canoe); and when a poor man looks

wistfully at what he cannot buy, they say, ‘Becalmed, and looking at the

fish.’[93] Among the list of the New Zealanders’ ‘whakatauki,’ or

proverbs, one describes a lazy glutton: ‘Deep throat, but shallow

sinews;’ another says that the lazy often profit by the work of the

industrious: ‘The large chips made by Hardwood fall to the share of

Sit-still;’ a third moralizes that ‘A crooked part of a stem of toetoe

can be seen; but a crooked part in the heart cannot be seen.’[94] Among

the Basutos of South Africa, ‘Water never gets tired of running’ is a

reproach to chatterers; ‘Lions growl while they are eating,’ means that

there are people who never will enjoy anything; ‘The sowing-month is the

headache-month,’ describes those lazy folks who make excuses when work

is to be done; ‘The thief eats thunderbolts,’ means that he will bring

down vengeance from heaven on himself.[95] West African nations are

especially strong in proverbial philosophy; so much so that Captain

Burton amused himself through the rainy season at Fernando Po in

compiling a volume of native proverbs,[96] among which there are

hundreds at about as high an intellectual level as those of Europe. ‘He

fled from the sword and hid in the scabbard,’ is as good as our ‘Out of

the frying-pan into the fire;’ and ‘He who has only his eyebrow for a

cross-bow can never kill an animal,’ is more picturesque, if less terse

than our ‘Hard words break no bones.’ The old Buddhist aphorism, that

‘He who indulges in enmity is like one who throws ashes to windward,

which come back to the same place and cover him all over,’ is put with

less prose and as much point in the negro saying, ‘Ashes fly back in the

face of him who throws them.’ When someone tries to settle an affair in

the absence of the people concerned, the negroes will object that ‘You

can’t shave a man’s head when he is not there,’ while, to explain that

the master is not to be judged by the folly of his servant, they say,

‘The rider is not a fool because the horse is.’ Ingratitude is alluded

to in ‘The sword knows not the head of the smith’ (who made it), and yet

more forcibly elsewhere, ‘When the calabash had saved them (in the

famine), they said, let us cut it for a drinking-cup.’ The popular

contempt for poor men’s wisdom is put very neatly in the maxim, ‘When a

poor man makes a proverb it does not spread,’ while the very mention of

making a proverb as something likely to happen, shows a land where

proverb-making is still a living art. Transplanted to the West Indies,

the African keeps up this art, as witness these sayings: ‘Behind dog it

is dog, but before dog it is Mr. Dog;’ and ‘Toute cabinette tini

maringouin’—‘Every cabin has its mosquito.’

The proverb has not changed its character in the course of history; but

has retained from first to last a precisely definite type. The

proverbial sayings recorded among the higher nations of the world are to

be reckoned by tens of thousands, and have a large and well-known

literature of their own. But though the range of existence of proverbs

extends into the highest levels of civilization, this is scarcely true

of their development. At the level of European culture in the middle

ages, they have indeed a vast importance in popular education, but their

period of actual growth seems already at an end. Cervantes raised the

proverb-monger’s craft to a pitch it never surpassed; but it must not be

forgotten that the incomparable Sancho’s wares were mostly heirlooms;

for proverbs were even then sinking to remnants of an earlier condition

of society. As such, they survive among ourselves, who go on using much

the same relics of ancestral wisdom as came out of the squire’s

inexhaustible budget, old saws not to be lightly altered or made anew in

our changed modern times. We can collect and use the old proverbs, but

making new ones has become a feeble, spiritless imitation, like our

attempts to invent new myths or new nursery rhymes.

Riddles start near proverbs in the history of civilization, and they

travel on long together, though at last towards different ends. By

riddles are here meant the old-fashioned problems with a real answer

intended to be discovered, such as the typical enigma of the Sphinx, but

not the modern verbal conundrums set in the traditional form of question

and answer, as a way of bringing in a jest à propos of nothing. The

original kind, which may be defined as ‘sense-riddles,’ are found at

home among the upper savages, and range on into the lower and middle

civilization; and while their growth stops at this level, many ancient

specimens have lasted on in the modern nursery and by the cottage

fireside. There is a plain reason why riddles should belong only to the

higher grades of savagery; their making requires a fair power of ideal

comparison, and knowledge must have made considerable advance before

this process could become so familiar as to fall from earnest into

sport. At last, in a far higher state of culture, riddles begin to be

looked on as trifling, their growth ceases, and they only survive in

remnants for children’s play. Some examples chosen among various races,

from savagery upwards, will show more exactly the place in mental

history which the riddle occupies.

The following are specimens from a collection of Zulu riddles,

recorded with quaintly simple native comments on the philosophy of the

matter:—_Q._ ‘Guess ye some men who are many and form a row; they

dance the wedding-dance, adorned in white hip-dresses?’ _A._ ‘The

teeth; we call them men who form a row, for the teeth stand like men

who are made ready for a wedding-dance, that they may dance well. When

we say, they are “adorned with white hip-dresses,” we put that in,

that people may not at once think of teeth, but be drawn away from

them by thinking, “It is men who put on white hip-dresses,” and

continually have their thoughts fixed on men,’ &c. _Q._ ‘Guess ye a

man who does not lie down at night: he lies down in the morning until

the sun sets; he then awakes, and works all night; he does not work by

day; he is not seen when he works?’ _A._ ‘The closing-poles of the

cattle-pen.’ _Q._ ‘Guess ye a man whom men do not like to laugh, for

it is known that his laughter is a very great evil, and is followed by

lamentation, and an end of rejoicing. Men weep, and trees, and grass;

and everything is heard weeping in the tribe where he laughs; and they

say the man has laughed who does not usually laugh?’ _A._ ‘Fire. It is

called a man that what is said may not be at once evident, it being

concealed by the word “man.” Men say many things, searching out the

meaning in rivalry, and missing the mark. A riddle is good when it is

not discernible at once,’ &c.[97] Among the Basutos, riddles are a

recognized part of education, and are set like exercises to a whole

company of puzzled children. _Q._ ‘Do you know what throws itself from

the mountain top without being broken?’ _A._ ‘A waterfall.’ _Q._

‘There is a thing that travels fast without legs or wings, and no

cliff, nor river, nor wall can stop it?’ _A._ ‘The voice.’ _Q._ ‘Name

the ten trees with ten flat stones on the top of them.’ _A._ ‘The

fingers.’ _Q._ ‘Who is the little immovable dumb boy who is dressed up

warm in the day and left naked at night?’ _A._ ‘The bed-clothes’

peg.’[98] From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is an example: _Q._

‘My hen has laid among thorns?’ _A._ ‘A pineapple.’[99] From West

Africa, this Yoruba one: ‘A long slender trading woman who never gets

to market?’ _A._ ‘A canoe (it stops at the landing-place).’[100] In

Polynesia, the Samoan Islanders are given to riddles. _Q._ ‘There are

four brothers, who are always bearing about their father?’ _A._ ‘The

Samoan pillow,’ which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four

legs. _Q._ ‘A white-headed man stands above the fence, and reaches to

the heavens?’ _A._ ‘The smoke of the oven.’ _Q._ ‘A man who stands

between two ravenous fish?’ _A._ ‘The tongue.’[101] (There is a Zulu

riddle like this, which compares the tongue to a man living in the

midst of enemies fighting.) The following are old Mexican enigmas:

_Q._ ‘What are the ten stones one has at his sides?’ _A._ ‘The

finger-nails.’ _Q._ ‘What is it we get into by three parts and out of

by one?’ _A._ ‘A shirt.’ _Q._ ‘What goes through a valley and drags

its entrails after it?’ _A._ ‘A needle.’[102]

These riddles found among the lower races do not differ at all in nature

from those that have come down, sometimes modernized in the setting,

into the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, ‘What

is the dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night?’

(the stars.) Our English riddle of the pair of tongs: ‘Long legs,

crooked thighs, little head, and no eyes,’ is primitive enough to have

been made by a South Sea Islander. The following is on the same theme as

one of the Zulu riddles: ‘A flock of white sheep, On a red hill; Here

they go, there they go; Now they stand still?’ Another is the very

analogue of one of the Aztec specimens: ‘Old Mother Twitchett had but

one eye, And a long tail which she let fly; And every time she went over

a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap?’

So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologic stage of

thought, that any poet’s simile, if not too far-fetched, needs only

inversion to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun

Saptâsva, i.e. ‘seven-horsed,’ while, with the same thought, the old

German riddle asks, ‘What is the chariot drawn by the seven white and

seven black horses?’ (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of

the week.[103]) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day

and Night, who gave birth each to the other to be born of her again:

Εἰσὶ κασίγνηται διτταί, ὧν ἡ μία τίκτει

Τὴν ἑτέραν, αὐτὴ δὲ τεκοῦσ ὑπὸ τῆσδε τεκνοῦται;

and the enigma of Kleoboulos, with its other like fragments of

rudimentary mythology:

Εἷς ὀ πατήρ, παῖδες δὲ δυώδεκα· τῶν δέ γ’ ἑκάστῳ

Παῖδες ἔασι τριήκοντ’ ἄνδιχα εἷδος ἔχουσαι·

Ηι μὲν λευκαὶ ἔασιν ἰδεῖν, ᾖ δ’ αὗτε μέλαιναι·

Ἀθάνατοι δέ τ’ ἐοῦσαι ἀποφθίνουσιν ἄπασαι.

‘One is the father, and twelve the children, and, born unto each

one,

Maidens thirty, whose form in twain is parted asunder,

White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other,

All immortal in being, yet doomed to dwindle and perish.’[104]

Such questions as these may be fairly guessed now as in old times, and

must be distinguished from that scarcer class which require the

divination of some unlikely event to solve them. Of such the typical

example is Samson’s riddle, and there is an old Scandinavian one like

it. The story is that Gestr found a duck sitting on her nest in an ox’s

horned skull, and thereupon propounded a riddle, describing with

characteristic Northman’s metaphor the ox with its horns fancied as

already made into drinking-horns. The following translation does not

exaggerate the quaintness of the original:—‘Joying in children the

bill-goose grew, And her building-timbers together drew; The biting

grass-shearer screened her bed, With the maddening drink-stream

overhead.’[105] Many of the old oracular responses are puzzles of

precisely this kind. Such is the story of the Delphic oracle, which

ordered Temenos to find a man with three eyes to guide the army, which

injunction he fulfilled by meeting a one-eyed man on horseback.[106] It

is curious to find this idea again in Scandinavia, where Odin sets King

Heidrek a riddle, ‘Who are they two that fare to the Thing with three

eyes, ten feet, and one tail?’ the answer being, the one-eyed Odin

himself on his eight-footed horse Sleipnir.[107]

The close bearing of the doctrine of survival on the study of manners

and customs is constantly coming into view in ethnographic research. It

seems scarcely too much to assert, once for all, that meaningless

customs must be survivals, that they had a practical, or at least

ceremonial, intention when and where they first arose, but are now

fallen into absurdity from having been carried on into a new state of

society, where their original sense has been discarded. Of course, new

customs introduced in particular ages may be ridiculous or wicked, but

as a rule they have discernible motives. Explanations of this kind, by

recourse to some forgotten meaning, seem on the whole to account best

for obscure customs which some have set down to mere outbreaks of

spontaneous folly. A certain Zimmermann, who published a heavy

‘Geographical History of Mankind’ in the 18th century, remarks as

follows on the prevalence of similar nonsensical and stupid customs in

distant countries:—‘For if two clever heads may, each for himself, hit

upon a clever invention or discovery, then it is far likelier,

considering the much larger total of fools and blockheads, that like

fooleries should be given to two far-distant lands. If, then, the

inventive fool be likewise a man of importance and influence, as is,

indeed, an extremely frequent case, then both nations adopt a similar

folly, and then, centuries after, some historian goes through it to

extract his evidence for the derivation of these two nations one from

the other.’[108]

Strong views as to the folly of mankind seem to have been in the air

about the time of the French Revolution, Lord Chesterfield was no doubt

an extremely different person from our German philosopher, but they were

quite at one as to the absurdity of customs. Advising his son as to the

etiquette of courts, the Earl writes thus to him:—‘For example, it is

respectful to bow to the King of England, it is disrespectful to bow to

the King of France; it is the rule to courtesy to the Emperor; and the

prostration of the whole body is required by Eastern Monarchs. These are

established ceremonies, and must be complied with; but why they were

established, I defy sense and reason to tell us. It is the same among

all ranks, where certain customs are received, and must necessarily be

complied with, though by no means the result of sense and reason. As for

instance, the very absurd, though almost universal custom of drinking

people’s healths. Can there be anything in the world less relative to

any other man’s health, than my drinking a glass of wine? Common sense,

certainly, never pointed it out, but yet common sense tells me I must

conform to it.’[109] Now, though it might be difficult enough to make

sense of the minor details of court etiquette, Lord Chesterfield’s

example from it of the irrationality of mankind is a singularly unlucky

one. Indeed, if any one were told to set forth in few words the

relations of the people to their rulers in different states of society,

he might answer that men grovel on their faces before the King of Siam,

kneel on one knee or uncover before a European monarch, and shake the

hand of the President of the United States as though it were a

pump-handle. These are ceremonies at once intelligible and significant.

Lord Chesterfield is more fortunate in his second instance, for the

custom of drinking healths is really of obscure origin. Yet it is

closely connected with an ancient rite, practically absurd indeed, but

done with a conscious and serious intention which lands it quite outside

the region of nonsense. This is the custom of pouring out libations and

drinking at ceremonial banquets to gods and the dead. Thus the old

Northmen drank the ‘minni’ of Thor, Odin, and Freya, and of kings

likewise at their funerals. The custom did not die out with the

conversion of the Scandinavian and Teutonic nations. Such formulas as

‘God’s minne!’ ‘a bowl to God in heaven!’ are on record, while in like

manner Christ, Mary, and the Saints were drunk to in place of heathen

gods and heroes, and the habit of drinking to the dead and the living at

the same feast and in similar terms goes far to prove here a common

origin for both ceremonies. The ‘minne’ was at once love, memory, and

the thought of the absent, and it long survived in England in the

‘minnying’ or ‘mynde’ days, on which the memory of the dead was

celebrated by services or banquets. Such evidence as this fairly

justifies the writers, older and newer, who have treated these

ceremonial drinking usages as in their nature sacrificial.[110] As for

the practice of simply drinking the health of living men, its ancient

history reaches us from several districts inhabited by Aryan nations.

The Greeks in symposium drank to one another, and the Romans adopted the

habit (προπίνειν, propinare, Græco more bibere). The Goths cried

‘hails!’ as they pledged each other, as we have it in the curious first

line of the verses ‘De conviviis barbaris’ in the Latin Anthology, which

sets down the shouts of a Gothic drinking-bout of the fifth century or

so, in words which still partly keep their sense to an English ear.

‘Inter _eils_ Goticum _scapiamatziaia drincan_

Non audet quisquam dignos educere versus.’

As for ourselves, though the old drinking salutation of ‘wæs hæl?’ is no

longer vulgar English, the formula remains with us, stiffened into a

noun. On the whole, there is presumptive though not conclusive evidence

that the custom of drinking healths to the living is historically

related to the religious rite of drinking to the gods and the dead.

Let us now put the theory of survival to a somewhat severe test, by

seeking from it some explanation of the existence, in practice or

memory, within the limits of modern civilized society, of three

remarkable groups of customs which civilized ideas totally fail to

account for. Though we may not succeed in giving clear and absolute

explanations of their motives, at any rate it is a step in advance to be

able to refer their origins to savage or barbaric antiquity. Looking at

these customs from the modern practical point of view, one is

ridiculous, the others are atrocious, and all are senseless. The first

is the practice of salutation on sneezing, the second the rite of laying

the foundations of a building on a human victim, the third the prejudice

against saving a drowning man.

In interpreting the customs connected with sneezing, it is needful to

recognize a prevalent doctrine of the lower races, of which a full

account will be given in another chapter. As a man’s soul is considered

to go in and out of his body, so it is with other spirits, particularly

such as enter into patients and possess them or afflict them with

disease. Among the less cultured races, the connexion of this idea with

sneezing is best shown among the Zulus, a people firmly persuaded that

kindly or angry spirits of the dead hover about them, do them good or

harm, stand visibly before them in dreams, enter into them, and cause

diseases in them. The following particulars are abridged from the native

statements taken down by Dr. Callaway:—When a Zulu sneezes, he will say,

‘I am now blessed. The Idhlozi (ancestral spirit) is with me; it has

come to me. Let me hasten and praise it, for it is it which causes me to

sneeze!’ So he praises the manes of his family, asking for cattle, and

wives, and blessings. Sneezing is a sign that a sick person will be

restored to health; he returns thanks after sneezing, saying, ‘Ye people

of ours, I have gained that prosperity which I wanted. Continue to look

on me with favour!’ Sneezing reminds a man that he should name the

Itongo (ancestral spirit) of his people without delay, because it is the

Itongo which causes him to sneeze, that he may perceive by sneezing that

the Itongo is with him. If a man is ill and does not sneeze, those who

come to him ask whether he has sneezed or not; if he has not sneezed,

they murmur, saying, ‘The disease is great!’ If a child sneezes, they

say to it, ‘Grow!’ it is a sign of health. So then, it is said, sneezing

among black men gives a man strength to remember that the Itongo has

entered into him and abides with him. The Zulu diviners or sorcerers are

very apt to sneeze, which they regard as an indication of the presence

of the spirits, whom they adore by saying, ‘Makosi!’ (i.e. lords or

masters). It is a suggestive example of the transition of such customs

as these from one religion to another, that the Amakosa, who used to

call on their divine ancestor Utixo when they sneezed, since their

conversion to Christianity say, ‘Preserver, look upon me!’ or, ‘Creator

of heaven and earth!’[111] Elsewhere in Africa, similar ideas are

mentioned. Sir Thomas Browne, in his ‘Vulgar Errors,’ made well known

the story that when the King of Monomotapa sneezed, acclamations of

blessing passed from mouth to mouth through the city; but he should have

mentioned that Godigno, from whom the original account is taken, said

that this took place when the king drank, or coughed, or sneezed.[112] A

later account from the other side of the continent is more to the

purpose. In Guinea, in the last century, when a principal personage

sneezed, all present fell on their knees, kissed the earth, clapped

their hands, and wished him all happiness and prosperity.[113] With a

different idea, the negroes of Old Calabar, when a child sneezes, will

sometimes exclaim, ‘Far from you!’ with an appropriate gesture as if

throwing off some evil.[114] Polynesia is another region where the

sneezing salutation is well marked. In New Zealand, a charm was said to

prevent evil when a child sneezed;[115] if a Samoan sneezed, the

bystanders said, ‘Life to you!’[116] while in the Tongan group a sneeze

on the starting of an expedition was a most evil presage.[117] A curious

American instance dates from Hernando de Soto’s famous expedition into

Florida, when Guachoya, a native chief, came to pay him a visit. ‘While

this was going on, the cacique Guachoya gave a great sneeze; the

gentlemen who had come with him and were lining the walls of the hall

among the Spaniards there all at once bowing their heads, opening their

arms, and closing them again, and making other gestures of great

veneration and respect, saluted him with different words, all directed

to one end, saying, “The Sun guard thee, be with thee, enlighten thee,

magnify thee, protect thee, favour thee, defend thee, prosper thee, save

thee,” and other like phrases, as the words came, and for a good space

there lingered the murmur of these words among them, whereat the

governor wondering said to the gentlemen and captains with him, “Do you

not see that all the world is one?” This matter was well noted among the

Spaniards, that among so barbarous a people should be used the same

ceremonies, or greater, than among those who hold themselves to be very

civilized. Whence it may be believed that this manner of salutation is

natural among all nations, and not caused by a pestilence, as is

vulgarly said,’ &c.[118]

In Asia and Europe the sneezing superstition extends through a wide

range of race, age, and country.[119] Among the passages relating to it

in the classic ages of Greece and Rome, the following are some of the

most characteristic,—the lucky sneeze of Telemachos in the Odyssey;[120]

the soldier’s sneeze and the shout of adoration to the god which rose

along the ranks, and which Xenophon appealed to as a favourable

omen;[121] Aristotle’s remark that people consider a sneeze as divine

(τὸν ηὲν πταρμὸν θεὸν ἡγούμεθα εἶναι), but not a cough,[122] &c.; the

Greek epigram on the man with the long nose, who did not say Ζεῦ σῶσον

when he sneezed, for the noise was too far off for him to hear;[123]

Petronius Arbiter’s mention of the custom of saying ‘Salve!’ to one who

sneezed;[124] and Pliny’s question, ‘Cur sternutamentis salutamus?’

apropos of which he remarks that even Tiberius Cæsar, that saddest of

men, exacted this observance.[125] Similar rites of sneezing have long

been observed in Eastern Asia.[126] When a Hindu sneezes, bystanders

say, ‘Live!’ and the sneezer replies, ‘With you!’ It is an ill omen, to

which among others the Thugs paid great regard on starting on an

expedition, and which even compelled them to let the travellers with

them escape.[127]

The Jewish sneezing formula is, ‘Tobim chayim!’ i.e. ‘Good life!’[128]

The Moslem says, ‘Praise to Allah!’ when he sneezes, and his friends

compliment him with proper formulas, a custom which seems to be conveyed

from race to race wherever Islam extends.[129] Lastly, the custom ranges

through mediæval into modern Europe. To cite old German examples, ‘Die

Heiden nicht endorften niesen, dâ man doch sprichet “Nu helfiu Got?”’

‘Wir sprechen, swer niuset, Got helfe dir.’[130] For a Norman French

instance in England, the following lines (A.D. 1100) may serve, which

show our old formula ‘waes hæl!’ (‘may you be well!’—‘wassail!’) used

also to avert being taken ill after a sneeze:—

‘E pur une feyze esternuer

Tantot quident mal trouer,

Si _uesbeil_ ne diez aprez.’[131]

In the ‘Rules of Civility’ (A.D. 1685, translated from the French) we

read:—‘If his lordship chances to sneeze, you are not to bawl out, “God

bless you, sir,” but, pulling off your hat, bow to him handsomely, and

make that obsecration to yourself.’[132] It is noticed that Anabaptists

and Quakers rejected these with other salutations, but they remained in

the code of English good manners among high and low till half a century

or so ago, and are so little forgotten now, that most people still see

the point of the story of the fiddler and his wife, where his sneeze and

her hearty ‘God bless you!’ brought about the removal of the fiddle

case. ‘Got hilf!’ may still be heard in Germany, and ‘Felicità!’ in

Italy.

It is not strange that the existence of these absurd customs should have

been for ages a puzzle to curious enquirers. Especially the

legend-mongers took the matter in hand, and their attempts to devise

historical explanations are on record in a group of philosophic

myths,—Greek, Jewish, Christian. Prometheus prays for the preservation

of his artificial man, when it gives the first sign of life by a sneeze;

Jacob prays that man’s soul may not, as heretofore, depart from his body

when he sneezes; Pope Gregory prays to avert the pestilence, in those

days when the air was so deadly that he who sneezed died of it; and from

these imaginary events legend declares that the use of the sneezing

formulas was handed down. It is more to our purpose to notice the

existence of a corresponding set of ideas and customs connected with

gaping. Among the Zulus, repeated yawning and sneezing are classed

together as signs of approaching spiritual possession.[133] The Hindu,

when he gapes, must snap his thumb and finger, and repeat the name of

some God, as Rama: to neglect this is a sin as great as the murder of a

Brahman.[134] The Persians ascribe yawning, sneezing, &c., to demoniacal

possession. Among the modern Moslems generally, when a man yawns, he

puts the back of his left hand to his mouth, saying, ‘I seek refuge with

Allah from Satan the accursed!’ but the act of yawning is to be avoided,

for the Devil is in the habit of leaping into a gaping mouth.[135] This

may very likely be the meaning of the Jewish proverb, ‘Open not thy

mouth to Satan!’ The other half of this idea shows itself clearly in

Josephus’ story of his having seen a certain Jew, named Eleazar, cure

demoniacs in Vespasian’s time, by drawing the demons out through their

nostrils, by means of a ring containing a root of mystic virtue

mentioned by Solomon.[136] The account of the sect of the Messalians,

who used to spit and blow their noses to expel the demons they might

have drawn in with their breath,[137] the records of the mediæval

exorcists driving out devils through the patients’ nostrils,[138] and

the custom, still kept up in the Tyrol, of crossing oneself when one

yawns, lest something evil should come into one’s mouth,[139] involve

similar ideas. In comparing the modern Kafir ideas with those of other

districts of the world, we find a distinct notion of a sneeze being due

to a spiritual presence. This, which seems indeed the key to the whole

matter, has been well brought into view by Mr. Haliburton, as displayed

in Keltic folk-lore, in a group of stories turning on the superstition

that any one who sneezes is liable to be carried off by the fairies,

unless their power be counteracted by an invocation, as ‘God bless

you!’[140] The corresponding idea as to yawning is to be found in an

Iceland folk-lore legend, where the troll, who has transformed herself

into the shape of the beautiful queen, says, ‘When I yawn a little yawn,

I am a neat and tiny maiden; when I yawn a half-yawn, then I am as a

half-troll; when I yawn a whole yawn, then am I as a whole troll.’[141]

On the whole, though the sneezing superstition makes no approach to

universality among mankind, its wide distribution is highly remarkable,

and it would be an interesting problem to decide how far this wide

distribution is due to independent growth in several regions, how far to

conveyance from race to race, and how far to ancestral inheritance. Here

it has only to be maintained that it was not originally an arbitrary and

meaningless custom, but the working out of a principle.[142] The plain

statement by the modern Zulus fits with the hints to be gained from the

superstition and folk-lore of other races, to connect the notions and

practices as to sneezing with the ancient and savage doctrine of

pervading and invading spirits, considered as good or evil, and treated

accordingly. The lingering survivals of the quaint old formulas in

modern Europe seem an unconscious record of the time when the

explanation of sneezing had not yet been given over to physiology, but

was still in the ‘theological stage.’

There is current in Scotland the belief that the Picts, to whom local

legend attributes buildings of prehistoric antiquity, bathed their

foundation-stones with human blood; and legend even tells that St.

Columba found it necessary to bury St. Oran alive beneath the foundation

of his monastery, in order to propitiate the spirits of the soil who

demolished by night what was built during the day. So late as 1843, in

Germany, when a new bridge was built at Halle, a notion was abroad among

the people that a child was wanted to be built into the foundation.

These ideas of church or wall or bridge wanting human blood or an

immured victim to make the foundation steadfast, are not only widespread

in European folk-lore, but local chronicle or tradition asserts them as

matter of historical fact in district after district. Thus, when the

broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired in 1463, the peasants, on the

advice to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk

and buried him there. Thuringian legend declares that to make the castle

of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard money

of its mother and walled in. It was eating a cake while the masons were

at work, the story goes, and it cried out, ‘Mother, I see thee still;’

then later, ‘Mother, I see thee a little still;’ and, as they put in the

last stone, ‘Mother, now I see thee no more.’ The wall of Copenhagen,

legend says, sank as fast as it was built; so they took an innocent

little girl, set her on a chair at a table of toys and eatables, and, as

she played and ate, twelve master-masons closed a vault over her; then,

with clanging music, the wall was raised, and stood firm ever after.

Thus Italian legend tells of the bridge of Arta, that fell in and fell

in till they walled in the master-builder’s wife, and she spoke her

dying curse that the bridge should tremble like a flower-stalk

henceforth. The Slavonic chiefs founding Detinez, according to old

heathen custom, sent out men to take the first boy they met and bury him

in the foundation. Servian legend tells how three brothers combined to

build the fortress of Skadra (Scutari); but, year after year, the demon

(vila) razed by night what the three hundred masons built by day. The

fiend must be appeased by a human sacrifice, the first of the three

wives who should come bringing food to the workmen. All three brothers

swore to keep the dreadful secret from their wives; but the two eldest

gave traitorous warning to theirs, and it was the youngest brother’s

wife who came unsuspecting, and they built her in. But she entreated

that an opening should be left for her to suckle her baby through, and

for a twelve-month it was brought. To this day, Servian wives visit the

tomb of the good mother, still marked by a stream of water which

trickles, milky with lime, down the fortress wall. Lastly, there is our

own legend of Vortigern, who could not finish his tower till the

foundation-stone was wetted with the blood of a child born of a mother

without a father. As is usual in the history of sacrifice, we hear of

substitutes for such victims; empty coffins walled up in Germany, a lamb

walled in under the altar in Denmark to make the church stand fast, and

the churchyard in like manner handselled by burying a live horse first.

In modern Greece an evident relic of the idea survives in the

superstition that the first passer-by after a foundation-stone is laid

will die within the year, wherefore the masons will compromise the debt

by killing a lamb or a black cock on the stone. With much the same idea

German legend tells of the bridge-building fiend cheated of his promised

fee, a soul, by the device of making a cock run first across; and thus

German folk-lore says it is well, before entering a new house, to let a

cat or dog run in.[143] From all this it seems that, with due allowance

for the idea having passed into an often-repeated and varied mythic

theme, yet written and unwritten tradition do preserve the memory of a

bloodthirsty barbaric rite, which not only really existed in ancient

times, but lingered long in European history. If now we look to less

cultured countries, we shall find the rite carried on in our own day

with a distinctly religious purpose, either to propitiate the

earth-spirits with a victim, or to convert the soul of the victim

himself into a protecting demon.

In Africa, in Galam, a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the

great gate of the city to make it impregnable, a practice once executed

on a large scale by a Bambarra tyrant; while in Great Bassam and Yarriba

such sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village.[144]

In Polynesia, Ellis heard of the custom, instanced by the fact that the

central pillar of one of the temples at Maeva was planted upon the body

of a human victim.[145] In Borneo, among the Milanau Dayaks, at the

erection of the largest house a deep hole was dug to receive the first

post, which was then suspended over it; a slave girl was placed in the

excavation; at a signal the lashings were cut, and the enormous timber

descended, crushing the girl to death, a sacrifice to the spirits. St.

John saw a milder form of the rite performed, when the chief of the Quop

Dayaks set up a flagstaff near his house, a chicken being thrown in to

be crushed by the descending pole.[146] More cultured nations of

Southern Asia have carried on into modern ages the rite of the

foundation-sacrifice. A 17th century account of Japan mentions the

belief there that a wall laid on the body of a willing human victim

would be secure from accident; accordingly, when a great wall was to be

built, some wretched slave would offer himself as foundation, lying down

in the trench to be crushed by the heavy stones lowered upon him.[147]

When the gates of the new city of Tavoy, in Tenasserim, were built about

1780, as Mason relates on the evidence of an eye-witness, a criminal was

put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon. Thus it appears that

such stories as that of the human victims buried for spirit watchers

under the gates of Mandalay, of the queen who was drowned in a Burmese

reservoir to make the dyke safe, of the hero whose divided body was

buried under the fortress of Thatung to make it impregnable, are the

records, whether in historical or mythical form, of the actual customs

of the land.[148] Within our own dominion, when Rajah Sala Byne was

building the fort of Sialkot in the Punjab, the foundation of the

south-east bastion gave way so repeatedly that he had recourse to a

soothsayer, who assured him that it would never stand until the blood of

an only son was shed there, wherefore the only son of a widow was

sacrificed.[149] It is thus plain that hideous rites, of which Europe

has scarcely kept up more than the dim memory, have held fast their

ancient practice and meaning in Africa, Polynesia, and Asia, among races

who represent in grade, if not in chronology, earlier stages of

civilization.

When Sir Walter Scott, in the ‘Pirate,’ tells of Bryce the pedlar

refusing to help Mordaunt to save the shipwrecked sailor from drowning,

and even remonstrating with him on the rashness of such a deed, he

states an old superstition of the Shetlanders. ‘Are you mad?’ says the

pedlar; ‘you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of

a drowning man? Wot ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be

sure to do you some capital injury?’ Were this inhuman thought noticed

in this one district alone, it might be fancied to have had its rise in

some local idea now no longer to be explained. But when mentions of

similar superstitions are collected among the St. Kilda islanders and

the boatmen of the Danube, among French and English sailors, and even

out of Europe and among less civilized races, we cease to think of local

fancies, but look for some widely accepted belief of the lower culture

to account for such a state of things. The Hindu does not save a man

from drowning in the sacred Ganges, and the islanders of the Malay

archipelago share the cruel notion.[150] Of all people the rude

Kamchadals have the prohibition in the most remarkable form. They hold

it a great fault, says Kracheninnikow, to save a drowning man; he who

delivers him will be drowned himself.[151] Steller’s account is more

extraordinary, and probably applies only to cases where the victim is

actually drowning: he says that if a man fell by chance into the water,

it was a great sin for him to get out, for as he had been destined to

drown he did wrong in not drowning, wherefore no one would let him into

his dwelling, nor speak to him, nor give him food or a wife, but he was

reckoned for dead; and even when a man fell into the water while others

were standing by, far from helping him out, they would drown him by

force. Now these barbarians, it appears, avoided volcanoes because of

the spirits who live there and cook their food; for a like reason, they

held it a sin to bathe in hot springs; and they believed with fear in a

fish-like spirit of the sea, whom they called Mitgk.[152] This

spiritualistic belief among the Kamchadals is, no doubt, the key to

their superstition as to rescuing drowning men. There is even to be

found in modern European superstition, not only the practice, but with

it a lingering survival of its ancient spiritualistic significance. In

Bohemia, a recent account (1864) says that the fishermen do not venture

to snatch a drowning man from the waters. They fear that the ‘Waterman’

(i.e. water-demon) would take away their luck in fishing, and drown

themselves at the first opportunity.[153] This explanation of the

prejudice against saving the water-spirit’s victim may be confirmed by a

mass of evidence from various districts of the world. Thus, in

discussing the doctrine of sacrifice, it will appear that the usual

manner of making an offering to a well, river, lake, or sea, is simply

to cast property, cattle, or men into the water, which personally or by

its indwelling spirit takes possession of them.[154] That the accidental

drowning of a man is held to be such a seizure, savage and civilized

folk-lore show by many examples. Among the Sioux Indians, it is Unk-tahe

the water-monster that drowns his victims in flood or rapid;[155] in New

Zealand huge supernatural reptile-monsters, called Taniwha, live in

river-bends, and those who are drowned are said to be pulled under by

them;[156] the Siamese fears the Pnük or water-spirit that seizes

bathers and drags them under to his dwelling;[157] in Slavonic lands it

is Topielec (the ducker) by whom men are always drowned;[158] when some

one is drowned in Germany, people recollect the religion of their

ancestors, and say, ‘The river-spirit claims his yearly sacrifice,’ or,

more simply, ‘The nix has taken him:’[159]—

‘Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen,

Am Ende Fischer und Kahn;

Und das hat mit ihrem Singen

Die Lorelei gethan.’

From this point of view it is obvious that to save a sinking man is to

snatch a victim from the very clutches of the water-spirit, a rash

defiance of deity which would hardly pass unavenged. In the civilized

world the rude old theological conception of drowning has long been

superseded by physical explanation; and the prejudice against rescue

from such a death may have now almost or altogether disappeared. But

archaic ideas, drifted on into modern folk-lore and poetry, still bring

to our view an apparent connexion between the primitive doctrine and the

surviving custom.

As the social development of the world goes on, the weightiest thoughts

and actions may dwindle to mere survival. Original meaning dies out

gradually, each generation leaves fewer and fewer to bear it in mind,

till it falls out of popular memory, and in after-days ethnography has

to attempt, more or less successfully, to restore it by piecing together

lines of isolated or forgotten facts. Children’s sports, popular

sayings, absurd customs, may be practically unimportant, but are not

philosophically insignificant, bearing as they do on some of the most

instructive phases of early culture. Ugly and cruel superstitions may

prove to be relics of primitive barbarism, for in keeping up such Man is

like Shakespeare’s fox,

‘Who, ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up,

Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’

Footnote 55:

Will. de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 46, 67, 132; Michie,

‘Siberian Overland Route,’ p. 96.

Footnote 56:

Ovid. Fast. v. 487. For modern Italy and France, see Edélestane du

Méril, ‘Études d’Archéol.’ p. 121.

Footnote 57:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ (ed. by J. R. Logan), vol. ii. p. liv.

Footnote 58:

Klemm, ‘Cultur-Geschichte,’ vol. ii. p. 209.

Footnote 59:

Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 266; Dumont d’Urville, ‘Voy.

de l’Astrolabe,’ vol. i. p. 411.

Footnote 60:

Strutt, ‘Sports and Pastimes,’ book ii. chap. ii.

Footnote 61:

Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. ii. p. 171.

Footnote 62:

Polack, ibid.; Wilkes, ‘U. S. Exp.’ vol. i. p. 194. See the account of

the game of liagi in Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 339; and Yate,

‘New Zealand,’ p. 113.

Footnote 63:

Petron. Arbitri Satiræ rec. Büchler, p. 64 (other readings are _buccæ_

or _bucco_).

Footnote 64:

Compare Davis, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 317; Wilkinson, Ancient

Egyptians, vol. i. p. 188; Facciolati, Lexicon, s.v. ‘micare’; &c.

Footnote 65:

Jamieson, ‘Dict. of Scottish Lang.’ s.v.

Footnote 66:

‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 244, &c.; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.,’ p.

573.

Footnote 67:

Grimm, _ibid._, p. 1200.

Footnote 68:

Halliwell, ‘Popular Rhymes,’ p. 112; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 812. Bastian,

‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 106. Johannis Philosophi Ozniensis Opera

(Aucher), Venice, 1834, pp. 78-89. ‘Infantium sanguini similam

commiscentes illegitimam communionem deglutiunt; quo pacto porcorum

suos fœtus immaniter vescentium exsuperant edacitatem. Quique illorum

cadavera super tecti culmen celantes, ac sursum oculis in cœlum

defixis respicientes, jurant alieno verbo ac sensu: _Altissimus

novit._ Solem vero deprecari volentes, ajunt: _Solicule_, _Lucicule_;

atque aëreos, vagosque dæmones clam invocant, juxta Manichæorum

Simonisque incantatoris errores. Similiter et primum parientis fœminæ

puerum de manu in manum inter eos invicem projectum, quum pessimâ

morte occiderint, illum, in cujus manu exspiraverit puer, ad primam

sectæ dignitatem provectum venerantur; atque per utriusque nomen

audent insane jurare; _Juro_, dicunt, _per unigenitum filium_: et

iterum: _Testem babeo tibi gloriam ejus, in cujus manum unigenitus

filius spiritum suum tradidit_.... Contra hos [the orthodox] audacter

evomere præsumunt impietatis suæ bilem, atque insanientes, ex mali

spiritus blasphemiâ, _Sculpticolas_ vocant.’

Footnote 69:

Polack, vol. i. p. 270.

Footnote 70:

Bosman, ‘Guinese Kust,’ letter x.; Eng. Trans. in Pinkerton, vol. xvi.

p. 399.

Footnote 71:

Homer, Iliad, vii. 171; Pindar, Pyth. iv. 338.

Footnote 72:

Tacit. Germania. 10.

Footnote 73:

Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.,’ arts. ‘oraculum,’ ‘sortes.’

Footnote 74:

Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations,’ p. 163.

Footnote 75:

Gataker, pp. 91, 141; see Lecky, ‘History of Rationalism,’ vol. i. p.

307.

Footnote 76:

Jeremy Taylor, ‘Ductor Dubitantium,’ in Works, vol. xiv. p. 337.

Footnote 77:

See Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 95, 115, 178.

Footnote 78:

Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands,’ vol. ii. p. 239; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p.

214; Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 228. Compare Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p.

231.

Footnote 79:

R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 206, 348, 387.

Footnote 80:

Smith’s Dic., art. ‘talus.’

Footnote 81:

Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. ii. p. 412.

Footnote 82:

D. & C. Livingstone, ‘Exp. to Zambesi,’ p. 51.

Footnote 83:

Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. pp. 108, 285-7; see 384; Bastian,

‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. pp. 76, 125.

Footnote 84:

Smith’s Dic., art. ‘cottabos.’

Footnote 85:

Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 222.

Footnote 86:

Plin. viii. 54.

Footnote 87:

From a letter of Mr. H. J. Stokes, Negapatam, to Mr. F. M. Jennings.

General details of the Couvade in ‘Early History of Mankind.’ p. 293.

Footnote 88:

Hâvamâl, 138.

Footnote 89:

Jamieson, ‘Scottish Dictionary,’ s.v. ‘coals’; R. Hunt, ‘Popular

Romances,’ 1st ser. p. 83.

Footnote 90:

Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 131.

Footnote 91:

Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube und Brauch,’ vol. i. p. 120; R. Chambers,

‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland,’ Miscellaneous; Grimm, pp. 969, 976;

Wuttke, p. 115.

Footnote 92:

Mendes, ‘Service for the First Nights of Passover,’ London, 1862 (in

the Jewish interpretation the word _sbunra_,—‘cat,’ is compared with

_sbinâr_). Halliwell, ‘Nursery Rhymes,’ p. 288; ‘Popular Rhymes,’ p.

6.

Footnote 93:

Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 110.

Footnote 94:

Shortland, ‘Traditions of N. Z.’ p. 196.

Footnote 95:

Casalis, ‘Études sur la langue Séchuana.’

Footnote 96:

R. F. Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa.’ See also Waitz, vol.

ii. p. 245.

Footnote 97:

Callaway, ‘Nursery Tales, &c. of Zulus,’ vol. i. p. 364, &c.

Footnote 98:

Casalis, ‘Etudes sur la langue Séchuana,’ p. 91; ‘Basutos,’ p. 337.

Footnote 99:

Steere, ‘Swahili Tales,’ p. 418.

Footnote 100:

Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 212.

Footnote 101:

Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 216. See Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. ii. p.

171.

Footnote 102:

Sahagun, ‘Historia de Nueva España,’ in Kingsborough’s ‘Antiquities,

of Mexico,’ vol. vii. p. 178.

Footnote 103:

Grimm, p. 699.

Footnote 104:

Diog. Laert. i. 91; Athenagoras. x, 451.

Footnote 105:

Mannhardt’s ‘Zeitschr. für Deutsche Mythologie,’ vol. iii. p. 2, &c.:

‘Nóg er forthun nösgás vaxin,

Barngiorn su er bar bútimbr saman;

Hlifthu henni halms bitskálmir,

Thó lá drykkjar drynhrönn yfir.’

Footnote 106:

See Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece,’ vol. ii. p. 5.

Footnote 107:

Mannhardt’s ‘Zeitschr.’ l.c.

Footnote 108:

E. A. W. Zimmermann, ‘Geographische Geschichte des Menschen,’ &c.,

1778-83, vol. iii. See Professor Rolleston’s Inaugural Address,

British Association, 1870.

Footnote 109:

Earl of Chesterfield, ‘Letters to his Son,’ vol. ii. No. lxviii.

Footnote 110:

See Hylten-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ vol. i. pp. 161-70 Grimm,

pp. 52-5, 1201; Brand, vol. ii. pp. 314, 325, &c.

Footnote 111:

Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 64, 222-5, 263.

Footnote 112:

Godignus, ‘Vita Patris Gonzali Sylveriæ.’ Col. Agripp. 1616; lib. ii.

c. x.

Footnote 113:

Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xviii. in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 478.

Footnote 114:

Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 373.

Footnote 115:

Shortland, ‘Trads. of New Zealand,’ p. 131.

Footnote 116:

Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 348; see also Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p.

250.

Footnote 117:

Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. i. p. 456.

Footnote 118:

Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Hist. de la Florida,’ vol. iii. ch. xli.

Footnote 119:

Among dissertations on the subject, see especially Sir Thos. Browne

‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ (Vulgar Errors), book iv. chap. ix.; Brand

‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. iii. p. 119, &c.; R. G. Haliburton, ‘New

Materials for the History of Man.’ Halifax, N. S. 1863; ‘Encyclopædia

Britannica,’ (5th ed.) art. ‘sneezing,’ Wernsdorf, ‘De Ritu

Sternutantibus bene precandi.’ Leipzig, 1741; see also Grimm, D. M. p.

1070, note.

Footnote 120:

Homer, Odyss. xvii. 541.

Footnote 121:

Xenophon, Anabasis, iii. 2, 9.

Footnote 122:

Aristot. Problem. xxxiii. 7.

Footnote 123:

Anthologia Græca, Brunck, vol. iii. p. 95.

Footnote 124:

Petron. Arb. Sat. 98.

Footnote 125:

Plin. xxviii. 5.

Footnote 126:

Noel, ‘Dic. des Origines;’ Migne, ‘Dic. des Superstitions,’ &c.;

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 129.

Footnote 127:

Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 142; Dubois, ‘Peuples de l’Inde,’ vol. i.

p. 465; Sleeman, ‘Ramaseeana,’ p. 120.

Footnote 128:

Buxtorf, ‘Lexicon Chaldaicum;’ Tendlau, ‘Sprichwörter, &c.

Deutsch-Jüdischer Vorzeit.’ Frankf. a. M., 1860, p. 142.

Footnote 129:

Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. i. p. 282. See Grant, in ‘Tr. Eth.

Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90.

Footnote 130:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 1070, 1110.

Footnote 131:

‘Manuel des Pecchés,’ in Wedgwood, ‘Dic. English Etymology,’ s.v.,

‘wassail.’

Footnote 132:

Brand, vol. iii. p. 126.

Footnote 133:

Callaway, p. 263.

Footnote 134:

Ward, l.c.

Footnote 135:

‘Pend-Nameh,’ tr. de Sacy, ch. lxiii.; Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c., p. 302;

Lane, l.c.

Footnote 136:

G. Brecher, ‘Das Transcendentale im Talmud,’ p. 168; Joseph. Ant. Jud.

viii. 2, 5.

Footnote 137:

Migne, ‘Dic. des Hérésies,’ s.v.

Footnote 138:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 115, 322.

Footnote 139:

Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 137.

Footnote 140:

Haliburton, op. cit.

Footnote 141:

Powell and Magnussen, ‘Legends of Iceland,’ 2nd ser. p. 448.

Footnote 142:

The cases in which a sneeze is interpreted under special conditions,

as with reference to right and left, early morning, &c. (see Plutarch,

De Genio Socratis, &c.), are not considered here, as they belong to

ordinary omen-divination.

Footnote 143:

W. Scott, ‘Minstrelsy of Scottish Border;’ Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races

of Scotland,’ vol. i. pp. 194, 487; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Mythologie,’ pp.

972, 1095; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 92, 407, vol. iii. pp. 105,

112; Bowring, ‘Servian Popular Poetry,’ p. 64. A review of the First

Edition of the present work in ‘Nature,’ June 15, 1871, contains the

following:—‘It is not, for example, many years since the present Lord

Leigh was accused of having built an obnoxious person—one account, if

we remember right, said eight obnoxious persons—into the foundation of

a bridge at Stoneleigh. Of course so preposterous a charge carried on

its face its own sufficient refutation; but the fact that it was

brought at all is a singular instance of the almost incredible

vitality of old traditions.’

Footnote 144:

Waitz, vol. ii. p. 197.

Footnote 145:

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 346; Tyerman and Bennet, vol. ii. p.

39.

Footnote 146:

St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 46; see Bastian, vol. ii. p. 407. I

am indebted to Mr. R. K. Douglas for a perfect example of one meaning

of the foundation-sacrifice, from the Chinese book, ‘Yūh hea ke’

(‘Jewelled Casket of Divination’): ‘Before beginning to build, the

workmen should sacrifice to the gods of the neighbourhood, of the

earth and wood. Should the carpenters be very apprehensive of the

building falling, they, when fixing a post, should take something

living and put it beneath, and lower the post on it, and to liberate

[the evil influences] they should strike the post with an axe and

repeat—

“It is well, it is well,

May those who live within

Be ever warm and well fed.”’

Footnote 147:

Caron, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 623.

Footnote 148:

F. Mason, ‘Burmah,’ p. 100; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. pp. 193,

214; vol. ii. pp. 91, 270; vol. iii. p. 16; Roberts, ‘Oriental

Illustrations,’ p. 283.

Footnote 149:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 107. A modern Arnaut story is given by

Prof. Liebrecht in ‘Philologus,’ vol. xxiii. (1865), p. 682.

Footnote 150:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 210; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 318.

Footnote 151:

Kracheninnikow, ‘Descr. du Kamchatka, Voy. en Sibérie,’ vol. iii. p.

72.

Footnote 152:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 265, 274.

Footnote 153:

J. V. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen,’ p. 12.

Footnote 154:

Chap. XVIII.

Footnote 155:

Eastman, ‘Dacotah,’ pp. 118, 125.

Footnote 156:

R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 48.

Footnote 157:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 34.

Footnote 158:

Hanusch, ‘Wissenschaft des Slawischen Mythus,’ p. 299.

Footnote 159:

Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth,’ p. 462.

CHAPTER IV.

SURVIVAL IN CULTURE (_continued_).

Occult Sciences—Magical powers attributed by higher to lower

races—Magical processes based on Association of Ideas—Omens—Augury,

&c.—Oneiromancy—Haruspication, Scapulimancy, Chiromancy,

&c.—Cartomancy, &c.—Rhabdomancy, Dactyliomancy, Coscinomancy,

&c.—Astrology—Intellectual conditions accounting for the persistence

of Magic—Survival passes into Revival—Witchcraft, originating in

savage culture, continues in barbaric civilization; its decline in

early mediæval Europe followed by revival; its practices and

counter-practices belong to earlier culture—Spiritualism has its

source in early stages of culture, in close connexion with

witchcraft—Spirit-rapping and Spirit-writing—Rising in the

air—Performances of tied mediums—Practical bearing of the study of

Survival.

In examining the survival of opinions in the midst of conditions of

society becoming gradually estranged from them, and tending at last to

suppress them altogether, much may be learnt from the history of one of

the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind, the belief in

Magic. Looking at Occult Science from this ethnographic point of view, I

shall instance some of its branches as illustrating the course of

intellectual culture. Its place in history is briefly this. It belongs

in its main principle to the lowest known stages of civilization, and

the lower races, who have not partaken largely of the education of the

world, still maintain it in vigour. From this level it may be traced

upward, much of the savage art holding its place substantially

unchanged, and many new practices being in course of time developed,

while both the older and newer developments have lasted on more or less

among modern cultured nations. But during the ages in which progressive

races have been learning to submit their opinions to closer and closer

experimental tests, occult science has been breaking down into the

condition of a survival, in which state we mostly find it among

ourselves.

The modern educated world, rejecting occult science as a contemptible

superstition, has practically committed itself to the opinion that magic

belongs to a lower level of civilization. It is very instructive to find

the soundness of this judgment undesignedly confirmed by nations whose

education has not advanced far enough to destroy their belief in magic

itself. In any country an isolated or outlying race, the lingering

survivor of an older nationality, is liable to the reputation of

sorcery. It is thus with the Lavas of Burma, supposed to be the

broken-down remains of an ancient cultured race, and dreaded as

man-tigers;[160] and with the Budas of Abyssinia, who are at once the

smiths and potters, sorcerers and were-wolves, of their district.[161]

But the usual and suggestive state of things is that nations who believe

with the sincerest terror in the reality of the magic art, at the same

time cannot shut their eyes to the fact that it more essentially belongs

to, and is more thoroughly at home among, races less civilized than

themselves. The Malays of the Peninsula, who have adopted Mohammedan

religion and civilization, have this idea of the lower tribes of the

land, tribes more or less of their own race, but who have remained in

their early savage condition. The Malays have enchanters of their own,

but consider them inferior to the sorcerers or poyangs belonging to the

rude Mintira; to these they will resort for the cure of diseases and the

working of misfortune and death to their enemies. It is, in fact, the

best protection the Mintira have against their stronger Malay

neighbours, that these are careful not to offend them for fear of their

powers of magical revenge. The Jakuns, again, are a rude and wild race,

whom the Malays despise as infidels and little higher than animals, but

whom at the same time they fear extremely. To the Malay the Jakun seems

a supernatural being, skilled in divination, sorcery, and fascination,

able to do evil or good according to his pleasure, whose blessing will

be followed by the most fortunate success, and his curse by the most

dreadful consequences; he can turn towards the house of an enemy, at

whatever distance, and beat two sticks together till that enemy will

fall sick and die; he is skilled in herbal physic; he has the power of

charming the fiercest wild beasts. Thus it is that the Malays, though

they despise the Jakuns, refrain, in many circumstances, from

ill-treating them.[162] In India, in long-past ages, the dominant Aryans

described the rude indigenes of the land by the epithets of ‘possessed

of magical powers,’ ‘changing their shape at will.’[163] To this day,

Hindus settled in Chota-Nagpur and Singbhum firmly believe that the

Mundas have powers of witchcraft, whereby they can transform themselves

into tigers and other beasts of prey to devour their enemies, and can

witch away the lives of man and beast; it is to the wildest and most

savage of the tribe that such powers are generally ascribed.[164] In

Southern India, again, we hear in past times of Hinduized Dravidians,

the Sudras of Canara, living in fear of the demoniacal powers of the

slave-caste below them.[165] In our own day, among Dravidian tribes of

the Nilagiri district, the Todas and Badagas are in mortal dread of the

Kurumbas, despised and wretched forest outcasts, but gifted, it is

believed, with powers of destroying men and animals and property by

witchcraft.[166] Northern Europe brings the like contrast sharply into

view. The Finns and Lapps, whose low Tatar barbarism was characterized

by sorcery such as flourishes still among their Siberian kinsfolk, were

accordingly objects of superstitious fear to their Scandinavian

neighbours and oppressors. In the middle ages the name of Finn was, as

it still remains among sea-faring men, equivalent to that of sorcerer,

while Lapland witches had a European celebrity as practitioners of the

black art. Ages after the Finns had risen in the social scale, the Lapps

retained much of their old half-savage habit of life, and with it

naturally their witchcraft, so that even the magic-gifted Finns revered

the occult powers of a people more barbarous than themselves. Rühs

writes thus early in the last century: ‘There are still sorcerers in

Finland, but the skilfullest of them believe that the Lapps far excel

them; of a well-experienced magician they say, “That is quite a Lapp,”

and they journey to Lapland for such knowledge.’[167] All this is of a

piece with the survival of such ideas among the ignorant elsewhere in

the civilized world. Many a white man in the West Indies and Africa

dreads the incantations of the Obi-man, and Europe ascribes powers of

sorcery to despised outcast ‘races maudites,’ Gypsies and Cagots. To

turn from nations to sects, the attitude of Protestants to Catholics in

this matter is instructive. It was remarked in Scotland: ‘There is one

opinion which many of them entertain, ... that a popish priest can cast

out devils and cure madness, and that the Presbyterian clergy have no

such power.’ So Bourne says of the Church of England clergy, that the

vulgar think them no conjurers, and say none can lay spirits but popish

priests.[168] These accounts are not recent, but in Germany the same

state of things appears to exist still. Protestants get the aid of

Catholic priests and monks to help them against witchcraft, to lay

ghosts, consecrate herbs, and discover thieves;[169] thus with

unconscious irony judging the relation of Rome toward modern

civilization.