Part 14 (1/2)

In Ireland the same conditions obtained so late as the sixteenth century; the native Irish retained their wandering habits, tilling a piece of fertile land in the spring, then retiring with their herds to the booleys or dairy habitations, generally in the mountain districts in the summer, and moving about where the herbage afforded sustenance to their cattle.[239] An eighteenth-century traveller in Ireland was a.s.sured that the quarter called Connaught was ”inhabited by a kind of savages,” and there is record of the capture of a hairy dwarf near Longford, who appears hardly to belong to civilisation.[240] Similar conditions obtained in the northern counties of England, and in other parts.[241] Special circ.u.mstances kept the borderland outside the influences of ordinary civilised thought and control, and these circ.u.mstances have been recorded by an eighteenth-century observer, from whom I will quote one or two facts as to the mode of life of these people: ”That they might be more invisible during their outrodes and consequently less liable to the effects of their enemies'

vigilance, the colour of their cloathes resembled that of the scenes of their employment or of their season of action, that is, of a brown heath and cloudy evening. Thus examples of what might condemn their conduct were never offered to them, and immemorial custom seemed as it were to sanctify their wildness. Every border-man, almost without exception, was brought up in a state which we would call unhappy, and every circ.u.mstance of his life tended to confirm his partiality for an uncertain bed and unprovided diet.”[242]

The evidence which this acute observer collected led him to conclude that the ”almost uniform train of circ.u.mstances which affected these countries from their border situation, and the little difference there was between one of the dark ages and another, strongly induce me to believe that the Northern people were little altered in manners from very remote times to those immediately preceding the reign of Queen Elizabeth,” and this is confirmed by what we actually find from the report of the Commissioners appointed to settle the peace of the Marches by fixed and established ordinances, who collected ”their ordinances from the traditional accounts of ancient usages that had been sanctified as laws by the length of time which they had endured.

These laws were different from most others, nay, almost peculiar to the men to whom they belonged.”[243]

I need not continue these notes as to the backwardness of portions of the country compared with its general level of culture, because I have dealt with the evidence elsewhere.[244] What I am anxious to point out here is that the faculty of such people as these to think, not in terms of modern science but in terms of their own psychological conditions, must have been p.r.o.nounced. If they ever put the question to themselves as to the origin of things, they would answer themselves according to the life impressions they were then receiving, and according to the limited range of their actual knowledge. As with the creators of the traditional myths, the scientific inquirers of primitive times, so with these non-advanced people of later times, they would deal with the problems they did not understand in fas.h.i.+ons suitable to their own understanding. It has always appeared to me that the impressions of the surrounding life are not sufficiently regarded in their influence upon primitive thought. They press down upon the mind, and enclose it within barriers so that it can only act through these surroundings. Child-life is, in this respect, much the same as the life of primitive man. A child thinks and acts in terms of his nursery, his school, or his playground. Thus a memory of my own is to the point. When quite a child, probably about eight or nine years old, I was entrusted with the changing of a small cheque drawn by my father in a country town where we were staying. I had never seen a cheque before. I remember the ceremony of writing it and the care with which the necessary instructions were given to me, and I remember the amazement with which I received the golden sovereigns. But my mind dwelt upon this strange thing called a cheque, and after a time I deliberately came to the conclusion that my father was allowed to get money for these cheques on condition only that he wrote them without a mistake and without a blot. The conception is absurd until we come to a.n.a.lyse the cause of it. My young life at that time was receiving its greatest impressions, its all-absorbing impressions, from my school exercises in writing. It was a copybook life for the time being, and when I turned to ask my question as to origins, as every human being has asked himself in turn, I could express myself only in copybook terms. It is so with the primitive mind. It can only express itself in the terms of its greatest impressions, and it is in this way that primitive animism, sympathetic magic and other conceptions obtained from the results of anthropological research, are to be found in much the same degree wherever humanity is found in primitive conditions.

As Mr. Hickson puts it so well: ”Just as the little black baby of the negro, the brown baby of the Malay, the yellow baby of the Chinaman, are in face and form, in gestures and habits, as well as in the first articulate sound they mutter, very much alike, so the mind of man, whether he be Aryan or Malay, Mongolian or Negrito, has, in the course of its evolution, pa.s.sed through stages which are practically identical. In the intellectual childhood of mankind natural phenomena, or some other causes, of which we are at present ignorant, have induced thoughts, stories, legends, and myths, that in their essentials are identical among all the races of the world with which we are acquainted;”[245] or to take one other example from the experience of travellers, Mr. Mitch.e.l.l, speaking of the Australians, says: ”I found a native still there, and on my advancing towards him with a twig he shook another twig at me, waving it over his head, and at the same time intimating with it that we must go back. He and the boy then threw up dust at us with their toes (_cf._ 2 Sam. xvi. 13).

These various expressions of hostility and defiance were too intelligible to be mistaken. The expressive pantomime of the man showed the ident.i.ty of the human mind, however distinct the races or different the language.”[246]

This ident.i.ty is shown in many other ways to have been operating, perhaps to be operating still, upon minds not attuned to the civilisation around them. The resistance of agriculturists to change is well known.[247] The crooked ridges of the open-field system were believed to be necessary because they were supposed to deceive the devil,[248] while a superst.i.tious dislike was entertained against winnowing machines, because they were supposed to interfere with the elements.[249] This is nothing but a modern example of sympathetic magic produced by the introduction of the new machine.

I need not go through the researches of the masters of anthropology to explain what the psychological evidence exactly amounts to, and the realms of primitive thought and experience which it connotes.[250] It will, however, be useful for the purpose of our present study, if we can find among the peasantry of our country (perchance from those districts where we have noted conditions under which primitive thought might retain a continuous hold) examples of belief or superst.i.tion which belongs rather to psychological than to traditional influences.

The interpretation of dreams, the belief in spirit apparitions, the practice of charms, all belong to this branch of our subject, though I shall ill.u.s.trate the points I wish to bring out by reference to less common departments.

It was only in the seventeenth century that a learned divine of the Church of England was shocked to hear one of his flock repeat the evidence of his pagan beliefs in language which is as explicit as it is amusing; and I shall not be accused of trifling with religious susceptibilities if I quote a pa.s.sage from a sermon delivered and printed in 1659--a pa.s.sage which shows not a departure from Christianity either through ignorance or from the result of philosophic study or contemplation, but a sheer non-advance to Christianity, a pa.s.sage which shows us an English pagan of the seventeenth century.

”Let me tell you a story,” says the Reverend Mr. Pemble, ”that I have heard from a reverend man out of the pulpit, a place where none should dare to tell a lye, of an old man above sixty, who lived and died in a parish where there had bin preaching almost all his time.... On his deathbed, being questioned by a minister touching his faith and hope in G.o.d, you would wonder to hear what answer he made: being demanded what he thought of G.o.d, he answers that he was a good old man; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly youth; and of his soule, that it was a great bone in his body; and what should become of his soule after he was dead, that if he had done well he should be put into a pleasant green meadow.”[251]

Of the four articles of this singular creed, the first two depict an absence of knowledge about the central features of Christian belief, the latter two denote the existence of knowledge about some belief not known to English scholars of that time. If it had so happened that the Reverend Mr. Pemble had thought fit to tell his audience only of the first two articles of this creed, it would have been difficult to resist the suggestion that they presented us merely with an example of stupid, or, perhaps, impudent, blasphemy caused by the events of the day. But the negative nature of the first two items of the creed is counterbalanced by the positive nature of the second two items; and thus this example shows us the importance of considering evidence as to all phases of non-belief in Christianity.

Pa.s.sing on to the two items of positive belief, it is to be noted that the soul resident in the body in the shape of a bone is no part of the early European belief, but equates rather with the savage idea which identifies the soul with some material part of the body, such as the eyes, the heart, or the liver; and it is interesting to note in this connection that the backbone is considered by some savage races, _e.g._, the New Zealanders, as especially sacred because the soul or spiritual essence of man resides in the spinal marrow.[252] And there is a well-known incident in folk-tales which seems to owe its origin to this group of ideas. This is where the hero having been killed, one of his bones tells the secret of his death, and thus acts the part of the soul-ghost.

In the pleasant green fields we trace the old faiths of the agricultural peasantry which, put into the words of Hesiod, tell us that ”for them earth yields her increase; for them the oaks hold in their summits acorns, and in their midmost branches bees. The flocks bear for them their fleecy burdens ... they live in _unchanged happiness_, and need not fly across the sea in impious s.h.i.+ps”--faiths which are in striking contrast to the tribal warrior's conception as set forth by the Saxon thane of King Eadwine of Northumbria. ”This life,” said this poetical thane, ”is like the pa.s.sage of a bird from the darkness without into a lighted hall where you, O King, are seated at supper, while storms, and rain, and snow rage abroad. The sparrow flying in at our door and straightway out at another is, while within, safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes into the darkness whence it came.”

Such faiths as these, indeed, show us primitive ideas at their very roots. This seventeenth-century pagan depended upon himself for his faith. He worked out his own ideas as to the origin of soul and heaven and G.o.d and Christ. They were terms that had filtered down to him through the hard surroundings of his life, and he set to work to define them in the fas.h.i.+on of the primitive savage. We meet with other examples. Thus among the superst.i.tions of Lancas.h.i.+re is one which tells us of the lingering belief in a long journey after death, when food is necessary to support the soul. A man having died of apoplexy, near Manchester, at a public dinner, one of the company was heard to remark: ”Well, poor Joe, G.o.d rest his soul! He has at least gone to his long rest wi' a belly full o' good meat, and that's some consolation,” and perhaps a still more remarkable instance is that of the woman buried in Cuxton Church, near Rochester, who directed by her will that the coffin was to have a lock and key, the key being placed in her dead hand, so that she might be able to release herself at pleasure.[253]

These people simply did not understand civilised thought or civilised religion. To escape from the pressure of trying to understand they turned to think for themselves, and thinking for themselves merely brought them back to the standpoint of primitive thought. It could hardly be otherwise. The working of the human mind is on the same plane wherever and whenever it operates or has operated. The difference in results arises from the enlarged field of observation.

When the Suffolk peasant set to work to account for the existence of stones on his field by a.s.serting that the fields produced the stones, and for the origin of the so-called ”pudding-stone” conglomerate, that it was a mother stone and the parent of the pebbles,[254] he was beginning a first treatise on geology; and when the Hamps.h.i.+re peasant attributes the origin of the tutsan berries to having germinated in the blood of slaughtered Danes,[255] other counties following the same thought, I am not at all sure that he is not beginning all over again the primitive conception of the origin of plants.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONG MEG AND HER DAUGHTERS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: STONE CIRCLES ON STANTON MOOR]

This beginning shows the mark of the primitive mind, and that it was operating in a country dominated by scientific thought is the phenomenon which makes it so important to consider psychological conditions among the problems of folklore. They account for some beliefs which may not contain elements of pure tradition. When the Mishmee Hill people of India affirm of a high white cliff at the foot of one of the hills that approaches the Burhampooter that it is the remains of the ”marriage feast of Raja Sisopal with the daughter of the neighbouring king, named Bhismak, but she being stolen away by Krishna before the ceremony was completed, the whole of the viands were left uneaten and have since become consolidated into their present form,”[256] we can understand that the belief is in strict accord with the primitive conditions of thought of the Mishmee people. Can we understand the same conditions of the parallel English belief concerning the stone circle known as ”Long Meg and her daughters,”[257]

and of that at Stanton Drew;[258] or of the allied beliefs in Scotland that a huge upright stone, Clach Macmeas, in Loth, a parish of Sutherlands.h.i.+re, was hurled to the bottom of the glen from the top of Ben Uarie by a giant youth when he was only one month old;[259] and in England that ”the Hurlers,” in Cornwall, were once men engaged in the game of hurling, and were turned into stone for playing on the Lord's Day; that the circle, known as ”Nine Maidens,” were maidens turned into stone for dancing on the Lord's Day;[260] that the stone circle at Stanton Drew represents serpents converted into stones by Keyna, a holy virgin of the fifth century;[261] and that the so-called snake stones found at Whitby were serpents turned into stones by the prayers of the Abbess Hilda.[262] These are only examples of the kind of beliefs entertained in all parts of the United Kingdom,[263] and they seem based upon psychological, rather than traditional conditions.

The giant and the witch, or wizard, are terms applied to the unknown personal agent. ”The two standing stones in the neighbourhood of West Skeld are said to be the metamorphosis of two wizards or giants, who were on their way to plunder and murder the inhabitants of West Skeld; but not having calculated their time with sufficient accuracy, before they could accomplish their purpose, or retrace their steps to their dark abodes, the first rays of the morning sun appeared, and they were immediately transformed, and remain to the present time in the shape of two tall moss-grown stones of ten feet in height.”[264] This is paralleled by the Merioneths.h.i.+re example of a large drift of stones about midway up the Moelore in Llan Dwywe, which was believed to be due to a witch who ”was carrying her ap.r.o.n full of stones for some purpose to the top of the hill, and the string of the ap.r.o.n broke, and all the stones dropped on the spot, where they still remain under the name of Fedogaid-y-Widdon.”[265] Giant and witch in these cases are generic terms by which the popular mind has conveyed a conception of the origin of these strange and remarkable monuments, whether natural or constructed by a long-forgotten people; and we cannot doubt that such beliefs are generated by the peasantry of civilisation from a mental conception not far removed from that of the primitive savage.

Neither their religion nor their education was concerned with such things, so the peasants turned to their own realm and created a myth of origins suitable to their limited range of knowledge.

It may perhaps be urged that such beliefs as these are on the borderland of psychological and traditional influences. Witches and giants certainly belong to tradition, but on the other hand they are the common factors of the natural mind which readily attributes personal origins to impersonal objects. I am inclined on the whole to attribute the beliefs attachable to the unexplained boulders or unknown monoliths to the eternal questionings in the minds of the uncultured peasants of uncivilised countries similar to those of the unadvanced savage. That the peasant of civilisation should confine his questionings to the by-products of his surroundings and not to the greater subjects which occupy the minds of savages, is only because the greater subjects have already been answered for him by the Christian Church.[266]

There is a point, however, where psychological and traditional conditions are in natural conjunction, and I will just refer to this.

That matters of legal importance should be preserved by the agency of tradition has already been shown to belong to that part of history for which there are no contemporary records, and its importance in this connection has been proved. Equally important from the psychological side is the fact that law is also preserved by tradition where people are unaccustomed to the use of writing, or by reason of their occupation have little use for writing. To ill.u.s.trate this, I will quote an excellent note preserved by a writer on Cornish superst.i.tions.

”There is an old 'vulgar error'--that no man can swear as a witness in a court of law to any thing he has seen through gla.s.s. This is based upon the formerly universal use of blown gla.s.s for windows, in which gla.s.s the constant recurrence of the greenish, and barely more than semi-transparent bull's eyes, so much distorted the view that it was unsafe for a spectator through gla.s.s to pledge his oath to what he saw going on outside. Now, through our present gla.s.s, this belief is relegated to the region of forgotten things, but nevertheless it has hold on Westcountry people still. I was, some years since, investigating the case of a derelict s.h.i.+p which had been found off the Scilly Islands, and towed by the pilots into a safe anchorage for the night. Next morning the pilots going out to complete their salvage, saw some men on board the derelict casting off the anchor rope by which they had secured her, but they distinctly declined to swear to the truth of what they had seen, and it turned out that they had seen through gla.s.s, by which they meant a telescope. In the same case I found that when these pilots (men intelligent much beyond the average, as all Scillonians are) had, on boarding the derelict (which had, of course, been deserted by her crew), found a living dog, they had deliberately thrown it overboard. They explained this act of cruelty to me by saying that a s.h.i.+p was not derelict if on board of her was found alive 'man, woman, child, dog, or cat.' And it turned out, on after-investigation, that these were the very words used in an obsolete Act of Parliament of one of the early Plantagenet kings, forgotten centuries ago by the English people, but borne in mind as a living fact by the Scillonians.”[267]

In some special departments elementary psychological conditions operate in a considerable degree--operate to produce not waifs and strays of primitive thought and belief, but whole cla.s.ses. Thus in the curious accretion of superst.i.tion around the objects connected with church wors.h.i.+p, the same agencies are at work. The general characteristic of popular beliefs which originated with, or have grown up around the consecrated objects of the Church, is that such objects are beneficent in their action when employed for any given purpose.

Thus, as Henderson says of the North of England, ”a belief in the efficacy of the sacred elements in the Eucharist for the cure of bodily disease is widely spread.” Silver rings, made from the offertory money, are very generally worn for the cure of epilepsy.

Water that had been used in baptism was believed in West Scotland to have virtue to cure many distempers; it was a preventive against witchcraft, and eyes bathed with it would never see a ghost. Dalyell puts the evidence very succinctly. ”Everything relative to sanct.i.ty was deemed a preservative. Hence the relics of saints, the touch of their clothes, of their tombs, and even portions of structures consecrated to divine offices were a safeguard near the person. A white marble altar in the church of Iona, almost entire towards the close of the seventeenth century, had disappeared late in the eighteenth, from its demolition in fragments to avert s.h.i.+pwreck.” And so what has been consecrated, must not be desecrated. In Leicesters.h.i.+re and Northamptons.h.i.+re there is a superst.i.tious idea that the removal or exhumation of a body after interment bodes death or some terrible calamity to the surviving members of the deceased's family.[268]

In the West of Ireland there were usually found upon the altars of the small missionary churches one or more oval stones, either natural waterwashed pebbles or artificially shaped and very smooth, and these were held in the highest veneration by the peasantry as having belonged to the founders of the churches, and were used for a variety of purposes, as the curing of diseases, taking oaths upon them, etc.[269] Similarly the using of any remains of destroyed churches for profane purposes was believed to bring misfortune,[270] while the land which once belonged to the church of St. Baramedan, in the parish of Kilbarrymeaden, county Waterford, ”has long been highly venerated by the common people, who attribute to it many surprising virtues.”[271]

In 1849 the people of Carrick were in the habit of carrying away from the churchyard portions of the clay of a priest's grave and using it as a cure for several diseases, and they also boiled the clay from the grave of Father O'Connor with milk and drank it.[272] One of the superst.i.tious fancies of the Connemara folk in 1825 was credulity with respect to the gospels, as they are called, which ”they wear round their neck as a charm against danger and disease. These are prepared by the priest, and sold by him at the price of two or three tenpennies. It is considered sacrilege in the purchaser to part with them at any time, and it is believed that the charm proves of no efficacy to any but the individual for whose particular benefit the priest has blessed it. The charm is written on a sc.r.a.p of paper and enclosed in a small cloth bag, marked on one side with the letters I. H. S. On one side of the paper is written the Lord's Prayer, and after it a great number of initial letters.”[273]