Part 25 (1/2)
[457] _Cf._ Kemble, _Saxons in England_, i. 330-335. Dr. Hearn writes: ”Even as the good Pope Gregory the Great permitted the newly converted English to retain their old temples and accustomed rites, attaching, however, to them another purpose and a new meaning, so his successors found means to utilize the simple beliefs of early animism. Long and vainly the Church struggled against this irresistible sentiment.
Fifteen centuries ago it was charged against the Christians of that day that they appeased the shades of the dead with feasts like the Gentiles. In the Penitentials we find the prohibition of burning grains where a man had died. In the _Indiculus superst.i.tionum et Paganiarum_ among the Saxons complaint is made of the too ready canonisation of the dead; and the Church seems to have been much troubled to keep within reasonable bounds this tendency to indiscriminate apotheosis. At length a compromise was effected, and the Feast of All Souls converted to pious uses that wealth of sentiment which previously was lavished on the dead” (_The Aryan Household_, p. 60). And, to close this short note upon an important subject, Mr. Metcalfe, speaking of the old poetic literature of the pagan English, says: ”It was kidnapped, and its features so altered and disguised as not to be recognisable. It was supplanted by Christian poetical legends and Bible lays produced in rivalry of the popular lays of their heathen predecessors. Finding that the people would listen to nothing but these old lays, the missionaries affected their spirit and language, and borrowed the words and phrases of heathenism” (Metcalfe's _Englishman and Scandinavian_, p. 155).
[458] For some reason not apparent in the doc.u.ment itself, Mrs. S. C.
Lomas, the editor of this report, says this interesting letter gives ”a curious and evidently prejudiced description of the religious houses and observances.” See preface to _Hist. MSS. Com. Report on the MSS. of Chequers Court, Bucks_, p. x.
[459] _Hist. MSS. Com., Chequers Court Papers_, pp. 171-2.
[460] _Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs in Italy_, p. 1.
[461] _Corpus insc. Lat._, i. 409; and _cf._ c.u.mont's _Mysteries of Mithra_ (1903).
[462] Leland, _Etruscan Roman Remains_ (1892).
[463] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ (Bury), ii. 15.
[464] _Decline and Fall_, ii. 17.
[465] Evidence is scattered far and wide in most of the reliable studies in folklore. Two special books may be mentioned. A great storehouse of examples is to be found in _The Popish Kingdoms_, by Thomas Naogeorgus, Englyshed by Barnabe Googe, 1570, a new edition of which was published by Mr. R. C. Hope in 1880; and Mr. H. M. Bower has exhaustively examined one important Italian ceremony in his _The Elevation and Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio_, published by the Folklore Society in 1897.
CHAPTER VII
ETHNOLOGICAL CONDITIONS
Already I have had to point out that an appeal to ethnological evidence is the means of avoiding the wholesale rejection of custom and belief recorded of early Britain, because it has been rejected as appertaining to the historic Celt. I will now proceed with the definite proposition that the survivals in folklore may be allocated and explained by their ethnological bearing.
Some years ago I advanced this proposition in my little book ent.i.tled _Ethnology in Folklore_. Only haltingly have my conclusions been accepted, but I nowhere find them disproved,[466] while here and there I find good authorities appealing to the ethnological element in folklore to help them in their views. Mr. MacCulloch, for instance, prefers to go for the basis of the Osiris and Dionysius myths to an earlier custom than that favoured by Mr. Frazer and Mr. Grant Allen, namely, to the practices of the neolithic folk, in Egypt and over a wide tract of country which includes Britain, of dismembering the dead body previous to its burial.[467] Mr. Lang, Mr. Frazer, Mr.
Hartland, and others are strangely reticent on this subject. That Mr.
Lang should be content to trace a story from the Vedas, in which Urvasi tells Pururavas that he must never let her see him naked, to ”a traditional Aryan law of nuptial etiquette,”[468] seems to be using the heaviest machinery for the smallest purposes, while for other and greater purposes he fails to find in ethnological distinctions, explanations which escape his research.[469] That Mr. Frazer should have been able to examine in so remarkable a manner the agricultural rites of European peoples, and only to have touched upon their ethnological bearings in one or two isolated cases, seems to me to be neglecting one of the obvious means of arriving at the solution of the problem he starts out to solve.[470]
I do not want to discount these fragmentary appeals to the ethnological element in folklore. I accept them as evidence that the appeal has to be made. I would only urge that it may be done on more thorough lines, after due consideration of all the elements of the proposition and of all that it means to the study of folklore. We cannot surrender to the palaeontologist all that folklore contains in tradition and in custom as to pygmy peoples, or to the Egyptologist all that it contains as to dismemberment burial rites, without at the same time realising that if it is correct to refer these two groups of folklore respectively to the earliest ages of man's existence as man and to the neolithic stage of culture, they must be withdrawn from all other cla.s.sification. We cannot use the same items of folklore in two totally different ways. The results of withdrawal are as important as the results of allocation, and the necessity for the correct docketing of all groups of folklore is thus at once ill.u.s.trated.
The first point in the argument for ethnological data being discoverable in folklore is that a survey of the survivals of custom, belief, and rites in any given country shows one marked feature, which results in a dividing line being drawn as between two distinct cla.s.ses. This feature is the antagonism which is discoverable in these cla.s.ses. On one side of the dividing line is a set of customs, beliefs, and rites which may be grouped together because they are consistent with each other, and on the other side is another set of customs, beliefs, and rites which may be grouped together on the same ground. But between these two sets of survivals there is no agreement.
They are the negations of each other. They show absolutely different conceptions of all the phases of life and thought which they represent, and it is impossible to consider that they have both come from the same culture source. I have applied the test of ethnology to such cases in Britain, and this appears to answer the difficulty which their antagonism presents. It appears too to be the only answer.
The subjects which show this antagonism are all of vital importance.
They include friendly and inimical relations with the dead; marriage as a sacred tribal rite and marriage as a rule of polyandrous society; birth ceremonies which tell of admittance into a sacred circle of kinsmen, and birth ceremonies which breathe of revenge and hostility; the reverential treatment of the aged folk and the killing of them off; the preservation of human life as part of the tribal blood, and human sacrifice as a certain cure for all personal evils; the wors.h.i.+p of waters as a strongly localised cult, preserved because it is local by whatsoever race or people are in occupation and in successive occupation of the locality; totemic beliefs connected with animals and plants contrasted with ideas entirely unconnected with totemism--all this, and much more which has yet to be collected and cla.s.sified, reveals two distinct streams of thought which cannot by any process be taken back to one original source.
This fact of definite antagonism between different sets of surviving beliefs existing together in one country leads to several very important conclusions. This is the case with the Irish Sids. These beings are said to be scattered over Ireland, and around them a.s.sembled for wors.h.i.+p the family or clan of the deified patron. While there were thus a number of topical deities, each in a particular spot where he was to be invoked, the deities themselves with the rest of their non-deified but blessed brother spirits had as their special abode ”Lands of the Living,” the happy island or islands somewhere far away in the ocean. Now this Sid wors.h.i.+p, we are told by Irish scholars, ”had nothing to do with Druidism--in fact, was quite opposed to it,” the Sids and the Druids being ”frequently found at variance with each other in respect to mortals.”[471]
This is the commencing point of the evidence which proves Druidism to have belonged to the pre-Celtic people, though finding an adopted home among them. This is so important a subject and has been so strangely and inconsistently dealt with by most authorities that it will be well to indicate where we have to search for the non-Celtic, and therefore pre-Celtic, origin of Druidism. The Druidism revealed by cla.s.sical authorities is, for the most part, the Druidism of continental peoples and not of Britain, and I hesitate to accept off-hand that it is proper to transfer the continental system to Britain and say that the two systems were one and the same. There is certainly no evidence from the British side which would justify such a course, and I think there is sufficient argument against it to suspend judgment until the whole subject is before us. If Professor Rhys is right in concluding that Druidism is at its roots a non-Celtic religion,[472] we must add to this that it was undoubtedly a non-Teutonic religion. Celts and Teutons were sufficiently near in all the elements of their civilisation for this want of parallel in their relations.h.i.+p to Druidism to be an additional argument against the Celts having originated this cult. And then the explanation of the differences between continental and British Druidism becomes comparatively easy to understand. The continental Celts, mixing more thoroughly with the pre-Celtic aborigines than did the British Celts, would have absorbed more of the pre-Celtic religion than the British Celts, and hence all the details which cla.s.sical authorities have left us of continental Druidism appear as part of the Celtic religion, while in Britain these details are for the most part absent. But this is not all. There are certain rites in Britain noted by the early authorities which are not attached to any particular cult. They are not Druidic; they are not Celtic. They are, as a matter of fact, special examples of rites practised in only one locality, and accordingly referred to as something extraordinary and not general. From this it is clearly correct to argue that the British Celts had in their midst a cult which, if they did not destroy, they certainly did not absorb, and that therefore this cult being non-Celtic must have been pre-Celtic.
I do not wish to argue this point out further than is necessary to explain the position which, it appears to me, Druidism occupies, and I will therefore only add a note as to the authorities for the statements I have advanced. The differences between continental and British Druidism are definite and p.r.o.nounced,[473] the mixture of the continental Celts with the Iberic people, which they displaced, is attested, by ancient authority and modern anthropology,[474] while the only evidence of such a mixture in Britain is the prominently recorded instance of the Picts intermarrying with the Gael,[475] and this has to be set against the close distinction between tribesmen and non-tribesmen, which is such a remarkable feature of Celtic law;[476]
the existence of local cults in early Britain having all the characteristics of a ruder and more savage origin, and not identified with Celticism, is a point derived from our early authorities.[477]
These are the main facts of the case, and the subject has to be worked out in considerable detail before it can be settled.
There is one other primary subject which bears upon the question of race distinctions in folklore. With the fact of conquest to reckon with, the relations.h.i.+p of the conqueror to the conquered is a matter to consider. In the European tribal system it was a definite relations.h.i.+p, so definite that the conquered, as we have seen, formed an essential part of the tribal organisation--the kinless slaves beneath the tribal kindred. There was a place for the kinless in the tribal economy and in the tribal laws. There was also a place for them in the tribal system of belief, and the mythic influence of the conquered is a subject that needs very careful consideration.