THE SACRED CHARACTER OF BRIDGE-BUILDING.
It is quite within the bounds of argument and proof to show that the Romans looked upon the building of a bridge as a sacred work. Upon no other hypothesis can we make clear why their chief priest was designated “the Greatest Bridge-Builder” (the Pontifex Maximus). That this idea was transmitted to the barbarians who occupied Continental and insular Europe would be a most plausible presumption, even were historical evidence lacking.
Concerning the tolls exacted from the prostitutes who crossed certain bridges in France, and the tenures by which certain estates were held in England, we have to bear in mind that during the Middle Ages bridges were erected by bodies or associations of bridge-builders, which seem to have been secret societies. “It seems not improbable that societies or lodges of bridge-builders existed at an early period, and that they were relics of the policy of Roman times; but the history of such societies is involved in obscurity. The Church appears to have taken them up and encouraged them in the twelfth century, and then they were endowed with a certain religious character.... The order of bridge-builders at Avignon, with the peculiar love of punning which characterized the Middle Ages, were called ‘fratres pontificales,’ and sometimes ‘fratres pontis’ and ‘factores pontium.’ ... According to Ducange (Gloss. v. fratres pontis), their dress was a white vest with a sign of a bridge and cross of cloth on the breast.” (“Essays on Archæological Subjects,” Thomas Wright, London, 1861, vol. ii. p. 137 et seq., article “Mediæval Bridge-Builders.”) In this connection it may be just as well to remember that the Pope of Rome is still the Pontifex Maximus.
Knowing that bridges were constructed by secret societies, we have fought out half our battle; for these secret societies were undoubtedly under the patronage and protection of some god in heathen times, or of some saint in later days, reserving for the honor of the latter the same ritual which had been consecrated to the devotion of the heathen predecessor.
The following from Fosbroke is pertinent: “Plutarch derives the word ‘Pontifex’ from sacrifices made upon bridges,—a ceremony of the highest antiquity. These priests are said to have been commissioned to keep the bridges in repair, as an indispensable part of their office. This custom no doubt gave birth to the chapel on London bridge, and the offerings were of course for repairs.” In another place he mentions “the annexation of chapels to almost all our bridges of note.”—(“Cyclopædia of Antiquities,” London, 1843, vol. i. pp. 62, 146, article “Bridges.”)
“Gottling (Gesch. d. Rom. Staatsv. p. 173) thinks that ‘Pontifex’ is only another form for ‘pompifex,’ which would characterize the pontiffs only as the managers and conductors of public processions and solemnities. But it seems far more probable that the word is formed from pons and facere, ... and that consequently it signifies the priest who offered sacrifices upon the bridge.”—(“Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities,” William Smith, LL. D., Boston, 1849, article “Pontifex.”)
“Les Romains avaient réuni en collége sacerdotal leurs constructeurs de ponts.”—(“Les Primitifs,” Elie Réclus, Paris, 1885, p. 116.)
Among the Romans—who were the great architects of the European world, and whose aqueducts, baths, roads, and bridges have never been approached in strength or beauty by those of any other nation about them—it was to be expected that the title of the great priest should be Pontifex Maximus, on the same principle that among the Todas of the Nilgherris, who are pre-eminently a pastoral race, the chief medicine man or priest is called Palal, “meaning the Great Milker.”—(See for these statements “Les Primitifs,” Réclus, p. 260, article “Les Monticules des Nilgherris.”)
The legends of the Middle Ages, all over Europe, from South Germany to Scandinavia, are filled with references to bridges, mills, and churches, but especially bridges, built by the Devil exclusively or by his assistance; and in every case there is the suggestion of human sacrifice having been offered.
“As a rule, the victims were captive enemies, purchased slaves or great criminals.... Hence, in our own folk-tales, the first to cross the bridge, the first to enter the new building or the country, pays with his life, which meant falls a sacrifice.... In folk-tales we find traces of the immolation of children; they are killed as a cure for leprosy, they are walled up in basements.... Extraordinary events might demand the death of kings’ sons and daughters, nay, of kings themselves.”—(“Teutonic Mythology,” Grimm, vol. i. p. 46.)
“When the Devil builds the bridge, he is either under compulsion from men or is hunting for a soul; but he has to put up with the cock or chamois, which is purposely made to run first across the new bridge,” or “they make a wolf scamper through the door” of the new church, or a goat.—(Idem, vol. iii. p. 102.)
“When the new bridge at Halle, finished in 1843, was building the common people fancied a child was wanted to be walled into the foundations.”—(Idem, vol. iii. p. 1142.)
“In modern Greece, when the foundation of a new building is being laid, it is the custom to kill a cock, a ram, or a lamb, and to let its blood flow on the foundation-stone, under which the animal is afterwards buried. The object of the sacrifice is to give strength and stability to the building. But sometimes, instead of killing an animal, the builder entices a man to the foundation-stone, secretly measures his body or a part of it, or his shadow, and buries them under the foundation-stone, or he lays the foundation-stone on the man’s shadow. It is believed that the man will die within a year.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 144.)
It is not our purpose to carry this part of the discussion farther. The curious may consult Grimm, who shows the frequency with which human victims were walled up alive in new castles, ramparts, bridges, and other structures. As time passed on and man grew wiser, there was a substitution of a coffin as a symbol of the human victim; in stables a calf or a lamb was buried alive under the main door, sometimes a cock or a goat; under altars, a live lamb; in newly opened graveyards, a live horse. All this testimony points conclusively to the fact that every such structure was begun at least under auspices from which all traces and suggestions of heathenism had not yet been eliminated; consequently we shall not be very much in error in deciding that there was some survival of a religious rite in the peculiar ceremony insisted upon at crossing the bridge of Montluc, or that it, as all others, was built by architects who still adhered to the old cultus, and had influence enough with the rustic population to secure the incorporation of certain features of a sacred character belonging to the superseded ritual, and which have come down to us, or almost to us, in a more or less mutilated and distorted condition.
A very interesting article is to be found in “Mélusine,” Paris, May 5, 1888, which may be read with great profit at this moment; it is entitled “Les Rites de la Construction,” and relates the popular tradition of the failure to maintain a bridge at a place called Resporden, in Cornwall, as each was swept away by flood almost as soon as completed. The good people of the vicinity suspected sorcery and witchcraft, and consulted a witch, whose directions were couched in these terms: “Si les gens de Resporden veulent avoir un pont qui ne fasse plus la culbute, ils devront enterrer vivant dans les fondations un petit garçon de quatre ans.... On placera l’enfant dans une futaille défoncée, tout nu, et il tiendra d’une main une chandelle bénite, de l’autre un morceau de pain.”
An unnatural mother was found who gave her infant son for the sacrifice, receiving some compensation, and the poor victim was walled up alive as directed; the bridge was completed, and has since withstood all the ravages of storm and freshet; but the tale still repeats the last words of the hapless babe,—
“Ma chandelle est morte, ma mère,
Et de pain, il ne me reste miette.”
The unnatural mother very properly went insane in a few days after the sacrifice; and the wail of the abandoned babe is still to be heard in the moaning of the winds and the sobs of the rains that fall upon Resporden.
XXIV.
OBSCENE SURVIVALS IN THE GAMES OF THE ENGLISH RUSTICS.
The rough games of the English rustics are not altogether free from vestiges of the same nature as have been recorded of the Arabian sheik in preceding pages. For example, in Northumberland, England, there was a curious diversion called “F⸺g for the pig.” Brand gives no explanation of the custom, which may be allied to the jocular tenures mentioned by Blount, and with them to the worship of Bel-Phegor. Brand says: “The ancient grossièreté of our manners would almost exceed belief. In the stage directions to old Moralites we often find, ‘Here Satan letteth a f⸺.’”—(“Popular Antiquities,” vol. ii. p. 9, article “Country Wakes.”)
In London itself such “survivals” lingered down to very recent periods. “In former times the porters that plyed at Billingsgate used civilly to entreat and desire every man that passed that way to salute a post that stood there in a vacant place. If he refused to do this, they forthwith laid hold of him, and by main force bouped his ⸺ against the post; but if he quietly submitted to kiss the same, and paid down sixpence, then they gave him a name, and chose some one of the gang for his godfather. I believe this was done in memory of some old image that formerly stood there, perhaps of Belius or Belin.”—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. ii. p. 433, article “Kissing the Post.”)
All these customs, absurd as they seem to us, may have been parts of the ritual of deities of the same class as Bel-Phegor, who looked after the excreta perhaps, and the organs connected therewith; some kind of a tribute was demanded, and none could be more appropriate than the offering of the parts or the submission to some pain inflicted upon them by those in charge of the shrine.
Crossing the Atlantic, a custom suspiciously like the preceding, was still to be heard of, as a rough boyish prank, in Philadelphia, Penn., thirty or more years ago. Whenever it happened that any boy was guilty of flatulence, all the party of school-boys would cry, “Touch wood!” and run to touch the nearest tree-box; those who were slow in doing this were pounded by the more rapid ones.
“Then, lads and lasses, merry be,
...
And, to make sport,
I f⸺t and snort.”
(“The Pranks of Robin Goodfellow,”
supposed to be by Ben Jonson,
quoted in Hazlitt’s “Fairy Tales,”
London, 1875, p. 420.)
The following memoranda from Buckle, “Commonplace Book,” seem to have no value beyond merely filthy stories:—
“Ludlow’s f⸺ was a prophetique trump;
There never was anything so jump;
’Twas a very type of a vote of this rump,
Which nobody can deny.”
Ludlow is a stanch Republican. The incident alluded to was a subject of much merriment, and exercised the pen of some of the choicest poets of the latter half of the seventeenth century.—(“Ballad: A New Year’s Gift for the Rump,” Jan. 5, 1659, and footnote in Percy Society’s “Early English Poetry,” London, 1841, vol. iii. p. 176.)
“And then my poets,
The same that writ so subtly of the fart.”
(“The Alchemist,” Ben Jonson, act ii. scene 1.)
“Who the author alluded to should be I cannot say. In the collection of poems called ‘Musarum Deliciæ; or, The Muse’s Recreation,’ by Sir John Ennis and Dr. Smith, there is a poem called ‘The Fart censured in the Parliament House.’ It was occasioned by an escape of that kind in the House of Commons. I have seen part of this poem ascribed to an author in the time of Elizabeth, and possibly it may be the thing referred to by Jonson.” (Whalley.) But Gifford, from whose later editions I have drawn my material, comments to the effect that “this escape, as Whalley calls it, took place in 1607, long after the time of Elizabeth. The ballad is among the Harleian Manuscripts, and is also printed in the State Poems; it contains about forty stanzas of the most wretched doggerel.”—(Gifford’s edition of Jonson, London, 1816.)
“The Fool of Cornwalle.” “I was told of a humorous knight dwelling in the same countrey (that is, Cornwall), who upon a time, having gathered together in one open market-place a great assemblie of knights, squires, gentlemen, and yeomen, and whilst they stood expecting to heare some discourse or speech to proceed from him, he, in a foolish manner (not without laughter), began to use a thousand jestures, turning his eyes this way and then that way, seeming always as though presently he would have begun to speake, and at last, fetching a deepe sigh, with a grunt like a hogge, he let a beastly loud fart, and tould them that the occasion of this calling them together was to no other end but that so noble a fart might be honoured with so noble a company as there was.”—(“Jack of Dover’s Quest of Inquiry,” in Percy Society, vol. vii. p. 30, London, 1852. “Jack of Dover,” A.D. 1604.)
“The Foole of Lincoln.” “There dwelleth of late a certaine poore labouring man in Lincoln, who, upon a time, after his wife had so reviled him with tongue nettle as the whole streete rung again for weariness thereof, at last he went out of the house, and sate him downe quietly upon a blocke before his owne doore; his wife, being more out of patience by his quietness and gentle sufferaunce, went up into the chamber, and out at the window powred downe a pisse-pot upon his head; which when the poor man sawe, in a merry moode he spake these words: ‘Now, surely,’ quoth he, ‘I thought at last that after so great a thunder we should have some raine.’”—(Idem, vol. vii. p. 15.)
The preceding filthy pleasantry comes down from a very distinguished origin. Harington recalls the adventure of the “good Socrates, who, when Xantippe had crowned him with a chamber-pot, he bore it off single with his head and shoulders, and said to such as laughed at it,—
“It never yet was deemed a wonder
To see that rain should follow thunder.”
(“Ajax,” p. 94.)
“Nathaniel. They write from Libtzig (reverence to your ears)
The art of drawing farts from out of dead bodies
Is by the brotherhood of the Rosie Cross
Produced unto perfection, in so sweet
And rich a tincture.”
(“The Staple of News,” Ben Jonson, Gifford’s edition,
London, 1816, act iii. scene 1, p. 240.)
XXV.
URINE AND ORDURE AS SIGNS OF MOURNING.
Care should be taken to distinguish between the religious use of ordure and urine, and that in which they figure as outward signs of mourning, induced by a frenzy of grief, or where they have been utilized in the arts.
Lord Kingsborough (Mexican Antiquities, vol. viii. p. 237) briefly outlines such ritualistic defilement in the Mortuary Ceremonies of Hebrews and Aztecs, giving as references for the latter Diego Duran, and for the former the prophet Zechariah, chap. iii.: “Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood before the angel,” etc.
“The nearest relations cut their hair and blacken their faces, and the old women put human excrement on their heads,—the sign of the deepest mourning.”—(“The Native Tribes of South Australia,” Adelaide, 1879, pp. 200, received through the kindness of the Royal Society, New South Wales, T. B. Kyngdon, Secretary.)
XXVI.
URINE AND ORDURE IN INDUSTRIES.
The economical value of human and animal excreta would seem to have obtained recognition among all races from the earliest ages. It is not venturing beyond limits to assert that a book could be written upon this phase of the subject alone. It is not essential to incorporate here all that could be compiled, but enough is submitted to substantiate the statement just made, and to cover every line of inquiry.
It might perhaps be well to consider whether or not the constant use of and familiarity with human urine and ordure in houses, arts, and industries of various kinds would have a tendency to blunt the sensibilities of rude races, so that in their rites we could look for the introduction of these loathsome materials; just as we find that all those races whose women are allowed to go naked place a very slight value upon chastity.
“It certainly is not possible to separate the religious uses of urine from its industrial and medical uses.... Probably nearly everywhere it has been the first soap known. Does not this aspect of the matter need to be insisted on, even from the religious point of view?... In England and France, and probably elsewhere, the custom of washing the hands in urine, with an idea of its softening and beautifying influence, still subsists among ladies, and I have known those who constantly made water on their hands with this idea.”—(Havelock Ellis, “Contemporary Science Series,” London, Personal letter.)