62. The recurrence of events.
A brief digression may be made here in order to suggest an explanation of another important class of primitive ideas. These arise from the belief that when something has happened, that same event, or some other resembling it, will again occur, or, more briefly, the belief in the recurrence of events. This view is the origin of a large class of omens, and appears to have been originally evolved simply from the recurring phenomena of day and night and of the months and climatic seasons. For suppose that one was in the position of primitive man, knowing absolutely nothing of the nature and constitution of the earth and the heavenly bodies, or of the most elementary facts of astronomy; then, if the question were asked why one expected the sun to rise to-morrow, the only possible answer, and the answer which one would give, would be because it had risen to-day and every day as long as one could remember. The reason so stated might have no scientific value, but would at any rate establish a strong general probability. But primitive man could not have given it in this form, because he had no memory and could not count. Even now comparatively advanced tribes like the Gonds have a hopelessly inaccurate memory for ordinary incidents; and, as suggested subsequently, the faculty of memory was probably acquired very slowly with the development of language. And since he could not count, the continuous recurrence of natural phenomena had no cumulative force with him, so that he might distinguish them from other events. His argument was thus simply “the sun will rise again because it rose before; the moon will wax and wane again because she waxed and waned before”; grass and leaves and fruit would grow again because they did so before; the animals which gave him food would come again as before; and so on. But these were the only events which his brain retained at all, and that only because his existence depended upon them and they continually recurred. The ordinary incidents of life which presented some variation passed without record in his mind, as they still do very largely in those of primitive savages. And since he made no distinction between the different classes of events, holding them all to be the acts of volitional beings, he applied this law of the recurrence of events to every incident of life, and thought that whenever anything happened, reason existed for supposing that the same thing or something like it would happen again. It was sufficient that the second event should be like the first, since, as already seen, he did not distinguish between similarity and identity. Thus, to give instances, the Hindus think that if a man lies full length inside a bed, he is lying as if on a bier and will consequently soon be dead on a real bier; hence beds should be made so that one’s feet project uncomfortably over the end. By a similar reasoning he must not lie with his feet to the south because corpses are laid in this direction. A Hindu married woman always wears glass bangles as a sign of her state, and a widow may not wear them. A married woman must therefore never let her arms be without bangles or it is an omen that she will become a widow. She must not wear wholly white clothes, because a widow wears these. If a man places one of his shoes over the other in the house, it is an omen that he will go on a journey when the shoes will be in a similar position as he walks along. A Kolta woman who desires to ascertain whether she will have a son, puts a fish into a pot full of water and spreads her cloth by it. If the fish jumps into her lap, it is thought that her lap will shortly hold another living being, that is a son. At a wedding, in many Hindu castes, the bride and bridegroom perform the business of their caste or an imitation of it. Among the Kuramwār shepherds the bride and bridegroom are seated with the shuttle which is used for weaving blankets between them. A miniature swing is put up and a doll is placed in it in imitation of a child and swung to and fro. The bride then takes the doll out and gives it to the bridegroom, saying:—“Here, take care of it, I am now going to cook food”; while, after a time, the boy returns the doll to the girl saying, “I must now weave the blanket and go to tend the flock.” Thus, having performed their life’s business at their wedding, it is thought that they will continue to do so happily as long as they live. Many castes, before sowing the real crop, make a pretence of sowing seed before the shrine of the god, and hope thus to ensure that the subsequent sowing will be auspicious. The common stories of the appearance of a ghost, or other variety of apparition, before the deaths of members of a particular family, are based partly on the belief in the recurrence of associated events. The well-known superstition about sitting down thirteen to dinner, on the ground that one of the party may die shortly afterwards, is an instance of the same belief, being of course based on the Last Supper. But the number thirteen is generally unlucky, being held to be so by the Hindus, Muhammadans and Persians, as well as Europeans, and the superstition perhaps arose from its being the number of the intercalary month in the soli-lunar calendar, which is present one year and absent the next year. Thirteen is one more than twelve, the auspicious number of the months of the year. Similarly seven was perhaps lucky or sacred as being the number of the planets which gave their names to the days of the week, and three because it represented the sun, moon and earth. When a gambler stakes his money on a number such as the date of his birth or marriage, he acts on the supposition that a number which has been propitious to him once will be so again, and this appears to be a survival of the belief in the recurrence of events.