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]]