Anacreontic poetry and Bacchic rites were merely intellectual developments of sentiments which the savage feels and expresses in a coarse animal way, just as the alderman’s sense of gratification and perfect contentment after a civic banquet is not altogether different in kind from that felt by a replete quadruped.
Alcoholic intoxication must have produced in primitive man visions far surpassing those of his pleasantest dreams, and his brain must have been filled with images, sometimes pleasant, sometimes horrible, of a more pronounced character than those which visited him in sleep. At such times would come some of the visitants from the world of imagination to the mind of primitive man which have had the most important influence on his intellectual development. The drinking customs of our working classes of the present day are in a great degree prompted by the longing which man in every condition has to escape for a while from the squalid, material surroundings of daily life into the ideal world of intellectual pleasures, however low these may often be. “A national love for strong drink,” says a competent authority,[111] “is a characteristic of the nobler and more energetic populations of the world; it accompanies public and private enterprise, constancy of purpose, liberality of thought, and aptitude for war.” Tea, haschish, hops, alcohol, and tobacco stimulate in small doses and narcotise in larger; there have been cases known of tea intoxication.[112]
The desire of escaping from self into an ideal world, a world of novelty and pleasures unimaginable, had much to do with the festivals in Greece in honour of Dionysus; it was in some places considered a crime to remain sober at the Dionysia; to be intoxicated on such occasions was to show one’s gratitude for the gift of wine.
CHAPTER VIII.
CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH PREGNANCY AND CHILD-BEARING.
The Couvade, its Prevalence in Savage and Civilized Lands.—Pregnant Women excluded from Kitchens.—The Deities of the Lying-in Chamber.
Dr. Tylor[113] gives the following account of the Carib couvade in the West Indies from the work of Du Tertre:[114]—
“When a child is born, the mother goes presently to her work, but the father begins to complain, and takes to his hammock, and there he is visited as though he were sick, and undergoes a course of dieting which would cure of the gout the most replete of Frenchmen. How they can fast so much and not die of it,” continues the narrator, “is amazing to me, for they sometimes pass the five first days without eating or drinking anything, then up to the tenth they drink oüycou, which has about as much nourishment in it as beer. These ten days passed, they begin to eat cassava only, drinking oüycou, and abstaining from everything else for the space of a whole month. During this time, however, they only eat the inside of the cassava, so that what is left is like the rim of a hat when the block has been taken out, and all the cassava rims they keep for the feast at the end of forty days, hanging them up in the house with the cord. When the forty days are up they invite their relations and best friends, who being arrived, before they set to eating, hack the skin of this poor wretch with agouti-teeth, and draw blood from all parts of his body in such sort that from being sick by pure imagination they often make a real patient of him. This is, however, so to speak, only the fish, for now comes the sauce they prepare for him; they take sixty or eighty large grains of pimento or Indian pepper, the strongest they can get, and after well washing it in water they wash with this peppery infusion the wounds and scars of the poor fellow, who I believe suffers no less than if he were burnt alive; however, he must not utter a single word if he will not pass for a coward and a wretch. This ceremony finished, they bring him back to his bed, where he remains some days more, and the rest go and make good cheer in the house at his expense. Nor is this all; for through the space of six whole months he eats neither birds nor fish, firmly believing that this would injure the child’s stomach, and that it would participate in the natural faults of the animals on which its father had fed; for example, if the father ate turtle, the child would be deaf and have no brains like this animal, if he ate manati, the child would have little round eyes like this creature, and so on with the rest. It seems that this very severe fasting is only for the first child, that for the others being slight.”
Among the Arawaks of Surinam a father must kill no large game for some time after his child is born. When a wife has borne a child, amongst the Abipones, the husband is put to bed and well wrapped up and kept as though he had had the child. Among the Land Dayaks of Borneo, after the birth of his child the father is kept in seclusion indoors for several days and dieted on rice and salt to prevent the child’s stomach from swelling. All this is due to a belief in a bodily union between father and child; different persons with these savages are not necessarily separate beings.
Tylor says[115] that Venegas mentions the couvade among the Indians of California; Zuccheli in West Africa; Captain Van der Hart in Bouro, in the Eastern Archipelago; and Marco Polo in Eastern Asia in the thirteenth century. In Europe even in modern times it existed in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees. Strabo said,[116] that among the Iberians of the North of Spain, the women, after the birth of a child, tend their husbands, putting them to bed instead of going themselves. Among the Basques, says Michel, “in valleys whose population recalls in its usages the infancy of society, the women rise immediately after childbirth and attend to the duties of the household, while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbours’ compliments.” Diodorus Siculus mentions the same thing of the Corsicans (v. 14). Hudibras says,[117]—