[422] Gordon Cumming, Hebrides, 365.
[423] Dalyell's Darker Superstitions of Scotland, 431. It should be noted that Dalyell wrote before the age of scientific folklore, and therefore his observations are founded more upon conjectures derived from the practices and beliefs themselves than from any theory as to origins.
[424] White horse, p. 208; black cat, p. 211, note 3; two magpies, p. 224; crickets, p. 238; hawthorn, p. 244.
[425] Fortnightly Review, xii. 562.
[426] It is just possible that the value of investigating Australian totemism may prove to have a still more direct bearing upon British folklore, for Huxley's opinion as to the Australoid race is not entirely to be neglected. He argued that "The Australoid race are dark complexion, ranging through various shades of light and dark chocolate colour; dark or black eyes; the hair of the scalp black and soft, silky and wavy; the skull dolichocephalic. The great continent of Australia is the headquarters of the Australoid race.... The Dekkan, which is so remarkably isolated on the north by the valleys of the Ganges and Indus, beyond these by the Himalaya Mountains, and on the east and west by the sea, was originally inhabited, and is still largely peopled by men who completely come under the definition of the Australoid race given above. In Abyssinia and Egypt there is a smooth-haired, dark-complexioned, long-headed stock which I am strongly inclined to regard as a westward extension of the Australoid race. I would venture to suggest that the dark whites who stretch from Northern Hindostan through Western Asia, skirt both shores of the Mediterranean, and extend through Western Europe to Ireland, may have had their origin in a prolongation of the Australoid race, which has become modified by selection or intermixture" (Huxley in Prehistoric Congress, 1868, pp. 92-94). This point of view is confirmed by Mr. Mathew's conclusions, Eaglehawk and Crow, cap. iii.
CHAPTER V
SOCIOLOGICAL CONDITIONS
Perhaps the most important part of the anthropological aspect of custom, rite, and belief in tradition is sociological. Perhaps, too, it is the most neglected. Inquirers into the origin of religion proceed one after the other to investigate the phenomena of early beliefs as they interpret the origin of religion, without one thought of the sociological conditions of the problem. They interpose, as I have already pointed out, the theory of a state religion, when such a foundation is incidentally found to be necessary to carry the imposing superstructure of Celtic mythology, but they do not pause to inquire whether the state, suddenly introduced into the argument, is a discoverable factor; or they proceed to erect their superstructure of religious origins without any social foundation whatever, and we are left with a great concept of abstract thought having no roots in the source from which it is supposed to be drawn. The sun-god and the dawn-god, even the All-father, are traced in the most primitive thought of man, but it is not deemed necessary to show in what relation these concepts stand to practical life. It is here I must refer back to Robertson-Smith's dictum on mythology, for it is the necessary preliminary to showing that belief cannot enter into life except through the sociological units into which all humanity fits itself; or rather, I would prefer Robertson-Smith's way of putting it, "the circle into which a man was born was not simply a human society, a circle of kinfolk and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the family and the state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of the particular community with which they stood connected as the human members of the social group."[427] Any proposal to examine a group of customs, beliefs, and rites which at their origin take us back to the earliest history of a country must, therefore, be considered from the sociological side. The great mass of the material to be used in such an inquiry is not ancient so far as its date of record is a test of antiquity, but it is ancient as traditional survival, and it is not possible to trace back custom and belief surviving in modern times to the earliest times, except through the medium of the institutions which formed the social basis of the peoples to whom such custom and belief belonged. A custom or belief exists as a living force before it sinks back into the position of a survival. It is the lingering effect of this living force which helps to preserve it for so many ages, and in the midst of such adverse circumstances, as a survival among other customs and beliefs existing under a different living force. It is not possible, therefore, to ascertain the origin of custom or belief in survival, except as a fragment of the social institution to which it originally belonged. No custom or belief has a life of its own separate from all other. It is joined to other customs and beliefs in indissoluble co-partnership, the whole group making up the institutions under which the race or people to whom they belong live and flourish. This, as we have already seen, is a most important principle in the study of survivals. Not only is it strictly true of all primitive peoples, but it is true of the early stages of more advanced communities.[428] Indeed it has been put into a phrase used long ago by an English writer on the manorial tenant, "His religion is a part of his copyhold,"[429] and when the jurist talks to us in highly technical language of lords, freeholders, villans, and serfs, we must bear in mind that at any rate these villans and serfs belonged to a social institution, one element of which was religion. So, too, must the folklorist bear in mind that it is not the individual belief he is concerned with, but with the belief that belongs to a community. It must be assumed that the true test of the antiquity of every custom or belief is its natural and easy assimilation with other customs and beliefs, equally with itself in the position of a survival, and the recognition of the whole group thus brought into relationship as belonging to the institutions of the people from whom it is derived.