[465] Evidence is scattered far and wide in most of the reliable studies in folklore. Two special books may be mentioned. A great storehouse of examples is to be found in The Popish Kingdoms, by Thomas Naogeorgus, Englyshed by Barnabe Googe, 1570, a new edition of which was published by Mr. R. C. Hope in 1880; and Mr. H. M. Bower has exhaustively examined one important Italian ceremony in his The Elevation and Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio, published by the Folklore Society in 1897.
CHAPTER VII
ETHNOLOGICAL CONDITIONS
Already I have had to point out that an appeal to ethnological evidence is the means of avoiding the wholesale rejection of custom and belief recorded of early Britain, because it has been rejected as appertaining to the historic Celt. I will now proceed with the definite proposition that the survivals in folklore may be allocated and explained by their ethnological bearing.
Some years ago I advanced this proposition in my little book entitled Ethnology in Folklore. Only haltingly have my conclusions been accepted, but I nowhere find them disproved,[466] while here and there I find good authorities appealing to the ethnological element in folklore to help them in their views. Mr. MacCulloch, for instance, prefers to go for the basis of the Osiris and Dionysius myths to an earlier custom than that favoured by Mr. Frazer and Mr. Grant Allen, namely, to the practices of the neolithic folk, in Egypt and over a wide tract of country which includes Britain, of dismembering the dead body previous to its burial.[467] Mr. Lang, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Hartland, and others are strangely reticent on this subject. That Mr. Lang should be content to trace a story from the Vedas, in which Urvasi tells Pururavas that he must never let her see him naked, to "a traditional Aryan law of nuptial etiquette,"[468] seems to be using the heaviest machinery for the smallest purposes, while for other and greater purposes he fails to find in ethnological distinctions, explanations which escape his research.[469] That Mr. Frazer should have been able to examine in so remarkable a manner the agricultural rites of European peoples, and only to have touched upon their ethnological bearings in one or two isolated cases, seems to me to be neglecting one of the obvious means of arriving at the solution of the problem he starts out to solve.[470]
I do not want to discount these fragmentary appeals to the ethnological element in folklore. I accept them as evidence that the appeal has to be made. I would only urge that it may be done on more thorough lines, after due consideration of all the elements of the proposition and of all that it means to the study of folklore. We cannot surrender to the palæontologist all that folklore contains in tradition and in custom as to pygmy peoples, or to the Egyptologist all that it contains as to dismemberment burial rites, without at the same time realising that if it is correct to refer these two groups of folklore respectively to the earliest ages of man's existence as man and to the neolithic stage of culture, they must be withdrawn from all other classification. We cannot use the same items of folklore in two totally different ways. The results of withdrawal are as important as the results of allocation, and the necessity for the correct docketing of all groups of folklore is thus at once illustrated.
The first point in the argument for ethnological data being discoverable in folklore is that a survey of the survivals of custom, belief, and rites in any given country shows one marked feature, which results in a dividing line being drawn as between two distinct classes. This feature is the antagonism which is discoverable in these classes. On one side of the dividing line is a set of customs, beliefs, and rites which may be grouped together because they are consistent with each other, and on the other side is another set of customs, beliefs, and rites which may be grouped together on the same ground. But between these two sets of survivals there is no agreement. They are the negations of each other. They show absolutely different conceptions of all the phases of life and thought which they represent, and it is impossible to consider that they have both come from the same culture source. I have applied the test of ethnology to such cases in Britain, and this appears to answer the difficulty which their antagonism presents. It appears too to be the only answer.
The subjects which show this antagonism are all of vital importance. They include friendly and inimical relations with the dead; marriage as a sacred tribal rite and marriage as a rule of polyandrous society; birth ceremonies which tell of admittance into a sacred circle of kinsmen, and birth ceremonies which breathe of revenge and hostility; the reverential treatment of the aged folk and the killing of them off; the preservation of human life as part of the tribal blood, and human sacrifice as a certain cure for all personal evils; the worship of waters as a strongly localised cult, preserved because it is local by whatsoever race or people are in occupation and in successive occupation of the locality; totemic beliefs connected with animals and plants contrasted with ideas entirely unconnected with totemism—all this, and much more which has yet to be collected and classified, reveals two distinct streams of thought which cannot by any process be taken back to one original source.