Folklore as an Historical Science

by George Laurence Gomme

I must here interpose a remark with reference to this grouping of the evidence. Apart from the significance of the superstitions as they are recorded in their bare condition among the peasantry, there is the additional fact to note that the superstition against eating or killing certain animals or birds, or against looking at them or naming them, etc., is not universal. It obtains in one place and not in another. If the injunction not to kill, injure, or eat a certain animal were simply the reflection of a universal practice, such a practice might originate in some attribute of the animal itself which characteristically would produce or tend to produce superstition. But the spread of this class of superstition in certain districts, and not in others, is indicative of an ancient origin, and it is exactly what might be expected to have been produced from totem-peoples. Unfortunately, neither the negative evidence of superstitious beliefs nor the local distribution of superstitious beliefs has ever been considered worthy of attention. But some little evidence is incidentally forthcoming, and I would submit that this may be taken as indicative of what might be obtained more fully by further research into this neglected aspect of folklore. I drew Miss Burne's attention to this subject, and she has noted some particulars in her valuable Shropshire Folklore.[424] But for the most part this portion of our evidence wants picking out by a long and tedious process from the mass of badly recorded facts about popular superstitions. I do not believe in the generally stated opinion that certain superstitions are universally believed or practised. It is difficult to prove a negative, and such evidence is not absolutely scientific, but when it comes in direct antithesis to positive, there does not seem any harm in accepting it. Every class of superstition wants tracing out geographically, and local variants want careful noting. I cannot doubt if this were properly done that many so-called universal superstitions would be found to be distinctly local. In the meantime, it is not with universal superstitions that we have to deal. It is primarily with those local variants which show us side by side the differences of belief. It is thus that we can afford evidence of that intermixture of totem-objects which is to be expected from the known facts of totem-beliefs and customs. Indeed, Mr. McLennan has laid it down that "we might expect that while here and there perhaps a tribe might appear with a single animal god, as a general rule tribes and nations should have as many animal and vegetable gods as there were distinct stocks in the population ... we should not expect to find the same animal dominant in all quarters, or worshipped even everywhere within the same nation."[425]

It is important that we should thoroughly understand what these survivals of totemism in the British isles really mean. On the extreme west coast of Ireland, farthest away from the centres of civilisation, there are found these unique examples of a savage institution. The argument that they might have been transplanted thither by travellers from the far west, where totemism has developed to its highest form, cannot seriously be advanced. The argument that they might be the accidental form into which some merely superstitious fancies of ignorant peasants happened to have ultimately shaped themselves, is met by the mathematical demonstration that the ratio of chance against such a development would be well-nigh incalculable. The remaining argument is that they indicate the last outpost, or perhaps one of the last outposts, of a primitive savage organisation which once existed throughout these lands. This is the view that appears to me to be the only possible one to meet all the conditions of the case; one proof in support of this view being the discovery of evidence in other parts of the country which shows that totemism has left its stamp in more or less perfect form upon the traditional beliefs and practices of the nation. Though we are not able to identify further complete examples of the same type as the seal clan of Western Ireland, or the wolf people of Ossory, we should be able, if the explanation I have advanced of their origin be the correct one, to produce examples of the varying forms which such an institution as totemism must have assumed when it had been broken up by the advance of civilising influences. If the seal clan, or the wolf clan, is in truth the last outpost of a savage organisation, there will be in the lands less remote from the centres of civilisation some evidences of the break-up of savagery as it has been driven westward. Somewhere in tradition, somewhere in local observances of beliefs or superstition, there must still be echoes, more or less faint, but still echoes, from totemism. Having discovered these undoubted examples of totemism, the argument shifts its ground. We can no longer say that the theory of totemism may possibly explain some of the customs and traditions of the people. We are, by the logic of the position, compelled to say that custom and tradition must have preserved many relics of totemism, and that so far from seeking to explain custom and tradition by the theory of totemism, we must seek to explain the survival of totemism by custom and tradition. I lay stress on this view of the case because it is hard to combat the views of those who look upon "mere superstition" as no explanation of primitive originals. To us of the present day the beliefs of the peasantry are no doubt properly definable as "mere superstition." But when we examine it as folklore we are seeking for its origin, not for its modern aspect; we are asking how "mere superstition" first arose, and in what forms, not how it exists; we are pushing back the inquiry from to-day when it exists side by side with a philosophical and moral religion to the time when it existed as the sole substitute for philosophy and morals. Even if it is "mere superstition" it has a dateless history. It is not conceivable that it suddenly arose at a particular period before which "mere superstition" did not exist, and all, both peasant and chief, were philosophical and moral. It is not conceivable that the mere superstition of to-day has replaced bodily the mere superstition of other ages. Every succeeding age of progress has influenced it, no doubt, but not eradicated it, and hence the mere superstition of to-day has just such an unbroken continuity of history as language or institutions. That we are able to pick out from among its items undoubted forms of totemism, and that we may add to these complete examples a classified grouping of customs and beliefs in survival parallel to the customs and beliefs of savage totemism, affords proof that at least we may carry back that history to the era of totemism, at whatever point that era may cross the line of, or come into contact with, political history.

This is the definite conclusion to be drawn from the anthropological interpretation of the presence of totemic beliefs among the survivals of folklore. The study of the anthropological conditions has occupied a wide range of thought and inquiry, but it leads us back to a safe basis for research, for it brings definitely within touch of that realm of man which lies outside the civilisation wherein folklore is embedded, the peoples who have made, and the peoples who are dominated by, that civilisation. The savage of Britain cannot with this evidence before us be considered as the mere product of the literature of Greece and Rome. He is part and parcel of the savagery of the human race. Anthropology has shown us that savagery reached the land we now call Britain as part of the general movement of people which has caused the whole earth to become a dwelling-place for man, and now that we know this we must appeal to anthropology whenever we find that the problems of folklore take us out of the culture period of a civilisation known to history.[426]

APPENDIX

I append a synopsis of the culture-structure of the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula (references are to Skeat and Blagden's Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula where not otherwise specified), in order that the position claimed for the one section of totemic belief may be tested by the remaining characteristics of Semang culture. I claim that there is nothing that remains which is inconsistent with the interpretation given of the totemic items.

Physical:—

(a). Live exclusively in the forest surrounded by hostile fauna (i. 13).

(b). Food consists of such wild vegetable food as may happen to fall from time to time in season (i. 109, 341, 525), together with small mammals and birds (i. 112), fish (i. 113).

(c). As soon as they have exhausted the sources of food in one neighbourhood they move on to the next (i. 109).