Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

For the existence of similar traditions as of similar fairy-tales in widely remote districts there are three possible hypotheses. These are, migration, community of origin, or similarity of development. Either they have spread from one place to another, or they are the legacies of times when the people possessing them were actually united, or they have sprung up independently in different localities, in virtue of the natural laws of mental growth. It may be difficult of any given belief to say to which of these three classes it belongs; but there are many beliefs, so alike in general features, yet so divergent in detail, as best to accord with the theory of a common descent or a common development. Some, for instance, may be so common to the different nations of one stock, as to be traceable to periods anterior to their dispersion; whilst others, yet more widely spread than these, suggest relationships between races of men more fundamental and remote than can be detected in language, and point to an affinity that is older and stronger than mere affinity of blood, an affinity, that is, in the conceptions and fancies of primitive thought. For where actual relationship is not proved by language, analogies in tradition are better accounted for by supposing similar grooves of mental development than by any other theory. Philology may prove a relationship between, let us say, the Nixens of Germany and the Nisses of Scandinavia: but there is no relationship beyond similarity of conception between the Nereids of antiquity and the mermaids of the North, or between the Brownies of Scotland and the Lares of Latium. Children, of whatever race or country they may be, dislike the dark, nor is it thought necessary to account for this common trait by any theory of connection or descent. So it is with nations. They are or were, in the face of nature, but as children in the dark, and the nearly similar phenomena of sun and storm, breeze and calm, have sufficed to create for them, in their several homes, many of those fears and fancies we find common to them all.

No one who has not turned special attention to the subject, can form any conception of the mass of purely pagan ideas, which, varnished over by Christianity, but barely hidden by it, grow in rank profusion in our very midst and exercise a living hold, which it is impossible either to realise or to fathom, on the popular mind. Like old Roman or British remains, buried under subsequent accumulations of earth and stones, or superficially concealed by an overgrowth of herbage, uninjured during all the length of time they have lain unobserved, there they lie just beneath the surface of nineteenth-century life, as indelible records of our mental history and origin. Only in the higher social strata can they be deemed extinct; but if it can no longer be said, as it was in the seventeenth century, that most houses of the West-end of London have the horse-shoe on the threshold,[426] yet it may still be said of many a farm or cottage in the country. The astronomer Tycho Brahe, if he met an old woman or hare on leaving home, would take the hint to turn back: but it seems to be only the working population of England, Scotland, or Germany who still do the same. Statistics show that the receipts of omnibus and railway companies in France are less on Friday than on any other day; and many a German that lay dead on the carnage fields of the late war was found to have carried his word-charm as his safest shield against sword or bullet. Most English villages still have their wise men or women, whose powers range, like those of the shamans in savage tribes, from ruling the planets to curing rheumatics or detecting thieves; and witchcraft still has its believers, occasionally its victims, as of yore.[427]

We who have been brought up to look upon the classification of things into animal, vegetable, and mineral, as primary, or indeed intuitive, are apt to forget that savages never classify, and that animate and inanimate to them are both alike. Sir John Lubbock has collected conclusive evidence that so inconceivable a confusion of thought exists.[428] The Tahitians, who sowed some iron nails that young ones might grow from them; the Esquimaux, who thought a musical-box the child of a small hand-organ; the Bushmen, who mistook a large waggon for the mother of some smaller ones, show the tendency of savages to identify motion with life, and to attribute feelings and relations such as actuate or connect themselves to everything that moves of itself or is capable of being moved. A native sent by one missionary to another with some loaves, and a letter stating the number, having eaten two of them and been detected through the letter, took the precaution the next time to put the letter under a stone that it might not see the theft committed.[429] Now there are numerous superstitions, which there is reason to think are relics of this savage state of thought, when all that existed existed under the same conditions as man himself, capable of the same feelings, and subject to the same wants and sorrows. Take, for example, bees. Bees are credited with a perfect comprehension of all that men do and utter, and, as members themselves of the family they belong to, they must be treated in every way as human in their emotions. On the day of the Purification in France it is customary in some parts for women to read the Gospel of the day to the bees.[430] French children are taught that the inmates of the hive will come out to sting them for any bad language uttered within their hearing; and in South Russia it is believed ‘that if any robbery be committed where a number of hives are kept, the whole stock will gradually diminish, and in a short time die; for bees, they say, will not suffer thieving.’[431] Many persons have probably at some time of their lives, on seeing a crape-covered hive, learnt on inquiry that the bees were in mourning for some member of their owner’s family. In Suffolk, when a death occurs in a house, the inmates immediately tell the bees, ask them formally to the funeral, and fix crape on their hives; otherwise it is believed they would die or desert. And the same custom, for the same reason, prevails, with local modifications, not only in nearly every English county, but very widely over the continent. In Normandy and Brittany may be seen, as in England, the crape-set hives; in Yorkshire some of the funeral bread, in Lincolnshire some cake and sugar, may be seen at the hive door; and a Devonshire nurse on her way to a funeral has been known to send back a child to perform the duty she herself had forgotten, of telling the bees. The usual explanation of these customs and ideas is that they originated long ago with the death or flight of some bees, consequent on the neglect they incurred when the hand that once tended them could do so no longer. Yet a wider survey of analogous facts leads to the explanation above suggested; for, not to dwell on the fact that in some places in England they are informed of weddings as well as of funerals, and their hives are decorated with favours as well as with crape, the practice of giving information of deaths extends in some parts not only to other animals as well, but, in addition, to inanimate things. In Lithuania, deaths are announced, not only to the bees, but to horses and cattle, by the rattling of a bunch of keys, and the same custom is reported from Dartford in Kent. In the North Riding, not long since, a farmer gravely attributed the loss of a cow to his not having told it of his wife’s death. In Cornwall, the indoor plants are often put into mourning as well as the hives; and at Rauen, in North Germany, not only are the bees informed of their master’s death, but the trees also, by means of shaking them. Near Speier, not only must the bees be moved, but the wine and vinegar must be shaken, if it is wished that they shall not turn bad. Near Würtemburg, the vinegar must be shaken, the bird-cage hung differently, the cattle tied up differently, and the beehive transposed. Near Ausbach the flower-pots must also be moved, and the wine-casks knocked three times; while at Gernsheim, not only must the wine in the cellar be shaken, to prevent it turning sour, but the corn in the loft must be moved if the sown corn is to sprout.[432] But all these customs, being too much alike to be unrelated, and too widely spread to have sprung up without some reason, by some mere caprice or coincidence, it is difficult to suggest any other reason for them than that they go back to a time when not only bees and cattle, but trees and flowers, vinegar and wine, were, like human beings, considered liable to take offence, and capable also of being pacified by kind treatment, since, according as their several temperaments predisposed them, they were able, by deserting, dying, turning sour, or other untoward conduct, to resent neglect or disrespect on the part of their owners. Such beliefs belong to the lowest state of mental development, to a time when the most obvious marks of natural differentiation were as yet insufficient to produce corresponding distinctions in the minds of their beholders.

Other popular traditions strengthen this interpretation. In Normandy and Brittany it is thought that bees will not suffer themselves to be bought or sold; in other words, that they would take offence if made the subjects of sale and barter.[433] The same belief prevails in Cheshire, Suffolk, Hampshire, Cornwall, and Devonshire, like the old Russian rule that sacred images might not be spoken of as ‘bought’ but only as ‘exchanged for money.’[434] The value of bees is measured, not by money, but by corn, hay, or some other exchangeable commodity; in Sussex, if any money is given for bees, it must be gold. Connected with this idea of the quasi-humanity of bees is the world-wide fear of slighting dangerous animals by calling them by their customary names. Mahometan women dare not call a snake a snake lest they should be bitten by one; Swedish women avert the wrath of bears by speaking of them as old men. Livonian fishermen, when at sea, fear to endanger their nets by calling any animal by its common name. At Mecklenburg, in the twelve days after Christmas, the fox goes by the appellation of the ‘Long Tail;’ even the timid mouse by that of the ‘Floor-runner.’ The Esthonians at all times call the fox ‘Gray Coat,’ the bear ‘Broad-foot,’ and should they take the liberty of too often mentioning the hare, their flax crops, they fear, would be in peril. In Sweden people dare not mention to anyone in the course of the day the number of fish they have caught, if they would catch any more; a feeling to which is probably related the North-Country prejudice against counting one’s fish before the day’s sport is over.

Witchcraft, although it represents a very low stage of religious conception, yet in its primary idea of a sympathy or identity existing between an original and its image, manifests some degree of intellectual advancement. For the idea of vicarious or representative influence, that if you wish to injure a man you can do so by an injury to a bit of his clothing or a lock of his hair, is, so far as it goes, a spiritual idea, presupposing notions about the interdependence of nature, and as far as possible removed from what we understand by mere materialism. Materialism indeed is one of the latest growths of the human mind, whilst spiritualism is one of its earliest. For to a savage, everything that exists lives and feels like himself, and the unseen spirits that surround and affect him are as the motes in a sunbeam for variety and number. The native Indian speaks of the earth as ‘the big plate where all the spirits eat.’[435] Yet the fetichistic mode of thought is undoubtedly a low, and to us an absurd one. Burnings in effigy may probably be traced to it, and the stories so common in the annals of witchcraft of waxen images stuck with pins or burned, in order to injure the person they represented, undoubtedly belong to it. In America Kane found an Indian tribe who believed that the hair of an enemy confined with a frog in a hole would cause the owner of the hair to suffer the torments of the frog.[436] In the Fiji Islands the health of a person can be made to fail with the decay of a cocoa-nut buried under a temple.[437] The Finns are said to this day to shoot in the water at images of their absent enemies. But our own country has its analogies. In Suffolk, in the last century, if an animal was thought to be bewitched, it was burned over a large fire, under the idea that as it consumed away the author of its bewitchment would consume away too. In Anglesey it is still believed that the name of a person inscribed on a pipkin, containing a live frog stuck full of pins, will injuriously affect the bearer of the name.

There are a numerous set of popular traditions which clearly relate to the same state of thought. There is a feeling so wide that it may be called European, that cut hair should always be burned, never thrown away: the reason given in France, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, and near Saalfeld in Germany, being, that its discovery by a witch would subject its owner to sorcery; that generally given in England and also in Swabia being, that if a bird took any of it for its nest the bearer would suffer from headache or lose the rest of his hair. A similar idea prevails about teeth: all over England children are taught to throw extracted teeth into the fire, lest a dog by swallowing them should induce the toothache. So with the nail that has scratched you, or the knife that has cut you,—keep the nail or knife free from rust, and the wound will not fester. But all such ideas are explained by those actually existent in savage parts, by the custom, for instance, of the Fijians of hiding their cut hair in the thatch of the house, that it may not be used against them in witchcraft, or by the practice of Zulu sorcerers to destroy their victims by burying some of his hair, his nails, or his dress in a secret place, that the decay of the one may ensure that of the other. And a similar philosophy lies at the root of most popular charms for certain complaints. The remedies for warts, for instance, are all vicarious. Both at home and abroad the most usual method is to rub a black snail on the wart, and then to hang it on a hedge, trusting to the sympathetic decay of the wart and snail. But a piece of stolen raw meat, a stalk of wheat or a hair with as many knots in them as there are warts on the hand, or two apple halves tied together, will, if applied to the part and then buried, cause effectual relief. The essential thing is to ensure the decay of the representative object. In Somersetshire a good ague cure is to shut up a large black spider in a box and leave it to perish, that spider and ague may disappear together. In many places, it is thought that the whooping-cough may be transferred to a hairy caterpillar tied in a bag round the neck: as the insect dies the cough will go. And in Devonshire some of the patient’s hair is given to a dog between two slices of buttered bread, that the dog may take the hair and the cough together; whilst in Sunderland the head is shaved and the hair (risking we must suppose a headache) left on a bush for the birds to carry off, that the cough itself may pass to them. May it not be said that such customs and fancies betray a mental constitution radically different from our present one, taking us back and ever reminding us of the savagery of our lineage as surely as do flint-flakes or bone-needles, and teaching us that only by the slowest degrees can emancipation be achieved from the superstitions, or, as some think, from the poetry, of ignorance?

Again, trees, stones, waters, stars, serpents, or animals, are all to this day worshipped far and wide by uncivilised races, and the marks of a similar object-worship by our own race still survive in many a popular tradition. A law of Canute earnestly forbade the heathenship of reverencing ‘the sun or moon, fire or flood, waterwhylls, or stones, or trees of the wood of any sort;’ yet, if such things are no longer worshipped, it may be certainly said that some of them are still reverenced. To take, for instance, tree-worship. Both in Guiana and Africa the natives have so superstitious a reverence for the silk cotton tree that they fear to cut it down lest death should ensue.[438] In New Zealand mythology, Rata was rebuked and put to shame by the spirits of the forest for cutting down a tall tree-divinity for making his canoe.[439] The trees which occupy the most prominent place in European folk-lore are the elder, the thorn, and the rowan or mountain ash. In Denmark a twig of elder placed silently in the ground is a popular cure for toothache or ague, whilst no furniture, least of all a cradle, may be made of its wood; for the tree is protected by the Elder-mother, without whose consent not a leaf may be touched, and who would strangle the baby as it lay asleep. So also about Chemnitz, elder boughs fixed before stalls keep witchcraft from the cattle; and wreaths of it hung up in houses on Good Friday, after sunset, are believed to confer immunity from the ravages of caterpillars. In Suffolk, it is the safest tree to stand under in a thunderstorm, and misfortune will ensue if ever it is burned. The legend that the cross was made of its wood is evidently an aftergrowth, an attempt, of which we have so many examples, to give a Christian colour to a heathen practice; for the elder was the tree under which, in pre-Christian times, the old Prussian Earth-god was fabled to dwell. Like the elder, the whitethorn was once an object of worship, for it too is held to be scatheless in storms; and how else can we account for the fact that in Switzerland, as in the Eastern counties of England, to bring its flowers into a house is thought to bring death, than by supposing it was once a tree too sacred to be touched, and likely to avenge in some way the profanation that was done to it? Too deeply rooted in popular veneration for its sacred character to disappear, the Church, in course of time, wound its own legend round it, and by the fiction that its wood had composed the Crown of Thorns, deprived the worship of its heathen sting. But if round the elder and the thorn feelings of reverence once gathered and still linger, yet more is it true of the rowan. In England, Germany, and Sweden its leaves are still the most potent instrument against the darker powers: Highlanders still insert crosses of it with red thread in the lining of their clothes, and Cornish peasants still carry some in their pocket and wind it round the horns of their cattle in order to keep off evil eyes. In Lancashire sprigs of it are for the same reason hung up at bedheads, and the churn staff is generally made of its wood. It used to stand in nearly every churchyard in Wales, and crosses of it were regularly distributed on Christian festivals as sure preservatives against evil spirits. But this is another attempt to Christianise what was heathen, for the ancient Danes always used some of it for their ships, to secure them against the storms which Rân, the great Ocean God’s wife, with her net for capsized mariners, was ever ready and desirous to raise. The rowan in heathen mythology was called Thor’s Helper, because it bent to his grasp in his passage over a flooded river on his way to the land of the Frost Giants; and it has been thought that the later sanctity of the tree may be due to the place it occupied in mythological fancy. Yet it seems more reasonable to trace the myth to a yet older superstition than to trace the superstition to the myth. For from the exceeding beauty of their berries the rowan and the elder and the thorn would naturally impress the savage mind with the feelings of actual divinity, and would consequently lend themselves to the earliest imaginings about the universe of things. It is more likely that they progressed from a divinity on earth to their position in mythology than from their position in mythology to a divinity on earth, for the mind is capable of employing things for worship long before it is capable of employing them for fable. Worship is the product of fear, and fable of fancy; and before men can indulge in fancy they must to some extent have cast off fear.

Certain traditions relating to birds and beasts are only explicable on the supposition that they were once objects of divination or worship. The old Germans, we know from Tacitus, used white horses, as the Romans used chickens, for purposes of augury, and divined future events from different intonations of neighings. Hence it probably is that the discovery of a horse-shoe is so universally thought lucky, some of the feelings that once attached to the animal still surviving round the iron of its hoof. For horses, like dogs or birds, were invariably accredited with a greater insight into futurity than man himself; and the many superstitions connected with the flight or voice of birds resolve themselves into the fancy, not inconceivable among men surrounded on all sides by unintelligible tongues, that birds were the bearers of messages and warnings to men, which skill and observation might hope to interpret. Why is the robin’s life and nest sacred, and why does an injury to either bring about bloody milk, lightning, or rain? It has been suggested that the robin, on account of its colour, was once sacred to Thor, the god of lightning; but it is possible that its red breast singled it out for worship from among birds, just as its red berries the rowan from among trees, long before its worshippers had arrived at any ideas of abstract divinities. All over the world there is a regard for things red. Captain Cook noticed a predilection for red feathers throughout all the islands of the Pacific.[440] In the Highlands women tie some red thread round the cows’ tails before turning them out to grass in spring, and tie red silk round their own fingers to keep off the witches: and just as in Esthonia, mothers put some red thread in their babies’ cradles, so in China they tie some round their children’s wrists, and teach them to regard red as the best known safeguard against evil spirits.

One, indeed, of the chief lessons of Comparative Folk-Lore is a caution against the theory which deduces popular traditions from Aryan or other mythology. The fact has been already alluded to, that in parts of China the same feelings prevail about the swallow as in England or Germany. But there are yet other analogies between the East and the West. A crowing hen is an object of universal dislike in England and Brittany; and few families in China will keep a crowing hen.[441] The owl’s voice is ominous of death or other calamity in England and Germany, as it was in Greece (except at Athens); but in the Celestial Empire also it presages death, and is regarded as the bird which calls for the soul. And the crow also is in China a bird of ill omen. Is it not therefore likely that all popular fancies about birds and animals have begun in the same way, among the same or different races of the globe, and were subsequently adopted but never originated by mythology? May it not be that certain birds or animals became prominent in mythology because they had already been prominent in superstition, rather than that they became prominent in superstition because they previously had been prominent in mythology? For instance, instead of tracing a dog’s howling as a death omen to an Aryan belief that the dog guided the soul from its earthly tenement to its abode in heaven, may we not suppose that the myth arose from an already existing omen, and that the latter arose, as omens still do, from a coincidence which suggested a connection, subsequently sustained by superficial observation? The St. Swithin fallacy, which arose within historical memory and still holds its ground in an age of scientific observation, well illustrates how one striking coincidence may grow into a belief, which no amount of later evidence can weaken or destroy. Just so, if it happened that a dog howled shortly before some calamity occurred to our Aryan forefathers, thousands and thousands of years ago, long before they had attained to any thoughts of soul or heaven, we can well imagine that the dog, thus thought to betoken death, should, when they came to frame the myth, be conceived as the guide which was waiting for the soul to take it to heaven, and that the belief thus perpetuated by the myth might survive to the latest ages.

There is abundant evidence in the practices to this very day, or till lately, prevalent in England and Europe, that the worship of the sun or of fire fills a large part in primitive religion. The passing of children through the fire is not only a Semitic custom, but extends wherever the human mind has attained to the idea of purification and sacrifice. Some North American tribes used to burn to the sun a man-offering in the spring, to the moon a woman-offering in the autumn, expressing thereby their sense of the blessings of light and a desire for their continuance. And traces of such fire-worship and of its accompanying human sacrifices lasted in Europe into the very heart of this century, and in many places still survive. The similarity that exists between them, both in their seasons and mode of observance, illustrates the marvellous sameness of ideas which may so often be found among people in widely remote districts of the globe.