A contributor to “Asiatic Researches” calls this powder of the Huli festival a “purple powder,” and claims that the idea is to represent the return of spring, which the Romans call “purple.”[91]
In some parts of North America the 1st of April is observed like Saint Valentine’s Day, with this difference, that the boys are allowed to chastise the girls, if they think fit, either with words or blows.—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. i. p. 141, article “April Fool’s Day.”)
A FEW REMARKS UPON THE USE OF BLADDERS IN RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES.
Whether or not primitive man, excited by his insatiate, omnivorous appetite for gods, under the impulses of which he deified winds, waters, trees, and stones, and looked with a veneration not far removed from devotion itself, upon the holy graals, chalices, and other paraphernalia of his ritual, should have associated a mysterious power with the bladders he employed to hold his urine and ordure is a question which no one can to-day determine.
For our own cow-worshipping Aryan ancestry bladders were a natural means of transporting liquids, exactly as they remain among the Apaches and other Indian tribes of America.
Introduced of necessity into religious ceremonial, they would, with the advance of years, and in spite of the improvement which might be brought about in the domestic comfort of the people at large, gain a certain “medicine” value, strictly parallel to that which we know has been gained by the gourd-rattle, which, in not a few cases, has been consulted as an oracle, and adored as a god.[92]
The author has observed a number of instances of the use by Sioux, Apache, and other Indians, of bladders tied in the hair as an “ornament” long after traders had placed within reach glass beads, feathers, and other means of decoration. The Hottentots kept drinking-water in “the intestines of animals.”—(Thurnberg, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. pp. 38, 73, 141.)
Of the Patagonians we are informed that “the only vessels they use for carrying water are bladders.”—(“Adventure and Beagle,” vol. i. p. 93.)