A fine kind of wheat bread called "wassail-bread" formed an important feature of the entertainment on New Year's Day in old England.[516]
Among love divinations may be reckoned the dumb cake, so called because it was to be made without speaking, and afterwards the parties were to go backward up the stairs to bed and put the cake under their pillows, when they were to dream of their lovers.[517]
References to the beal-tine ceremonies of Ireland and Scotland, in which oatmeal gruel figured as a dish, or cakes made of oatmeal and carraway seeds, may be found in Brand, Pop. Antiq., vol. 1, p. 226; in Blount, Tenures of Land and Customs of Manors, London, 1874, p. 131; and in Pennant's Tour in Scotland, in Pinkerton's Voyages, vol. 3, p. 49. In "A Charm for Bewitched Land" we find the mode of making a cake or loaf with holy water.
The mince pie and plum pudding of Christmas are evidently ancient preparations, and it is not unlikely that the shape of the former, which, prior to the Reformation, was that of a child's cradle, had a reminiscence of the sacrifice of babies at the time of the winter solstice. Grimm has taught that where human sacrifice had been abolished the figure of a coffin or a cradle was still used as a symbol.
There is a wide field of information to be gleaned in the investigation of the subject of bean foods at certain periods or festivals of the year, and upon this point I have some notes and memoranda, but, as my present remarks are limited to prehistoric farinaceous foods, I do not wish to add to the bulk of the present chapter.[518]
"Kostia—boiled rice and plums—is the only thing partaken of on Christmas Eve."[519]
GALENA.
At times one may find in the "medicine" of the more prominent and influential of the chiefs and medicine-men of the Apache little sacks which, when opened, are found to contain pounded galena; this they tell me is a "great medicine," fully equal to hoddentin, but more difficult to obtain. It is used precisely as hoddentin is used; that is, both as a face paint and as a powder to be thrown to the sun or other elements to be propitiated. The Apache are reluctant to part with it, and from living Apache I have never obtained more than one small sack of it.
No one seems to understand the reason for its employment. Mr. William M. Beebe has suggested that perhaps the fact that galena always crystallizes in cubes, and that it would thus seem to have a mysterious connection with the cardinal points to which all nomadic peoples pay great attention as being invested with the power of keeping wanderers from going astray, would not be without influence upon the minds of the medicine-men, who are quick to detect and to profit by all false analogies. The conjecture appears to me to be a most plausible one, but I can submit it only as a conjecture, for no explanation of the kind was received from any of the Indians. All that I can say is that whenever procurable it was always used by the Apache on occasions of unusual importance and solemnity and presented as a round disk painted in the center of the forehead.