Folk-lore is often explained as the remains of ancient mythology, but the explanation, though perhaps true of some traditional lore still surviving in legends and fairy tales, seems of doubtful application to those popular superstitions yet so prevalent among us, of which our kitchens, our cottages, and our nurseries are the chief depositories. Beliefs, fancies, and customs, however trivial in themselves, and locally absurd, gain an interest from the area they cover and the races they connect; suggesting past unions between nations now remote, in the same way as the smallest weeds are capable of telling, by their geographical dispersion, of lands that once stretched where seas now roll. To take some instances. The English tradition that a swallow’s nest is lucky, and its life protected by imaginary penalties, is one that in isolation we should naturally and rightly disregard. But when we find that the belief belongs to Germany, and that the supposed penalties are the same in Yorkshire as they are in Swabia, our wonder is aroused; and when we further learn that in China, too, the swallow’s nest is lucky and its life inviolate, we become aware of a possible history and antiquity attaching to the superstition, which offer an inviting field for speculation and study. The belief, that the first appearance of mice in a house betokens death, becomes of interest when we find it in Russia as well as in Devonshire. Mothers there are both in Germany and in England who fear their children may grow up to be thieves if their nails are cut before their first year is over. Such superstitions, as we call them, had, without doubt, once a reason; in some cases still to be traced, in others effaced by the wear and tear of time. By the application to them of the comparative method not only may we hope to explain and connect ideas otherwise inexplicable, but also to come to conclusions not uninteresting from an archÆological point of view. For if it can be shown that they are the remains of ancient barbarism rather than of ancient mythology, their testimony may be added to that, long since given by the more material relics and witnesses of early times, concerning the general history of civilisation.

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.

The three great festivals of the Druids took place on Mayday Eve, on Midsummer Eve, and on All Hallow-e’en. On those days went up from cairns, foothills, and Belenian heights fires and sacrifices to the sun-god Beal: and from such fires the lord of the neighbourhood would take the entrails of the sacrificed animal, and, walking barefoot over the ashes, carry them to the Druid who presided over the ceremonies. These fires have descended to us as the famous Beltane fires, lit still, or till lately, in Ireland, Scotland, Northern England, and Cornwall, on the eve of the summer solstice and at the equinoxes, usually on hill tops, with rejoicing and merriment and leaping through the flames on the part of all ages and sexes of the population.[442] It is possible that this leaping through the flames is a relic of the time when men fell victims to them, a modification of the more barbarous custom. In the Highlands, where at the Beltane feast an oatmeal cake is toasted and portions of it drawn for blindfold by the company as they sit in a trench round a grass table, whosoever is the drawer of that portion which has been purposely toasted black is devoted to Baal to be sacrificed, and must leap perforce three times through the flames. In the same country it is, or was, customary on Yeule or Christmas Eve to burn in a cartload of lighted peat the stump of an old tree, which went by the name of Callac Nollic, or Christmas Old Wife. And in several Continental traditions we find the memory of a sacrifice still adhering to Midsummer Eve, or St. John the Baptist’s Vigil. On that day, in Livonia, one or two old boats were burned to the songs and dances of young and old; whilst at Reichenbach, in the Voightland, a May-pole, planted on the green, was, after similar festivities, thrown into the water. On the same day many watermen still refrain from committing themselves to the Elbe, the Unstrut, or the Elster, from the belief that upon that day those rivers require a sacrifice; and the Saale is avoided for the same reason on Walpurgis, or Mayday Eve, as well. From the latter cases we may infer that, where rivers flowed near, a sacrifice by water was as usual as one by fire, which possibly explains the custom so common in many places in connection with these Beltane fires of rolling something lighted down a hill, and, if possible, into a river. At Conz, on the Moselle, a burning wheel was rolled down the hill into the river, and Scotch children at the Beltane feast used to roll their bannocks three times down a hill before consuming them round a good fire of heath and brushwood. So in Swabia, wheels of lighted straw were rolled down the Frauenberg, and on Scheiblen-Sonntag the young people still go by night to a hill, and after dancing and singing round a fire, swing wooden wheels by means of a stick round and round till they are thoroughly alight, and then fling them down the hill. In North Germany, where the fires take place at Easter instead of at Midsummer, lighted tar-barrels are rolled down the Osterberge. The Church, to sanctify these fires, made the day of John the Baptist coincident with Midsummer-day, and taught that the heathen customs were symbolical of Christian doctrine. The fires themselves signified the Baptist, that burning and shining light who was to precede the true light; whilst the rolling wheels, as they represented the gradual descent of the sun in heaven after it had reached the highest point, so they illustrated the diminution of the fame of John, who was at first thought to be the real Messiah, till on his own testimony he said, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ It has even been attempted in recent times to show that the Midsummer fires, in spite of all their heathen surroundings, were really of Christian origin, and in some way connected with John the Baptist. The two chief objections to this theory are, the survival of heathen names for the fires, as for instance, among others, the name Himmelsfeuer, and not the usual Johannisfeuer, in one of the districts of Upper Swabia, and also the close analogy, both in the idea and mode of purification, which exists between the Midsummer fire for men and the Needfires for cattle.

Needfires were fires through which cattle were driven if any disease broke out amongst them. Such a fire was lit in Mull in 1767, and was not only the method lately employed in Lower Saxony, but is said to be still actually prevalent in Caithness. It would thus appear that after the sacrifice to fire had been modified into the custom of passing through or over it, the newer mode of cure gradually found its explanation in the idea, that fire was a healing or purifying agent on account of its power to drive away those evil spirits, which in savage estimation cause or constitute natural disease. The essential thing was that all fires in the neighbourhood should be first extinguished and new ones relit by means of friction for the cattle to go through. The virtue lay in the new virgin fire uncontaminated by previous use for any purpose whatsoever; and the Forlorn Fires, which are said to be still lighted in Scotland when any man thinks himself the victim of witchcraft,[443] agree closely in ceremonial with the Needfires for cattle. A notice having been given to all the householders within the two nearest streams to extinguish all lights and fires on a given morning, the sufferer and his friends on the day cause the emission of new fire by a spinning-wheel or other means of friction, and having spread it from some tow to a candle, thence to a torch, and from the torch to a peatload, send it by messengers to the expectant houses. But exactly similar purificatory effects were attributed to the Midsummer fires. As far as their light reached, crops enjoyed immunity from sorcery for a year, and the ashes collected from them were a constant insurance against calamities of all sorts. Leaping through them was held to avert malignant spirits for a year, and in many places not only did men leap, but cattle were driven, through the flames. Both America and Africa supply curious analogues to the Needfires of Scotland. In the former the Mayas at a festivity in honour of their gods of agriculture danced about the ashes of a burnt pile of wood, and passed barefooted over the coals with or without injury, believing that thus they would avert misfortune and appease the anger of the gods.[444] And among the Hottentots Kolbe attests the custom of driving sheep through a fire, and though the reason told to him for it was, the warding off the attacks of wild dogs by the smell of smoke, the other ceremonies usual on the occasion suggest the interpretation applicable to the Scotch custom.[445] Purification by passing between two fires was also a custom of the Tartars.[446]

Hence there is reason to think that the Midsummer fires were simply annual and public Needfires, resembling the yearly harvest feasts of the Creeks of North America, among whom, as among the ancients who annually imported fresh fire from Delos to Lemnos, there was an idea of a new and purified life commencing with a new and pure flame, after all fires, debased by their subservience to human needs, had been first extinguished. The Minnetarees at their feast of the new corn made a new fire by drilling the end of a stick into a piece of hard wood;[447] and the Sioux at their sacred feasts were wont to remove all fire from the lodge and rekindle a fresh fire before cooking the food, in order to have nothing unclean at the feast.[448] In India the Nagas, when they clear a fresh piece of jungle, first put out their old fires, and produce a new fire by friction, that of ordinary domestic use not being considered pure enough for the purpose.[449]

The same idea has been found among the Indian tribes of South America. There it was the duty of the high-priests ‘to guard the Eternal Fire in the Rotunda; and, in the solemn, annual festival of the Busque, when all the fires of the nation were extinguished, the high-priest alone was commissioned, in the temple, to reproduce the celestial spark and give new fire to the community.’[450] So that from this most remarkable identity of conception between our forefathers and the native tribes of America, it is evident there is nothing exclusively Indo-Germanic in the holiness ascribed to virgin-fire, and that there is no need to ascribe to Phoenician influence customs which occur where such influence is at most uncertain. The wheel ignited by friction of its axle was, it has been suggested, an emblem of the sun, and the old Aryan belief, that when the sun was hidden by clouds its light was extinguished and needed renewing, which could only take place by some god working a ‘pramantha’ in its cold wheel till it glowed again, has been referred to as the possible root of the custom. But such an origin being of difficult application outside the geographical limits of Aryanism, it is obviously better to refer the myth to the custom than the custom to the myth, and to a custom moreover which is as wide as the world.

It may here be noticed in connection with the sacrificial customs which were once a part of the heathen worship, that the idea of a sacrifice to appease an angry spirit that has caused a disease is still far from extinct. The burial of a live animal is still believed in WÄrend and North Sweden to prevent the cattle-plague, and an instance of such a sacrifice to the earth spirits is said to have occurred in JÖnkÖping so recently as 1843. In Moray not long ago, whenever a herd of cattle was seized with the murrain, one of them was buried alive, just as in the North-west Highlands and in Cornwall a black cock is buried alive on the spot where a person is first attacked by epilepsy; or as, in Algeria, one is drowned in a sacred well for a similar purpose. A case is even cited in this century of an Englishman who burned a live calf to counteract the attacks of evil spirits.[451] Near Speier in Germany, if many hens or pigs or ducks died in quick succession, one of their kind was thrown into the fire, and the Esthonians, if a fire broke out, were wont to throw in a black living fowl to appease the flames.

English country boys, when on the sight of a new moon they turn the money in their pockets to ensure a constant supply there, have no idea of the reason that once underlay the practice. But a wide comparison of customs supplies us with a key; for we find everywhere a prevalent mental association between the increase or wane of the moon and the increase or wane of things on earth. Maladies, it is thought, will wane more readily if the medicine be taken in the moon’s wane, and wood cut at that time will burn better, just as, on the other hand, crops are more likely to be plentiful if sown whilst the moon is young, and marriages more likely to be happy. In some English counties pigs must be killed at the same season, lest the pork should waste in boiling. In Germany it is the best time for the father of a family to die, for in the latter half of the month his death would portend the decrease of his whole family; it is also the best time for counting money which it is desired may increase. An invalid in face of a waning moon should pray that his pains may diminish with it. Hence, too, the French idea that hair cut in the moon’s wane will never grow again, or the similar one in Devonshire and Iceland, that the rest will fall off; and hence probably the popular English belief that the weather of the new moon foreshadows the weather for the month. But are all these fancies relics of an old moon-worship, of the existence of which we have other evidence, or simply expressions of that feeling, once so prevalent, that there existed an intimate sympathy between man and nature, and that everything which affected the former was in some way or another typified by the latter? Analogy seems to favour the latter hypothesis. For instance, all along the East coast of England it is thought that most deaths occur at the fall of the tide, a sympathy being imagined between the ebbing of the water and the ebbing of life; and it is curious that Aristotle and Pliny entertained a similar idea, the former with respect to all animals, the latter only about man; and though Pliny’s observation of the fact was instigated by the statement of his predecessor, it is likely that the latter was led to the inquiry by the notoriety of a popular belief. The Cornish idea that deaths are delayed till the ebb-tide, or the Icelandic one that more blood flows from sheep killed while the sea is running out, or that chimneys smoke more if built when the sea is running in, may be cited as similar instances. The inhabitants of Esthonia, if a wolf runs away with a lamb, think, by a kind of sympathy, to cause the wolf to drop it by themselves dropping something out of their pockets. And in parts of England to this day, the bloodstone is a remedy for a bleeding nose, and nettle-tea for a nettle-rash; just as turmeric was once accounted a cure for the jaundice on account of its yellow colour, and the lungs of a fox were held good for asthma on account of that animal’s respiratory powers.

Water-worship, whether as river, lake, or spring, seems as widely spread as that of trees or other natural objects, and the numerous traditions connected with it form yet another link between our civilised present and our barbarous past. ‘There is scarcely,’ says a writer on Lancashire Folk-Lore, ‘a stream of any magnitude in either Lancashire or Yorkshire, which does not possess a presiding spirit in some part of its course.’ A water-spirit that haunts some stepping-stones near Clitheroe is still believed once in every seven years to require a human life; nor is it long since a farmer in Anglesea had to drain a well belonging to him, on account of the damage done by persons resorting thither, under the belief that if they cursed the disease they suffered from and dropped pins about the well, they would shortly be cured. There is still a pin-well in Northumberland, and another in Westmoreland, wherein country girls in passing throw an offering of pins to the resident spirits. So in Ireland, votive rags may be seen on trees and hedges that surround sacred wells, whither people travel great distances in order to crawl an uneven number of times in the sun’s direction round the water, hoping thereby to propitiate the fairies and to avert sorceries.[452] St. Gowen’s well on the coast of Pembroke was lately or is still frequented for the cure of paralysis and other maladies, and there are few counties in England where the dedication of curative wells to Christian saints does not betray the attempt to hallow and hide a heathen practice under a Christian name. In Northampton alone we find St. Lawrence’s at Peterborough, St. John’s at Boughton, St. Rumbald’s at Brackley, St. Loy’s at Weedon-Loys, St. Dennis’ at Naseby, St. Mary’s at Hardwick, and St. Thomas’ at Northampton. So in Normandy, people still resort from all parts of the province, on the eve of the first of June, to the fountain of St. Clotilde, near Andelys, and there are other French wells of no inferior celebrity. As English peasants propitiate bad water-spirits by presents of pins, so do the Bretons by slices of bread and butter; and the Livonians, before starting on a voyage, calm the sea-mother by a libation of brandy.[453] But water, in addition to its dangerous and curative properties, is supposed to contain prophetic ones as well. The Castalian fountain in Greece was prophetic; and as the Laconians, by cakes thrown into a pool sacred to Juno, used to augur good or bad to themselves according as their cakes sank or floated, so do our Cornish countrymen by dropping pins or pebbles into wells read futurity in the signs of the bubbles.

The belief in unseen spirits, which underlies many of the foregoing superstitions, as it is one of the earliest beliefs of the human mind, so it is one of the most persistent. The worship of water, fire, and other natural objects probably arose from a dread of spirits thought to be resident within them, whom it was as well to cajole by gifts and prayers. Earth and air, like fire and water, were peopled respectively with invisible demons, which survive in still current traditions of the Gabriel Hounds, the Seven Whistlers, fairies, elves, and all their tribe. Our countrymen in Cornwall, if the breeze fail while they are winnowing, whistle to the Spriggian, or air-spirits, to bring it back; and the Esthonians on the Gulf of Finland do, or did, precisely the same. In Northamptonshire, till lately, women used to sweep the hearth before they went to bed, and leave vessels of water for the ablutions of the fairies or spirits of the earth, just as in Siberia food is placed daily in the cellar for the benefit of the Domavoi or house-spirits. In Scotland green patches may still be seen on field or moor left uncultivated as ‘the gudeman’s croft,’ by which it has been hoped to buy the goodwill of the otherwise evil-disposed Devil or earth-spirit; and it is doubtless from a similar fear of showing neglect or disrespect that Esthonian peasants dislike parting with any earth from their fields, and in drinking beer or eating bread recognise the existence and wants of the earth-spirit by letting some drops of the one and some crumbs of the other find their way to the floor.[454]

The foregoing instances of actual Folk-Lore, many of them now mere meaningless survivals, seem only intelligible on the ground that they have descended to us either from the earliest inhabitants of Western Europe, or from times when our Aryan progenitors were perhaps not unlike modern Fuejians. The existence has been proved, not only in England but throughout Europe, of phases of thought and modes of worship closely similar to those still found among actual savages. There is no nation that we know in the present or read of in the past so cultivated as not to retain many spots from the dark ages of its infancy and ignorance; but these, absurd as they may seem, hold the rank and claim the interest of prehistoric antiquities. The fact that there still survive among civilised people ideas and practices, corresponding in structure to those found in the various stages of the lower races, is of the same force to prove that we once went through those several stages, as the survival of traits in the growth of the individual, similar to those actually found in lower animals, point to our gradual ascent from a lower scale of being. The belief in, and dread of, evil spirits; the endeavour to affect them by acting on their fetishes or substitutes; the worship of natural objects, as trees, animals, water or even stones; the mistaking of mere sequence in time for causal connection and the consequent importance attached to such occurrences as have been observed to precede remarkable phenomena,—these and many other characteristics of modern savages find abundant representation in modern civilisation, and it is more likely they are there as survivals than as importations.

But it may be urged that no necessary antiquity can be asserted of traditions simply on account of the wide area they range over, and instances may be cited of Christian superstitions no less widely extended than many above mentioned. The belief, for instance, that about midnight on Christmas Eve, cattle rise on their knees to salute the Nativity, is found with slight modifications in England, Brittany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In Cornwall a strong prejudice exists against burying on the north side of a church, and precisely the same feeling is found in Esthonia, for the reason there given that at the end of the world all churches will fall on that side. So, too, the custom of opening all doors and windows at a death, to give free outlet to the departing soul, prevails no less in the south of Spain than in England or in parts of Germany.

To this objection there are two answers: first, that the capacity of superstitions to spread widely and rapidly is by no means denied; secondly, that many Christian traditions are really heathen, though their origin and meaning may now be lost. For the policy of the Church towards paganism, though at times one of radical opposition, was generally one better calculated for success. It learned to prefer gradual triumphs to speedy conquests, aware that the former were more likely to last, and was pleased to satisfy its conscience and hide its impotence under connivance and compromise. It assimilated beliefs which it could not destroy, and glossed over what it could not erase, substituting simply its saints and angels for the gods and spirits of older cults. On Monte Casino, near Rome, there existed down to the sixth century a temple sacred to Apollo, till St. Benedict came and, like another Josiah, broke the idols and overthrew the altar and burned the grove, but set up a temple to St. Martin in its stead. And this case is typical of the way in which obstinate heathen rites were diverted and customs consecrated. Some illustrations may be added to those already incidentally alluded to, since they serve to explain how so many relics of heathenism have resisted centuries of Christian teaching. The Scandinavian water-spirit, Nikur, inhabitant of lakes and rivers and raiser of storms, whose favour could only be won by sacrifices, became in the middle ages St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors and sole refuge in danger; and near St. Nicholas’ church at Liverpool there stood a statue of the Christian saint, to whom sailors used to present a peace-offering when they went to sea, and a wave-offering when they returned. So it was with sacred trees and flowers and waters. Their sanctity was transferred, not destroyed. St. Boniface, with the wood of the oak he so miraculously felled, raised an oratory to St. Peter, to whom were thenceforth paid the honours of Thor. Nobody ventured the more to touch the famous oak at Kenmare when blown down by a storm, because it had been handed over to the protection of St. Columba, nor did a fragment of St. Colman’s oak held in the mouth the less avert death by hanging because it had been sanctified by the name of a saint. The Breton princes, before they entered the church at Vretou, offered prayers under a yew outside, which was said to have sprung from St. Martin’s staff and to have been so replete with holiness that the very birds of the air left its berries untouched. The great goddess Freja could only be banished from men’s thoughts by transferring what had been sacred to her to the Virgin Mary; and the names of such common plants as Lady’s Grass, Lady’s Smock, Lady’s Slipper, Lady’s Mantle, and others, attest to this day the wrong that was done to the Northern goddess. Bits of seaweed called Lady’s Trees still decorate many a Cornish chimney-piece, and protect the house from fire and other evils. The Ladybird was once Freja’s bird; and Orion’s belt, which in Sweden is still called Freja’s spindle, in Zealand now belongs to her successor Mary. In the same way Christmas has supplanted the old Yule festival, and the Yule log still testifies to the rites of fire-worship once connected with the season. So we now keep Easter at the time when our pagan forefathers used to sacrifice to the goddess Eostre, and hot cross-buns are perhaps the descendants of cakes once eaten in her honour, on which the mark of Christianity has taken the place of some heathen sign.

Such then is the evidence which Comparative Folk-Lore affords in confirmation of the teaching of history, that the people from whom we inherit our popular traditions were once as miserable and savage as those we now place in the lowest scale of the human family. The evidence that the nations now highest in culture were once in the position of those now the lowest is ever increasing, and the study of Folk-Lore corroborates the conclusions long since arrived at by archÆological science. For, just as stone monuments, flint knives, lake-piles, or shell-mounds point to a time when Europeans resembled races where such things are still part of actual life, so do the traces in our social organism of fetishism, totemism, and other low forms of thought, connect our past with people where such forms of thought are still predominant. The analogies with barbarism which still flourish in civilised communities seem only explicable on the theory of a slow and more or less uniform metamorphosis to higher types and modes of life, whilst they enforce the belief that before long it will appear a law of development, as firmly established on the inconceivability of the contrary, that civilisation should emerge from barbarism, as that butterflies should first be caterpillars, or that ignorance should precede knowledge. In this way superstition itself turns to the service of science, confirming its teaching, that the history of humanity has been a rise, not a fall, not a degradation from completeness to imperfection, but a constantly accelerating progress from savagery to culture; that, in short, the iron age of the world belongs to the past, its golden one to the future.