Folklore as an Historical Science Part 12

3 = a, b + g, h, i, k.

4 = + g, h, i, l, m.

The first conclusion to be drawn from this is that the overlapping of the several examples (No. 1 overlapping No. 2 at a, b, c, d, No. 2 overlapping No. 3 at a, b + g, h, No. 3 overlapping No.

4 at + g, h, i) shows all these several examples to be but variations of one original custom, example No. 4, though possessing none of the elements of example No. 1, being the same custom as example No. 1. Secondly, the divergences g to m mark the line of decay which this particular custom has undergone since it ceased to belong to the dominant culture of the people, and dropped back into the position of a survival from a former culture preserved only by a fragment of the people.[224]

The first of these conclusions is not affected by the order in which the examples are arranged; whether we begin with No. 4 or with No. 1, the relations.h.i.+p of each example to the others, thus proved to be in intimate a.s.sociation, is the same. The second conclusion is necessarily dependent upon what we take to be "primary elements" and "secondary elements;" and the question is how can these be determined?

As a rule it will be found that the primary elements are the most constant parts of the whole group of examples, appearing more frequently, possessing greater adherence to a common form, changing (when they do change) with slighter variations; while the secondary elements, on the other hand, a.s.sume many different varieties of form, are by no means of constant occurrence, and do not even amongst themselves tend to a common form. The primary elements, therefore, const.i.tute the form of the custom which represents the oldest part of the survival. They alone will help us to determine the origin of the custom, whether by features represented in the elements thus brought together or by comparison with ancient custom elsewhere or with survivals elsewhere similarly reconst.i.tuted. Altogether these elements, thus linked together by the tie of common attributes, are parts of one organic whole, and it is on this reconstructed organism we have to rely for the evidence from tradition.

When any given custom or belief has undergone this double process of a.n.a.lysis of its component parts and cla.s.sification of its several elements, another process has to be undertaken, namely, to ascertain its a.s.sociation with other customs or beliefs, in the same country or among the same people, each of which customs or beliefs, being treated in exactly the same manner, is found to exhibit some degree of relations.h.i.+p in origin, condition, or purpose to the whole group under examination. In this way cla.s.sification, a.n.a.lysis, and a.s.sociation go hand in hand as the necessary methods of studying survivals. Without a.n.a.lysis we cannot properly arrive at a cla.s.sification; without cla.s.sification we cannot work out the a.s.sociation of survivals.

The process is perhaps highly technical and complicated. It may not be of interest to all to discuss the process by which results are attained when what is most desired are the results themselves. But in truth the two parts of this study cannot well be separated. To judge of the validity of the results one must know what the process has been, and too often results are jumped at without warrant; items of custom and usage or of belief and myth are docketed as belonging to a given phase of culture, a given group of people, when they have no right to such a place in the history of man. It is not only distasteful to the inquirer, but almost impossible to dislodge any item of folklore once so placed, and thus much of the value of the material supplied by folklore is lost or discounted.

Custom, rite, and belief treated in this fas.h.i.+on become veritable monuments of history--a history too ancient to have been recorded in script, too much an essential part of the folk-life to have been lost to tradition. We may hope to restore therefrom the surviving mosaic of ancient inst.i.tutions, ancient law, and ancient religion, and we may further hope, with this mosaic to work upon, to restore much of the entire fabric which has been lying so many centuries beneath the acc.u.mulated and acc.u.mulating ma.s.s of new developments representing the civilisation of the Western world.

III

It is only here that we can discover the point where we may properly commence the work of comparative folklore. An item of folklore which stands isolated is practically of no use for scientific investigation.

It may be, as we have seen, that the myth is in its primary stage as a sacred belief among primitive people, in its secondary or folk-tale stage as a sacred memory of what was once believed, in its final or legendary stage when it does duty in preserving the memory of a hero or a place of abiding interest. It may be, as we have seen, that the custom, rite, or belief is a mere formula without purpose or result, a mere traditional expression of a purpose without formula or result, a mere statement of result without formula or purpose. We must know the exact position of each item before we begin to compare, or we may be comparing absolutely unlike things. The exact position of each item of folklore is not to be found from one isolated example. It has first to be restored to its a.s.sociation with all the known examples of its kind, so that the earliest and most complete form may be recorded.

That is the true position to which it has been reduced as a survival.

This restored and complete example is then in a position to be compared either with similar survivals in other countries on the same level of culture, or within the same ethnological or political sphere of influence, or with living customs, rites, or beliefs of peoples of a more backward state of culture or in a savage state of culture.

Comparison of this kind is of value. Comparison of a less technical or comprehensive kind may be of value in the hands of a great master; but it is often not only valueless but mischievous in the hands of less experienced writers, who think that comparison is justified wherever similarity is discovered.

Similarity in form, however, does not necessarily mean similarity in origin. It does not mean similarity in motive. Customs and rites which are alike in practice can be shown to have originated from quite different causes, to express quite different motifs, and cannot therefore be held to belong to a common cla.s.s, the elements of which are comparable. Thus to take a very considerable custom, to be found both in folk-tales and in usage, the succession of the youngest son, it is pretty clear that among European peoples it originated in the tribal practice of the elder sons going out of the tribal household to found tribal households of their own, thus leaving the youngest to inherit the original homestead. But among savage peoples where the youngest son inherits the homestead, he does not do so because of a tribal custom such as that to be found in the European evidence. It is because of the conditions of the marriage rites. Thus among the Kafir peoples of South Africa

"the young man of the commonality, who being a young man has had but little or no means of displaying his sagacity--a quality with them most frequently synonymous with cunning--commences for himself in a small way. Hence, too, being polygamous, and his wives being bought with cattle, his first wife is taken from a position accordant with that of a young, untried, and poor or comparatively poor man. Hence also it happens that his wives increase in number, and in--so to speak--position, in accordance with his wealth, and with his reputation for wisdom and sagacity, which may have raised him to the rank of headman of a district, and one of the Chief's counsellors. It is, therefore, only when old in years that he takes to himself his 'great wife,' one of greater social and racial position than were his previous wives, and her son, that is, her eldest son, who is consequently the father's youngest or nearly his youngest, becomes his 'great son,' and par excellence the heir. If the father be a Chief, this son becomes the Chief at his father's death.

"As, however, subordinate heirs, the father after some consultation and ceremony chooses out of his other sons, secondly 'the son of his right hand,' and thirdly, 'the son of his grandfather.' If the father be a Chief, these two are after his death accounted as Chiefs in the tribe, subordinate to the 'great son,'

and even if through their superior energy, the size of the tribe requiring emigration to pastures new, or other causes, one or both of them break off, and with their respective inheritance or following form a separate tribe or tribes, yet they are federally bound to their great brother, and their successors to his successors, and recognise him as their supreme or national Chief. Thus Krili, the Chief of the Amagcaleka tribe across the Kei, was also paramount Chief of all the Amaxosas, including his own tribe, and those this side the Kei, who are divided into the two great divisions--each of which includes several tribes--of the Amangquika and Amandhlambi, which latter has among it the Amagqunukwebi, a tribe of Caffre intermingled with Hottentot blood, and therefore rather looked down upon."[225]

Dr. Nicholson, from whom I quote this evidence, goes on to say that the

"custom then of the heirs.h.i.+p of the youngest, appears to me to have not unlikely grown up among a polygamous race, and to have arisen both from considerations of self security and from those of race and rank."

Quite independently of Dr. Nicholson I had come to the same conclusion;[226] and Dr. Nicholson, after handsomely acknowledging my priority in the "discovery," very properly alludes to the not unimportant fact of two workers in the same field coming to like conclusions. It is remarkable that the same distinction between the succession of the youngest son and of the son of the youngest wife appears in folk-tales.[227] Now clearly it would be quite wrong to suggest a parallel between the heirs.h.i.+p of the youngest among the Kafir peoples of Africa and heirs.h.i.+p of the youngest among the tribal people of early Europe. They are not comparable at all points, and it is just where the point of comparison fails that it becomes so important to science.[228]

I will take one other example, and this is the important practice of human sacrifice which looms so largely in anthropological research, and which is considered by so good an authority as Schrader to have taken a prominent place among the Aryans,[229] though he takes his examples, not from language, but from the unexamined customs of the Greeks, Romans, northerns, Indians, and Persians. We know more about the development of sacrifice now that Professor Robertson Smith has dealt with the Semitic part of the evidence. Without resting on the fact that the occurrence of human sacrifice in a country occupied by Aryan-speaking people does not, of itself alone, imply that the rite was Aryan, it is far more important to point out that among the higher races "the feeling that the slaying involves a grave responsibility and must be justified by divine permission" appears, and "care was taken to slay the victim without bloodshed, or to make believe that it had killed itself."[230] This feeling marks distinctly the Greek sacrifice as at Thargelia and in the Leukadian ceremony, the Roman sacrifice at the Tarpeian Rock, the sacrifice at the Valhalla rock of the northerns, while among the Hindus there is much to show that the idea of human sacrifice in some of the early writings is a literary borrowing from the Hebrews; and that if it ever prevailed among the Aryas of India it was very early superseded by the sacrifice of animals.[231] Colonel Dalton has given good reasons for his views "that the Hindus derived from the aboriginal races the practice of human sacrifices."[232] Although, then, Greek ritual and Greek myth are full of legends which tell of sacrifices once human, but afterwards commuted into sacrifices where some other victim is slain or the dummy of a man is destroyed;[233] although the significant Hindu ceremonial of so throwing the limbs of an animal slaughtered to be burnt with the dead that every limb lies upon a corresponding part of the corpse;[234] although Teuton, Celt, and Norse[235] are credited with the practice by authorities not to be questioned, it appears by the evidence that the European form of human sacrifice has little in common with the savage form except in the nature of the victim. It occurred, as Grimm states, when some great disaster, some heinous crime, had to be retrieved or purged, a kind of sacrifice, says Mr.

Lang, not necessarily savage except in its cruelty; and the victims were not tribesmen, but captive enemies, purchased slaves, or great criminals.

These two examples will serve as warning against the too general acceptance of the custom and belief of savage and barbaric races, as identical with the custom and belief of early or primitive man. Such identification is in the main correct; but it is correct not because it has been proved by the best methods to be so, but because, of all possible explanations, this is the only one that meets the general position in a satisfactory manner. In many cases, however, it is monstrously incorrect, and it is the incorrect conclusion which weighs far more against the acceptance of the results of folklore than do the correct conclusions in its favour.

The work which has to be accomplished by the comparative method of research is of such magnitude that it needs to be considered. The labour and research might in point of volume be out of proportion to the results, and it may be questioned, as it has already been questioned by inference, whether it is worth the while. The first answer to this objection is that all historical investigation is justified, however much the labour, however extensive the research.

Secondly, considering the very few results which the study of folklore has. .h.i.therto produced upon the investigations into prehistoric Europe, it must be worth while for the student of custom and belief to conduct his experiments upon a recognised plan in order to get at the secret of man's place in the struggle for existence, which is determined more by psychological than by physical phenomena. Thirdly, if the psychical anthropology of prehistoric times is to be sought for in the customs and beliefs of modern savages, it is of vital importance to anthropological science that this should be established by methods exactly defined. Whatever of traditional custom and belief is capable of bearing the test and of being definitely labelled as belonging to prehistoric man, becomes thereafter the data for the psychical anthropology of civilised man. Edmund Spenser understood this when his official duties took him among the "wild" Irish. "All the customs of the Irish," he says, "which I have often noted and compared with that I have read, would minister occasion of a most ample discourse of the original of them, and the antiquity of that people, which in truth I think to be more ancient than most that I know in this end of the world; so as if it were in the handling of some man of sound judgment and plentiful reading, it would be most pleasant and profitable."[236]

Comparative folklore, then, to be of value must be based upon scientific principles. The unmeaning custom or belief of the peasantry of the Western world of civilisation must not be taken into the domains of savagery or barbarism for an explanation without any thought as to what this action really signifies to the history of the custom or belief in question. No doubt the explanation thus afforded is correct in most cases, and perhaps it was necessary to begin with the comparative method in order to understand the importance and scope of the study of apparently worthless material. A new stage in comparative folklore must now be entered upon. It must be understood what the effective comparison of a traditional peasant custom or belief with a savage custom or belief really amounts to. The process includes the comparison of an isolated custom or belief belonging, perhaps secretly, to a particular place, a particular cla.s.s of persons, or perhaps a particular family or person, with a custom or belief which is part of a whole system belonging to a savage race or tribe; of a custom or belief whose only sanction is tradition, the conservative instinct to do what has been done by one's ancestors, with a custom or belief whose sanction is the professed and established polity or religion of a people; of a custom or belief which is embedded in a civilisation, of which it is not a part and to which it is antagonistic, with a custom or belief which helps to make up the civilisation of which it is part. In carrying out such a comparison, therefore, a very long journey back into the past of the civilised race has been performed. For unless it be admitted that civilised people consciously borrow from savages and barbaric peoples or constantly revert to a savage original type of mental and social condition, the effect of such a comparison is to take back the custom or belief of the modern peasant to a date when a people of savage or barbaric culture occupied the country now occupied by their descendants, the peasants in question, and to equate the custom or belief of this ancient savage or barbaric culture with the custom or belief of modern savage or barbaric culture. The line of comparison is not therefore simply drawn level from civilisation to savagery; but it consists, first, of two vertical lines from civilisation and savagery respectively, drawn to a height scaled to represent the antiquity of savage culture in modern Europe, and then the level horizontal line drawn to join the two vertical lines. Thus the line of comparison is

Ancient savagery Ancient savagery +-------------------------------+ Savagery Civilisation

We thus arrive at some conception of the work to be accomplished by and involved in comparative folklore. The results are worth the work.

They relate to stages of culture in the countries of civilisation which are recoverable by no other means. The stages of culture are practically lost to history. In ancient Greek and Roman history, and in ancient Scandinavian history, there are priceless fragments of information which tell us much. But these fragments are not the complete story, and they belong to relatively small areas of European history. Every nation has the right to go back as far in its history as it is possible to reach. It can only do this by the help of comparative folklore. In our own country we have seen how history breaks down, and yet historical records in Britain are perhaps the richest in Europe. The traditional materials known to us as folklore are the only means left to us, and we can only properly avail ourselves of these when we have mastered the methods of science which it is necessary to use in their investigation.

FOOTNOTES:

[182] Mr. MacCulloch, in the t.i.tle of his interesting book, the _Childhood of Fiction_, has emphasised this mischievous idea. I am not convinced to the contrary by the evidence he gives as to the popularity of the folk-tale among all peoples (p. 2). Indeed, the book itself is an emphatic testimony against its t.i.tle. Mr. MacCulloch evidently began with the idea that the folk-tale belonged to the domain of fiction.

Thus the opening words of his book are: "Folk-tales are the earliest form of romantic and imaginative literature--the unwritten fiction of early man and of primitive people in all parts of the world;" whereas as he nears the end of his study he observes: "Thus, in their origin, folk-tales may have had some other purpose than mere amus.e.m.e.nt; they may have embodied the traditions, histories, beliefs, ideas, and customs of men at an early stage of civilisation" (p. 451). Mr.

MacCulloch himself proves this to be the case, and it is therefore all the more unfortunate that he should have stamped his very important study with the word "fiction."

[183] A folk-tale of the Veys, a North African people, explains this view most graphically in its opening sentences. The narrator begins his tale by saying: "I speak of the long time past; hear! It is written in our old-time-palaver-books--I do not say _then_; in old time the Vey people had no books, but the old men told it to their children and they kept it; afterwards it was written" (_Journ. Ethnol. Soc._, N.S., vi.

354). A parallel to this comes from Ireland: "What I have told your honour is true; and if it stands otherwise in books, it's the books which are wrong. Sure we've better authority than books, for we have it all handed down from generation to generation" (Kohl's _Travels in Ireland_, 140).

[184] I am the more willing to take this as my ill.u.s.tration of myth because, strangely enough, Mr. MacCulloch has omitted it from the examples he uses in his _Childhood of Fiction_.

[185] _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. 166.

[186] Mr. Jeremiah Curtin has collected and published the _Creation Myths of Primitive America_ (London, 1899), and his introduction is a specially valuable study of the subject. I printed the Fijian myth from Williams' _Fiji and Fijians_, i. 204, and the k.u.mis myth from Lewin's _Wild Races of South-east India_, 225-6, in my _Handbook of Folklore_, 137-139, and Mr. Lang, in cap. vi. of his _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_ deals with a sufficient number of examples. _Cf._ also Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, cap. ix.

[187] Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, 1-15. I have only summarised the full legend on the lines adopted by Dr. Tylor.

[188] On the Kronos myth consult Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, i. 23-31, who gives an admirable summary of the evidence as it at present stands; Harrison and Verrall, _Mythology and Monuments of Anc.

Athens_, 192; Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. 295-323.

[189] Mr. Crawley discovered this story in Mr. Bain's _A Digit of the Moon_, 13-15, and printed it in his _Mystic Rose_, 33-34.

[190] "The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature," and "Mr. Gladstone and Genesis," in _Science and Hebrew Tradition_, cap.

iv. and v.

[191] _Adonis, Attis and Osiris_, 4, 25. Mr. Jevons, too, lays stress upon "the source of errors in religion" as human reason gone astray, _Introd. to Hist. of Religion_, 463.

[192] Mr. Jevons practically arrives at this conclusion from a different standpoint. "Beliefs," he says, "are about facts, are statements about facts, statements that certain facts will be found to occur in a certain way or be of a certain kind" (_Introd. to Hist. of Religion_, 402). Mr. Curtin, _Creation Myths of Primitive America_ (p.

xx), confirms the view I take.

[193] Orpen, _Cape Monthly Magazine_. Quoted in Lang's _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, i. 71.

[194] This myth is, I think, worth giving, because of its obvious object to account for the difference between white and black races. It is as follows: "In the beginning of the world G.o.d created three white men and three white women, and three black men and three black women.

In order that these twelve human souls might not thenceforth complain of Divine partiality and of their separate conditions, G.o.d elected that they should determine their own fates by their own choice of good and evil. A large calabash or gourd was placed by G.o.d upon the ground, and close to the side of the calabash was also placed a small folded piece of paper. G.o.d ruled that the black man should have the first choice. He chose the calabash, because he expected that the calabash, being so large, could not but contain everything needful for himself. He opened the calabash, and found a sc.r.a.p of gold, a sc.r.a.p of iron, and several other metals of which he did not understand the use. The white man had no option. He took, of course, the small folded piece of paper, and discovered that, on being unfolded, it revealed a boundless stock of knowledge. G.o.d then left the black men and women in the bush, and led the white men and women to the seash.o.r.e. He did not forsake the white men and women, but communicated with them every night, and taught them how to construct a s.h.i.+p, and how to sail from Africa to another country. After a while they returned to Africa with various kinds of merchandise, which they bartered to the black men and women, who had the opportunity of being greater and wiser than the white men and women, but who, out of sheer avidity, had thrown away their chance."

[195] _Native Tribes of South-east Australia_, cap. viii.

[196] _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, cap. xxii.; _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, cap. xviii.

[197] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes_, 624; _cf. Native Tribes of Central Australia_, 564.

[198] Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, 229.

[199] Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, p. xi. _Cf._ Taylor, _Te Ika a Maui_, where myths told by the priests are given in cap. vi. and vii., and _Trans. Ethnological Soc._, new series, i. 45.

[200] White's _Anc. Hist. of the Maori_, i. 8-13.

[201] Curtin, _Creation Myths of Primitive America_, p. xxi.