Folklore as an Historical Science Part 19

Unfortunately, neither the negative evidence of superst.i.tious beliefs nor the local distribution of superst.i.tious beliefs has ever been considered worthy of attention. But some little evidence is incidentally forthcoming, and I would submit that this may be taken as indicative of what might be obtained more fully by further research into this neglected aspect of folklore. I drew Miss Burne's attention to this subject, and she has noted some particulars in her valuable _Shropshire Folklore_.[424] But for the most part this portion of our evidence wants picking out by a long and tedious process from the ma.s.s of badly recorded facts about popular superst.i.tions. I do not believe in the generally stated opinion that certain superst.i.tions are universally believed or practised. It is difficult to prove a negative, and such evidence is not absolutely scientific, but when it comes in direct ant.i.thesis to positive, there does not seem any harm in accepting it. Every cla.s.s of superst.i.tion wants tracing out geographically, and local variants want careful noting. I cannot doubt if this were properly done that many so-called universal superst.i.tions would be found to be distinctly local. In the meantime, it is not with universal superst.i.tions that we have to deal. It is primarily with those local variants which show us side by side the differences of belief. It is thus that we can afford evidence of that intermixture of totem-objects which is to be expected from the known facts of totem-beliefs and customs. Indeed, Mr. McLennan has laid it down that "we might expect that while here and there perhaps a tribe might appear with a single animal G.o.d, as a general rule tribes and nations should have as many animal and vegetable G.o.ds as there were distinct stocks in the population ... we should not expect to find the same animal dominant in all quarters, or worshipped even everywhere within the same nation."[425]

It is important that we should thoroughly understand what these survivals of totemism in the British isles really mean. On the extreme west coast of Ireland, farthest away from the centres of civilisation, there are found these unique examples of a savage inst.i.tution. The argument that they might have been transplanted thither by travellers from the far west, where totemism has developed to its highest form, cannot seriously be advanced. The argument that they might be the accidental form into which some merely superst.i.tious fancies of ignorant peasants happened to have ultimately shaped themselves, is met by the mathematical demonstration that the ratio of chance against such a development would be well-nigh incalculable. The remaining argument is that they indicate the last outpost, or perhaps one of the last outposts, of a primitive savage organisation which once existed throughout these lands. This is the view that appears to me to be the only possible one to meet all the conditions of the case; one proof in support of this view being the discovery of evidence in other parts of the country which shows that totemism has left its stamp in more or less perfect form upon the traditional beliefs and practices of the nation. Though we are not able to identify further complete examples of the same type as the seal clan of Western Ireland, or the wolf people of Ossory, we should be able, if the explanation I have advanced of their origin be the correct one, to produce examples of the varying forms which such an inst.i.tution as totemism must have a.s.sumed when it had been broken up by the advance of civilising influences. If the seal clan, or the wolf clan, is in truth the last outpost of a savage organisation, there will be in the lands less remote from the centres of civilisation some evidences of the break-up of savagery as it has been driven westward. Somewhere in tradition, somewhere in local observances of beliefs or superst.i.tion, there must still be echoes, more or less faint, but still echoes, from totemism.

Having discovered these undoubted examples of totemism, the argument shifts its ground. We can no longer say that the theory of totemism may possibly explain some of the customs and traditions of the people.

We are, by the logic of the position, compelled to say that custom and tradition must have preserved many relics of totemism, and that so far from seeking to explain custom and tradition by the theory of totemism, we must seek to explain the survival of totemism by custom and tradition. I lay stress on this view of the case because it is hard to combat the views of those who look upon "mere superst.i.tion" as no explanation of primitive originals. To us of the present day the beliefs of the peasantry are no doubt properly definable as "mere superst.i.tion." But when we examine it as folklore we are seeking for its origin, not for its modern aspect; we are asking how "mere superst.i.tion" first arose, and in what forms, not how it exists; we are pushing back the inquiry from to-day when it exists side by side with a philosophical and moral religion to the time when it existed as the sole subst.i.tute for philosophy and morals. Even if it is "mere superst.i.tion" it has a dateless history. It is not conceivable that it suddenly arose at a particular period before which "mere superst.i.tion"

did not exist, and all, both peasant and chief, were philosophical and moral. It is not conceivable that the mere superst.i.tion of to-day has replaced bodily the mere superst.i.tion of other ages. Every succeeding age of progress has influenced it, no doubt, but not eradicated it, and hence the mere superst.i.tion of to-day has just such an unbroken continuity of history as language or inst.i.tutions. That we are able to pick out from among its items undoubted forms of totemism, and that we may add to these complete examples a cla.s.sified grouping of customs and beliefs in survival parallel to the customs and beliefs of savage totemism, affords proof that at least we may carry back that history to the era of totemism, at whatever point that era may cross the line of, or come into contact with, political history.

This is the definite conclusion to be drawn from the anthropological interpretation of the presence of totemic beliefs among the survivals of folklore. The study of the anthropological conditions has occupied a wide range of thought and inquiry, but it leads us back to a safe basis for research, for it brings definitely within touch of that realm of man which lies outside the civilisation wherein folklore is embedded, the peoples who have made, and the peoples who are dominated by, that civilisation. The savage of Britain cannot with this evidence before us be considered as the mere product of the literature of Greece and Rome. He is part and parcel of the savagery of the human race. Anthropology has shown us that savagery reached the land we now call Britain as part of the general movement of people which has caused the whole earth to become a dwelling-place for man, and now that we know this we must appeal to anthropology whenever we find that the problems of folklore take us out of the culture period of a civilisation known to history.[426]

APPENDIX

I append a synopsis of the culture-structure of the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula (references are to Skeat and Blagden's _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_ where not otherwise specified), in order that the position claimed for the one section of totemic belief may be tested by the remaining characteristics of Semang culture. I claim that there is nothing that remains which is inconsistent with the interpretation given of the totemic items.

_Physical_:--

(a). Live exclusively in the forest surrounded by hostile fauna (i.

13).

(b). Food consists of such wild vegetable food as may happen to fall from time to time in season (i. 109, 341, 525), together with small mammals and birds (i. 112), fish (i. 113).

(c). As soon as they have exhausted the sources of food in one neighbourhood they move on to the next (i. 109).

(d). Fire obtained by friction (i. 111, 113), but meat is eaten raw (i. 112).

(e). Nudity is alleged (_Journ. Indian Archipelago_, i. 252; ii.

258); no satisfactory proof (i. 137); do not use skins of animals nor feathers of birds (i. 138); a girdle of fungus string (i. 138, 142, 380); fringe of leaves suspended from a string (i. 139, 142); necklaces and ligatures of jungle fibre (i. 144, 145); women wear a comb made of bamboo as a charm against diseases (i. 149).

(f). Habitations are rock shelters (i. 173), tree shelters afforded by branches of trees improved by construction of a weather screen (i.

174); ground screen of palm leaves (i. 175).

(g). Hunt successfully the largest animals, escaping easily up the trees (i. 202-204).

(h). Knives made of bamboo, flakes and chips of stone, knives of bone (i. 249, 269); bow and arrow (i. 251, 255); not sufficiently advanced to have produced neolithic implements (i. 268); wooden spear (i. 270).

(i). Ignorant of pottery, vessels made from big stems of bamboo (i.

383).

_Social_:--

(j). Chief of the group is the princ.i.p.al medicine man, but is on an equal footing with his men, no caste and property is in common (i.

497, 499).

(k). Marriage rights are secured by the presentation of a jungle knife to the bride's parents and a girdle to the bride, and the bride never lets the girdle part from her for fear of its being used to her prejudice in some magic ceremony; adultery is punishable by death (ii.

58, 59) [but this information was not obtained from the most primitive of the Semang people].

(l). Semang women are common to all men (Newbold, _Political and Stat. Acc. of Settlements in Straits of Malacca_, ii. 379). Great ante-nuptial freedom (ii. 56, 218); "Of the Semang I have not had an opportunity of personally judging" (ii. 377, Newbold).

[Ill.u.s.tration: TREE HUT, ULU BATU, ABOUT 12 MILES FROM KUALA LUMPUR, SELANGOR]

(m). Eat dead kindred except head (Newbold, ii. 379); burial takes place in the ground, and the older practice was exposure in trees; the Semang have no dread of ghosts of the deceased (ii. 89, 91).

(n). No sacred shrines or places (ii. 197).

(o). Avoidance of mother-in-law (ii. 204).

(p). Myth of the ringdove informing the children of the first woman that they had married within prohibited degrees of consanguinity, and advising them to separate and marry "other people" (ii. 218).

(q). Myth as to ignorance of cause of birth being dispelled by the cocoanut monkey informing the first man and woman (ii. 218).

(r). The Semang are almost ineradicably nomadic, have no fixed habitation, and rove about like the beasts of the forest (i. 172; ii.

470).

(s). Women and girls are not allowed to eat until the men and boys have finished their repast (i. 116); the men do most of the hunting and trapping, and the women take a large share in the collecting of roots and fruits; all the cooking is performed by the women and girls (i. 375).

(t). They are split up into a large number of dialects, each of which is confined to a relatively small area, and it often happens that a little [clan] or even a single family uses a form of speech which is differentiated from other dialects to be practically unintelligible to all except the members of the little community itself (ii. 379).

(u). Natural segregation of the [tribes] into small [clans] to some extent cut off from one another and surrounded by settled Malay communities (ii. 379).

(v). The most thoroughly wild and uncivilised members of our race, regarded by the Malays as little better than brute beasts, with no recorded history (ii. 384).

(w). Nomadic life of the Semang leads them over a considerable tract of country (ii. 388).

_Psychical_:--

(x). Decorative patterns on quivers representing natural objects, and possessing magical virtue to bring down various species of monkeys and apes and other small mammals (i. 417), and as charms for the men (i. 423).

(y). Decorative pattern on magic comb worn by women to serve as a charm against venomous reptiles and insects, similar design for similar reason sometimes painted on the breast (i. 41, 420-436).

(z). Child's name is taken from some tree which stands near the prospective birthplace of the child. As soon as the child is born this name is shouted aloud by the _sage femme_, who then hands over the child to another woman, who buries the afterbirth underneath the birth-tree or name-tree of the child. As soon as this is done the father cuts a series of notches in the tree, starting from the ground and terminating at the height of the breast. The cutting of these notches is intended to signalise the arrival on earth of a new human being, since it thus shows that Kari registers the souls that he has sent forth by notching the tree against which he leans. Trees thus "blazed" are never felled. The child must not in later life injure any tree which belongs to the species of his tree; for him all such trees are taboo, and he must not even eat their fruit, the only exception being when an expectant mother revisits her birth-tree. Every tree of its species is regarded as identical with the birth-tree (ii. 3, 4).

When an East Semang dies his birth-tree dies too (ii. 5).

(aa). The child's soul is conveyed in a bird, which always inhabits a tree of the species to which the birth-tree belongs. It flies from one tree of the species to another, following the as yet unborn body.

The souls of first-born children are always young birds newly hatched, the offspring of the bird which contained the soul of the mother. If the mother does not eat the soul-bird during her accouchement the child will be stillborn or will die shortly after birth (ii. 4, 192, 194, 216). She keeps the soul-bird within the birth-bamboo, and does not eat it all at once, but piecemeal (ii. 6). All human souls grow upon a soul-tree in the other world, whence they are fetched by a bird which was killed and eaten by the expectant mother (ii. 194).

(bb). Semang religion, in spite of its recognition of a thunder-G.o.d (Kari) and certain minor deities (so called), has very little indeed in the way of ceremonial, and appears to consist mainly of mythology and legend. It shows remarkably few traces of demon worship, very little fear of ghosts of the deceased, and still less of any sort of animistic beliefs (ii. 174). [As the Kari is the deity common to the Semang and the people higher in culture than the Semang, it is difficult to trace out the primitive idea. The myths also show a common impress, "which is probably mainly due to the same savage Malay element" (ii. 183).]

(cc). During a storm of thunder and lightning the Semang draw a few drops of blood from the region of the shin bone, mix it with a little water in a bamboo receptacle, and throw it up to the angry skies (ii.

204).

(dd). Pretend entire ignorance of a supreme being, but on pressure confessed to a very powerful yet benevolent being, the maker of the world (ii. 209).

FOOTNOTES:

[284] Beddoe, _Races of Britain_, cap. ii., and _Journ. Anthrop.

Inst._, x.x.xv. 236-7; Boyd-Dawkins, _Early Man in Britain_, cap. vii.

viii. and ix.; Ripley, _Races of Europe_, cap. xii.

[285] Rhys, _Celtic Britain_, 271; Rhys, _Celtic Heathendom_, _pa.s.sim_; Rhys and Jones, _Welsh People_, cap. i. and Appendix B on "Pre-Aryan Syntax in Insular Celtic," by Professor Morris Jones.