The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Part 19

Among the Gualala Indians of California, we find the "devil-dance,"

which Powers compares to the _haberfeldtreiben_ of the Bavarian peasants,--an inst.i.tution got up for the purpose of frightening the women and children, and keeping them in order. While the ordinary dances are going on, there suddenly stalks forth "an ugly apparition in the shape of a man, wearing a feather mantle on his back, reaching from the arm-pits down to the mid-thighs, zebra-painted on his breast and legs with black stripes, bear-skin shako on his head, and his arms stretched out at full length along a staff pa.s.sing behind his neck. Accoutred in this harlequin rig, he dashes at the squaws, capering, dancing, whooping; and they and the children flee for life, keeping several hundred yards between him and themselves." It is believed that, if they were even to touch his stick, their children would die (519. 194).

Among the Patwin, Nishinam, and Pomo Indians, somewhat similar practices are in vogue (519. 157, 160, 225). From the golden age of childhood, with its divinities and its demons, we may now pa.s.s to the consideration of more special topics concerning the young of the races of men.

CHAPTER IX.

CHILDREN'S FOOD.

Der Mensch ist, was er isst.--_Feuerbach_.

For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.--_Coleridge_.

Man did eat angels' food.--_Psalm_ ixxviii. 25.

_Honey_.

_Der Mensch ist, was er isst_,--"man is what he eats,"--says Feuerbach, and there were food-philosophies long before his time. Among primitive peoples, the food of the child often smacks of the Golden Age.

Tennyson, in _Eleanore_, sings:--

"Or, the yellow-banded bees, Through half-open lattices Coming in the scented breeze, Fed thee, a child lying alone, With white honey, in fairy gardens cull'd-- A glorious child dreaming alone, In silk-soft folds, upon yielding down, With the hum of swarming bees Into dreamful slumber lull'd."

This recalls the story of Cretan Zeus, fed, when an infant, by the nymphs in a cave on Mount Ida with the milk of the goat Amalthaea and honey brought by the bees of the mountain.

In the sacred books of the ancient Hindus we read: "The father puts his mouth to the right ear of the new-born babe, and murmurs three times, 'Speech! Speech!' Then he gives it a name. Then he mixes clotted milk, honey, and b.u.t.ter, and feeds the babe with it out of pure gold"

(460.129). Among the ancient Frisians and some other Germanic tribes, the father had the right to put to death or expose his child so long as it had not taken food; but "so soon as the infant had drunk milk and eaten honey he could not be put to death by his parents" (286. 69). The custom of giving the new-born child honey to taste is referred to in German counting-out rhymes, and the ancient Germans used to rub honey in the mouth of the new-born child. The heathen Czechs used to drop honey upon the child's lips, and in the Eastern Church it was formerly the custom to give the baptized child milk and honey to taste (392. II. 35).

When the Jewish child, in the Middle Ages, first went to school, one of the ceremonial observances was to have him lick a slate which had been smeared with honey, and upon which the alphabet, two Bible verses, and the words "The Tora shall be my calling" were written; this custom is interestingly explanative of the pa.s.sage in Ezekiel (iii. 3) where we read "Then I did eat it [the roll of a book given the prophet by G.o.d]; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness." There were also given to the child sweet cakes upon which Bible verses were written. Among the Jews of Galicia, before a babe is placed in the cradle for the first time, it is customary to strew into the latter little pieces of honey-comb. Among the Wotjaks we find the curious belief that those who, in eating honey, do not smear their mouth and hands with it, will die.

With children of an older growth,--the second Golden Age,--honey and cakes again appear. Magyar maidens at the new moon steal honey and cakes, cook them, and mix a part in the food of the youth of their desires; among the White Russians, the bridal couple are fed honey with a spoon. Even with us "the first sweet month of matrimony," after the "bless you, my children" has been spoken by parents, church, and state, is called the "honey-moon," for our Teutonic ancestors were in the habit of drinking honey-wine or mead for the s.p.a.ce of thirty days after marriage (392. IV. 118,211). In wedding-feasts the honey appears again, and, as Westermarck observes, the meal partaken of by the bride and bridegroom practically const.i.tutes the marriage-ceremony among the Navajos, Santal, Malays, Hovas, and other primitive peoples (166. 419).

In Iceland, in ancient times, "the food of sucklings was sweetened by honey," and "in the mouths of weakly children a slice of meat was placed at which they sucked." Among other interesting items from Scandinavia, Ploss (326. II. 182) gives the following: "In Iceland, if the child has been suckled eight (at most, fourteen) days, it is henceforth placed upon the ground; near it is put a vessel with luke-warm whey, in which a reed or a quill is stuck, and a little bread placed before it. If the child should wake and show signs of hunger, he is turned towards the vessel, and the reed is placed in his mouth. When the child is nine months old, it must eat of the same food as its parents do."

In Shropshire, England, the first food given a child is a spoonful of sugar and b.u.t.ter, and, in the Highlands of Scotland, "at the birth of an infant the nurse takes a green stick of ash, one end of which she puts into the fire, and, while it is burning, receives in a spoon the sap that oozes from the other, which she administers to the child as its first food." This recalls the sap of the sacred ash of Scandinavian mythology. Solinus states that the ancient Irish mother "put the first food of her newborn son on the sword of her husband, and, lightly introducing it into his mouth, expressed a wish that he might never meet death otherwise than in war and amid arms," and a like custom is said "to have been kept up, prior to the union, in Annandale and other places along the Scottish border" (460. 129, 131).

_Salt._

Among the Negritos of the Philippine Islands, when a child is born, one of the other children immediately gives it to eat some salt on the point of a knife (326. I. 258). The virtues of salt are recognized among many peoples. In the Middle Ages, when mothers abandoned their infants, they used to place beside them a little salt in token that they were unbaptized (326. I. 284); in Scotland, where the new-born babe is "bathed in salted water, and made to taste it three times, because the water was strengthening and also obnoxious to a person with the evil eye," the lady of the house first visited by the mother and child must, with the recital of a charm, put some salt in the little one's mouth. In Brabant, during the baptismal ceremony, the priest consecrates salt, given him by the father, and then puts a grain into the child's mouth, the rest being carefully kept by the father. The great importance of salt in the ceremonies of the Zuni and related Indians of the Pueblos has been pointed out by Mr. Gushing.

Salt appears also at modern European wedding-feasts and prenuptial rites, as do also rice and meal, which are also among the first foods of some primitive races. Among the Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills, when the child is named (from twenty to thirty days after birth), the maternal uncle places three small bits of rice in its mouth (326. I. 284).

_Folk-Medicine_.

Among the Tlingit Indians, of Alaska, the new-born infant "is not given the breast until all the contents of its stomach (which are considered the cause of disease) are removed by vomiting, which is promoted by pressing the stomach" (403. 40), and among the Hare Indians, "the infant is not allowed food until four days after birth, in order to accustom it to fasting in the next world" (396. I. 121). The Songish Indians do not give the child anything to eat on the first day (404. 20); the Kolosh Indians, of Alaska, after ten to thirty months "accustom their children to the taste of a sea-animal," and, among the Arctic Eskimo, Kane found "children, who could not yet speak, devouring with horrible greediness, great lumps of walrus fat and flesh." Klutschak tells us how, during a famine, the Eskimo of Hudson's Bay melted and boiled for the children the blood-soaked snow from the spot where a walrus had been killed and cut up (326. II. 181).

In Culdaff, in the county of Donegal, Ireland, "an infant at its birth is forced to swallow spirits, and is immediately afterwards [strange antic.i.p.ation of Dr. Robinson] suspended by the upper jaw on the nurse's forefinger. Whiskey is here the representative of the Hindu soma, the sacred juice of the ash, etc., and the administration of alcoholic liquors to children of a tender age in sickness and disease so common everywhere but a few years ago, founded itself perhaps more upon this ancient belief than upon anything else" (401. 180).

The study of the food of sick children is an interesting one, and much of value may be read of it in Zanetti (173), Black (401), and other writers who have treated of folk-medicine. The decoctions of plants and herbs, the preparations of insects, reptiles, the flesh, blood, and ordure of all sorts of beasts (and of man), which the doctrines of signatures and sympathies, the craze of _similia similibus_, forced down the throat of the child, in the way of food and medicine, are legion in number, and must be read in Folkard and the herbalists, in Bourke (407), Strack, etc.

In some parts of the United States even snail-water and snail-soup are not unknown; in New England, as Mrs. Earle informs us (221. 6), much was once thought of "the admirable and most famous snail-water."

_Milk and Honey_.

As we have abundantly seen, the first food of the child is the "food of the G.o.ds," for so were honey and milk esteemed among the ancient Germans, Greeks, Slavs, Hindus, etc., and of the Paradise where dwelt the G.o.ds, and into which it was fabled children were born, we have some recollection, as Ploss suggests, in the familiar "land flowing with milk and honey," into the possession of which the children of Israel entered after their long wandering in the wilderness (462. II. 696). Of the ancient Hindu G.o.d Agni, Letourneau (100. 315) observes: "After being for a long time fed upon melted b.u.t.ter and the alcoholic liquor from the acid asclepias, the sacred Soma, he first became a glorious child, then a metaphysical divinity, a mediator living in the fathers and living again in the sons." It was the divine _Soma_ that, like the nectar of the Greeks, the elixirs of the Scandinavians, conferred youth and immortality upon those who drank it.

According to Moslem legend, after his birth, Abraham "remained concealed in a cave during fifteen months, and his mother visited him sometimes to nurse him. But he had no need of her food, for Allah commanded water to flow from one of Abraham's fingers, milk from another, honey from the third, the juice of dates from the fourth, and b.u.t.ter from the fifth"

(547. 69).

_Poison_.

In the _Gesta Romanorum_ (Cap. XI.) we read of the "Queen of the North," who "nourished her daughter from the cradle upon a certain kind of deadly poison; and when she grew up, she was considered so beautiful, that the sight of her alone affected one with madness." Moreover, her whole nature had become so imbued with poisons that "she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have been poison, her embrace death." Hawthorne's story of "Rappaccini's Daughter,"--"who ever since infancy had grown and blossomed with the plants whose fatal properties she had imbibed with the air she breathed,"--comes from the same original source (390. II.

172). Here we are taken back again to the Golden Age, when even poisons could be eaten without harm.

_Priest and Food_.

With the giving of the child's food the priest is often a.s.sociated. In the Fiji Islands, at Vitilevu, on the day when the navel-string falls off, a festival is held, and the food of the child is blest by the priest with prayers for his life and prosperity. In Upper Egypt, a feast is held at the house of the father and the child consecrated by the cadi or a priest, to whom is brought a plate with sugar-candy. The priest chews the candy and lets the sweet juice fall out of his mouth into that of the child, and thus "gives him his name out of his mouth" (326. I.

284).

The over-indulgence of children in food finds parallels at a later period of life, when, as with the people of southern Nubia and the Sahara between Talifet and Timbuktu, men fatten girls before marriage, making them consume huge quant.i.ties of milk, b.u.t.ter, etc.

For children, among many primitive peoples, there are numerous _taboos_ of certain cla.s.ses and kinds of food, from religious or superst.i.tious motives. This _taboo_-system has not lost all its force even to-day, as no other excuse can reasonably be offered for the refusal of certain harmless food to the young.

_Tobacco_.

Concerning certain Australian tribes, Lumholtz remarks: "Before the children are big enough to hold a pipe in their mouth they are permitted to smoke, and the mother will share her pipe with the nursing babe"

(495. 193). In like manner, among the natives of the Solomon Islands, Mr. Guppy witnessed displays of precocity in this regard: "Bright-looking lads, eight or nine years of age, stood smoking their pipes as gravely as Haununo [a chief] himself; and even the smallest babe in its father's arms caught hold of his pipe and began to suck instinctively" (466.42). With the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, according to Simson, the child, when three or four years old, is initiated into the mysteries of tobacco-smoking, amid great festivities and ceremonies (533. 388).

_Drink of Immortality_.

Feeding the dead has been in practice among many primitive peoples. The mother, with some of the Indian tribes of New Mexico, used to drop milk from her breast on the lips of her dead babe; and in many parts of the world we meet with the custom of placing food near the grave, so that the spirits may not hunger, or of placing it in the grave or coffin, so that on its way to the spirit-land the soul of the deceased may partake of some refreshment. Among the ancient natives of Venezuela, "infants who died a few days after their birth, were seated around the Tree of Milk, or Celestial Tree, that distilled milk from the extremity of its branches"; and kindred beliefs are found elsewhere (448. 297).

We have also the tree a.s.sociated beautifully with the newborn child, as Reclus records concerning the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills, in India: "Immediately the deliverance has taken place--it always happens in the open air--three leaves of the aforementioned tree [under which the mother and father have pa.s.sed the night] are presented to the father, who, making cups of them, pours a few drops of water into the first, wherewith he moistens his lips; the remainder he decants into the two other leaves; the mother drinks her share, and causes the baby to swallow his. Thus, father, mother, and child, earliest of Trinities, celebrate their first communion, and drink the living water, more sacred than wine, from the leaves of the Tree of Life" (523. 201).

The sacred books of the Hebrews tell us that the race of man in its infancy became like the G.o.ds by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and in the legends of other peoples immortality came to the great heroes by drinking of the divine sap of the sacred tree, or partaking of some of its fruit. The ancient Egyptians believed that milk from the breast of the divine mother Isis conferred divinity and immortality upon him who drank of it or imbibed it from the sacred source. Wiedemann aptly compares with this the Greek story of the infancy of Hercules. The great child-hero was the son of the G.o.d Jupiter and Alcmena, daughter of Electryon, King of Argos. He was exposed by his mother, but the G.o.ddess Athene persuaded Hera to give him her breast (another version says Hermes placed Hercules on the breast of Hera, while she slept) and the infant Hercules drew so l.u.s.tily of the milk that he caused pain to the G.o.ddess, who s.n.a.t.c.hed him away. But Hercules had drunk of the milk of a G.o.ddess and had become immortal, and as one of the G.o.ds (167. 266).