Edwin Sidney Hartland

“ A custom more widely spread than that of keeping the bones, because attended with much less inconvenience, is that of taking and keeping some of the hair, nails or pieces of garments of the dead. It may, indeed, be said to prevail through the greater part of the world; nor has the custom of preserving a lock of hair cut after death as a memorial of the departed yet vanished from among ourselves. ”

“ A conception of life which we know to be held from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the islands of the Southern Seas we may reasonably believe to be inseparable from human thought, at least until it has reached the highest levels of culture; and we may therefore predicate it with every probability not merely of living races whose traditions have yet to be explored, but also of the prehistoric dead whose barrows, dumb on this question, often betray only that other belief to which human nature clings everywhere so pathetically—the belief in the life after death. ”

“ When we read, whether in classical writers or in the works of modern travellers, of community of women, we must always beware of giving the words the meaning of absolute promiscuity. Very strong evidence, and not merely that of writers imperfectly acquainted with the language and customs of a savage people, is called for to establish absolute promiscuity. But limited promiscuity among the members of a clan is a different matter. As a savage practice it is beyond doubt; and I have already pointed out that it owes its origin to the solidarity of the kindred in the lower culture. ”

“ In spite of the investigations of anthropologists during the last thirty years, we are as yet far from being in a position to form a satisfactory synthesis—a synthesis which will reckon with the many-sided activity of the human mind, even in the lower stages of its development, and will estimate at its due value every influence, material as well as intellectual, which, entering in early times into the stream of culture, deflected its current or added to its volume, until it at last attained that irresistible force whose direction we know though its issue remains dark and uncertain. ”

“ The cross-road is everywhere a place only one degree less dreadful than the churchyard; and burial there is doubtless a substitute for burial in the churchyard and committing the hair as a pledge to the keeping of the dead. A traveller in Ireland in the early part of the last century declares that a love-sick Irish youth will thread a needle with the hair of the damsel he covets and run it through the fleshy part of the arm or leg of a corpse, “and the charm has that virtue in it to make her run mad for him whom she so lately slighted.” ”

“ And holding that outward form is by no means of the essence of existence or of individuality, he looks upon transformation as an ordinary incident, happening to all men at death, happening to many men and other creatures whensoever they will. From the capacity of transformation to the capacity of division the step is not a long one. To be transformed into a pomegranate or a heap of grain is to have one’s life equally diffused through a thousand seeds, each of which is endowed with the powers and possibilities of the whole. ”

“ The Couvade as generally explained is the custom which requires the father of a child, immediately after its birth, to lie-in as if he were a woman in childbed, while his wife, who has actually given birth to the babe, goes about her ordinary work, and of course waits upon her husband in his feigned sickness. But this definition is inadequate and misleading. In order to attain a true conception of the custom it is not enough to limit our observation to a small number of cases and in those cases to regard only the most prominent phenomena, because they strike us as the most ridiculous. ”

“ The godfather cuts the hair in the form of a cross and drops it into a cup of water, into which he puts some money as a gift for the child; and the parent then entertains him at a feast and presents him with gifts in return. As the ceremony is not distinctive of any religious denomination, Christian and Moslem do not scruple to enter into the relationship of hair-cutting sponsorship with one another. It unites the families in ties so close as to involve them in one another’s blood-feuds; and a Moslem woman unveils before her child’s godfather, though a stranger and even a Christian. ”

“ And when a woman is in the pains of childbirth, one of her attendant friends will go to the window and spit thrice, looking sternly all about, as if she hoped to find and reach with her saliva the witch who is retarding delivery. ”

“ An unaccountable thrill, we are told, shoots through a father who meets unwittingly a child whom he has never seen, or has seen but for a moment long years before. This involuntary recognition of the same blood is a convention not yet wholly discarded by the writers who thus aim at affecting our emotions, because it has not quite passed out of the shadowy region bordering our clear beliefs into the limbo {424} of things that neither prescribe our action nor convince and captivate our imagination. ”

“ The reason why the corporeal connection with a kinsman, or his ownership of the life-token, is equivalent to that of the absent hero, is because the kinsman, being of the same stock as the hero, is deemed to have an original corporeal bond with him like that of the tree in the märchen growing from the bones or scales of the fish from whose flesh the hero is sprung. ”

“ The custom is too well known to require more than a passing reference. Nor do I propose to give more to another custom, that, namely of the exchange, temporary or permanent, of wives. Where it is not dictated by mere occasional wantonness, but is a regular institution, it is usually limited to brethren of the blood. These cases may not go very far: to understand the true value of their evidence they must be placed side by side with cases where the husband’s prior right is determined either by his death or divorce. Among the Arabs, if a man divorced his wife, his heirs had a right to take her. ”

“ They afford ample evidence that death, as the most solemn and mysterious fact of our existence, has exercised the thoughts of men from the remotest ages. When they arose the idea of a soul or spirit, as distinct from its corporeal tenement, had hardly yet been evolved. Reason, as well as feeling, could do no otherwise than cling to the bodily relics of the dead. And still it clings, even in the highest plane of culture. ”

“ The thief always comes to a bad end, or at least escapes only by the skin of his teeth. These catastrophes are attributed to ghostly action; but a similar power is ascribed to mere sympathy. To appropriate pieces of a coffin, or flowers from a grave, to say nothing of bones or other parts of a corpse, is, among the Saxons of the Seven Cities, to appropriate ill-luck for the rest of one’s life. To hang rags from the clothing of a dead man upon a vine is to render it barren. ”

“ Eating together is—not merely on solemn occasions, as the sacrifice of the totem-beast, but in a lesser degree at other times—an act of communion. The sharing of a common substance as food unites those who partake of it in a common life: it makes them parts of one another: they incorporate one another’s substance. This is the significance of eating “things sacrificed to idols,” and of “sitting at meat in an idol’s temple.” The idol is supposed to have partaken of the meat; and those who afterwards eat of it share by that act the idol’s life ”

“ Now life was, in his contemplation, so much more desirable than death, that the dead would naturally have been supposed to envy the living. Here was a distinct cause of ill-will. The dead man must, therefore, be kept from haunting the survivors. To that end his funeral rites must be fully and properly performed, and every precaution taken both to persuade him to stay at a distance and to prevent him from finding his way back. ”

“ Major Godwin-Austen says “that the collection of the bones into one vault, as it may be termed, is done under the impression that the souls of the departed may all mingle together again in one large family without trouble or suffering. The idea of a member of a family being a wanderer in the other world, cut off from, and unable to join, the circle of the spirits of his own clan is most repugnant to the feelings of a Khási or Sinteng.” ”

“ Religion, like other forms of human thought and other human institutions, has been a slow and constant growth. If the whole field be surveyed, it will be found that there are no yawning chasms dividing period from period, and cult from cult. Everything evolves by processes analogous to those with which we are familiar in the physical world. The totem, released from the bonds of kinship, and soaring upward to the heaven of Godhead, ceases not to be worshipped with rites appropriate only to the social reunions of the clan. ”

“ Thus far, in pursuing our investigations into the significance of the Life-token, we have arrived at the conclusion that the reason of the mysterious sympathy between the hero and an object external to himself is not merely that, actually or by imputation, the Life-token has been part of his substance, but further that, notwithstanding severance, it is still in unapparent but real connection with him, and consequently any mischance he may suffer will be felt by the Life-token and reflected in its condition. ”

“ I believe that a profounder thought forms the common ground in which all the customs under consideration—or, as I should prefer to say, all the variations of a single custom—are rooted. They are simply another application of the reasoning that underlies the practices of witchcraft and folk-medicine discussed in previous chapters. If an article of my clothing in a witch’s hands may cause me to suffer, the same article in contact with a beneficent power may relieve my pain, restore me to health, or promote my general prosperity. ”

“ What Professor Robertson Smith points out concerning the Semites is universally true, namely, that when a member of the clan has been slain, the others say, not “The blood of such an one has been spilt,” but “Our blood has been spilt.” The injury is felt by the entire body; and it is the business of the entire body to revenge it. Conversely, not merely the man who commits the wrong is liable for it. His whole kin is involved in the guilt, and must suffer for it until atonement shall have been made. ”

“ No legal tie of blood results from the ceremony. For all that, a tie is formed. The tie of hospitality, or the tie of gossipry, is, in the contemplation of the Italian peasant, or the Dyak, a tie involving rights and duties similar within its limits to those of blood. So when two Slavs enter into adoptive brotherhood, the evolution of society, which has mollified the rude rite, has also shorn it of many of the resulting consequences ”

“ The motive that prompts an English mother to wear in a brooch a lock of hair and the likeness of the darling she will see no more on earth is the same as induces a Friendly Islander to pass a braid of the hair of his dead kinsman through his own ear, and to wear it there for the rest of his life. ”

“ The aboriginal Luh-N’zehtsze believe that health depends on the cleanness of the bones of departed kinsmen. Accordingly, when a man has been in the grave a year he is exhumed and his bones are carefully washed; and whenever any of his family are sick the same operation is at once performed, no matter how long or how short the time since he was buried.439.1 Even in Europe we have the well-known superstition that the state and appearance of a corpse before burial indicate whether other deaths in the family are to follow, as if it be limp, or the eyes cannot be closed, and so forth. ”

“ If, instead of using a rag, I rub my warts with raw meat and then bury the meat, the wart will decay and disappear with the decay and dissolution of the meat. In like manner my shirt or stocking, or a rag to {215} represent it, placed upon a sacred bush, or thrust into a sacred well—my name written upon the walls of a temple—a stone or a pellet from my hand cast upon a sacred image or a sacred cairn—a remnant of my food cast into a sacred waterfall or bound upon a sacred tree, or a nail from my hand driven into the trunk of the tree—is thenceforth in continual contact with divinity ”

“ The reason for the rights and privileges acquired by the whole kindred, alike whether marriage operated as a blood-covenant or not, is founded on, and springs directly from, the conception of the kin as one body whereof all the brethren were as literally members as the hand and the foot are members of the physical body of each man. ”

“ Nor dare they build a house, or thatch it, nor drive nails; and before breaking tobacco or siri it must be drawn out of the bag which contains it, or the babe cannot be born. They look in no mirror or bamboo-tube, lest the child squint. They eat no bujuwu (a kind of bird) or owl, lest he croak or whoop instead of speaking. They touch no monkey, lest the infant get eyes and forehead like a monkey’s. They enter no house where a corpse lies, else he will die. They eat of no pig killed for a funeral feast, lest he get the itch. ”

“ There their counsel had the assurance to plead that “in Dalmatia it is every man’s duty to take vengeance where blood has been shed; and that the people feel it right to pursue a family, one of whose members has killed a connection of their own, as long as there is a male descendant.” ”

“ And if I have succeeded in laying with any measure of clearness before the reader the sacramental conception of life underlying the incident of the Life-token, I must not be supposed to depreciate as factors in savage culture other conceptions with which I am not immediately concerned. I am quite aware, too, that much that I have put forward, in so far as I have put forward anything new, must be considered as yet only tentative and conjectural. Tradition, conservative as it is, is in its nature shifting and liable to endless combinations. ”

“ Until group-marriage had practically passed away, and society had organised itself into true clans, there could be no actual reception of the wife into the kin. We must therefore not look to so archaic a condition as group-marriage for rites of reception, or for the resulting status of the wife. Where the clan has been most completely organised, we may expect to find its results most logically carried out; and some of the most logical results will often remain even when society has passed into a still higher development. ”

“ In the higher civilisation of China, however, it is quite clear that the condition of a corpse is of the greatest moment to the health and prosperity of his descendants. Wherefore small iron nails are scattered in the coffin, also hempseeds, peas and millet, and red yeast, to cause the sons and grandsons of the dead to beget numerous sons and become the ancestors of remoter progeny, and to provide them with plenty of food for all time to come. Pith and rice-paper, which will absorb the fluid products of decay, are scattered to cause the descendants to become grand and of high rank. ”