4IO S.A. NATIVES AND PRIMITIVE FOLK CUSTOM. 



was to give the son the honour of giving- the coup de grace 

 with a hatchet, and that in France the custom long survived of 

 placing a lump of granite on the head of the 

 dying to help him to die quickly and even to give him 

 an ancient stone axe to kiss, on the same principle tkat those 

 to l?e beheaded sometimes kissed the axe or block. Such an 

 axe was sometimes buried in the grave. As for the state 

 after death, there is a remarkable parallel between Basuto and 

 Roman ideas of transmigration. Among some tribes a snake 

 was allowed free entrance and protection and was fed on milk, 

 under the idea that it was an ancestral soul. Aeneas' doubt as 

 to whether the serpent was " Geniumne loci famulumne 

 parentis " pointed to the same belief. In Sicily we are told 

 that when a snake is killed, it is explained that it is killed as a 

 snake. This is no doubt a particular form of the totemism 

 which requires that a mokoena should apologize to the 

 crocodile he killed. 



There is no room to elaborate further the amazingly extended 

 parallels in the realm of death and burial custom. I think I 

 hear a sigh of relief, so let us leave these rather gruesome 

 subjects and trace backward the lives of primitive man by means 

 of hints in literature and folklore and of survivals in rite and 

 folkcustom. Let us see what light these sources will throw 

 on their marriage and birth, their work and recreation, their 

 ideas on religion and magic (that is to say primitive science), 

 and the origin and powers of the world in which they found 

 themselves. Let us go back to marriage and its preparation, 

 not the mid-point of a life, as so often with us, but the prompt 

 sequel to the ceremonies which marked the beginning of ma- 

 turity. And here we must pause to consider how far developed 

 man must have been before he had learnt to regulate and or- 

 ganise so perfectly the allied mysteries of puberty rites and mar- 

 riage, especially when we consider that the former was also the 

 initial training for the war-host. Though in very special excep- 

 tions such as that of the celibate Zulu army which attained such 

 tyrannous strength last century, in which the warriors remained 

 unmarried not merely till they had fleshed their spears but even 

 till middle age, the usual plan both in Europe and Africa was 

 that only warriors might marry (would that it were so in Eng- 

 land to-day that no man should marry till he had served a term 

 of military training). The puberty rites introduced at once to 

 the marriagable state and the war-host. The Basuto circum- 

 cision schools, for example, are gathered round a chief's son 

 and those trained with him are his " lithaka," his thegns, his 

 peculiar bodyguard, whose sons will accompany his sons after 

 him in circumcision, lodge and battlefield. The training is 

 vigorous, even wdiere an operation is absent (e.g., among some 

 Australian tribes and our European ancestors who did not need 

 it) : the " ephebi " at Sparta suffering scourging before the al- 

 tar, sometimes with even fatal results, corresponds to the con- 

 stant beatings of an Australian or South African youth in train- 

 ing, and the Spartan mother's courageous epitaph found not so 

 long ago on her son who had succumbed to the scourging 



