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♦ KNOWLEDGE 



[July 2, 1888. 



sponding in their assumptions and pretensions to the 

 medicine-men of all barbarous peoples. Shamans, con- 

 jurors, sorcerei-s, wizards, spiritual ancestors of all those 

 who claim to hold the keys of the kingdom of heaven, to 

 brine down gifts for men, to bind or to loose, to absolve or 

 to curee, such men naturally rose to power among, and to 

 rule over, their fellows, whose terrified and undisciplined 

 imagination saw in them the ministers and agents of the 

 gods. " They tamed the people as wild beasts are tamed," 

 and among the convenient weapo7is which thej- used in 

 common with wizards the world over, were fetichism, 

 magic, and divination in many forms, notably by the entrails 

 of sacrificed victims and the flight of birds. The old account of 

 their ceremonies in groves, of their cutting with golden sickle 

 the mistletoe when, growing from the sacred oak, it denoted 

 the presence of the god, and of their bearing it on waggons 

 driiwn by two snow-white bulls, point to a form of nature- 

 worship which had been assimilated and refined by Celtic 

 polytheism. But we know Druidism only as thus amal- 

 gamated, and we need to resolve it into more primitive and 

 grosser elements. One of these is, without doubt, that 

 ghastly rite of human sacrifice which does not, as has been 

 suggested, indicate Semitic influences, but which has its 

 origin in the primitive object and intent of offering to the 

 gods that which, being most valued by man, must be most 

 acceptable to them. If any person of importance were in 

 peril from disease or from the chance of war, a criminal or 

 slave was killed, or promised as a substitute. The Druids 

 held that by no other means could a man's life be redeemed 

 or the wrath of the gods ajipeased ; and they went so far as 

 to teach that the crops would be fertile in proportion to the 

 richness of the harvest of death. It became a national 

 institution to offer a ghastly hecatomb at particular seasons 

 of the year. In some places the victims were crucified, or 

 shot to death with arrows ; elsewhere they would be stufl^ed 

 into huge figures of wickerwoi'k, or a heap of hay would be 

 laid out in the human shape, where men, cattle, and wild 

 beasts were burned in a general holocaust. The memory of 

 the public sacrifices seems to have been preserved by the 

 Irish proverb, in which a person in great danger was said to 

 be " between two Beltain fires." In the Highlands, even in 

 modern times, there were May-day bonfires at which the 

 spirits were implored to make the year productive, a feast 

 was set out upon the grass, and lots were drawn for the 

 semblance of a human sacrifice, and whoever drew the 

 " black piece " of a cake dressed on the fire, was made to 

 leap three times through the flame. In many parts of 

 France the sheriffs or the mayor of a town burned baskets 

 filled with wolves, foxes, and cats in the bonfires at the 

 Feast of St. John ; and it is said that the Basques burn 

 vipers in wicker panniers at midsummer, and that Breton 

 villagers will sacrifice a snake when they burn the sacred 

 boat to the goddess who has assumed the title of St. Anne. 



The Welsh and Irish traditions contain many other traces 

 of the custom of human sacrifice. Some of the penalties of 

 the ancient laws seem to have originated in an age when 

 the criminal was offered to the gods. The thief and the 

 seducer of women were burned on a pile of logs or cast into 

 a fiery furnace ; the maiden who forgot her duty was 

 burned, or drowned, or sent adrift to sea. The lives of 

 the saints and the household foiry tales are full of the 

 miracles by which the innocent queen or princess is saved 

 from an unjust doom. 



All these are of the past, yet now and again reminders 

 come to us what strange beliefs are yet nurtured among us, 

 what fetichistic customs still linger, what unlaid ghosts still 

 haunt the barrows, what fairy-darts and elf-bolts are still 

 thrown, wh.at merry dances the little people still have in 

 their fairy rings, what helpful or spiteful things they do, 



in districts where the thud of the navvy's pickaxe has not 

 disturbed their trysting time, nor the screech of the railway 

 whistle driven them to their imdergrouud homes, where, 

 according to Danish legend, their ancestors, the unwashed 

 children of Eve, were cast by Jesus. 



The older and grosser elements, never eliminated from 

 Christianity, easily coalesced with those in the pagan 

 rehgiona, which it nowhere thoroughh- supplanted. It 

 had attained a richer spiritual development than they, 

 but its roots lie in the same soil, fed by the same needs. 

 The penalties pronounced in its authoritative writings 

 against witches ; the vast organised doctrine of demonology 

 which was, and is, an integral part of the teaching of its 

 founder, and therefore of his disciples ; the superstitions 

 attached and attaching to the water of baptism, and which 

 led the ignorant rustic to steal it from the fonts for use in 

 magical rites (accounting for locked covers on fonts) ; these 

 and other elements, of the earth earthy, it shared with other 

 religions, and if it bestowed upon them new names, the 

 essence remained unchanged. 



The dressing of wells at Tissington and other places ; the 

 wells in the northern counties into which the country girls 

 throw pence as offerings to the spirits ; the rags and other 

 votive offerings on trees and hedges around sacred wells in 

 Britain and Ireland ; the pilgrimages to St. Gowen's well in 

 Pembrokeshire ; are among the undoubted relics of that 

 water-worship which is one of the many departments of the 

 nature- worship of our forefathers, and which is linked with 

 the offerings round sacred wells in India and Ceylon, and 

 with the more graceful Fontinalia of the Romans, when 

 the fountains and wells were garlanded in. honour of their 

 nymphs. 



One might think that there remained no relic of sacrificial 

 customs which, as we have .seen, were so hideous a feature 

 of the old British religion, as of all others at a correspond- 

 ingly low level ; and yet it is recorded that not twenty-five 

 years ago, when a herd of cattle was attacked with murrain, 

 one of them was buried alive as a propitiatory offering for 

 the rest, and that a live ox was burned in Northumberland 

 with the same intent ; whilst a remedy for erysipelas applied 

 within recent years was to cut off part of a cat's ear and let 

 the blood drop on the part affected. So in the Highlands 

 and Cornwall, a black cock is buried alive on the spot where 

 a person is first attacked by epilepsy. 



Scratch a Russian, says the adage, and you will find a 

 Tatar ; scratch a peasant, and, for the matter of that, a good 

 many of his betters, and you'll find a fetichist — a pagan to 

 the core. What will the old crones tell us to this day 1 

 Th.at the sickly child will not thrive till it is christened ; 

 that the souls of the unbaptised babes wander in the 

 air till Doomsday, or join the mystic team of the 

 Wild Huntsman, be he Arthur or Odin ; that the first 

 parings of the infant's nails, which must never be 

 cut on a Friday, should be buried under an ash-tree, in 

 which superstition we see mixed the s,avage notion of bury- 

 ing nail-parings and other refuse lest the sorcerer work harm 

 thereby, and the important part assigned to the ash in 

 Norse, American, Greek, and other myths ; that the mourner 

 on whom the sun shines at a funeral is sure to die ; that 

 when birds tap against the window, or ravens croak, or the 

 dogs howl before the house, or the click of the death-watch 

 spider is heard, or, queerest of all, when one's own wraith is 

 met, or a corpse doesn't stiffen, 'tis an omen of death. 



Furthermore, that the faithless lover's heart maybe tortured 

 by sticking pins into a h.are's heart ; that 'tis unlucky to 

 look at the new moon through glass ; that 'tis -nicked to 

 point at the stars or count them — itself a relic of the Aryan 

 ancestor-worship, and of the personifying of the " Fathers " who 

 live in the sky along with Yama, and who are the great original 



