SUPERSTITIOUS SURVIVALS.* IT is the common belief among hard-headed and
severely sen- sible people that we have at last banished useless and senseless superstitions ; how great an error this is, the Strange Survivals of Mr. Baring-Gould will show with overwhelming directness. We are literally smothered in the thousand-and-one observ- ances which custom and tradition dictate to us in our daily life. If a man were to stop and consider why he did this thing or that thing, he would be puzzled to give the merest apology for the doing of it. Many tricks of custom no one ever could, or ever will, explain ; but enough remain, the origin of which accident reveals to us, to make nervous and impres- sionable people gasp. One class of superstitions, though still vigorous and powerful—that of omens—has now nothing like the importance our forefathers attached to it. What terrors the study of omens had for the ancients we know ; a couple of birds fighting in the air sufficed to send an army flying, an army of Roman legionaries, too. The sternest discipline in the world was no better than ice on a river, if the soldier was a fatalist. To-day, there are plenty of timid people who make their lives a pilgrimage through a Valley of Shadows. We may not Bing before breakfast, we may not spill salt, we must not forget to bow to a magpie, or remove our hat, as the case may be, or pass under a ladder, or sail on a Friday, or sit down thirteen, or drink a health in water ; these are common superstitions, it is true, and need not distress any one much. But there are hundreds more that crop up sud- denly, which some sympathetic sense bids us dread, even if no officious individual is there to point them out. So strong, indeed, is the sense of calamity and its warnings, that those who affect to despise superstitions, are notoriously uncomfort- able after neglect of the proper reverence for them.
One very ancient and universal superstition has lost a great deal of vitality,—namely, that no structure would stand unless a human life was sacrificed at some time during the building of it, or immediately on its completion. Nowadays, huge houses and great bridges are raised with no worse accident than a broken limb, and the proudest boast of the undertakers of any giant structure is that no life has been lost. A subor- dinate will mutter and shake his head, but few pay attention to him. Nevertheless, there is a deeply rooted feeling that some unseen power must be propitiated, that there must be a quid pro quo some time or other. If things go smoothly and uneventfully, it is a surprising self-restraint on the part of the community in general if no more disparaging remark than "Extraordinarily lucky!" is made ; every one in his own heart believes the balance will be redressed some day. It really seems that even now people believe at heart with Schopen- hauer that evil is positive. Our ancestors must have had this. belief ; they certainly acted in accordance with it, and con- sidering that the most trivial act had an unseen terror for them, we need not wonder. Why wonder, indeed, if their pleasures were violent and their joys spasmodic ?
The legends attaching to great cathedrals and bridges on the Continent, and to our parish churches, old manor-halls ; to the White Ladies, the Pale Children, the Black Dogs, the • Strange Survival*: awns Chapters in the History of Man. By S. Baring- Gould, MA. London : Methuen and Co. Spectres of the Hearth, descend from times when an actual human sacrifice was built into the foundation or wall of a building. The legends of Aix-la-Chapelle Church and the Sachsenhituser Bridge at Frankfort relate bow the Devil was cheated of the life he was promised, in the one instance, by the letting loose of a wolf through the door, and in the other, by driving a cock over the bridge. The raisings of lofty spires have generally some variation of the same legend, the fall of a man either by accident or in a rivalry as to who had the steadiest head. It is only too probable that the real nature of the sacrifice in many instances has assumed a softer and more picturesque form in the lapse of time. Again and again, indeed, there is no disguise, and we are frankly told that in the building of the castles of Ffenneberg, Liebenstein, Reichenfels, and Nieder Manderscheid and Winneburg, in the Eifel, children were walled-in alive. In China periodic panics take place when some great building is to be erected ; both at Shanghai when the cathedral was building, and at Singapore on the commencement of some public -works, the Coolie population went mad with fear, and no one ventured out after nightfall. The riots at Soul were supposed to be due to the same cause. But the astonishing thing is, not that the belief in the necessity of human sacrifice should obtain in the conservative East, impregnated as it is with fatalism, but in Europe, where the Teutonic races seem to have held to the notion with extraordinary persistency. The people of Halle tried to persuade the builder of a bridge to immure a child in the basement, insisting on the impossi- bility of making the piers safe unless he did so ; this occurred exactly fifty years ago. In course of time, other animals have taken the place of man ; most of us have heard of spectral dogs in tombs. Candles, too, doubtless took the place of a sacrifice, though the deceased, it was said, needed some light to find his way to paradise,—a feeble explanation on the face of it.
Gable-ends have a significance that few people realise now. The carved ridge-tiles, and representations of animals, such as horses and horsemen, and the stone balls, all possess a meaning. Horses' heads are common in Germany on the points of gables, and are found in Russia, while chamois' heads occur in the Tyrol. The completion of a building was signalised by a sacrifice originally, just as the laying of the foundations was; perhaps more of the final ceremony remains to-day than the initial one. Horses were held to be sacred by the Northern races, and formed, next to a man, the worthiest sacrifice ; and if a horse's skull was not put on the point of the gable, a horse's head was carved. At a chieftain's death, his horse was buried with him ; and to-day the charger of an officer follows his coffin to the grave. Poles surmounted by bunches of leaves and flowers protect the farm-houses of the Black Forest from lightning, and represent the ancient oblation of a bunch of grain to Odin's horse ; and gables often have carvings connected with this oblation to Odin. We know the legend of the "Weird Hunt," and many reminiscences of this remain in Denmark. At Yule-tide, oats are thrown out for Saint Clans'a home (the cult of Odin having been transferred to Saint Claus), and a person con- valescent after a dangerous illness, is said to have "given a feed to Death's horse." The sheaf of corn that is fastened to the gable in Norway and Denmark, now an offering to the birds, was originally a feed for Odin's horse. "Formerly," says Mr. Baring-Gould, "the last bundle of oats in a field was cast into the air by the reapers, for Odin at Yule to feed his horse." And in his recollection it was customary in Devon for the last sheaf to be raised in the air, with the cry, "A neck Weeday ! "—that is, to "Nicker Woden."
The mediaeval habit of affixing the heads of criminals and prisoners to spikes on battlements, was the survival of the offering of skulls to Woden, and the stone balls on the gables of manor-houses and on lodge-gates, are the survival of the right of life and death possessed by the lords of the manor. Manors without capital jurisdiction had no right to these Renaissance ornaments, and if they set them up, put them- selves on a level with the parvenu who assumes armorial bearings. One bas only got to look at these seemingly empty ornaments to be convinced of this inherently true and ghastly significance.
Under the heading of "Ovens," Mr. Baring-Gould details some curious facts about the " bee-hive " hut. " Bee-hive " huts are still used as living-houses by some of the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides. 'Fite greatest number of ruined huts are found in Cornwall and on Dartmoor, and they have ob- viously been placed contiguous to some stream convenient for the working of tin, and their builders are also held to be responsible for the stone monuments. These metal-workers are supposed to be the Ivernian race who overflowed from the northern steppes of Asia, and displaced the long-settled rein- deer-hunter or cave-dweller. Their remains are plentiful in France, and, of course, they survive in Spain. Another branch, instead of following the Baltic shores, separated at the Cas- pian, and reached Palestine and Arabia. Dr. Geikie's deserip- tion of these Holy Land remains is quoted by the writer. They exist in the Wilderness of Beersheba, and some conjec- ture them to be the ancient houses of the Amalekites. Seven or eight feet in diameter, with a doorway of two uprights and a lintel, these Amalakite huts only require the further circum- tial evidence afforded by the circles of stones standing near them, to convince most of us that their builders belonged to the same race as the Cornish and Welsh and Scotch hut- builders. On the Siberian Tundras and in Lapland, smoke- huts, with a hole in the centre of the roof, are yet in use, only the fire, after having heated the hut, is put out to allow of the inhabitant occupying it, and the hole blocked up. Another variety of hut has the fire at the side, as in the Hebridean huts, but it must be kept low. The Finn uses a similar hut to bathe in, throwing water on to hot stones, and shutting himself up in it. The Eskimo adopts the same type of hut to live in, made of snow. The advantage of square houses were soon realised, we may be sure. Mr. Baring-Gould exhumed on the edge of Trewortha Marsh a settlement of oblong houses for living in, and bee-hive huts which had been built into smaller huts for baking purposes. And to-day one sees often enough brick ovens in the walls of farm-houses and cottages ; and capital bread they make, too, properly heated with wood-ashes. But what a long-descended sur- vival ! Not so ancient as a cave-dwelling, for the Bosjes- mans, and the Chiracahuas of the South-Western States, live in Caves, we believe.
Another strange survival is noted by the writer in the pierced slab of slate bearing an epitaph in the wall of a tomb, which had the date 1807 on it. lie compares this hole with a similar hole in pre-historic dolmens and cromlechs occurring in Cornwall and Gloucestershire, in Hera.ult, at Cahaignes in Normandy, in France, in the Crimea and the Caucasus, in Sardinia, in Circassia, in Palestine, and in India. Some other explanation must be sought than to suppose bones were slid in, or where the holes were large enough, carried in. They have been left for the passage of the soul, as the holes in a boy's coffin are to-day. made in the Caucasus for bees to fly in and out of, the insects representing souls. The story of the sleeping shepherd, and the bees that issued from his mouth, to cross a tiny rivulet by a blade of grass and fly away among flowers, and the dream that the sleeper afterwards told his comrades, in which he had crossed a great river by a magnificent bridge and visited Paradise, illustrates this belief; though, indeed, not more strikingly than the story Mr. Baring-Gould tells, of a nurse who opened the window to facilitate the passing-away of a soul from a slowly dying man. The extraordinary custom of trepanning practised by pre- historic man is due to a similar habit of thought,—a passage for the evil spirit of some individual subject to fits being intended by the hole. Other uses for hollows on tombs were as cups for the dead man,—a survival to the present day from the cromlech era.
We cannot possibly mention more than the names of the chapters on "Broadside Ballads," "Beds," "Umbrellas," "Revivals," "Dolls," in this fascinating volume. Every one should read Strange Surviva/s, for no man has a clearer view of racial customs, a more discriminating judgment, or is more thoroughly imbued with the poetry of archa3ology than Mr. Baring-Gould.
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