Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/100

Rh 90 P I L P I L these apocryphal writings see Tischcndorfs Euaiigclia Apocryplui (1863). PILCHARD (Clupea pilchard us), a fish of the herring family (Clupeidx), abundant in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coasts of Europe, northwards to the British Channel. Sardine is another name for the same fish, which on the coast of Britanuy and Normandy is also called Celan or Celeren. It is readily distinguished from the other European species of Clupea or herrings. The oper- culum is sculptured with ridges radiating and descending towards the suboperculum ; the scales are large, about thirty along the lateral line, deciduous ; the ventral fins are inserted below, or nearly below, the middle of the base of the dorsal fin ; the dorsal fin has seventeen or eighteen, the anal from nineteen to twenty-one rays. A small blackish spot in the scapulary region is very constant, and sometimes succeeded by other similar marks. There are no teeth on the palate ; pyloric appendages exist in great numbers ; the vertebrae number fifty-three. The pilchard is one of the most important fishes of the English Channel (see article FISHERIES, vol. ix. p. 253 sq.). It spawns at a distance from the shore, and, ac cording to Couch, the spawn has been seen to extend several miles in length, and a mile or more in breadth floating on the surface of the sea, of the thickness of brown paper, and so tough as not to be readily torn in pieces. The spawning takes place at two periods of the year, viz., in April or May, and again in the early part of autumn ; but it is not probable that the same individuals or shoals spawn twice in the same year. When commenc ing their migrations towards the land, the shoals consist of countless numbers, but they break up into smaller com panies in close vicinity to the shore. Pilchards feed on minute crustaceans and other animalcules, and require two or three years before they attain their full size, which is about 10 inches in length. On the Pacific coasts of America, in New Zealand, and in Japan a pilchard occurs (Clupea sagax) which in its characters and habits is so similar to the European pilchard that its general utiliza tion is deserving of attention, and there is every reason to believe that New Zealand could produce its own sardines and fumadoes. Immense shoals are reported to visit the east coast of Otago every year in February and March. PILES. See HEMORRHOIDS. PILGRIMAGE. The word Pilgrimage (derived from the Latin pereyer, i.e., per-ager, &quot; one who traverses a region,&quot; through the intermediate forms pereyrinus, pelleyrino, pdegrin) denotes the act of journeying to some place esteemed sacred, for the purpose of discharging a religious obligation, or to obtain some supernatural assist ance or benefit. The practice is common to many re ligions, and mounts back to prehistoric ages. It is ulti mately traceable to the nature of tribal religion, in its early form of worship of a deity regarded as purely local in the sphere of his special influence. As community in religious acts was one of the principal ties between members of the same tribe, to the exclusion of outsiders, it would naturally become the rule, and then the duty, of the tribesmen to pre sent themselves at recurrent intervals at the sanctuary of their tribal god. As they scattered away from their own settlement, and became travellers or sojourners amongst aliens, the belief that they were in some sense cut off from the protection of their tribal deity, and subjected to the influence of others in whose worship they had no share, would induce visits from a distance to the seat of their own religion, not merely for the purpose of keeping up their tribal relations, but to propitiate a power which perhaps could not hear supplications addressed from a distance, and would in any case be more ready to hear and answer prayers made in his own special shrine, attended with the appro priate rites performed by his own body of ministers. This latter consideration would operate even in the case of cults directed to the Sun-God, the Moon-Goddess, and the planet ary bodies, which could hardly be regarded as localized within earthly boundaries, but might well be supposed more placable in shrines of exceptional splendour and sanctity, officered by a trained and numerous priesthood. And wherever it was believed that the deity not merely responded to prayer, but gave direct answers by omen or by oracle to inquirers, the frequentation of the prophetic seat would naturally increase. Further, as the political strength of any tribe grew, that would be attributed in a multitude of cases to the superior power of its tutelary god, or, where they worshipped the same deity as their neighbours, to some more acceptable mode of paying that worship, whence the custom would grow of making the principal temple of the most powerful tribe the meeting-place of the confederacy, as well for political deliberation as for the more directly religious purpose of reaffirming the common pact with sacrificial ceremonies. And if the strongest tribe passed from the stage of hegemony to that of sovereignty, whether by cession or by conquest, so becoming the nucleus of a nation or kingdom, the same feelings would operate yet more powerfully, the subject tribes being either compelled to accept the gods of their conquerors, or voluntarily adopting them from a conviction of their superior might. Certain temples would in this wise become national from having been tribal, and in large empires, such as Egypt and Assyria, would collect worshippers from all the various peoples ruled under a common sceptre. The second stage in the genesis of special sanctuaries is peculiar to religions with a real or supposed historical basis, and takes the form of devotion towards localities which have been the scenes of important events in the lives of personages reverenced in the creeds of those religions. And the third stage, be longing to a much later period than either of the former, when self-consciousness had become more developed, is that where the aim of the pilgrims is primarily subjective, to stir up certain emotions in their own minds, through the means of the associations connected with special localities. But in each and all of these the fundamental underlying thought is the same, the localization of deity, the almost insuperable difficulty which the ideas of omniscience and omnipresence offer to undeveloped intellects. It will be convenient, in tracing the history of pilgrim ages, to begin with those which belong to the various forms of heathenism, ancient and modern, as pertaining, whatever be their actual date, to an earlier stage of mental evolution than the Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan ones. The first pilgrimages, then, of which we have any trust- Egypt! worthy knowledge, are those of ancient Egypt. The mythology of the Egyptians is even yet but imperfectly understood, but it is at any rate clear that, just as the votaries of Vishnu and of Siva keep apart in modern Hindustan, so the chief deities of the Egyptian pantheon had cults which were as often rival as complementary, and that the emulation of the competing temples took the form of bidding against each other for popular favour by the splendour of their chief yearly festivals. We are obliged to have recourse to Herodotus and Plutarch for informa tion as to the general cycle of feasts nationally observed; for, although local calendars and rubrics of festivals have been discovered in several places, nothing cognate with Ovid s Fasti has yet been found in Egypt. Herodotus notices that, instead of having but one yearly national festival (Trav^yv/Hs), the Egyptians had six, the principal of which was that of Artemis (i.e., Bast or Sekhet) at Bubastis, to which the pilgrims went in boats crowded with both sexes, playing on castanets and flutes, and singing to this accompaniment. They landed at every town along the