Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/212

206 singular clearness, traditions, or it may be observations, of an altogether different set of ideas which belonged to the race with which he first came into contact, namely, the Iberic. But whether the story is a mythic interpretation by Aryans of non-Aryan practices, or a non-Aryan tradition, varied, as soon as it became the property of the Aryan, to suit Aryan ideas, it clearly takes us back to practices very remote, to use Mr. Elton's forcible words, from the reverence for the parents' authority which might have perhaps been expected from descendants of "the Aryan household". These practices lead us back to a period of savagery which we are only just beginning to understand. Far back in this period we become aware of a central conception of the savage mind upon the shedding of blood; namely, the blood that alone calls for vengeance is blood that falls on the ground; and so we often find the idea, says Professor Robertson Smith, that "a death in which no blood is shed, or none falls upon the ground, does not call for vengeance". Thus certain “piacula were simply pushed over a height, so that they might seem to kill themselves by their fall”; and we are not only reminded of the Valhalla of the Scandinavians, and of the Tarpeian Rock of the Romans, but of the recent sacrifice of Professor Palmer by the Arabs in this rude and savage manner. "But", says Professor Robertson Smith, "applications of this principle to the sacrifice of sacrosanct and kindred animals are frequent; they are strangled or killed with a blunt instrument"; in which connection, we are to note the club or mallet that appears in sacrificial scenes on ancient Chaldean cylinders, and the club or mallet that Aubrey tells us of in his "countrie story" of English peasants in the seventeenth century, and that Mr. Campbell tells us of in his folk-tale of Scottish peasants in the nineteenth century.