Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/167

 Ethnological Data in Folklore, 139

larger than the family, represented by the modern village in a geographical sense and by a group of common de- scendants in a personal sense.

But as soon as we are justified in using such significant terminology as this, we have already made the first step to- wards the identification of these survivals as the remnants of a system of fire-worship belonging to a people whose social organisation was that of the tribe ; for the connection between the modern village-fire and the house-fire is of exactly the same character as the ancient connection be- tween the tribal fire and the family or clan fire. When, therefore, in addition to this essential feature of the con- nection between the village-fire and the house-fire, an examination of the details of both village-fire customs and house-fire customs has revealed certain significant indi- cations of the once sacred character of these fires, of cere- monies which recall almost the formula of a lost religious rite, and of usages which go back to prehistoric civilisation for their only possible explanation — when it has been found that these conceptions, clustering round the burning embers of the modern fire belong to the ancient tribal fire cult, a very important stage is reached in the identification of these fire-customs with a definite race of people.

Nearly every writer on this subject has, it seems to me, begun at the wrong end. He has commenced with the few references to the god Bel, and has built up a theory of sacrifice and worship which has little or no evidence in its favour in the examples which have been examined in the previous pages. And in thus accentuating the religious element of these rites he has left wholly un- touched the one clue to their origin, namely, the social organisation of the people who performed them. It is always useless to discuss early religions without taking count of the social organism of which the religion is only a portion. Early peoples did not differentiate, as modern peoples do, between the various elements of their culture ;