Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/57

Rh inform themselves about the religion of the whites, and that perversions of Christian doctrine were passed about across the continent as songs and dances are transmitted. This theory I would accept at once if we were dealing with Märchen, aniles fabulæ, despised by the men and to be picked up from the old women. But, notoriously, the inner religious beliefs are concealed from the women under pain of death. Mr. Manning's informants dared only to halfwhisper their lore in secret places. One of them, after repeatedly examining doors and windows, slunk "into a wooden fire-place," and murmured his gospel. The reason always given was, that if a man's wife came to know these things, he would be obliged to kill her, lest the news should spread among the women. This "quite worthless" evidence of Mr. Manning's is corroborated by Mr. Howitt, to whom a man said: "If a woman were to hear these things, or hear what we tell the boys, I would kill her" (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xiv., p. 310). Knowledge on the part of the women would mean cataclysm, universal madness, universal massacre. Now, if the advocates of the borrowing theory had looked at the subject all round, they must have observed that missionaries do not usually neglect to teach women. If then the "biblical characteristics" were borrowed from missionaries, the women would know them already. But they don't. Again, why should blacks hide from whites just the very things which whites have taught them? Once more, Mr. Hale (1840) remarked on the extreme aversion of the blacks to borrow any idea from Europeans. Now, of all things, the mysteries are, or then were, the most unalterable, and, of all men, the sages who direct the mysteries are the most conservative. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have a