Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/221

 REVIEWS.

The Mystic Rose : a Study of Primitive Marriage. By Ernest Crawley, M.A. Macmillan. 1902.

Mr. Crawley has chosen a singularly inappropriate title. The first half of it is derived from the phrase applied by fantastic devotion to the Virgin Mary. Its relation to the real subject is, to say the least, far-fetched. The second half is accordingly necessary, not so much to explain, as to explain away, the first half. Yet even the second half does not succeed in correctly expressing the contents of the work. Properly speaking, the author has given us not a study of Primitive Marriage, but a study of Taboo in relation to Marriage. As such, it is an important contribution to the discussion of the many questions connected with the evolution of the human relation known as Marriage.

The influence of Taboo in savage life is undeniable. If the term law may be used in this connection, peoples in the lower culture do not distinguish between moral and ceremonial law. Taboo is the consecration of savage custom, both moral and cere- monial. Among some races, the Polynesian for example, it was elaborated into minute and multiplex rules. As the sanction of the moral and ceremonial law, there is a sense in which it is every- where the bond of society. It was eminently desirable that mar- riage should be studied in relation to this potent factor of savage life, and Mr. Crawley has rendered a signal service to anthro- pologists in doing so. But after all. Taboo is not the whole pre- occupation of the savage mind. We must never forget that in concentrating the attention, as it is necessary to do, on any subject which we happen to be investigating, we cannot avoid throwing the surrounding subjects out of perspective. Before we can arrive at a just estimate of the value of the subject we are studying, and its relation to other subjects, the perspective must be corrected. This, I hold, is just what Mr. Crawley has omitted to do ; and