Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/535

 Reviews. 477

written, where the manners, institutions, customs, and opinions of a people are neglected, and rightly insists on the necessity of taking them into account. "The comparison," he says, "of customs, cults, idioms, even of dress; that of the means of trans- mitting language, that is to say, of writing; the comparison of the superstitious ceremonies observed at births, marriages, and deaths; the comparison of practices intended to prevent trouble- some accidents, calamities, and diseases, to bring abundance and prosperity, and to implore the divinity and render him favourable; these comparisons, I say, will lead to conclusions on the origin of the different peoples more certain than can be drawn from the greater part of our historical traditions." It is thus evident that he was possessed of the truly scientific spirit. The root of the matter was in him. But when he came to apply the principle enunciated in the words I have quoted, the application was thwarted by two difficulties. First, he could not shake himself entirely free of the theories of Dupuis, who had written a ponderous work to prove that the primitive worship was that of the heavenly bodies. Among these bodies, of course, the sun in his various zodiacal phases took a prominent place. Dulaure correlates the worship of the reproductive principle of nature with that of the sun. Here there was a germ, and more than a germ, of truth. In the northern hemisphere, with which he was almost exclusively concerned, the springtime, when the sun enters the sign of Taurus, is especially the time when the reproductive powers of the vegetable world are manifested, and when religious festivals to celebrate the return of life after the temporary death of winter are held. It is undeniable that at these festivals phallic emblems are honoured and phallic rites performed. Dulaure's mistake was in assuming that the cult of the sun was primitive and universal, and that the cult of the phallus was likewise primitive and universal and necessarily connected with the cult of the sun. The evidence he brings forward ought to have been sufficient to put him on his guard as to the latter. It is quite certain, at all events in the light of more modern researches, that any cult, strictly so called, of the phallus is of limited range and sporadic, that it is not