Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/451

 The Principles of Fasting. 409

for instance, when a girl reaches puberty, she fasts for the first four days and abstains from fresh meats of any kind throughout the whole period of her seclusion. " There was a two-fold object in this abstention. First, the girl, it was thought, would be harmed by the fresh meat in her peculiar condition ; and second, the game animals would take offence if she partook of their meat in these circumstances," and would not permit her father to kill them.^

It should finally be noticed that, though the custom of fasting after a death in the main has a superstitious origin, there may at the same time be a physiological motive for it.^ Even the rudest savage feels afflicted at the death of a friend, and grief is accompanied by a loss of appetite. This natural disinclination to partake of food may, combined with superstitious fear, have given rise to prohibitory rules, nay, may even in the first instance have suggested the idea that there is danger in taking food. The mourning observances so commonly coincide with the natural expressions of sorrow, that we are almost bound to assume the exist- ence of some connection between them, even though in their developed forms the superstitious motive be the most prominent.

An important survival of the mourning fast is the Lent fast. It originally lasted for forty hours only, that is, the time when Christ lay in the grave.^ Irenaeus speaks of the fast of forty hours before Easter,'* and


 * Tout, m Jour. Atithr. Inst. xxxv. 136.

^Cf. Mallery, 'Manners and Meals,' in American Anthropologist, i. 202; Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 213 ; Schuitz, Urgeschichte der Kultur, p. 587.

■■'Cf. St. Matthew, ix. 15; St. Mark, ii. 20; St. Luke, v. 35.

•* Irenaeus, quoted by Eusebius, IJistoria ecclesiastica, v. 24 (Migno, J'atrologice cnrsus, Ser. Graeca, xx. 501). Cf. Funk, 'Die Entwicklung des Osterfastens,' in Theologische Quartalschrift, Ixxv. 181 sqi].; Duchesne, Christian Worship, p. 241.

2 D