Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/238

230 woman sits with her face turned towards the moon, her child will be a lunatic" (Arnason, supra). "The Brazilian mother carefully shielded her infant from the lunar rays, believing that they would produce sickness" (Brinton, supra). In Greece, "nurses take every precaution to avoid exposing infants to the moon" (Plutarch, Q. Conv., III, x, 3). And it is hardly necessary to remark that new-born children and puerperæ are alike tabu, and particularly liable to possession (as regards classical antiquity, cf Suid., αμφιδρόμια, and Censorin., De die nat., c. II, 7, p. 28, Jahn). Dr. Stengel's book on the Ritual Antiquities of Greece is part of Iwan von Müller's valuable series of manuals of classical antiquities. We may, perhaps, not unreasonably regard it as a sign of the times worth noting in that the German school-boy will be henceforward taught that the Greek religion was no "nature-religion", that the attempt to identify Greek gods with nature-powers or natural phenomena is a failure. He is further to be taught that similarity between the myths of different nations does not necessarily imply borrowing, or even joint inheritance from the beliefs of common ancestors : it presumably points only to similarity in the mental constitution of different peoples. And, further, the capacity to believe in the actual, visible, and tangible appearance of supernatural beings was not confined to pre-historic times, but lived ever fresh and flourishing right throughout historic times. All this is most excellent. But it is quite as necessary in folk-lore as in politics "to be always asking for everything you can think of, to be always taking all you can get, and be always grumbling about what you have not got." Then come, let us grumble. In the first place it is strange that, in a work dealing with ritual from the point of view just described, there is no recognition of the fact that, amongst the things which myths are invented to explain, are rites themselves. And this is the more surprising because the Dionysia are