Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/26

18, to the intent that they might give a more ungracious and deadly blow.

These, and their allied and variant customs, are relics, not so much of the absorption by Christian baptism of rites belonging to early paganism as of the struggle between Christianity and paganism for the mastery, of the anathemas of Christians against pagans, and of the terrible answer of the pagan. And what are we to say to it? Is it that the struggle itself has lasted all these centuries, or only its memory? My belief is that the struggle itself has lasted in reality though not in name.

But if we have been able to look through the very portals of Christianity to the regions of paganism behind, can we not boldly pass through altogether and recover from folk-lore much of the lost evidence of our prehistoric ancestors? I put the question in this way purposely because it is the way which is indicated by the methods and data of folk-lore, and it is a question which has much to do with the different views held of the province of folk-lore.

Let us first note the pre-baptismal rites of washing. In Northumberland we meet with the analogue of the sixteenth century Irish practice, for there the child's right hand is left unwashed that it may gather riches better—the golden coin being the modern weapon in this as in other features of civilisation. Not only is the water used for this purpose heated in the old-fashioned way by placing red-hot irons in it (i.e., the modern equivalent for stone-boiling); but in Yorkshire we have the custom that the new-born infant must be placed in the arms of a maiden before anyone else touches it, two practices represented exactly in the customs of the Canary Islanders, who were in the stone age of culture and are considered to be the last remnants of a race which once included Britain among its lands of occupation.

Of course we cannot, on the present occasion, deal exhaustively with any of these subjects. I can only indicate