Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/41

Rh dross has been rejected, and the phrases and sentiments of another society and another period have been eliminated, but the purely human element in them has remained to exercise a powerful influence upon the mind of the people. The mystical poem of the Rose, or kindred allegorical poems, may have influenced Bunyan in a subtle manner, and produced the Pilgrim's Progress. On the other hand, there were also branches of knowledge which appealed to the darker side of human nature. The king's astrologer becomes afterwards the man who casts nativities, and Zadkiel and Old Moore are the last puny offspring of the mystical old science of astrology, which once held sway over the world and has not yet died out. Scholars brought up in Toledo became in popular imagination wizards, and the Evil Spirit reared in the Dualistic conception of the world cast his shadow over many lands, and claimed his victims among innocent, hysterical women, burnt at the stake as witches.

Folklore alone holds the key also to these tragical mysteries, it alone explains some of the dark workings of the mind, the result of contending forces fighting one against the other. It is a full picture of humanity which Folklore presents to us. There is light and darkness, and there is also the shading off in different hues, which tasks the skill of the investigator, but which repays him amply for the time and energy spent in these investigations. Nature abhors a vacuum, and, as we are shown, the human mind abhors it likewise. The eager desire to learn and to know, to understand the world around us and in us, is one of the prominent features of man. As Aristotle said, man is a ζω&#x0342;ον πολιτικόν, a "political being" interested in everything, accepting suitable instruction from every quarter, but also accepting everything that is offered to him, indiscriminately. He throws it, as it were, into the melting-pot out of which emerges that mass of ballads and superstitions, tales and legends, games and songs, gathered