Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/143

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customs he is for the most part dependent on second-hand material rather than on the observations of field workers. The danger of utiHzing citations without a knowledge of their context lies in the undue simplification of the data, and ni a certain encouragement of the tendency to collect similarities and neglect dissimilarities in the comparative evidence. And it is the negative evidence that produces the most certain results. Again, one has an uneasy feeling that the rites connected with three great human crises are not necessarily so homogeneous as Professor Samter assumes. For instance, one remains unconvinced by examples of the offering of shoes in burial ritual that shoes are thrown at newly-married couples with the idea of making offerings of placation.

The author rightly acknowledges that a religious usage has often more than one motive behind it, but in practice he is some- limes seduced into the primrose path of simplification. The ritual wearing of the clothes of the other sex, for example, presents more and more complex problems than his chapter would lead one to suppose. I am doubtful, by the way, if the hanging up of a pair of trousers to defend mother and child from evil influences is quite the same thing as wearing the clothes of the other sex.

There are dangers, too, in giving way to a tendency towards dogmatic or a priori explanation. Some reasons given for obser- vances are not sufficiently simple, we are told, to be original. For instance, the statement of peasants that they put a broom in front of the door because the A/p has to stop and count the twigs (p. 34, Note 8) must, according to our author, be an invented interpretation. But have we the right to push it aside in favour of a hypothesis? It is after all a very familiar device for dealing with the stupid bogey. In modern Greece, if you meet a Kalli- kdntzaros, and give him a sieve, he will stop to count the holes, and as no Kallikdtitzaros can count more than two, you will have ample time to escape. Similarly, witches can be induced to stop and count the leaves on an onion-flower or a red carnation. ^

The first chapter again displays an eagerness to find a religious meaning for an action for which a secular motive seems adequate. After discussing the statue of a kneeling female figure wiiii two

1 Politis, IlapaSoo-ets, i. p. 596; Sir Reniiel Kodd, Ciis/ovts and Lore of Modern Greece, p. 200.