Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/42

 30 Presidential Address.

the most primitive form of social organisation, the old gorilla with his harem, as described by Mr. Darwin.^i The influence of some powerful or gifted race has given a per- manent direction to the thought of its successors in the same region, or the permanence is the result of the environ- ment and social atmosphere.

In Egvpt, where the Mediterranean type of race has been modified by the immigration of Semites from the east, of negroes from the south, and successive invasions of foreigners, Persians, Greeks, or Turks within the historical period, we are assured that tiie folk beliefs of the present day are those of the dynastic and pre-dynastic peoples. In the welter of races which constitutes the present population of Palestine, we find distinct survivals of early Semitic beliefs, older even than those of the Arabs. In Greece the ancient -Hellenic folklore survives to the present day. "The past," as Mr. Abbott" says, is found " peeping through the mask of the present," or, according to Mr. Lawson,--' " practically all the religious customs most characteristic of ancient paganism, such as sacrifice, the taking of auspices, and the consulta- tion of oracles, continue with or without the sanction of the Church down to the present day." And this occurs in spite of the fact that, while in the islands the inhabitants largely represent the old Hellenic stock, whatever purity that may have ever possessed, on the mainland it is only the power of the Church which gives to Slav or Toskh, Vlach, or half-bred Italian or Turk, a community of tradition, hope, language, creed, and a single national character.-* When we find a seemingly alien element, as in the horrid cycle of tales centring round the Callicantzari or Vampires, it originated, as Mr. Lawson tells us, in the reputation for sorcery enjoyed b\' the Centaurs, a Pelasgian tribe on Mount

21 The Descent of Man (2iul ed.), pp. 590 el seq.

-^G. Y. \hhoVX, Macedonian Folklore, p. 25.

23 J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, p. 47.

2* D. G. Y{o^z.\K\\,- Ionia and the East, \). 149.