Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/42

 ^o Presidential Address.

neutralize the circumambient devils ; finally, a dance was prescribed. The patient, however, despite powders, box, dancing, and all, grew worse instead of better, and took to her bed, a nervous wreck. At last she pulled herself together and went off to tell the police, and even then she was witch-ridden ; so that, if someone had not forcibly stopped lier in the road, she would have gone on running for ever. All this in the year of grace 1914 in the fortunate islands where I was born.^ I am about to go round the world in search of anthropological adventures, but, as for the acquisition of authentic experience of the primitive, it seems as if I might be better occupied at home.

One more example, which will serve to show how we need not discriminate too nicel}' between survival and revival, when we are studying some old-world type of experience as realized under modern and familiar con- ditions. If we want to understand the psychological rationale of an initiation ceremon\% shall we not do well before we try to determine the inwardness of savage rites, into the secrets of which we may be pretty sure that no European has been allowed fully to penetrate, to seek entrance into a lodge of freemasons, and taste for oneself the feelings of exaltation, of submissipn, and what not, — I speak as one of the profane, — to which the novice is wrought up, with more or less effect on the subsequent conduct of his life "■ There may be reasons in this case, — reasons the ver\^ existence of which throws a flood of light on the similar esotericism of the savage, — why knowledge so acquired cannot be turned directly to account. Yet the example is none the less apposite as regards the point that I have been labouring throughout, — namely that you are not in a position to explain a human institution until, by direct experience, or by sympathetic self-projection from close at hand, you are enabled to speak about it as an insider. To recur to the present instance, it is of quite Giternsey Evening Press, Jan. 29, 1914.