Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/45

Rh of intellectual activity that we may hardly refuse to the brutes. All ritual implies a certain degree of pre-existing belief, be it only a belief in the efficacy of the ritual. Our concern here, however, is with the reactive effect of the rite on the idea that it embodies; as seen for instance in what Sir Edward Tylor has called "that interesting form of survival which, keeping up the old ceremony in form, has adapted its motives to new thoughts and feelings"

As a peg on which to hang his speculations, Sir James Frazer has taken up that question asked by Plutarch, why an exile, reported to be dead, for whom funeral ceremonies have been performed, may not re-enter his house through the door, but must find entrance through the roof. The solution offered is that he is still officially dead, and, until he can be reborn ceremonially, must be considered a ghost. As such it is physically impossible for him to cross the threshold, for the simple reason that the threshold has been rendered ghost-proof by a mystic barrier of fire and water, all ghosts being regarded as undesirable and malignant.

Now this explanation is quite clear, and may even be quite true as it applies to the custom of Plutarch's time; but the question for us is whether it carries us back to the primitive motive. It seems possible that, before the etiquette for ghosts was so clearly defined, the exile might have found the same reception, but for reasons more vaguely and impulsively conceived. Surely it was enough that the man was felt to be uncanny; in a sense he had been dead. Some taint of mystic danger therefore attached to him, and he must not be given a chance to contaminate the threshold. It will be remembered how often the corpse itself is taken out through some special opening, that the threshold may remain pure for the living.