Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/156

148 above ceremony, he was utterly detested in the neighbourhood—regarded as a mere Pariah—as one irredeemably lost." Mr. Moggridge specified the neighbourhood of Llandebie, about twelve or thirteen miles from Swansea, as a place where the custom had survived to within a recent period.

No explanation of this strange custom has, so far as I know, been hitherto offered, beyond Aubrey's conjecture that it has some reference to the Hebrew Scape-goat. I propose briefly to compare it with one or two other customs in this country and abroad, for the purpose if possible of tracing its origin. In doing so I will ask you to assume that, as is usual in traditional rites which have continued to modern times, we have in the custom described only a mutilated form of the original ceremony. If that ceremony was in ancient times at all widely distributed we shall probably find its remains in places far apart; but we must not expect to find them all exactly alike. The portion of the ceremony, or the interpretation of it, which most forcibly strikes the popular imagination, and is consequently held most tenaciously in the popular memory, in one place is not always precisely that which is to be recognized at first sight elsewhere. We shall have to piece together the relics we find, first in order to show that they relate to the same rite, that they are in fact portions of the same pattern, though perhaps distorted or half obliterated, and secondly to discover what the original pattern was. Fortunately in the present case the pattern is simple, and the fragments, though few, are unmistakable in their characteristics.

At present we will note that the rite has to do with the disposal of the dead, that the eating of food placed upon the coffin, or rather upon the body itself, is the substance of the rite, and that the belief connected with it is that by the act of eating some properties of the dead are taken over by the eater. With this general idea in our minds we may look for analogues.