Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/165

Rh good qualities of a departed member by consuming his body powdered in drink. The Bavarian peasant has passed the stage whereat the coarse directness of this expedient can be tolerated. He tries to achieve the same result by the symbolical act of eating cakes baked of dough which has been put upon the breast of the dead man to rise, and has in rising absorbed his virtues. In the Sin-eater the same act is put to another, but strictly analogous, use in the absorption of the sins of the dead. Why it was supposed that in the one case good, and in the other evil, properties were communicated we do not know. Some variation in the view taken of the matter by the clergy may have led to the rite being considered disgraceful in Wales, and so may have rendered those who persisted in it the objects of persecution. Payment to undertake the odium, the consequent degradation as well of the rite as of the person who performed it, and the influence of the Biblical account of the Hebrew Scape-goat may have done the rest. The gifts of food to the poor, both in their intermediate form described by Pennant, and in their final form as mere doles, however, point to a different interpretation of the same original observance. They can hardly be derived from the Sin-eater; their relation to it is not lineal but collateral. They are variants of the ceremony, and variants bearing the strongest testimony to the form and meaning of the parent type.