Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/21

Rh serving the older superstition of not giving a light from the homestead fire.

I will just touch upon one other subject dealt with by Professor Rhys during last session: I mean the well-known custom of offering rags at sacred wells. Professor Rhys thought that the object of these scraps of clothing being placed at the well was for the purpose of transferring the disease from the sick person to some one else. But I ventured to oppose this idea, and considered that they were offerings, pure and simple, to the spirit of the well. Since the discussion, which took place in December, I have turned to examples of the subject, and, among other items, I have come across an account of an Irish "station", as it is called, at a sacred well, the details of which fully bear out my view as to the nature of the rags deposited at the shrine being offerings to the local deity. One of the devotees, in true Irish fashion, made his offering accompanied by the following words: "To St. Columbkill—I offer up this button, a bit o' the waistband o' my own breeches, an' a taste o' my wife's petticoat, in remimbrance of us havin' made this holy station; an' may they rise up in glory to prove it for us in the last day." I shall not attempt to account for the presence of the usual Irish wit in this, to the devotee, most solemn offering; but I point out the undoubted nature of the offerings and their service, in the identification of their owners — a service which implies their power to bear witness in spirit-land to the pilgrimage of those who deposited them during lifetime at the sacred well.

Now, in all these cases there is an original and a secondary, or derivative, form, of the superstition, and it is our object to trace out which is which, for it is only with the original form that we can properly deal with the comparative side of folk-lore. Do the rags deposited at wells symbolise offerings to the local deity? If so, they bring us within measurable distance of a cult which rests upon faith in the power of natural objects to harm or render aid