Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/223

 Water and Well- Woi'sJiip in Man. ^ 215

soon afterwards, but the girl made no attempt to avail herself of the attributes with which she was supposed to have been endowed.^

Water had yet another connexion with witches, i.e., that of being used as a protection against them. For it was supposed that washing the face in dew on May morning rendered their hostilities innocuous.'^ It is possible, too, that this supposed protective power of water rendered the rite of baptism acceptable to the converts from paganism as a safeguard against the "evil eye".^ In the same way, also, the Church seems to have persuaded them that it was equally efficacious against their abduction by fairies,'' and, at a much later date, it was able to convince the people that the sprinkling of water on the places haunted by fairies would suffice to drive them away.* I believe also that the practice of putting crocks of water out for the fairies at night arose from the persuasion that not only would it propitiate them, but that it would guard the occupants of the house from them.^

And now, coming to the superstitious use of well-water in particular, it may, I think, be reasonably conjectured that it was the employment of water in baptism, at the time when paganism was giving way to Christianity, that made the worship of water in wells more fashionable than the worship of river or sea-water. For the keeills, or cells, of the ancient recluses, who lived in Man during the dawn of Christianity there, were invariably near a well, whence they would draw water both for their own consumption and for baptising those who came to them for that pur- pose. And it was, doubtless, part of their policy to place their cell close to a well which had hitherto been made use of in the performance of pagan rites, so that the memory of the old beliefs might be obliterated by the practice of the

^ J. C. (Douglas).

- Folk-Lorc of the Isle of Man., p. 11 1. ■' Ibid.., pp. 156-7.


 * Robertson, History of the Isle of Man (1798), p. 198.

' Folk-lore of the Isle of Man., p. 34.