Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/57

 Rh originally derived from paganism, and to contain not a few of the sacred rites peculiar to that impure religion—as the leavened dough, and the mixing it with sugar and spices, the consecrated ground, etc., etc. But the particular deity for whose honour these cakes were at first made is not, perhaps, easy to determine."

Apart from the very significant details of this Scottish practice, which I cannot now discuss, here is a parallel in custom which we all recognise as among those things worth studying. But is it more worth studying than its converse? Is it more remarkable that the barbarous unculture of the Kourds should have produced the self-same practice as the peasant unculture of the British, than that the peasant unculture should have produced two entirely different customs or beliefs about the same central subject? And yet this is what has happened. Take, for example, the cult of the dead. Among the superstitions of our own country there are two distinct groups, one pointing to a reverence and love of the dead, the other to a detestation and fear of the dead. Both are survivals, but the question is, Are they survivals of the same original?

In both these classes of comparative folk-lore—that which takes us to close parallels in widely separated areas, and that which takes us to divergencies in the same or closely contiguous' areas—we fully recognise that we are in the presence of uncivilisation. In the Western world, at all events, this carries with it one other conclusion, namely, that the uncivilisation belongs not to the products of our own age, but to those of an age which we must be content to call prehistoric—prehistoric, that is, because nothing in history accounts for one tithe of the customs and beliefs of the people. And the question remains to be solved. What is the age thus indicated as prehistoric? Who are the people or peoples whom we can satisfactorily say were prehistoric, but to whom at present we dare not give a name? If we call them Aryans, we are told there were no such people, that Aryan is a language-term only, and