Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/299

Rh may be seen from the important position it holds in all mythologies.

Rochholz asserts that there is reason to believe the legend of the Holy Grail itself, elevating and poetical as it is, had its sources in heathen veneration for blood no less than in Christian mysticism. The custom of drinking the blood of men to bring about the disappearance of physical disease has, it may be surmised, come down from hoary antiquity. When once the natural deduction had been formed that the life principle, or the chief among several life principles, existed in the blood, it became quite reasonable to have confidence in its power to revivify an unhealthy person, or to bestow fertility, and even to give strength to the dead in another existence.

The New Testament bears evidence to the fact that the Jews and Greeks to whom St. Paul preached, regarded clothes which merely touched him as capable of influencing in a favourable direction the physical and mental condition of those to whom they were carried. It is related in the Acts of the Apostles, xix., 11, 12, that special miracles were wrought by the hands of Paul "so that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them." Among the early Christians the blood of their martyrs was carefully wiped up on cloths, collected in vials, or otherwise preserved, to be used as relics; and even to the present time the "standing miracle" of the blood of St. Januarius liquifying and boiling up when the head of the martyr is brought near it on days of grand ceremonial, or of danger to the community, is one of the marvellous sights afforded to the world by the Latin Church.

Among uncivilized races the imperceptible principle attaching to flesh and blood is often of the highest impor-