Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/307

Rh as applicable to folklore as to political history. The ground-ideas on which popular mysticism lays the foundation of its tenets are identical among all people unhabituated to abstruse thought. To the savage, "courage" is no abstract conceptio ; it is a thing to be got hold of and appropriated by carrying out the quasi-obligatory act of devouring the courageous adversary whom he has killed: and equally, to the English collier, "goodness" is a transferable article, a something he cannot actually see and handle, but which may, nevertheless, be passed over from one person to another. The latter belief, it is true, clothes itself in a touching religious shape, while the former startles and revolts the cultivated mind, but the intellectual groundwork on which the two ideas are based is the same.

A practice which affords another illustration of this mode of thought is said to be followed in Upper Bavaria. When a dead person is laid out, a cake of ordinary flour is put on his breast, which is supposed to absorb the virtues of the deceased, the cake afterwards being eaten by the nearest relatives.

In Wales, as is generally known, the sins of the dead used to be similarly taken into possession by the sin-eater. But it is a fact worthy of mention that the characteristics usually taken over from the dead are those regarded as laudable. The uncivilised warrior, and those like-minded with him, are desirous of assuming the nobler traits of a corpse's ebbing individuality, but as a rule they lay no claim to its weaknesses: they have no inclination to become the scape-goat of the departed and make themselves responsible for his evil qualities. A natural proneness to shun what is contemptible and of ill report seems to be the chief cause of this tendency; but it may also be, in some degree, attributable to the feeling that defects and faults are, as these words really imply, failures, lacks, and