Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/57

Rh to everything, the belief that death is a non-natural event; add, too, the rough inferences which the untutored mind draws from the mystery of origins and growth, from the seeming unrelation between the seed and the plant, the egg and the animal, the pupa and the insect; and herein there lie the sufficing materials for the belief in human descent from trees and stones of which totemism is an outcome; in the passage of life from one body to another of which metempsychosis is an outcome; and in the varied possible modes of generation, of which the highest outcome is belief in incarnate deities.

To those who are familiar with Dr. Tylor's Primitive Culture it is obvious that both Mr. Frazer and Mr. Hartland are but following the lines laid down in that great book. But their merit is to have advanced folklore still further from the empirical stage, and to show how it alone supplies the explanation of beliefs and customs, and of rites and ceremonies, all the world over and through every grade of culture. They who would deny the fundamental unity of these phenomena, and justify the exclusion of any portion of them from comparative treatment, will, if successful in their contention, at least be grateful to those whose challenge has secured them that desired result.

It is because folklore appeals to me as a subject freighted with human interest that I would thus press upon you plain dealing with the materials whose meaning it is our duty to seek to reach. And if books of the type of the Golden Bough and the Legend of Perseus have some higher purpose than entertainment, it must follow that they drive home the evidence as to the persistence of barbaric ideas and their outward expression throughout the higher culture.

Excavations have shown that the church of St. Peter in the Vatican was founded near a seat of worship of Cybele, the Magna Mater, whose image in the shape of a rough field-stone had been given by the Phrygian priests and was