Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/202

178 become a god (vi. 512). We should have been glad if all the evidence for animal gods had been collected together into an appendix, and connected with totemism. But the author of the standard work on totemism seems to have grown very cautious; the word is hardly mentioned in the whole book, and does not occur in the Index. As regards ritual, the commentary is also rich: priests don the mask of the god or of some animal; there is a good description of the Bouphonia, discussed more fully in The Golden Bough; new matter is adduced to explain the Torch Race (ii. 392); there are traditions, survivals, and substitutions in human sacrifice; ceremonial abuse; sleeping in or on sheepskins; painting of gods' faces red (iii. 20); and a host of other things. Or to take legend: parallels are given to most of the important legends mentioned, as to the creation of man out of clay, the discovery of fire, the sleep of Epimenides, Pandora's box, the bed of Procrustes, Pirene smitten out by a horse's hoof, the story of Medea.

Mr. Frazer is equally at home in restoring a folk-tale out of bits, as those of Melampus (hi. 428), and of Alcathous (ii. 528). He has much to say of taboo (though that word also is omitted from the Index, and we think never occurs in the work), rules of chastity, bean-eating, iron, special kinds of shoes, and so forth. Among ruder conceptions we have the worship of rough or conical stones, fettered gods (iii. 336), beating for fertility, scourging at puberty (iii. 341), ordeal of ducking for witchcraft, with a simple explanation (iii. 338), ordeals by drinking, with a capital explanation of the oath by the Styx (iv. 253), the worship of Hanged Helen and Strangled Artemis (iv. 279), self-mutilation an expiatory sacrifice in substitution for the life of the victim (iv. 355), talismans of cities, ancient and modern.

We have funeral games and funeral rites, the great Games being traced to a funeral origin; pouring of blood upon a grave and feeding the dead (v. 227, where Mr. Frazer might have got more evidence from the tombs near Rome, and the terra-cottas in Roman museums, which often have holes in them for this purpose); and death masks, but without mention of the paper in Folk-Lore (vol. vii., p. 350) on that subject. Divination, agricultural customs, disguise of sexes, all have their place. This rapid sketch will give some idea of the varied contents of these volumes.