Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/331

 Presidential Address. 23

affords only the flimsiest evidence for the occurrence of a universal symbolism, whether dependent upon heredity or derived from some mysterious store of collective conscious- ness, situated we know not where.

So far as one can gather, those who beheve in the universal presence in the human mind of the image or idea of water as a symbol of birth hold two different views concerning its source. According to one view the existence of water as a symbol of birth is the product of heredity. We inherit the tendency to symbolise birth in this manner just as we inherit a tendency to suck the mother's breast or struggle to attain the erect position and move from one place to another when it has been attained. According to the other point of view the symbolisation of birth by means of water is the result of that epoch in our life-history when we leave the amniotic fluid of the mother to enter upon our career on earth. ^ That almost superhuman prescience and those acute powers of observation with which the psycho-analyst endows the child, even before its birth, are held to bring about so intimate an association between water and birth that one serves as the symbol of the other throughout life in the mysterious depths of the unconscious.

Let us, however, leave these fantastic speculations and inquire whether the comparative study of human belief and culture gives to the symbolism of rebirth by water the support which is claimed. It will not be possible here to consider fully the evidence from the vast store of belief and custom with which the industry of ethnographers and folk- lorists has provided us. I must be content with a brief survey of the evidence bearing on this topic provided by religious ritual.

I will begin with the country which may be regarded as

the chief home of the idea of rebirth at the present time.

All are familiar with the features of the highest Indian

castes according to which their members are regarded as

^ See as an example, Rank, op. cit., pp. 69-70.