Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/263

 s. in. MARCH is, iocs.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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to be the correct position. It is a lazily per- formed task, at its best, to attempt to ward off evil in any other way than by one's own efforts, and those who are lazy and credulous enough to expect the horseshoe to do it for them would certainly not be at the extra trouble involved in placing the shoe with the horns upwards like the crescent moon. The moon is thus represented on a Babylonian boundary stone 830 B.C., and also on a Carthaginian tablet in the British Museum, doubtless as a symbol of the earth-goddess with which the moon became identified. The horn is a well known Oriental symbol of power. In Scripture a tusk is called a horn, and we find that the mules and cattle in Spain and Italy are adorned with a small crescent ; formed by two boar's tusks, or else a forked piece of wood. Observe the brass pendants which hang from the breast of the carthorse and adorn his harness, and it will be found that the forks of the crescent always point upwards. When the Italian makes the ! gesture of projecting the little finger and thumb with the remaining three fingers closed, it is upwards that he turns them. And when he hangs the half-moon from the harness of his cattle, does not the Italian and Sicilian peasant maintain the custom of his pagan forefathers in their efforts to secure j the protection of the goddess Diana ? Doubt- 1 less, too, it is a still earlier relic of lunar ! worship that survives among the gipsies who I use a crescent to adorn their sorry van-laden j cattle ; while a cabalistic token, which they I believe brings good luck to the bearer of I it, represents roughly a serpent, the evil ' principle in gipsy mythology, which encloses the moon and stars, symbolical of the world lying in evil. It is a very remarkable fact, in connecting this horseshoe superstition with lunar worship, that Beckman ('Hist, of Inventions,' 1846, vol. i. p. 453) traces to 2eAr'i'7;, the moon, the Greek word for horse- shoes, creA^vcua, and he says, " I think we may venture to conclude, without any fear of erring, that this word was employed to signify horseshoes of the same kind as ours, and that they were known, if not earlier, at least in the ninth century."

J. HOLDEN MAcMlCHAEL.

The iast word has not been said on this question until a reason has been given. Our primitive ancestors were not so foolish as their superstitious descendants. We are .content with the phrase "So as to keep the luck from dropping out" ; but if the horse- shoe amulet is a survival of early religion (or Shamanism or superstition, call it what you will), this idea is too puerile to have

been the original concomitant reason for setting the amulet one way up and not another. The points should be upwards, because this is the position in nature of the horns of the bull.

Death being obviously a manifestation of the power and presence of evil, life, espe- cially in its generative aspect, appears to the savage as a manifestation of the good principle. This is naturally symbolized by something connected with agriculture among ploughmen, or by a very prolific animal among shepherds and hunters. Hence come two classes of amulets : horns and boars' tusks.

Now, having naturally selected the bull's horns as a sign of procreative life, look up into the sky and you will see the talisman in the heavens ; hence the moon-goddess comes to be regarded as the universal mother.

The horseshoe, then, is not a conven- tionalized crescent, pace MR. ELWORTHY, but both crescent and horseshoe are con- ventionalized horns. Compare C. G. Leland's ' Gypsy Sorcery ' pzssi'wt.

FRED. G. ACKERLEY.

Libau, Russia.

In his remarks on this subject MR. SNOWDEN WARD states that "Roman Catholic Chris- tians assign the blue robe and the crescent

moon of [the Egyptian goddess] Isis to the Virgin Mary." The italics are mine. It is hardly necessary to say that the" assigning" of the crescent moon to the Virgin Mary, in Catholic art, has nothing whatever to do with heathen mythology. The true explana- tion of the assignment is to be found in the first verse of the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse of St. John, in which occur the following words: "A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars." As regards the " blue robe," there has always existed a tradition in the Catholic Church that blue was the dominant colour worn by the maidens of Nazareth, and consequently by the Blessed Virgin herself. Thus from the earliest times the painters of the various Madonnas have depicted the " Mater Pia" in blue apparel, or, as was sometimes the case, in garments of white and blue. This last admixture would accord well with the following precept of the Mosaic law: " Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them to make to themselves fringes on the borders of their garments, putting in them ribbons of blue" (Numbers xv. 38). Et may not be amiss to quote, in this connexion, a few lines from some interesting 'Notes from Palestine,' written in 1890 by the Very Bev, Canou ,