Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/339

Rh stratum of post-mundane oaths such as obtain among modern civilized nations. Roughly, the development in the course of ages may be expressed in the following two classifications:

Though these two series only partly coincide in history, they so far fit that the judicial oaths of the lower culture belong to the class of mundane curse, while those of the higher culture in general belong to that of post-mundane judgment. Anthropologically, this is the most special new view I have here to bring forward. It forms part of a wider generalization, belonging at once to the science of morals and the science of religion. But, rather than open out the subject into this too wide field, we may do well to fix it in our minds by tracing a curious historical point in the legal customs of our own country. Every one knows that the modes of administering a judicial oath in Scotland and in England are not the same. In Scotland, where the witness holds up his hand toward heaven, and swears to tell the truth as he shall answer to God at the day of judgment, we have before us the most explicit possible example of a post-mundane oath framed on Christian lines. In contrasting this with the English judicial oath, we first notice that our acted ceremony consists commonly in taking a New Testament in the hand and kissing it. Thus, unlike the Scotch oath, the English oath is sworn on a halidome (Anglo-Saxon, háligdōm; German, heiligthum), a holy or sacred object. Many writers have fallen into confusion about this word, mystifying it into sacred judgment or "holy doom;" but it is a perfectly straightforward term for a sanctuary or relic, as "On tham haligdome swerian"—to swear by the relic. Now, this custom of swearing on a halidome belongs to far pre-Christian antiquity, one famous example being when Hannibal, then a lad of nine years old, was brought by his father to the altar and made to swear, by touching the sacred things (tactis sacris), that when he grew up he would be the enemy of Rome. In classical antiquity the sacred objects were especially the images and altars of the gods, as it is put in a scene in Plautus, "Touch this altar of Venus!" The man answers, "I touch it," and then he is sworn. When this ancient rite came into use in early Christian England, the object touched might be the altar itself, or a relic-shrine like that which Harold is touching with his right fore-finger in the famous scene in the Bayeux tapestry, or it might be a missal, or a book of the gospels. In modern England a copy of the New Testament has become the recognized halidome on which oaths are taken, and the practice of kissing it has almost supplanted the older and more general custom of touching it with the hand.

Next, our attention must be called to the remarkable formula in which (in England, not in Scotland) the invocation of the Deity is