Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/114

96 the irrationality of mankind is a singularly unlucky one. Indeed, if any one were told to set forth in few words the relations of the people to their rulers in different states of society, he might answer that men grovel on their faces before the King of Siam, kneel on one knee or uncover before a European monarch, and shake the hand of the President of the United States as though it were a pump-handle. These are ceremonies at once intelligible and significant. Lord Chesterfield is more fortunate in his second instance, for the custom of drinking healths is really of obscure origin. Yet it is closely connected with an ancient rite, practically absurd indeed, but done with a conscious and serious intention which lands it quite outside the region of nonsense. This is the custom of pouring out libations and drinking at ceremonial banquets to gods and the dead. Thus the old Northmen drank the 'minni' of Thor, Odin, and Freya, and of kings likewise at their funerals. The custom did not die out with the conversion of the Scandinavian and Teutonic nations. Such formulas as 'God's minne!' 'a bowl to God in heaven!' are on record, while in like manner Christ, Mary, and the Saints were drunk to in place of heathen gods and heroes, and the habit of drinking to the dead and the living at the same feast and in similar terms goes far to prove here an common origin for both ceremonies. The 'minne' was at once love, memory, and the thought of the absent, and it long survived in England in the 'minnying' or 'mynde' days, on which the memory of the dead was celebrated by services or banquets. Such evidence as this fairly justifies the writers, older and newer, who have treated these ceremonial drinking usages as in their nature sacrificial. As for the practice of simply drinking the health of living men, its ancient history reaches us from several districts inhabited by Aryan nations. The Greeks