Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/56

46 alliance or friendship by clasping hands was already familiar to them, so that they would readily adopt it as a form of salutation, if they had not used it so before the arrival of the Europeans. More than a century ago, Charlevoix noticed in the Indian picture-writing the expression of alliance by the figure of two men holding each other by one hand, while each grasped a calumet in the other hand. In one of the Indian pictures given by Schoolcraft, close affection is represented by two bodies united by a single arm (see Fig. 6); and in a pictorial message sent from an Indian tribe to the President of the United States, an eagle, which represents a chief, is holding out a hand to the President, who also holds out a hand. The last of these pictured signs may be perhaps ascribed to European influence, but hardly the first two.

We could scarcely find a better illustration of the meaning of the gesture of joining hands than in its use as a sign of the marriage contract. One of the ceremonies of a Moslem wedding consists in the bridegroom and the bride's proxy sitting upon the ground, face to face, with one knee on the ground, and grasping each other's right hands, raising the thumbs and pressing them against each other, or in the almost identical ceremony in the Pacific Islands, in which the bride and bridegroom are placed on a large white cloth, spread on the pavement of a marae, and join hands. This as evidently means that the man and wife are joined together, as the corresponding ceremony in the ancient Mexican and the modern Hindu wedding, in which the clothes of the parties are tied together in a knot. Among our own Aryan race, the taking hands was a usual ceremony in marriage in the Vedic period. The idea which shaking hands was originally intended to convey, was clearly that of fastening together in peace and friendship; and the same thought appears in the probable etymology of peace, pax, Sanskrit paç, to bind, and in league from ligare.

Cowering or crouching is so natural an expression of fear or