Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/108

 100 and folk-wont), but it seems to me that the two are inseparable. Practice hinges on belief. A man who has spilt salt throws some of it over his left shoulder, because he believes (or his ancestors believed for him) that spilling salt will bring ill-luck; so he resorts to a superstitious practice to avert it. This is the reason why I would place superstitions before customs. Mr. Lang has taught us how often myth and superstition arise out of custom, but, in many cases, superstition is the mother of custom also. Thus, many burial customs have originated in the superstitious dread of ghosts; and, again, as the general "unluckiness" of women has caused it to be thought an ill omen if a woman should be the first comer to a house on 'New Year's Day, it has become customary in many English counties for parties of men and boys to go about on New Year's morning "letting the new year in" to their neighbours' houses, and expecting food and drink in return.

Class a (Goblindom) would be formed by distinguishing between belief or practice relating to real and material things and that relating to imaginary or invisible beings; and by taking from Mr. Gomme's Class c in this group everything belonging to the latter. "Goblindom" would include wish-hounds, ghosts, fairies, brownies, and innumerable queerly-named local demons; in fact, of the crowd of uncanny beings who, when "all the old gods are dead," remain in the popular imagination as "something betwixt heaven and hell." It would comprise anecdotes, such as that of the household familiar crying "We're a-flitting"; superstitious terrors, as of ghostly times and places; and practices, such as the "cream-bowl duly set " for the wage of the "lubber fiend." It would, in fact, go over the whole ground of the traces of a belief in subordinate and local deities surviving in the form of belief in goblin creatures.

In Class b (Witchcraft), I think it would be necessary to treat not only of witches but of their counter-magicians, the "white witches" or "charmers," taking care to distinguish between the two. The