Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/296

258 and nail-parings for the same cause. That a man spits in his breast only shows that he is torn by two superstitious ideas, and is attempting to sit on the rail. I think, too, that my theory explains more satisfactorily than any other I know the practice of the Hungarian who dreads an attack of fever, or actually has an attack of fever, going to a tree and spitting into its stem. It seems to me that we see in both cases a very old belief in a changing and changed state. For an explanation of it we must go back to long-forgotten times, when the Hungarian worshipped trees as gods, considering that they were endowed with a divine life that was shared in by himself, and believed that their divinity would protect, and was bound to protect him when threatened with danger or disaster of any kind. And if we think of that, and if we recollect how the priests of Baal, at the contest between the god of Tyre and the God of Israel, shed their own blood at the altar in order to recommend themselves to their deity, whom they believed was bound to look after them, we may see that it was the same idea of establishing or renewing a physical bond between himself and his deity that drove the Hungarian, when the impending disaster threatened him, to fly to the tree and spit. That ultimately the materialistic idea of spitting merely to throw out disease should have overgrown the older and more religious idea need not surprise us. Examples of the same kind meet us on all sides; this one only further confirms the truth of the statement that the religion of one age becomes the superstition of the next. I do not know whether I have succeeded in convincing you of what I started out to prove, that just as there is a "blood covenant", so there is a "saliva covenant", and that both rest upon the same conception. Still less do I know whether, in attributing the extensive use of saliva to a belief in its being the vehicle of life, I have hit the real reason of the curious custom, and answered the question of why men spit; for the ways of primitive man are not our ways, neither are his thoughts our thoughts. Perhaps the best that can be said for my theory, and all I claim for it, is, that it introduces a little method into the seeming madness of a wide-spread and curious superstition.