Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/377

 Jevons. — European or Asiatic Origin of the Aryans. 339 Again, when we find that the bride is expected both by Aryans and Finnic-Ugrians to run away from the bridegroom to her parents' home at some stage of the wedding ceremonies, we may perhaps be in doubt whether to consider this a survival from marriage by capture or to compare it with the extravagant lamen- tation just referred to ; but we cannot be wrong in refusing to regard the custom as borrowed. Nor can any one, who properly appreciates the extent to which primitive man relies on Sympathetic Magic, be at a loss what to think when he finds that amongst the Esthonians, the Finns, and the Mordwins, it is the custom to pour some kind of grain over the head of the bride when first she arrives at her new home. This custom at once ranges itself with those collected by Mann- hardt {Mythologische Forschungen, p. 351, " Kind und Korn") from Aryan peoples, and shown by him to have been pro-ethnic. The object of the practice is to ensure the fertility of the bride, and is a piece of Sympathetic Magic which we may much more easily suppose to have originated independently amongst two primitive peoples than to have been borrowed by one from the other. The same object is even more plain in the case of a ceremony of the Esthonians, Finns, and Mordwins, the ancient Hindoos, the Servians, the Albanians, in Corsica and in modern Rome ; for a child, a boy, is placed on the lap of the bride when she comes to her new home ; and to set the matter beyond all doubt the Kauflkasutra in India provides a sentence to be uttered on the occasion : " May it be thy lot to have so excellent a son", while the Esthonians explicitly say the ceremony ensures a large family of boys, and the phrase usual amongst Armenian women (see Miss Garnett's Women of Turkey and their Folli-lore, p. 239), " May you be a happy mother", is equally clear.

Again, the -belief is so prevalent amongst primitive races that peculiar dangers attend on those about to enter the estate of matrimony, that the use of exorcism on the occasion by both Aryans and Finnish-Ugrians does not call for the borrowing hypothesis to explain it. So, too, all primitive peoples believe that the waxing and waning of the moon exercise a sympathetic influence on sub-lunar objects; and from this premiss the Finnish- Ugrians and the Aryans were capable of independently drawing the conclusion that weddings should take place on a waxing moon.