Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/41

 Rh everywhere which have reached a certain level of civilisation. Sacrifice, expiation, communion of the people with their God, laws of ceremonial, uncleanness, prohibitions from certain acts and certain foods, the tabernacle, and the rest, we find them, practically, in solution everywhere; in Judaism we find them codified, as it were, and committed, as a body of rules, to writing and to the care of a priestly class. Now the theory which I advance here in the case of certain rites, may be employed in all the provinces of traditional custom, belief, and even literature. The Greeks, like Herodotus and Aristotle, were struck by the coincidences of custom, festival, sacrifice, and hymn, among Hellenes and Barbarians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Scythians. Aristotle himself could see that Greece had inherited, developed, and purified barbaric beliefs and usages, and myths; that the common stock was the same everywhere, and was only modified by the peculiarities of race. The modern learning has acquired fresh information, and has found that the myths and beliefs and customs of African, Australian, American, and insular races correspond with those of the ancient classical races. Further, we have learned that ideas, habits, myths, similar to those of the ancient world and of remote barbaric peoples unknown to the ancient world, endure still among the folk, the more stationary, the more uncultivated classes of modern Europe, among Lincolnshire hinds, Highland crofters, peasants of France, Italy, Germany, Russia. Now Folk-lore approaches the whole topic of these singular harmonies and coincidences from the side of the folk, of the unlearned rural classes in civilised Europe. We have turned the method of mythology, for instance, upside down. The old manner was to begin with the cultivated and literary myths, as we find them in Ovid, or Apollodorus, or Pausanias, and to regard modern rural rites and legends and beliefs as modified descendants of these traditions. But the method of Folk-lore is to study these rural customs and notions as survivals, relics enduring from a mental condition of