The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) 📖

>etc. Some of the “devils” are mild and almost gentlemen, like their lord and master at times; others are fierce, cruel, and bloodthirsty; their number is almost infinite, and they have the forms of women as well as of men.

Over a large portion of western Europe is found the nursery story of the “Sand-Man,” who causes children to become drowsy and sleepy; “the sand-man is coming, the sand-man has put dust in your eyes,” are some of the sayings in use. By and by the child gets “so fast asleep that one eye does not see the other,” as the Frisian proverb puts it. When, on a cold winter day, her little boy would go out without his warm mittens on, the East Frisian mother says, warningly: De Fingerbiter is buten, “the Fingerbiter is outside.”

Among the formidable evil spirits who war against or torment the child and its mother are the Hebrew Lilith, the long-haired night-flier; the Greek Strigalai, old and ugly owl-women; the Roman Caprimulgus, the nightly goat-milker and child-killer, and the wood-god Silvanus; the Coptic Berselia; the Hungarian “water-man,” or “water-woman,” who changes children for criples or demons; the Moravian Vestice, or “wild woman,” able to take the form of any animal, who steals away children at the breast, and substitutes changelings for them; the Bohemian Polednice, or “noon-lady,” who roams around only at noon, and substitutes changelings for real children; the Lithuanian and Old Prussian Laume, a child-stealer, whose breast is the thunderbolt, and whose girdle is the rainbow; the Servian Wjeschtitza, or witches, who take on the form of an insect, and eat up children at night; the Russian “midnight spirit,” who robs children of rest and sleep; the Wendish “Old mountain-woman”; the German (Brunswick) “corn-woman,” who makes off with little children looking for flowers in the fields; the Röggenmuhme ( “rye-aunt”), the Tremsemutter, who walks about in the cornfields; the Katzenveit, a wood spirit, and a score of bogies called Popel, Popelmann, Popanz, Butz, etc.; the Scotch “Boo Man,” “Bogie Man,” “Jenny wi’ the Airn Teeth,” “Jenny wi’ the lang Pock “; the English and American bogies, goblins, ogres, ogresses, witches, and the like; besides, common to all peoples, a host of werwolves and vampires, giants and dwarfs, witches, ogres, ogresses, fairies, evil spirits of air, water, land, inimical to childhood and destructive of its peace and enjoyment. The names, lineage, and exploits of these may be read in Ploss, Grimm, Hartland, etc.

In the time of the Crusades, Richard Cœur de Lion, the heroking of England, became so renowned among the Saracens that (Gibbon informs us) his name was used by mothers and nurses to quiet their infants, and other historical characters before and after him served to like purpose. To the children of Rome in her later days, Attila, the great Hun, was such a bogy, as was Narses, the Byzantian general (d. 568 A.D.), to the Assyrian children. Bogies also were Matthias Corvinus (d. 1490 A.D.), the Hungarian king and general, to the Turks; Tamerlane (Timur), the great Mongolian conqueror (d. 1405 A.D.), to the Persians; and Bonaparte, at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, in various parts of the continent of Europe. These, and other historical characters have, in part, taken the place of the giants and bogies of old, some of whom, however, linger, even yet, in the highest civilizations, together with fabulous animals (reminiscent of stern reality in primitive times), with which, less seriously than in the lands of the eastern world, childhood is threatened and cowed into submission.

The Ponka Indian mothers tell their children that if they do not behave themselves the Indaciñga (a hairy monster shaped like a human being, that hoots like an owl) will get them; the Omaha bogy is Icibaji; a Dakota child-stealer and bogy is Añungite or “Two Faces” (433. 386, 473). With the Kootenay Indians, of southeastern British Columbia, the owl is the bogy with which children are frightened into good behaviour, the common saying of mothers, when their children are troublesome, being, “If you are not quiet, I’ll give you to the owl” (203). Longfellow, in his Hiawatha, speaks of one of the bogies of the eastern Indians:—

 

“Thus the wrinkled old Nokomis Nursed the little Hiawatha, Rooked him in his linden cradle, Stilled his fretful wail by saying, ‘Hush! the naked bear will get thee!’”

 

Among the Nipissing Algonkian Indians, koko is a child-word for any terrible being; the mothers say to their children, “beware of the koko.” Champlain and Lescarbot, the early chroniclers of Canada, mention a terrible creature (concerning which tales were told to frighten children) called gougou, supposed to dwell on an island in the Baie des Chaleurs (200. 239). Among the bogies of the Mayas of Yucatan, Dr. Brinton mentions: the balams (giant beings of the night), who carry off children; the culcalkin, or “neckless priest”; besides giants and witches galore (411. 174, 177).

Among the Gualala Indians of California, we find the “devil-dance,” which Powers compares to the haberfeldtreiben of the Bavarian peasants,—an institution got up for the purpose of frightening the women and children, and keeping them in order. While the ordinary dances are going on, there suddenly stalks forth “an ugly apparition in the shape of a man, wearing a feather mantle on his back, reaching from the arm-pits down to the mid-thighs, zebra-painted on his breast and legs with black stripes, bear-skin shako on his head, and his arms stretched out at full length along a staff passing behind his neck. Accoutred in this harlequin rig, he dashes at the squaws, capering, dancing, whooping; and they and the children flee for life, keeping several hundred yards between him and themselves.” It is believed that, if they were even to touch his stick, their children would die (519. 194).

Among the Patwin, Nishinam, and Pomo Indians, somewhat similar practices are in vogue (519. 157, 160, 225). From the golden age of childhood, with its divinities and its demons, we may now pass to the consideration of more special topics concerning the young of the races of men.

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

CHILDREN’S FOOD.

 

Der Mensch ist, was er isst.—_Feuerbach_.

For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.—_Coleridge_.

Man did eat angels’ food.—_Psalm_ ixxviii. 25.

 

Honey.

Der Mensch ist, was er isst,—“man is what he eats,”—says Feuerbach, and there were food-philosophies long before his time. Among primitive peoples, the food of the child often smacks of the Golden Age. Tennyson, in Eleanore, sings:—

 

“Or, the yellow-banded bees, Through half-open lattices Coming in the scented breeze, Fed thee, a child lying alone, With white honey, in fairy gardens cull’d— A glorious child dreaming alone, In silk-soft folds, upon yielding down, With the hum of swarming bees Into dreamful slumber lull’d.”

 

This recalls the story of Cretan Zeus, fed, when an infant, by the nymphs in a cave on Mount Ida with the milk of the goat Amalthæa and honey brought by the bees of the mountain.

In the sacred books of the ancient Hindus we read: “The father puts his mouth to the right ear of the newborn babe, and murmurs three times, ‘Speech! Speech!’ Then he gives it a name. Then he mixes clotted milk, honey, and butter, and feeds the babe with it out of pure gold” (460.129). Among the ancient Frisians and some other Germanic tribes, the father had the right to put to death or expose his child so long as it had not taken food; but “so soon as the infant had drunk milk and eaten honey he could not be put to death by his parents” (286. 69). The custom of giving the newborn child honey to taste is referred to in German counting-out rhymes, and the ancient Germans used to rub honey in the mouth of the newborn child. The heathen Czechs used to drop honey upon the child’s lips, and in the Eastern Church it was formerly the custom to give the baptized child milk and honey to taste (392. II. 35). When the Jewish child, in the Middle Ages, first went to school, one of the ceremonial observances was to have him lick a slate which had been smeared with honey, and upon which the alphabet, two Bible verses, and the words “The Tora shall be my calling” were written; this custom is interestingly explanative of the passage in Ezekiel (iii. 3) where we read “Then I did eat it [the roll of a book given the prophet by God]; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.” There were also given to the child sweet cakes upon which Bible verses were written. Among the Jews of Galicia, before a babe is placed in the cradle for the first time, it is customary to strew into the latter little pieces of honey-comb. Among the Wotjaks we find the curious belief that those who, in eating honey, do not smear their mouth and hands with it, will die. With children of an older growth,—the second Golden Age,—honey and cakes again appear. Magyar maidens at the new moon steal honey and cakes, cook them, and mix a part in the food of the youth of their desires; among the White Russians, the bridal couple are fed honey with a spoon. Even with us “the first sweet month of matrimony,” after the “bless you, my children” has been spoken by parents, church, and state, is called the “honeymoon,” for our Teutonic ancestors were in the habit of drinking honey-wine or mead for the space of thirty days after marriage (392. IV. 118,211). In wedding-feasts the honey appears again, and, as Westermarck observes, the meal partaken of by the bride and bridegroom practically constitutes the marriage-ceremony among the Navajos, Santal, Malays, Hovas, and other primitive peoples (166. 419).

In Iceland, in ancient times, “the food of sucklings was sweetened by honey,” and “in the mouths of weakly children a slice of meat was placed at which they sucked.” Among other interesting items from Scandinavia, Ploss (326. II. 182) gives the following: “In Iceland, if the child has been suckled eight (at most, fourteen) days, it is henceforth placed upon the ground; near it is put a vessel with luke-warm whey, in which a reed or a quill is stuck, and a little bread placed before it. If the child should wake and show signs of hunger, he is turned towards the vessel, and the reed is placed in his mouth. When the child is nine months old, it must eat of the same food as its parents do.”

In Shropshire, England, the first food given a child is a spoonful of sugar and butter, and, in the Highlands of Scotland, “at the birth of an infant the nurse takes a green stick of ash, one end of which she puts into the fire, and, while it is burning, receives in a spoon the sap that oozes from the other, which she administers to the child as its first food.” This recalls the sap of the sacred ash of Scandinavian mythology. Solinus states that the ancient Irish mother “put the first food of her newborn son on the sword of her husband, and, lightly introducing it into his mouth, expressed a wish that he might never meet death otherwise than in war and amid arms,” and a like custom is said “to have been kept up, prior to the union, in Annandale and other places along the Scottish border” (460. 129, 131).

 

Salt.

Among the Negritos of the Philippine Islands, when a child is born, one of the other children immediately gives it to eat some salt on the point of a knife (326. I. 258). The virtues of salt are recognized among many peoples. In