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

alleged to have been brought about by the Jews of Tisza-Eszlar in Hungary, in 1882, are investigated by Strack, and shown to be utterly without foundation of fact, merely the product of frenzied Anti-Semitism (191. 171-175).

The use of blood and the sacrifice of little children, as well as other fetichistic practices, have been charged against some of the secret religious sects of modern Russia.

 

Dead Children.

In Annam the natives “surround the beds of their children suffering from small-pox with nets, and never leave them alone, fearing lest a demon, in the form of a strange child, should sneak in and take possession of them” (397. 169, 242). This belief is akin with the widespread superstitions with respect to changelings and other metamorphoses of childhood, to the discussion of which Ploss and Hartland have devoted much space and attention, the latter, indeed, setting apart some forty pages of his book on fairy-tales to the subject.

In Devonshire, England, it was formerly believed lucky to put a stillborn child into an open grave, “as it was considered a sure passport to heaven for the next person buried there.” In the Border country, on the other hand, it is unlucky to tread on the graves of unbaptized children, and “he who steps on the grave of a stillborn or unbaptized child, or of one who has been overlaid by its nurse, subjects himself to the fatal disease of the grave-merels, or grave-scab.” In connection with this belief, Henderson cites the following popular verses, of considerable antiquity:—

 

“Woe to the babie that ne’er saw the sun, All alane and alane, oh! His bodie shall lie in the kirk ‘neath the rain, All alane and alane, oh!

“His grave must be dug at the foot o’ the wall, All alane and alane, oh! And the foot that treadeth his body upon Shall have scab that will eat to the bane, oh!

“And it ne’er will be cured by doctor on earth, Tho’ every one should tent him, oh! He shall tremble and die like the elf-shot eye, And return from whence he came, oh!” (469. 13).

 

Among the natives of the Andaman Islands, after a dead child has been buried and the parents have mourned for about three months, the remains are exhumed, cleansed at the seashore by the father, and brought back to the hut, where the bones are broken up to make necklaces, which are distributed to friends and relatives as mementos. Moreover, “the mother, after painting the skull with kòi-ob—[a mixture of yellow ochre, oil, etc.] and decorating it with small shells attached to pieces of string, hangs it round her neck with a netted chain, called râb—. After the first few days her husband often relieves her by wearing it himself” (498. 74,75).

According to Lumholtz, “a kind of mummy, dried by the aid of fire and smoke, is also found in Australia. Male children are most frequently prepared in this manner. The corpse is then packed into a bundle, which is carried for some time by the mother. She has it with her constantly, and at night sleeps with it at her side. After about six months, when nothing but the bones remain, she buries it in the earth. Full-grown men are sometimes treated in this manner, particularly the bodies of great heroes” (495. 278).

Among the western Eskimo, “the mother who loses her nursling places the poor ‘papoose’ in a beautifully ornamented box, which she fastens on her back and carries about her for a long while. Often she takes the miserable mummy in her arms and makes it a kind of toilette, disinfecting it, and removing the mouldiness” (523. 102).

According to the traveller Lander, a woman of Yoruba, in Africa, “carries for some time a wooden figure of her lost child, and, when she eats, puts part of her food to its lips”; and Catlin writes of the Mandan Indians: “They place the skulls of their dead in a circle. Each wife knows the skull of her former husband or child, and there seldom passes a day that she does not visit it with a dish of the best cooked food … There is scarcely an hour in a pleasant day, but more or less of these women may be seen sitting or lying by the skull of their dead child or husband, talking to it in the most pleasant and endearing language they can use (as they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer back” (Spencer, Princ. of Soc., 1882, I. 332, 326).

Of the Nishinam Indians of California, Mr. Powers tells us: “When a Nishinam wife is childless, her sympathizing female friends sometimes make out of grass a rude image of a baby, and tie it in a miniature baby-basket, according to the Indian custom. Some day, when the woman and her husband are not at home, they carry this grass baby and lay it in their wigwam. When she returns and finds it, she takes it up, holds it to her breast, pretends to nurse it, and sings it lullaby songs. All this is done as a kind of conjuration, which they hope will have the effect of causing the barren woman to become fertile” (519. 318).

Of certain Indians of the northern United States we read, in the early years of the present century: “The traders on the river St. Peter’s, Mississippi, report that some of them have seen in the possession of the Indians a petrified child, which they have often wished to purchase; but the savages regard it as a deity, and no inducement could bribe them to part with it” (_Philos. Mag._ XXIX., p. 5).

 

Child-Worship.

As Count D’Alviella has pointed out, we have in the apocryphal book of the Wisdom of Solomon the following interesting passage: “For a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man; and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices.”

Mrs. Stevenson, in a Zuñi tale of motherly affection, relates how, in crossing a river in the olden time, the children clinging to their mothers were transformed into such ugly and mischievous shapes that the latter let many of them fall into the river. Some held their children close, and on the other side these were restored to their natural forms. Those who had lost their children grieved and would not be comforted; so two twin-brothers—sons of the sun, they are called—went beneath the waters of a lake to the dwelling of the children, who asked them to tell how it fared with their mothers. Their visitors told them of the grief and sorrow of the parents, whereupon the children said: “Tell our mothers we are not dead, but live and sing in this beautiful place, which is the home for them when they sleep. They will wake here and be always happy. And we are here to intercede with the sun, our father, that he may give to our people rain and the fruits of the earth, and all that is good for them.” Since that time these children have been “worshipped as ancestral gods, bearing the name of kok-ko” (358. 541). This reminds us strikingly of the great Redeemer, of whom it was said that he is “an Advocate for us with the Father,” and who himself declared: “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.”

In not a few mythologies we meet with the infant god in the arms of its mother or of some other woman. Of the goddess of pity in the Celestial Empire we read: “The Chinese Lady of Mercy in her statues is invariably depicted as young, symmetrical, and beautiful. Sometimes she stands or sits alone. Sometimes she holds an infant god in her lap. Sometimes she holds one, while a second plays about her knee. Another favourite picture and statue represents her standing on the head of a great serpent, with a halo about her face and brows, and spirits encircling her. In the sixth, she stands upon a crescent, awaiting a bird approaching her from the skies. In a seventh, she stands smiling at a beautiful child on the back of a water-buffalo. In an eighth, she is weeping for the sins of either humanity or the female portion of it. She is the patron saint of all her sex, and intercedes for them at the great throne of Heaven. She is a very old divinity. The Chinese themselves claim that she was worshipped six thousand years ago, and that she was the first deity made known to mankind. The brave Jesuit missionaries found her there, and it matters not her age; she is a credit to herself and her sex, and aids in cheering the sorrowful and sombre lives of millions in the far East.” We also find “the saintly infant Zen-zai, so often met with in the arms of female representations of the androgynous Kwanon.”

Mr. C. N. Scott, in his essay on the “Child-God in Art” (344), is hesitant to give to many mythologies any real child-worship or artistic concept of the child as god. Not even Rama and Krishna, or the Greek Eros, who had a sanctuary at Thespiae in Boeotia, are beautiful, sweet, naive child-pictures; much less even is Hercules, the infant, strangling the serpents, or Mercury running off with the oxen of Admetus, or bacchic Dionysus. In Egypt, in the eleventh, or twelfth dynasty, we do find a family of gods, the triad, father (Amun), mother (Maut), child (Khuns). Mr. Scott follows Ruskin in declaring that classic Greek art gives no real child-concept; nor does Gothic art up to the thirteenth century, when the influence of Christianity made itself felt, that influence which made art lavish its genius upon the Madonna and the Santo Bambino—the Virgin and the Christ-Child.

 

CHAPTER XXVI.

 

THE CHRIST-CHILD.

The holy thing that is to be born shall be called the Son of God.—_Luke_ i. 35. There is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is anointed Lord.—_Luke_ ii. 11.

 

Great little One! whose all-embracing birth Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth.—_Richard Crashaw._

Our Babe, to show his Godhead true, Can in his swaddling hands control the damnèd crew.—_Milton._

The heart of Nature feels the touch of Love; And Angels sing: “The Child is King! See in his heart the life we live above.”—_E. P. Gould._

 

During the nineteen centuries that have elapsed since Jesus of Nazareth was born, art and music, eloquence and song, have expended their best talents in preserving forever to us some memories of the life and deeds of Him whose religion of love is winning the world. The treasures of intellectual genius have been lavished in the interpretation and promulgation of the faith that bears his name. At his shrine have worshipped the great and good of every land, and his name has penetrated to the uttermost ends of the earth.

But in the brief record of his history that has come down to us, we read: “The common people heard him gladly”; and to these, his simple life, with its noble consecration and unselfish aims, appealed immeasurably more even than to the greatest and wisest of men. This is evident from a glance into the lore that has grown up among the folk regarding the birth, life, and death of the Christ. Those legends and beliefs alone concern us here which cluster round his childhood,—the tribute of the lowly and the unlearned to the great world-child, who was to usher in the Age of Gold, to him whom they deemed Son of God and Son of Man, divinely human,