Popular Customs Research Articles

Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period

The newspaper archive is, potentially, the largest untapped source of material concerning the popular belief in witchcraft and magic for the period after the formal cessation of the witchcraft trials in 1736. Several historians have successfully exploited the newspaper archive to examine popular customs in the modern period. However, little use has been made of newspapers to examine magical beliefs in the period defined by the decline of learned belief in witchcraft during the early eighteenth century and the eventual demise of popular belief in witchcraft two centuries later. Writing some fifty years ago, L. F. Newman noted that many witchcraft cases “only appear in the local Press of each district and extensive search is necessary to trace cases.” Newman hoped that his own very brief search would act as a catalyst for more intensive studies. Unfortunately, no one has conducted such work, and our understanding of the extent and influence of witchcraft and magic in the modern period is much the poorer for it. The present discussion, which seeks to begin that task, is based on short searches through various newspapers from around the country, the following up of secondary references, and an extensive, systematic ongoing survey of Somerset newspapers.As Gustav Henningsen has observed, the newspaper has an important advantage over the folklore record in that it “always shows us the tradition in a concrete social context” and also provides a definite chronological basis. The combined exploration of folkloric sources and newspapers provides great potential for the regional study of witchcraft and magic in defined cultural settings.

WORKS ON MING HISTORY (1991)

This bibliography, which appeared in the 1992 issue of Mingshi yanjiu, introduces recent Chinese scholarship on Ming dynasty history. While it primarily lists works by authors from mainland China, it also lists some articles and books contributed by scholars from Taiwan, Japan, and the Unites States. Following the organization used in Mingshi yanjiu, we have divided the list into articles and books. The articles fall into the following thirteen categories: Politics; Economics; Military Affairs; Thought; Literature; Arts; Science and Technology; Local History; Popular Customs; Minority Nationalities; Sino-foreign Relations; Biographies; and Reviews and Information. Compared to the bibliography in the 1990 issue of Mingshi yanjiu, which is translated in Ming Studies, no. 36, pp. 64–105, the sections on Military Affairs, Science and Technology, and Popular Customs appear as new categories in this bibliography.

‘Singing for his supper’: The reinvention of juvenile streetsinging in early modern Nuremberg*

From 1478 onwards, the magistrates of the wealthy and influential imperial city of Nuremberg passed a series of increasingly stricter measures dealing with the ancient custom of poor children singing from house to house, particularly during the Christmas season, for food or money. Except for a few approved and closely supervised children from the city's Latin schools and orphanage, all other practice of the custom was prohibited and punished. After I588 this meant brief incarceration for offending children in the municipal pesthouse (Siechenhaus), with fines and possible banishment for their parents. During the i66os the government's campaign against all begging especially intensified, culminating in the I670 opening of the Nuremberg Discipline and Workhouse. By the end of the seventeenth century, though the problem of child begging continued, the custom of singing for one's supper had been effectively eliminated or at least restricted to organized outings from the city's Latin schools and orphanages. On the surface this appears as clear a case of early modern acculturation and social disciplining2 as we could hope to find. A religiously inspired governmental elite acts to suppress a popular custom involving unruly individuals and often lewd and 'unchristian' songs, in the process ensuring its own political authority and cultural hegemony. The internment of begging

Seasonality of work, religion and popular customs: the seasonality of marriage in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Netherlands

Cet article présente une étude régionale et sociale des fluctuations saisonnières du mariage aux Pays-Bas, à partir des actes de mariage relevés pour une vingtaine de municipaliés entre 1812 et 1912.On commence par examiner les statistiques publiées qui sont disponibles par province et pour l'ensemble des Pays-Bas, puis on procède à une analyse plus détaillée selon les groupes socio-économiques et les régions. Il en ressort que deux facteurs fondamentaux interviennent dans les différences de saisonnalité des mariages observées entre provinces et groupes sociaux: ce sont les contraintes ecclésiastiques et les variations de la saisonnalité du travail. Pour mesurer avec précision l'impact des interdits émanents du droit canon, on a suivi une procédure qui tient compte des variations détaillées, d'une annee sur l'autre, des périodes d'interdit. Dans les régions catholiques, il n'y a pratiquement pas de différences de comportement selon les groupes socio-économiques dans le respect des périodes interdites; il est clair que les variations régionales ne sont que la marque des différences de confession religieuse dans la population. Au cours de la période étudiée, les effets de la sécularisation ne sont pas encore sensibles.L'idée d'un modèle ‘continental’ de la saisonnalité du manage est mise sérieusement en doute: le fait d'éviter les manages de mai, trait qui était jusqu'à présent considéré comme une caractéristique majeure du modèle européen, ne concerne en réalite nullement les Pays-Bas, non plus que l'Allemagne, l'Angleterre ou la Belgique. Nous pensons que la popularité des mariages de mai reflète l'adhésion a un rythme de travail saisonnier bien caractéristique et lié a l'importance de ce mois dans les coutumes folkloriques.

The continuities of counter‐memory: French republicanism and the revolutionary tradition

Abstract Although republicanism in France was discredited in 1815, being associated with dictatorship and terror, it provided the foundations for the political consensus of the late 1870s. Republican ideas survived through the creation of a collective ‘counter‐memory’ by a persecuted minority of republicans in the early nineteenth century; this tradition kept republicanism alive and available for later generations to adopt it more widely. This paper examines ways in which this counter‐memory was developed, from historical writings to popular customs, and how it was able to become part of the political mainstream once again.

Plebeians and Proletarians in 18th-Century Britain

EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, students from the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick set the historical establishment on its heels with a brilliant book of essays on the criminal law and criminality in Hanoverian England. Pursuing the poacher, the wrecker, and the smuggler through the archives, they recovered forms of community-sanctioned action that addressed the important distinction between the law and the unwritten popular code of justice that resonated with such vigour in the 18th century. And by exploring the bloody code and the way in which popular custom became reified as crime, they offered new insights into the social relations of an age immortalized by Hogarth and Fielding and inscribed in the shadow of Tyburn's 'triple tree.' Both of the books under review may be said to have grown out of that collaborative, pioneering venture. Peter Linebaugh's monograph on the London hanged is a substantial reworking of his Warwick doctoral thesis, of which he gave us but a glimpse in his fascinating essay on the Tyburn riots against the surgeons. Edward Thompson's collection of essays in Customs in Common represents the

Neuroses and Group Culture in Southern Italy: The Matrix of a `Real' Large Group

At the 7th European Symposium in Group Analysis, Oxford, 1987, in my paper: `Transpersonal Processes and Self' I concluded by saying that: `Popular customs, rituals and traditions of Central-Southern Italy are based on certain main themes such as fertility and impotence, which are blended with or juxtaposed to magic-supernatural ones of propitiation, spells and exorcism. The dominating figure... is the mother, often felt to be omnipotent and hyper-protective. `I referred to a hypochondriac Self, clinical expression of a group matrix, whose main cultural aspect is a profound dependence on the mother figure. These conclusions were taken from a work I did on about 1000 patients coming from Central-Southern Italy (Pisani, 1990), the part of Italy I now examine as the matrix of a real large group.

Myths and Symbols in Religion and Folklore

WHAT interest now have folklorists in the remote past before the coming of Christianity in north-western Europe, a time when written records were rare and by no means reliable? We now know that folk customs and traditions of our own times, impressive and barbarous though they seem, cannot confidently be assumed to go back into 'the mists of antiquity', as popular guide-books are apt to phrase it. They probably emerged as recently as the nineteenth century or even later, and may have deliberately been given their present shape by some local antiquary, hoping to bring new dignity and popularity to some rowdy annual get-together. Consequently folklorists now tend to concentrate on the detailed history of recent customs, or on story-telling, jokes and popular practices of the present time which can be recorded on a vast scale by the computer. The tendency to avoid the study of past customs has been strengthened by the attitude of archaeologists. Faced with material from the historic past, they have been most reluctant for the last half-century or so, as Ralph Merrifield put it in The Archaeology of Religion and Magic, 'to recognise evidence for behaviour that has no obvious material purpose', if this was not found in a manifestly religious or mortuary context.' While accustomed to draw elaborate conclusions as to what those in earlier times ate or wore, or used as tools or weapons, in building, or in industrial or military organisations, they felt unable to comment on, or sometimes even to record, details which might indicate ideas about the sacred, the spirit world, attempts to avert bad luck, or popular rituals in everyday use. This negative attitude towards the interpretation of spontaneous religious practices or beliefs was of course in its turn a reaction against the tendency to assume that popular customs and traditional tales and odd bits of archaeological evidence difficult to understand must reveal glimpses of a wellorganised pagan past. Encouraged by Robert Graves and his like, many had envisaged a religion of set festivals and sacrifices with such concepts as the dying god, the naked goddess, the dancing corn spirit, all universally recognised by the folk. Traces of such an attitude remain with us yet, as in the recent case of a new Vicar of Bury,2 unnecessarily distressed and agitated by the fear that in allowing a Rose Queen for MayDay to be selected from little girls attending his Sunday School, he would be encouraging a heathen activity, 'firmly rooted' he is reported to have said, 'in pagan fertility rites ... like dancing round a maypole.' Those better versed in the study of folklore realise that such a dream world of orthodox heathen practices dominating early societies and reflected in fragments of later folklore could not conceivably have existed. It has become evident from the work of anthropologists among isolated and what might seem 'primitive' peoples that their beliefs are far from being fixed and simple; complications have inevitably crept in, either through outside influences or from the rich and complex reactions of the human mind and the creative powers of imagination, inspired by natural surroundings and life lived close to the natural world. We have to remember that those following a slower and simpler way of life were not less intelligent than we are; moreover they probably had far more opportunity and encouragement to use their natural gifts for the creation of symbols and the development of imagination and intuition.

Folk religion in the Ise-Shima region: The takemairi custom at Mount Asama

The present paper deals with the folk custom of takemairi 4 19 at Mt. Asama _ ~ LL in Mie Prefecture, Japan. It is part of a wider research project on folk religion, and particularly on Bon observances (Festival of the Dead) in the Ise-Shima region' which has been conducted for five years since 1983. The folk custom of takemairi has as its purpose not only the climbing of and worshiping at Mt. Asama but also the performance of memorial services (kuy5 AI ) for the deceased at the Donkai-in TFa Q , which is the oku-no-in (inner sanctuary) of the Kongosh-ji , ~'I1 E 1 affiliated with the Nanzenji Sect of the Rinzai Zen tradition, by putting up square tiba (wooden stupa slats) at both sides of the approach from the Gokuraku temple gate to the inner sanctuary. This popular custom, called thba kuye j i, constitutes in itself an important element of the takemairi.

Social Science and Segregation before Brown

The courts must bear a heavy share of the burden of American racism. An outpouring of historical scholarship on racism and the American law reveals the outrageous and humiliating extent to which American lawyers, judges, and legislators created, perpetuated, and defended racist American institutions. The law is not autonomous, however, particularly in areas of explicit public policy making. Lawyers did not invent racism. Rather they created racist institutions because society was racist and racism was implicit in its values. The trend in scholarship on the legal history of American racism, however, has been to place most of the blame for racism entirely on the lawmakers. C. Vann Woodward began the trend a half century ago by identifying the rise of the 'Strange Career of Jim Crow' with the passage of statutes that mandated segregation in the American South. Woodward studied both antebellum and post-Civil War America to about 1890 and argued that popular custom favored integration as a general rule, with segregation as the exception. He suggested that only after southern self-determination was restored at the end of Reconstruction did whites assert their hostility toward afro-Americans. This article disputes this view. It examines the relationship between law and the social sciences during the period in which many of America's segregationist legal institutions and practices came into effect. Before the turn of the century, a large number of scientific studies warned against the dangers of racial mixing. Elite scientists just as much as laypersons believed that Afro-Americans were intellectually inferior, that they learned much more slowly than white persons, and that their close association with whites could contaminate and weaken the white race. After the Civil War, the possibility of substantial racial mixing became real; the prospect most feared was that of interracial marriage. Nearly everyone assumed that the way to prevent interracial sexual contact was to keep the races separated, particularly in those institutions where young people's values and attractions were developed, such as the schools. The development of a ruling environmentalist paradigm to explain racial differences in test performance, physical integrity, criminal behavior, and economic status took more than half a century from the rise of the Jim Crow era. Scientific racism did not begin to disappear from American universities until the 1940's, until the publication of such consensus-creating documents as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in 1944.

From Play to Plays: The Folklore of Comedy

From Play to Plays: The Folklore of Comedy Harry Levin “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do,” Mark Twain has written. . . Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” This distinction, as Tom Sawyer learns and lives it, is what stands between being ordered to whitewash a fence and allowing other boys—for a consideration—to whitewash that fence. Comparably, though we might not think of Immanuel Kant as a prime exponent of the pleasure principle, his esthetics were based upon the conception of free play, a purely disinter­ ested mode of activity. That autotelic impetus was expressed more emphatically by his poetic disciple, Friedrich Schiller: “Man plays only when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only a complete human being when he plays.” Man is a playful if not an entirely rational animal, by Aristotelian definition the sole animal who laughs. Schiller speaks of Spieltrieb, the play instinct, the urge toward esthetic pleasure, Spiel signifying game and likewise drama in German: Schauspiel (show-game), Trauerspiel (mourning-game or tragedy), Lustspiel (pleasure-game or comedy). We encounter the same double meaning in the English word play, as well as in the French jeu and the Latin ludus. Though there is no parallel in Greek, it is significant that drama was derived from a root which means act, another ambiguity. Play itself primarily connoted movement or exercise, as in swordplay, and has often been connected with music, as in playing an instrument. During recent years there has been psychological small-talk about the games that people play. Game is etymologically related to concepts of participation and communion. Games­ manship has been reduced to one-upmanship, the habit of maHARRY LEVIN, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, has published widely on Renaissance drama. His first article was published in The Criterion in 1934. 130 Harry Levin 131 neuvering for personal advantage by appealing to social conven­ tions. But there are times when one must appeal against les règles du jeu to life itself, as Alice discovers, waking up from nightmare to reality by telling her adversaries of Wonderland, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” or alternately pulling out the tablecloth from the banquet of chessmen in Through the Looking-Glass. In both conclusive situations the game, in each case a different game, is up. It might well seem that Love is a game, poetry is a game, life should become a game (this is the sole hope for our political struggles), and “the revolu­ tion itself is a game,” as the most conscious among the revolu­ tionists said in May. [So Alain Robbe-Grillet was writing in 1970. Nevertheless, he went on to say,] The rapid recovery from their gesture through moral, humanistic, and ultimately religious values has also shown that our society was not yet quite ready to heed such a watchword. . . . Games have formed a conventional part of the epic, to be sure, and the great mock-epic of Rabelais includes a long catalogue in which we recognize such unheroic sports as dice, cards, checkers, marbles, jackstraws, skittles, tiddledy-winks, shuttle­ cock—not to mention French counterparts of London Bridge and morris dances. The Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, has concretely demonstrated the large extent to which the Rabel­ aisian jests and japes were grounded in the popular customs of the Middle Ages. It should be said that Bakhtin, as a Marxist, emphasizes feasts and fairs and folktales at the expense of Renaissance humanism, which found such eloquent and sar­ donic expression in the same hodgepodge. But it is precisely the intermixture of broad buffoonery and speculative fantasy that makes Gargantua and Pantagruel so unique. The basic seriousness of what might have seemed a frivo­ lous subject was quite convincingly established by the Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, a comparative sketch of civilization viewed sub specie ludi. “Tell me how they played,” says Huizinga in effect, “and I can tell you what they were.” The mechanism he stresses is the agon, as organized through love or war or...

A Note on the Survival of Popular Christian Magic

THE magical use of Christian symbols prayers, relics, parts of the 'true cross' or the gospels has been noted as an integral element in the origins of popular magical practices in Europe.' The medieval Church encouraged, or at least tolerated, the use of tokens of faith to provide magical protection for their owners. In this way the language and symbols of Christianity passed into the general pool of popular magic. Yet it is unclear from the evidence collected, for example, by Keith Thomas, whether the supposed 'decline of magic' in the seventeenth century affected this element of traditional popular culture. It is reasonable to suppose, as Thomas does, that despite the changing intellectual climate and its consequences for the credibility of astrology or the legal respectability of witchcraft cases, popular customs in the rural villages remained relatively untouched until the nineteeth century. One unexplored area in this pattern of survival, therefore, is the extent to which Christianity itself provided the symbols and resources for magical practices throughout the period. Certainly Christian prayers and phrases were much used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for charms, spells and curses. Many of these formulae consisted of Catholic prayers and words which had been outlawed in the midsixteenth century. The Latin prayers, the paternoster, aves and the creed were thought to be particularly effective in curing disease and countering witchcraft. Because Catholicism was illegal, and frequently regarded as devilish, it is not surprising to find the use of Latin prayers for magical purposes figuring as evidence in accusations of witchcraft and sorcery.2 In the ecclesiastical courts, for example, there were many cases of the use of paternosters and creeds as charms to cure sickness. One woman from Aldeburgh in Suffolk, accused in 1597, was thought to be particularly good at cures through this method, 'and therefore hath recourse of people to her farre and nighe.'3 One of the Lancashire witches of 1612 was alleged to have sold a charm against bewitched drink (ironically), which concluded:-

Propertius 4.7.26 Again

In CQ N.S. 28 (1978), 242, Frances Mueeke, quoting Beroaldus, rightly understood this line to refer to a funerary practice. In default of ancient parallels the author offered us a modern one from a novel I vicerè by Federico De Roberto, first published in 1894. 1894. But even before De Roberto's novel was published, Vincenzo Padula, in his curious work Pauca Quae in Sexto Aurelio Propertio Vincentius Padula ab Acrio Animadvertabat (Naples, 1871), had explained Prop. 4.7.26 by reference to popular custom:

From Idea to Word: Folk Beliefs and Customs Underlying Folk Speech

W AORDS ARE THE MAGIC WINGS upon which man's ideas take flight.1 They may range from single prosaic words representing an object, an action, or an idea to phrases that enlarge, enhance, and even poetize the original ideas. As a field of study, words may claim the attention of the lexicographer, the rhetorician, the student of poetry, the proverb scholar, or the compiler of popular expressions found in a language, the so-called winged words. Folk speech moves on a somewhat humbler level but is, in some of its genres, not without its own symbolic and poetic qualities. That the field of folk speech should have attracted such a large number of students and scholars from the ranks of philology, dialectology, onomastics, folklore, and kindred disciplines is a tribute to the power of the word-not the word quite in the sense in which it is used in the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, but the word as the prime human mover. Here I should like to consider the word in a manner that will certainly not be new to most readers of American Speech. All members of the American Dialect Society who receive the Society's publications are no doubt impressed, as I have been, with the attempts on the part of fieldworkers and compilers of glossaries of local folk speech to supply all the background they can on every single item reported. It is from careful work of this kind that complete dictionary entries will be compiled for the Society's Dictionary of American Regional English. In the thought that American popular belief and folk custom contain much material that will be useful for the dictionary and for work in the field of folk speech generally, I suggest that greater attention be directed to these fertile sources.2 I have no new methodology to propose. I would simply urge the

British Popular Customs, Present and Past; Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People

British Popular Customs, Present and Past; Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People

Who is the Godfather?

Under the canon law of all Christian churches (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Armenian Gregorian), the godfather is above all the sponsor at the christening, which is the acceptance of an infant (and sometimes of an adult) into the bosom of the church. But under these same rules of canon law, and particularly in popular custom, the role and functions of the godfather are considerably broader. He remains for the rest of his life, and that of his godchild, his spiritual father (pater spiritualis among Catholics), the individual who raises and guides him in youth and young manhood, his constant guardian and adviser even in years of maturity.

Opinions on the old Japanese Law-including some views on Chinese legal history

This is a treatise describing the development of legal concepts in Japan. It is divided into ten sections, each of which is independent. But if they are read through, Dr. Nakada's view on the development of legal concepts in Japan becomes clear.Up till the medieval times, adjudications of the law court had legal force and were contrasted with the enacted law. Popular customs were also a kind of norm other than the positive law till the middle of the medieval times. In the latter half of the medieval times, the customary law was called Minkan-no-Taiho (popular great law) contrasted with Tenka-no-Taiho (public great law). But in the Tokugawa Shogunate era, these three forms of law were unified into the single concept of "Taiho".What has been stated above is the conclusion reached by Dr. Nakada in this description of history of development of the legal concepts in Japan (Cf. the ninth section). In other sections, however, Dr. Nakada gives his suggestions on various problems of legal history.In the third section, Dr. Nakada discusses the development of the system of. penal (lü _??_) and non-penal (ling _??_) laws in China. In the Ch'un-ch'iu era, hsing-shu _??__??_ (document of penalty) was the criminal law that defined the grave crimes and provided penalties for them, while chiao-ling-chih-shu _??__??__??__??_ (document of discipline) was the supplementary laws which were enacted whenever necessity arose, Dr. Nakada explains. He advances to say that the former was codified into lü and the latter into ling in the Han era. But ling was still supplementary to lü. Dr. Nakada further explains that ling was separated from lü in the Chin era acquiring an independent position and that it became the non-penal code.The fourth section says that Imanogyoji (_??__??__??_) and Rei (_??_) of the ritsu-ryo period were the laws enforced by the government agencies in conformity with Horei (_??__??_).The first section advises those who want to study the old Japanese law in connection with politics not to forget that the principle of Tokuji(_??__??_) (moral influence of the ruler) was not the essence of the dictatorship in the ancient Japan but only one attribute of it. Dr. Nakada says also in the seventh section that the Chinese law and the Japanese law were not examples of government through moral influence, though some believe so.The seventh and the tenth sections say the lack of clear consciousness of right in the old Japanese law does not indicate that the people willingly subjected themselves to the moral influence of the ruler but that the law was imposed on the people by the ruler in their own interests. Dr. Nakada points out that the law was not created by the people themselves. (Ryosuke Ishii)A Sumerian Record of Criminal ProcedureKeikichi HaradaThe New York Times in its March 12 issue in 1950 reported on the archaeological finds obtained in the excavation at Ras Shamra in Syria. The Manchester Guardian in the March 4 issue of 1950 gave some account on one of the clay tablets excavated at Nippur of Sumer. Late Professor Keikichi Harada makes a brief comment on these two newspaper reports. He surmises that the clay tablet is the same one as what is usually called " di-til-la" (finished procedure). This is the last manuscript written by Professor Harada, who passed away on September 1, 1950. The professor intimated his intention to make the manuscript public several days before his death.

Easter Customs in Poland

Saint Paul insists, as we know, on the idea that the whole of Christianity depends on the fact of Christ's Resurrection. ‘If Christ has not risen’, he says, ‘our faith is vain and our hope groundless’, adding at once, ‘No, Christ really has risen from the dead, and I am witness to that’.In Poland this thought of Christ’s Resurrection in addition to being a fundamental article of religious faith, had also a deeply patriotic and national meaning. During the period of enemy domination the feast of the Resurrection, the Christian Easter, became as well a symbol of national resurrection. Each of the faithful who spoke of the risen Christ, the conqueror over death, joined thereto in his heart another thought and sentiment—his lively and fundamental hope in the resurrection of Poland. That is what gave Easter, on both the traditional and the religious side, a very special colour which made its old popular customs still dearer, more intimate and more venerable. We do not know how the Easter festival can be observed in Poland at the present day, but we may be sure that no Pole behind the Iron Curtain ever lets go his steadfast hope of seeing his country really free and returning to life.The season of Lent has had in Poland for centuries a special popular service, the singing of the Lamentation*, or Bitter Mourning for the Passion. This must not be confused with Tenebrae in Holy Week. It is sung in church several times a week, usually on Wednesdays and Fridays and also on Sunday evenings.

Christmas Customs and their Origins

OF the popular customs associated with Christmas, few have a Christian origin. The aim of the early Church was to distract its followers from the great festivals of the heathen, and consequently pagan elements were allowed to be incorporated as freely in the observance of Christmas as they were in the other major feasts of the Christian calendar. Here the pietistic sentiment of the Mediterranean peoples has tended to preserve the mystic element of paganism rather than the saturnalian. Hence the devotion to the Midnight Mass; and, as the cult of the Madonna enshrines-the popular memory of the great pagan mother goddess, so the Cave of Zeus, of Adonis, and of Mithra survive in the cult of the Manger, in which both in the representations in the churches and in the popular shrines in the Italian streets, Mary, Joseph, and the animals kneel in adoration of the Child.1 In Spain the Manger is set up even in private houses, where one or two rooms may be set aside for the purpose. In England the cult may be traced in the belief, once common in the west country, but not confined to that area, that at twelve o'clock on Christmas Eve the oxen kneel in their stalls. A connexion, with more than a flavour of paganism, may also be inferred in the divinatory custom of placing a cake on the head or horns of an ox in its stall on Christmas Eve, once practised in Herefordshire and other western counties and in the north, the prosperity of the coming year being foretold by the direction in which the cake fell or was shaken off. To the Manger cult may also be ascribed the ‘vessel cup’ of northern England, a box or framework, usually decorated with evergreens, containing a doll, or more often two dolls representing the Madonna and Child, which was carried from house to house by ‘vessel cup’ women or children. In the name ‘vessel cup,’ a corruption of ‘wassail,’ northern paganism combines with that of the south.

Italian Votive Offerings

A very pretty custom of ancient Greece and Rome was the laying of votive offerings before the shrines of their gods. This is found amongst all ancient nations and most modern ones; but it is amongst the Greeks and Romans that it was commonest. Every crisis of life-birth, marriage, and death, sickness and safety-served as the occasion for some offering. It is not now my idea to deal with the ancient practice-that I hope to do on another opportunity-but to point out a few places where the old tradition has been kept up to the present day. Nothing is more noteworthy than the persistency of popular custom in religion; all through the classic lands can be seen the same things done as were done two thousand years ago, with just so much change as the social changes of these years have made inevitable. In many churches on the Continent may be seen votive limbs and figures hung up in token of thanks for recovery from some sickness or danger. Images of this sort, in metal, stone, or terra-cotta, have been excavated on the sites of many ancient sanctuaries; and again, as the ancients consecrated images of their gods in the temples, so the modern peasant consecrates plaster images of the Virgin. Sometimes these votive limbs are hung up in street shrines, as I have seen in Naples. A fine collection of glass and china eyes, some very large, hang in the little chapel of St. Ottilien (Black Forest), where there is a spring, still held sacred, which is believed to have healing power for the eyes. The Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, in Venice, contains a shrine of S. Vicenzo, who is credited with the power of healing cripples by miracle. Beside it hang a number of modelled limbs, and the crutches of the patients. But my present purpose is to describe two collections of II