2

child may grow and flourish like the tree.' When Lord Byron first visited his ancestral estate of Newstead "he planted, it seems, a young oak in some part of the grounds, and had an idea that as it flourished so should he." On a day when the cloud that settled on the later years of Sir Walter Scott lifted a little, and he heard that Woodstock had sold for over eight thousand pounds, he wrote in his journal: "I have a curious fancy; I will go set two or three acorns, and judge by their success in growing whether I shall succeed in clearing my way or not." 3 Near the Castle of Dalhousie, not far from Edinburgh, there grows an oak-tree, called the Edgewell Tree, which is popularly believed to be linked to the fate of the family by a mysterious tic; for they say that when one of the family dies, or is about to die, a branch falls from the Edgewell Tree. Thus, on seeing a great bough drop from the tree on a quiet, still day in July 1874, an old forester exclaimed, "The laird's deid noo!" and soon after news came that Fox Maule, cleventh Earl of Dalhousie, was dead.*

In England children are sometimes passed through a cleft ash-tree as a cure for rupture or rickets, and thenceforward a sympathetic connection is supposed to exist between them and the tree. An ash-tree which had been used for this purpose grew at the edge of Shirley Heath, on the road from Hockly House to Birmingham. "Thomas Chillingworth, son of the owner of an adjoining farm, now about thirty-four, was, when an infant of a year old, passed through a similar tree, now perfectly sound, which he preserves with so much care that he will not suffer a single branch to be touched, for it is believed the life of the patient depends on the life of the tree, and the moment that is cut down, be the patient ever so distant, the rupture returns, and a mortification ensues, and terminates in death, as was the case in a man driving a waggon on the very road in question." "It is not uncommon, however," adds the writer, "for persons to survive for a time the felling of the

F. S. Krauss, 66

"Haarschurgod

schaft bei den Südslaven," Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, vii. (1894), p. 193.

Moore's Life of Lord Byron, i. 101.

3 Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott (First Edition), vi. 283.

4 Sir Walter Scott's Journal (First Edition), ii. 282, with the editor's

note.

tree." The ordinary mode of effecting the cure is to split a young ash-sapling longitudinally for a few feet and pass the child, naked, thrice through the fissure at sunrise. As soon as the ceremony has been performed, the tree is bound tightly up and the fissure plastered over with mud or clay. The belief is that just as the cleft in the tree closes up, so the rupture in the child's body will be healed; but that if the rift in the tree remains open, the rupture in the child will remain too. Some thirty years ago the remedy was still in common use at Fittleworth and many other places in Sussex. The account of the Sussex practice and belief is notable because it brings out very clearly the sympathetic relation supposed to exist between the ruptured child and the tree through which it has been passed. We are told that the patient "must be passed nine times every morning on nine successive days at sunrise through a cleft in a sapling ash-tree, which has been so far given up by the owner of it to the parents of the child, as that there is an understanding it shall not be cut down during the life of the infant who is to be passed through it. The sapling must be sound at heart, and the cleft must be made with an axe. The child on being carried to the tree must be attended by nine persons, each of whom must pass it through the cleft from west to east. On the ninth morning the solemn ceremony is concluded by binding the tree lightly with a cord, and it is supposed that as the cleft closes the health of the child will improve. In the neighbourhood of Petworth some cleft ash-trees may be seen, through which children have very recently been passed. I may add, that only a few weeks since, a person who had lately purchased an ash-tree

The Gentleman's Magazine, 1804, p. 909: Brand, Popular Antiquities, iii. 289.

Brand, op. cit. iii. 287-292; W. G. Black. Folk-medicine, p. 67 sq.; W. Wollaston Groome, "Suffolk Leechcraft," Folk-lore, vi. (1895), p. 123 sq.; E. S. Hartland, in Folk-tøre, vii. (1896), pp. 303-306; County Folk-lore, Suffolk, edited by Lady Gurdon, pp. 26.28. To ensure the success of the cure various additional precautions are

sometimes prescribed, as that the ash should be a maiden, that is a tree that has never been topped or cut; that the split should be made east and west; that the child should be passed into the tree by a maiden and taken out on the other side by a boy; that the child should always be passed through head foremost (but according to others feet foremost), and so forth. In Surrey we hear of a holly-tree being used instead of an ash (Notes and Queries, Sixth Series, xi. Jan.-Jun. 1885, p. 46).

standing in this parish, intending to cut it down, was told by the father of a child, who had some time before been passed through it, that the infirmity would be sure to return upon his son if it were felled. Whereupon the good man said, he knew that such would be the case; and therefore he would not fell it for the world." 1

A similar cure for various diseases, but especially for rupture, has been commonly practised in other parts of Europe, for example in Germany, France, Denmark, and Sweden, but in these countries the tree employed for the purpose is generally not an ash but an oak. With this exception, the practice and the belief are nearly the same on the continent as in England, though sometimes German wiscacres recommend that the ceremony should be performed on Christmas Eve, Good Friday, or the Eve of St. John; in this last case it is desirable that two persons of the name of John should hold the split oaksapling open, while a third John receives the child after it has been passed through the cleft.2 In Mecklenburg, as in England, the sympathetic relation thus established between

1 "Some West Sussex superstitions lingering in 1868, collected by Charlotte Latham, at Fittleworth," Folk-lore Record, i. (1878), p. 40 sq.

2 For the custom in Germany, see Grimm, D... ii. 975 sq.; Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube,2 p. 317,

503; Kuhn und Schwartz, Norddeutsche Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche, P. 443 sq., $ 340; Woeste, Volksüberlieferungen in der Grafschaft Mark, P. 54, § 4; E. Meier, Deutsche Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Schwaben, p. 390, § 56: Bavaria, Landes- und Volkskunde des Königreichs Bayern, ii. 255 (willowtree): J. A. E. Köhler, Volksbrauch, etc., im Voigtlande, p. 414 sy. L. Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg, i. 72 $4., $ 88; K. Bartsch, Sagen,

Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg, ii. p. 290 sq., § 1447: J. Haltrich, Zur Volkskunde der Siebenbürger Sachsen, p. 264. As to France, see Marcellus, De medicamentis, xxxiii. 26 (where the tree is a cherry); De

Nore, Coutumes, Mythes et Traditions des Provinces de France, p. 231: Bérenger-Féraud, in Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, Quatrième Série, i. (1890), pp. 895-902; id., Superstitions et Survivances, i. 523 sqq. As to Denmark and Sweden, see Grimm, D... ii. 976; H. F. Feilberg, "Zwieselbäume nebst verwandten Aberglauben in Skandinavien," Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, vii. (1897), p. 42 sqq. According to some, the tree through which the child is passed should have been split by lightning (Bartsch, Zc.). The whole subject of passing sick people through narrow apertures as a mode of cure has been well handled in an elegant little monograph (Un vieux rite medical, Paris, 1892) by Mr. H. Gaidoz, with whose general conclusion I agree. Compare also R. Andree, Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche (Stuttgart, 1878), p. 31 sq.; E. S. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, ii. 146 57.; Bérenger- Féraud, Superstitions et Survivances, i. 523-540.

the tree and the child is so close that if the tree is cut down the child will die.1 In the island of Rügen people believe that when a person who has been thus cured of rupture dies, his soul passes into the same oak-tree through which his body was passed in his youth. Thus it seems that with the disease the sufferer is supposed to transfer a certain vital part of himself to the tree so that it is impossible to injure the tree without at the same time injuring the man; and in Rügen this partial union is thought to be completed by the transmigration of the man's soul at death into the tree. Apparently the disease is conceived as something physical, which forms part of the patient and yet can be stripped off him and left behind in the narrow aperture through which he has forced his way. As this view of the matter has been recently disputed, it seems desirable to establish it, if possible, by confirmatory evidence. We shall find such evidence in various parts of the world.

In the island of Nias, when a man is in training for the priesthood, he has to be introduced to the various spirits between whom and mankind it will be his office to mediate. A priest takes him to an open window, and while the drums are beating points out to him the great spirit in the sun who calls away men to himself through death; for it is needful that the future pricst should know him from whose grasp he will often be expected to wrest the sick and dying. In the evening twilight he is led to the graves and shown the envious spirits of the dead, who also are ever drawing away the living to their own shadowy world. Next day he is conducted to a river and shown the spirit of the waters; and finally they take him up to a mountain and exhibit to him the spirits of the mountains, who have diverse shapes, some appearing like swine, others like buffaloes, others like goats, and others again like men with long hair on their bodies. When he has seen all this, his education is complete, but on his return from the mountain the new priest may not at once enter his own house. For the

1 Ploss, Das Kind, ii. 221.

2 R. Baier," Beitrage von der Insel Rügen," Zeitschrift für deutsche My

thologie und Sittenkunde, ii. (1855). p. 141.

3 By M. E. S. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, ii. 147.

people think that, were he to do so, the dangerous spirits by whom he is still environed would stay in the house and visit both the family and the pigs with sickness. Accordingly he betakes himself to other villages and passes several nights there, hoping that the spirits will leave him and settle on the friends who receive him into their houses; but naturally he does not reveal the intention of his visit to his hosts. Lastly, before he enters his own dwelling, he looks out for some young tree by the way, splits it down the middle, and then creeps through the fissure, in the belief that any spirit which may still be clinging to him will thus be left sticking to the tree. Again, among the Bilqula or Bella Coola Indians of British Columbia "the bed of a mourner must be protected against the ghost of the deceased. His male relatives stick a thorn-bush into the ground at each corner of their beds. After four days these are thrown into the water. Mourners must rise early and go into the woods, where they stick four thorn-bushes into the ground, at the corners of a square, in which they cleanse themselves by rubbing their bodies with cedar branches. They also swim in ponds. After swimming they cleave four small trees and creep through the clefts, following the course of the sun. This they do on four subsequent mornings, cleaving new trees every day. Mourners cut their hair short. The hair that has been cut off is burnt. If they should not observe these regulations, it is believed that they would dream of the deceased." 2 To the savage, who fails to distinguish the visions of sleep from the appearances of waking life, the apparition of a dead man in a dream is equivalent to the actual presence of the ghost; and accordingly he seeks to keep off the spiritual intruder, just as he might a creature of flesh and blood, by fencing his bed with thorn-bushes. Similarly the practice of creeping through four cleft trees is clearly an attempt to shake off the clinging ghost and leave it adhering to the trees, just as in Nias the

1 Fr. Kramer, "Der Götzendienst der Niasser,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde, xxxiii. (1890), pp. 478-480.

2 Fr. Boas, in Seventh Report on the North-Western Tribes of Canada,

p. 13 (separate reprint from the Report of the British Association for 1891). We have seen (vol. i. p. 325) that the Shushwap Indians of the same region also fence their beds against ghosts with a hedge of thorn bushes.