Custom and Myth | Page 4

of fairy arrows. Such things are still
treasured in remote nooks of England, and the 'thunderbolt' is applied
to cure certain maladies by its touch.
As for the fairy arrows, we know that even in ancient Etruria they were
looked on as magical, for we sometimes see their points set, as amulets,
in the gold of Etruscan necklaces. In Perugia the arrowheads are still
sold as charms. All educated people, of course, have long been aware
that the metal wedge is a celt, or ancient bronze axe-head, and that it
was not fairies, but the forgotten peoples of this island who used the
arrows with the tips of flint. Thunder is only so far connected with
them that the heavy rains loosen the surface soil, and lay bare its long
hidden secrets.
There is a science, Archaeology, which collects and compares the
material relics of old races, the axes and arrow-heads. There is a form
of study, Folklore, which collects and compares the similar but
immaterial relics of old races, the surviving superstitions and stories,
the ideas which are in our time but not of it. Properly speaking, folklore
is only concerned with the legends, customs, beliefs, of the Folk, of the
people, of the classes which have least been altered by education,
which have shared least in progress. But the student of folklore soon
finds that these unprogressive classes retain many of the beliefs and
ways of savages, just as the Hebridean people use spindle-whorls of
stone, and bake clay pots without the aid of the wheel, like modern
South Sea Islanders, or like their own prehistoric ancestors. {11a} The
student of folklore is thus led to examine the usages, myths, and ideas
of savages, which are still retained, in rude enough shape, by the

European peasantry. Lastly, he observes that a few similar customs and
ideas survive in the most conservative elements of the life of educated
peoples, in ritual, ceremonial, and religious traditions and myths.
Though such remains are rare in England, we may note the custom of
leading the dead soldier's horse behind his master to the grave, a relic
of days when the horse would have been sacrificed. {11b} We may
observe the persistence of the ceremony by which the monarch, at his
coronation, takes his seat on the sacred stone of Scone, probably an
ancient fetich stone. Not to speak, here, of our own religious traditions,
the old vein of savage rite and belief is found very near the surface of
ancient Greek religion. It needs but some stress of circumstance,
something answering to the storm shower that reveals the flint
arrow-heads, to bring savage ritual to the surface of classical religion.
In sore need, a human victim was only too likely to be demanded;
while a feast-day, or a mystery, set the Greeks dancing serpent-dances
or bear-dances like Red Indians, or swimming with sacred pigs, or
leaping about in imitation of wolves, or holding a dog-feast, and
offering dog's flesh to the gods. {12} Thus the student of folklore soon
finds that he must enlarge his field, and examine, not only popular
European story and practice, but savage ways and ideas, and the myths
and usages of the educated classes in civilised races. In this extended
sense the term 'folklore' will frequently be used in the following essays.
The idea of the writer is that mythology cannot fruitfully be studied
apart from folklore, while some knowledge of anthropology is required
in both sciences.
The science of Folklore, if we may call it a science, finds everywhere,
close to the surface of civilised life, the remains of ideas as old as the
stone elf-shots, older than the celt of bronze. In proverbs and riddles,
and nursery tales and superstitions, we detect the relics of a stage of
thought, which is dying out in Europe, but which still exists in many
parts of the world. Now, just as the flint arrow-heads are scattered
everywhere, in all the continents and isles, and everywhere are much
alike, and bear no very definite marks of the special influence of race,
so it is with the habits and legends investigated by the student of
folklore. The stone arrow-head buried in a Scottish cairn is like those
which were interred with Algonquin chiefs. The flints found in

Egyptian soil, or beside the tumulus on the plain of Marathon, nearly
resemble the stones which tip the reed arrow of the modern Samoyed.
Perhaps only a skilled experience could discern, in a heap of such
arrow-heads, the specimens which are found in America or Africa from
those which are unearthed in Europe. Even in the products of more
advanced industry, we see early pottery, for example, so closely alike
everywhere that, in the British Museum, Mexican vases have, ere now,
been mixed up on