SUPERSTITIONS THAT COLOUR OUR LIVES

Hokitika Guardian, 25 July 1928, Page 4

SUPERSTITIONS THAT COLOUR OUR LIVES

(By Oswald Barron, who is an, authority on Folk-lore, among other things, and is also well known as ‘•The Londoner” of the London “Evening News)”

We are the heirs of all the ages. If I pull out that text, it is not because I would have us flatter ourselves. What I mean to say is that we are really 1 and truly ‘ heirs whose inheritance comes to us from all the past times.

There is what we learned yesterday. It is the truth as science can tell us the truth, ns far ns we can understand what the new science has been telling. But' it goes into our pack with odd things we picked up ages ago, before we could read and write or trim our nails. What a. rag-bag we carry! Here we are, not quite sure of everything that the professors say. not wholly disbelieving what we were told by witch-doctors at the beginning of the Stone Age.

They say that our new-born babies will cling to,a finger or to an umbrella handle, and hang from it us the young ape will hang to the bough. This is so, for I have seen a baby do it; I am not yet persuaded to think that, even when he shall have grown up to be a man and learned all that the professors can teach liim, the baby will have quite forgotten nil his ancestral tricks. There was a professor, a professor of the- higher mathematics, who looked like the modernest of professors. Yet he was the man who told mo that if you wore an iron ring hidden in your golden ring it would keep off the rheumatism; some forefather of his must have learned as much so soon as wo came to work in iron and make magical toys out of that wonderful metal.

A wonderful metal is iron, still magical. One must be careful in handling it, careful to make no gifts of knives. When a penknife changes hands we take a threepenny hit for it, cloaking the gift as though it were a sale. N

Your door, is it charmed with the holy iron against death, against malice of witchcraft ? My front door is safe; so soon' as we moved into our house T nailed up the old horseshoe which an omnibus horse had cast at my feet near Somerset House in the days when horses were pulling omnibuses. Even so have householders nailed up the shoe ever since they had the holy iron; it kept them safe from the charms of the wild folk in tlm eaves on the other side of the hill, who had no iron, who were still chipping flint. A powerful thing is the horseshoe of iron, the shoe of the horse which is a sacred beast. Gold also, that is a mighty thing. It was hut last week, when I. had a. stye on the eyelid, a young woman of the newest fashion besought me to strike the stye witfi a golden wedding ring. I thanked .her, hut I had done that the first thing in the morning. Now the stye is gone; how handily this old magic comes in! I say that, for now I cannot remember how styes may bo hepled by new science, although it is not so long nco that ray friend, a groat oculist, told mo all about it. But 1 have remembered the magic of the golden ring for thousands of years. ’Doubtless wo believe the woijds written in wise books by the professors: we must believe them, and reverently. But that is with one side of our heads; the other side goes on recalling what our ancestors said in the old time as they sat with their feet to the fire. We obey the professors; muddled souls that we are, we obey also those ancestral voices. As I write this, I shudder to think of that man who, at dinner in my own house, tried again and again to send the decanter round from left to right, widdevshiip. the way that -is against the sun. A man like that would have brought down a curse on the house: my ancestors co-iild not have borne with him.

So wo live, half bv the new rules of wise men and half by ancient lore that comes down to us out of the darkness- of the darkest ago. This is because we are human creatures, not wholly reasonable. Nothing, we are told, is without its causes behind it ; no cause without its own causes. But this is a hard truth. Deep in our hearts we hope that all things do not fall out so reasonably. Therefore we are yet playing with charms, considering dreams and signs, toying with scrap of old magic. If you doubt tills, think of what happened at "Weymouth on the day when, as a foolish prophet had told W/cymouth, it should be whelmed by a wave of the sea. There were many who heeded the prophet;, nobody. I think, put questions to me of science. At Weymouth men waited with their eyes upon the clock for the terrible moment; they giggled, but they watched the clock.