The Survival of Superstitions.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 66, 6 September 1884, Page 5

The Survival of Superstitions.

A curious case of tho survival of medieval superstition in a civilised country was recently revealed in a magistrate's court in rural Ireland. Two young peasant women, named Ellen Cushion and Anastasia Rourke, of comely appearance and not exceptional ignorance, were brought up charged with gross cruelty towards a little girl three years old. They had availed themselves of tho absence of the parents to take the child away from its home, and, apparently without the slightest qualm of pity, to place it on a hot shovel, and keep it there until it was dangerously if not fatally burned. It appears that the child had become what is called in Ireland a "fairy changeling;" and their honest but benighted purpose had been to exorcise the evil spirit which had entered its infantile pei son. The girl was deformed and crippled, and this seems to have been the circumstance which convinced the women of its supernatural origin. In inflicting the cruelty thoy did, they only followed what is a rooted superstition in some parts of Ireland. It is thoroughly believed by many of the ignorant and imaginative peasantry that fairies, both good and bad, actually •'revisit the glimpses of the moon," and play all sorts of good or ill-natured pranks upon mortals. These fairies, or elves, are thought to be exceedingly small and light, and to have the power ot voluntary invisibility. They are said to dwell in picturesque caves underground, or beneath the limpid waters of Erin's lakes ; and sometimes the peasants imagine that they hear the elves discoursing sweetest music in the subterranean depths. One of the favourite tricks of the evilly disposed elves is to enter a house through chimney or key-hole, take away the children, and replace them with elf-children, to whom the people give the name of " fairy changelings." Ireland is not the only civilised region where the teeming superstitions which had their rise in the Middle Ages still lurk and linger. In England, and especially in Scotland, the historic hobgoblin still holds his own in many a nook and corner of the land. Tho Scotch "brownie," corresponding to the " banshee " of the Irish, still alarms the denizen of the remoter Highland fastnesses. Ghost lore is eagerly credited in the rural regions of Southern England. Many an Italian peasant still devoutly shrinks from the " mal' oechio," but tho " evil eye" also on occasion disturbs the slumbers of the Devon hind. The Germans are, perhaps, the least superstitious of European peoples ; yet there is scarcely a locality in the Fatherland whore phantom tales do not cluster around hoary schlosses or solitary houses, devoutly believed in by the grape-growers and farmers. Superstition, it need not be said, is also rife in tho Pagan Orient, and there, sad to say, it oftenest takes cruel and vengeful forms. There is, perhaps, not a country in Europe or Asia where the belief in witchcraft is wholly extinct. Less than twenty years ago, an old Frenchman, accused of witchery, was lynched by an English mob in a country town. Such things have happened in rural France at a much more recent period. A few years ago at Nagpore, two Hindoos were condemned to penal servitude for lifo, because they savagely put to death no less than eight persons whom they declared to be witches, wno had cast their spells over the faithful of the neighbourhood. On this side of the sea, it is scarcely necessary to add, the physician and the philosopher encountor both gross and subtle forms of superstition. The contribution, for example, made by the Southern coloured people to a summary of purely American types of superstition is both large and striking.— "Boston Advertiser,"