The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
Among primitive peoples we find a like prejudice against still-born
children and children who die very young. The natives of the Highlands
of Borneo think that still-born infants go to a special spirit-land
called _Tenyn lallu_, and "the spirits of these children are
believed to be very brave and to require no weapon other than a stick to
defend themselves against their enemies. The reason given for this idea
is, that the child has never felt pain in this world and is therefore
very daring in the other" (475. 199). In Annam the spirits of children
still-born and of those dying in infancy are held in great fear. These
spirits, called _Con Ranh_, or _Con Lôn_ (from _lôn_, "to
enter into life"), are ever seeking "to incorporate themselves in the
bodies of others, though, after so doing, they are incapable of life."
Moreover, "their names are not mentioned in the presence of women, for
it is feared they might take to these, and a newly-married woman is in
like manner afraid to take anything from a woman, or to wear any of the
clothing of one, who has had such a child. Special measures are
necessary to get rid of the _Con Ranh_" (397. 18-19). The Alfurus,
of the Moluccas, "bury children up to their waists and expose them to
all the tortures of thirst until they wrench from them the promise to
hurl themselves upon the enemies of the village. Then they take them
out, but only to kill them on the spot, imagining that the spirits of
the victims will respect their last promise" (388. 81). On the other
hand, Callaway informs us that the Zulu diviner may divine by the
_Amatongo_ (spirit) of infants, "supposed to be mild and
beneficent" (417. 176).
_Transmigration_.
Wordsworth, in that immortal poem, which belongs to the jewels of the
treasure-house of childhood, has sung of the birth of man:--
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But, trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"--
and the humbler bards of many an age, whose names have perished with
the races that produced them, have thought and sung of soul-incarnation,
metempsychosis, transmigration, and kindred concepts, in a thousand
different ways. In their strangely poetical language, the Tupi Indians,
of Brazil, term a child _pitanga_, "suck soul," from _piter_,
"to suck," _anga_, "soul." The Seminole Indians, of Florida, "held
the baby over the face of the woman dying in child-birth, so that it
might receive her parting spirit" (409. 271). A similar practice (with
the father) is reported from Polynesia. In a recently published work on
"Souls," by Mrs. Mary Ailing Aber, we read:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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