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SPIRIT BASIS OF BELIEF AND CUSTOM.
NOVEMBER, 1895.]
scaring rose and let showers of rose leaves fall on his guests.61 He crowned the drinkers with never-fading spirit-proof ivy, he protected their fingers with madness-scaring amethyst, he armed the cup with guardian gems and cameos,62 The Greeks crowned the cup with garlands, the Catholic priest crosses the cup, the Jew blesses it, and the Roman of the early empire, with a similar spirit-scaring or housing object, graved its outside with pleasing adulteries.63 Saint Chrysostom (A. D. 398) seems to recognise the principle when he says: "Take holy oil, and thou wilt never suffer the shipwreck of drunkenness." In the Eastern Church, the Sacramental cup contains a portion of the consecrated bread.65 The early English custom of dropping into wine pieces of toast is the origin of the phrase the toasting of beauties and honoured guests,68 This toasting of beauties, of honoured guests, of the king or earthly guardian, and of the deity or heavenly guardian, is based on the rule that all in honour, whether child, guest or guardian, want special protection, since they are particularly open to the intrusion of evil spirits.
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Health-drinking is a complicated rite. The Middle-Age Skandinavian practice of drinking the health of Christ, the present South Slav or Balkan drinking to the ancestral guardian or Slawa, and the Pârsi drinking of the toast of Zoroaster, seem to have their origin less in the hope of housing the guardian than in the belief that the drinker becomes a scape, taking into himself evil influences, which, if not absorbed by him, might enter into the Name, and so annoy the being whose health is drunk. This view finds support in Firdûsi's (A. D. 1000) statement that, when the ancient Persians drank in memory of King Quûs, they prostrated and kissed the earth.87 The same worshipful feeling is the main element in the English practice of drinking the Health of the Queen, the bride, the newly christened babe, the hero of the birthday, absent friends, the dead. The silent toasting of the dead has passed through many phases. The drinking at funerals was originally to scare from the living the dreaded spirit of the dead and other evil spirits; then to scare evil spirits from the corpse; then to tempt the spirit of the beloved dead to house himself in some one of his relations, as the Roman son received in his pious mouth the last breath of his dying parent. This view of ceremonial drinking explains how, among many nations, at certain seasons and on certain occasions, drinking, that is, drinking to excess, is a duty and a self-sacrifice, the drinker taking into himself the evil influences, which, but for him and his comrade scapes, might cause general mischief. The spilling of wine in christening a ship has the early object of scaring the spirits of ill-luck, probably to empty the ship of the spirits that took shelter in her when she was building, and make the ship ready to receive the spirit of the guardian deity or saint in whose name and under whose charge she is to be launched. Like the new-built ship, the field is sprinkled to purge it of the demons of barrenness and blight, the sea to scare the storm-fiend, the river to drive away the devil of drought, military standards to put fear and panic to flight, and fishing boats on June 29th, the day of the great fisher St. Peter, to get rid of fish-scaring influences.68 The experience, that Truth and Wit are in Wine, that Wine is the Opener, the Revealer, together with the belief that in wine ancestral spirits pass into the drinker, explain how, among Greeks, Persians, Carthaginians, Scythians, Thracians, Germans, Celts, and Iberians, important questions were settled over wine. What was fixed over wine was more inviolable than their sober resolutions. Among the Babylonians, the drinking of Belshazar before his thousand lords when the writing appeared on the wall was ceremonial or religions, a loving cup to the
61 Potter's Antiquities, Vol. II. p. 281.
62 Op. cit. Vol. II. pp. 380, 388; Penny Encyclopædia, Article "Cameo."
65 Poona Stat. Act. Vol. I. pp. 512-516; Pliny's Natural History, Book vi. Chap. 22.
64 Smith's Christian Antiquities, p. 1454.
es Op. cit. p. 414.
66 Compare Shakespeare's Merry Wives, Act III, Scene 5. Also below, page 326, note 48. 67 Modi's Wine among Ancient Persians, p. 15. 68 Bassett's Sea Legends, p. 414.
es Potter's Antiquities, Vol. II. p. 404; Rawlinson's Herodotus, Vol. I. p. 274. For wine as the Heart-Opener the saying of Tacitus (Germania, XXII.) that in the freedom of festivity the Germana disclose the most secret emotions of the heart finds a parallel in the Urdu lines. "Let not the fumes of wine lay open the nature either of me or of thee." Kahin nashé mên khuôn, na jauhar | Idhar hamáré udhar tumhare.
