Primitive culture, vol. 1 (of 2)

They fear that the ‘Waterman’ (i.e. water-demon) would take away their luck in fishing, and drown themselves at the first opportunity.[153] This explanation of the prejudice against saving the water-spirit’s victim may be confirmed by a mass of evidence from various districts of the world. Thus, in discussing the doctrine of sacrifice, it will appear that the usual manner of making an offering to a well, river, lake, or sea, is simply to cast property, cattle, or men into the water, which personally or by its indwelling spirit takes possession of them.[154] That the accidental drowning of a man is held to be such a seizure, savage and civilized folk-lore show by many examples. Among the Sioux Indians, it is Unk-tahe the water-monster that drowns his victims in flood or rapid;[155] in New Zealand huge supernatural reptile-monsters, called Taniwha, live in river-bends, and those who are drowned are said to be pulled under by them;[156] the Siamese fears the Pnük or water-spirit that seizes bathers and drags them under to his dwelling;[157] in Slavonic lands it is Topielec (the ducker) by whom men are always drowned;[158] when some one is drowned in Germany, people recollect the religion of their ancestors, and say, ‘The river-spirit claims his yearly sacrifice,’ or, more simply, ‘The nix has taken him:’[159]—

From this point of view it is obvious that to save a sinking man is to snatch a victim from the very clutches of the water-spirit, a rash defiance of deity which would hardly pass unavenged. In the civilized world the rude old theological conception of drowning has long been superseded by physical explanation; and the prejudice against rescue from such a death may have now almost or altogether disappeared. But archaic ideas, drifted on into modern folk-lore and poetry, still bring to our view an apparent connexion between the primitive doctrine and the surviving custom.

As the social development of the world goes on, the weightiest thoughts and actions may dwindle to mere survival. Original meaning dies out gradually, each generation leaves fewer and fewer to bear it in mind, till it falls out of popular memory, and in after-days ethnography has to attempt, more or less successfully, to restore it by piecing together lines of isolated or forgotten facts. Children’s sports, popular sayings, absurd customs, may be practically unimportant, but are not philosophically insignificant, bearing as they do on some of the most instructive phases of early culture. Ugly and cruel superstitions may prove to be relics of primitive barbarism, for in keeping up such Man is like Shakespeare’s fox,