| Curiosities of Olden Times Contributor(s): Baring-Gould, Sabine (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: ISBN-13: 9798700250535 Publisher: Independently Published OUR PRICE: $8.09 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2021 * Not available - Not in print at this time * |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Classics - Fiction | Literary |
| Physical Information: 0.31" H x 7.01" W x 10" (0.58 lbs) 144 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The usage is one that commends itself to us as an outward and visible sign of the inward sentimentof bereavement, and not one in ten thousand who adopt mourning has any idea that it everpossessed a signification of another sort. And yet the correlations of general custom-of mourningfashions, lead us to the inexorable conclusion that in its inception the practice had quite a differentsignification from that now attributed to it, nay more, that it is solely because its primitive meaninghas been absolutely forgotten, and an entirely novel significance given to it, that mourning is stillemployed after a death.Look back through the telescope of anthropology at our primitive ancestors in their naked savagery, and we see them daub themselves with soot mingled with tallow. When the savage assumed clothesand became a civilised man, he replaced the fat and lampblack with black cloth, and this black clothhas descended to us in the nineteenth century as the customary and intelligible trappings of woe.The Chinaman when in a condition of bereavement assumes white garments, and we may be prettycertain that his barbarous ancestor, like the Andaman Islander of the present day, pipeclayed hisnaked body after the decease and funeral of a relative. In Egypt yellow was the symbol of sorrow fora death, and that points back to the ancestral nude Egyptian having smeared himself with yellowochre |
