CONCLUSION

It is fairly obvious that the observance of tabooed and unlucky days must be included among the many superstitions which have retarded the progress of mankind. They hinder individual initiative and tend to prevent the undertaking of lengthy enterprises which may be interrupted by the recurrence of an unfavourable period. Their extensive development compels fitful, intermittent labour, rather than a steady and continuous occupation. The Burman, for example, “is so fettered by his horoscope and the lucky and unlucky days for him recorded therein, which are taught him in rhymes from childhood, that the character has been given him by strangers of alternate idleness and energy. But both are enforced by the numerous days and seasons when he may not work without disaster to himself. Unlucky days cause him so much fear that he will resort to all sorts of excuses to avoid business on them. Similarly, on lucky days he will work beyond his strength, because he is assured of success.”⁠[936] Again, it is said that Europeans in India usually fail to realize the great influence which ideas of lucky and unlucky days exert on the conduct of the people. Superstitious avoidance of unpropitious occasions will often explain the failure of the natives to obey a court summons or to keep their appointments with government officers.⁠[937] These remarks, by keen observers, are capable of a wide application to various primitive races. The belief in unfavourable seasons may even directly affect political and social progress, where, as in modern Ashanti and in ancient Rome, assemblies could not be held, or courts of justice stand open, or armies engage the enemy, when the unlucky day came round. It is equally obvious that all such beliefs play into the hands of the astrologer and magician, tending further to strengthen the bonds with which superstition enchains its votaries.

From the economic point of view it deserves to be pointed out how the extensive development of tabooed and unlucky days seriously limits production and thus lowers the efficiency of labour. In Hawaii the seasons of strict abstinence regularly observed during eight months of the year reached a total of seventy-two days, while from time to time still other tabu days were appointed by the priests.⁠[938] In Ashanti an old writer calculated that there were only from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty days in the year during which business of any importance could be safely undertaken.⁠[939] Few peoples have more holidays than the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Their religious festivals occupy more than half the year. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that the Hopi celebrate their longest and most important ceremonies during the months from harvest time to planting, when there is little work to be done. “Although the Pueblo farmer may thoroughly believe in his ceremonial system as efficacious, his human nature is too practical to consume the precious planting time with elaborate ceremonials.”⁠[940] In modern China and Korea so many festivals in honour of deities are observed as holidays that they take the place, to a certain extent, of the Sabbath institution.⁠[941] Among the ancient Egyptians the unlucky days varied in number according to the different months, six, for instance, occurring in Paophi, seven each in Choiak and Phamenoth, and five in Pharmuthi. It may be reckoned that “popular superstition rendered useless about one-fifth of the year.”⁠[942] The Athenian festivals are estimated to have occupied from fifty to sixty days of the year. The irregular distribution of these holidays throughout the months, and especially their congestion in spring and autumn, must have caused much interference with the routine of daily life.⁠[943] In some city-states the festivals were more numerous: at Tarentum, in the days of its prosperity, the people are said to have had more holidays than working days.⁠[944]⁠

In the old Roman calendar, out of three hundred and fifty-five days, nearly one-third (one hundred and nine) were marked as nefasti, that is, as unlawful for judicial and political business. These days belonged wholly to the gods, while eleven more days of the year were shared by the divine and the human inhabitants of the city.⁠[945] We know on the evidence of Cicero that in the last century of the republic the numerous days when courts could not sit had become a resource on which a wealthy criminal could speculate as a means of delaying and evading justice; while Suetonius enumerates among the praiseworthy reforms of Augustus the cutting-down of non-judicial days by thirty, “in order that crimes might not escape punishment or business be impeded by delay.”⁠[946] Of the dies nefasti sixty-one, including the Ides of every month, the Kalends of three months, and the Nones of July, were numbered in the republican calendar among the public festivals—feriæ publicæ—on which the state expected the citizens to abstain, as far as possible, from their private business and labour.⁠[947] But the number of rest days observed really reached a larger total, when we remember that, besides the extraordinary feriæ, proclaimed from time to time, there was a marked tendency during the last two centuries of the republic to extend over several days festivals to which originally only one day had been allotted. This was for the purpose of giving time for an elaborate programme of public games (ludi), consisting of chariot-races, stage plays, and other forms of popular amusement. As the Roman passion for holidays and their attendant spectacles increased, we find the number of days devoted to them rising from sixty-six in the reign of Augustus to eighty-seven in that of Tiberius, and, under Marcus Aurelius, to a hundred and thirty-five. By the middle of the fourth century their number had reached one hundred and seventy-five.⁠[948] For the lower classes at Rome the gladiatorial combats, chariot-races, and dramatic shows formed the chief pleasure of life. The once-sovereign people of Rome became a lazy, worthless rabble, fed by the state and amused with the games. Of them it was well said by an ancient satirist that they wanted only two things to make them happy—“bread and the games of the circus.”⁠[949]⁠

Many of the holy days in the religious calendar of Christendom were borrowed, as is well known, from the public festivals of ancient paganism. This must be the chief reason for the observance of so many non-working days during the Middle Ages. Their number was largely reduced in Protestant Europe as the result of the Reformation, which did away with the majority of saints’ days. In Catholic countries, however, there is still an excessive amount of time devoted to religious celebrations. Mexico, for instance, is described as “a land of holidays. Counting Sundays, there are one hundred and thirty-one in the Mexican calendar, and it is asserted that more than half of the people observe them all.... On certain of these days all Mexico takes to the festival, and it usually requires from one to three days for the peons to sober up and get back to regular work again.”⁠[950] The Greek Church, as a celebrated traveller and historian once pointed out, requires her followers to observe so many holy days “as practically to shorten the lives of the people very materially. I believe that one-third of the number of days in the year are ‘kept holy,’ or rather, kept stupid, in honour of the saints: no great portion of the time thus set apart is spent in religious exercises and the people don’t betake themselves to any animating pastimes, which might serve to strengthen the frame, or invigorate the mind, or exalt the taste.”⁠[951] In Russia commercial and educational progress is hindered by the multitude of saints’ days. “The dies nefas, when work is tabooed, becomes a serious handicap in the race of modern life. These saints’ days, together with the Sundays, rob the Russian of nearly one-third of his time, for they leave him only about two hundred and fifty days for work. He would sooner work on a Sunday than on a saint’s day.”⁠[952] In eastern Galicia, where a calendar is in use which permits the observance of the religious festivals of both the Roman and the Greek churches, the number of holidays or non-working days is considerably in excess of one hundred, rising in some districts to one hundred and fifty, and in others reaching the amazing total of two hundred.⁠[953] To what extremes the practice of abstaining from labour on holy days may extend is further illustrated in Abyssinia, where the numerous fasts and feasts are so strictly kept as to render about six months of the year prohibited for any secular employments.⁠[954]⁠

Human nature, it has been said, is always ready for the shift from fast to feast, from Sabbath to Saturnalia. To the student of primitive religion and sociology nothing is more interesting than the contemplation of that unconscious though beneficent process which has converted institutions, based partly or wholly on a belief in the imaginary and the supernatural, into institutions resting on the rock of reason and promoting human welfare. Though the origin of tabooed and unlucky days must be sought in gross superstition, sooner or later they acquire a secular character and may then be perpetuated as holidays, long after their earlier significance has disappeared. The transition, with all its subtle and manifold results on the organization of society, may be followed under our own eyes. The passage of the holy day into the holiday, beginning in the lower culture, promises to reach its culmination in the secularizing of all the great festivals of the Christian year. This evolutionary movement, whether for weal or woe, at least provides a singularly instructive illustration of the close relations between religion and social progress, which must ever impress the inquirer into the early history of mankind.