ORAL FUNERAL RITES IN IRELAND AND ELSEWHERE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3143, 13 November 1922, Page 2

ORAL FUNERAL RITES IN IRELAND AND ELSEWHERE.

One ponders (if one happens to have been born and bred in some inland country village) as the motor hearse and the attendant car speed through the traffc of the*town, whether it woijjd not he wiser or more human to revert to primitive manners—whether the "keening" of the Irish in the West or the folk funeral feasts of Teuton and Latin, are not more civilised than our unseemly hurrying away of the clay tenement? The ethnologist*) are now greatly concerned with the primitive tribes in Australia as material for the investigation of those customs among men which seem to have sprung from a sense ot duty to the tribe or community. M. .Marcel Mauss in the Journal cle Psvciiologi© tells of the crying for the dead, or keening, which is general in south-eastern Queensland. The keening lasts as long as the interval between tho first and second' burial. Fixed hours are assigned for it. For about ten minutes before the sun rises and before the sun sets, the entnv camp to which the dead man 'belonged begins to wail and lament. These cries and groans are often melodious and rhythmical. Compare this description with the Irish wake in Synge's "Rulers to the Sea'' : . Tho door opens softly and old women begin to come in—they aft? keening softly and swaying themselves with a. slow movement. In Australia, as in Ireland, the oral funeral rites are exclusively delegateed to the women. The mother, the sisters. and especially the widow intone the recitative of 'the dirge to which the other women reply in chorus. Synge. whether instinctively or as an actual observation, followed this rite in the play and Maurva. tho mother, tells the storv of tho"soiis "who're all gone now, aiid there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . . I'll have no call now to be going down and yetting holv water in the dark night after Samhaiii, and 1 won't care what way the sea is when the other women will ho keening." The Australian mother in the same way would curse the enemy or force ot nature that robbed her or Death itself. Some of the chants are more elemental and scarcely go beyond exclamation. affirmative 'or interrogative, as: "Where i- my nephew, the only one I haver" To ibis the wife ot the dead man answers: "My husband is dead." There i.s nothing elegiac and lyric, but simple descriptions or recitals ot facts as if bearing testimony that the tribe is not to blame. There is never the touch of sentiment of the Irish sisters: Caihlcen: "Ah, Nora, isn't it a better thing to think of him floating that way to the far north, and no one to keen him but the black hags that do lie flying on the sea." Or the Irish mother's: He's gone now and when the black night is falling I'll have no son left me in the world. The chorus of the women keening in the Australian tribes has a definite meaning which is now lost to us in tho Irish equivalent. M. Mauss quotes Strehlow to the effect that the cry of banban chanted in a low key by tho Arunta and Loritza mourners is a command to the evil cause of death to depart from the dead. The intrusion of every-day cares is absent from the Australian rites, but there is gross vulgarity in their imprecations against the Evil Magician who has brought death to the tribe. The Irish humor is veiled and full of character. The sister in the "Riders of the Sea" says to an old man : "Maybe yourself and Eamon would make a coffin when the sun rises. We have fine white boards herself bought. God help her .... and I have a newcake yon can cat while you'll be working:" The Old Man : "Arc there nails with them?"

Cathleen (the sister) : "There are not. Colum; we didn't think of the nails." Another man : "It's a great wonder she wouldn't think of the nails, and all the coffins she's seen made already." The Australian women of the western tribes sometimes scratch and punch each other in order to excite proper moans of pain, but in Ireland! tbe keening, «sryes the more merciful purpose of bringing on the oblivion of exhaustion in the distracted mourners.

In all of the primitive people a certain pleasure is felt in the proper observance: of these public funeral cere*monies—at its highest point at outlet for the personal emotion and at its lowest ebb a satisfaction of the mere animal gregarious instinct. A curious instance of a frank avowal of this latter sentiment, is current in the jest books of the Bavarian Tyrol ese. A peasant returning from his wife's funerail mass to the house where the funeral "baked meats" are to be served tells the driver : "Don't put me with my mother-in-law fcmst frcut nu'ch nit/le gauze Leieh (the whole: wake'll be" spoilt) !" Nearer home, any dweller among the Southern negroes can hear witness to the impossibility of keeping a cook or nurse away from any funeral whatsoever within a radius of ten miles and to the equal impossibility of divorcing them from their sable weeds, if any relative to the ninth degree has involuntarily given any plausible excuse for mourning. The Appalachian Mountain people follow tbe Australian ritual in so far that the body of the dead is carried on the shoulders of the future avengers who are bis blood kin. Hut the wife of tho Southern feudist, like Sinding's sculptured widow, crouches in ambush with the weapon of reprisal instead of waving green branches to exorcise the Evil Spirit from the departed master, as with the Tullv River tribe.