QUEER OLD CUSTOMS.

Evening Post, Volume XLVI, Issue 25, 29 July 1893, Page 2 (Supplement)

QUEER OLD CUSTOMS.

Many queer old customs spring, says the Cornhill Magazine, from the almost immoral idea of the unfitness of iron for sacred or religious purposes. The Roman priests, for instance, mightn't be shaved with a steel razor, but only scraped on the face with a knife of bronze — a most inconvenient and painful implement, one would say, for the person experimented upon. But a rule like this evidently dates back to the transitional time when iron was only just beginning to supersede* bronze in ordinary life, aud whs felt to his too ne»F for any sacred purpobe. Even so, middle - aged people among ourselves can remember tho shock of surprise aud discomfort they felt when they first saw a church lighted with gas; and though we have all grown accustomed long since to that particular form of industrial profanation, I confess it would shock me myself, even now, to see the electric light introduced into a cathedral. Again, whenever an iron graving tool was brought into the sacred grove of the Arval Brethren at Rome, for the sake of cutting an inscription, an expiatory sacrifice of a lamb and a pig was offered to the gods or spirits of the grove for the indignity shown them by bringing the unholy thing into their consecrated precincts. Sometimes the priest or king himself may not even so much as touch the dubious metal. Thus the King of Corea at the present day mayn't go near it with his flesh, even in the direst extremity. This is an awkward restriction when surgical cases crop up, and shoWB us in a very graphic manner how uneasy lies the head that wears a crown among certain peoples ; for one Corean Kiug actually died of a tumour in his back, which might have been oasily lanced if only he'd hud the good luck to be an ordinary subject; but nobody about the Court dared to use a steel lancet on his sacred person, so he bore it like a martyr ; and another King suffered agonies from an abecess on his lip, till a wise physician called in a jester, who (unlike the jesters of our Western world) made the monarch ; laugh so heartily that the abscess | burst, and all went well again. In | such cases, I take it, the King is ac- ; counted the descendant of gods who never used iron ; and being himself a god like them, he mustn't pollute ■ his sacred person by couiiug- into ; contact with the unholy metal unknown to his ancostors