The folk-lore of China : and its affinities with that of the Aryan and Semitic…
"The folk-lore of China : and its affinities with that of the Aryan and Semitic…." by N. B. Dennys is a scholarly comparative folklore study written in the late 19th century. It surveys Chinese popular beliefs, superstitions, rituals, and legends and sets them alongside Aryan and Semitic traditions to show striking parallels and probable common roots. Organized systematically from life-cycle rites to omens, charms, ghosts, dragons, nature lore, legends, fables, and proverbs,
it argues that Chinese folk-belief is unusually pervasive across all classes and institutions. The work aims to be both a compendium of practices and a comparative argument about shared myth-making across cultures. The opening of the work explains that it compiles earlier articles, acknowledges limited access to sources, and thanks contributors, then makes the case that China is a vast, under-studied field for folklore, whose beliefs closely resemble Western ones in principle but dominate daily life from emperor to peasant. The introduction reviews European scholarship, urges a systematic plan (birth–marriage–death, days and seasons, omens, charms, the supernatural, legends, fables), notes the role of almanacs and cheap print in preserving lore, and advances the idea of a common origin with Aryan traditions, illustrated by courtly astrology and ubiquitous geomancy. Early chapters sample practices around birth (hour-of-birth charts and verses, fertility shoes or flowers from a child goddess, demon-frightening rites, taboos like not rocking an empty cradle, postnatal talismans), marriage (rings and betrothal tokens, sieving garments over fire, veils, symbolic altar objects, honeyed wine, candle omens, cakes, threshold rites, shoe symbolism, playful contests of dominance), and death (coffin customs, lights and “saining”-like rites, roof holes for the soul, white cock emblems, vigil beliefs, paper offerings, earth on the coffin, feng-shui graves, white mourning, and dread of disturbing burials). It then outlines lucky and unlucky days and seasons (a marked weekly “rest” day of Persian derivation, the moon festival, tabulated day-qualities, New Year “first-foot” and first-words omens, and a Chinese analogue to St. Swithin), before beginning a section on portents from daily mishaps and animals (oil spills, crows, magpies, dogs, cats, crowing hens, swallows, bats, owls). (This is an automatically generated summary.)
The folk-lore of China : and its affinities with that of the Aryan and Semitic races
Original Publication
London: Trübner and Co., 1876.
Note
"A series of articles contributed to the China review, and now republished with a few additions and corrections."
Credits
Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Reading Level
Reading ease score: 63.0 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read.
