Hungarian Peasant Customs [antikvár]

PrefaceYoung habit, old practice is a Hungarian proverb. The things to which we get accustomed in our youth we are bound to practise in our old age. Not only people, whole countries practise the things they got accustomed to in their youth, even if the original meaning of these customs has long grown obsolete. A custom is simply a habit, which, like a childish game, we have to practise instinctively, though there is no sense in it just as, according to a Hungarian sajring, a hen scratches out of habit!Ethnology has discovered the ancient kernel and meaning of many customs, which seem quite senseless now-a-days, and it explains them in the light of the evidence yielded by these discoveries. These explanations are often in striking contradiction to our conventional ideas of morality. They do not proceed along that straight road which is expected of human deeds according to our present standards. But we need not despise them for this reason, because old customs, old morals, and at present these customs are mostly but frames, quite innocuous memories of a long passed childhood; they are no longer vehicles for those long forgotten morals which science has surmised in them. A wooden hook gets bent while still a young twig.In the course of history each newly established social and moral order not only obliterates ancient customs, but systematically persecutes and destroys them, possibly replacing them by new ones. Their ancient meanings get obliterated and forgotten, however important they may have been in their own time. After all according to Hungarian popular opinion even a horse's tail can be trained to stand upwards with sufficient patience and dogged perseverance.