The explanation of this Scottish rite is not quite so easy as that of some others. But I think it will be agreed that it is hardly possible to assign an intelligible meaning to it if it be not of the same order of thought as that expressed in the Bavarian, and perhaps also in the Dyak, and Gipsy rites. The empty dishes placed on the hearth, or on a table close beside the corpse, the attendants sitting with their hands in them, the completion of the performance by eating and drinking of food set on the table in the very place where the dishes have been, all point to a ceremonial banquet in which the food has a mysterious connection with the dead. There is no doubt something which this supposition does not fully explain—the sieve, for example, and the words of the songs; but we must remember that the dishes give their name to the rite, and are bound up with its essential elements, while there can be no doubt that it is in a state of decadence. Now when a ceremonial is decaying and passing gradually out of use, the non-essential portions first drop out and are replaced by others, or altogether omitted. This, therefore, is what we should have expected to occur to this Lowland rite.
The Lowland, the Dyak, and the Gipsy rites, however, are all more archaic, and therefore more significant in form than the custom of doles of money and food at funerals, which was identified by Aubrey in the passages I have quoted, as well as by more recent writers, as a survival of
- ↑ Henderson, Folk-lore of the Northern Counties, 53, quoting the Wilkie MSS.
