Superstition, Custom, and Ritual Magic: Harry M. Hyatt's Approach to the Study of FolkloreAuthor(s): Wayland D. Hand and Frances M. TallyReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 16, No. 1/2 (Jan. - Aug., 1979), pp. 28-43Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3813985 .Accessed: 18/01/2012 17:02

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SUPERSTITION, CUSTOM, AND RITUAL MAGIC: HARRY M. HYATT'S

APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE*

Wayland D. Hand and Frances M. Tally

Students of folklore using Harry Middleton Hyatt's Folk-Lorefrom Adams CountyIllinois for the first time soon learn that this impressive collection from America's heartland is not what the title suggests. It is, rather, an exhaustive compilation of popular beliefs and superstitions for the area specified, together with a considerable number of folk legends and customs and a reasonably full survey of folk medical beliefs and practices. A more detailed examination of the Adams County corpus reveals that, in addition to the usual kind of short entries characteristic of the genre, many folk beliefs are illustrated with extended narrative accounts. Likewise, folk customs and rituals are set down in great detail with regard to time, circumstance, and the pur- pose and meaning of the particular item covered. In the main, all of these Adams Ceunty narrative traditions-whether legends, or cus- toms and rituals were taken down verbatim and are properly en- closed ill quotation marks.

When Hyatt began the Adams County collection in the early 1 930s there were only a few published collections of folklore from individual states and regions, and folklore as a discipline was not conceived in the comprehensive way that it was later on in the 1 930s and the 1 940s when folklore became an academic Fleld irl American universities and col- leges. Disregarding Allsopp's two-volume Folklore of Romantic Arkansas,

* The authors are indebted to Harry Middleton Hyatt, Anne Pogge, his secretary and research assistant of many yearn, and to Michael E. Bell for supplying much of the factual data upon zlwhich thiss study rests.

28

HYATT AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 29

which came out in 1931s1 and which was not well known to folklorists, there were only three other titles in print that could serve as models for a general state or regional collection of folklore. These were Arthur Huff Fauset's Folklore from Nova Scotia (1931),2 Hudson's sampling of folklore from Mississippi,3 and the excellent collection of folklore from Maryland which the American Folklore Society brought out in 1925.4 The Nova Scotia and Maryland volumes were in Hyatt's library, but the Mississippi collection, done in an early offset printing process from the author's manuscript, was always difficult to Elnd in the book trade, and Hyatt did not know it.

Hyatt's difficulty in selecting a more descriptive title is not hard to understand. In these general collections of folklore mentioned above, and in several others for various states across the country that have been published down to our own time, one would be hard put to formulate what could be regarded as the normal limits and the proper coverage of folklore as a field.5 In Hyatts time as now, folklore was too often made to stand for just about anything that didn't pass muster as scientific fact, had no objective reality, or lacked a literary or historical pedigree.

The conception for the title of Hyatt's own collection apparently came from Whitney and Bullock, even though the Maryland volume does offer a somewhat broader panorama of the field of folklore than does Hyatt's Illinois collection. One of the earliest collections of popu- lar beliefs and superstitions, Kentucky Superstitions by Daniel Lindsey Thomas and Lucy Blayney Thomas, a volume of 3,954 items published by the Princeton University Press in 1920, was the practical working guide and field manual for Folk-Lore from Adams County Iltinois.

As for collections of folk beliefs and superstitions, which were his sole concern, Hyatt knew and used the standard collections of Bergen which had appeared before the turn of the century,6 and Fogel's excellent Pennsylvania German study that was published in 1915.7 For his work in Negro folklore, Hyatt depended heavily on Puckett's Folk Beliefs °f the Southern Negro,8 which came out soon after the young clergyman had entered the Episcopalian ministry, and had begun to broaden his intellectual base from comparative religion to ethnology and anthropology and finally to folklore. Hyatt was later to appreciate Vance Randolph's memorable Ozark Superstitions ( 1947),9 and to secure the final two volumes of the Brown Collection which provided for the first time a referencing medium for American popular beliefs and superstitions, in addition to presenting an estimable collection for North Carolina,l° second in size for the country only to HyattSs own

30 Wayland D. Hand and Frances M. 7 ally

Illinois collection. Hyatt's interest in Negro folklore, Flrst awakened by Puckett, continued to grow during this period, with systematic read- ings in Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, and other collectors and writers in the field of black folklore.

Hyatt was never an academic folklorist, and made no pretenses to being one, even after his epochal Adams County collection had come out and had gone into an expanded second edition thirty years later.1 1 His interest in the study of man sprang from his love of primitive religion and mythology and from his study of the primal instincts that are manifest the world over, even among people in enlightened socletles.

Hyatt came to folklore as part of a larger concern with cultural history, but especially with an interest in primitive man, and with manSs preoccupation with the forces that rule his life. This involvement with primitive religion led Hyatt to seek answers to life's most profound questions. These answers came only in part from his study of compara- tive religion; further light had to be gained from a study of systems of magic that operated outside accepted religious creeds. This part of Hyattss scholarly training came largely from self tuition, priIlcipally in the fields of anthropology and ethnology. To this end he acquired a select library, and sought the help and guidance of professionals in the field whenever he could. During his student days at Oxford, for example, he was in touch with Fellows of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. Reading, reading, and more reading was the prescription for one who had had little formal classroom education in these two fields that focus on man at the most fundamental level. Anthropology and ethnology, of course, were natural corollaries to Hyatt's grounding in comparative religion, mythology, and literary history. Taken together, these various fields placed at Hyatt's com- mand the necessary tools to study culture in its broadest ramiElcations, and to perceive universal principles that underlie all human activity. In this regimen of systematic reading, he was conversant, for example, withJacob Grimm'sDeutsche Mythologie (1835),12 and with E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture,l3 relishing the famous English anthropologist's basic formulations and his trenchant expository style. Hyatt made constant use of Frazer's Golden Bough,l4 and it was from this great comparative work, perhaps more than from any other, that he came to think of cultural phenomena as being world-wide in their distribution. Far from being disturbed at the fact that items from modern civilized society were juxtaposed to materials found among primitives, Hyatt found in this parallelism a confirmation to the view that basic human

HYA ltl AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 31

feelings evoke similar responses in all segments of society irrespective of differing ways of life. Criticisms against Frazer's work for its lack of "psychic unity" had not been raised in Hyatt's day. Frazer's Folk-lore in the OZd Testament also laid a strong hold on the young clergymanl5

whose theological training and pastoral discipline were not too confin- ing to admit folklore to the cultural equation at the level of religion. Among English folklorists, Hyatt read and admired Edwin Sidney HartlandS and he organized his categorization of folklore along the lines of Charlotte Sophia Burne's Handbook of FoZkZore.l6 This work derives in part, of course, from Sabine Baring-Gouldis '4Story Radi- cals," and ultimately from the formulations of J. G. von Hahn in his Griechische und albanesische Marchen.l7 Hyatt possessed some of the volumes of the ;'County Folk-Lore Series8' of the Folk-Lore Society. It was in this filne series of field texts and published extracts under the caption Goblindom" that he read about the work of the devil and witches, as well as about other creatures of lower mythology. These readings were augmented by recourse to the writings of Montague Summers on witchcraft and the standard works of Margaret Murray.

Of all the works mentioned above, howevers none made a deeper impression upon him than did Arthur Bernard Cook's masterful work on Zeus.t8 Here it was that he saw the wedding of mythology and folklore, and the author's successful use of archaeology, epigraphy, philology, iconography literary history, and the many other tools in the classicistSs armamentarium that bring to bear on every problem a full and meaningful analysis. Hastingst Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics was a constant companion in his readingl9 and it was this magnif- icent work of scholarship that opened up source books and formal bibliographies for his reading. Earlier, before he ever came to the formal study of primitive religion Hyatt had read Ernst Haeckels Riddle of the Universe, a work of biology and embryology that sharpened his mind and opened his vision. This controversial work on evolution- ary principles of development was not to deter him from pursuirlg the ministry. His spiritual preceptors, to whom he confessed his doubts about the claims of religion, bade him to continue with his clerical duties, and urged him to keep an open mind as he proceeded.

During young Hyatt's brief Chicago period at the Western Theological Seminary, 1917-1918, he came under the tutelage of a scholar in the field of Semitic Studies who had a profound influence on him, particularly as regards religious worship at nature shrines trees, springs, caves, mountain peaks, and so on. Hyatt knew of the work of Paul Carus and other writers associated with this controversial scholar

32 Wayland D. Hand and Franses M. Tallw1

at the Open Court Publishing Company in the Illinois metropolis, but never did meet Carus.

Hyatt's religious studies involved readings in the great religions of the world, but the only intensive study he himself made was on the Abyssinian Christian community. His The Church of Abyssinia, which was published in 1928, exemplifies Hyatt's interest in things remote from his own American heritage. What he perceived as common cultural manifestations in various parts of the world must also be repeated, at least in kind, he thought, by ways of life to be encountered among his own fellow Americans, and among his own beloved kin. lt was Hyatt's study of genealogy and family history, as a matter of fact, that led him into anthropology and folklore in the Elrst place. By the time he entered divinity school in 1917, young Hyatt had compiled over two thousand pages of family history. His interviews involved not only relatives and townspeople, but young people and children as well. It was at the level of stories and storytelling in his study of family history that Hyatt got into folklore; it was this same experience with family roots and valuesften exemplifUled in verse, song, and story that led him as an older man to collect the folklore of his native town and county.

There was one other important external factor that led directly to his study of local culture in Adams County. It was the creation in 1932 of the Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, a fund granting institution with far-flung scientific interests, ambitious publication programs, and an illustrious panel of Fellows from all over the world. This scholarly enterprise constituted a grand backdrop for the study of comparative religion and mythology, and for the investigation of comparative cul- ture in its broadest outlines. Under the auspices of the foundation, Harry Hyatt, now in his prime years, pursued his thesis of the recapitu- lation of universal principles and of the recurrence of basic human traits everywhere. In 1932 he began to collect intensively the folklore of a single area. His native Adams County, where he and his own people were well known proved to be an ideal laboratory for the testing of his thesis of the local reflection of universal manifestations.

Business of the Hyatt Foundation, of which he was the director and the moving spirit, kept him in New York, but he was able to make frequent trips to Quincy, and to train his sister, Minnie Hyatt Small, widowed some twenty years earlier, to begin work on the Hyatt collec- tion. The richness of the material was at once apparent, and what had initially been a modest intention now broadened into a major undertak- ing. Standing at some 2,500 entries by 1933, the Adams County collec- tion was reckoned to be the third largest in the country.20 Fired on by

HYA1T AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 33

the expanding collection, and by the new and important material that was coming to view week by week, the collectors, now joined by another Hyatt sister, Emma Hyatt Rothgeb and by a niece, Frances Rothgeb, could eventually compile the incredible number of 10,049 entries.

Minnie Hyatt Small's account of the collectirlg activity in and around Quincy between 1932 and 1934, or thereabouts, reads almost like a diary** Incentive for the venture was Harry Hyatt's disappoint- ment that there had been no book of folklore produced for the state of Illinois, despite the fact that many states by that time had set about to collect their respective popular traditions. By setting an initial goal of 4C000 entries, Hyatt and Small would surpass the Kentucky collection of superstitions of the Thomases, and would go well beyond collections of Fogel for the Pennsylvania German country and Whitney and Bul- lock for Maryland. Minnie began by setting down folk beliefs and traditions she had remembered from her mother and grandmother. Soon she was collecting from her German maid and then she went to visit a woman who had lived on a plantation during the Civil War. At the end of a week's time she had recorded a hundred items The next week she collected from an old German woman who brought vege- tables to her house, and from this woman's husband, who knew all kinds of witch stories, particularly those that had to do with the be- witchment of cows. This man knew a witch in Melrose just south of Quincy, who came to the fence one day to offer him some cookies while he was plowing. The man took the cookies, but burned them so as not to fall under the witchis spell. This German vegetable peddler also put Minnie in touch with some more German women, but told her to avoid a certain one who could cause her harm, perhaps turn her into a cat. Things worked out all right7 however, because by then Minnie had made a point of not visiting an unknown informant without a reference from a friend. This witch referred her to another woman suspected of being a witch who, in reality, was a family friend. Minnie was astonished at the number of people who were thought to be witches. To please her informants she carried a rabbit's foot to keep from falling victim to hoodoo. By this time she had come to take a reasoned view of every- thing, and had learned to discount the rampant witch suspicions a little. In a month's time the Adams County collection had grown to two hundred items. One woman who disavowed knowing any old-time beliefs at all, found herself reciting twenty-two items in response to

* See "Letter oJC Minnie Hyatt Small to Harry M. Hyatt Describing Her Work on Folklore from Adams County Illinois,"pp. 97-119.

34 Wayland D. Hand and Frances M. Tally

some beliefs which Mrs. Small had shared. Thus it went with the

German community. Finally, through friends, Minnie was able to meet

an elderly black woman, who proved to be not only a treasure trove of

folk beliefs and superstitions, but was instrumental in introducing

Minnie to members of her own circle of friends. This woman was to

contribute fifty new items right off, and Minnie returned time and

again to collect much of this woman's repertoire before the old lady

took sick and died. Minnie's attendance at the funeral opened up many

new contacts among the black people of Quincy.

She collected at the Soldiers and Sailors Home with good effect;

also among bench sitters in Washington Park. For trips to outlying

places she was occasionally taken by her niece, Frances Rothgeb.

Out-of-town trips were made by public transportation facilities, espec-

ially the railroad. Mention is made of collecting trips to Melrose and

Payson to the south and east of Quincy, and to Coatsburg, some fifteen

miles northeast. A trip to Bay Island, up-river, provided a whole new

adventure, and brought in additional valuable items. Harry Hyatt has

said that although the bulk of the Adams County collection came from

Quincy and environs, material came in from all parts of the county,

which comprises some 840 square miles in all.

The passion for the work grew with each new experierlce, and

Minnie found herself breaking off club and social activities so as to be

able to spend more time in her newly-found work. Even Sunday

afternoons were given over to collecting, and Mrs. Small could fre-

quently be seen taking down notes on front porches in different parts

of town. Eventually she made her way to some of the poorer parts of

town, and to places not ordinarily frequented by unaccompanied wo-

men. Dump City and Hog Lane in the backwater sections of Quincy

were not out of bounds for her. She collected in fishermen?s shacks,

and on one occasion sat on an old wagon wheel in a blacksmith's shop to

record the sayings of the blacksmith who was fabled for his stories.

Once she even went to a notorious establishment on Broadway to

collect some unusual items from a woman there that she had heard

about. In these efforts she was steadfastly supported by Harry, who,

later on in his researches in the East and the South, was to shun no place

at all if he thought it would be fruitful as a source of black folklore for

his projected Hoodoo work. Referrals came in the most unusual ways. An old black woman, for

example, put Mrs. Small in contact with an Irish woman who had a

particularly rich stock in trade of stories. Along with the longer items in

the collection which are often labeled "Negro" or "German," there is a

HYATT AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 35

good number marked "Irish." These entries came from this first con- tact.

By the time Minnie Small had collected the first 4,000 items, many of the informants had died, and few remained when the Adams County collection was actually published in 1935. After the magic number had been reached, a goal of 1,000 additional items was estab- lished. This process was repeated at the urging of Harry until 8,000 items were in hand. In due course the magic number had risen to 10,000 items. This material included, of course, numerous items that Harry had collected before ever enlisting the help of his sisters, but which he did not work into the Adams County collection until he started to classify the material as the great compendium began to take shape. The basic stock was augmented by many a choice item which he continued to collect in his own comings and goings about Quincy on his frequent trips back home from New York. He solicited successfully in stores, public buildings, and churches, and even on the streets, but found that there were often too many distractions when groups of people would gather around on the corner to listen. It was during a sustained collecting trip in the northern part of Adams County after the appearance of Folk-Loretrom Adams County Illinois, vol. I (hereafter abbreviated as FACI), that, sensing the wealth of folklore around him, Hyatt decided to bring out an enlarged second edition.2l Minnie Hyatt Small's help in bringing out the Adams County collection is duly acknowledged in the preface to FACI I (p. XVI), but Hyatt still con- tinued to praise her work. Recently he summed up her contribution with some heartfelt and nostalgic words: "She was the greatest assistant I ever had."22

The success of the collecting venture of the Hyatts would not have been possible without the good will which the Hyatt family enjoyed through the reputation and wide circle of friends of Samuel Seger Hyatt ( 1855-1924), sire of the Hyatt clan. The elder Hyatt had worked long years for a tobacco firm in St. Louis, commuting back and forth to Quincy on weekends. When the company later changed hands he returned to Quincy, sold insurance, and finally went into politics. He served in the Illinois legislature for a seven-year period, 1917-1924, and had also represented his fellow townsmen in Quincy in various municipal and civic capacities. At one time he served on the city police commission. Samuel Hyatt's identiElcation with liberal causes, and with the common people gave him a broad constituency and won him countless friends. Young Harry himself served as a deputy police officer one summer, an experience which gave him his first opportu-

36 Wayland D. Hand and Frances M. Tally

nity as a young man to come into contact with people whose lives were lived somewhat on the margins of society.

The success of Folk-Lorefrom Adams County Illinois was immediate, and Hyatt almost at once made plans for a revised and an enlarged edition, as we have said. The order and classiElcation of the new edition remained essentially intact, but frequent headings within the text itself made the second edition easier to use. Items with both positive and negative aspects were joined into single entries, and other economies of presentation were effected. In one instance, for example, twenty-seven individual statements were combined into a single treatment. Where he could, Hyatt gave the ethnic background of the informant, and if the item has special interest, he was at pains to quote it verbatim, without refining the language in any way. Since Negroes had been completely assimilated in that part of Illinois, there is no Negro dialect as such in the entries. The introduction of technical words in the headings of FACI II are of Hyatt's own doing. These are scholarly flourishes, to be sure, and the use of the term embryo for an unborn baby in the matter of sex determination must derive from his thinking in the days when he read the great embryologist Haeckel.

The most notable enlargements in FACI II are made in areas that interested Hyatt in an intimate and personal way, notably in sections on witchcraft and magic, folk medicine, birth, infancy, childhood, and the like. One can see Harry Middleton Hyatt, the scholar, at his best in the treatment of witchcraft near the end of the volume. His treatment of the "Witch Wreath" (pp. 855-873), for example, is exhaustive, and the section on "Protection Against Witches" (pp. 873-918) is a classic example of the use of the background and detail necessary to present legerlds in a matter-of-fact and believable way. Likewise, numerous entries under "Spirits" are in reality more legends than folk beliefs per se, because these accounts are full of the detail required by legend to address the need for historical and geographical fixity.23 T hese ghostly transactions often occupy from a third to a half of a page, and a few in FACI I run to a full page. A few representative illustrations from FACI II show how faithfully these requirements of legend narrative for credibility are met: 15619. "I lived in a house at Twenty-Sixth and Maine years ago. It is torn down now and the Madison School is on the grounds. That house was haunted...."; 15594. "Years ago up on Honey Creek out in the woods near Mendon an old woman died. She had some money and had buried it in the cellar...."; 15476. "My husband and his first wife were living in a haunted house out near Plainville...."; 15467. '4We had a friend that lived down in South

HYATT AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 37

Bottom near Quincy twenty years ago. . . ."; 15433. "We were living up here on a farm in the North Bottom about thirty-five years ago (1903) near Meyer....", and so forth. The witch stories often exhibit this same concern for detail. Two examples will suffice to show the need for a proper setting and mood for the tale: 16190. "I remember this well. Fifty years ago (1889) there were two farmers (between Camp Point and Clayton) living right close to each other... ."; 16203. "About fifty years ago (1885) out near Mill Creek Bridge an old woman lived on a hill, and everyone thought she could put a spell on you...."

It is in these longer accounts that the geographical spread of the Adams County collection is best seen. Dozens of small towns, not mentioned in connection with Minnie Hyatt Small's collecting trips and Harry's occasional out-of-town forays, are found in entries themselves as a way of providing a setting for legends and other narrative ac- counts. Among these sm-all towns and settlements one notes the follow- ing: Mendon, Melrose, Ursa, Liberty, Fall Creek, Meyer, Plainville, Marblehead, Kingston, Kinderhook, Barry, La Grange. Numerous towns in adjoining Illinois counties are mentioned, as well as many towns and settlements across the Mississippi River in Missouri. These out-of-state entries are always properly indicated.

Hyatt was attracted to these Adams County legends and other narrative accounts dealing with death, ghostlore, and the realm of the dead because they involved magical and supernatural elements; he was likewise attracted to the stories dealing with witchcraft, magic, and conjury. Religious miracles, vivid counterparts of secular magic, were seen in the beliefs and customs of conception and birth, but they were to be seen more particularly throughout the whole body of lore dealing with the human body and folk medicine. Sacred magic was visible in animal and plant husbandry, and could be noted also in the weather at seedtime and harvest.

It was clear to Hyatt as the great Adams County collection took shape that miracle and magic, taken together, was the one intrinsic element that set folk belief and custom apart from all other kinds of folklore. Magic and ritual were merely extensions of these two basic forms, and magical principles and magical objects could be discerned in the whole corpus of folklore springing from folk belief and custom. It was in this world of magic and fantasy that he came to know, for instance, of the special times of day to carry out ritual acts. For different kinds of customary or ritual acts choices ranged between midnight, cockcrow, dawn, midday, or sundown. Likewise, there were important days and religious feasts that the officiant must observe, such as Friday,

38 Wayland D. Hand and Frances Mt Tally

Good Friday, Easter, May Day, St. John's Eve, All Hallows, and the like. Phases of the moon, signs of the zodiac, and the weather itself usually figured in these calculations. For crucial exertions the person seeking help must be in proper physical shape and in the right frame of mind to enlist outside powers. Whether the magical office in question should be carried out on a fasting stomach, amid sexual abstinence, or by with- drawal to a sequestered spot all of these things were part of the magical equation. Place and orientation were important as was the distinction between acts involving movement toward the left or right, or directions forward or backward, clockwise or counter-clockwise. Numinous places should be sought out: crossroads, boundaries, cemeteries, churchyards, bridges, mounds, caves, streams, and water- courses. Indoors one spoke of cellars, attics, closets, and areas under porches, no less than under thresholds, rather than more frequently used parts of the house. Success of a magical undertaking might rest on secrecy or silence, or, by way of contrast, might hinge on the recitation of verbal charms, or on onomastic magic. In these customary observ- ances and in these ritual acts one discerns a curious syncretism of sacred and profane elements. Apotropaic measures to combat ghosts, witches, or the creatures of lower mythologys for example, may involve objects made of iron, a substance venerated from heathen antiquity to the present day, or simple stones, pieces of earth, or sticks of wood. Side by side with these magical objects in the believer's arsenal, however, the Christian cross, prayer books, and other holy utensils are likewise to be found. Shiny pebbles found in the brook, unspoiled in nature's bosom from the dawn of time, or a knot sloughed from a grizzled oak, are used in magical rituals with the same assurance as rosaries, mezuzahs, and other man-made religious amulets. A cast feather from a bird- buzzard, magpie, owl, or whatever-similarly, may be employed along with the most neatly embroidered scapularies and prayer cloths. As a man of the cloth, knowledgeable in the miracles and sacred objects of the church, Reverend Hyatt was quick to sense also the immanent power of natural objects, and to realize at the same time how complete had been the blending of sacred miracle and profane magic within parts of the Christian community.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Hyatt's collecting and re- search, however, particularly in the Hoodoo volumes, is the notable enlargement of the medical pharmacopeia,24 and the systematic cataloguing of the natural and man-made objects employed to magical ends. This great work reveals for the filrst time the pervasiveness of magic and magical thinking in representative segments of black Amer-

HYATT AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 39

ica. Important to note in this regard is the fact that collateral work in the field of popular beliefs and superstitions in this country shows that the belief in magic is shared in varying ways by people from all ethnic backgrounds. Of the great collections now being edited, the Newbell Niles Puckett Collection of Ohio Popular Beliefs and Superstitions, complete with an ethnic finding list, will put the Negro component in its proper perspective and provide the base for interracial studies in folk custom and ritual. Hyatt's influence on these ongoing studies over the past forty years has been great. The Adams County collection as well as the more ambitious Hoodoo venture have been logical parts of one grand and consistent effort.

When Harry Middleton Hyatt visited the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore at UCLA in 1973 there was ample time to talk with him about the Adams County collection and about his interest in popular beliefs and superstitions. It was soon apparent that he cared little for the common run of superstitions. They piqued his interest only if they involved magic and symbolism, and if they went to the heart of human fear and apprehension, no less than to elation and the exaltation of the human spirit. He frequently remarked, "I'm not interested in the common stuff!" From this mental and spiritual per- spective, and from the course of his scholarly development and career since the appearance of the first edition of the Adams County work, the answer is clear as to why the collecting and reasearch for the Hoodoo volumes became the consllming preoccupation of Hyatt's life. He wanted to produce for America a body of primitive thought and magic that could compare with materials of this kind, found not only in different parts of Europe, but elsewhere in the world.

With this thought in mind, and with the rich garnerings of Negro folklore in Illinois as a basis for more intensive penetration into the field? Hyatt began to collect Negro folklore in New Jersey and elsewhere along the eastern seaboard. Soon he would venture farther south, and would ultimately collect black folklore all the way to the Gulf. This exciting venture, which involved almost half a dozen differ- ent collecting trips between 1936 and 1940, is treated elsewhere in the pages of this special issue of theJournal. In this connection, however, it is important to note that the staging ground for these extensive collect- ing trips of the late 1930s and up until the outbreak of World War II was not located in any teeming black metropolis in the East. Rather, it must be affirmed that the basis for Hyatt's future work had been laid, and the course set, in a rural county in Illinois. Here it was that he and his fellow collectors worked among the descendants of about 2,000

40 Wayland D. Hand and Frances M. Tally

Negroes who had found their way to Quincy and other parts of Adams County after the Civil War. Hyatt was right in believing, of course, that a more intricate system of belief and magic could be found in urban settings where the pressures of life were more intense, and where resort to clandestine ways of life and even to criminal activity was more likely. From this point of view, it is interesting to note that whereas considerable ghostlore and witchcraft in the Adams County collection was gathered in small towns and settlements throughout the county, most of the hoodoo and black magic appears to have come from Quincy itself. Far from being a large city, Quincy, even in the 1930s with its somewhat fewer than 40,000 inhabitants, neverthless exemplified some of the social complexity and malaise found in larger urban centers in Illinois and elsewhere in America.

It is too difficult to trace out the individual threads of black folklore held in common by Hyatt's Negro informants in Adams County and his black contacts in the South, but one can see a striking replication of Adams County material in the more intricate and diffuse five-volume Hoodoo work. When the index to Hoodoo, laboriously com- piled by Michael Edward Bell and Frances M. Tally, is complete, it will be possible to confirm these impressions. The proposed index of FACI II by Frances Tally, begun by Harry Hyatt himself in the 1930s, will open up both works for closer scrutiny, and will make available ample materials for the study of black folklore in both rural and urban American settings. In his vision to collect and record these basic human documents before their relevance to present-day American culture was recognized, Harry Middleton Hyatt proved to be decades ahead of his time as a scholar and social thinker. As a prolegomenon to the great Hoodoo work, and as an indispensable companion piece for the study of black folklore in the United States, Folk-Lore from Adams County Illinois in its own right is a major source book for the general study of Amer- ican popular beliefs and superstitions in the United States. As indicated in the title of this article, magic and ritual are crucial primitive compo- nents that have persisted to our own time. Belief, custom, ritual, magic, and legend are fields to which Harry Middleton Hyatt was to devote a scholarly lifetime.

Universitzy of California Los Angeles, California

HYA lwl AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 41

NOTES

l Frederick William Allsopp, Folklore of Romantic Arkansas, 2 vols. (New York: The Grolier Society, 1931).

2 Arthur Huff Fauset, Folklore from Nova Scotia, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 24 (New York: The American Folklore Society, 1931).

3 Arthur Palmer Hudson, Specimens of Mississippi Folk-Lore, mimeo- graphed (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1928).

4 Annie Weston Whitney and Caroline Canfield Bullock, Folk-Lore from Maryland, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 18 (New York: American Folklore Society, 1925).

5 Collections from Iowa: EarlJ. Stout,FolklorefromIowa, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 29 (New York: American Folklore Society, 1936); New York: Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner,Folklorefrom the Schoharie Hills, New York (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1937); Illinois: John W. Allen, Legends S Lore of Southern Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1963); Kansas: Samuel J. Sackett and William E. Koch, Kansas Folklore (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); and Georgia: Ronald G. Killion and Charles T. Waller, A Treasury of Georgia Folklore (Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing Co., 1972) kept pretty much to the early models of Whitney-Bullock and Fauset. The Georgia collection was made under W.P.A. auspices in the 1940s. In Harold W. Thompson's anthology of New York State folklore, Body, Boots S Britches (1939; reprint ed., New York: Dover Publications, 1962), and Horace Beck'sFolklore of Maine (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957), an attempt was made to reach a wide popular audi- ence. The most recent attempt at a regional survey is Oregon Folklore, by Suzi Jones (Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon, 1977), which, following recent trends in American folklife studies, emphasizes the folklore of material culture. The multivolume Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, 7 vols. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 1952-1964), was to dwarf efforts made in other states. This big set represents thirty years of collecting, ca. 1910-1940, and was edited by a staff of nationally known scholars. Treatment of the folklore was in the best scholarly traditions of the emerging discipline of folklore in the United States.

6 Fanny D. Bergen, Current Superstitions, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 4 (Boston and New York, 1896) and Plant and Animal Lore, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 7 (Boston and New York, 1899).

42 Wayland D. Hand cmd Frances M. Tally

7 Edwin Miller Fogel, Belaefs and Superstitions of the Pennsylvania Ger- mans, Americana Germanica 18 (Philadelphia: Americana Germanica Press, 1918).

8 Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926). 9 Vance Randolph, Ozark Superstitions (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 1947). This has since been reprinted in paperback as Ozark Magic. 10 Popular Beliefs and Superstitionsfiom North Carolina, ed. Wayland D. Hand, 2 vols. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 1961-1964), constituting vols. 6-7 of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. 1 1 Harry Middleton Hyatt, Folk-Lore from Adams County Illirzois, Mem- oirs of the Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation (New York: Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, 1935). 12 Hyatt knew Grimm's great work in the translation of James Steven Stallybrass, 4 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1880-1888), made from the 4th ed. of 1875-1878. 13 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primative Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy Religion Art and Custom, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1871). 14 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., 12 vols. (Londc)n: Macmillan and Co., 1911-1915). 15 James George Frazer, The Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion Legend, and Law, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co. 1918). 16 Charlotte Sophia Burne, The Handbook of Folklore, new ed., rev. and enl. (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1914). 17 J G. von Hahn, Griechische und albanesische Marchen (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1864). This rare collection has come to us in Paul Ernst's two-volume edition (Munich and Berlin: G. Muller, 1918). Sabine Baring-Gould adapted von Hahn's early classification of folktale types as an appendix to William Henderson'sFolk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1866). 18 Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, 3 vols. in 5 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1914-1940). 19 James Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols. (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1908-1926). 20 Folk-Lore from Adams County Illinois, 2nd ed., p. 940. 21 Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo - Conjuration - Witchcraft - Rootwork, 5 vols.> Memoirs of the Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation (Quincy Ill.:

HYATT AND THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE 43

Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, 1970-1978), 1:XIV. Biographical in- formation on Hyatt and the Adams County collection appears in cer- tain parts of the bigHoodoo work. This one must take almost as a matter of course, for in Hyatt's own mind, intensive work among the blacks in the East and South was really nothing but a continuation of the work begun years earlier in Adams County, Illinois. We follow Hyatt in using the abbreviation FACI I and FACI II in referring to Folk-Lore from Adams County Illinois. 22 With characteristic generosity, Hyatt has also made laudatory ref- erences to the work and devotion of Anne Pogge who worked at his side during the long and demanding work on Hoodoo . Similar sentiments of appreciation have been expressed for the work of Michael Edward Bell in completing the index to Hoodoo, and explicating the big corpus of black American folklore as a doctoral dissertation at Indiana Univer- Sity.

23 In FACI I the caption is "Spirits and Ghosts." 24 The Hoodoo volumes are unusually strong in scatology, and this set provides a significant updating of Christian Franz Paullini's Heilsame Dreck-Apotheke (Frankfurt: Friederich Knochens, 1696), no less than constituting an appendage toJohn G. Bourke's standard modern work on Scatologic Rites of AII Nations (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Lowdermilk and Co., 1891).