SYMPATHETIC MAGIC
§ 1. _The Principles of Magic_
[Sidenote: The two principles of Sympathetic Magic are the Law of
Similarity and the Law of Contact or Contagion.]
If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based,
they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first,
that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause;
and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each
other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical
contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law
of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the
first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician
infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating
it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material
object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once
in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not. Charms based
on the Law of Similarity may be called Homoeopathic or Imitative
Magic.[189] Charms based on the Law of Contact or Contagion may be
called Contagious Magic. To denote the first of these branches of magic
the term Homoeopathic is perhaps preferable, for the alternative term
Imitative or Mimetic suggests, if it does not imply, a conscious agent
who imitates, thereby limiting the scope of magic too narrowly. For
the same principles {p53} which the magician applies in the practice
of his art are implicitly believed by him to regulate the operations
of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws
of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not
limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of
natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false
science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural
law, that is, as a statement of the rules which determine the sequence
of events throughout the world, it may be called Theoretical Magic:
regarded as a set of precepts which human beings observe in order to
compass their ends, it may be called Practical Magic. At the same time
it is to be borne in mind that the primitive magician knows magic
only on its practical side; he never analyses the mental processes on
which his practice is based, never reflects on the abstract principles
involved in his actions. With him, as with the vast majority of men,
logic is implicit, not explicit: he reasons just as he digests his food
in complete ignorance of the intellectual and physiological processes
which are essential to the one operation and to the other. In short,
to him magic is always an art, never a science; the very idea of
science is lacking in his undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic
student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magician’s
practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein
is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete
applications; in short, to discern the spurious science behind the
bastard art.
[Sidenote: The two principles are misapplications of the association of
ideas.]
If my analysis of the magician’s logic is correct, its two great
principles turn out to be merely two different misapplications of
the association of ideas.[190] Homoeopathic magic is founded on the
association of ideas by similarity: contagious magic is founded on the
association of ideas by contiguity. Homoeopathic magic commits the
mistake of assuming that things which resemble each other are the same:
contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have
once been in contact with {p54} each other are always in contact. But
in practice the two branches are often combined; or, to be more exact,
while homoeopathic or imitative magic may be practised by itself,
contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of
the homoeopathic or imitative principle. Thus generally stated the
two things may be a little difficult to grasp, but they will readily
become intelligible when they are illustrated by particular examples.
Both trains of thought are in fact extremely simple and elementary. It
could hardly be otherwise, since they are familiar in the concrete,
though certainly not in the abstract, to the crude intelligence not
only of the savage, but of ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere.
Both branches of magic, the homoeopathic and the contagious, may
conveniently be comprehended under the general name of Sympathetic
Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance
through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to
the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible
ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a
precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically
affect each other through a space which appears to be empty.
[Sidenote: Table of the branches of Sympathetic Magic.]
It may be convenient to tabulate as follows the branches of magic
according to the laws of thought which underlie them:—
Sympathetic Magic (_Law of Sympathy_)
Homoeopathic Magic (_Law of Similarity_)
Contagious Magic[191] (_Law of Contact_)
I will now illustrate these two great branches of sympathetic magic by
examples, beginning with homoeopathic magic. {p55}
§2. _Homeopathic or Imitative Magic_
[Sidenote: Magical images among the American Indians.]
Perhaps the most familiar application of the principle that like
produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in
many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an
image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so does
the man, and that when it perishes he must die. A few instances out of
many may be given to prove at once the wide diffusion of the practice
over the world and its remarkable persistence through the ages. For
thousands of years ago it was known to the sorcerers of ancient
India, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as of Greece and Rome,[192] and
at this day it is still resorted to by cunning and malignant savages
in Australia, Africa, and Scotland. Thus the North American Indians,
we are told, believe that by drawing the figure of a person in sand,
ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body, and then
pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any other injury, they
inflict a corresponding injury on the person represented.[193] For
example, when an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he
makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its
head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever
the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the
same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of
his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or
buries the puppet, uttering certain magic words as he does so.[194]
So when a Cora Indian {p56} of Mexico wishes to kill a man, he makes
a figure of him out of burnt clay, strips of cloth, and so forth, and
then, muttering incantations, runs thorns through the head or stomach
of the figure to make his victim suffer correspondingly. Sometimes the
Cora Indian makes a more beneficent use of this sort of homoeopathic
magic. When he wishes to multiply his flocks or herds, he models a
figure of the animal he wants in wax or clay, or carves it from tuff,
and deposits it in a cave of the mountains; for these Indians believe
that the mountains are masters of all riches, including cattle and
sheep. For every cow, deer, dog, or hen he wants, the Indian has to
sacrifice a corresponding image of the creature.[195] This may help
us to understand the meaning of the figures of cattle, deer, horses,
and pigs which were dedicated to Diana at Nemi.[196] They may have
been the offerings of farmers or huntsmen who hoped thereby to multiply
the cattle or the game. Similarly when the Todas of Southern India
desire to obtain more buffaloes, they offer silver images of these
animals in the temples.[197] The Peruvian Indians moulded images of
fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or
feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended
victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul. But they drew a
delicate distinction between the kinds of materials to be used in the
manufacture of these images, according as the victim was an Indian or a
Viracocha, that is, a Spaniard. To kill an Indian they employed maize
and the fat of a llama, to kill a Spaniard they used wheat and the fat
of a pig, because Viracochas did not eat llamas and preferred wheat to
maize.[198] {p57}
[Sidenote: Magical images among the Malays.]
A Malay charm of the same sort is as follows. Take parings of nails,
hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended victim, enough
to represent every part of his person, and then make them up into his
likeness with wax from a deserted bees’ comb. Scorch the figure slowly
by holding it over a lamp every night for seven nights, and say:
“_It is not wax that I am scorching,_
_It is the liver, hearty and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch._”
After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die. This
charm obviously combines the principles of homoeopathic and contagious
magic; since the image which is made in the likeness of an enemy
contains things which once were in contact with him, namely, his nails,
hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay charm, which resembles the
Ojebway practice still more closely, is to make a corpse of wax from
an empty bees’ comb and of the length of a footstep; then pierce the
eye of the image, and your enemy {p58} is blind; pierce the stomach,
and he is sick; pierce the head, and his head aches; pierce the breast,
and his breast will suffer. If you would kill him outright, transfix
the image from the head downwards; enshroud it as you would a corpse;
pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then bury it in the
middle of a path where your victim will be sure to step over it. In
order that his blood may not be on your head, you should say:
“_It is not I who am burying him,_
_It is Gabriel who is burying him._”
Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the
archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than
you are.[199] In eastern Java an enemy may be killed by means of a
likeness of him drawn on a piece of paper, which is then incensed or
buried in the ground.[200] Among the Minangkabauers of Sumatra a man
who is tormented by the passion of hate or of unrequited love will
call in the help of a wizard in order to cause the object of his hate
or love to suffer from a dangerous ulcer known as a _tinggam_. After
giving the wizard the necessary instructions as to the name, bodily
form, dwelling, and family of the person in question, he makes a puppet
which is supposed to resemble his intended victim; and repairs with
it to a wood, where he hangs the image on a tree that stands quite
by itself. Muttering a spell, he then drives an instrument through
the navel of the puppet into the tree, till the sap of the tree oozes
through the hole thus made. The instrument which inflicts the wound
bears the same name (_tinggam_) as the ulcer which is to be raised on
the body of the victim, and the oozing sap is believed to be his or
her life-spirit. Soon afterwards the person against whom the charm is
directed begins to suffer from an ulcer, which grows worse and worse
till he dies, unless a friend can procure a piece of the wood of the
tree to which the image is attached.[201] {p59}
[Sidenote: Magical images in Torres Straits and Borneo.]
The sorcerers of Mabuiag or Jervis Island, in Torres Straits, kept
an assortment of effigies in stock ready to be operated on at the
requirement of a customer. Some of the figures were of stone; these
were employed when short work was to be made of a man or woman. Others
were wooden; these gave the unhappy victim a little more rope, only,
however, to terminate his prolonged sufferings by a painful death.
The mode of operation in the latter case was to put poison, by means
of a magical implement, into a wooden image, to which the name of the
intended victim had been given. Next day the person aimed at would
feel chilly, then waste away and die, unless the same wizard who had
wrought the charm would consent to undo it.[202] If the sorcerer
pulled off an arm or leg of the image, the human victim felt pain in
the corresponding limb of his body; but if the sorcerer restored the
severed arm or leg to the figure, the man recovered. Another mode of
compassing a man’s death in Torres Straits was to prick a wax effigy
of him or her with the spine of a sting-ray; so when the man whose
name had been given to the waxen image next went afishing on the reef
a sting-ray would sting him in the exact part of his body where the
waxen image had been pierced. Or the sorcerer might hang the effigy
on the bough of a tree, and as it swayed to and fro in the wind the
person represented by it would fall sick. However, he would get well
again if a friend of his could induce the magician to steady the figure
by sticking it firmly in the sandy bottom of the sea.[203] When the
Lerons of Borneo wish to be revenged on an enemy, they make a wooden
image of him and leave it in the jungle. As it decays, he dies.[204]
More elaborate is the proceeding adopted by the Kenyahs of Borneo in
similar circumstances. The operator retires with the image to a quiet
spot on the river bank, and when a hawk appears in a certain part of
the sky, he kills a fowl, smears its blood on the image, and puts a
bit of fat in the mouth of the figure, saying, “Put fat in his mouth.”
By that he means, “May {p60} his head be cut off, hung up in an enemy’s
house, and fed with fat in the usual way.” Then he strikes at the
breast of the image with a small wooden spear, throws it into a pool of
water reddened with red earth, and afterwards takes it out and buries
it in the ground.[205]
[Sidenote: Magical images in Japan and China.]
If an Aino of Japan desires to compass the destruction of an enemy, he
will make a likeness of him out of mugwort or the guelder-rose and bury
it in a hole upside down or under the trunk of a rotten tree, with a
prayer to a demon to carry off the man’s soul or to make his body rot
away with the tree. Sometimes an Aino woman will attempt to get rid of
her husband in this fashion by wrapping up his head-dress in the shape
of a corpse and burying it deep in the ground, while she breathes a
prayer that her husband may rot and die with the head-dress.[206] The
Japanese themselves are familiar with similar modes of enchantment.
In one of their ancient books we read of a rebellious minister who
made figures of the heir to the throne with intent, no doubt, to do
him grievous bodily harm thereby; and sometimes a woman who has been
deserted by her lover will make a straw effigy of the faithless gallant
and nail it to a sacred tree, adjuring the gods to spare the tree and
to visit the sacrilege on the traitor. At a shrine of Kompira there
stood a pine-tree studded with nails which had been thus driven in
for the purpose of doing people to death.[207] The Chinese also are
perfectly aware that you can harm a man by maltreating or cursing an
image of him, especially if you have taken care to write on it his
name and horoscope. This mode of venting spite on an enemy is said to
be commonly practised in China. In Amoy such images, roughly made of
bamboo splinters and paper, are called “substitutes of persons” and may
be bought very cheap for a cash or so apiece at any shop which sells
paper articles for the use of the dead or the gods; for the frugal
Chinese are in the habit of palming off paper imitations of all kinds
of valuables on the simple-minded ghosts and gods, who take them in all
good faith for the genuine articles. As {p61} usual, the victim suffers
a hurt corresponding to the hurt done to his image. Thus if you run a
nail or a needle into the eyes of the puppet, your man will go more or
less blind; if you stick a pin in its stomach, he will be doubled up
with colic; a stab in the heart of the effigy may kill him outright;
and in general the more you prick it and the louder you speak the
spell, the more certain is the effect. To make assurance doubly sure
it is desirable to impregnate the effigy, so to say, with the personal
influence of the man by passing it clandestinely beforehand over him
or hiding it, unbeknown to him, in his clothes or under his bed. If
you do that, he is quite sure to die sooner or later.[208] Naturally
these nefarious practices are no new thing in the Chinese empire.
There is a passage in the Chinese _Book of Rewards and Penalties_
which illustrates their prevalence in days gone by. There, under the
rubric “To hide an effigy of a man for the purpose of giving him the
nightmare,” we read as follows: “This means hiding the carved wooden
effigy of a man somewhere with intent to give him the nightmare.
Kong-sun-tcho having died suddenly some time after he had succeeded to
the post of treasurer, he appeared in a dream to the governor of his
district and said unto him: ‘I have been the victim of an odious crime,
and I am come, my lord, to pray you to avenge me. My time to die had
not yet come; but my servants gave me the nightmare, and I was choked
in my sleep. If you will send secretly some dauntless soldiers, not one
of the varlets will escape you. Under the seventh tile of the roof of
my house will be found my image carved of wood. Fetch it and punish the
criminals.’ Next day the governor of the district had all the servants
arrested, and sure enough, after some search, they found under the
aforesaid tile the figure of a man in wood, a foot high, and bristling
all over with nails. Bit by bit the wood changed into flesh and uttered
inarticulate cries when it was struck. The governor of the district
immediately reported to the prefect of the department, who condemned
several of the servants to suffer the extreme rigour of the law.”[209]
{p62}
[Sidenote: Magical images in Australia.]
When some of the aborigines of Victoria desired to destroy an enemy,
they would occasionally retire to a lonely spot, and drawing on the
ground a rude likeness of the victim would sit round it and devote
him to destruction with cabalistic ceremonies. So dreaded was this
incantation that men and women, who learned that it had been directed
against them, have been known to pine away and die of fright.[210]
On the Bloomfield River in Queensland the natives think they can doom
a man by making a rough wooden effigy of him and burying it in the
ground, or by painting his likeness on a bull-roarer; and they believe
that persons whose portraits are carved on a tree at Cape Bedford will
waste away.[211] When the wife of a Central Australian native has
eloped from him and he cannot recover her, the disconsolate husband
repairs with some sympathising friends to a secluded spot, where a
man skilled in magic draws on the ground a rough figure supposed to
represent the woman lying on her back. Beside the figure is laid a
piece of green bark, which stands for her spirit or soul, and at it
the men throw miniature spears which have been made for the purpose
and charmed by singing over them. This barken effigy of the woman’s
spirit, with the little spears sticking in it, is then thrown as far as
possible in the direction which she is supposed to have taken. During
the whole of the operation the men chant in a low voice, the burden of
their song being an invitation to the magic influence to go out and
enter her body and dry up all her fat. Sooner or later—often a good
deal later—her fat does dry up, she dies, and her spirit is seen in the
sky in the form of a shooting star.[212]
[Sidenote: Magical images in Burma, and Africa.]
In Burma a rejected lover sometimes resorts to a sorcerer and engages
him to make a small image of the scornful fair one, containing a piece
of her clothes, or of something which she has been in the habit of
wearing. Certain charms or medicines also enter into the composition
of the doll, which is then hung up or thrown into the water. As a
{p63} consequence the girl is supposed to go mad.[213] In this
last example, as in the first of the Malay charms noticed above,
homoeopathic or imitative magic is blent with contagious magic in the
strict sense of the word, since the likeness of the victim contains
something which has been in contact with her person. A Matabele who
wishes to avenge himself on an enemy makes a clay figure of him and
pierces it with a needle; next time the man thus represented happens
to engage in a fight he will be speared, just as his effigy was
stabbed.[214] The Ovambo of South-western Africa believe that some
people have the power of bewitching an absent person by gazing into a
vessel full of water till his image appears to them in the water; then
they spit at the image and curse the man, and that seals his fate.[215]
[Sidenote: Magical images in ancient India.]
The ancient books of the Hindoos testify to the use of similar
enchantments among their remote ancestors. To destroy his foe a man
would fashion a figure of him in clay and transfix it with an arrow
which had been barbed with a thorn and winged with an owl’s feathers.
Or he would mould the figure of wax and melt it in a fire. Sometimes
effigies of the soldiers, horses, elephants, and chariots of a hostile
army were modelled in dough, and then pulled in pieces.[216] Again,
to destroy an enemy the magician might kill a red-headed lizard with
the words, “I am killing So-and-so,” smear it with blood, wrap it in
a black cloth, and having pronounced an incantation burn it.[217]
Another way was to grind up mustard into meal, with which a figure was
made of the person who was to be overcome or destroyed. Then having
muttered certain spells to give efficacy to the rite, the enchanter
chopped up the image, anointed it with melted butter, curds, or
some such thing, and finally burnt it in a sacred pot.[218] In the
so-called “sanguinary chapter” of the _Calica Puran_ there occurs the
following passage: “On {p64} the autumnal _Maha-Navami_, or when the
month is in the lunar mansion _Scanda_, or _Bishácá_, let a figure be
made, either of barley-meal or earth, representing the person with whom
the sacrificer is at variance, and the head of the figure be struck
off; after the usual texts have been used, the following text is to
be used in invoking an axe on the occasion: ‘Effuse, effuse blood; be
terrific, be terrific; seize, destroy, for the love of _Ambica_, the
head of this enemy.’”[219]
[Sidenote: Magical images in modern India.]
In modern India the practices described in these old books are still
carried on with mere variations of detail. The magician compounds the
fatal image of earth taken from sixty-four filthy places, and mixed
up with clippings of hair, parings of nails, bits of leather, and so
on. Upon the breast of the image he writes the name of his enemy; then
he pierces it through and through with an awl, or maims it in various
ways, hoping thus to maim or kill the object of his vengeance.[220]
Among the Nambutiris of Malabar a figure representing the enemy to
be destroyed is drawn on a small sheet of metal, gold by preference,
on which some mystic diagrams are also inscribed. The sorcerer then
declares that the bodily injury or death of the person shall take
place at a certain time. After that he wraps up the little sheet in
another sheet or leaf of metal (gold if possible), and buries it in
a place where the victim is expected to pass. Sometimes instead of a
small sheet of metal he buries a live frog or lizard enclosed in a
coco-nut shell, after sticking nails into its eyes and stomach. At the
same moment that the animal dies the person expires also.[221] Among
the Mohammedans of Northern India the proceeding is as follows. A
doll is made of earth taken from a grave or from a place where bodies
are cremated, and some sentences of the Coran are read backwards over
twenty-one small wooden pegs. These pegs the operator next strikes into
various parts of the body of the image, which is afterwards shrouded
like a corpse, carried to a graveyard, and buried in the name of the
enemy whom it is intended to injure. The man, it is {p65} believed,
will die without fail after the ceremony.[222] A slightly different
form of the charm is observed by the Bâm-Margi, a very degraded sect
of Hindoos in the North-West Provinces. To kill an enemy they make an
image of flour or earth, and stick razors into the breast, navel, and
throat, while pegs are thrust into the eyes, hands, and feet. As if
this were not enough, they next construct an image of Bhairava or Durga
holding a three-pronged fork in her hand; this they place so close
to the effigy of the person to whom mischief is meant that the fork
penetrates its breast.[223] To injure a person a Singhalese sorcerer
will procure a lock of his intended victim’s hair, a paring of his
nails, or a thread of his garment. Then he fashions an image of him and
thrusts nails made of five metals into the joints. All these he buries
where the unfortunate man is likely to pass. No sooner has he done so
than the victim falls ill with swelling or stiffness of joints, or
burning sensations in the body, or disfigurements of the mouth, legs,
and arms.[224]
[Sidenote: Magical images among the Arabs of North Africa.]
Similar enchantments are wrought by the Moslem peoples of North Africa.
Thus an Arabic treatise on magic directs that if you wish to deprive
a man of the use of his limbs you should make a waxen image of him,
and engrave his name and his mother’s name on it with a knife of
which the handle must be made of the same wax; then smite the limb of
the image which answers to the particular limb of the man which you
desire to disable; at the same moment the limb of flesh and blood will
be paralysed.[225] The following is another extract from the same
treatise: “To injure the eyes of an enemy, take a taper and fashion it
into the likeness of him whom you would harm. Write on it the seven
signs, along with the name of your enemy and the name of his mother
and gouge out the two eyes of the figure with two points. Then put it
in a pot with {p66} quicklime on which you must throw a little _chârib
el h’amâm_, and bury the whole near the fire. The fire will make your
victim to shriek and will hurt his eyes so that he will see nothing,
and that the pain will cause him to utter cries of distress. But do not
prolong the operation more than seven days, for he would die and you
would have to answer for it at the day of the last judgment. If you
wish to heal him, withdraw the figure and throw it into water. He will
recover, with God’s leave.”[226]
[Sidenote: Magical images in ancient Egypt and Babylon.]
Nowhere, perhaps, were the magic arts more carefully cultivated,
nowhere did they enjoy greater esteem or exercise a deeper influence
on the national life than in the land of the Pharaohs. Little wonder,
therefore, that the practice of enchantment by means of images was
familiar to the wizards of Egypt. A drop of a man’s blood, some
clippings of his hair or parings of his nails, a rag of the garment
which he had worn, sufficed to give a sorcerer complete power over
him. These relics of his person the magician kneaded into a lump of
wax, which he moulded into the likeness and dressed after the fashion
of his intended victim, who was then at the mercy of his tormentor.
If the image was exposed to the fire, the person whom it represented
straightway fell into a burning fever; if it were stabbed with a knife,
he felt the pain of the wound.[227] Thus, for instance, a certain
superintendent of the king’s cattle was once prosecuted in an Egyptian
court of law for having made figures of men and women in wax, thereby
causing paralysis of their limbs and other grievous bodily harm. He
had somehow obtained a book of magic which contained the spells and
directions how to act in reciting them. Armed with this powerful
instrument the rogue had shut himself up in a secret chamber, and
there proceeded to cast spells over the people of his town.[228] In
ancient Babylonia also it was {p67} a common practice to make an image
of clay, pitch, honey, fat, or other soft material in the likeness of
an enemy, and to injure or kill him by burning, burying, or otherwise
ill-treating it. Thus in a hymn to the fire-god Nusku we read:
_“Those who have made images of me, reproducing my features,_
_Who have taken away my breath, torn my hairs,_
_Who have rent my clothes, have hindered my feet from treading the
dust,_
_May the fire-god, the strong one, break their charm.”_[229]
[Sidenote: Magical images in Babylon and Egypt for the discomfiture of
demons]
But both in Babylon and in Egypt this ancient tool of superstition,
so baneful in the hands of the mischievous and malignant, was also
pressed into the service of religion and turned to glorious account
for the confusion and overthrow of demons. In a Babylonian incantation
we meet with a long list of evil spirits whose effigies were burnt by
the magician in the hope that, as their images melted in the fire, so
the fiends themselves might melt away and disappear.[230] Every night
when the sun-god Ra sank down to his home in the glowing west he was
assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the arch-fiend
Apepi. All night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers
of darkness sent up clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky to obscure
his light and weaken his power. To aid the sun-god in this daily
struggle, a ceremony was daily performed in his temple at Thebes. A
figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile with a hideous face
or a serpent with many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon’s
name was written in green ink. Wrapt in a papyrus case, on which
another likeness of Apepi had been drawn in green ink, the figure was
then tied up with black hair, spat upon, hacked with a stone knife,
and cast on the ground. There the priest trod on it with his left foot
again and again, and then burned it in a fire made of a certain plant
or grass. When Apepi himself had thus been effectually disposed of,
waxen effigies of each of his principal demons, and of their fathers,
mothers, and children, were {p68} made and burnt in the same way. The
service, accompanied by the recitation of certain prescribed spells,
was repeated not merely morning, noon, and night, but whenever a storm
was raging, or heavy rain had set in, or black clouds were stealing
across the sky to hide the sun’s bright disc. The fiends of darkness,
clouds, and rain felt the injuries inflicted on their images as if they
had been done to themselves; they passed away, at least for a time, and
the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant once more.[231]
[Sidenote: Magical images in Scotland.]
From the azure sky, the stately fanes, and the solemn ritual of ancient
Egypt we have to travel far in space and time to the misty mountains
and the humble cottages of the Scottish Highlands of to-day; but at
our journey’s end we shall find our ignorant countrymen seeking to
attain the same end by the same means and, unhappily, with the same
malignity as the Egyptian of old. To kill a person whom he hates, a
modern Highlander will still make a rude clay image of him, called a
_corp chre_ or _corp chreadh_ (“clay body”), stick it full of pins,
nails, and broken bits of glass, and then place it in a running stream
with its head to the current. As every pin is thrust into the figure
an incantation is uttered, and the person represented feels a pain in
the corresponding part of his body. If the intention is to make him
die a lingering death, the operator is careful to stick no pins into
the region of the heart, whereas he thrusts them into that region
deliberately if he desires to rid himself of his enemy at once. And as
the clay puppet crumbles away in the running water, so the victim’s
body is believed to waste away and turn to clay. In Islay the spell
spoken over the _corp chre_, when it is ready to receive the pins, is
as follows: “From behind you are like a ram with an old fleece.” And
as the pins are being thrust in, a long incantation is pronounced,
beginning “As you waste away, may she waste away; as this wounds you,
may it wound her.” Sometimes, we are told, the effigy is set before
a blazing fire on a door which has been taken off its hinges; there
it is toasted and {p69} turned to make the human victim writhe in
agony. The _corp chre_ is reported to have been employed of late years
in the counties of Inverness, Ross, and Sutherland. A specimen from
Inverness-shire may be seen in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford.[232]
It is remarkable, however, that in the Highlands this form of magic
has no power over a man who has lost any of his members. For example,
though Ross-shire witches made a clay figure of “Donald of the Ear,”
they could not destroy him, because he had lost an ear in battle.[233]
A similar form of witchcraft, known as “burying the sheaf,” seems
still to linger in Ireland among the dwellers in the Bog of Ardee. The
person who works the charm goes first to a chapel and says certain
prayers with his back to the altar; then he takes a sheaf of wheat,
which he fastens into the likeness of a human body, sticking pins in
the joints of the stems and, according to one account, shaping a heart
of plaited straw. This sheaf he buries in the devil’s name near the
house of his enemy, who will, it is supposed, gradually pine away as
the sheaf decays, dying when it finally decomposes. If the enchanter
desires his foe to perish speedily, he buries the sheaf in wet ground,
where it will soon moulder away; but if on the other hand his wish is
that his victim should linger in pain, he chooses a dry spot, where
decomposition will be slow.[234] However, in Scotland, as in Babylon
and Egypt, the destruction of an image has also been employed for the
discomfiture of fiends. When Shetland fishermen wish to disenchant
their boat, they {p70} row it out to sea before sunrise, and as the day
is dawning they burn a waxen figure in the boat, while the skipper
exclaims, “Go hence, Satan.”[235]
[Sidenote: Magical images to procure offspring in America and Africa.]
If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has
commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting obnoxious
people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been
employed with the benevolent intention of helping others into it. In
other words, it has been used to facilitate childbirth and to procure
offspring for barren women. Thus among the Esquimaux of Bering Strait
a barren woman desirous of having a son will consult a shaman, who
commonly makes, or causes her husband to make, a small doll-like image
over which he performs certain secret rites, and the woman is directed
to sleep with it under her pillow.[236] Amongst the many ceremonies
which a Thompson Indian girl of British Columbia had formerly to
perform at puberty was the following. She had to run four times in
the morning, carrying two small stones which had been obtained from
underneath the water. These were put in her bosom; and as she ran,
they slipped down between her body and her clothes and fell to the
ground. While she ran, she prayed to the Dawn that when she should be
with child she might be delivered as easily as she had been delivered
of these stones.[237] Similarly among the Haida Indians of the Queen
Charlotte Islands a pregnant woman would let round stones, eels,
chips, or other small objects slip down over her abdomen for the sake
of facilitating her delivery.[238] Among the Nishinam Indians of
California, when a woman is childless, her female friends sometimes
make out of grass a rude image of a baby and tie it in a small basket
after the Indian fashion. Some day, when the woman is from home, they
lay this grass baby in her hut. On finding it she holds it to her
breast, pretends {p71} to nurse it, and sings it lullabies. This is
done as a charm to make her conceive.[239] The Huichol Indians of
Mexico believe in a certain Mother who is the goddess of conception
and childbirth, and lives in a cave near Santa Catarina. A woman
desirous of offspring deposits in this cave a doll made of cotton
cloth to represent the baby on which her heart is set. After a while
she goes back to the cave, puts the doll under her girdle, and soon
afterwards is supposed to be pregnant.[240] With a like intent Indian
women in Peru used to wrap up stones like babies and leave them at
the foot of a large stone, which they revered for this purpose.[241]
Among the Makatisses, a Caffre tribe of South Africa, a traveller
observed a woman carefully tending a doll made out of a gourd, adorned
with necklaces of glass beads, and heavily weighted with iron ore.
On enquiry he learned that she had been directed by the medicine-man
to do this as a means of obtaining a child.[242] Among the Basutos
childless wives make rude effigies of clay, and give them the name
of some tutelar deity. They treat these dolls as if they were real
children, and beseech the divinity to whom they have dedicated them to
grant them the power of conception.[243] In Anno, a district of West
Africa, women may often be seen carrying wooden dolls strapped, like
babies, on their backs as a cure for sterility.[244] In Japan, when a
marriage is unfruitful, the old women of the neighbourhood come to the
house and go through a pretence of delivering the wife of a child. The
infant is represented by a doll.[245] The Maoris had a household god
whose image was in the form of an infant. The image was very carefully
made, generally life-size, and adorned with the family jewels. Barren
women nursed it and addressed it in the most endearing terms in order
to become mothers.[246]
[Sidenote: Magical images to procure offspring in the Eastern
Archipelago.]
Among the Battas of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother,
will make a wooden image of a {p72} child and hold it in her lap,
believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish.[247]
In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she
invites a man who is himself the father of a large family to pray on
her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red
cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms as if she would suckle it.
Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs
to the woman’s head, saying, “O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let
fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child
fall and descend into my hands and on my lap.” Then he asks the woman,
“Has the child come?” and she answers, “Yes, it is sucking already.”
After that the man holds the fowl on the husband’s head, and mumbles
some form of words. Lastly, the bird is killed and laid, together with
some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is
over, word goes about in the village that the woman has been brought to
bed, and her friends come and congratulate her.[248] Here the pretence
that a child has been born is a purely magical rite designed to secure,
by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child really shall be born;
but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy of the rite by means of
prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magic is here blent with
and reinforced by religion. In Saibai, one of the islands in Torres
Straits, a similar custom of purely magical character is observed,
without any religious alloy. Here, when a woman is pregnant, all the
other women assemble. The husband’s sister makes an image of a male
child and places it before the pregnant woman; afterwards the image
is nursed until the birth of the child in order to ensure that the
baby shall be a boy. To secure male offspring a woman will also press
to her abdomen a fruit resembling the male organ of generation, which
she then passes to another woman who has borne none but boys. This, it
is clear, is imitative magic in a slightly different form.[249] In
the seventh month of a woman’s {p73} pregnancy common people in Java
observe a ceremony which is plainly designed to facilitate the real
birth by mimicking it. Husband and wife repair to a well or to the bank
of a neighbouring river. The upper part of the woman’s body is bare,
but young banana leaves are fastened under her arms, a small opening,
or rather fold, being left in the leaves in front. Through this opening
or fold in the leaves on his wife’s body the husband lets fall from
above a weaver’s shuttle. An old woman receives the shuttle as it
falls, takes it up in her arms and dandles it as if it were a baby,
saying, “Oh, what a dear little child! Oh, what a beautiful little
child!” Then the husband lets an egg slip through the fold, and when it
lies on the ground as an emblem of the afterbirth, he takes his sword
and cuts through the banana leaf at the place of the fold, obviously
as if he were severing the navel-string.[250] Persons of high rank in
Java observe the ceremony after a fashion in which the real meaning of
the rite is somewhat obscured. The pregnant woman is clothed in a long
robe, which her husband, kneeling before her, severs with a stroke of
his sword from bottom to top. Then he throws his sword on the ground
and runs away as fast as he can.[251] According to another account,
the woman is wrapt round with white thread; her husband cuts it with
his sword, throws away an oblong white gourd, dashes a fowl’s egg to
the ground, rolls along a young coco-nut on which the figures of a man
and woman have been painted, and so departs in haste.[252] Among some
of the Dyaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labour, a wizard is
called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery in a rational manner
by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime another wizard
outside the room exerts himself to attain the same {p74} end by means
which we should regard as wholly irrational. He, in fact, pretends
to be the expectant mother; a large stone attached to his stomach by
a cloth wrapt round his body represents the child in the womb, and,
following the directions shouted to him by his colleague on the real
scene of operations, he moves this make-believe baby about on his body
in exact imitation of the movements of the real baby till the infant is
born.[253]
[Sidenote: Simulation of birth at adoption, and after supposed death.]
The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led other
peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption, and even
as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life. If you pretend
to give birth to a boy, or even to a great bearded man who has not a
drop of your blood in his veins, then, in the eyes of primitive law
and philosophy, that boy or man is really your son to all intents and
purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that when Zeus persuaded his jealous
wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the goddess got into bed, and clasping
the burly hero to her bosom, pushed him through her robes and let him
fall to the ground in imitation of a real birth; and the historian adds
that in his own day the same mode of adopting children was practised
by the barbarians.[254] At the present time it is said to be still in
use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy
whom she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes;
ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son, and inherits the
whole property of his adoptive parents.[255] Among the Berawans of
Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a grown-up man or woman, a great
many people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated
in public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to
crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front he
is {p75} stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the areca palm,
and tied to the woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son
or daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the house and
back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established between
the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict; an
offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned more heinous
than one committed against a real child.[256] In Central Africa “the
Bahima practise adoption; the male relatives always take charge of a
brother’s children. When a man dies his brother takes any children of
the deceased and places them one by one in his wife’s lap. Then he
binds round her waist the thong used for tying the legs of restive cows
during milking, just as is done after childbirth. The children are then
brought up with his own family.”[257] In ancient Greece any man who
had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence
funeral rites had been performed, was treated as dead to society till
he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through
a woman’s lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out
to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might
he mix freely with living folk.[258] In ancient India, under similar
circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after
his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he
sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child
in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were
wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning he got out
of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had
formerly partaken of from his youth up; in particular, he married a
wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.[259]
[Sidenote: Simulation of birth among the Akikuyu.]
Amongst the Akikuyu of British East Africa every member of the tribe,
whether male or female, has to go {p76} through a pretence of being
born again. The age at which the ceremony is performed varies with the
ability of the father to provide the goat or sheep which is required
for the due observance of the rite; but it seems that the new birth
generally takes place when a child is about ten years old or younger.
If the child’s father or mother is dead, a man or woman acts as proxy
on the occasion, and in such a case the woman is thenceforth regarded
by the child as its own mother. A goat or sheep is killed in the
afternoon and the stomach and intestines are reserved. The ceremony
takes place at evening in a hut; none but women are allowed to be
present. A circular piece of the goat-skin or sheep-skin is passed over
one shoulder and under the other arm of the child who is to be born
again; and the animal’s stomach is similarly passed over the child’s
other shoulder and under its other arm. The mother, or the woman who
acts as mother, sits on a hide on the floor with the child between
her knees. The sheep’s or goat’s gut is passed round her and brought
in front of the child. She groans as if in labour, another woman cuts
the gut as if it were the navel-string, and the child imitates the
cry of a new-born infant. Until a lad has thus been born again in
mimicry, he may not assist at the disposal of his father’s body after
death, nor help to carry him out into the wilds to breathe his last.
Formerly the ceremony of the new birth was combined with the ceremony
of circumcision; but the two are now kept separate.[260] In origin we
may suppose that this curious pretence of being born again regularly
formed part of the initiatory rites through which every Kikuyu lad and
every Kikuyu girl had to pass before he or she was recognised as a
full-grown member of the tribe;[261] for in many parts of the world
a simulation of death and resurrection has been enacted by candidates
on such occasions as well as on admission to the membership of certain
secret societies.[262] The intention of the mock birth {p77} or mock
resurrection is not clear; but we may conjecture that it is designed,
on the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic, either to impart
to the candidate the powers of a ghost or to enable him to be reborn
again into the world whenever he shall have died in good earnest.
[Sidenote: Magical images to procure love.]
Magical images have often been employed for the amiable purpose of
winning love. Thus to shoot an arrow into the heart of a clay image
was an ancient Hindoo mode of securing a woman’s affection; only the
bow-string must be of hemp, the shaft of the arrow must be of black
_ala_ wood, its plume an owl’s feather, and its barb a thorn.[263]
No doubt the wound inflicted on the heart of the clay image was
supposed to make a corresponding impression on the woman’s heart.
Among the Chippeway Indians there used to be few young men or women
who had not little images of the persons whose love they wished to
win. They pricked the hearts of the images and inserted magical
powders in the punctures, while they addressed the effigies by the
names of the persons whom they represented, bidding them requite their
affection.[264] Ancient witches and wizards melted wax in the fire in
order to make the hearts of their sweethearts to melt of love.[265]
And as the wound of love may be inflicted by an image, so by an image
it may be healed. How that can be done is told by Heine in a poem
based on the experience of one of his own schoolfellows. It is called
_The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_, and describes how sick people offer waxen
models of their ailing members to the Virgin Mary at Kevlaar in order
that she may heal them of their infirmities. In the poem a lover,
wasting away for love and sorrow at the death of his sweetheart, offers
to the Virgin the waxen model of a heart with a prayer that she would
heal his heart-ache.[266] Such customs, still commonly {p78} observed
in some parts of Catholic Europe, are interesting because they shew
how in later times magic comes to be incorporated with religion. The
moulding of wax images of ailing members is in its origin purely
magical: the prayer to the Virgin or to a saint is purely religious:
the combination of the two is a crude, if pathetic, attempt to turn
both magic and religion to account for the benefit of the sufferer.
[Sidenote: Magical images to maintain domestic harmony.]
The natives of New Caledonia make use of effigies to maintain or
restore harmony between husband and wife. Two spindle-shaped bundles,
one representing the man and the other the woman, are tied firmly
together to symbolise and ensure the amity of the couple. They are
made up of various plants, together with some threads from the
woman’s girdle and a piece of the man’s apron; a bone needle forms
the axis of each. The talisman is meant to render the union of the
spouses indissoluble, and is carefully treasured by them both. If,
nevertheless, a domestic jar should unfortunately take place, the
husband repairs to the family burying-ground with the precious packet.
There he lights a fire with a wood of a particular kind, fumigates
the talisman, sprinkles it with water from a prescribed source, waves
it round his head, and then stirring the needle in the bundle which
represents himself he says, “I change the heart of this woman, that she
may love me.” If the wife still remains obdurate, he ties a sugar-cane
to the bundle, and presents it to her through a third person. If she
eats of the sugar-cane, she feels her love for her husband revive. On
her side she has the right to operate in like manner on the bundle
which represents herself, always provided that she does not go to the
burying-ground, which is strictly forbidden to women.[267]
[Sidenote: Homoeopathic magic in medicine.]
Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent
sickness. In ancient Greece, when a man died of dropsy, his children
were made to sit with their feet in water until the body was burned.
This was supposed to prevent the disease from attacking them.[268]
Similarly, on {p79} the principle of water to water, among the natives
of the hills near Rajamahall in India, the body of a person who has
died of dropsy is thrown into a river; they think that if the corpse
were buried, the disorder would return and carry off other people.[269]
[Sidenote: Homoeopathic treatment of jaundice
Homoeopathic treatment of St. Anthony’s fire.
Homoeopathic virtue of crossbills.]
The ancient Hindoos performed an elaborate ceremony, based on
homoeopathetic magic, for the cure of jaundice. Its main drift was
to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures and yellow things,
such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for the
patient a healthy red colour from a living, vigorous source, namely a
red bull. With this intention, a priest recited the following spell:
“Up to the sun shall go thy heart-ache and thy jaundice: in the colour
of the red bull do we envelop thee! We envelop thee in red tints, unto
long life. May this person go unscathed and be free of yellow colour!
The cows whose divinity is Rohini, they who, moreover, are themselves
red (_rohinih_)—in their every form and every strength we do envelop
thee. Into the parrots, into the thrush, do we put thy jaundice, and,
furthermore, into the yellow wagtail do we put thy jaundice.” While he
uttered these words, the priest, in order to infuse the rosy hue of
health into the sallow patient, gave him water to sip which was mixed
with the hair of a red bull; he poured water over the animal’s back
and made the sick man drink it; he seated him on the skin of a red
bull and tied a piece of the skin to him. Then in order to improve his
colour by thoroughly eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus.
He first daubed him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of
turmeric or curcuma (a yellow plant), set him on a bed, tied three
yellow birds, to wit a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by means
of a yellow string to the foot of the bed; then pouring water over
the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with it no doubt
the jaundice, from him to the birds. After that, by way of giving a
final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red bull, wrapt
them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient’s skin.[270] The
{p80} ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked
sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he
was cured of the disease. “Such is the nature,” says Plutarch, “and
such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives
the malady which issues, like a stream, through the eyesight.”[271]
So well recognised among bird-fanciers was this valuable property of
the stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds for sale they
kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it
and be cured for nothing.[272] The virtue of the bird lay not in its
colour but in its large golden eye, which, if it do not pass for a
tuft of yellow lichen, is the first thing that strikes the searcher,
as the bird cowers, to escape observation, on the sandy, flint-strewn
surface of the ground which it loves to haunt, and with which its drab
plumage blends so well that only a practised eye can easily detect
it.[273] Thus the yellow eye of the bird drew out the yellow jaundice.
Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same, bird, to which the Greeks
gave their name for jaundice, because if a jaundiced man saw it, the
disease left him and slew the bird.[274] He mentions also a stone
which was supposed to cure jaundice because its hue resembled that of
a jaundiced skin.[275] In modern Greece jaundice goes by the name of
the Golden Disease, and very naturally it can be healed by gold. To
effect a perfect cure all that you have to do is this. Take a piece
of gold (best of all an English sovereign, since English gold is the
purest) and put it in a measure of wine. Expose the wine with the gold
to the stars for three nights; then drink three glasses of it daily
till it is used up. By that time the jaundice will be quite washed out
of your system. The cure is, in the strictest sense of the word, a
sovereign one.[276] {p81} A Wend cure for jaundice, like the modern
Greek one, is to drink a glass of water in which a gold coin has been
left overnight.[277] A remedy based on the principle of contraries is
to look steadily at pitch or other black substances.[278] In South
Russia a Jewish remedy for jaundice is to wear golden bracelets.[279]
Here the great homoeopathic principle is clearly the same as in the
preceding cases, though its application is different. In Germany
yellow turnips, gold coins, gold rings, saffron, and other yellow
things are still esteemed remedies for jaundice, just as a stick of
red sealing-wax carried on the person cures the red eruption popularly
known as St. Anthony’s fire, or the blood-stone with its blood-red
spots allays bleeding.[280] Another popular remedy in Germany for the
red St. Anthony’s fire and also for bleeding is supplied by the common
crossbills. In this bird “after the first moult the difference between
the sexes is shewn by the hens inclining to yellowish-green, while
the cocks become diversified by orange-yellow and red, their plumage
finally deepening into a rich crimson-red, varied in places by a
flame-colour.”[281] The smallest reflection may convince us that these
gorgeous hues must be endowed with very valuable medical properties.
Accordingly in some parts of Bavaria, Saxony, and Bohemia people keep
crossbills in cages in order that the red birds may draw the red St.
Antony’s fire and the inflammation of fever to themselves and so
relieve the human patient. Often in a peasant’s cottage you may see the
red bird in its cage hanging beside a sick-bed and drawing to itself
the hectic flush from the cheeks of the hot and restless patient, who
lies tossing under the blankets. And the dried body of a crossbill has
only to be placed on a wound to stop the bleeding at once. It is not
the colour only of the feathers which produces this salutary effect;
the peculiar {p82} shape of the bill, which gives the bird its English
and German name, is a contributory cause. For the horny sheaths of the
bill cross each other obliquely, and this formation undoubtedly enables
the bird to draw diseases to itself more readily than a beak of the
common shape could possibly do. Curious observers have even remarked
that when the upper bill crosses the lower to the right, the bird
will attract the diseases of men, whereas if the upper bill crosses
the lower to the left, it will attract the diseases of women. But I
cannot vouch for the accuracy of this particular observation. However
that may be, certain it is that no fire will break out in a house
where a crossbill is kept in a cage, neither will lightning strike the
dwelling; and this immunity can only be ascribed to the protective
colouring of the bird, the red hue of its plumage serving to ward off
the red lightning and to nip a red conflagration in the bud. However,
the poor bird seldom lives to old age; nor could this reasonably be
expected of a creature which has to endure so much vicarious suffering.
It generally falls a victim to one or other of the maladies of which
it has relieved our ailing humanity. The causes which have given the
crossbill its remarkable colour and the peculiar shape of its bill have
escaped many naturalists, but they are familiar to children in Germany.
The truth is that when Jesus Christ hung on the cross a flight of
crossbills fluttered round him and tugged with their bills at the nails
in his hands and feet to draw them out, till their feathers, which were
grey before, were all bedabbled with blood, and their beaks, which
had been straight, were twisted awry. So red have been their feathers
and twisted their beaks from that day to this.[282] Another cure
prescribed in Germany for St. Anthony’s fire is to rub the patient with
ashes from a house that has been burned down;[283] for it is easy to
see that as the fire died out in that house, so St. Anthony’s fire will
die out in that man.
[Sidenote: The shrew-mouse and the shrew-ash.
Homoeopathic prescriptions to make the hair grow.]
A curious application of homoeopathic magic to the {p83} cure of disease
is founded on the old English superstition that if a shrew-mouse runs
over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, the animal suffers cruelly
and may lose the use of its limb. Against this accident the farmer
used to keep a shrew-ash at hand as a remedy. A shrew-ash was prepared
thus. A deep hole was bored in the tree, and a shrew-mouse was thrust
in alive and plugged in, probably with some incantations which have
been forgotten.[284] An ancient Indian cure for a scanty crop of
hair was to pour a solution of certain plants over the head of the
patient; this had to be done by a doctor who was dressed in black and
had eaten black food, and the ceremony must be performed in the early
morning, while the stars were fading in the sky, and before the black
crows had risen cawing from their nests.[285] The exact virtue of
these plants has escaped our knowledge, but we can hardly doubt that
they were dark and hairy; while the black clothes of the doctor, his
black food, and the swarthy hue of the crows unquestionably combined to
produce a crop of black hair on the patient’s head. A more disagreeable
means of attaining the same end is adopted by some of the tribes of
Central Australia. To promote the growth of a boy’s hair a man with
flowing locks bites the youth’s scalp as hard as he can, being urged
thereto by his friends, who sit round watching him at his task, while
the sufferer howls aloud with pain.[286] Clearly, on the principle
of capillary attraction, if I may say so, he thus imparts of his own
mature abundance to the scarcity of his youthful friend.
[Sidenote: Various homoeopathic remedies.]
One of the great merits of homoeopathic magic is that it enables the
cure to be performed on the person of the doctor instead of on that
of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and inconvenience,
while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish before him. For
example, the peasants of {p84} Perche, in France, labour under the
impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought about by the
patient’s stomach becoming unhooked, as they call it, and so falling
down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called in to restore the organ to
its proper place. After hearing the symptoms he at once throws himself
into the most horrible contortions, for the purpose of unhooking his
own stomach. Having succeeded in the effort, he next hooks it up again
in another series of contortions and grimaces, while the patient
experiences a corresponding relief. Fee five francs.[287] In like
manner a Dyak medicine-man, who has been fetched in a case of illness,
will lie down and pretend to be dead. He is accordingly treated like
a corpse, is bound up in mats, taken out of the house, and deposited
on the ground. After about an hour the other medicine-men loose the
pretended dead man and bring him to life; and as he recovers, the sick
person is supposed to recover too.[288] A cure for a tumour, based
on the principle of homoeopathic magic, is prescribed by Marcellus of
Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius the First, in his curious work
on medicine. It is as follows. Take a root of vervain, cut it across,
and hang one end of it round the patient’s neck, and the other in the
smoke of the fire. As the vervain dries up in the smoke, so the tumour
will also dry up and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove
ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself
very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs
the moisture once more, the tumour will return.[289] The same sapient
writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for
a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting
from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that comes
to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples will fall
from your body; only you must be very careful not to wipe them with
your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to it.[290] {p85}
[Sidenote: Sympathetic magic to ensure the food supply.]
Further, homoeopathic and in general sympathetic magic plays a great
part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to secure an
abundant supply of food. On the principle that like produces like, many
things are done by him and his friends in deliberate imitation of the
result which he seeks to attain; and, on the other hand, many things
are scrupulously avoided because they bear some more or less fanciful
resemblance to others which would really be disastrous.
[Sidenote: Systematic use of sympathetic magic in Central Australia.]
Nowhere is the theory of sympathetic magic more systematically carried
into practice for the maintenance of the food supply than in the barren
regions of Central Australia. Here the tribes are divided into a number
of totem clans, each of which is charged with the duty of propagating
and multiplying their totem for the good of the community by means of
magical ceremonies and incantations. The great majority of the totems
are edible animals and plants, and the general result supposed to be
accomplished by these magical totemic ceremonies or _intichiuma_, as
the Arunta call them, is that of supplying the tribe with food and
other necessaries. Often the rites consist of an imitation of the
effect which the people desire to produce; in other words, their magic
is of the homoeopathic or imitative sort.
[Sidenote: _Intichiuma_, or magical ceremonies for the increase of the
totemic animals and plants in Central Australia.
Witchetty grub ceremony.
Emu ceremony.
Hakea flower ceremony.
Kangaroo ceremony.
Grass seed ceremony.]
Thus among the Arunta the men of the witchetty grub totem perform a
series of elaborate ceremonies for multiplying the grub which the other
members of the tribe use as food. One of the ceremonies is a pantomime
representing the fully-developed insect in the act of emerging from the
chrysalis. A long narrow structure of branches is set up to imitate
the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure a number of men, who
have the grub for their totem, sit and sing of the creature in its
various stages. Then they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture,
and as they do so they sing of the insect emerging from the chrysalis.
This is supposed to multiply the numbers of the grubs.[291] Again, in
order to multiply emus, which are an important article of food, the men
of the emu totem in the Arunta tribe proceed as follows. They clear
a small spot of level ground, and opening veins in their arms they
let the {p86} blood stream out until the surface of the ground, for a
space of about three square yards, is soaked with it. When the blood
has dried and caked, it forms a hard and fairly impermeable surface,
on which they paint the sacred design of the emu totem, especially the
parts of the bird which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the
eggs. Round this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers,
wearing head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the
emu, mimic the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering
about in all directions.[292] Again, men of the hakea flower totem
in the Arunta tribe perform a ceremony to make the hakea tree burst
into blossom. The scene of the ceremony is a little hollow, by the
side of which grows an ancient hakea tree. In the middle of the hollow
is a small worn block of stone, supposed to represent a mass of hakea
flowers. Before the ceremony begins, an old man of the totem carefully
sweeps the ground clean, and then strokes the stone all over with his
hands. After that the men sit round the stone and chant invitations to
the tree to flower much and to the blossoms to be filled with honey.
Finally, at the request of the old leader, one of the young men opens
a vein in his arm and lets the blood flow freely over the stone,
while the rest continue to sing. The flow of blood is supposed to
represent the preparation of the favourite drink of the natives, which
is made by steeping the hakea flower in water. As soon as the stone
is covered with blood the ceremony is complete.[293] Again, the men
of the kangaroo totem in the Arunta tribe perform ceremonies for the
multiplication of kangaroos at a certain rocky ledge, which, in the
opinion of the natives, is full of the spirits of kangaroos ready to go
forth and inhabit kangaroo bodies. A little higher up on the hillside
are two blocks of stone, which represent a male and female kangaroo
respectively. At the ceremony these two blocks are rubbed with a stone
by two men. Then the rocky ledge below is decorated with alternate
vertical stripes of red and white, to indicate the red fur and white
bones of the kangaroo. After that a number of young men sit on the
ledge, open veins in {p87} their arms, and allow the blood to spurtle
over the edge of the rock on which they are seated. This pouring out
of the blood of the kangaroo men on the rock is thought to drive out
the spirits of the kangaroos in all directions, and so to increase the
number of the animals. While it is taking place, the other men sit
below watching the performers and singing songs which refer to the
expected increase of kangaroos.[294] In the Kaitish tribe, when the
headman of the grass seed totem wishes to make the grass grow, he takes
two sacred sticks or stones (_churinga_) of the well-known bull-roarer
pattern, smears them with red-ochre, and decorates them with lines and
dots of down to represent grass seed. Then he rubs the sticks or stones
together so {p88} that the down flies off in all directions. The down is
supposed to carry with it some virtue from the sacred stick or stone
whereby the grass seed is made to grow. For days afterwards the headman
walks about by himself in the bush singing the grass seed and carrying
one of the sacred bull-roarers (_churinga_) with him. At night he hides
the implement in the bush and returns to camp, where he may have no
intercourse with his wife. For during all this time he is believed to
be so full of magic power, derived from the bull-roarer, that if he had
intercourse with her the grass seed would not grow properly and his
body would swell up when he tasted of it. When the seed begins to grow,
he still goes on singing to make it grow more, but when it is fully
grown he brings back the sacred implement to his camp hidden in bark;
and having gathered a store of the seed he leaves it with the men of
the other half of the tribe, saying, “You eat the grass seed in plenty,
it is very good and grows in my country.”[295]
[Sidenote: Manna ceremony.]
A somewhat similar ceremony is performed by men of the manna totem
in the Arunta tribe for the increase of their totem. This manna is
a product of the mulga tree (_Acacia aneura_), and resembles the
better-known sugar-manna of gum trees. When the men of the totem wish
to multiply the manna, they resort to a great boulder of grey rock,
curiously streaked with black and white seams, which is thought to
represent a mass of manna deposited there long ago by a man of the
totem. The same significance is attributed to other smaller stones
which rest on the top of the boulder. The headman of the totem begins
the ceremony by digging up a sacred bull-roarer (_churinga_), which
is buried in the earth at the foot of the boulder. It is supposed to
represent a lump of manna and to have lain there ever since the remote
_alcheringa_ or dream time, the farthest past of which these savages
have any conception. Next the headman climbs to the top of the boulder
and rubs it with the bull-roarer, and after that he takes the smaller
stones and with them rubs the same spot on the boulder. Meantime the
other men, sitting round about, chant loudly an invitation to the dust
produced by {p89} the rubbing of the stones to go out and generate a
plentiful supply of manna on the mulga-trees. Finally, with twigs of
the mulga the leader sweeps away the dust which has gathered on the
surface of the stone; his intention is to cause the dust to settle on
the mulga-trees and so produce manna.[296]
[Sidenote: Euro ceremony.
Cockatoo ceremony.]
Again, in a rocky gorge of the Murchison Range there are numbers of
little heaps of rounded, water-worn stones, carefully arranged on beds
of leaves and hidden away under piles of rougher quartzite blocks. In
the opinion of the Warramunga tribe, these rounded stones represent
euros, that is, a species of kangaroo. According to their size they
stand for young or old, male or female euros. Any old man of the euro
totem who happens to pass the spot may take the stones out, smear
them with red ochre and rub them well. This is supposed to cause the
spirits of euros to pass out from the stones and to be born as animals,
thus increasing the food supply.[297] Again, in the Warramunga tribe
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen saw and heard a ceremony which was believed
to multiply white cockatoos to a wonderful extent. From ten o’clock
one evening until after sunrise next morning the headman of the white
cockatoo totem held in his hand a rude effigy of the cockatoo and
imitated the harsh cry of the bird, with exasperating monotony, all
night long. When his voice failed him, his son took up the call and
relieved the old man until such time as his father was rested enough to
begin again.[298]
[Sidenote: Homoeopathic or imitative character of these rites.
Use of human blood in these ceremonies.]
In this last ceremony the homoeopathic or imitative character of the
rite is particularly plain: the shape of the bird which is to be
multiplied is mimicked by an effigy, its cry is imitated by the human
voice. In others of the ceremonies just described the homoeopathic
principle works by means of stones, which resemble in shape the edible
animals or plants that the natives desire to increase. We shall see
presently that the Melanesians similarly attribute fertilising virtues
to stones of certain shapes.[299] Meantime it {p90} deserves to be
noticed that in some of these Australian rites for the multiplication
of the totemic animals the blood of the men of the totem plays an
important part. Similarly in a ceremony performed by men of the
Dieri tribe for the multiplication of carpet-snakes and iguanas the
performers wound themselves and the blood that drips from their wounds
is poured on a sandhill in which a mythical ancestor is believed to
be buried and from which carpet-snakes and iguanas are confidently
expected to swarm forth.[300] Again, when the headman of the fish
totem in the Wonkgongaru tribe desires to make fish plentiful, he
paints himself all over with red ochre, and, taking little pointed
bones, goes into a pool. There he pierces his scrotum and the skin
around the navel with the bones, and sits down in the water. The blood
from the wounds, as it mingles with the water, is supposed to give
rise to fish.[301] In all these cases clearly a fertilising virtue
is ascribed to human blood. The ascription is interesting and may
possibly go some way to explain the widely-spread custom of voluntary
wounds and mutilations in religious or magical rites. It may therefore
be worth while, even at the cost of a digression, to enquire a little
more closely into the custom as it is practised by the rude savages of
Australia.[302]
[Sidenote: Blood poured into graves.
Blood given to the sick and aged
Blood used by an avenging party.]
In the first place, then, the Dieri custom of pouring blood over the
supposed remains of the ancestor in his sandhill closely resembles the
custom observed by some of the Australian aborigines at the graves of
their relatives. Thus among the tribes on the River Darling several
men used to stand by the open grave and cut each other’s heads with a
boomerang, and then hold their bleeding heads over the grave so that
the blood dripped on the corpse at the bottom of it. If the deceased
was highly esteemed, the bleeding was repeated after some earth had
been thrown on the corpse.[303] Among {p91} the Arunta it is customary
for the women kinsfolk to cut themselves at the grave so that blood
flows upon it.[304] Again, at the Vasse River, in Western Australia,
before the body was lowered into the grave, the natives used to gash
their thighs, and at the flowing of the blood they all said, “I have
brought blood,” and they stamped the foot forcibly on the ground,
sprinkling the blood around them; then wiping the wounds with a wisp of
leaves, they threw it, all bloody, on the dead man. After that they let
the body down into the grave.[305] Further, it is a common practice
with the Central Australians to give human blood to the sick and aged
for the purpose of strengthening them; and in order that the blood may
have this effect it need not always be drunk by the infirm person, it
is enough to sprinkle it on his body. For example, a young man will
often open a vein in his arm and let the blood trickle over the body
of an older man in order to strengthen his aged friend; and sometimes
the old man will drink a little of the blood.[306] So in illness
the blood is sometimes applied outwardly as well as inwardly, the
patient both drinking it and having it rubbed over his body; sometimes
apparently he only drinks it. The blood is drawn from a man or woman
who is related to the sufferer either by blood or marriage, and the
notion always is to convey to the sick person some of the strength
of the blood-giver.[307] In the Wiimbaio tribe, if a man had nearly
killed his wife in a paroxysm of rage, the woman was laid out on the
ground, and the husband’s arms being tightly bound above the elbows,
the medicine-man opened the veins in them and allowed the blood to flow
on the prostrate body of the victim till the man grew faint.[308] The
intention of thus bleeding the man over the woman {p92} was apparently
to restore her to life by means of the blood drawn from her assailant.
Again, before an avenging party starts to take the life of a distant
enemy, all the men stand up, open veins in their genital organs with
sharp flints or pointed sticks, and allow the blood to spurtle over
each other’s thighs. This ceremony is supposed to strengthen the men
mutually, and also to knit them so closely together that treachery
henceforth becomes impossible. Sometimes for the same purpose blood is
drawn from the arm and drunk by the men of the avenging party, and if
one of them refuses thus to pledge himself the others will force his
mouth open and pour the blood into it. After that, even if he wishes
to play the traitor and to give the doomed man warning, he cannot do
so; he is bound by a physical necessity to side with the avengers whose
blood he has swallowed.[309]
[Sidenote: Blood of circumcision and subincision; uses made of it.
Anodynes based on the principle of homoeopathic magic.]
Further, it is worth while to notice some uses made of human blood in
connexion with the ceremonies of circumcision and subincision, which
all lads of the Central Australian tribes have to undergo before
they are recognised as full-grown men. For example, the blood drawn
from them at these operations is caught in a hollow shield and taken
to certain kinsmen or kinswomen, who drink it or have it smeared on
their breasts and foreheads.[310] The motive of this practice is
not mentioned, but on the analogy of the preceding customs we may
conjecture that it is to strengthen the relatives who partake of
the blood. This interpretation is confirmed by an analogous use in
Queensland of the blood drawn from a woman at the operation which in
the female sex corresponds to subincision in the male; for that blood,
mixed with another ingredient, is kept and drunk as a medicine by any
sick person who may be in the camp at the time.[311] Moreover, it is
corroborated by a similar use of the foreskin which has been removed at
circumcision; for among the southern Arunta this piece of skin is given
to the younger brother of the circumcised lad and he swallows {p93}
it, in the belief that it will make him grow strong and tall.[312]
In the tribe at Fowler’s Bay, who practise both circumcision and
subincision, the severed foreskin is swallowed by the operator,[313]
perhaps in order to strengthen the lad sympathetically. In some tribes
of North-West Australia it is the lad himself who swallows his own
foreskin mixed with kangaroo flesh; while in other tribes of the same
region the severed portion is taken by the relations and deposited
under the bark of a large tree.[314] The possible significance of
this latter treatment of the foreskin will appear presently. Among the
Kolkodoons of Cloniny, in Northern Queensland, the foreskin is strung
on twine made of human hair, and is then tied round the mother’s neck
“to keep off the devil.”[315] In the Warramunga tribe the old men
draw blood from their own subincised urethras in presence of the lads
who a few days before have undergone the operation of subincision. The
object of this custom, we are told, is to promote the healing of the
young men’s wounds and to strengthen them generally.[316] It does
not appear that the blood of the old men is drunk by or smeared upon
the youths; seemingly it is supposed to benefit them sympathetically
without direct contact. A similar action of blood at a distance may
partly explain a very singular custom observed by the Arunta women at
the moment when a lad is being subincised. The operation is performed
at a distance from, but within hearing of, the women’s camp. When the
boy is seized in order to be operated on, the men of the {p94} party
raise a loud shout of “Pirr-rr.” At that sound the women immediately
assemble in their camp, and the boy’s mother cuts gashes across the
stomach and shoulders of the boy’s sisters, her own elder sisters, an
old woman who furnished the boy with a sacred fire at circumcision, and
all the women whose daughters he would be allowed to marry; and while
she cuts she imitates the sound made by the men who are subincising her
son. These cuts generally leave behind them a definite series of scars;
they have a name of their own (_urpma_), and are often represented by
definite lines on the bull-roarers.[317] What the exact meaning of
this extraordinary ceremony may be, I cannot say; but perhaps one of
its supposed effects may be to relieve the boy’s pain by transferring
it to his women-kind. In like manner, when the Warramunga men are
fighting each other with blazing torches, the women burn themselves
with lighted twigs in the belief that by so doing they prevent the
men from inflicting serious injuries on each other.[318] The theory
further receives some support from certain practices formerly observed
by the natives inhabiting the coast of New South Wales. Before lads had
their noses bored, the medicine men threw themselves into contortions
on the ground, and after pretending to suffer great pain were delivered
of bones, which were to be used at the ceremony of nose-boring. The
lads were told that the more the medicine men suffered, the less pain
they themselves would feel.[319] Again, among the same natives, when a
woman was in labour, a female friend would tie one end of a cord round
the sufferer’s neck and rub her own gums with the other end till they
bled,[320] probably in order to draw away the pain from the mother to
herself. For a similar reason, perhaps, in Samoa, while blood was being
drawn from a virgin bride, her friends, young and old, beat their heads
with stones till they bled.[321]
[Sidenote: Fertilising virtue attributed to blood of circumcision and
subincision.
Fertilising virtue attributed to foreskin.
Belief of the Central Australian tribes in the reincarnation of the
dead.]
Lastly, in some tribes the blood shed at the circumcision {p95} and
subincision of lads is collected in paper bark and buried in the bank
of a pool where water-lilies grow; this is supposed to promote the
growth of the lilies.[322] Needless to say, this rude attempt at
horticulture is not prompted by a simple delight in contemplating these
beautiful bright blue flowers which bloom in the Australian wilderness,
decking the surface of pools by countless thousands. The savages feed
on the stems and roots of the lilies; that is why they desire to
cultivate them.[323] In this last practice a fertilising virtue is
clearly attributed to the blood of circumcision and subincision. The
Anula tribe, who among others observe the custom, obviously ascribe
the same virtue to the severed foreskin, for they bury it also by the
side of a pool.[324] The Warramunga entertain the same opinion of
this part of the person, for they place the foreskin in a hole made by
a witchetty grub in a tree, believing that it will cause a plentiful
supply of these edible grubs.[325] Among the Unmatjera the custom
is somewhat different, but taken in connexion with their traditions
it is even more significant. The boy puts his severed foreskin on a
shield, covers it up with a broad spear-thrower, and then carries it
in the darkness of night, lest any woman should see what he is doing,
to a hollow tree in which he deposits it. He tells no one where he has
hidden it, except a man who stands to him in the relation of father’s
sister’s son. Nowadays there is no special relation between the boy
and the tree, but formerly the case seems to have been different.
For according to {p96} tradition the early mythical ancestors of the
tribe placed their foreskins in their _nanja_ trees, that is, in
their local totem centres, the trees from which their spirits came
forth at birth and to which they would return after death.[326]
If, as seems highly probable, such a custom as that recorded by the
tradition ever prevailed, its intention could hardly be any other
than that of securing the future birth and reincarnation of the owner
of the foreskin when he should have died and his spirit returned to
its abode in the tree. For among all these Central tribes the belief
is firmly rooted that the human soul undergoes an endless series of
reincarnations, the living men and women of one generation being
nothing but the spirits of their ancestors come to life again, and
destined to be themselves reborn in the persons of their descendants.
During the interval between two incarnations the souls live in their
_nanja_ spots or local totem centres, which are always natural objects
such as trees or rocks. Each totem clan has a number of such totem
centres scattered over the country. There the souls of the dead men
and women of the totem, but of no other, congregate during their
disembodied state, and thence they issue and are born again in human
form when a favourable opportunity presents itself.[327] It might
well be thought that a man’s new birth would be facilitated if, in his
lifetime, he could lay up a stock of vital energy for the use of his
disembodied spirit after death. That he did, apparently, by detaching
a portion of himself, namely the foreskin, and depositing it in his
_nanja_ tree, or rock, or whatever it might be.
[Sidenote: Circumcision perhaps intended to ensure reincarnation.
Subincision possibly also designed to secure rebirth.]
Is it possible that in this belief and this practice we have the long
lost key to the meaning of circumcision? In other words, can it be
that circumcision was originally intended to ensure the rebirth at
some future time of the circumcised man by disposing of the severed
portion of his body in such a way as to provide him with a stock of
energy on which his disembodied spirit could draw when the critical
moment of reincarnation came round? The conjecture is confirmed by
the observation that among the Akikuyu of {p97} British East Africa
the ceremony of circumcision used to be regularly combined with a
graphic pretence of rebirth enacted by the novice.[328] If this should
prove to be indeed the clue to the meaning of circumcision, it would
be natural to look for an explanation of subincision along the same
lines. Now we have seen that the blood of subincision is used both
to strengthen relatives and to make water-lilies grow. Hence we may
conjecture that the strengthening and fertilising virtue of the blood
was applied, like the foreskin at circumcision, to lay up a store of
energy in the _nanja_ spot against the time when the man’s feeble ghost
would need it. The intention of both ceremonies would thus be to ensure
the future reincarnation of the individual by quickening the local
totem centre, the home of his disembodied spirit, with a vital portion
of himself. That portion, whether the foreskin or the blood, was in a
manner seed sown to grow up and provide his immortal spirit with a new
body when his old body should have mouldered in the dust.
[Sidenote: Knocking out of teeth in Australia perhaps practised for the
same purpose.
Extraction of teeth associated with rain.]
Perhaps the same theory may serve to explain another initiatory rite
practised by some of the Australian aborigines, namely, the knocking
out of teeth. This is the principal ceremony of initiation amongst
the tribes of eastern and south-eastern Australia; and it is often
practised, though not as an initiatory rite, by the Central tribes,
with whom the essential rites of initiation are circumcision and
subincision.[329] On the hypothesis here suggested, we should expect
to find the tooth regarded as a vital part of the man which was
sacrificed to ensure another life for him after death. The durability
of the teeth, compared to the corruptible nature of the greater part
of the body, might be a sufficient reason with a savage philosopher
for choosing this portion of the corporeal frame on which to pin his
hope of immortality. The evidence at our disposal certainly does not
suffice to establish this explanation of the rite; but there are some
facts which seem to point in that direction. In the first {p98} place,
the extracted tooth is supposed to remain in sympathetic connexion with
the man from whom it has been removed; and if proper care is not taken
of it, he may fall ill.[330] With some Victorian tribes the practice
was for the mother of the lad to choose a young gum-tree and to insert
her son’s teeth in the bark, at the fork of two of the topmost boughs.
Ever afterwards the tree was held in a sense sacred. It was made known
only to certain persons of the tribe, and the youth himself was never
allowed to learn where his teeth had been deposited. When he died, the
tree was killed by fire.[331] Thus in a fashion the tree might be
said to be bound up with the life of the man whose teeth it contained,
since when he died it was destroyed. Further, among some of the
Central tribes the extracted tooth is thrown away as far as possible
in the direction of the spot where the man’s mother is supposed to
have had her camp in the far-off legendary time which is known as the
_alcheringa_.[332] May not this be done to secure the rebirth of the
man’s spirit in that place? In the Gnanji tribe the extracted tooth is
buried by the man’s or woman’s mother beside a pool, for the purpose
of stopping the rain and increasing the number of water-lilies that
grow in the pool.[333] Thus the same fertilising virtue is ascribed to
the tooth which is attributed to the foreskin severed at circumcision
and to the blood drawn at subincision. Why the drawing of teeth should
be supposed to stop rain, I cannot guess. Curiously enough, among
the Central tribes generally, the extraction of teeth has a special
association with rain and water. Thus among the Arunta it is practised
chiefly by the members of the rain or water totem; and it is nearly if
not quite obligatory on all the men and women of that totem, whereas
it is merely optional with members of the other clans. Further, the
ceremony is always performed among the {p99} Arunta immediately after
the magical ceremony for the making of rain.[334] In the Warramunga
tribe the knocking out of the teeth generally takes place towards the
end of the wet season, when the water-holes are full, and the natives
do not wish any more rain to fall. Moreover, it is always performed
on the banks of a water-hole. The persons to be operated on enter the
pool, fill their mouths with water, spit it out in all directions, and
splash the water over themselves, taking care to wet thoroughly the
crown of the head. Immediately afterwards the tooth is knocked out. The
Chingilli also knock out teeth towards the close of the wet season,
when they think they have had enough of rain. The extracted tooth is
thrown into a water-hole, in the belief that it will drive rain and
clouds away.[335] I merely note, without attempting to account for,
this association between the extraction of teeth and the stopping of
rain.
[Sidenote: Extraction of tooth used to determine a man’s country and
totem.
Belief in reincarnation among the natives of the Pennefather River in
Queensland.]
The natives of the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland use the extraction
of the tooth to determine both a man’s totem and the country to which
he belongs. While the tooth is being knocked out, they mention the
various districts owned or frequented by the lad’s mother, her father,
or other of her relatives. The one which happens to be mentioned at
the moment when the tooth breaks away is the country to which the lad
belongs in future, that is, the country where he will have the right
to hunt and to gather roots and fruits. Further, the bloody spittle
which he ejects after the extraction of the tooth is examined by the
old men, who trace some likeness between it and a natural object,
such as an animal, a plant, or a stone. Henceforth that object will
be the young man’s _ari_ or totem.[336] Some light is thrown on this
ceremony by a parallel custom which the natives of the Pennefather
River in Queensland observe at the birth of a child. They believe that
every person’s spirit undergoes a series of reincarnations, and that
during the interval between two {p100} successive reincarnations the
spirit stays in one or other of the haunts of Anjea, the being who
causes conception in women by putting mud babies into their wombs.
Hence, in order to determine where the new baby’s spirit resided since
it was last in the flesh, they mention Anjea’s haunts one after the
other while the grandmother is cutting the child’s navel-string; and
the place which happens to be mentioned when the navel-string breaks
is the spot where the spirit lodged since its last incarnation. That
is the country to which the child belongs; there he will have the
right of hunting when he grows up. Hence, according to the home from
which its spirit came to dwell among men, a child may be known as a
baby obtained from a tree, a rock, or a pool of fresh water. Anjea,
with whom the souls of the dead live till their time comes to be born
again, is never seen; but you may hear him laughing in the depths of
the woods, among the rocks, down in the lagoons, and along the mangrove
swamps.[337] Hence we may fairly infer that the country assigned to a
man of the Cape York Peninsula at the extraction of his tooth is the
one where his spirit tarried during the interval which elapsed since
its last incarnation. His totem, which is determined at the same time,
may possibly be the animal, plant, or other natural object in which
his spirit resided since its last embodiment in human form, or perhaps
rather in which a part of his spirit may be supposed to lodge outside
of his body during life. The latter view is favoured by the belief
of the tribe of the Pennefather River, whose practice at childbirth
so closely resembles that of the Cape York natives at puberty; for
the Pennefather people hold that during a man’s life a portion of his
spirit lodges outside of his body in his afterbirth.[338] However that
may be, it seems probable that among the Cape York natives the custom
of knocking out the tooth is closely associated with a theory of {p101}
reincarnation. Perhaps the same theory explains a privilege enjoyed by
the Kamilaroi tribe of New South Wales. They claimed a superiority over
the surrounding tribes, and enforced their claim by exacting from them
the teeth knocked out at puberty. The exaction of this tribute might
have passed for a mere assertion of suzerainty, were it not that the
Kamilaroi knocked out their own teeth also.[339] Perhaps the extracted
teeth were believed to secure to their present possessors a magical
control over their former owners, not only during life but after death,
so that armed with them the Kamilaroi could help or hinder the rebirth
of their departed friends or enemies.[340]
[Sidenote: Australian initiatory rites meant to secure rebirth.
Certain funeral rites also intended to ensure reincarnation.
Australian funeral ceremonies intended to ensure the reincarnation of
the dead.]
Thus, if I am right, the essential feature in all the three great
initiatory rites of the Australians is the removal of a vital part
of the person which shall serve as a link between two successive
incarnations by preparing for the novice a new body to house his
spirit when its present tabernacle shall have been worn out. Now, if
there is any truth in this suggestion, we should expect to find that
measures to ensure reincarnation are also taken at death and burial.
This seems in fact to be done. For, in the first place, the practice of
pouring the blood of kinsmen and kinswomen into the grave is obviously
susceptible of this explanation, since, in accordance with the
Australian usages which I have cited, the blood might well be thought
{p102} to strengthen the feeble ghost for a new birth. The same may be
said of the Australian custom of depositing hair with the dead,[341]
for it is a common notion that the hair is the seat of strength.[342]
Again, it has been a rule with some Australian tribes to bury their
dead on the spot where they were born.[343] This was very natural
if they desired the dead man to be born again. Further, the common
Australian practice of depositing the dead in trees[344] may, in
some cases at least, have been designed to facilitate rebirth; for
trees are often the places in which the souls of the dead reside, and
from which they come forth to be born again in human shape. Thus the
Unmatjera and Kaitish tribes bury very aged women and decrepit old men
in the ground; but the bodies of children, young women, and men in the
prime of life are laid on platforms among the boughs of trees; and in
regard to children we are definitely told that this is done in the hope
that “before very long its spirit may come back again and enter the
body of a woman—in all probability that of its former mother.”[345]
Further, the Arunta, who bury their dead, are careful to leave a low
depression on one side of the mound, in order that the spirit may pass
out and in; and this depression always faces towards the dead man’s or
woman’s camping-ground in the _alcheringa_ or remote past, that is,
the spot which he or she inhabited in spirit form.[346] Is not this
done to let the spirit rid itself of its decaying tabernacle and repair
to the place where in due time it will find a new and better body?
In this connexion the final burial rites in the Binbinga, Anula, and
Mara tribes are worthy of remark. Among these people the bones of the
dead are, after a series of ceremonies, deposited in a hollow log, on
which the dead man’s totem is painted. This log is then placed, with
the {p103} bones, in the boughs of a tree beside a pool, so that if
possible it overhangs the water. For about three wet seasons the father
and son of the deceased, who placed the log there, are alone allowed
to eat water-lilies out of that pool, and no woman is permitted to go
near the spot. There the bones of the dead man remain till the log rots
and they fall into the water or are carried away by a flood. When the
burial rites are all over, the spirit of the deceased returns to its
_mungai_ spot, that is, to the place where it dwells in the interval
between two successive incarnations. Sooner or later it will be born
again.[347] These rites seem, therefore, clearly to be a preparation
for the new birth.
[Sidenote: Belief in reincarnation and measures taken to secure it
among other peoples.
Reincarnation among the Bagishu of Mount Elgon.
Reincarnation among the tribes of the Lower Congo.
Reincarnation in India.
Reincarnation among the Hurons.
Reincarnation among the ancient Greeks.]
As the belief in reincarnation is shared by many peoples besides the
Australians, it is natural to suppose that funeral rites intended to
facilitate the rebirth of the deceased may be found in other parts of
the world. Elsewhere I have cited examples of these rites:[348] here
I will add a few more. It is especially the bodies of dead infants
which are the object of such ceremonies; for since their lives have
been cut prematurely short, it seems reasonable to give their souls
a chance of beginning again and lengthening out their existence on
earth to its natural close. But it is not always dead babies only whom
the living seek thus to bring back to life. For example, we read that
round about Mount Elgon in East Africa “the custom of throwing out the
dead is universal among all the clans of Bagishu, except in the case
of the youngest child or the old grandfather or grandmother, for whom,
like the child, a prolonged life on earth is desired. . . . When it is
desired to perpetuate on the earth the life of some old man or woman,
or that of some young baby, the corpse is buried inside the house
or just under the eaves, until another child is born to the nearest
relation of the corpse. This child, male or female, takes the name of
the corpse, and the Bagishu firmly believe that the spirit of the dead
has passed into this new child and lives again on earth. The remains
are then dug up and thrown out into the open.”[349] Similarly among
the {p104} tribes of the Lower Congo “a baby is always buried near
the house of its mother, never in the bush. They think that, if the
child is not buried near its mother’s house, she will be unlucky and
never have any more children. It is believed that the only new thing
about a child is its body. The spirit is old and formerly belonged to
some deceased person, or it may have the spirit of some living person.
They have two reasons for believing this. The child speaks early of
strange things the mother has never taught it, so that they believe the
old spirit is talking in the child. Again, if the child is like its
mother, father, or uncle, they think it has the spirit of the person
it resembles, and that that person will soon die. Hence a parent will
resent it if you say that the baby is like him or her.”[350] Thus it
appears that the argument for the pre-existence of the human soul,
which Plato and Wordsworth[351] drew from reminiscence, is fully
accepted by some negro tribes of West Africa. In the Bilaspore district
of India “a still-born child, or one who has passed away before the
_Chhatti_ (the sixth day, the day of purification) is not taken out of
the house for burial, but is placed in an earthen vessel (a _gharā_)
and is buried in the doorway or in the yard of the house. Some say that
this is done in order that the mother may bear another child.”[352]
It is said that among the Kondhs of India, on the day after a death,
some boiled rice and a small fowl are taken to the place where the body
was burned; there the fowl is split down the breast and placed on the
spot, after which it is eaten and the soul of the departed is invited
to enter a new-born child.[353] On the fifth day after a death the
Gonds perform the ceremony of bringing back the soul. They go to the
riverside and call aloud the name of the deceased. {p105} Then they
enter the river, catch a fish or an insect, and taking it home place
it among the sainted dead of the family, believing that the spirit of
their lost one has thus been brought back to the house. Sometimes the
fish or insect is eaten in order that the spirit which it contains may
be born again as a child.[354] When a baby died within a month or two
of birth, the Hurons did not dispose of its little body like those of
grown people by depositing it on a scaffold; they buried it beside
the road in order, so they said, that the child might enter secretly
into the womb of some woman passing by and be born again into the
world.[355] Some of the ancient rules observed with regard to funerals
in the Greek island of Ceos have been ingeniously explained by Mr. F.
B. Jevons as designed to secure the rebirth of the departed in one of
the women of the family.[356] The widespread custom of burying the
dead in the house was perhaps instituted for the same purpose,[357]
and the ancient Greek practice of sacrificing to the dead man at the
grave on his birthday may possibly have originated in the same train of
thought.[358] For example, sacrifices were annually offered on their
birthdays to Hippocrates by the Coans, to Aratus by the Sicyonians, and
to Epicurus by his disciples.[359]
[Sidenote: Rites to procure the rebirth of edible animals and plants.]
Now too we can fully understand the meaning of the bloody ritual in the
ceremonies for the multiplication of the totem animals and plants. We
have seen that a strengthening and fertilising virtue is attributed to
human blood. What {p106} more natural than that it should be poured out
by the men of the totem on the spot in which the disembodied spirits
of the totem animals or plants are waiting for reincarnation? Clearly
the rite seems intended to enable these spirits to take bodily shape
and be born again, in order that they may again serve as food, if not
to the men of the totem clan, at least to all the other numbers of the
tribe. Later on we shall find that the attempt to reincarnate the souls
of dead animals, in order that their bodies may be eaten over again,
is not peculiar to the Australian savages, but is practised with many
curious rites by peoples in other parts of the world.
[Sidenote: General theory of _intichiuma_ and initiatory rites in
Australia.
Cannibalism in Australia.
Australian totemism not a religion.
Present function of totemism in Central Australia.]