Chapter 69. Farewell to Nemi

Preface

THE PRIMARY aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which

regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia. When

I first set myself to solve the problem more than thirty years ago,

I thought that the solution could be propounded very briefly, but I

soon found that to render it probable or even intelligible it was

necessary to discuss certain more general questions, some of which

had hardly been broached before. In successive editions the

discussion of these and kindred topics has occupied more and more

space, the enquiry has branched out in more and more directions,

until the two volumes of the original work have expanded into

twelve. Meantime a wish has often been expressed that the book

should be issued in a more compendious form. This abridgment is an

attempt to meet the wish and thereby to bring the work within the

range of a wider circle of readers. While the bulk of the book has

been greatly reduced, I have endeavoured to retain its leading

principles, together with an amount of evidence sufficient to

illustrate them clearly. The language of the original has also for

the most part been preserved, though here and there the exposition

has been somewhat condensed. In order to keep as much of the text as

possible I have sacrificed all the notes, and with them all exact

references to my authorities. Readers who desire to ascertain the

source of any particular statement must therefore consult the larger

work, which is fully documented and provided with a complete

bibliography.

In the abridgment I have neither added new matter nor altered the

views expressed in the last edition; for the evidence which has come

to my knowledge in the meantime has on the whole served either to

confirm my former conclusions or to furnish fresh illustrations of

old principles. Thus, for example, on the crucial question of the

practice of putting kings to death either at the end of a fixed

period or whenever their health and strength began to fail, the body

of evidence which points to the wide prevalence of such a custom has

been considerably augmented in the interval. A striking instance of

a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished by the powerful

mediaeval kingdom of the Khazars in Southern Russia, where the kings

were liable to be put to death either on the expiry of a set term or

whenever some public calamity, such as drought, dearth, or defeat in

war, seemed to indicate a failure of their natural powers. The

evidence for the systematic killing of the Khazar kings, drawn from

the accounts of old Arab travellers, has been collected by me

elsewhere.[1] Africa, again, has supplied several fresh examples of

a similar practice of regicide. Among them the most notable perhaps

is the custom formerly observed in Bunyoro of choosing every year

from a particular clan a mock king, who was supposed to incarnate

the late king, cohabited with his widows at his temple-tomb, and

after reigning for a week was strangled.[2] The custom presents a

close parallel to the ancient Babylonian festival of the Sacaea, at

which a mock king was dressed in the royal robes, allowed to enjoy

the real king's concubines, and after reigning for five days was

stripped, scourged, and put to death. That festival in its turn has

lately received fresh light from certain Assyrian inscriptions,[3]

which seem to confirm the interpretation which I formerly gave of

the festival as a New Year celebration and the parent of the Jewish

festival of Purim.[4] Other recently discovered parallels to the

priestly kings of Aricia are African priests and kings who used to

be put to death at the end of seven or of two years, after being

liable in the interval to be attacked and killed by a strong man,

who thereupon succeeded to the priesthood or the kingdom.[5]

[1] J. G. Frazer, "The Killing of the Khazar Kings," _Folk-lore,_

xxviii. (1917), pp. 382-407.

[2] Rev. J. Roscoe, _The Soul of Central Africa_ (London, 1922), p.

200. Compare J. G. Frazer, &147;The Mackie Ethnological Expedition

to Central Africa," _Man,_ xx. (1920), p. 181.

[3] H. Zimmern, _Zum babylonischen Neujahrsfest_ (Leipzig, 1918).

Compare A. H. Sayce, in _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,_ July

1921, pp. 440-442.

[4] _The Golden Bough,_ Part VI. _The Scapegoat,_ pp. 354 _sqq.,_

412 _sqq._

[5] P. Amaury Talbot in _Journal of the African Society,_ July 1916,

pp. 309 _sq.; id.,_ in _Folk-lore, xxvi._ (1916), pp. 79 _sq.;_ H.

R. Palmer, in _Journal of the African Society,_ July 1912, pp. 403,

407 _sq._

With these and other instances of like customs before us it is no

longer possible to regard the rule of succession to the priesthood

of Diana at Aricia as exceptional; it clearly exemplifies a

widespread institution, of which the most numerous and the most

similar cases have thus far been found in Africa. How far the facts

point to an early influence of Africa on Italy, or even to the

existence of an African population in Southern Europe, I do not

presume to say. The pre-historic historic relations between the two

continents are still obscure and still under investigation.

Whether the explanation which I have offered of the institution is

correct or not must be left to the future to determine. I shall

always be ready to abandon it if a better can be suggested. Meantime

in committing the book in its new form to the judgment of the public

I desire to guard against a misapprehension of its scope which

appears to be still rife, though I have sought to correct it before

now. If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the

worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its

importance in the history of religion, still less because I would

deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I

could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the

significance of a priest who bore the title of King of the Wood, and

one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough--the

Golden Bough--from a tree in the sacred grove. But I am so far from

regarding the reverence for trees as of supreme importance for the

evolution of religion that I consider it to have been altogether

subordinate to other factors, and in particular to the fear of the

human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably the

most powerful force in the making of primitive religion. I hope that

after this explicit disclaimer I shall no longer be taxed with

embracing a system of mythology which I look upon not merely as

false but as preposterous and absurd. But I am too familiar with the

hydra of error to expect that by lopping off one of the monster's

heads I can prevent another, or even the same, from sprouting again.

I can only trust to the candour and intelligence of my readers to

rectify this serious misconception of my views by a comparison with

my own express declaration.

J. G. FRAZER.

1 BRICK COURT, TEMPLE, LONDON,

June 1922.

I. The King of the Wood

1. Diana and Virbius

WHO does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough? The scene,

suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine

mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural

landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of

Nemi-- "Diana's Mirror," as it was called by the ancients. No one

who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban

hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages

which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose

terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the

stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself

might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands

wild.

In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and

recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under

the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is

perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis,

or Diana of the Wood. The lake and the grove were sometimes known as

the lake and grove of Aricia. But the town of Aricia (the modern La

Riccia) was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the Alban

Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in

a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this sacred

grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day,

and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to

prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering

warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon

by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he

looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in

his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the

priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and

having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a

stronger or a craftier.

The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the

title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was

visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out, in

summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his

lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at

the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the

smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put

him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant. To gentle

and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to

darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on

a bright day. The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of

summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded

but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to

ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated

wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are

falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying

year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music--the

background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and

stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of

the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the

shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and

now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder

whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down

at him through the matted boughs.

The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical

antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation

we must go farther afield. No one will probably deny that such a

custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial

times, stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian

society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a

smooth-shaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the

custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches

into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity

with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has

elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we

can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of

Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led

to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated

widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied

circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but

generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives,

with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in

classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age

the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an

inference, in default of direct evidence as to how the priesthood

did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration. But it will

be more or less probable according to the degree of completeness

with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. The object of

this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly

probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.

I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have come

down to us on the subject. According to one story the worship of

Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing Thoas,

King of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to

Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a

faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were transported from

Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the

Capitoline slope, beside the temple of Concord. The bloody ritual

which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical

readers; it is said that every stranger who landed on the shore was

sacrificed on her altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed

a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of

which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to

break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt

entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew

him he reigned in his stead with the title of King of the Wood (_Rex

Nemorensis_). According to the public opinion of the ancients the

fateful branch was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl's bidding,

Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world

of the dead. The flight of the slave represented, it was said, the

flight of Orestes; his combat with the priest was a reminiscence of

the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This rule of

succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for

amongst his other freaks Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi

had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to slay him;

and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the

Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still

the prize of victory in a single combat.

Of the worship of Diana at Nemi some leading features can still be

made out. From the votive offerings which have been found on the

site, it appears that she was conceived of especially as a huntress,

and further as blessing men and women with offspring, and granting

expectant mothers an easy delivery. Again, fire seems to have played

a foremost part in her ritual. For during her annual festival, held

on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her

grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was

reflected by the lake; and throughout the length and breadth of

Italy the day was kept with holy rites at every domestic hearth.

Bronze statuettes found in her precinct represent the goddess

herself holding a torch in her raised right hand; and women whose

prayers had been heard by her came crowned with wreaths and bearing

lighted torches to the sanctuary in fulfilment of their vows. Some

one unknown dedicated a perpetually burning lamp in a little shrine

at Nemi for the safety of the Emperor Claudius and his family. The

terra-cotta lamps which have been discovered in the grove may

perhaps have served a like purpose for humbler persons. If so, the

analogy of the custom to the Catholic practice of dedicating holy

candles in churches would be obvious. Further, the title of Vesta

borne by Diana at Nemi points clearly to the maintenance of a

perpetual holy fire in her sanctuary. A large circular basement at

the north-east corner of the temple, raised on three steps and

bearing traces of a mosaic pavement, probably supported a round

temple of Diana in her character of Vesta, like the round temple of

Vesta in the Roman Forum. Here the sacred fire would seem to have

been tended by Vestal Virgins, for the head of a Vestal in

terra-cotta was found on the spot, and the worship of a perpetual

fire, cared for by holy maidens, appears to have been common in

Latium from the earliest to the latest times. Further, at the annual

festival of the goddess, hunting dogs were crowned and wild beasts

were not molested; young people went through a purificatory ceremony

in her honour; wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted of a

kid cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still

hanging in clusters on the boughs.

But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi. Two lesser

divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph of

the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to

fall in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Le Mole,

because here were established the mills of the modern village of

Nemi. The purling of the stream as it ran over the pebbles is

mentioned by Ovid, who tells us that he had often drunk of its

water. Women with child used to sacrifice to Egeria, because she was

believed, like Diana, to be able to grant them an easy delivery.

Tradition ran that the nymph had been the wife or mistress of the

wise king Numa, that he had consorted with her in the secrecy of the

sacred grove, and that the laws which he gave the Romans had been

inspired by communion with her divinity. Plutarch compares the

legend with other tales of the loves of goddesses for mortal men,

such as the love of Cybele and the Moon for the fair youths Attis

and Endymion. According to some, the trysting-place of the lovers

was not in the woods of Nemi but in a grove outside the dripping

Porta Capena at Rome, where another sacred spring of Egeria gushed

from a dark cavern. Every day the Roman Vestals fetched water from

this spring to wash the temple of Vesta, carrying it in earthenware

pitchers on their heads. In Juvenal's time the natural rock had been

encased in marble, and the hallowed spot was profaned by gangs of

poor Jews, who were suffered to squat, like gypsies, in the grove.

We may suppose that the spring which fell into the lake of Nemi was

the true original Egeria, and that when the first settlers moved

down from the Alban hills to the banks of the Tiber they brought the

nymph with them and found a new home for her in a grove outside the

gates. The remains of baths which have been discovered within the

sacred precinct, together with many terra-cotta models of various

parts of the human body, suggest that the waters of Egeria were used

to heal the sick, who may have signified their hopes or testified

their gratitude by dedicating likenesses of the diseased members to

the goddess, in accordance with a custom which is still observed in

many parts of Europe. To this day it would seem that the spring

retains medicinal virtues.

The other of the minor deities at Nemi was Virbius. Legend had it

that Virbius was the young Greek hero Hippolytus, chaste and fair,

who learned the art of venery from the centaur Chiron, and spent all

his days in the greenwood chasing wild beasts with the virgin

huntress Artemis (the Greek counterpart of Diana) for his only

comrade. Proud of her divine society, he spurned the love of women,

and this proved his bane. For Aphrodite, stung by his scorn,

inspired his stepmother Phaedra with love of him; and when he

disdained her wicked advances she falsely accused him to his father

Theseus. The slander was believed, and Theseus prayed to his sire

Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong. So while Hippolytus drove in

a chariot by the shore of the Saronic Gulf, the sea-god sent a

fierce bull forth from the waves. The terrified horses bolted, threw

Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged him at their hoofs to

death. But Diana, for the love she bore Hippolytus, persuaded the

leech Aesculapius to bring her fair young hunter back to life by his

simples. Jupiter, indignant that a mortal man should return from the

gates of death, thrust down the meddling leech himself to Hades. But

Diana hid her favourite from the angry god in a thick cloud,

disguised his features by adding years to his life, and then bore

him far away to the dells of Nemi, where she entrusted him to the

nymph Egeria, to live there, unknown and solitary, under the name of

Virbius, in the depth of the Italian forest. There he reigned a

king, and there he dedicated a precinct to Diana. He had a comely

son, Virbius, who, undaunted by his father's fate, drove a team of

fiery steeds to join the Latins in the war against Aeneas and the

Trojans. Virbius was worshipped as a god not only at Nemi but

elsewhere; for in Campania we hear of a special priest devoted to

his service. Horses were excluded from the Arician grove and

sanctuary because horses had killed Hippolytus. It was unlawful to

touch his image. Some thought that he was the sun. "But the truth

is," says Servius, "that he is a deity associated with Diana, as

Attis is associated with the Mother of the Gods, and Erichthonius

with Minerva, and Adonis with Venus." What the nature of that

association was we shall enquire presently. Here it is worth

observing that in his long and chequered career this mythical

personage has displayed a remarkable tenacity of life. For we can

hardly doubt that the Saint Hippolytus of the Roman calendar, who

was dragged by horses to death on the thirteenth of August, Diana's

own day, is no other than the Greek hero of the same name, who,

after dying twice over as a heathen sinner, has been happily

resuscitated as a Christian saint.

It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the stories

told to account for Diana's worship at Nemi are unhistorical.

Clearly they belong to that large class of myths which are made up

to explain the origin of a religious ritual and have no other

foundation than the resemblance, real or imaginary, which may be

traced between it and some foreign ritual. The incongruity of these

Nemi myths is indeed transparent, since the foundation of the

worship is traced now to Orestes and now to Hippolytus, according as

this or that feature of the ritual has to be accounted for. The real

value of such tales is that they serve to illustrate the nature of

the worship by providing a standard with which to compare it; and

further, that they bear witness indirectly to its venerable age by

showing that the true origin was lost in the mists of a fabulous

antiquity. In the latter respect these Nemi legends are probably

more to be trusted than the apparently historical tradition, vouched

for by Cato the Elder, that the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana

by a certain Egerius Baebius or Laevius of Tusculum, a Latin

dictator, on behalf of the peoples of Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium,

Laurentum, Cora, Tibur, Pometia, and Ardea. This tradition indeed

speaks for the great age of the sanctuary, since it seems to date

its foundation sometime before 495 B.C., the year in which Pometia

was sacked by the Romans and disappears from history. But we cannot

suppose that so barbarous a rule as that of the Arician priesthood

was deliberately instituted by a league of civilised communities,

such as the Latin cities undoubtedly were. It must have been handed

down from a time beyond the memory of man, when Italy was still in a

far ruder state than any known to us in the historical period. The

credit of the tradition is rather shaken than confirmed by another

story which ascribes the foundation of the sanctuary to a certain

Manius Egerius, who gave rise to the saying, "There are many Manii

at Aricia." This proverb some explained by alleging that Manius

Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas

others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed

people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from _Mania,_ a

bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the

name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims

on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with

the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius

of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both names to the

mythical Egeria, excite our suspicion. Yet the tradition recorded by

Cato seems too circumstantial, and its sponsor too respectable, to

allow us to dismiss it as an idle fiction. Rather we may suppose

that it refers to some ancient restoration or reconstruction of the

sanctuary, which was actually carried out by the confederate states.

At any rate it testifies to a belief that the grove had been from

early times a common place of worship for many of the oldest cities

of the country, if not for the whole Latin confederacy.

2. Artemis and Hippolytus

I HAVE said that the Arician legends of Orestes and Hippolytus,

though worthless as history, have a certain value in so far as they

may help us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing it

with the ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask

ourselves, Why did the author of these legends pitch upon Orestes

and Hippolytus in order to explain Virbius and the King of the Wood?

In regard to Orestes, the answer is obvious. He and the image of the

Tauric Diana, which could only be appeased with human blood, were

dragged in to render intelligible the murderous rule of succession

to the Arician priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus the case is not

so plain. The manner of his death suggests readily enough a reason

for the exclusion of horses from the grove; but this by itself seems

hardly enough to account for the identification. We must try to

probe deeper by examining the worship as well as the legend or myth

of Hippolytus.

He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troezen, situated

on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay, where groves of oranges

and lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires above the

garden of Hesperides, now clothe the strip of fertile shore at the

foot of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of the tranquil

bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon's sacred

island, its peaks veiled in the sombre green of the pines. On this

fair coast Hippolytus was worshipped. Within his sanctuary stood a

temple with an ancient image. His service was performed by a priest

who held office for life; every year a sacrificial festival was held

in his honour; and his untimely fate was yearly mourned, with

weeping and doleful chants, by unwedded maids. Youths and maidens

dedicated locks of their hair in his temple before marriage. His

grave existed at Troezen, though the people would not show it. It

has been suggested, with great plausibility, that in the handsome

Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis, cut off in his youthful prime, and

yearly mourned by damsels, we have one of those mortal lovers of a

goddess who appear so often in ancient religion, and of whom Adonis

is the most familiar type. The rivalry of Artemis and Phaedra for

the affection of Hippolytus reproduces, it is said, under different

names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and Proserpine for the love of

Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of Aphrodite. The theory

probably does no injustice either to Hippolytus or to Artemis. For

Artemis was originally a great goddess of fertility, and, on the

principles of early religion, she who fertilises nature must herself

be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male consort.

On this view, Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis at Troezen, and

the shorn tresses offered to him by the Troezenian youths and

maidens before marriage were designed to strengthen his union with

the goddess, and so to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of

cattle, and of mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that

within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there were worshipped

two female powers named Damia and Auxesia, whose connexion with the

fertility of the ground is unquestionable. When Epidaurus suffered

from a dearth, the people, in obedience to an oracle, carved images

of Damia and Auxesia out of sacred olive wood, and no sooner had

they done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again.

Moreover, at Troezen itself, and apparently within the precinct of

Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing was held in honour

of these maidens, as the Troezenians called them; and it is easy to

show that similar customs have been practised in many lands for the

express purpose of ensuring good crops. In the story of the tragic

death of the youthful Hippolytus we may discern an analogy with

similar tales of other fair but mortal youths who paid with their

lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal goddess.

These hapless lovers were probably not always mere myths, and the

legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the

violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush of

the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty fleeting as

the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of the

relation of the life of man to the life of nature--a sad philosophy

which gave birth to a tragic practice. What that philosophy and that

practice were, we shall learn later on.

3. Recapitulation

WE can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified

Hippolytus, the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who, according to

Servius, stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the Mother

of the Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in

general, and of childbirth in particular. As such she, like her

Greek counterpart, needed a male partner. That partner, if Servius

is right, was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the sacred

grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical

predecessor or archetype of the line of priests who served Diana

under the title of Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him, one

after the other, to a violent end. It is natural, therefore, to

conjecture that they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same

relation in which Virbius stood to her; in short, that the mortal

King of the Wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself. If

the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as

seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not

only have worshipped it as his goddess but embraced it as his wife.

There is at least nothing absurd in the supposition, since even in

the time of Pliny a noble Roman used thus to treat a beautiful

beech-tree in another sacred grove of Diana on the Alban hills. He

embraced it, he kissed it, he lay under its shadow, he poured wine

on its trunk. Apparently he took the tree for the goddess. The

custom of physically marrying men and women to trees is still

practised in India and other parts of the East. Why should it not

have obtained in ancient Latium?

Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship

of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and

immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of

woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle

and of the fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men

and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed; that her

holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burned perpetually in a round

temple within the precinct; that associated with her was a

water-nymph Egeria who discharged one of Diana's own functions by

succouring women in travail, and who was popularly supposed to have

mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove; further, that

Diana of the Wood herself had a male companion Virbius by name, who

was to her what Adonis was to Venus, or Attis to Cybele; and,

lastly, that this mythical Virbius was represented in historical

times by a line of priests known as Kings of the Wood, who regularly

perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in

a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long

as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.

Clearly these conclusions do not of themselves suffice to explain

the peculiar rule of succession to the priesthood. But perhaps the

survey of a wider field may lead us to think that they contain in

germ the solution of the problem. To that wider survey we must now

address ourselves. It will be long and laborious, but may possess

something of the interest and charm of a voyage of discovery, in

which we shall visit many strange foreign lands, with strange

foreign peoples, and still stranger customs. The wind is in the

shrouds: we shake out our sails to it, and leave the coast of Italy

behind us for a time.

II. Priestly Kings

THE questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly two:

first, why had Diana's priest at Nemi, the King of the Wood, to slay

his predecessor? second, why before doing so had he to pluck the

branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of the ancients

identified with Virgil's Golden Bough?

The first point on which we fasten is the priest's title. Why was he

called the King of the Wood? Why was his office spoken of as a

kingdom?

The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in

ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium

there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred

Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites. In

republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was

called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were

religious. Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose

duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly, and to

have centered round the Common Hearth of the state. Some Greek

states had several of these titular kings, who held office

simultaneously. At Rome the tradition was that the Sacrificial King

had been appointed after the abolition of the monarchy in order to

offer the sacrifices which before had been offered by the kings. A

similar view as to the origin of the priestly kings appears to have

prevailed in Greece. In itself the opinion is not improbable, and it

is borne out by the example of Sparta, almost the only purely Greek

state which retained the kingly form of government in historical

times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings

as descendants of the god. One of the two Spartan kings held the

priesthood of Zeus Lacedaemon, the other the priesthood of Heavenly

Zeus.

This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is

familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of

various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred

slaves, and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and

spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such

priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pessinus. Teutonic kings, again,

in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position, and to

have exercised the powers, of high priests. The Emperors of China

offered public sacrifices, the details of which were regulated by

the ritual books. The King of Madagascar was high-priest of the

realm. At the great festival of the new year, when a bullock was

sacrificed for the good of the kingdom, the king stood over the

sacrifice to offer prayer and thanksgiving, while his attendants

slaughtered the animal. In the monarchical states which still

maintain their independence among the Gallas of Eastern Africa, the

king sacrifices on the mountain tops and regulates the immolation of

human victims; and the dim light of tradition reveals a similar

union of temporal and spiritual power, of royal and priestly duties,

in the kings of that delightful region of Central America whose

ancient capital, now buried under the rank growth of the tropical

forest, is marked by the stately and mysterious ruins of Palenque.

When we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests also,

we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of their

office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty

form of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings were

revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as

intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to

bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are

commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought,

if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and

invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and

sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange

as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece with early

modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly

drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the

supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by

supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses

and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to

their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a world so conceived he

sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to

his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine

weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should

happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own

person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the savage,

possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own

well-being and that of his fellow-men.

This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there

is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by

spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still

older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion

of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring

in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency.

The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as

it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of

superstition. In early society the king is frequently a magician as

well as a priest; indeed he appears to have often attained to power

by virtue of his supposed proficiency in the black or white art.

Hence in order to understand the evolution of the kingship and the

sacred character with which the office has commonly been invested in

the eyes of savage or barbarous peoples, it is essential to have

some acquaintance with the principles of magic and to form some

conception of the extraordinary hold which that ancient system of

superstition has had on the human mind in all ages and all

countries. Accordingly I propose to consider the subject in some

detail.

III. Sympathetic Magic

1. The Principles of Magic

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. 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 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.

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. 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 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.

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)

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Homoeopathic Magic Contagious Magic

(Law of Similarity) (Law of Contact)

I will now illustrate these two great branches of sympathetic

magic by examples, beginning with homoeopathic magic.

2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic

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,

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. 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. 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.

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, heart, 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 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.

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

Bataks of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will

make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing

that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. 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. 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.

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

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.

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. 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.

Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a

grownup 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 stroked with the sweet-scented

blossoms of the areca palm and tied to a 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. 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. 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.

Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent

sickness. The ancient Hindoos performed an elaborate ceremony, based

on homoeopathic 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

tumeric 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.

The 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." So

well recognised among birdfanciers 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. The virtue of the bird lay not in its

colour but in its large golden eye, which naturally 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. He

mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because

its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.

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 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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 multiplying their totem for the good of the community by means of

magical ceremonies. Most of the totems are edible animals and

plants, and the general result supposed to be accomplished by these

ceremonies 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

homoeopathic or imitative. Thus among the Warramunga the headman of

the white cockatoo totem seeks to multiply white cockatoos by

holding an effigy of the bird and mimicking its harsh cry. Among the

Arunta the men of the witchetty grub totem perform 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. Again, in order to

multiply emus, which are an important article of food, the men of

the emu totem paint on the ground the sacred design of their totem,

especially the parts of the emu 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.

The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which

abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due

season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an

image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction

from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by

a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once. The

islanders of Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to

charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Toradjas of

Central Celebes believe that things of the same sort attract each

other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital ether. Hence

they hang up the jawbones of deer and wild pigs in their houses, in

order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the living

creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. In the

island of Nias, when a wild pig has fallen into the pit prepared for

it, the animal is taken out and its back is rubbed with nine fallen

leaves, in the belief that this will make nine more wild pigs fall

into the pit, just as the nine leaves fell from the tree. In the

East Indian islands of Saparoea, Haroekoe, and Noessa Laut, when a

fisherman is about to set a trap for fish in the sea, he looks out

for a tree, of which the fruit has been much pecked at by birds.

From such a tree he cuts a stout branch and makes of it the

principal post in his fish-trap; for he believes that, just as the

tree lured many birds to its fruit, so the branch cut from that tree

will lure many fish to the trap.

The western tribes of British New Guinea employ a charm to aid the

hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. A small beetle, which haunts

coco-nut trees, is placed in the hole of the spear-haft into which

the spear-head fits. This is supposed to make the spear-head stick

fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast to a

man's skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter has set his

nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes some way off,

then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it, lets himself be

caught in it, and cries, "Hillo! what's this? I'm afraid I'm

caught." After that the net is sure to catch game. A pantomime of

the same sort has been acted within the living memory in our

Scottish Highlands. The Rev. James Macdonald, now of Reay in

Caithness, tells us that in his boyhood when he was fishing with

companions about Loch Aline and they had had no bites for a long

time, they used to make a pretence of throwing one of their fellows

overboard and hauling him out of the water, as if he were a fish;

after that the trout or silloch would begin to nibble, according as

the boat was on fresh or salt water. Before a Carrier Indian goes

out to snare martens, he sleeps by himself for about ten nights

beside the fire with a little stick pressed down on his neck. This

naturally causes the fall-stick of his trap to drop down on the neck

of the marten. Among the Galelareese, who inhabit a district in the

northern part of Halmahera, a large island to the west of New

Guinea, it is a maxim that when you are loading your gun to go out

shooting, you should always put the bullet in your mouth before you

insert it in the gun; for by so doing you practically eat the game

that is to be hit by the bullet, which therefore cannot possibly

miss the mark. A Malay who has baited a trap for crocodiles, and is

awaiting results, is careful in eating his curry always to begin by

swallowing three lumps of rice successively; for this helps the bait

to slide more easily down the crocodile's throat. He is equally

scrupulous not to take any bones out of his curry; for, if he did,

it seems clear that the sharp-pointed stick on which the bait is

skewered would similarly work itself loose, and the crocodile would

get off with the bait. Hence in these circumstances it is prudent

for the hunter, before he begins his meal, to get somebody else to

take the bones out of his curry, otherwise he may at any moment have

to choose between swallowing a bone and losing the crocodile.

This last rule is an instance of the things which the hunter

abstains from doing lest, on the principle that like produces like,

they should spoil his luck. For it is to be observed that the system

of sympathetic magic is not merely composed of positive precepts; it

comprises a very large number of negative precepts, that is,

prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also what to

leave undone. The positive precepts are charms: the negative

precepts are taboos. In fact the whole doctrine of taboo, or at all

events a large part of it, would seem to be only a special

application of sympathetic magic, with its two great laws of

similarity and contact. Though these laws are certainly not

formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by

the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to

regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. He

thinks that if he acts in a certain way, certain consequences will

inevitably follow in virtue of one or other of these laws; and if

the consequences of a particular act appear to him likely to prove

disagreeable or dangerous, he is naturally careful not to act in

that way lest he should incur them. In other words, he abstains from

doing that which, in accordance with his mistaken notions of cause

and effect, he falsely believes would injure him; in short, he

subjects himself to a taboo. Thus taboo is so far a negative

application of practical magic. Positive magic or sorcery says, "Do

this in order that so and so may happen." Negative magic or taboo

says, "Do not do this, lest so and so should happen." The aim of

positive magic or sorcery is to produce a desired event; the aim of

negative magic or taboo is to avoid an undesirable one. But both

consequences, the desirable and the undesirable, are supposed to be

brought about in accordance with the laws of similarity and contact.

And just as the desired consequence is not really effected by the

observance of a magical ceremony, so the dreaded consequence does

not really result from the violation of a taboo. If the supposed

evil necessarily followed a breach of taboo, the taboo would not be

a taboo but a precept of morality or common sense. It is not a taboo

to say, "Do not put your hand in the fire"; it is a rule of common

sense, because the forbidden action entails a real, not an imaginary

evil. In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just

as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery.

The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great

disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of

ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the

negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole

erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be

defined as the negative side of practical magic. To put this in

tabular form:

Magic

|

----------------------

| |

Theoretical Practical

(Magic as a (Magic as a

pseudo-science) pseudo-art)

|

-----------------

| |

Positive Magic Negative Magic

or Sorcery or Taboo

I have made these remarks on taboo and its relations to magic

because I am about to give some instances of taboos observed by

hunters, fishermen, and others, and I wished to show that they fall

under the head of Sympathetic Magic, being only particular

applications of that general theory. Thus, among the Esquimaux boys

are forbidden to play cat's cradle, because if they did so their

fingers might in later life become entangled in the harpoon-line.

Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law of similarity,

which is the basis of homoeopathic magic: as the child's fingers are

entangled by the string in playing cat's cradle, so they will be

entangled by the harpoonline when he is a man and hunts whales.

Again, among the Huzuls of the Carpathian Mountains the wife of a

hunter may not spin while her husband is eating, or the game will

turn and wind like the spindle, and the hunter will be unable to hit

it. Here again the taboo is clearly derived from the law of

similarity. So, too, in most parts of ancient Italy women were

forbidden by law to spin on the highroads as they walked, or even to

carry their spindles openly, because any such action was believed to

injure the crops. Probably the notion was that the twirling of the

spindle would twirl the corn-stalks and prevent them from growing

straight. So, too, among the Ainos of Saghalien a pregnant woman may

not spin nor twist ropes for two months before her delivery, because

they think that if she did so the child's guts might be entangled

like the thread. For a like reason in Bilaspore, a district of

India, when the chief men of a village meet in council, no one

present should twirl a spindle; for they think that if such a thing

were to happen, the discussion, like the spindle, would move in a

circle and never be wound up. In some of the East Indian islands any

one who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in; he may

not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would in like

manner stop in front of the hunter's snares and then turn back,

instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar reason it is a

rule with the Toradjas of Central Celebes that no one may stand or

loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a pregnant woman, for

such delay would retard the birth of the child; and in various parts

of Sumatra the woman herself in these circumstances is forbidden to

stand at the door or on the top rung of the house-ladder under pain

of suffering hard labour for her imprudence in neglecting so

elementary a precaution. Malays engaged in the search for camphor

eat their food dry and take care not to pound their salt fine. The

reason is that the camphor occurs in the form of small grains

deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the camphor tree.

Accordingly it seems plain to the Malay that if, while seeking for

camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground, the camphor would be

found also in fine grains; whereas by eating his salt coarse he

ensures that the grains of the camphor will also be large. Camphor

hunters in Borneo use the leathery sheath of the leaf-stalk of the

Penang palm as a plate for food, and during the whole of the

expedition they will never wash the plate, for fear that the camphor

might dissolve and disappear from the crevices of the tree.

Apparently they think that to wash their plates would be to wash out

the camphor crystals from the trees in which they are imbedded. The

chief product of some parts of Laos, a province of Siam, is lac.

This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the young branches

of trees, to which the little creatures have to be attached by hand.

All who engage in the business of gathering the gum abstain from

washing themselves and especially from cleansing their heads, lest

by removing the parasites from their hair they should detach the

other insects from the boughs. Again, a Blackfoot Indian who has set

a trap for eagles, and is watching it, would not eat rosebuds on any

account; for he argues that if he did so, and an eagle alighted near

the trap, the rosebuds in his own stomach would make the bird itch,

with the result that instead of swallowing the bait the eagle would

merely sit and scratch himself. Following this train of thought the

eagle hunter also refrains from using an awl when he is looking

after his snares; for surely if he were to scratch with an awl, the

eagles would scratch him. The same disastrous consequence would

follow if his wives and children at home used an awl while he is out

after eagles, and accordingly they are forbidden to handle the tool

in his absence for fear of putting him in bodily danger.

Among the taboos observed by savages none perhaps are more numerous

or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods, and of such

prohibitions many are demonstrably derived from the law of

similarity and are accordingly examples of negative magic. Just as

the savage eats many animals or plants in order to acquire certain

desirable qualities with which he believes them to be endowed, so he

avoids eating many other animals and plants lest he should acquire

certain undesirable qualities with which he believes them to be

infected. In eating the former he practises positive magic; in

abstaining from the latter he practises negative magic. Many

examples of such positive magic will meet us later on; here I will

give a few instances of such negative magic or taboo. For example,

in Madagascar soldiers are forbidden to eat a number of foods lest

on the principle of homoeopathic magic they should be tainted by

certain dangerous or undesirable properties which are supposed to

inhere in these particular viands. Thus they may not taste hedgehog,

"as it is feared that this animal, from its propensity of coiling up

into a ball when alarmed, will impart a timid shrinking disposition

to those who partake of it." Again, no soldier should eat an ox's

knee, lest like an ox he should become weak in the knees and unable

to march. Further, the warrior should be careful to avoid partaking

of a cock that has died fighting or anything that has been speared

to death; and no male animal may on any account be killed in his

house while he is away at the wars. For it seems obvious that if he

were to eat a cock that had died fighting, he would himself be slain

on the field of battle; if he were to partake of an animal that had

been speared, he would be speared himself; if a male animal were

killed in his house during his absence, he would himself be killed

in like manner and perhaps at the same instant. Further, the

Malagasy soldier must eschew kidneys, because in the Malagasy

language the word for kidney is the same as that for "shot"; so shot

he would certainly be if he ate a kidney.

The reader may have observed that in some of the foregoing examples

of taboos the magical influence is supposed to operate at

considerable distances; thus among the Blackfeet Indians the wives

and children of an eagle hunter are forbidden to use an awl during

his absence, lest the eagles should scratch the distant husband and

father; and again no male animal may be killed in the house of a

Malagasy soldier while he is away at the wars, lest the killing of

the animal should entail the killing of the man. This belief in the

sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at

a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubts science may

entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has

none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern

advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have

no difficulty in convincing a savage; the savage believed in it long

ago, and what is more, he acted on his belief with a logical

consistency such as his civilised brother in the faith has not yet,

so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct. For the savage is

convinced not only that magical ceremonies affect persons and things

afar off, but that the simplest acts of daily life may do so too.

Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends and relations

at a distance is often regulated by a more or less elaborate code of

rules, the neglect of which by the one set of persons would, it is

supposed, entail misfortune or even death on the absent ones. In

particular when a party of men are out hunting or fighting, their

kinsfolk at home are often expected to do certain things or to

abstain from doing certain others, for the sake of ensuring the

safety and success of the distant hunters or warriors. I will now

give some instances of this magical telepathy both in its positive

and in its negative aspect.

In Laos when an elephant hunter is starting for the chase, he warns

his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence; for if

she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled

herself it would slip through them. When a Dyak village has turned

out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may

not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their

friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be

"butter-fingered" and the prey would slip through their hands.

Elephant-hunters in East Africa believe that, if their wives prove

unfaithful in their absence, this gives the elephant power over his

pursuer, who will accordingly be killed or severely wounded. Hence

if a hunter hears of his wife's misconduct, he abandons the chase

and returns home. If a Wagogo hunter is unsuccessful, or is attacked

by a lion, he attributes it to his wife's misbehaviour at home, and

returns to her in great wrath. While he is away hunting, she may not

let any one pass behind her or stand in front of her as she sits;

and she must lie on her face in bed. The Moxos Indians of Bolivia

thought that if a hunter's wife was unfaithful to him in his absence

he would be bitten by a serpent or a jaguar. Accordingly, if such an

accident happened to him, it was sure to entail the punishment, and

often the death, of the woman, whether she was innocent or guilty.

An Aleutian hunter of sea-otters thinks that he cannot kill a single

animal if during his absence from home his wife should be unfaithful

or his sister unchaste.

The Huichol Indians of Mexico treat as a demi-god a species of

cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant

does not grow in their country, and has to be fetched every year by

men who make a journey of forty-three days for the purpose.

Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to the safety of their absent

husbands by never walking fast, much less running, while the men are

on the road. They also do their best to ensure the benefits which,

in the shape of rain, good crops, and so forth, are expected to flow

from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject themselves

to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their husbands.

During the whole of the time which elapses till the festival of the

cactus is held, neither party washes except on certain occasions,

and then only with water brought from the distant country where the

holy plant grows. They also fast much, eat no salt, and are bound to

strict continence. Any one who breaks this law is punished with

illness, and, moreover, jeopardises the result which all are

striving for. Health, luck, and life are to be gained by gathering

the cactus, the gourd of the God of Fire; but inasmuch as the pure

fire cannot benefit the impure, men and women must not only remain

chaste for the time being, but must also purge themselves from the

taint of past sin. Hence four days after the men have started the

women gather and confess to Grandfather Fire with what men they have

been in love from childhood till now. They may not omit a single

one, for if they did so the men would not find a single cactus. So

to refresh their memories each one prepares a string with as many

knots as she has had lovers. This she brings to the temple, and,

standing before the fire, she mentions aloud all the men she has

scored on her string, name after name. Having ended her confession,

she throws the string into the fire, and when the god has consumed

it in his pure flame, her sins are forgiven her and she departs in

peace. From now on the women are averse even to letting men pass

near them. The cactus-seekers themselves make in like manner a clean

breast of all their frailties. For every peccadillo they tie a knot

on a string, and after they have "talked to all the five winds" they

deliver the rosary of their sins to the leader, who burns it in the

fire.

Many of the indigenous tribes of Sarawak are firmly persuaded that

were the wives to commit adultery while their husbands are searching

for camphor in the jungle, the camphor obtained by the men would

evaporate. Husbands can discover, by certain knots in the tree, when

the wives are unfaithful; and it is said that in former days many

women were killed by jealous husbands on no better evidence than

that of these knots. Further, the wives dare not touch a comb while

their husbands are away collecting the camphor; for if they did so,

the interstices between the fibres of the tree, instead of being

filled with the precious crystals, would be empty like the spaces

between the teeth of a comb. In the Kei Islands, to the southwest of

New Guinea, as soon as a vessel that is about to sail for a distant

port has been launched, the part of the beach on which it lay is

covered as speedily as possible with palm branches, and becomes

sacred. No one may thenceforth cross that spot till the ship comes

home. To cross it sooner would cause the vessel to perish. Moreover,

all the time that the voyage lasts three or four young girls,

specially chosen for the duty, are supposed to remain in sympathetic

connexion with the mariners and to contribute by their behaviour to

the safety and success of the voyage. On no account, except for the

most necessary purpose, may they quit the room that has been

assigned to them. More than that, so long as the vessel is believed

to be at sea they must remain absolutely motionless, crouched on

their mats with their hands clasped between their knees. They may

not turn their heads to the left or to the right or make any other

movement whatsoever. If they did, it would cause the boat to pitch

and toss; and they may not eat any sticky stuff, such as rice boiled

in coco-nut milk, for the stickiness of the food would clog the

passage of the boat through the water. When the sailors are supposed

to have reached their destination, the strictness of these rules is

somewhat relaxed; but during the whole time that the voyage lasts

the girls are forbidden to eat fish which have sharp bones or

stings, such as the sting-ray, lest their friends at sea should be

involved in sharp, stinging trouble.

Where beliefs like these prevail as to the sympathetic connexion

between friends at a distance, we need not wonder that above

everything else war, with its stern yet stirring appeal to some of

the deepest and tenderest of human emotions, should quicken in the

anxious relations left behind a desire to turn the sympathetic bond

to the utmost account for the benefit of the dear ones who may at

any moment be fighting and dying far away. Hence, to secure an end

so natural and laudable, friends at home are apt to resort to

devices which will strike us as pathetic or ludicrous, according as

we consider their object or the means adopted to effect it. Thus in

some districts of Borneo, when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife

or, if he is unmarried, his sister must wear a sword day and night

in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may

not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the morning,

lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep

by an enemy. Among the Sea Dyaks of Banting in Sarawak the women

strictly observe an elaborate code of rules while the men are away

fighting. Some of the rules are negative and some are positive, but

all alike are based on the principles of magical homoeopathy and

telepathy. Amongst them are the following. The women must wake very

early in the morning and open the windows as soon as it is light;

otherwise their absent husbands will oversleep themselves. The women

may not oil their hair, or the men will slip. The women may neither

sleep nor doze by day, or the men will be drowsy on the march. The

women must cook and scatter popcorn on the verandah every morning;

so will the men be agile in their movements. The rooms must be kept

very tidy, all boxes being placed near the walls; for if any one

were to stumble over them, the absent husbands would fall and be at

the mercy of the foe. At every meal a little rice must be left in

the pot and put aside; so will the men far away always have

something to eat and need never go hungry. On no account may the

women sit at the loom till their legs grow cramped, otherwise their

husbands will likewise be stiff in their joints and unable to rise

up quickly or to run away from the foe. So in order to keep their

husbands' joints supple the women often vary their labours at the

loom by walking up and down the verandah. Further, they may not

cover up their faces, or the men would not to be able to find their

way through the tall grass or jungle. Again, the women may not sew

with a needle, or the men will tread on the sharp spikes set by the

enemy in the path. Should a wife prove unfaithful while her husband

is away, he will lose his life in the enemy's country. Some years

ago all these rules and more were observed by the women of Banting,

while their husbands were fighting for the English against rebels.

But alas! these tender precautions availed them little; for many a

man, whose faithful wife was keeping watch and ward for him at home,

found a soldier's grave.

In the island of Timor, while war is being waged, the high-priest

never quits the temple; his food is brought to him or cooked inside;

day and night he must keep the fire burning, for if he were to let

it die out, disaster would be fall the warriors and would continue

so long as the hearth was cold. Moreover, he must drink only hot

water during the time the army is absent; for every draught of cold

water would damp the spirits of the people, so that they could not

vanquish the enemy. In the Kei Islands, when the warriors have

departed, the women return indoors and bring out certain baskets

containing fruits and stones. These fruits and stones they anoint

and place on a board, murmuring as they do so, "O lord sun, moon,

let the bullets rebound from our husbands, brothers, betrothed, and

other relations, just as raindrops rebound from these objects which

are smeared with oil." As soon as the first shot is heard, the

baskets are put aside, and the women, seizing their fans, rush out

of the houses. Then, waving their fans in the direction of the

enemy, they run through the village, while they sing, "O golden

fans! let our bullets hit, and those of the enemy miss." In this

custom the ceremony of anointing stones, in order that the bullets

may recoil from the men like raindrops from the stones, is a piece

of pure homoeopathic or imitative magic; but the prayer to the sun,

that he will be pleased to give effect to the charm, is a religious

and perhaps later addition. The waving of the fans seems to be a

charm to direct the bullets towards or away from their mark,

according as they are discharged from the guns of friends or foes.

An old historian of Madagascar informs us that "while the men are at

the wars, and until their return, the women and girls cease not day

and night to dance, and neither lie down nor take food in their own

houses. And although they are very voluptuously inclined, they would

not for anything in the world have an intrigue with another man

while their husband is at the war, believing firmly that if that

happened, their husband would be either killed or wounded. They

believe that by dancing they impart strength, courage, and good

fortune to their husbands; accordingly during such times they give

themselves no rest, and this custom they observe very religiously."

Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast the wives of men

who are away with the army paint themselves white, and adorn their

persons with beads and charms. On the day when a battle is expected

to take place, they run about armed with guns, or sticks carved to

look like guns, and taking green paw-paws (fruits shaped somewhat

like a melon), they hack them with knives, as if they were chopping

off the heads of the foe. The pantomime is no doubt merely an

imitative charm, to enable the men to do to the enemy as the women

do to the paw-paws. In the West African town of Framin, while the

Ashantee war was raging some years ago, Mr. Fitzgerald Marriott saw

a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers to

the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short

petticoat. At their head was a shrivelled old sorceress in a very

short white petticoat, her black hair arranged in a sort of long

projecting horn, and her black face, breasts, arms, and legs

profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried long

white brushes made of buffalo or horse tails, and as they danced

they sang, "Our husbands have gone to Ashanteeland; may they sweep

their enemies off the face of the earth!"

Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, when the men were on

the war-path, the women performed dances at frequent intervals.

These dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition.

The dancers flourished their knives, threw long sharp-pointed sticks

forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and

forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or

warding off the enemy, and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing

their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was

particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a life-saving

apparatus. The women always pointed their weapons towards the

enemy's country. They painted their faces red and sang as they

danced, and they prayed to the weapons to preserve their husbands

and help them to kill many foes. Some had eagle-down stuck on the

points of their sticks. When the dance was over, these weapons were

hidden. If a woman whose husband was at the war thought she saw hair

or a piece of a scalp on the weapon when she took it out, she knew

that her husband had killed an enemy. But if she saw a stain of

blood on it, she knew he was wounded or dead. When the men of the

Yuki tribe in California were away fighting, the women at home did

not sleep; they danced continually in a circle, chanting and waving

leafy wands. For they said that if they danced all the time, their

husbands would not grow tired. Among the Haida Indians of the Queen

Charlotte Islands, when the men had gone to war, the women at home

would get up very early in the morning and pretend to make war by

falling upon their children and feigning to take them for slaves.

This was supposed to help their husbands to go and do likewise. If a

wife were unfaithful to her husband while he was away on the

war-path, he would probably be killed. For ten nights all the women

at home lay with their heads towards the point of the compass to

which the war-canoes had paddled away. Then they changed about, for

the warriors were supposed to be coming home across the sea. At

Masset the Haida women danced and sang war-songs all the time their

husbands were away at the wars, and they had to keep everything

about them in a certain order. It was thought that a wife might kill

her husband by not observing these customs. When a band of Carib

Indians of the Orinoco had gone on the war-path, their friends left

in the village used to calculate as nearly as they could the exact

moment when the absent warriors would be advancing to attack the

enemy. Then they took two lads, laid them down on a bench, and

inflicted a most severe scourging on their bare backs. This the

youths submitted to without a murmur, supported in their sufferings

by the firm conviction, in which they had been bred from childhood,

that on the constancy and fortitude with which they bore the cruel

ordeal depended the valour and success of their comrades in the

battle.

Among the many beneficent uses to which a mistaken ingenuity has

applied the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, is that of

causing trees and plants to bear fruit in due season. In Thüringen

the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which reaches

from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so

that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this

will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the interior of Sumatra

rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down

their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have

long stalks. Similarly, in ancient Mexico a festival was held in

honour of the goddess of maize, or "the long-haired mother," as she

was called. It began at the time "when the plant had attained its

full growth, and fibres shooting forth from the top of the green ear

indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this festival the

women wore their long hair unbound, shaking and tossing it in the

dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial, in order that

the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion, that the grain

might be correspondingly large and flat, and that the people might

have abundance." In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high in

the air are approved homoeopathic modes of making the crops grow

high. Thus in Franche-Comté they say that you should dance at the

Carnival in order to make the hemp grow tall.

The notion that a person can influence a plant homoeopathically by

his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a Malay

woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her body naked

in reaping the rice, she explained that she did it to make the

rice-husks thinner, as she was tired of pounding thick-husked rice.

Clearly, she thought that the less clothing she wore the less husk

there would be on the rice. The magic virtue of a pregnant woman to

communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants,

who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with

child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the

other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her

husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from

bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The

Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of

the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might

teem and the corn swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest

remonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women

to sow the fields in the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts,

the men answered, "Father, you don't understand these things, and

that is why they vex you. You know that women are accustomed to bear

children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of

the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two

or three basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now

why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and

know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them

sow, then; we men don't know as much about it as they do."

Thus on the theory of homoeopathic magic a person can influence

vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the

bad character of his acts or states: for example, a fruitful woman

makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren. Hence this

belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal

qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions or

rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things lest

they should homoeopathically infect the fruits of the earth with

their own undesirable state or condition. All such customs of

abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative magic or

taboo. Thus, for example, arguing from what may be called the

infectiousness of personal acts or states, the Galelareese say that

you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit-tree, or

the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground;

and that when you are eating water-melon you ought not to mix the

pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have

put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat

out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep

falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these

pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought

leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of

a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, the tree that springs from that

graft will let its fruit fall untimely. When the Chams of

Cochinchina are sowing their dry rice fields and desire that no

shower should fall, they eat their rice dry in order to prevent rain

from spoiling the crop.

In the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence vegetation

homoeopathically. He infects trees or plants with qualities or

accidents, good or bad, resembling and derived from his own. But on

the principle of homoeopathic magic the influence is mutual: the

plant can infect the man just as much as the man can infect the

plant. In magic, as I believe in physics, action and reaction are

equal and opposite. The Cherokee Indians are adepts in practical

botany of the homoeopathic sort. Thus wiry roots of the catgut plant

are so tough that they can almost stop a plowshare in the furrow.

Hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction of the roots

to make the hair strong, and Cherokee ball-players wash themselves

with it to toughen their muscles. It is a Galelareese belief that if

you eat a fruit which has fallen to the ground, you will yourself

contract a disposition to stumble and fall; and that if you partake

of something which has been forgotten (such as a sweet potato left

in the pot or a banana in the fire), you will become forgetful. The

Galelareese are also of opinion that if a woman were to consume two

bananas growing from a single head she would give birth to twins.

The Guarani Indians of South America thought that a woman would

become a mother of twins if she ate a double grain of millet. In

Vedic times a curious application of this principle supplied a charm

by which a banished prince might be restored to his kingdom. He had

to eat food cooked on a fire which was fed with wood which had grown

out of the stump of a tree which had been cut down. The recuperative

power manifested by such a tree would in due course be communicated

through the fire to the food, and so to the prince, who ate the food

which was cooked on the fire which was fed with the wood which grew

out of the tree. The Sudanese think that if a house is built of the

wood of thorny trees, the life of the people who dwell in that house

will likewise be thorny and full of trouble.

There is a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic which works by

means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear nor

speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people blind,

deaf and dumb by the use of dead men's bones or anything else that

is tainted by the infection of death. Thus among the Galelareese,

when a young man goes a-wooing at night, he takes a little earth

from a grave and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart's house

just above the place where her parents sleep. This, he fancies, will

prevent them from waking while he converses with his beloved, since

the earth from the grave will make them sleep as sound as the dead.

Burglars in all ages and many lands have been patrons of this

species of magic, which is very useful to them in the exercise of

their profession. Thus a South Slavonian housebreaker sometimes

begins operations by throwing a dead man's bone over the house,

saying, with pungent sarcasm, "As this bone may waken, so may these

people waken"; after that not a soul in the house can keep his or

her eyes open. Similarly, in Java the burglar takes earth from a

grave and sprinkles it round the house which he intends to rob; this

throws the inmates into a deep sleep. With the same intention a

Hindoo will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the house;

Indians of Peru scatter the dust of dead men's bones; and Ruthenian

burglars remove the marrow from a human shin-bone, pour tallow into

it, and having kindled the tallow, march thrice round the house with

this candle burning, which causes the inmates to sleep a death-like

sleep. Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg-bone

and play upon it; whereupon all persons within hearing are overcome

with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this maleficent

purpose the left fore-arm of a woman who had died in giving birth to

her first child; but the arm had to be stolen. With it they beat the

ground before they entered the house which they designed to plunder;

this caused every one in the house to lose all power of speech and

motion; they were as dead, hearing and seeing everything, but

perfectly powerless; some of them, however, really slept and even

snored. In Europe similar properties were ascribed to the Hand of

Glory, which was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been

hanged. If a candle made of the fat of a malefactor who had also

died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the Hand of Glory as

in a candlestick, it rendered motionless all persons to whom it was

presented; they could not stir a finger any more than if they were

dead. Sometimes the dead man's hand is itself the candle, or rather

bunch of candles, all its withered fingers being set on fire; but

should any member of the household be awake, one of the fingers will

not kindle. Such nefarious lights can only be extinguished with

milk. Often it is prescribed that the thief's candle should be made

of the finger of a new-born or, still better, unborn child;

sometimes it is thought needful that the thief should have one such

candle for every person in the house, for if he has one candle too

little somebody in the house will wake and catch him. Once these

tapers begin to burn, there is nothing but milk that will put them

out. In the seventeenth century robbers used to murder pregnant

women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs. An ancient

Greek robber or burglar thought he could silence and put to flight

the fiercest watchdogs by carrying with him a brand plucked from a

funeral pyre. Again, Servian and Bulgarian women who chafe at the

restraints of domestic life will take the copper coins from the eyes

of a corpse, wash them in wine or water, and give the liquid to

their husbands to drink. After swallowing it, the husband will be as

blind to his wife's peccadilloes as the dead man was on whose eyes

the coins were laid.

Further, animals are often conceived to possess qualities of

properties which might be useful to man, and homoeopathic or

imitative magic seeks to communicate these properties to human

beings in various ways. Thus some Bechuanas wear a ferret as a

charm, because, being very tenacious of life, it will make them

difficult to kill. Others wear a certain insect, mutilated, but

living, for a similar purpose. Yet other Bechuana warriors wear the

hair of a hornless ox among their own hair, and the skin of a frog

on their mantle, because a frog is slippery, and the ox, having no

horns, is hard to catch; so the man who is provided with these

charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the

frog. Again, it seems plain that a South African warrior who twists

tufts of rat's hair among his own curly black locks will have just

as many chances of avoiding the enemy's spear as the nimble rat has

of avoiding things thrown at it; hence in these regions rats' hair

is in great demand when war is expected. One of the ancient books of

India prescribes that when a sacrifice is offered for victory, the

earth out of which the altar is to be made should be taken from a

place where a boar has been wallowing, since the strength of the

boar will be in that earth. When you are playing the one-stringed

lute, and your fingers are stiff, the thing to do is to catch some

long-legged field spiders and roast them, and then rub your fingers

with the ashes; that will make your fingers as lithe and nimble as

the spiders' legs--at least so think the Galelareese. To bring back

a runaway slave an Arab will trace a magic circle on the ground,

stick a nail in the middle of it, and attach a beetle by a thread to

the nail, taking care that the sex of the beetle is that of the

fugitive. As the beetle crawls round and round, it will coil the

thread about the nail, thus shortening its tether and drawing nearer

to the centre at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopathic magic

the runaway slave will be drawn back to his master.

Among the western tribes of British New Guinea, a man who has killed

a snake will burn it and smear his legs with the ashes when he goes

into the forest; for no snake will bite him for some days

afterwards. If a South Slavonian has a mind to pilfer and steal at

market, he has nothing to do but to burn a blind cat, and then throw

a pinch of its ashes over the person with whom he is higgling; after

that he can take what he likes from the booth, and the owner will

not be a bit the wiser, having become as blind as the deceased cat

with whose ashes he has been sprinkled. The thief may even ask

boldly, "Did I pay for it?" and the deluded huckster will reply,

"Why, certainly." Equally simple and effectual is the expedient

adopted by natives of Central Australia who desire to cultivate

their beards. They prick the chin all over with a pointed bone, and

then stroke it carefully with a magic stick or stone, which

represents a kind of rat that has very long whiskers. The virtue of

these whiskers naturally passes into the representative stick or

stone, and thence by an easy transition to the chin, which,

consequently, is soon adorned with a rich growth of beard. The

ancient Greeks thought that to eat the flesh of the wakeful

nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping; that to smear the

eyes of a blear-sighted person with the gall of an eagle would give

him the eagle's vision; and that a raven's eggs would restore the

blackness of the raven to silvery hair. Only the person who adopted

this last mode of concealing the ravages of time had to be most

careful to keep his mouth full of oil all the time he applied the

eggs to his venerable locks, else his teeth as well as his hair

would be dyed raven black, and no amount of scrubbing and scouring

would avail to whiten them again. The hair-restorer was in fact a

shade too powerful, and in applying it you might get more than you

bargained for.

The Huichol Indians admire the beautiful markings on the backs of

serpents. Hence when a Huichol woman is about to weave or embroider,

her husband catches a large serpent and holds it in a cleft stick,

while the woman strokes the reptile with one hand down the whole

length of its back; then she passes the same hand over her forehead

and eyes, that she may be able to work as beautiful patterns in the

web as the markings on the back of the serpent.

On the principle of homoeopathic magic, inanimate things, as well as

plants and animals, may diffuse blessing or bane around them,

according to their own intrinsic nature and the skill of the wizard

to tap or dam, as the case may be, the stream of weal or woe. In

Samaracand women give a baby sugar candy to suck and put glue in the

palm of its hand, in order that, when the child grows up, his words

may be sweet and precious things may stick to his hands as if they

were glued. The Greeks thought that a garment made from the fleece

of a sheep that had been torn by a wolf would hurt the wearer,

setting up an itch or irritation in his skin. They were also of

opinion that if a stone which had been bitten by a dog were dropped

in wine, it would make all who drank of that wine to fall out among

themselves. Among the Arabs of Moab a childless woman often borrows

the robe of a woman who has had many children, hoping with the robe

to acquire the fruitfulness of its owner. The Caffres of Sofala, in

East Africa, had a great dread of being struck with anything hollow,

such as a reed or a straw, and greatly preferred being thrashed with

a good thick cudgel or an iron bar, even though it hurt very much.

For they thought that if a man were beaten with anything hollow, his

inside would waste away till he died. In eastern seas there is a

large shell which the Buginese of Celebes call the "old man"

(_kadjâwo_). On Fridays they turn these "old men" upside down and

place them on the thresholds of their houses, believing that whoever

then steps over the threshold of the house will live to be old. At

initiation a Brahman boy is made to tread with his right foot on a

stone, while the words are repeated, "Tread on this stone; like a

stone be firm"; and the same ceremony is performed, with the same

words, by a Brahman bride at her marriage. In Madagascar a mode of

counteracting the levity of fortune is to bury a stone at the foot

of the heavy house-post. The common custom of swearing upon a stone

may be based partly on a belief that the strength and stability of

the stone lend confirmation to an oath. Thus the old Danish

historian Saxo Grammaticus tells us that "the ancients, when they

were to choose a king, were wont to stand on stones planted in the

ground, and to proclaim their votes, in order to foreshadow from the

steadfastness of the stones that the deed would be lasting."

But while a general magical efficacy may be supposed to reside in

all stones by reason of their common properties of weight and

solidity, special magical virtues are attributed to particular

stones, or kinds of stone, in accordance with their individual or

specific qualities of shape and colour. For example, the Indians of

Peru employed certain stones for the increase of maize, others for

the increase of potatoes, and others again for the increase of

cattle. The stones used to make maize grow were fashioned in the

likeness of cobs of maize, and the stones destined to multiply

cattle had the shape of sheep.

In some parts of Melanesia a like belief prevails that certain

sacred stones are endowed with miraculous powers which correspond in

their nature to the shape of the stone. Thus a piece of water-worn

coral on the beach often bears a surprising likeness to a

bread-fruit. Hence in the Banks Islands a man who finds such a coral

will lay it at the root of one of his bread-fruit trees in the

expectation that it will make the tree bear well. If the result

answers his expectation, he will then, for a proper remuneration,

take stones of less-marked character from other men and let them lie

near his, in order to imbue them with the magic virtue which resides

in it. Similarly, a stone with little discs upon it is good to bring

in money; and if a man found a large stone with a number of small

ones under it, like a sow among her litter, he was sure that to

offer money upon it would bring him pigs. In these and similar cases

the Melanesians ascribe the marvellous power, not to the stone

itself, but to its indwelling spirit; and sometimes, as we have just

seen, a man endeavours to propitiate the spirit by laying down

offerings on the stone. But the conception of spirits that must be

propitiated lies outside the sphere of magic, and within that of

religion. Where such a conception is found, as here, in conjunction

with purely magical ideas and practices, the latter may generally be

assumed to be the original stock on which the religious conception

has been at some later time engrafted. For there are strong grounds

for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded

religion. But to this point we shall return presently.

The ancients set great store on the magical qualities of precious

stones; indeed it has been maintained, with great show of reason,

that such stones were used as amulets long before they were worn as

mere ornaments. Thus the Greeks gave the name of tree-agate to a

stone which exhibits tree-like markings, and they thought that if

two of these gems were tied to the horns or necks of oxen at the

plough, the crop would be sure to be plentiful. Again, they

recognised a milkstone which produced an abundant supply of milk in

women if only they drank it dissolved in honey-mead. Milk-stones are

used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and Melos at the

present day; in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in order to

ensure an abundant flow of milk. Again, the Greeks believed in a

stone which cured snake-bites, and hence was named the snake-stone;

to test its efficacy you had only to grind the stone to powder and

sprinkle the powder on the wound. The wine-coloured amethyst

received its name, which means "not drunken," because it was

supposed to keep the wearer of it sober; and two brothers who

desired to live at unity were advised to carry magnets about with

them, which, by drawing the twain together, would clearly prevent

them from falling out.

The ancient books of the Hindoos lay down a rule that after sunset

on his marriage night a man should sit silent with his wife till the

stars begin to twinkle in the sky. When the pole-star appears, he

should point it out to her, and, addressing the star, say, "Firm art

thou; I see thee, the firm one. Firm be thou with me, O thriving

one!" Then, turning to his wife, he should say, "To me Brihaspati

has given thee; obtaining offspring through me, thy husband, live

with me a hundred autumns." The intention of the ceremony is plainly

to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of

earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It is

the wish expressed in Keats's last sonnet:

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.

Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its

ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude

philosophy of sympathy and resemblance which here engages our

attention, to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its

tides and the life of man, of animals, and of plants. In the flowing

tide they see not merely a symbol, but a cause of exuberance, of

prosperity, and of life, while in the ebbing tide they discern a

real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure, of weakness,

and of death. The Breton peasant fancies that clover sown when the

tide is coming in will grow well, but that if the plant be sown at

low water or when the tide is going out, it will never reach

maturity, and that the cows which feed on it will burst. His wife

believes that the best butter is made when the tide has just turned

and is beginning to flow, that milk which foams in the churn will go

on foaming till the hour of high water is past, and that water drawn

from the well or milk extracted from the cow while the tide is

rising will boil up in the pot or saucepan and overflow into the

fire. According to some of the ancients, the skins of seals, even

after they had been parted from their bodies, remained in secret

sympathy with the sea, and were observed to ruffle when the tide was

on the ebb. Another ancient belief, attributed to Aristotle, was

that no creature can die except at ebb tide. The belief, if we can

trust Pliny, was confirmed by experience, so far as regards human

beings, on the coast of France. Philostratus also assures us that at

Cadiz dying people never yielded up the ghost while the water was

high. A like fancy still lingers in some parts of Europe. On the

Cantabrian coast they think that persons who die of chronic or acute

disease expire at the moment when the tide begins to recede. In

Portugal, all along the coast of Wales, and on some parts of the

coast of Brittany, a belief is said to prevail that people are born

when the tide comes in, and die when it goes out. Dickens attests

the existence of the same superstition in England. "People can't

die, along the coast," said Mr. Pegotty, "except when the tide's

pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in--not

properly born till flood." The belief that most deaths happen at ebb

tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from

Northumberland to Kent. Shakespeare must have been familiar with it,

for he makes Falstaff die "even just between twelve and one, e'en at

the turning o' the tide." We meet the belief again on the Pacific

coast of North America among the Haidas. Whenever a good Haida is

about to die he sees a canoe manned by some of his dead friends, who

come with the tide to bid him welcome to the spirit land. "Come with

us now," they say, "for the tide is about to ebb and we must

depart." At Port Stephens, in New South Wales, the natives always

buried their dead at flood tide, never at ebb, lest the retiring

water should bear the soul of the departed to some distant country.