To ensure a long life the Chinese have recourse to certain

complicated charms, which concentrate in themselves the magical

essence emanating, on homoeopathic principles, from times and

seasons, from persons and from things. The vehicles employed to

transmit these happy influences are no other than grave-clothes.

These are provided by many Chinese in their lifetime, and most

people have them cut out and sewn by an unmarried girl or a very

young woman, wisely calculating that, since such a person is likely

to live a great many years to come, a part of her capacity to live

long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus stave off for many

years the time when they shall be put to their proper use. Further,

the garments are made by preference in a year which has an

intercalary month; for to the Chinese mind it seems plain that

grave-clothes made in a year which is unusually long will possess

the capacity of prolonging life in an unusually high degree. Amongst

the clothes there is one robe in particular on which special pains

have been lavished to imbue it with this priceless quality. It is a

long silken gown of the deepest blue colour, with the word

"longevity" embroidered all over it in thread of gold. To present an

aged parent with one of these costly and splendid mantles, known as

"longevity garments," is esteemed by the Chinese an act of filial

piety and a delicate mark of attention. As the garment purports to

prolong the life of its owner, he often wears it, especially on

festive occasions, in order to allow the influence of longevity,

created by the many golden letters with which it is bespangled, to

work their full effect upon his person. On his birthday, above all,

he hardly ever fails to don it, for in China common sense bids a man

lay in a large stock of vital energy on his birthday, to be expended

in the form of health and vigour during the rest of the year.

Attired in the gorgeous pall, and absorbing its blessed influence at

every pore, the happy owner receives complacently the

congratulations of friends and relations, who warmly express their

admiration of these magnificent cerements, and of the filial piety

which prompted the children to bestow so beautiful and useful a

present on the author of their being.

Another application of the maxim that like produces like is seen in

the Chinese belief that the fortunes of a town are deeply affected

by its shape, and that they must vary according to the character of

the thing which that shape most nearly resembles. Thus it is related

that long ago the town of Tsuen-cheu-fu, the outlines of which are

like those of a carp, frequently fell a prey to the depredations of

the neighbouring city of Yung-chun, which is shaped like a

fishing-net, until the inhabitants of the former town conceived the

plan of erecting two tall pagodas in their midst. These pagodas,

which still tower above the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu, have ever since

exercised the happiest influence over its destiny by intercepting

the imaginary net before it could descend and entangle in its meshes

the imaginary carp. Some forty years ago the wise men of Shanghai

were much exercised to discover the cause of a local rebellion. On

careful enquiry they ascertained that the rebellion was due to the

shape of a large new temple which had most unfortunately been built

in the shape of a tortoise, an animal of the very worst character.

The difficulty was serious, the danger was pressing; for to pull

down the temple would have been impious, and to let it stand as it

was would be to court a succession of similar or worse disasters.

However, the genius of the local professors of geomancy, rising to

the occasion, triumphantly surmounted the difficulty and obviated

the danger. By filling up two wells, which represented the eyes of

the tortoise, they at once blinded that disreputable animal and

rendered him incapable of doing further mischief.

Sometimes homoeopathic or imitative magic is called in to annul an

evil omen by accomplishing it in mimicry. The effect is to

circumvent destiny by substituting a mock calamity for a real one.

In Madagascar this mode of cheating the fates is reduced to a

regular system. Here every man's fortune is determined by the day or

hour of his birth, and if that happens to be an unlucky one his fate

is sealed, unless the mischief can be extracted, as the phrase goes,

by means of a substitute. The ways of extracting the mischief are

various. For example, if a man is born on the first day of the

second month (February), his house will be burnt down when he comes

of age. To take time by the forelock and avoid this catastrophe, the

friends of the infant will set up a shed in a field or in the

cattle-fold and burn it. If the ceremony is to be really effective,

the child and his mother should be placed in the shed and only

plucked, like brands, from the burning hut before it is too late.

Again, dripping November is the month of tears, and he who is born

in it is born to sorrow. But in order to disperse the clouds that

thus gather over his future, he has nothing to do but to take the

lid off a boiling pot and wave it about. The drops that fall from it

will accomplish his destiny and so prevent the tears from trickling

from his eyes. Again, if fate has decreed that a young girl, still

unwed, should see her children, still unborn, descend before her

with sorrow to the grave, she can avert the calamity as follows. She

kills a grasshopper, wraps it in a rag to represent a shroud, and

mourns over it like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to

be comforted. Moreover, she takes a dozen or more other

grasshoppers, and having removed some of their superfluous legs and

wings she lays them about their dead and shrouded fellow. The buzz

of the tortured insects and the agitated motions of their mutilated

limbs represent the shrieks and contortions of the mourners at a

funeral. After burying the deceased grasshopper she leaves the rest

to continue their mourning till death releases them from their pain;

and having bound up her dishevelled hair she retires from the grave

with the step and carriage of a person plunged in grief. Thenceforth

she looks cheerfully forward to seeing her children survive her; for

it cannot be that she should mourn and bury them twice over. Once

more, if fortune has frowned on a man at his birth and penury has

marked him for her own, he can easily erase the mark in question by

purchasing a couple of cheap pearls, price three halfpence, and

burying them. For who but the rich of this world can thus afford to

fling pearls away?

3. Contagious Magic

THUS far we have been considering chiefly that branch of sympathetic

magic which may be called homoeopathic or imitative. Its leading

principle, as we have seen, is that like produces like, or, in other

words, that an effect resembles its cause. The other great branch of

sympathetic magic, which I have called Contagious Magic, proceeds

upon the notion that things which have once been conjoined must

remain ever afterwards, even when quite dissevered from each other,

in such a sympathetic relation that whatever is done to the one must

similarly affect the other. Thus the logical basis of Contagious

Magic, like that of Homoeopathic Magic, is a mistaken association of

ideas; its physical basis, if we may speak of such a thing, like the

physical basis of Homoeopathic Magic, is a material medium of some

sort which, like the ether of modern physics, is assumed to unite

distant objects and to convey impressions from one to the other. The

most familiar example of Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy

which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of

his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of

human hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon the

person from whom they were cut. This superstition is world-wide;

instances of it in regard to hair and nails will be noticed later on

in this work.

Among the Australian tribes it was a common practice to knock out

one or more of a boy's front teeth at those ceremonies of initiation

to which every male member had to submit before he could enjoy the

rights and privileges of a full-grown man. The reason of the

practice is obscure; all that concerns us here is the belief that a

sympathetic relation continued to exist between the lad and his

teeth after the latter had been extracted from his gums. Thus among

some of the tribes about the river Darling, in New South Wales, the

extracted tooth was placed under the bark of a tree near a river or

water-hole; if the bark grew over the tooth, or if the tooth fell

into the water, all was well; but if it were exposed and the ants

ran over it, the natives believed that the boy would suffer from a

disease of the mouth. Among the Murring and other tribes of New

South Wales the extracted tooth was at first taken care of by an old

man, and then passed from one headman to another, until it had gone

all round the community, when it came back to the lad's father, and

finally to the lad himself. But however it was thus conveyed from

hand to hand, it might on no account be placed in a bag containing

magical substances, for to do so would, they believed, put the owner

of the tooth in great danger. The late Dr. Howitt once acted as

custodian of the teeth which had been extracted from some novices at

a ceremony of initiation, and the old men earnestly besought him not

to carry them in a bag in which they knew that he had some quartz

crystals. They declared that if he did so the magic of the crystals

would pass into the teeth, and so injure the boys. Nearly a year

after Dr. Howitt's return from the ceremony he was visited by one of

the principal men of the Murring tribe, who had travelled some two

hundred and fifty miles from his home to fetch back the teeth. This

man explained that he had been sent for them because one of the boys

had fallen into ill health, and it was believed that the teeth had

received some injury which had affected him. He was assured that the

teeth had been kept in a box apart from any substances, like quartz

crystals, which could influence them; and he returned home bearing

the teeth with him carefully wrapt up and concealed.

The Basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth, lest these

should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings who haunt

graves, and who could harm the owner of the tooth by working magic

on it. In Sussex some fifty years ago a maid-servant remonstrated

strongly against the throwing away of children's cast teeth,

affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any animal, the

child's new tooth would be, for all the world, like the teeth of the

animal that had bitten the old one. In proof of this she named old

Master Simmons, who had a very large pig's tooth in his upper jaw, a

personal defect that he always averred was caused by his mother, who

threw away one of his cast teeth by accident into the hog's trough.

A similar belief has led to practices intended, on the principles of

homoeopathic magic, to replace old teeth by new and better ones.

Thus in many parts of the world it is customary to put extracted

teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat, in

the hope that, through the sympathy which continues to subsist

between them and their former owner, his other teeth may acquire the

same firmness and excellence as the teeth of these rodents. For

example, in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim among

the people that when you have had a tooth taken out you should

insert it in a mouse's hole. To do so with a child's milk-tooth

which has fallen out will prevent the child from having toothache.

Or you should go behind the stove and throw your tooth backwards

over your head, saying "Mouse, give me your iron tooth; I will give

you my bone tooth." After that your other teeth will remain good.

Far away from Europe, at Raratonga, in the Pacific, when a child's

tooth was extracted, the following prayer used to be recited:

"Big rat! little rat!

Here is my old tooth.

Pray give me a new one."

Then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house, because rats

make their nests in the decayed thatch. The reason assigned for

invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats' teeth were the

strongest known to the natives.

Other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a sympathetic

union with the body, after the physical connexion has been severed,

are the navel-string and the afterbirth, including the placenta. So

intimate, indeed, is the union conceived to be, that the fortunes of

the individual for good or evil throughout life are often supposed

to be bound up with one or other of these portions of his person, so

that if his navel-string or afterbirth is preserved and properly

treated, he will be prosperous; whereas if it be injured or lost, he

will suffer accordingly. Thus certain tribes of Western Australia

believe that a man swims well or ill, according as his mother at his

birth threw the navel-string into water or not. Among the natives on

the Pennefather River in Queensland it is believed that a part of

the child's spirit (_cho-i_) stays in the afterbirth. Hence the

grandmother takes the afterbirth away and buries it in the sand. She

marks the spot by a number of twigs which she sticks in the ground

in a circle, tying their tops together so that the structure

resembles a cone. When Anjea, the being who causes conception in

women by putting mud babies into their wombs, comes along and sees

the place, he takes out the spirit and carries it away to one of his

haunts, such as a tree, a hole in a rock, or a lagoon where it may

remain for years. But sometime or other he will put the spirit again

into a baby, and it will be born once more into the world. In

Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands, the navel-string is placed in a

shell and then disposed of in such a way as shall best adapt the

child for the career which the parents have chosen for him; for

example, if they wish to make him a good climber, they will hang the

navel-string on a tree. The Kei islanders regard the navel-string as

the brother or sister of the child, according to the sex of the

infant. They put it in a pot with ashes, and set it in the branches

of a tree, that it may keep a watchful eye on the fortunes of its

comrade. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, as among many other peoples of

the Indian Archipelago, the placenta passes for the child's younger

brother or sister, the sex being determined by the sex of the child,

and it is buried under the house. According to the Bataks it is

bound up with the child's welfare, and seems, in fact, to be the

seat of the transferable soul, of which we shall hear something

later on. The Karo Bataks even affirm that of a man's two souls it

is the true soul that lives with the placenta under the house; that

is the soul, they say, which begets children.

The Baganda believe that every person is born with a double, and

this double they identify with the afterbirth, which they regard as

a second child. The mother buries the afterbirth at the root of a

plantain tree, which then becomes sacred until the fruit has

ripened, when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the

family. Among the Cherokees the navel-string of a girl is buried

under a corn-mortar, in order that the girl may grow up to be a good

baker; but the navel-string of a boy is hung up on a tree in the

woods, in order that he may be a hunter. The Incas of Peru preserved

the navel-string with the greatest care, and gave it to the child to

suck whenever it fell ill. In ancient Mexico they used to give a

boy's navel-string to soldiers, to be buried by them on a field of

battle, in order that the boy might thus acquire a passion for war.

But the navel-string of a girl was buried beside the domestic

hearth, because this was believed to inspire her with a love of home

and taste for cooking and baking.

Even in Europe many people still believe that a person's destiny is

more or less bound up with that of his navel-string or afterbirth.

Thus in Rhenish Bavaria the navel-string is kept for a while wrapt

up in a piece of old linen, and then cut or pricked to pieces

according as the child is a boy or a girl, in order that he or she

may grow up to be a skilful workman or a good sempstress. In Berlin

the midwife commonly delivers the dried navel-string to the father

with a strict injunction to preserve it carefully, for so long as it

is kept the child will live and thrive and be free from sickness. In

Beauce and Perche the people are careful to throw the navel-string

neither into water nor into fire, believing that if that were done

the child would be drowned or burned.

Thus in many parts of the world the navel-string, or more commonly

the afterbirth, is regarded as a living being, the brother or sister

of the infant, or as the material object in which the guardian

spirit of the child or part of its soul resides. Further, the

sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a person and his

afterbirth or navel-string comes out very clearly in the widespread

custom of treating the afterbirth or navel-string in ways which are

supposed to influence for life the character and career of the

person, making him, if it is a man, a nimble climber, a strong

swimmer, a skilful hunter, or a brave soldier, and making her, if it

is a woman, a cunning sempstress, a good baker, and so forth. Thus

the beliefs and usages concerned with the afterbirth or placenta,

and to a less extent with the navel-string, present a remarkable

parallel to the widespread doctrine of the transferable or external

soul and the customs founded on it. Hence it is hardly rash to

conjecture that the resemblance is no mere chance coincidence, but

that in the afterbirth or placenta we have a physical basis (not

necessarily the only one) for the theory and practice of the

external soul. The consideration of that subject is reserved for a

later part of this work.

A curious application of the doctrine of contagious magic is the

relation commonly believed to exist between a wounded man and the

agent of the wound, so that whatever is subsequently done by or to

the agent must correspondingly affect the patient either for good or

evil. Thus Pliny tells us that if you have wounded a man and are

sorry for it, you have only to spit on the hand that gave the wound,

and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated. In

Melanesia, if a man's friends get possession of the arrow which

wounded him, they keep it in a damp place or in cool leaves, for

then the inflammation will be trifling and will soon subside.

Meantime the enemy who shot the arrow is hard at work to aggravate

the wound by all the means in his power. For this purpose he and his

friends drink hot and burning juices and chew irritating leaves, for

this will clearly inflame and irritate the wound. Further, they keep

the bow near the fire to make the wound which it has inflicted hot;

and for the same reason they put the arrow-head, if it has been

recovered, into the fire. Moreover, they are careful to keep the

bow-string taut and to twang it occasionally, for this will cause

the wounded man to suffer from tension of the nerves and spasms of

tetanus. "It is constantly received and avouched," says Bacon, "that

the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the

wound itself. In this experiment, upon the relation of men of credit

(though myself, as yet, am not fully inclined to believe it), you

shall note the points following: first, the ointment wherewith this

is done is made of divers ingredients, whereof the strangest and

hardest to come by are the moss upon the skull of a dead man

unburied, and the fats of a boar and a bear killed in the act of

generation." The precious ointment compounded out of these and other

ingredients was applied, as the philosopher explains, not to the

wound but to the weapon, and that even though the injured man was at

a great distance and knew nothing about it. The experiment, he tells

us, had been tried of wiping the ointment off the weapon without the

knowledge of the person hurt, with the result that he was presently

in a great rage of pain until the weapon was anointed again.

Moreover, "it is affirmed that if you cannot get the weapon, yet if

you put an instrument of iron or wood resembling the weapon into the

wound, whereby it bleedeth, the anointing of that instrument will

serve and work the effect." Remedies of the sort which Bacon deemed

worthy of his attention are still in vogue in the eastern counties

of England. Thus in Suffolk if a man cuts himself with a bill-hook

or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils

it to prevent the wound from festering. If he runs a thorn or, as he

calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted

thorn. A man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand, having run a

thorn into it while he was hedging. On being told that the hand was

festering, he remarked, "That didn't ought to, for I greased the

bush well after I pulled it out." If a horse wounds its foot by

treading on a nail, a Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the

nail, clean it, and grease it every day, to prevent the foot from

festering. Similarly Cambridgeshire labourers think that if a horse

has run a nail into its foot, it is necessary to grease the nail

with lard or oil and put it away in some safe place, or the horse

will not recover. A few years ago a veterinary surgeon was sent for

to attend a horse which had ripped its side open on the hinge of a

farm gatepost. On arriving at the farm he found that nothing had

been done for the wounded horse, but that a man was busy trying to

pry the hinge out of the gatepost in order that it might be greased

and put away, which, in the opinion of the Cambridge wiseacres,

would conduce to the recovery of the animal. Similarly Essex rustics

opine that, if a man has been stabbed with a knife, it is essential

to his recovery that the knife should be greased and laid across the

bed on which the sufferer is lying. So in Bavaria you are directed

to anoint a linen rag with grease and tie it on the edge of the axe

that cut you, taking care to keep the sharp edge upwards. As the

grease on the axe dries, your wound heals. Similarly in the Harz

Mountains they say that if you cut yourself, you ought to smear the

knife or the scissors with fat and put the instrument away in a dry

place in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

As the knife dries, the wound heals. Other people, however, in

Germany say that you should stick the knife in some damp place in

the ground, and that your hurt will heal as the knife rusts. Others

again, in Bavaria, recommend you to smear the axe or whatever it is

with blood and put it under the eaves.

The train of reasoning which thus commends itself to English and

German rustics, in common with the savages of Melanesia and America,

is carried a step further by the aborigines of Central Australia,

who conceive that under certain circumstances the near relations of

a wounded man must grease themselves, restrict their diet, and

regulate their behaviour in other ways in order to ensure his

recovery. Thus when a lad has been circumcised and the wound is not

yet healed, his mother may not eat opossum, or a certain kind of

lizard, or carpet snake, or any kind of fat, for otherwise she would

retard the healing of the boy's wound. Every day she greases her

digging-sticks and never lets them out of her sight; at night she

sleeps with them close to her head. No one is allowed to touch them.

Every day also she rubs her body all over with grease, as in some

way this is believed to help her son's recovery. Another refinement

of the same principle is due to the ingenuity of the German peasant.

It is said that when one of his pigs or sheep breaks its leg, a

farmer of Rhenish Bavaria or Hesse will bind up the leg of a chair

with bandages and splints in due form. For some days thereafter no

one may sit on that chair, move it, or knock up against it; for to

do so would pain the injured pig or sheep and hinder the cure. In

this last case it is clear that we have passed wholly out of the

region of contagious magic and into the region of homoeopathic or

imitative magic; the chair-leg, which is treated instead of the

beast's leg, in no sense belongs to the animal, and the application

of bandages to it is a mere simulation of the treatment which a more

rational surgery would bestow on the real patient.

The sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a man and the

weapon which has wounded him is probably founded on the notion that

the blood on the weapon continues to feel with the blood in his

body. For a like reason the Papuans of Tumleo, an island off New

Guinea, are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages with

which their wounds have been dressed, for they fear that if these

rags fell into the hands of an enemy he might injure them magically

thereby. Once when a man with a wound in his mouth, which bled

constantly, came to the missionaries to be treated, his faithful

wife took great pains to collect all the blood and cast it into the

sea. Strained and unnatural as this idea may seem to us, it is

perhaps less so than the belief that magic sympathy is maintained

between a person and his clothes, so that whatever is done to the

clothes will be felt by the man himself, even though he may be far

away at the time. In the Wotjobaluk tribe of Victoria a wizard would

sometimes get hold of a man's opossum rug and roast it slowly in the

fire, and as he did so the owner of the rug would fall sick. If the

wizard consented to undo the charm, he would give the rug back to

the sick man's friends, bidding them put it in water, "so as to wash

the fire out." When that happened, the sufferer would feel a

refreshing coolness and probably recover. In Tanna, one of the New

Hebrides, a man who had a grudge at another and desired his death

would try to get possession of a cloth which had touched the sweat

of his enemy's body. If he succeeded, he rubbed the cloth carefully

over with the leaves and twigs of a certain tree, rolled and bound

cloth, twigs, and leaves into a long sausage-shaped bundle, and

burned it slowly in the fire. As the bundle was consumed, the victim

fell ill, and when it was reduced to ashes, he died. In this last

form of enchantment, however, the magical sympathy may be supposed

to exist not so much between the man and the cloth as between the

man and the sweat which issued from his body. But in other cases of

the same sort it seems that the garment by itself is enough to give

the sorcerer a hold upon his victim. The witch in Theocritus, while

she melted an image or lump of wax in order that her faithless lover

might melt with love of her, did not forget to throw into the fire a

shred of his cloak which he had dropped in her house. In Prussia

they say that if you cannot catch a thief, the next best thing you

can do is to get hold of a garment which he may have shed in his

flight; for if you beat it soundly, the thief will fall sick. This

belief is firmly rooted in the popular mind. Some eighty or ninety

years ago, in the neighbourhood of Berend, a man was detected trying

to steal honey, and fled, leaving his coat behind him. When he heard

that the enraged owner of the honey was mauling his lost coat, he

was so alarmed that he took to his bed and died.

Again, magic may be wrought on a man sympathetically, not only

through his clothes and severed parts of himself, but also through

the impressions left by his body in sand or earth. In particular, it

is a world-wide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure

the feet that made them. Thus the natives of South-eastern Australia

think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz,

glass, bone, or charcoal in his footprints. Rheumatic pains are

often attributed by them to this cause. Seeing a Tatungolung man

very lame, Mr. Howitt asked him what was the matter. He said, "some

fellow has put _bottle_ in my foot." He was suffering from

rheumatism, but believed that an enemy had found his foot-track and

had buried it in a piece of broken bottle, the magical influence of

which had entered his foot.

Similar practices prevail in various parts of Europe. Thus in

Mecklenburg it is thought that if you drive a nail into a man's

footprint he will fall lame; sometimes it is required that the nail

should be taken from a coffin. A like mode of injuring an enemy is

resorted to in some parts of France. It is said that there was an

old woman who used to frequent Stow in Suffolk, and she was a witch.

If, while she walked, any one went after her and stuck a nail or a

knife into her footprint in the dust, the dame could not stir a step

till it was withdrawn. Among the South Slavs a girl will dig up the

earth from the footprints of the man she loves and put it in a

flower-pot. Then she plants in the pot a marigold, a flower that is

thought to be fadeless. And as its golden blossom grows and blooms

and never fades, so shall her sweetheart's love grow and bloom, and

never, never fade. Thus the love-spell acts on the man through the

earth he trod on. An old Danish mode of concluding a treaty was

based on the same idea of the sympathetic connexion between a man

and his footprints: the covenanting parties sprinkled each other's

footprints with their own blood, thus giving a pledge of fidelity.

In ancient Greece superstitions of the same sort seem to have been

current, for it was thought that if a horse stepped on the track of

a wolf he was seized with numbness; and a maxim ascribed to

Pythagoras forbade people to pierce a man's footprints with a nail

or a knife.

The same superstition is turned to account by hunters in many parts

of the world for the purpose of running down the game. Thus a German

huntsman will stick a nail taken from a coffin into the fresh spoor

of the quarry, believing that this will hinder the animal from

escaping. The aborigines of Victoria put hot embers in the tracks of

the animals they were pursuing. Hottentot hunters throw into the air

a handful of sand taken from the footprints of the game, believing

that this will bring the animal down. Thompson Indians used to lay

charms on the tracks of wounded deer; after that they deemed it

superfluous to pursue the animal any further that day, for being

thus charmed it could not travel far and would soon die. Similarly,

Ojebway Indians placed "medicine" on the track of the first deer or

bear they met with, supposing that this would soon bring the animal

into sight, even if it were two or three days' journey off; for this

charm had power to compress a journey of several days into a few

hours. Ewe hunters of West Africa stab the footprints of game with a

sharp-pointed stick in order to maim the quarry and allow them to

come up with it.

But though the footprint is the most obvious it is not the only

impression made by the body through which magic may be wrought on a

man. The aborigines of South-eastern Australia believe that a man

may be injured by burying sharp fragments of quartz, glass, and so

forth in the mark made by his reclining body; the magical virtue of

these sharp things enters his body and causes those acute pains

which the ignorant European puts down to rheumatism. We can now

understand why it was a maxim with the Pythagoreans that in rising

from bed you should smooth away the impression left by your body on

the bed-clothes. The rule was simply an old precaution against

magic, forming part of a whole code of superstitious maxims which

antiquity fathered on Pythagoras, though doubtless they were

familiar to the barbarous forefathers of the Greeks long before the

time of that philosopher.

4. The Magician's Progress

WE have now concluded our examination of the general principles of

sympathetic magic. The examples by which I have illustrated them

have been drawn for the most part from what may be called private

magic, that is from magical rites and incantations practised for the

benefit or the injury of individuals. But in savage society there is

commonly to be found in addition what we may call public magic, that

is, sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole community.

Wherever ceremonies of this sort are observed for the common good,

it is obvious that the magician ceases to be merely a private

practitioner and becomes to some extent a public functionary. The

development of such a class of functionaries is of great importance

for the political as well as the religious evolution of society. For

when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the

performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a

position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the

rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession accordingly

draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men of

the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect of honour,

wealth, and power such as hardly any other career could offer. The

acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother

and to play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that

the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he is often sincerely

convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the

credulity of his fellows ascribes to him. But the more sagacious he

is, the more likely he is to see through the fallacies which impose

on duller wits. Thus the ablest members of the profession must tend

to be more or less conscious deceivers; and it is just these men who

in virtue of their superior ability will generally come to the top

and win for themselves positions of the highest dignity and the most

commanding authority. The pitfalls which beset the path of the

professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the man of

coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through

them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single

profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false;

not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or

unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his

own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more

likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor.

The honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations

will produce their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only

really, as they always do, but conspicuously and disastrously, as

they often do, he is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish

colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure,

and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head by his

disappointed and angry employers.

The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the

supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest

intelligence and the most unscrupulous character. If we could

balance the harm they do by their knavery against the benefits they

confer by their superior sagacity, it might well be found that the

good greatly outweighed the evil. For more mischief has probably

been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by

intelligent rascals. Once your shrewd rogue has attained the height

of his ambition, and has no longer any selfish end to further, he

may, and often does, turn his talents, his experience, his

resources, to the service of the public. Many men who have been

least scrupulous in the acquisition of power have been most

beneficent in the use of it, whether the power they aimed at and won

was that of wealth, political authority, or what not. In the field

of politics the wily intriguer, the ruthless victor, may end by

being a wise and magnanimous ruler, blessed in his lifetime,

lamented at his death, admired and applauded by posterity. Such men,

to take two of the most conspicuous instances, were Julius Caesar

and Augustus. But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the

power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he

makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach

with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not

been an honest dullard.

Thus, so far as the public profession of magic affected the

constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of

affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of

power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a

democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general the

savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult males, but

by a council of elders. The change, by whatever causes produced, and

whatever the character of the early rulers, was on the whole very

beneficial. For the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential

condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No human being

is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage;

in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and

difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind

is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible

master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who

haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of

iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to

which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The least possible

scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for

the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and

dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise,

while the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents a

uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the

natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn

capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality.

From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues

and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the

Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by

opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of

authority to men's natural abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all

who have the real good of their fellows at heart. Once these

elevating influences have begun to operate--and they cannot be for

ever suppressed--the progress of civilisation becomes comparatively

rapid. The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry

through changes in a single lifetime which previously many

generations might not have sufficed to effect; and if, as will often

happen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the common, he

will readily avail himself of the opportunity. Even the whims and

caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of

custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe

ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders,

and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it

becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of

aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly

favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress. For

extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary

submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and

slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual

struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of

devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which

is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of

man.

Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and

science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissociated

from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives

an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere accident

that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have

followed close on the heels of victory, and that the great

conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and

spread civilisation, thus healing in peace the wounds they inflicted

in war. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs are our

witnesses in the past: we may yet live to see a similar outburst in

Japan. Nor, to remount the stream of history to its sources, is it

an accident that all the first great strides towards civilisation

have been made under despotic and theocratic governments, like those

of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme ruler claimed and

received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double

character of a king and a god. It is hardly too much to say that at

this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and,

paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is more

liberty in the best sense--liberty to think our own thoughts and to

fashion our own destinies--under the most absolute despotism, the

most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage

life, where the individual's lot is cast from the cradle to the

grave in the iron mould of hereditary custom.

So far, therefore, as the public profession of magic has been one of

the roads by which the ablest men have passed to supreme power, it

has contributed to emancipate mankind from the thraldom of tradition

and to elevate them into a larger, freer life, with a broader

outlook on the world. This is no small service rendered to humanity.

And when we remember further that in another direction magic has

paved the way for science, we are forced to admit that if the black

art has done much evil, it has also been the source of much good;

that if it is the child of error, it has yet been the mother of

freedom and truth.

IV. Magic and Religion

THE examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate

the general principles of sympathetic magic in its two branches, to

which we have given the names of Homoeopathic and Contagious

respectively. In some cases of magic which have come before us we

have seen that the operation of spirits is assumed, and that an

attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. But

these cases are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit magic tinged

and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its

pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows

another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any

spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is

identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system

is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity

of nature. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will

always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper

ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be

attended by the desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations

should chance to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of

another sorcerer. He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour

of no fickle and wayward being: he abases himself before no awful

deity. Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means

arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly

conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called the laws

of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to break

these laws in the smallest particular, is to incur failure, and may

even expose the unskilful practitioner himself to the utmost peril.

If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional

sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and exercised in exact

conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between the magical

and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of

them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and

certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which

can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice,

of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature.

Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to

him who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs

that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world.

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have

exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both

have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary

enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of

disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the

future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain

and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet,

a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with

unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.

The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a

sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception

of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If

we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been

passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken as

fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already

indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or other

of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of

ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in

space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces

homoeopathic or imitative magic: a mistaken association of

contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The principles of

association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely

essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied

they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the

bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a

tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren;

for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be

magic but science. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a

search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural

phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has

scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden

and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the

body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to enquire

how it stands related to religion. But the view we take of that

relation will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have

formed of the nature of religion itself; hence a writer may

reasonably be expected to define his conception of religion before

he proceeds to investigate its relation to magic. There is probably

no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the

nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would

satisfy every one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer

can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and

afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout

his work. By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or

conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct

and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined,

religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical,

namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to

propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first,

since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we

can attempt to please him. But unless the belief leads to a

corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology;

in the language of St. James, "faith, if it hath not works, is dead,

being alone." In other words, no man is religious who does not

govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On

the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is

also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and

yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts

from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if the other acts

from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral according as

his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good. Hence

belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are

equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of

them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always

take the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the

offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward

ceremonies. Its aim is to please the deity, and if the deity is one

who delights in charity and mercy and purity more than in oblations

of blood, the chanting of hymns, and the fumes of incense, his

worshippers will best please him, not by prostrating themselves

before him, by intoning his praises, and by filling his temples with

costly gifts, but by being pure and merciful and charitable towards

men, for in so doing they will imitate, so far as human infirmity

allows, the perfections of the divine nature. It was this ethical

side of religion which the Hebrew prophets, inspired with a noble

ideal of God's goodness and holiness, were never weary of

inculcating. Thus Micah says: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is

good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and

to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" And at a later time

much of the force by which Christianity conquered the world was

drawn from the same high conception of God's moral nature and the

duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it. "Pure religion and

undefiled," says St. James, "before God and the Father is this, To

visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep

himself unspotted from the world."

But if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings who

rule the world, and, second, an attempt to win their favour, it

clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic

or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings

who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events

from the channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this

implied elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed to

the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume

that the processes of nature are rigid and invariable in their

operation, and that they can as little be turned from their course

by persuasion and entreaty as by threats and intimidation. The

distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns

on their answer to the crucial question, Are the forces which govern

the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and impersonal?

Religion, as a conciliation of the superhuman powers, assumes the

former member of the alternative. For all conciliation implies that

the being conciliated is a conscious or personal agent, that his

conduct is in some measure uncertain, and that he can be prevailed

upon to vary it in the desired direction by a judicious appeal to

his interests, his appetites, or his emotions. Conciliation is never

employed towards things which are regarded as inanimate, nor towards

persons whose behaviour in the particular circumstances is known to

be determined with absolute certainty. Thus in so far as religion

assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be

turned from their purpose by persuasion, it stands in fundamental

antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of which take for

granted that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions

or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable

laws acting mechanically. In magic, indeed, the assumption is only

implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true that magic often

deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by

religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them

exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is,

it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating

them as religion would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings,

whether human or divine, are in the last resort subject to those

impersonal forces which control all things, but which nevertheless

can be turned to account by any one who knows how to manipulate them

by the appropriate ceremonies and spells. In ancient Egypt, for

example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even the

highest gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them with

destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes, without going quite

so far as that, the wizard declared that he would scatter the bones

of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved

contumacious. Similarly in India at the present day the great Hindoo

trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is subject to the

sorcerers, who, by means of their spells, exercise such an

ascendency over the mightiest deities, that these are bound

submissively to execute on earth below, or in heaven above, whatever

commands their masters the magicians may please to issue. There is a

saying everywhere current in India: "The whole universe is subject

to the gods; the gods are subject to the spells (_mantras_); the

spells to the Brahmans; therefore the Brahmans are our gods."

This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion

sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history

the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty

self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the

higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like

theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful

sense of the divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence

of it, such claims and such a demeanour must have appeared an

impious and blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives that belong to

God alone. And sometimes, we may suspect, lower motives concurred to

whet the edge of the priest's hostility. He professed to be the

proper medium, the true intercessor between God and man, and no

doubt his interests as well as his feelings were often injured by a

rival practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road to

fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour.

Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its

appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an

earlier stage the functions of priest and sorcerer were often

combined or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet

differentiated from each other. To serve his purpose man wooed the

good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the

same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which he

hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without the

help of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and magical

rites simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations almost in

the same breath, knowing or recking little of the theoretical

inconsistency of his behaviour, so long as by hook or crook he

contrived to get what he wanted. Instances of this fusion or

confusion of magic with religion have already met us in the

practices of Melanesians and of other peoples.

The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among peoples

that have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in ancient

India and ancient Egypt; it is by no means extinct among European

peasantry at the present day. With regard to ancient India we are

told by an eminent Sanscrit scholar that "the sacrificial ritual at

the earliest period of which we have detailed information is

pervaded with practices that breathe the spirit of the most

primitive magic." Speaking of the importance of magic in the East,

and especially in Egypt, Professor Maspero remarks that "we ought

not to attach to the word magic the degrading idea which it almost

inevitably calls up in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the

very foundation of religion. The faithful who desired to obtain some

favour from a god had no chance of succeeding except by laying hands

on the deity, and this arrest could only be effected by means of a

certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers, and chants, which the

god himself had revealed, and which obliged him to do what was

demanded of him."

Among the ignorant classes of modern Europe the same confusion of

ideas, the same mixture of religion and magic, crops up in various

forms. Thus we are told that in France "the majority of the peasants

still believe that the priest possesses a secret and irresistible

power over the elements. By reciting certain prayers which he alone

knows and has the right to utter, yet for the utterance of which he

must afterwards demand absolution, he can, on an occasion of

pressing danger, arrest or reverse for a moment the action of the

eternal laws of the physical world. The winds, the storms, the hail,

and the rain are at his command and obey his will. The fire also is

subject to him, and the flames of a conflagration are extinguished

at his word." For example, French peasants used to be, perhaps are

still, persuaded that the priests could celebrate, with certain

special rites, a Mass of the Holy Spirit, of which the efficacy was

so miraculous that it never met with any opposition from the divine

will; God was forced to grant whatever was asked of Him in this

form, however rash and importunate might be the petition. No idea of

impiety or irreverence attached to the rite in the minds of those

who, in some of the great extremities of life, sought by this

singular means to take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The secular

priests generally refused to say the Mass of the Holy Spirit; but

the monks, especially the Capuchin friars, had the reputation of

yielding with less scruple to the entreaties of the anxious and

distressed. In the constraint thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to

be laid by the priest upon the deity we seem to have an exact

counterpart of the power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to

their magicians. Again, to take another example, in many villages of

Provence the priest is still reputed to possess the faculty of

averting storms. It is not every priest who enjoys this reputation;

and in some villages, when a change of pastors takes place, the

parishioners are eager to learn whether the new incumbent has the

power (_pouder_), as they call it. At the first sign of a heavy

storm they put him to the proof by inviting him to exorcise the

threatening clouds; and if the result answers to their hopes, the

new shepherd is assured of the sympathy and respect of his flock. In

some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this respect

stood higher than that of his rector, the relations between the two

have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has had to

translate the rector to another benefice. Again, Gascon peasants

believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will

sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint

Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those

who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked

priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite

sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at

the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch,

can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The

Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted

church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming,

where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the

desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his

light o' love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble

the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the

midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black

and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks

the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has

been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground

and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good

Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and

dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said

withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter

with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know

that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.

Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with religion

in many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for thinking

that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was a time when

man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of such wants as

transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first place a

consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and religion may

incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion in the

history of humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is

nothing but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most

elementary processes of the mind, namely the association of ideas by

virtue of resemblance or contiguity; and that on the other hand

religion assumes the operation of conscious or personal agents,

superior to man, behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the

conception of personal agents is more complex than a simple

recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas; and a theory

which assumes that the course of nature is determined by conscious

agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its

apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and reflection,

than the view that things succeed each other simply by reason of

their contiguity or resemblance. The very beasts associate the ideas

of things that are like each other or that have been found together

in their experience; and they could hardly survive for a day if they

ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the

phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible animals

or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes?

It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume that the honour

of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human

reason. Thus, if magic be deduced immediately from elementary

processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an error into which the

mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests on conceptions

which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have

yet attained to, it becomes probable that magic arose before

religion in the evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend

nature to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and enchantments

before he strove to coax and mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible

deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.

The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a

consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is

confirmed inductively by the observation that among the aborigines

of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate

information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the

sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems

to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are

magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can

influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic,

but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.

But if in the most backward state of human society now known to us

we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously

absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of

the world have also at some period of their history passed through a

similar intellectual phase, that they attempted to force the great

powers of nature to do their pleasure before they thought of

courting their favour by offerings and prayer--in short that, just

as on the material side of human culture there has everywhere been

an Age of Stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere

been an Age of Magic? There are reasons for answering this question

in the affirmative. When we survey the existing races of mankind

from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore,

we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great

variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to

speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but

descend into the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths,

nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family,

so that the surface of society all over the world is cracked and

seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning

crevasses opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious

dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences,

which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the

community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of

intellectual agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and

the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority

of mankind. One of the great achievements of the nineteenth century

was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of

the world, and thus to discover its substantial identity everywhere.

It is beneath our feet--and not very far beneath them--here in

Europe at the present day, and it crops up on the surface in the

heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever the advent of a

higher civilisation has not crushed it under ground. This universal

faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of

magic. While religious systems differ not only in different

countries, but in the same country in different ages, the system of

sympathetic magic remains everywhere and at all times substantially

alike in its principles and practice. Among the ignorant and

superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much what it was

thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among

the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world.

If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads,

the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the

Catholic Church, to the proud motto, "_Quod semper, quod ubique,

quod ab omnibus,_" as the sure and certain credential of its own

infallibility.

It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent

existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of

society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and

culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate

observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly

regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We

seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the

subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow

murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of

what is going on beneath our feet. Now and then the polite world is

startled by a paragraph in a newspaper which tells how in Scotland

an image has been found stuck full of pins for the purpose of

killing an obnoxious laird or minister, how a woman has been slowly

roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a girl has been

murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those candles of human

tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade

unseen. But whether the influences that make for further progress,

or those that threaten to undo what has already been accomplished,

will ultimately prevail; whether the impulsive energy of the

minority or the dead weight of the majority of mankind will prove

the stronger force to carry us up to higher heights or to sink us

into lower depths, are questions rather for the sage, the moralist,

and the statesman, whose eagle vision scans the future, than for the

humble student of the present and the past. Here we are only

concerned to ask how far the uniformity, the universality, and the

permanence of a belief in magic, compared with the endless variety

and the shifting character of religious creeds, raises a presumption

that the former represents a ruder and earlier phase of the human

mind, through which all the races of mankind have passed or are

passing on their way to religion and science.

If an Age of Religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise,

been preceded by an Age of Magic, it is natural that we should

enquire what causes have led mankind, or rather a portion of them,

to abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to betake

themselves to religion instead. When we reflect upon the multitude,

the variety, and the complexity of the facts to be explained, and

the scantiness of our information regarding them, we shall be ready

to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so profound

a problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the most we can do in

the present state of our knowledge is to hazard a more or less

plausible conjecture. With all due diffidence, then, I would suggest

that a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of

magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a

truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her

resources to account. The shrewder intelligences must in time have

come to perceive that magical ceremonies and incantations did not

really effect the results which they were designed to produce, and

which the majority of their simpler fellows still believed that they

did actually produce. This great discovery of the inefficacy of

magic must have wrought a radical though probably slow revolution in

the minds of those who had the sagacity to make it. The discovery

amounted to this, that men for the first time recognised their

inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which

hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control. It

was a confession of human ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he

had taken for causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts

to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain. His

painful toil had been wasted, his curious ingenuity had been

squandered to no purpose. He had been pulling at strings to which

nothing was attached; he had been marching, as he thought, straight

to the goal, while in reality he had only been treading in a narrow

circle. Not that the effects which he had striven so hard to produce

did not continue to manifest themselves. They were still produced,

but not by him. The rain still fell on the thirsty ground: the sun

still pursued his daily, and the moon her nightly journey across the

sky: the silent procession of the seasons still moved in light and

shadow, in cloud and sunshine across the earth: men were still born

to labour and sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were

gathered to their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things

indeed went on as before, yet all seemed different to him from whose

eyes the old scales had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the

pleasing illusion that it was he who guided the earth and the heaven

in their courses, and that they would cease to perform their great

revolutions were he to take his feeble hand from the wheel. In the

death of his enemies and his friends he no longer saw a proof of the

resistless potency of his own or of hostile enchantments; he now

knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a force stronger

than any that he could wield, and in obedience to a destiny which he

was powerless to control.

Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a

troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty, his old happy confidence in

himself and his powers rudely shaken, our primitive philosopher must

have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he came to rest, as in a

quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new system of faith and

practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his harassing doubts

and a substitute, however precarious, for that sovereignty over

nature which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the great world went

on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be

because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger,

who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all

the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be

dependent on his own magic. It was they, as he now believed, and not

he himself, who made the stormy wind to blow, the lightning to

flash, and the thunder to roll; who had laid the foundations of the

solid earth and set bounds to the restless sea that it might not

pass; who caused all the glorious lights of heaven to shine; who

gave the fowls of the air their meat and the wild beasts of the

desert their prey; who bade the fruitful land to bring forth in

abundance, the high hills to be clothed with forests, the bubbling

springs to rise under the rocks in the valleys, and green pastures

to grow by still waters; who breathed into man's nostrils and made

him live, or turned him to destruction by famine and pestilence and

war. To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced in all the

gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself,

humbly confessing his dependence on their invisible power, and

beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good things,

to defend him from the perils and dangers by which our mortal life

is compassed about on every hand, and finally to bring his immortal

spirit, freed from the burden of the body, to some happier world,

beyond the reach of pain and sorrow, where he might rest with them

and with the spirits of good men in joy and felicity for ever.

In this, or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be conceived

to have made the great transition from magic to religion. But even

in them the change can hardly ever have been sudden; probably it

proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its more or less

perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of man's powerlessness

to influence the course of nature on a grand scale must have been

gradual; he cannot have been shorn of the whole of his fancied

dominion at a blow. Step by step he must have been driven back from

his proud position; foot by foot he must have yielded, with a sigh,

the ground which he had once viewed as his own. Now it would be the

wind, now the rain, now the sunshine, now the thunder, that he

confessed himself unable to wield at will; and as province after

province of nature thus fell from his grasp, till what had once

seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a prison, man must have

been more and more profoundly impressed with a sense of his own

helplessness and the might of the invisible beings by whom he

believed himself to be surrounded. Thus religion, beginning as a

slight and partial acknowledgment of powers superior to man, tends

with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession of man's

entire and absolute dependence on the divine; his old free bearing

is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest prostration before the

mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit

his will to theirs: _In la sua volontade è nostra pace._ But this

deepening sense of religion, this more perfect submission to the

divine will in all things, affects only those higher intelligences

who have breadth of view enough to comprehend the vastness of the

universe and the littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp great

ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing

seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly

rise into religion at all. They are, indeed, drilled by their

betters into an outward conformity with its precepts and a verbal

profession of its tenets; but at heart they cling to their old

magical superstitions, which may be discountenanced and forbidden,

but cannot be eradicated by religion, so long as they have their

roots deep down in the mental framework and constitution of the

great majority of mankind.

The reader may well be tempted to ask, How was it that intelligent

men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How could they

continue to cherish expectations that were invariably doomed to

disappointment? With what heart persist in playing venerable antics

that led to nothing, and mumbling solemn balderdash that remained

without effect? Why cling to beliefs which were so flatly

contradicted by experience? How dare to repeat experiments that had

failed so often? The answer seems to be that the fallacy was far

from easy to detect, the failure by no means obvious, since in many,

perhaps in most cases, the desired event did actually follow, at a

longer or shorter interval, the performance of the rite which was

designed to bring it about; and a mind of more than common acuteness

was needed to perceive that, even in these cases, the rite was not

necessarily the cause of the event. A ceremony intended to make the

wind blow or the rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will

always be followed, sooner or later, by the occurrence it is meant

to bring to pass; and primitive man may be excused for regarding the

occurrence as a direct result of the ceremony, and the best possible

proof of its efficacy. Similarly, rites observed in the morning to

help the sun to rise, and in spring to wake the dreaming earth from

her winter sleep, will invariably appear to be crowned with success,

at least within the temperate zones; for in these regions the sun

lights his golden lamp in the east every morning, and year by year

the vernal earth decks herself afresh with a rich mantle of green.

Hence the practical savage, with his conservative instincts, might

well turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical doubter,

the philosophic radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and

spring might not, after all, be direct consequences of the punctual

performance of certain daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun

might perhaps continue to rise and trees to blossom though the

ceremonies were occasionally intermitted, or even discontinued

altogether. These sceptical doubts would naturally be repelled by

the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries subversive of

the faith and manifestly contradicted by experience. "Can anything

be plainer," he might say, "than that I light my twopenny candle on

earth and that the sun then kindles his great fire in heaven? I

should be glad to know whether, when I have put on my green robe in

spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same? These are facts

patent to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain

practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and

choppers of logic. Theories and speculation and all that may be very

well in their way, and I have not the least objection to your

indulging in them, provided, of course, you do not put them in

practice. But give me leave to stick to facts; then I know where I

am." The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious to us, because it

happens to deal with facts about which we have long made up our

minds. But let an argument of precisely the same calibre be applied

to matters which are still under debate, and it may be questioned

whether a British audience would not applaud it as sound, and esteem

the speaker who used it a safe man--not brilliant or showy, perhaps,

but thoroughly sensible and hard-headed. If such reasonings could

pass muster among ourselves, need we wonder that they long escaped

detection by the savage?

V. The Magical Control of the Weather

1. The Public Magician

THE READER may remember that we were led to plunge into the

labyrinth of magic by a consideration of two different types of

man-god. This is the clue which has guided our devious steps through

the maze, and brought us out at last on higher ground, whence,

resting a little by the way, we can look back over the path we have

already traversed and forward to the longer and steeper road we have

still to climb.

As a result of the foregoing discussion, the two types of human gods

may conveniently be distinguished as the religious and the magical

man-god respectively. In the former, a being of an order different

from and superior to man is supposed to become incarnate, for a

longer or a shorter time, in a human body, manifesting his

super-human power and knowledge by miracles wrought and prophecies

uttered through the medium of the fleshly tabernacle in which he has

deigned to take up his abode. This may also appropriately be called

the inspired or incarnate type of man-god. In it the human body is

merely a frail earthly vessel filled with a divine and immortal

spirit. On the other hand, a man-god of the magical sort is nothing

but a man who possesses in an unusually high degree powers which

most of his fellows arrogate to themselves on a smaller scale; for

in rude society there is hardly a person who does not dabble in

magic. Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or inspired type

derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped to hide his

heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mould, a man-god of

the latter type draws his extraordinary power from a certain

physical sympathy with nature. He is not merely the receptacle of a

divine spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is so delicately

attuned to the harmony of the world that a touch of his hand or a

turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through the universal

framework of things; and conversely his divine organism is acutely

sensitive to such slight changes of environment as would leave

ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the line between these two

types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it in theory, is

seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows

I shall not insist on it.

We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for the

benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and that

according as it is directed to one or other of these two objects it

may be called private or public magic. Further, I pointed out that

the public magician occupies a position of great influence, from

which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may advance step by step

to the rank of a chief or king. Thus an examination of public magic

conduces to an understanding of the early kingship, since in savage

and barbarous society many chiefs and kings appear to owe their

authority in great measure to their reputation as magicians.

Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed to

secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food. The

examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of

food--the hunter, the fisher, the farmer--all resort to magical

practices in the pursuit of their various callings; but they do so

as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and their

families, rather than as public functionaries acting in the interest

of the whole people. It is otherwise when the rites are performed,

not by the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves, but by

professional magicians on their behalf. In primitive society, where

uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the

community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every

man is more or less his own magician; he practises charms and

incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies. But a

great step in advance has been taken when a special class of

magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men

have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole

community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the

healing of diseases, the forecasting of the future, the regulation

of the weather, or any other object of general utility. The

impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to

accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense

importance of the institution itself. Here is a body of men

relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need

of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay,

expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret

ways of nature. It was at once their duty and their interest to know

more than their fellows, to acquaint themselves with everything that

could aid man in his arduous struggle with nature, everything that

could mitigate his sufferings and prolong his life. The properties

of drugs and minerals, the causes of rain and drought, of thunder

and lightning, the changes of the seasons, the phases of the moon,

the daily and yearly journeys of the sun, the motions of the stars,

the mystery of life, and the mystery of death, all these things must

have excited the wonder of these early philosophers, and stimulated

them to find solutions of problems that were doubtless often thrust

on their attention in the most practical form by the importunate

demands of their clients, who expected them not merely to understand

but to regulate the great processes of nature for the good of man.

That their first shots fell very far wide of the mark could hardly

be helped. The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in

perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at

the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views

of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear

to us manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were

legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test of

experience. Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who

devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately adhered

to them after better had been propounded. Certainly no men ever had

stronger incentives in the pursuit of truth than these savage

sorcerers. To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely

necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their life.

This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of

concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the most

powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since,

if you would appear to know anything, by far the best way is

actually to know it. Thus, however justly we may reject the

extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions

which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of

this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of

incalculable good to humanity. They were the direct predecessors,

not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators

and discoverers in every branch of natural science. They began the

work which has since been carried to such glorious and beneficent

issues by their successors in after ages; and if the beginning was

poor and feeble, this is to be imputed to the inevitable

difficulties which beset the path of knowledge rather than to the

natural incapacity or wilful fraud of the men themselves.

2. The Magical Control of Rain

OF THE THINGS which the public magician sets himself to do for the

good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the weather and

especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain. Water is an essential

of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends upon

showers. Without rain vegetation withers, animals and men languish

and die. Hence in savage communities the rain-maker is a very

important personage; and often a special class of magicians exists

for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water-supply. The methods

by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are

commonly, though not always, based on the principle of homoeopathic

or imitative magic. If they wish to make rain they simulate it by

sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their object is to stop

rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and

fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture. Such

attempts are by no means confined, as the cultivated reader might

imagine, to the naked inhabitants of those sultry lands like Central

Australia and some parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, where often

for months together the pitiless sun beats down out of a blue and

cloudless sky on the parched and gaping earth. They are, or used to

be, common enough among outwardly civilised folk in the moister

climate of Europe. I will now illustrate them by instances drawn

from the practice both of public and private magic.

Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain

was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of an old

sacred grove. One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small

cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two fire-brands together

and made the sparks fly, to imitate lightning; and the third, who

was called "the rain-maker," had a bunch of twigs with which he

sprinkled water from a vessel on all sides. To put an end to drought

and bring down rain, women and girls of the village of Ploska are

wont to go naked by night to the boundaries of the village and there

pour water on the ground. In Halmahera, or Gilolo, a large island to

the west of New Guinea, a wizard makes rain by dipping a branch of a

particular kind of tree in water and then scattering the moisture

from the dripping bough over the ground. In New Britain the

rain-maker wraps some leaves of a red and green striped creeper in a

banana-leaf, moistens the bundle with water, and buries it in the

ground; then he imitates with his mouth the plashing of rain.

Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America, when the corn is

withering for want of rain, the members of the sacred Buffalo

Society fill a large vessel with water and dance four times round

it. One of them drinks some of the water and spirts it into the air,

making a fine spray in imitation of a mist or drizzling rain. Then

he upsets the vessel, spilling the water on the ground; whereupon

the dancers fall down and drink up the water, getting mud all over

their faces. Lastly, they squirt the water into the air, making a

fine mist. This saves the corn. In spring-time the Natchez of North

America used to club together to purchase favourable weather for

their crops from the wizards. If rain was needed, the wizards fasted

and danced with pipes full of water in their mouths. The pipes were

perforated like the nozzle of a watering-can, and through the holes

the rain-maker blew the water towards that part of the sky where the

clouds hung heaviest. But if fine weather was wanted, he mounted the

roof of his hut, and with extended arms, blowing with all his might,

he beckoned to the clouds to pass by. When the rains do not come in

due season the people of Central Angoniland repair to what is called

the rain-temple. Here they clear away the grass, and the leader

pours beer into a pot which is buried in the ground, while he says,

"Master _Chauta,_ you have hardened your heart towards us, what

would you have us do? We must perish indeed. Give your children the

rains, there is the beer we have given you." Then they all partake

of the beer that is left over, even the children being made to sip

it. Next they take branches of trees and dance and sing for rain.

When they return to the village they find a vessel of water set at

the doorway by an old woman; so they dip their branches in it and

wave them aloft, so as to scatter the drops. After that the rain is

sure to come driving up in heavy clouds. In these practices we see a

combination of religion with magic; for while the scattering of the

water-drops by means of branches is a purely magical ceremony, the

prayer for rain and the offering of beer are purely religious rites.

In the Mara tribe of Northern Australia the rain-maker goes to a

pool and sings over it his magic song. Then he takes some of the

water in his hands, drinks it, and spits it out in various

directions. After that he throws water all over himself, scatters it

about, and returns quietly to the camp. Rain is supposed to follow.

The Arab historian Makrizi describes a method of stopping rain which

is said to have been resorted to by a tribe of nomads called Alqamar

in Hadramaut. They cut a branch from a certain tree in the desert,

set it on fire, and then sprinkled the burning brand with water.

After that the vehemence of the rain abated, just as the water

vanished when it fell on the glowing brand. Some of the Eastern

Angamis of Manipur are said to perform a some-what similar ceremony

for the opposite purpose, in order, namely, to produce rain. The

head of the village puts a burning brand on the grave of a man who

has died of burns, and quenches the brand with water, while he prays

that rain may fall. Here the putting out the fire with water, which

is an imitation of rain, is reinforced by the influence of the dead

man, who, having been burnt to death, will naturally be anxious for

the descent of rain to cool his scorched body and assuage his pangs.

Other people besides the Arabs have used fire as a means of stopping

rain. Thus the Sulka of New Britain heat stones red hot in the fire

and then put them out in the rain, or they throw hot ashes in the

air. They think that the rain will soon cease to fall, for it does

not like to be burned by the hot stones or ashes. The Telugus send a

little girl out naked into the rain with a burning piece of wood in

her hand, which she has to show to the rain. That is supposed to

stop the downpour. At Port Stevens in New South Wales the

medicine-men used to drive away rain by throwing fire-sticks into

the air, while at the same time they puffed and shouted. Any man of

the Anula tribe in Northern Australia can stop rain by simply

warming a green stick in the fire, and then striking it against the

wind.

In time of severe drought the Dieri of Central Australia, loudly

lamenting the impoverished state of the country and their own

half-starved condition, call upon the spirits of their remote

predecessors, whom they call Mura-muras, to grant them power to make

a heavy rain-fall. For they believe that the clouds are bodies in

which rain is generated by their own ceremonies or those of

neighbouring tribes, through the influence of the Mura-muras. The

way in which they set about drawing rain from the clouds is this. A

hole is dug about twelve feet long and eight or ten broad, and over

this hole a conical hut of logs and branches is made. Two wizards,

supposed to have received a special inspiration from the Mura-muras,

are bled by an old and influential man with a sharp flint; and the

blood, drawn from their arms below the elbow, is made to flow on the

other men of the tribe, who sit huddled together in the hut. At the

same time the two bleeding men throw handfuls of down about, some of

which adheres to the blood-stained bodies of their comrades, while

the rest floats in the air. The blood is thought to represent the

rain, and the down the clouds. During the ceremony two large stones

are placed in the middle of the hut; they stand for gathering clouds

and presage rain. Then the wizards who were bled carry away the two

stones for about ten or fifteen miles, and place them as high as

they can in the tallest tree. Meanwhile the other men gather gypsum,

pound it fine, and throw it into a water-hole. This the Mura-muras

see, and at once they cause clouds to appear in the sky. Lastly, the

men, young and old, surround the hut, and, stooping down, butt at it

with their heads, like so many rams. Thus they force their way

through it and reappear on the other side, repeating the process

till the hut is wrecked. In doing this they are forbidden to use

their hands or arms; but when the heavy logs alone remain, they are

allowed to pull them out with their hands. "The piercing of the hut

with their heads symbolises the piercing of the clouds; the fall of

the hut, the fall of the rain." Obviously, too, the act of placing

high up in trees the two stones, which stand for clouds, is a way of

making the real clouds to mount up in the sky. The Dieri also

imagine that the foreskins taken from lads at circumcision have a

great power of producing rain. Hence the Great Council of the tribe

always keeps a small stock of foreskins ready for use. They are

carefully concealed, being wrapt up in feathers with the fat of the

wild dog and of the carpet snake. A woman may not see such a parcel

opened on any account. When the ceremony is over, the foreskin is

buried, its virtue being exhausted. After the rains have fallen,

some of the tribe always undergo a surgical operation, which

consists in cutting the skin of their chest and arms with a sharp

flint. The wound is then tapped with a flat stick to increase the

flow of blood, and red ochre is rubbed into it. Raised scars are

thus produced. The reason alleged by the natives for this practice

is that they are pleased with the rain, and that there is a

connexion between the rain and the scars. Apparently the operation

is not very painful, for the patient laughs and jokes while it is

going on. Indeed, little children have been seen to crowd round the

operator and patiently take their turn; then after being operated

on, they ran away, expanding their little chests and singing for the

rain to beat upon them. However, they were not so well pleased next

day, when they felt their wounds stiff and sore. In Java, when rain

is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods

till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming blood

represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the

ground. The people of Egghiou, a district of Abyssinia, used to

engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other, village against

village, for a week together every January for the purpose of

procuring rain. Some years ago the emperor Menelik forbade the

custom. However, the following year the rain was deficient, and the

popular outcry so great that the emperor yielded to it, and allowed

the murderous fights to be resumed, but for two days a year only.

The writer who mentions the custom regards the blood shed on these

occasions as a propitiatory sacrifice offered to spirits who control

the showers; but perhaps, as in the Australian and Javanese

ceremonies, it is an imitation of rain. The prophets of Baal, who

sought to procure rain by cutting themselves with knives till the

blood gushed out, may have acted on the same principle.

There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical

powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather. This

curious superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of

British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular

restrictions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact

meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure. Thus the

Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control the

weather; therefore they pray to wind and rain, "Calm down, breath of

the twins." Further, they think that the wishes of twins are always

fulfilled; hence twins are feared, because they can harm the man

they hate. They can also call the salmon and the olachen or

candle-fish, and so they are known by a name which means "making

plentiful." In the opinion of the Kwakiutl Indians of British

Columbia twins are transformed salmon; hence they may not go near

water, lest they should be changed back again into the fish. In

their childhood they can summon any wind by motions of their hands,

and they can make fair or foul weather, and also cure diseases by

swinging a large wooden rattle. The Nootka Indians of British

Columbia also believe that twins are somehow related to salmon.

Hence among them twins may not catch salmon, and they may not eat or

even handle the fresh fish. They can make fair or foul weather, and

can cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then

washing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark

clouds. The Shuswap Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate

twins with the grizzly bear, for they call them "young grizzly

bears." According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with

supernatural powers. In particular they can make good or bad

weather. They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the

air; they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood

attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down

on the ends of spruce branches.

The same power of influencing the weather is attributed to twins by

the Baronga, a tribe of Bantu negroes who, inhabit the shores of

Delagoa Bay in South-eastern Africa. They bestow the name of

_Tilo_--that is, the sky--on a woman who has given birth to twins,

and the infants themselves are called the children of the sky. Now

when the storms which generally burst in the months of September and

October have been looked for in vain, when a drought with its

prospect of famine is threatening, and all nature, scorched and

burnt up by a sun that has shone for six months from a cloudless

sky, is panting for the beneficent showers of the South African

spring, the women perform ceremonies to bring down the longed-for

rain on the parched earth. Stripping themselves of all their

garments, they assume in their stead girdles and head-dresses of

grass, or short petticoats made of the leaves of a particular sort

of creeper. Thus attired, uttering peculiar cries and singing ribald

songs, they go about from well to well, cleansing them of the mud

and impurities which have accumulated in them. The wells, it may be

said, are merely holes in the sand where a little turbid unwholesome

water stagnates. Further, the women must repair to the house of one

of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drench her

with water, which they carry in little pitchers. Having done so they

go on their way, shrieking out their loose songs and dancing

immodest dances. No man may see these leaf-clad women going their

rounds. If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him aside. When

they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the

graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It often happens,

too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the

graves of twins. For they think that the grave of a twin ought

always to be moist, for which reason twins are regularly buried near

a lake. If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive, they

will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on

the side of a hill. "No wonder," says the wizard in such a case,

"that the sky is fiery. Take up his body and dig him a grave on the

shore of the lake." His orders are at once obeyed, for this is

supposed to be the only means of bringing down the rain.

Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation which

Professor Oldenberg has given of the rules to be observed by a

Brahman who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian

collection known as the Samaveda. The hymn, which bears the name of

the Sakvari¯ song, was believed to embody the might of Indra's

weapon, the thunderbolt; and hence, on account of the dreadful and

dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the bold student

who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his fellow-men, and

to retire from the village into the forest. Here for a space of

time, which might vary, according to different doctors of the law,

from one to twelve years, he had to observe certain rules of life,

among which were the following. Thrice a day he had to touch water;

he must wear black garments and eat black food; when it rained, he

might not seek the shelter of a roof, but had to sit in the rain and

say, "Water is the Sakvari¯ song"; when the lightning flashed, he

said, "That is like the Sakvari¯ song"; when the thunder pealed, he

said, "The Great One is making a great noise." He might never cross

a running stream without touching water; he might never set foot on

a ship unless his life were in danger, and even then he must be sure

to touch water when he went on board; "for in water," so ran the

saying, "lies the virtue of the Sakvari¯ song." When at last he was

allowed to learn the song itself, he had to dip his hands in a

vessel of water in which plants of all sorts had been placed. If a

man walked in the way of all these precepts, the rain-god Parjanya,

it was said, would send rain at the wish of that man. It is clear,

as Professor Oldenberg well points out, that "all these rules are

intended to bring the Brahman into union with water, to make him, as

it were, an ally of the water powers, and to guard him against their

hostility. The black garments and the black food have the same

significance; no one will doubt that they refer to the rain-clouds

when he remembers that a black victim is sacrificed to procure rain;

'it is black, for such is the nature of rain.' In respect of another

rain-charm it is said plainly, 'He puts on a black garment edged

with black, for such is the nature of rain.' We may therefore assume

that here in the circle of ideas and ordinances of the Vedic schools

there have been preserved magical practices of the most remote

antiquity, which were intended to prepare the rain-maker for his

office and dedicate him to it."

It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is

desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather-doctor to observe

precisely opposite rules of conduct. In the tropical island of Java,

where the rich vegetation attests the abundance of the rainfall,

ceremonies for the making of rain are rare, but ceremonies for the

prevention of it are not uncommon. When a man is about to give a

great feast in the rainy season and has invited many people, he goes

to a weather-doctor and asks him to "prop up the clouds that may be

lowering." If the doctor consents to exert his professional powers,

he begins to regulate his behaviour by certain rules as soon as his

customer has departed. He must observe a fast, and may neither drink

nor bathe; what little he eats must be eaten dry, and in no case may

he touch water. The host, on his side, and his servants, both male

and female, must neither wash clothes nor bathe so long as the feast

lasts, and they have all during its continuance to observe strict

chastity. The doctor seats himself on a new mat in his bedroom, and

before a small oil-lamp he murmurs, shortly before the feast takes

place, the following prayer or incantation: "Grandfather and

Grandmother Sroekoel" (the name seems to be taken at random; others

are sometimes used), "return to your country. Akkemat is your

country. Put down your water-cask, close it properly, that not a

drop may fall out." While he utters this prayer the sorcerer looks

upwards, burning incense the while. So among the Toradjas the

rain-doctor, whose special business it is to drive away rain, takes

care not to touch water before, during, or after the discharge of

his professional duties. He does not bathe, he eats with unwashed

hands, he drinks nothing but palm wine, and if he has to cross a

stream he is careful not to step in the water. Having thus prepared

himself for his task he has a small hut built for himself outside of

the village in a rice-field, and in this hut he keeps up a little

fire, which on no account may be suffered to go out. In the fire he

burns various kinds of wood, which are supposed to possess the

property of driving off rain; and he puffs in the direction from

which the rain threatens to come, holding in his hand a packet of

leaves and bark which derive a similar cloud-compelling virtue, not

from their chemical composition, but from their names, which happen

to signify something dry or volatile. If clouds should appear in the

sky while he is at work, he takes lime in the hollow of his hand and

blows it towards them. The lime, being so very dry, is obviously

well adapted to disperse the damp clouds. Should rain afterwards be

wanted, he has only to pour water on his fire, and immediately the

rain will descend in sheets.

The reader will observe how exactly the Javanese and Toradja

observances, which are intended to prevent rain, form the antithesis

of the Indian observances, which aim at producing it. The Indian

sage is commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly as well as

on various special occasions; the Javanese and Toradja wizards may

not touch it at all. The Indian lives out in the forest, and even

when it rains he may not take shelter; the Javanese and the Toradja

sit in a house or a hut. The one signifies his sympathy with water

by receiving the rain on his person and speaking of it respectfully;

the others light a lamp or a fire and do their best to drive the

rain away. Yet the principle on which all three act is the same;

each of them, by a sort of childish make-believe, identifies himself

with the phenomenon which he desires to produce. It is the old

fallacy that the effect resembles its cause: if you would make wet

weather, you must be wet; if you would make dry weather, you must be

dry.

In South-eastern Europe at the present day ceremonies are

observed for the purpose of making rain which not only rest on the

same general train of thought as the preceding, but even in their

details resemble the ceremonies practised with the same intention

by the Baronga of Delagoa Bay. Among the Greeks of Thessaly and

Macedonia, when a drought has lasted a long time, it is customary

to send a procession of children round to all the wells and springs

of the neighbourhood. At the head of the procession walks a girl

adorned with flowers, whom her companions drench with water at

every halting-place, while they sing an invocation, of which the

following is part:

"Perperia all fresh bedewed,

Freshen all the neighbourhood;

By the woods, on the highway,

As thou goest, to God now pray:

O my God, upon the plain,

Send thou us a still, small rain;

That the fields may fruitful be,

And vines in blossom we may see;

That the grain be full and sound,

And wealthy grow the folks around."

In time of drought the Serbians strip a girl to her skin and clothe

her from head to foot in grass, herbs, and flowers, even her face

being hidden behind a veil of living green. Thus disguised she is

called the Dodola, and goes through the village with a troop of

girls. They stop before every house; the Dodola keeps turning

herself round and dancing, while the other girls form a ring about

her singing one of the Dodola songs, and the housewife pours a pail

of water over her. One of the songs they sing runs thus:

"We go through the village;

The clouds go in the sky;

We go faster,

Faster go the clouds;

They have overtaken us,

And wetted the corn and the vine."

At Poona in India, when rain is needed, the boys dress up one of

their number in nothing but leaves and call him King of Rain. Then

they go round to every house in the village, where the house-holder

or his wife sprinkles the Rain King with water, and gives the party

food of various kinds. When they have thus visited all the houses,

they strip the Rain King of his leafy robes and feast upon what they

have gathered.

Bathing is practised as a rain-charm in some parts of Southern and

Western Russia. Sometimes after service in church the priest in his

robes has been thrown down on the ground and drenched with water by

his parishioners. Sometimes it is the women who, without stripping

off their clothes, bathe in crowds on the day of St. John the

Baptist, while they dip in the water a figure made of branches,

grass, and herbs, which is supposed to represent the saint. In

Kursk, a province of Southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the

women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river, or

souse him from head to foot. Later on we shall see that a passing

stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some

natural power. It is recorded in official documents that during a

drought in 1790 the peasants of Scheroutz and Werboutz collected all

the women and compelled them to bathe, in order that rain might

fall. An Armenian rain-charm is to throw the wife of a priest into

the water and drench her. The Arabs of North Africa fling a holy

man, willy-nilly, into a spring as a remedy for drought. In

Minahassa, a province of North Celebes, the priest bathes as a

rain-charm. In Central Celebes when there has been no rain for a

long time and the rice-stalks begin to shrivel up, many of the

villagers, especially the young folk, go to a neighbouring brook and

splash each other with water, shouting noisily, or squirt water on

one another through bamboo tubes. Sometimes they imitate the plump

of rain by smacking the surface of the water with their hands, or by

placing an inverted gourd on it and drumming on the gourd with their

fingers.

Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by ploughing,

or pretending to plough. Thus the Pshaws and Chewsurs of the

Caucasus have a ceremony called "ploughing the rain," which they

observe in time of drought. Girls yoke themselves to a plough and

drag it into a river, wading in the water up to their girdles. In

the same circumstances Armenian girls and women do the same. The

oldest woman, or the priest's wife, wears the priest's dress, while

the others, dressed as men, drag the plough through the water

against the stream. In the Caucasian province of Georgia, when a

drought has lasted long, marriageable girls are yoked in couples

with an ox-yoke on their shoulders, a priest holds the reins, and

thus harnessed they wade through rivers, puddles, and marshes,

praying, screaming, weeping, and laughing. In a district of

Transylvania when the ground is parched with drought, some girls

strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also

naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the fields to a

brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow and

keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then

they leave the harrow in the water and go home. A similar rain-charm

is resorted to in some parts of India; naked women drag a plough

across a field by night, while the men keep carefully out of the

way, for their presence would break the spell.

Sometimes the rain-charm operates through the dead. Thus in New

Caledonia the rain-makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a

dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the

skeleton over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton

to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the

deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and showered it

down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not

long since the peasants of any district that chanced to be afflicted

with drought used to dig up the corpse of some one who had drunk

himself to death and sink it in the nearest swamp or lake, fully

persuaded that this would ensure the fall of the needed rain. In

1868 the prospect of a bad harvest, caused by a prolonged drought,

induced the inhabitants of a village in the Tarashchansk district to

dig up the body of a Raskolnik, or Dissenter, who had died in the

preceding December. Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was

left of it, about the head, exclaiming, "Give us rain!" while others

poured water on it through a sieve. Here the pouring of water

through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and reminds

us of the manner in which Strepsiades in Aristophanes imagined that

rain was made by Zeus. Sometimes, in order to procure rain, the

Toradjas make an appeal to the pity of the dead. Thus, in the

village of Kalingooa, there is the grave of a famous chief, the

grandfather of the present ruler. When the land suffers from

unseasonable drought, the people go to this grave, pour water on it,

and say, "O grandfather, have pity on us; if it is your will that

this year we should eat, then give rain." After that they hang a

bamboo full of water over the grave; there is a small hole in the

lower end of the bamboo, so that the water drips from it

continually. The bamboo is always refilled with water until rain

drenches the ground. Here, as in New Caledonia, we find religion

blent with magic, for the prayer to the dead chief, which is purely

religious, is eked out with a magical imitation of rain at his

grave. We have seen that the Baronga of Delagoa Bay drench the tombs

of their ancestors, especially the tombs of twins, as a raincharm.

Among some of the Indian tribes in the region of the Orinoco it was

customary for the relations of a deceased person to disinter his

bones a year after burial, burn them, and scatter the ashes to the

winds, because they believed that the ashes were changed into rain,

which the dead man sent in return for his obsequies. The Chinese are

convinced that when human bodies remain unburied, the souls of their

late owners feel the discomfort of rain, just as living men would do

if they were exposed without shelter to the inclemency of the

weather. These wretched souls, therefore, do all in their power to

prevent the rain from falling, and often their efforts are only too

successful. Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities

in China, because bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in its

train. Hence it has been a common practice of the Chinese

authorities in time of drought to inter the dry bones of the

unburied dead for the purpose of putting an end to the scourge and

conjuring down the rain.

Animals, again, often play an important part in these

weather-charms. The Anula tribe of Northern Australia associate the

dollar-bird with rain, and call it the rain-bird. A man who has the

bird for his totem can make rain at a certain pool. He catches a

snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water

for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of

the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in

imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After that

all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow; sooner

or later the rain will fall. They explain this procedure by saying

that long ago the dollar-bird had as a mate at this spot a snake,

who lived in the pool and used to make rain by spitting up into the

sky till a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell. A common way

of making rain in many parts of Java is to bathe a cat or two cats,

a male and a female; sometimes the animals are carried in procession

with music. Even in Batavia you may from time to time see children

going about with a cat for this purpose; when they have ducked it in

a pool, they let it go.

Among the Wambugwe of East Africa, when the sorcerer desires to make

rain, he takes a black sheep and a black calf in bright sunshine,

and has them placed on the roof of the common hut in which the

people live together. Then he slits the stomachs of the animals and

scatters their contents in all directions. After that he pours water

and medicine into a vessel; if the charm has succeeded, the water

boils up and rain follows. On the other hand, if the sorcerer wishes

to prevent rain from falling, he withdraws into the interior of the

hut, and there heats a rock-crystal in a calabash. In order to

procure rain the Wagogo sacrifice black fowls, black sheep, and

black cattle at the graves of dead ancestors, and the rain-maker

wears black clothes during the rainy season. Among the Matabele the

rain-charm employed by sorcerers was made from the blood and gall of

a black ox. In a district of Sumatra, in order to procure rain, all

the women of the village, scantily clad, go to the river, wade into

it, and splash each other with the water. A black cat is thrown into

the stream and made to swim about for a while, then allowed to

escape to the bank, pursued by the splashing of the women. The Garos

of Assam offer a black goat on the top of a very high mountain in

time of drought. In all these cases the colour of the animal is part

of the charm; being black, it will darken the sky with rain-clouds.

So the Bechuanas burn the stomach of an ox at evening, because they

say, "The black smoke will gather the clouds and cause the rain to

come." The Timorese sacrifice a black pig to the Earth-goddess for

rain, a white or red one to the Sun-god for sunshine. The Angoni

sacrifice a black ox for rain and a white one for fine weather.

Among the high mountains of Japan there is a district in which, if

rain has not fallen for a long time, a party of villagers goes in

procession to the bed of a mountain torrent, headed by a priest, who

leads a black dog. At the chosen spot they tether the beast to a

stone, and make it a target for their bullets and arrows. When its

life-blood bespatters the rocks, the peasants throw down their

weapons and lift up their voices in supplication to the dragon

divinity of the stream, exhorting him to send down forthwith a

shower to cleanse the spot from its defilement. Custom has

prescribed that on these occasions the colour of the victim shall be

black, as an emblem of the wished-for rain-clouds. But if fine

weather is wanted, the victim must be white, without a spot.

The intimate association of frogs and toads with water has earned

for these creatures a widespread reputation as custodians of rain;

and hence they often play a part in charms designed to draw needed

showers from the sky. Some of the Indians of the Orinoco held the

toad to be the god or lord of the waters, and for that reason feared

to kill the creature. They have been known to keep frogs under a pot

and to beat them with rods when there was a drought. It is said that

the Aymara Indians often make little images of frogs and other

aquatic animals and place them on the tops of the hills as a means

of bringing down rain. The Thompson Indians of British Columbia and

some people in Europe think that to kill a frog will cause rain to

fall. In order to procure rain people of low caste in the Central

Provinces of India will tie a frog to a rod covered with green

leaves and branches of the _nîm_ tree (_Azadirachta Indica_) and

carry it from door to door singing:

"Send soon, O frog, the jewel of water!

And ripen the wheat and millet in the field."