The principal key to the understanding of Occult Science is to consider

it as based on the Association of Ideas, a faculty which lies at the

very foundation of human reason, but in no small degree of human

unreason also. Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, having come

to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be

connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to

conclude that association in thought must involve similar connexion in

reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events

by means of processes which we can now see to have only an ideal

significance. By a vast mass of evidence from savage, barbaric, and

civilized life, magic arts which have resulted from thus mistaking an

ideal for a real connexion, may be clearly traced from the lower culture

which they are of, to the higher culture which they are in.[170] Such

are the practices whereby a distant person is to be affected by acting

on something closely associated with him—his property, clothes he has

worn, and above all cuttings of his hair and nails. Not only do savages

high and low like the Australians and Polynesians, and barbarians like

the nations of Guinea, live in deadly terror of this spiteful craft—not

only have the Parsis their sacred ritual prescribed for burying their

cut hair and nails, lest demons and sorcerers should do mischief with

them, but the fear of leaving such clippings and parings about lest

their former owner should be harmed through them, has by no means died

out of European folk-lore, and the German peasant, during the days

between his child’s birth and baptism, objects to lend anything out of

the house, lest witchcraft should be worked through it on the yet

unconsecrated baby.[171] As the negro fetish-man, when his patient does

not come in person, can divine by means of his dirty cloth or cap

instead,[172] so the modern clairvoyant professes to feel

sympathetically the sensations of a distant person, if communication be

made through a lock of his hair or any object that has been in contact

with him.[173] The simple idea of joining two objects with a cord,

taking for granted that this communication will establish connexion or

carry influence, has been worked out in various ways in the world. In

Australia, the native doctor fastens one end of a string to the ailing

part of the patient’s body, and by sucking at the other end pretends to

draw out blood for his relief.[174] In Orissa, the Jeypore witch lets

down a ball of thread through her enemy’s roof to reach his body, that

by putting the other end in her own mouth she may suck his blood.[175]

When a reindeer is sacrificed at a sick Ostyak’s tent door, the patient

holds in his hand a cord attached to the victim offered for his

benefit.[176] Greek history shows a similar idea, when the citizens of

Ephesus carried a rope seven furlongs from their walls to the temple of

Artemis, thus to place themselves under her safeguard against the attack

of Crœsus; and in the yet more striking story of the Kylonians, who tied

a cord to the statue of the goddess when they quitted the asylum, and

clung to it for protection as they crossed unhallowed ground; but by

ill-fate the cord of safety broke and they were mercilessly put to

death.[177] And in our own day, Buddhist priests in solemn ceremony put

themselves in communication with a sacred relic, by each taking hold of

a long thread fastened near it and around the temple.[178]

Magical arts in which the connexion is that of mere analogy or symbolism

are endlessly numerous throughout the course of civilization. Their

common theory may be readily made out from a few typical cases, and

thence applied confidently to the general mass. The Australian will

observe the track of an insect near a grave, to ascertain the direction

where the sorcerer is to be found, by whose craft the man died.[179] The

Zulu may be seen chewing a bit of wood, in order, by this symbolic act,

to soften the heart of the man he wants to buy oxen from, or of the

woman he wants for a wife.[180] The Obi-man of West Africa makes his

packet of grave-dust, blood, and bones, that this suggestive

representation of death may bring his enemy to the grave.[181] The Khond

sets up the iron arrow of the War-god in a basket of rice, and judges

from its standing upright that war must be kept up also, or from its

falling that the quarrel may be let fall too; and when he tortures human

victims sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, he rejoices to see them shed

plentiful tears, which betoken copious showers to fall upon his

land.[182] These are fair examples of the symbolic magic of the lower

races, and they are fully rivalled in superstitions which still hold

their ground in Europe. With quaint simplicity, the German cottager

declares that if a dog howls looking downward, it portends a death; but

if upward, then a recovery from sickness.[183] Locks must be opened and

bolts drawn in a dying man’s house, that his soul may not be held

fast.[184] The Hessian lad thinks that he may escape the conscription by

carrying a baby-girl’s cap in his pocket—a symbolic way of repudiating

manhood.[185] Modern Servians, dancing and singing, lead about a little

girl dressed in leaves and flowers, and pour bowls of water over her to

make the rain come.[186] Sailors becalmed will sometimes whistle for a

wind; but in other weather they hate whistling at sea, which raises a

whistling gale.[187] Fish, says the Cornishman, should be eaten from the

tail towards the head, to bring the other fishes’ heads towards the

shore, for eating them the wrong way turns them from the coast.[188] He

who has cut himself should rub the knife with fat, and as it dries, the

wound will heal; this is a lingering survival from days when recipes for

sympathetic ointment were to be found in the Pharmacopœia.[189] Fanciful

as these notions are, it should be borne in mind that they come fairly

under definite mental law, depending as they do on a principle of ideal

association, of which we can quite understand the mental action, though

we deny its practical results. The clever Lord Chesterfield, too clever

to understand folly, may again be cited to prove this. He relates in one

of his letters that the king had been ill, and that people generally

expected the illness to be fatal, because the oldest lion in the Tower,

about the king’s age, had just died. ‘So wild and capricious is the

human mind,’ he exclaims, by way of comment. But indeed the thought was

neither wild nor capricious, it was simply such an argument from analogy

as the educated world has at length painfully learnt to be worthless;

but which, it is not too much to declare, would to this day carry

considerable weight to the minds of four-fifths of the human race.

A glance at those magical arts which have been systematized into

pseudo-sciences, shows the same underlying principle. The art of taking

omens from seeing and meeting animals, which includes augury, is

familiar to such savages as the Tupis of Brazil[190] and the Dayaks of

Borneo,[191] and extends upward through classic civilization. The Maoris

may give a sample of the character of its rules: they hold it unlucky if

an owl hoots during a consultation, but a council of war is encouraged

by prospect of victory when a hawk flies overhead; a flight of birds to

the right of the war-sacrifice is propitious if the villages of the

tribe are in that quarter, but if the omen is in the enemy’s direction

the war will be given up.[192] Compare these with the Tatar rules, and

it is obvious that similar thoughts lie at the source of both. Here a

certain little owl’s cry is a sound of terror, although there is a white

owl which is lucky; but of all birds the white falcon is most prophetic,

and the Kalmuk bows his thanks for the good omen when one flies by on

the right, but seeing one on the left turns away his face and expects

calamity.[193] So to the negro of Old Calabar, the cry of the great

kingfisher bodes good or evil, according as it is heard on the right or

left.[194] Here we have the obvious symbolism of the right and left

hand, the foreboding of ill from the owl’s doleful note, and the

suggestion of victory from the fierce swooping hawk, a thought which in

old Europe made the bird of prey the warrior’s omen of conquest. Meaning

of the same kind appears in the ‘Angang,’ the omens taken from meeting

animals and people, especially on first going out in the morning, as

when the ancient Slaves held meeting a sick man or an old woman to bode

ill-luck. Any one who takes the trouble to go into this subject in

detail, and to study the classic, mediæval, and oriental codes of rules,

will find that the principle of direct symbolism still accounts for a

fair proportion of them, though the rest may have lost their early

significance, or may have been originally due to some other reason, or

may have been arbitrarily invented (as a considerable proportion of such

devices must necessarily be) to fill up the gaps in the system. It is

still plain to us why the omen of the crow should be different on the

right or left hand, why a vulture should mean rapacity, a stork concord,

a pelican piety, an ass labour, why the fierce conquering wolf should be

a good omen, and the timid hare a bad one, why bees, types of an

obedient nation, should be lucky to a king, while flies, returning

however often they are driven off, should be signs of importunity and

impudence.[195] And as to the general principle that animals are ominous

to those who meet them, the German peasant who says a flock of sheep is

lucky but a herd of swine unlucky to meet, and the Cornish miner who

turns away in horror when he meets an old woman or a rabbit on his way

to the pit’s mouth, are to this day keeping up relics of early savagery

as genuine as any flint implement dug out of a tumulus.

The doctrine of dreams, attributed as they are by the lower and

middle races to spiritual intercourse, belongs in so far rather to

religion than to magic. But oneiromancy, the art of taking omens

from dreams by analogical interpretation, has its place here. Of the

leading principle of such mystical explanation, no better types

could be chosen than the details and interpretations of Joseph’s

dreams (Genesis xxxvii., xl., xli.), of the sheaves and the sun and

moon and eleven stars, of the vine and the basket of meats, of the

lean and fat kine, and the thin and full corn-ears. Oneiromancy,

thus symbolically interpreting the things seen in dreams, is not

unknown to the lower races. A whole Australian tribe has been known

to decamp because one of them dreamt of a certain kind of owl, which

dream the wise men declared to forebode an attack from a certain

other tribe.[196] The Kamchadals, whose minds ran much on dreams,

had special interpretations of some; thus to dream of lice or dogs

betokened a visit of Russian travellers, &c.[197] The Zulus,

experience having taught them the fallacy of expecting direct

fulfilment of dreams, have in some cases tried to mend matters by

rushing to the other extreme. If they dream of a sick man that he is

dead, and they see the earth poured into the grave, and hear the

funeral lamentation, and see all his things destroyed, then they

say, ‘Because we have dreamt of his death he will not die.’ But if

they dream of a wedding-dance, it is a sign of a funeral. So the

Maoris hold that a kinsman dreamt of as dying will recover, but to

see him well is a sign of death.[198] Both races thus work out, by

the same crooked logic that guided our own ancestors, the axiom that

‘dreams go by contraries.’ It could not be expected, in looking over

the long lists of precepts of classic, oriental, and modern popular

dream-interpretation, to detect the original sense of all their

readings. Many must turn on allusions intelligible at the time, but

now obscure. The Moslem dream-interpretation of eggs as concerning

women, because of a saying of Mohammed about women being like an egg

hidden in a nest, is an example which will serve as well as a score

to show how dream-rules may turn on far-fetched ideas, not to be

recognized unless the key happens to have been preserved. Many rules

must have been taken at random to fill up lists of omens, and of

contingencies to match them. Why should a dream of roasting meat

show the dreamer to be a back-biter, or laughter in sleep presage

difficult circumstances, or a dream of playing on the clavicord the

death of relatives? But the other side of the matter, the still

apparent nonsensical rationality of so many dream omens, is much

more remarkable. It can only be considered that the same symbolism

that lay at the root of the whole delusion, favoured the keeping up

and new making of such rules as carried obvious meaning. Take the

Moslem ideas that it is a good omen to dream of something white or

green, or of water, but bad to dream of black or red, or of fire;

that a palm-tree indicates an Arab, and a peacock a king; that he

who dreams of devouring the stars will live free at some great man’s

table. Take the classic rules as in the ‘Oneirocritica’ of

Artemidorus, and pass on through the mediæval treatises down to such

a dream-dictionary as servant-maids still buy in penny chap-books at

the fair, and it will be seen that the ancient rules still hold

their places to a remarkable extent, while half the mass of precepts

still show their original mystic significance, mostly direct, but

occasionally according to the rule of contraries. An offensive odour

signifies annoyance; to wash the hands denotes release from

anxieties; to embrace one’s best beloved is very fortunate; to have

one’s feet cut off prevents a journey; to weep in sleep is a sign of

joy; he who dreams he hath lost a tooth shall lose a friend; and he

that dreams that a rib is taken out of his side shall ere long see

the death of his wife; to follow bees, betokens gain; to be married

signifies that some of your kinsfolk are dead; if one sees many

fowls together, that shall be jealousy and chiding; if a snake

pursue him, let him be on his guard against evil women; to dream of

death, denotes happiness and long life; to dream of swimming and

wading in the water is good, so that the head be kept above water;

to dream of crossing a bridge, denotes you will leave a good

situation to seek a better; to dream you see a dragon is a sign that

you shall see some great lord your master, or a magistrate.[199]

Haruspication belongs, among the lower races, especially to the Malays

and Polynesians,[200] and to various Asiatic tribes.[201] It is

mentioned as practised in Peru under the Incas.[202] Captain Burton’s

account from Central Africa perhaps fairly displays its symbolic

principle. He describes the mganga or sorcerer taking an ordeal by

killing and splitting a fowl and inspecting its inside: if blackness or

blemish appears about the wings, it denotes the treachery of children

and kinsmen; the backbone convicts the mother and grandmother; the tail

shows that the criminal is the wife, &c.[203] In ancient Rome, where the

art held so great a place in public affairs, the same sort of

interpretation was usual, as witness the omen of Augustus, where the

livers of the victims were found folded, and the diviners prophesied him

accordingly a doubled empire.[204] Since then, haruspication has died

out more completely than almost any magical rite, yet even now a

characteristic relic of it may be noticed in Brandenburg; when a pig is

killed and the spleen is found turned over, there will be another

overthrow, namely a death in the family that year.[205] With

haruspication may be classed the art of divining by bones, as where

North American Indians would put in the fire a certain flat bone of a

porcupine, and judge from its colour if the porcupine hunt would be

successful.[206] The principal art of this kind is divination by a

shoulder-blade, technically called scapulimancy or omoplatoscopy. This

art, related to the old Chinese divination by the cracks of a

tortoise-shell on the fire, is especially found in vogue in Tartary. Its

simple symbolism is well shown in the elaborate account with diagrams

given by Pallas. The shoulder-blade is put on the fire till it cracks in

various directions, and then a long split lengthwise is reckoned as the

‘way of life,’ while cross-cracks on the right and left stand for

different kinds and degrees of good and evil fortune; or if the omen is

only taken as to some special event, then lengthwise splits mean going

on well, but crosswise ones stand for hindrance, white marks portend

much snow, black ones a mild winter, &c.[207] To find this quaint art

lasting on into modern times in Europe, we can hardly go to a better

place than our own country; a proper English term for it is ‘reading the

speal-bone’ (_speal_ = _espaule_). In Ireland, Camden describes the

looking through the blade-bone of a sheep, to find a dark spot which

foretells a death, and Drayton thus commemorates the art in his

Polyolbion:—

‘By th’ shoulder of a ram from off the right side par’d,

Which usually they boile, the spade-bone being bar’d,

Which when the wizard takes, and gazing therupon

Things long to come foreshowes, as things done long agone.’[208]

Chiromancy, or palmistry, seems much like this, though it is also mixed

up with astrology. It flourished in ancient Greece and Italy as it still

does in India, where to say, ‘It is written on the palms of my hands,’

is a usual way of expressing a sense of inevitable fate. Chiromancy

traces in the markings of the palm a line of fortune and a line of life,

finds proof of melancholy in the intersections on the saturnine mount,

presages sorrow and death from black spots in the finger-nails, and at

last, having exhausted the powers of this childish symbolism, it

completes its system by details of which the absurdity is no longer

relieved by even an ideal sense. The art has its modern votaries not

merely among Gypsy fortune-tellers, but in what is called ‘good

society.’[209]

It may again and again thus be noticed in magic arts, that the

association of ideas is obvious up to a certain point. Thus when the New

Zealand sorcerer took omens by the way his divining sticks (guided by

spirits) fell, he quite naturally said it was a good omen if the stick

representing his own tribe fell on top of that representing the enemy,

and vice versâ. Zulu diviners still work a similar process with their

magical pieces of stick, which rise to say yes and fall to say no, jump

upon the head or stomach or other affected part of the patient’s body to

show where his complaint is, and lie pointing towards the house of the

doctor who can cure him. So likewise, where a similar device was

practised ages ago in the Old World, the responses were taken from

staves which (by the operation of demons) fell backward or forward, to

the right or left.[210] But when processes of this kind are developed to

complexity, the system has, of course, to be completed by more arbitrary

arrangements. This is well shown in one of the divinatory arts mentioned

in the last chapter for their connexion with games of chance. In

cartomancy, the art of fortune-telling with packs of cards, there is a

sort of nonsensical sense in such rules as that two queens mean

friendship and four mean chattering, or that the knave of hearts

prophesies a brave young man who will come into the family to be useful,

unless his purpose be reversed by his card being upside down. But of

course the pack can only furnish a limited number of such comparatively

rational interpretations, and the rest must be left to such arbitrary

fancy as that the seven of diamonds means a prize in the lottery, and

the ten of the same suit an unexpected journey.[211]

A remarkable group of divining instruments illustrates another

principle. In South-East Asia, the Sgau Karens, at funeral feasts, hang

a bangle or metal ring by a thread over a brass basin, which the

relatives of the dead approach in succession and strike on the edge with

a bit of bamboo; when the one who was most beloved touches the basin,

the dead man’s spirit responds by twisting and stretching the string

till it breaks and the ring falls into the cup, or at least till it

rings against it.[212] Nearer Central Asia, in the north-east corner of

India, among the Bodo and Dhimal, the professional exorcist has to find

out what deity has entered into a patient’s body to punish him for some

impiety by an attack of illness; this he discovers by setting thirteen

leaves round him on the ground to represent the gods, and then holding a

pendulum attached to his thumb by a string, till the god in question is

persuaded by invocation to declare himself, making the pendulum swing

towards his representative leaf.[213] These mystic arts (not to go into

the question how these tribes came to use them) are rude forms of the

classical dactyliomancy, of which so curious an account is given in the

trial of the conspirators Patricius and Hilarius, who worked it to find

out who was to supplant the emperor Valens. A round table was marked at

the edge with the letters of the alphabet, and with prayers and mystic

ceremonies a ring was held suspended over it by a thread, and by

swinging or stopping towards certain letters gave the responsive words

of the oracle.[214] Dactyliomancy has dwindled in Europe to the art of

finding out what o’clock it is by holding a ring hanging inside a

tumbler by a thread, till, without conscious aid by the operator, it

begins to swing and strikes the hour. Father Schott, in his ‘Physica

Curiosa’ (1662), refrains with commendable caution from ascribing this

phenomenon universally to demoniac influence. It survives among

ourselves in child’s play, and though we are ‘no conjurers,’ we may

learn something from the little instrument, which remarkably displays

the effects of insensible movement. The operator really gives slight

impulses till they accumulate to a considerable vibration, as in ringing

a church-bell by very gentle pulls exactly timed. That he does, though

unconsciously, cause and direct the swings, may be shown by an attempt

to work the instrument with the operator’s eyes shut, which will be

found to fail, the directing power being lost. The action of the famous

divining-rod with its curiously versatile sensibility to water, ore,

treasure, and thieves, seems to belong partly to trickery by

professional Dousterswivels, and partly to more or less conscious

direction by honester operators. It is still known in England, and in

Germany they are apt to hide it in a baby’s clothes, and so get it

baptized for greater efficiency.[215] To conclude this group of

divinatory instruments, chance or the operator’s direction may determine

the action of one of the most familiar of classic and mediæval ordeals,

the so-called coscinomancy, or, as it is described in Hudibras, ‘th’

oracle of sieve and shears, that turns as certain as the spheres.’ The

sieve was held hanging by a thread, or by the points of a pair of shears

stuck into its rim, and it would turn, or swing, or fall, at the mention

of a thief’s name, and give similar signs for other purposes. Of this

ancient rite, the Christian ordeal of the Bible and key, still in

frequent use, is a variation: the proper way to detect a thief by this

is to read the 50th Psalm to the apparatus, and when it hears the verse,

‘When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him,’ it will turn

to the culprit.[216]

Count de Maistre, with his usual faculty of taking an argument up at the

wrong end, tells us that judicial astrology no doubt hangs to truths of

the first order, which have been taken from us as useless or dangerous,

or which we cannot recognize under their new forms.[217] A sober

examination of the subject may rather justify the contrary opinion, that

it is on an error of the first order that astrology depends, the error

of mistaking ideal analogy for real connexion. Astrology, in the

immensity of its delusive influence on mankind, and by the comparatively

modern period to which it remained an honoured branch of philosophy, may

claim the highest rank among the occult sciences. It scarcely belongs to

very low levels of civilization, although one of its fundamental

conceptions, namely, that of the souls or animating intelligences of the

celestial bodies, is rooted in the depths of savage life. Yet the

following Maori specimen of astrological reasoning is as real an

argument as could be found in Paracelsus or Agrippa, nor is there reason

to doubt its being home-made. When the siege of a New Zealand ‘pa’ is

going on, if Venus is near the moon, the natives naturally imagine the

two as enemy and fortress; if the planet is above, the foe will have the

upper hand; but if below, then the men of the soil will be able to

defend themselves.[218] Though the early history of astrology is

obscure, its great development and elaborate systematization were

undoubtedly the work of civilized nations of the ancient and mediæval

world. As might be well supposed, a great part of its precepts have lost

their intelligible sense, or never had any, but the origin of many

others is still evident. To a considerable extent they rest on direct

symbolism. Such are the rules which connect the sun with gold, with the

heliotrope and pæony, with the cock which heralds day, with magnanimous

animals, such as the lion and bull; and the moon with silver, and the

changing chamæleon, and the palm-tree, which was considered to send out

a monthly shoot. Direct symbolism is plain in that main principle of the

calculation of nativities, the notion of the ‘ascendant’ in the

horoscope, which reckons the part of the heavens rising in the east at

the moment of a child’s birth as being connected with the child itself,

and prophetic of its future life.[219] It is an old story, that when two

brothers were once taken ill together, Hippokrates the physician

concluded from the coincidence that they were twins, but Poseidonios the

astrologer considered rather that they were born under the same

constellation: we may add, that either argument would be thought

reasonable by a savage. One of the most instructive astrological

doctrines which has kept its place in modern popular philosophy, is that

of the sympathy of growing and declining nature with the waxing and

waning moon. Among classical precepts are these: to set eggs under the

hen at new moon, but to root up trees when the moon is on the wane, and

after midday. The Lithuanian precept to wean boys on a waxing, but girls

on a waning moon, no doubt to make the boys sturdy and the girls slim

and delicate, is a fair match for the Orkney islanders’ objection to

marrying except with a growing moon, while some even wish for a flowing

tide. The following lines, from Tusser’s ‘Five Hundred Points of

Husbandry,’ show neatly in a single case the two contrary lunar

influences:—

‘Sowe peason and beans in the wane of the moone

Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soone:

That they, with the planet, may rest and rise,

And flourish with bearing, most plentiful wise.’[220]

The notion that the weather changes with the moon’s quarterings is still

held with great vigour in England. Yet the meteorologists, with all

their eagerness to catch at any rule which at all answers to facts,

quite repudiate this one, which indeed appears to be simply a maxim

belonging to popular astrology. Just as the growth and dwindling of

plants became associated with the moon’s wax and wane, so changes of

weather became associated with changes of the moon, while, by

astrologer’s logic, it did not matter whether the moon’s change were

real, at new and full, or imaginary, at the intermediate quarters. That

educated people to whom exact weather records are accessible should

still find satisfaction in the fanciful lunar rule, is an interesting

case of intellectual survival.

In such cases as these, the astrologer has at any rate a real analogy,

deceptive though it be, to base his rule upon. But most of his

pseudo-science seems to rest on even weaker and more arbitrary

analogies, not of things, but of names. Names of stars and

constellations, of signs denoting regions of the sky and periods of days

and years, no matter how arbitrarily given, are materials which the

astrologer can work upon, and bring into ideal connexion with mundane

events. That astronomers should have divided the sun’s course into

imaginary signs of the zodiac, was enough to originate astrological

rules that these celestial signs have an actual effect on real earthly

rams, bulls, crabs, lions, virgins. A child born under the sign of the

Lion will be courageous; but one born under the Crab will not go forward

well in life; one born under the Waterman is likely to be drowned, and

so forth. Towards 1524, Europe was awaiting in an agony of prayerful

terror a second deluge, prophesied for February in that year. As the

fatal month drew nigh, dwellers by the waterside moved in crowds to the

hills, some provided boats to save them, and the President Aurial, at

Toulouse, built himself a Noah’s Ark. It was the great astrologer

Stoefler (the originator, it is said, of the weather-prophecies in our

almanacks) who foretold this cataclysm, and his argument has the

advantage of being still perfectly intelligible—at the date in question,

three planets would be together in the aqueous sign of Pisces. Again,

simply because astronomers chose to distribute among the planets the

names of certain deities, the planets thereby acquired the characters of

their divine namesakes. Thus it was that the planet Mercury became

connected with travel, trade, and theft, Venus with love and mirth, Mars

with war, Jupiter with power and ‘joviality.’ Throughout the East,

astrology even now remains a science in full esteem. The condition of

mediæval Europe may still be perfectly realized by the traveller in

Persia, where the Shah waits for days outside the walls of his capital

till the constellations allow him to enter, and where on the days

appointed by the stars for letting blood, it literally flows in streams

from the barbers’ shops into the street. Professor Wuttke declares that

there are many districts in Germany where the child’s horoscope is still

regularly kept with the baptismal certificate in the family chest. We

scarcely reach this pitch of conservatism in England, but I happen to

myself live within a mile of an astrologer, and I lately saw a grave

paper on nativities, offered in all good faith to the British

Association. The piles of ‘Zadkiel’s Almanack’ in the bookseller’s

windows in country towns about Christmas are a symptom how much yet

remains to be done in popular education. As a specimen at once of the

survival and of the meaning of astrologic reasoning, I cannot do better

than quote a passage from a book published in London in 1861, and

entitled ‘The Hand-Book of Astrology, by Zadkiel Tao-Sze.’ At page 72 of

his first volume, the astrologer relates as follows: ‘The Map of the

heavens given at page 45 was drawn on the occasion of a young lady

having been arrested on a charge of the murder of her infant brother.

Having read in a newspaper, at twenty-four minutes past noon on the 23rd

July, 1860, that Miss C. K. had been arrested on a charge of the murder

of her young brother, the author felt desirous to ascertain whether she

were guilty or not, and drew the map accordingly. Finding the moon in

the twelfth house, she clearly signifies the prisoner. The moon is in a

moveable sign, and moves in the twenty-four hours, 14° 17´. She is,

therefore, swift in motion. These things indicated that the prisoner

would be very speedily released. Then we find a moveable sign in the

cusp of the twelfth, and its ruler, ♀, in a moveable sign, a further

indication of speedy release. Hence it was judged and declared to many

friends that the prisoner would be immediately released, which was the

fact. We looked to see whether the prisoner were guilty of the deed or

not, and finding the Moon in Libra, a humane sign, and having just past

the ⚹ aspect of the Sun and ♃, both being on the M. C. we felt assured

that she was a humane, feeling, and honourable girl, and that it was

quite impossible she could be guilty of any such atrocity. We declared

her to be perfectly innocent, and as the Moon was so well aspected from

the tenth house, we declared that her honour would be very soon

perfectly established.’ Had the astrologer waited a few months longer,

to have read the confession of the miserable Constance Kent, he would

perhaps have put a different sense on his moveable signs, just balances,

and sunny and jovial aspects. Nor would this be a difficult task, for

these fancies lend themselves to endless variety of new interpretation.

And on such fancies and such interpretations, the great science of the

stars has from first to last been based.

Looking at the details here selected as fair samples of symbolic magic,

we may well ask the question, is there in the whole monstrous farrago no

truth or value whatever? It appears that there is practically none, and

that the world has been enthralled for ages by a blind belief in

processes wholly irrelevant to their supposed results, and which might

as well have been taken just the opposite way. Pliny justly saw in magic

a study worthy of his especial attention, ‘for the very reason that,

being the most fraudulent of arts, it had prevailed throughout the world

and through so many ages’ (eo ipso quod fraudulentissima artium plurimum

in toto terrarum orbe plurimisque seculis valuit). If it be asked how

such a system could have held its ground, not merely in independence but

in defiance of its own facts, a fair answer does not seem hard to give.

In the first place, it must be borne in mind that occult science has not

existed entirely in its own strength. Futile as its arts may be, they

are associated in practice with other proceedings by no means futile.

What are passed off as sacred omens, are often really the cunning man’s

shrewd guesses at the past and future. Divination serves to the sorcerer

as a mask for real inquest, as when the ordeal gives him invaluable

opportunity of examining the guilty, whose trembling hands and

equivocating speech betray at once their secret and their utter belief

in his power of discerning it. Prophecy tends to fulfil itself, as where

the magician, by putting into a victim’s mind the belief that fatal arts

have been practised against him, can slay him with this idea as with a

material weapon. Often priest as well as magician, he has the whole

power of religion at his back; often a man in power, always an

unscrupulous intriguer, he can work witchcraft and statecraft together,

and make his left hand help his right. Often a doctor, he can aid his

omens of life or death with remedy or poison, while what we still call

‘conjurers’ tricks’ of sleight of hand have done much to keep up his

supernatural prestige. From the earliest known stages of civilization,

professional magicians have existed, who live by their craft, and keep

it alive. It has been said, that if somebody had endowed lecturers to

teach that two sides of a triangle are together equal to the third, the

doctrine would have a respectable following among ourselves. At any

rate, magic, with an influential profession interested in keeping it in

credit and power, did not depend for its existence on mere evidence.

And in the second place, as to this evidence. Magic has not its origin

in fraud, and seems seldom practised as an utter imposture. The sorcerer

generally learns his time-honoured profession in good faith, and retains

his belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and

cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a

hypocrite. Had occult science been simply framed for purposes of

deception, mere nonsense would have answered the purpose, whereas, what

we find is an elaborate and systematic pseudo-science. It is, in fact, a

sincere but fallacious system of philosophy, evolved by the human

intellect by processes still in great measure intelligible to our own

minds, and it had thus an original standing-ground in the world. And

though the evidence of fact was dead against it, it was but lately and

gradually that this evidence was brought fatally to bear. A general

survey of the practical working of the system may be made somewhat thus.

A large proportion of successful cases belong to natural means disguised

as magic. Also, a certain proportion of cases must succeed by mere

chance. By far the larger proportion, however, are what we should call

failures; but it is a part of the magician’s profession to keep these

from counting, and this he does with extraordinary resource of

rhetorical shift and brazen impudence. He deals in ambiguous phrases,

which give him three or four chances for one. He knows perfectly how to

impose difficult conditions, and to lay the blame of failure on their

neglect. If you wish to make gold, the alchemist in Central Asia has a

recipe at your service, only, to use it, you must abstain three days

from thinking of apes; just as our English folk-lore says, that if one

of your eyelashes comes out, and you put it on your thumb, you will get

anything you wish for, if you can only avoid thinking of foxes’ tails at

the fatal moment. Again, if the wrong thing happens, the wizard has at

least a reason why. Has a daughter been born when he promised a son,

then it is some hostile practitioner who has turned the boy into a girl;

does a tempest come just when he is making fine weather, then he calmly

demands a larger fee for stronger ceremonies, assuring his clients that

they may thank him as it is, for how much worse it would have been had

he not done what he did. And even setting aside all this accessory

trickery, if we look at honest but unscientific people practising occult

science in good faith, and face to face with facts, we shall see that

the failures which condemn it in our eyes carry comparatively little

weight in theirs. Part escape under the elastic pretext of a ‘little

more or less,’ as the loser in the lottery consoles himself that his

lucky number came within two of a prize, or the moon-observer points out

triumphantly that a change of weather has come within two or three days

before or after a quarter, so that his convenient definition of near a

moon’s quarter applies to four or six days out of every seven. Part

escape through incapacity to appreciate negative evidence, which allows

one success to outweigh half-a-dozen failures. How few there are even

among the educated classes now, who have taken in the drift of that

memorable passage in the beginning of the ‘Novum Organum:’—‘The human

understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from

general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces

everything else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although most

cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does

not observe or despises them, or gets rid of and rejects them by some

distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice

the authority of its first conclusions. It was well answered by him who

was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had

escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would

then recognize the power of the gods, by an inquiry, “But where are the

portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows?”’[221]

On the whole, the survival of symbolic magic through the middle ages and

into our own times is an unsatisfactory, but not a mysterious fact. A

once-established opinion, however delusive, can hold its own from age to

age, for belief can propagate itself without reference to its reasonable

origin, as plants are propagated from slips without fresh raising from

the seed.

The history of survival in cases like those of the folk-lore and occult

arts which we have been considering, has for the most part been a

history of dwindling and decay. As men’s minds change in progressing

culture, old customs and opinions fade gradually in a new and

uncongenial atmosphere, or pass into states more congruous with the new

life around them. But this is so far from being a law without exception,

that a narrow view of history may often make it seem to be no law at

all. For the stream of civilization winds and turns upon itself, and

what seems the bright onward current of one age may in the next spin

round in a whirling eddy, or spread into a dull and pestilential swamp.

Studying with a wide view the course of human opinion, we may now and

then trace on from the very turning-point the change from passive

survival into active revival. Some well-known belief or custom has for

centuries shown symptoms of decay, when we begin to see that the state

of society, instead of stunting it, is favouring its new growth, and it

bursts forth again with a vigour often as marvellous as it is unhealthy.

And though the revival be not destined to hold on indefinitely, and

though when opinion turns again its ruin may be more merciless than

before, yet it may last for ages, make its way into the inmost

constitution of society, and even become a very mark and characteristic

of its time.

Writers who desire to show that, with all our faults, we are wiser and

better than our ancestors, dwell willingly on the history of witchcraft

between the middle and modern ages. They can quote Martin Luther,

apropos of the witches who spoil the farmers’ butter and eggs, ‘I would

have no pity on these witches; I would burn them all.’ They can show the

good Sir Matthew Hale hanging witches in Suffolk, on the authority of

scripture and the consenting wisdom of all nations; and King James

presiding at the torture of Dr. Fian for bringing a storm against the

king’s ship on its course from Denmark, by the aid of a fleet of witches

in sieves, who carried out a christened cat to sea. In those dreadful

days, to be a blear-eyed wizened cripple was to be worth twenty

shillings to a witch-finder; for a woman to have what this witch-finder

was pleased to call the devil’s mark on her body was presumption for

judicial sentence of death; and not to bleed or shed tears or sink in a

pond was torture first and then the stake. Reform of religion was no

cure for the disease of men’s minds, for in such things the Puritan was

no worse than the Inquisitor, and no better. Papist and Protestant

fought with one another, but both turned against that enemy of the human

race, the hag who had sold herself to Satan to ride upon a broomstick,

and to suck children’s blood, and to be for life and death of all

creatures the most wretched. But with new enlightenment there came in

the very teeth of law and authority a change in European opinion. Toward

the end of the seventeenth century the hideous superstition was breaking

down among ourselves; Richard Baxter, of the ‘Saint’s Rest,’ strove with

fanatic zeal to light again at home the witch-fires of New England, but

he strove in vain. Year by year the persecution of witches became more

hateful to the educated classes, and though it died hard, it died at

last down to a vestige. In our days, when we read of a witch being burnt

at Camargo in 1860, we point to Mexico as a country miserably in the

rear of civilization. And if in England it still happens that village

boors have to be tried at quarter-sessions for ill-using some poor old

woman, who they fancy has dried a cow or spoiled a turnip crop, we

comment on the tenacity with which the rustic mind clings to exploded

follies, and cry out for more schoolmasters.

True as all this is, the ethnographer must go wider and deeper in his

enquiry, to do his subject justly. The prevailing belief in witchcraft

that sat like a nightmare on public opinion from the 13th to the 17th

centuries, far from being itself a product of mediævalism, was a revival

from the remote days of primæval history. The disease that broke out

afresh in Europe had been chronic among the lower races for how many

ages we cannot tell. Witchcraft is part and parcel of savage life. There

are rude races of Australia and South America whose intense belief in it

has led them to declare that if men were never bewitched, and never

killed by violence, they would not die at all. Like the Australians, the

Africans will inquire of their dead what sorcerer slew them by his

wicked arts, and when they have satisfied themselves of this, blood must

atone for blood. In West Africa, it has been boldly asserted that the

belief in witchcraft costs more lives than the slave trade ever did. In

East Africa, Captain Burton, a traveller apt to draw his social sketches

in a few sharp lines, remarks that what with slavery and what with

black-magic, life is precarious among the Wakhutu, and ‘no one,

especially in old age, is safe from being burnt at a day’s notice;’ and,

travelling in the country of the Wazaramo, he tells us of meeting every

few miles with heaps of ashes and charcoal, now and then such as seemed

to have been a father and mother, with a little heap hard by that was a

child.[222] Even in districts of British India a state of mind ready to

produce horrors like these is well known to exist, and to be kept down

less by persuasion than by main force. From the level of savage life, we

trace witchcraft surviving throughout the barbarian and early civilized

world. It was existing in Europe in the centuries preceding the 10th,

but with no especial prominence, while laws of Rothar and Charlemagne

are actually directed against such as should put men or women to death

on the charge of witchcraft. In the 11th century, ecclesiastical

influence was discouraging the superstitious belief in sorcery. But now

a period of reaction set in. The works of the monastic legend and

miracle-mongers more and more encouraged a baneful credulity as to the

supernatural. In the 13th century, when the spirit of religious

persecution had begun to possess all Europe with a dark and cruel

madness, the doctrine of witchcraft revived with all its barbaric

vigour.[223] That the guilt of thus bringing down Europe intellectually

and morally to the level of negro Africa lies in the main upon the Roman

Church, the records of Popes Gregory IX. and Innocent VIII., and the

history of the Holy Inquisition, are conclusive evidence to prove. To us

here the main interest of mediæval witchcraft lies in the extent and

accuracy with which the theory of survival explains it. In the very

details of the bald conventional accusations that were sworn against the

witches, there may be traced tradition often hardly modified from

barbarous and savage times. They raised storms by magic rites, they had

charms against the hurt of weapons, they had their assemblies on wild

heath and mountain-top, they could ride through the air on beasts and

even turn into witch-cats and were-wolves themselves, they had familiar

spirits, they had intercourse with incubi and succubi, they conveyed

thorns, pins, feathers and such things into their victims’ bodies, they

caused disease by demoniacal possession, they could bewitch by spells

and the evil eye, by practising on images and symbols, on food and

property. Now all this is sheer survival from præ-Christian ages, ‘in

errore paganorum revolvitur,’ as Burchard of Worms said of the

superstition of his time.[224] Two of the most familiar devices used

against the mediæval witches may serve to show the place in civilization

of the whole craft. The Oriental jinn are in such deadly terror of iron,

that its very name is a charm against them; and so in European folk-lore

iron drives away fairies and elves, and destroys their power. They are

essentially, it seems, creatures belonging to the ancient Stone Age, and

the new metal is hateful and hurtful to them. Now as to iron, witches

are brought under the same category as elves and nightmares. Iron

instruments keep them at bay, and especially iron horseshoes have been

chosen for this purpose, as half the stable doors in England still

show.[225] Again, one of the best known of English witch ordeals is the

trial by ‘fleeting’ or swimming. Bound hand and foot, the accused was

flung into deep water, to sink if innocent and swim if guilty, and in

the latter case, as Hudibras has it, to be hanged only for not being

drowned. King James, who seems to have had a notion of the real

primitive meaning of this rite, says in his Dæmonology, ‘It appears that

God hath appointed for a supernatural signe of the monstrous impietie of

witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom that

have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism,’ &c. Now, in early

German history this same trial by water was well known, and its meaning

recognized to be that the conscious element rejects the guilty (si aqua

illum velut innoxium receperit—innoxii submerguntur aqua, culpabiles

supernatant). Already in the 9th century the laws were prohibiting this

practice as a relic of superstition. Lastly, the same trial by water is

recognized as one of the regular judicial ordeals in the Hindu code of

Manu; if the water does not cause the accused to float when plunged into

it, his oath is true. As this ancient Indian body of laws was itself no

doubt compiled from materials of still earlier date, we may venture to

take the correspondence of the water-ordeal among the European and

Asiatic branches of the Aryan race as carrying back its origin to a

period of remote antiquity.[226]

Let us hope that if the belief in present witchcraft, and the

persecution necessarily ensuing upon such belief, once more come into

prominence in the civilized world, they may appear in a milder shape

than heretofore, and be kept down by stronger humanity and tolerance.

But any one who fancies from their present disappearance that they have

necessarily disappeared for ever, must have read history to little

purpose, and has yet to learn that ‘revival in culture’ is something

more than an empty pedantic phrase. Our own time has revived a group of

beliefs and practices which have their roots deep in the very stratum of

early philosophy where witchcraft makes its first appearance. This group

of beliefs and practices constitutes what is now commonly known as

Spiritualism.

Witchcraft and Spiritualism have existed for thousands of years in a

closeness of union not unfairly typified in this verse from John Bale’s

16th-century Interlude concerning Nature, which brings under one head

the art of bewitching vegetables and poultry, and causing supernatural

movement of stools and crockery.

‘Theyr wells I can up drye,

Cause trees and herbes to dye,

And slee all pulterye,

Whereas men doth me move:

I can make stoles to daunce

And earthen pottes to praunce,

That none shall them enhaunce,

And do but cast my glove.’

The same intellectual movement led to the decline of both witchcraft and

spiritualism, till, early in the last century, men thought that both

were dying or all but dead together. Now, however, not only are

spiritualists to be counted by tens of thousands in America and England,

but there are among them several men of distinguished mental power. I am

well aware that the problem of the so-called ‘spirit-manifestations’ is

one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct

opinion how far it may be concerned with facts insufficiently

appreciated and explained by science, and how far with superstition,

delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful

observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light on

some most interesting psychological questions. But though it lies beyond

my scope to examine the spiritualistic evidence for itself, the

ethnographic view of the matter has, nevertheless, its value. This shows

modern spiritualism to be in great measure a direct revival from the

regions of savage philosophy and peasant folk-lore. It is not a simple

question of the existence of certain phenomena of mind and matter. It is

that, in connexion with these phenomena, a great philosophic-religious

doctrine, flourishing in the lower culture but dwindling in the higher,

has re-established itself in full vigour. The world is again swarming

with intelligent and powerful disembodied spiritual beings, whose direct

action on thought and matter is again confidently asserted, as in those

times and countries where physical science had not as yet so far

succeeded in extruding these spirits and their influences from the

system of nature.

Apparitions have regained the place and meaning which they held from the

level of the lower races to that of mediæval Europe. The regular

ghost-stories, in which spirits of the dead walk visibly and have

intercourse with corporeal men, are now restored and cited with new

examples as ‘glimpses of the night-side of nature,’ nor have these

stories changed either their strength to those who are disposed to

believe them, or their weakness to those who are not. As of old, men

live now in habitual intercourse with the spirits of the dead.

Necromancy is a religion, and the Chinese manes-worshipper may see the

outer barbarians come back, after a heretical interval of a few

centuries, into sympathy with his time-honoured creed. As the sorcerers

of barbarous tribes lie in bodily lethargy or sleep while their souls

depart on distant journeys, so it is not uncommon in modern

spiritualistic narratives for persons to be in an insensible state when

their apparitions visit distant places, whence they bring back

information, and where they communicate with the living. The spirits of

the living as well as of the dead, the souls of Strauss and Carl Vogt as

well as of Augustine and Jerome, are summoned by mediums to distant

spirit-circles. As Dr. Bastian remarks, if any celebrated man in Europe

feels himself at some moment in a melancholy mood, he may console

himself with the idea that his soul has been sent for to America, to

assist at the ‘rough fixings’ of some backwoodsman. Fifty years ago, Dr.

Macculloch, in his ‘Description of the Western Islands of Scotland,’

wrote thus of the famous Highland second-sight: ‘In fact it has

undergone the fate of witchcraft; ceasing to be believed, it has ceased

to exist.’ Yet a generation later he would have found it reinstated in a

far larger range of society, and under far better circumstances of

learning and material prosperity. Among the influences which have

combined to bring about the spiritualistic renaissance, a prominent

place may, I think, be given to the effect produced on the religious

mind of Europe and America by the intensely animistic teachings of

Emanuel Swedenborg, in the 18th century. The position of this remarkable

visionary as to some of the particular spiritualistic doctrines may be

judged of by the following statements from ‘The True Christian

Religion.’ A man’s spirit is his mind, which lives after death in

complete human form, and this spirit may be conveyed from place to place

while the body remains at rest, as on some occasions happened to

Swedenborg himself. ‘I have conversed,’ he says, ‘with all my relations

and friends, likewise with kings and princes, and men of learning, after

their departure out of this life, and this now for twenty-seven years

without interruption.’ And foreseeing that many who read his ‘Memorable

Relations’ will believe them to be fictions of imagination, he protests

in truth they are not fictions, but were really seen and heard; not seen

and heard in any state of mind in sleep, but in a state of complete

wakefulness.[227]

I shall have to speak elsewhere of some of the doctrines of modern

spiritualism, where they seem to fall into their places in the study of

Animism. Here, as a means of illustrating the relation of the newer to

the older spiritualistic ideas, I propose to glance over the ethnography

of two of the most popular means of communicating with the spirit-world

by rapping and writing, and two of the prominent spirit-manifestations,

the feat of rising in the air, and the trick of the Davenport Brothers.

The elf who goes knocking and routing about the house at night, and

whose special German name is the ‘Poltergeist,’ is an old and familiar

personage in European folk-lore.[228] From of old, such unexplained

noises have been ascribed to the agency of personal spirits, who more

often than not are considered human souls. The modern Dayaks, Siamese,

and Singhalese agree with the Esths as to such routing and rapping being

caused by spirits.[229] Knockings may be considered mysterious but

harmless, like those which in Swabia and Franconia are expected during

Advent on the Anklöpferleins-Nächte, or ‘Little Knockers’ Nights.’[230]

Or they may be useful, as when the Welsh miners think that the

‘knockers’ they hear underground are indicating the rich veins of lead

and silver.[231] Or they may be simply annoying, as when, in the ninth

century, a malignant spirit infested a parish by knocking at the walls

as if with a hammer, but being overcome with litanies and holy water,

confessed itself to be the familiar of a certain wicked priest, and to

have been in hiding under his cloak. Thus, in the seventeenth century,

the famous demon-drummer of Tedworth, commemorated by Glanvil in the

‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ thumped about the doors and the outside of the

house, and ‘for an hour together it would beat _Roundheads and

Cuckolds_, the _Tat-too_, and several other _Points of War_, as well as

any Drummer.’[232] But popular philosophy has mostly attached to such

mysterious noises a foreboding of death, the knock being held as a

signal or summons among spirits as among men. The Romans considered that

the genius of death thus announced his coming. Modern folk-lore holds

either that a knocking or rumbling in the floor is an omen of a death

about to happen, or that dying persons themselves announce their

dissolution to their friends in such strange sounds. The English rule

takes in both cases: ‘Three loud and distinct knocks at the bed’s head

of a sick person, or at the bed’s head or door of any of his relations,

is an omen of his death.’ We happen to have a good means of testing the

amount of actual correspondence between omen and event necessary to

establish these rules: the illogical people who were (and still are)

able to discover a connexion between the ticking of the ‘death-watch’

beetle and an ensuing death in the house, no doubt found it equally easy

to give a prophetic interpretation to any other mysterious knocks.[233]

There is a story, dated 1534, of a ghost that answered questions by

knocking in the Catholic church of Orleans, and demanded the removal of

the provost’s Lutheran wife, who had been buried there; but the affair

proved to be a trick of a Franciscan friar.[234] The system of working

an alphabet by counted raps is a device familiar to prison-cells, where

it has long been at once the despair of gaolers and an evidence of the

diffusion of education even among the criminal classes. Thus when, in

1847, the celebrated rappings began to trouble the township of Arcadia

in the State of New York, the Fox family of Rochester, founders of the

modern spiritual movement, had on the one hand only to revive the

ancient prevalent belief in spirit-rappings, which had almost fallen

into the limbo of discredited superstitions, while, on the other hand,

the system of communication with the spirits was ready made to their

hand. The system of a rapping-alphabet remains in full use, and

numberless specimens of messages thus received are in print, possibly

the longest being a novel, of which I can only give the title, ‘Juanita,

Nouvelle par une Chaise. À l’Imprimerie du Gouvernement, Basse Terre

(Guadeloupe), 1853.’ In the recorded communications, names, dates, &c.,

are often alleged to have been stated under remarkable circumstances,

while the style of thought, language, and spelling fits with the

intellectual quality of the medium. A large proportion of the

communications being obviously false and silly, even when the ‘spirit’

has announced itself in the name of some great statesman, moralist, or

philosopher of the past, the theory has been adopted by spiritualists

that foolish or lying spirits are apt to personate those of higher

degree, and give messages in their names.

Spirit-writing is of two kinds, according as it is done with or without

a material instrument. The first kind is in full practice in China,

where, like other rites of divination, it is probably ancient. It is

called ‘descending of the pencil,’ and is especially used by the

literary classes. When a Chinese wishes to consult a god in this way, he

sends for a professional medium. Before the image of the god are set

candles and incense, and an offering of tea or mock money. In front of

this, on another table, is placed an oblong tray of dry sand. The

writing instrument is a V-shaped wooden handle, two or three feet long,

with a wooden tooth fixed at its point. Two persons hold this

instrument, each grasping one leg of it, and the point resting in the

sand. Proper prayers and charms induce the god to manifest his presence

by a movement of the point in the sand, and thus the response is

written, and there only remains the somewhat difficult and doubtful task

of deciphering it. To what state of opinion the rite belongs may be

judged from this: when the sacred apricot-tree is to be robbed of a

branch to make the spirit-pen an apologetic inscription is scratched

upon the trunk.[235] Notwithstanding theological differences between

China and England, the art of spirit-writing is much the same in the two

countries. A kind of ‘planchette’ seems to have been known in Europe in

the seventeenth century.[236] The instrument, which may now be bought at

the toy-shops, is a heart-shaped board some seven inches long, resting

on three supports, of which the two at the wide end are castors, and the

third at the pointed end is a pencil thrust through a hole in the board.

The instrument is placed on a sheet of paper, and worked by two persons

laying their fingers lightly on it, waiting till, without conscious

effort of the operators, it moves and writes answers to questions. It is

not everybody who has the faculty of spirit-writing, but a powerful

medium will write alone. Such mediums sometimes consider themselves

acted on by some power separate from themselves, in fact, possessed.

Ecclesiastical history commemorates a miracle at the close of the Nicene

Council. Two bishops, Chrysanthus and Mysonius, had died during its

sitting, and the remaining crowd of Fathers brought the acts, signed by

themselves, to the tomb, addressed the deceased bishops as if still

alive, and left the document. Next day, returning, they found the two

signatures added, to this effect:—‘We, Chrysanthus and Mysonius,

consenting with all the Fathers in the holy first and œcumenical Nicene

Synod, although translated from the body, have also signed the volume

with our own hands.’[237] Such spirit-writing without material

instrument has lately been renewed by the Baron de Guldenstubbé. This

writer confirms by new evidence the truth of the tradition of all

peoples as to souls of the dead keeping up their connexion with their

mortal remains, and haunting the places where they dwelt ‘during their

terrestrial incarnation.’ Thus Francis I. manifests himself principally

at Fontainebleau, while Louis XV. and Marie-Antoinette roam about the

Trianons. Moreover, if pieces of blank paper be set out in suitable

places, the spirits, enveloped in their ethereal bodies, will

concentrate by their force of will electric currents on the paper, and

so form written characters. The Baron publishes, in his ‘Pneumatologie

Positive,’ a mass of facsimiles of spirit-writings thus obtained. Julius

and Augustus Cæsar give their names near their statues in the Louvre;

Juvenal produces a ludicrous attempt at a copy of verses; Héloise at

Père-la-Chaise informs the world, in modern French, that Abelard and she

are united and happy; St. Paul writes himself ελζιστος αποστολον

(meaning, we may suppose, ελαχιστος αποστολων); and Hippokrates the

physician (who spells himself Hippōkratĕs) attended M. de Guldenstubbé

at his lodgings in Paris, and gave him a signature which of itself cured

a sharp attack of rheumatism in a few minutes.[238]

The miracle of rising and floating in the air is one fully recognized in

the literature of ancient India. The Buddhist saint of high ascetic rank

attains the power called ‘perfection’ (irdhi), whereby he is able to

rise in the air, as also to overturn the earth and stop the sun. Having

this power, the saint exercises it by the mere determination of his

will, his body becoming imponderous, as when a man in the common human

state determines to leap, and leaps. Buddhist annals relate the

performance of the miraculous suspension by Gautama himself, as well as

by other saints, as, for example, his ancestor Maha Sammata, who could

thus seat himself in the air without visible support. Even without this

exalted faculty, it is considered possible to rise and move in the air

by an effort of ecstatic joy (udwega prîti). A remarkable mention of

this feat, as said to be performed by the Indian Brahmans, occurs in the

third-century biography of Apollonius of Tyana; these Brahmans are

described as going about in the air some two cubits from the ground, not

for the sake of miracle (such ambition they despised), but for its being

more suitable to solar rites.[239] Foreign conjurers were professing to

exhibit this miracle among the Greeks in the second century, as witness

Lucian’s jocular account of the Hyperborean conjurer:—‘Thou art joking,

said Kleodemos, but I was once more incredulous than thou about such

things, for I thought nothing could have persuaded me to believe them;

but when I first saw that foreign barbarian flying—he was of the

Hyperboreans, he said—I believed, and was overcome in spite of my

resistance. For what was I to do, when I saw him carried through the air

in daylight, and walking on the water, and passing leisurely and slowly

through the fire? What? (said his interlocutor), you saw the Hyperborean

man flying, and walking on the water? To be sure, said he, and he had on

undressed leather brogues as they generally wear them; but what’s the

use of talking of such trifles, considering what other manifestations he

showed us,—sending loves, calling up demons, raising the dead, and

bringing in Hekate herself visibly, and drawing down the moon?’

Kleodemos then goes on to relate how the conjurer first had his four

minæ down for sacrificial expenses, and then made a clay Cupid, and sent

it flying through the air to fetch the girl whom Glaukias had fallen in

love with, and presently, lo and behold, there she was knocking at the

door! The interlocutor, however, comments in a sceptical vein on the

narrative. It was scarce needful, he says, to have taken the trouble to

send for the girl with clay, and a magician from the Hyperboreans, and

even the moon, considering that for twenty drachmas she would have let

herself be taken to the Hyperboreans themselves; and she seems,

moreover, to have been affected in quite an opposite way to spirits, for

whereas these beings take flight if they hear the noise of brass or

iron, Chrysis no sooner hears the chink of silver anywhere, but she

comes toward the sound.[240] Another early instance of the belief in

miraculous suspension is in the life of Iamblichus, the great

Neo-Platonist mystic. His disciples says Eunapius, told him they had

heard a report from his servants, that while in prayer to the gods he

had been lifted more than ten cubits from the ground, his body and

clothes changing to a beautiful golden colour, but after he ceased from

prayer his body became as before, and then he came down to the ground

and returned to the society of his followers. They entreated him

therefore, ‘Why, O most divine teacher, why dost thou do such things by

thyself, and not let us partake of the more perfect wisdom?’ Then

Iamblichus, though not given to laughter, laughed at this story, and

said to them, ‘It was no fool who tricked you thus, but the thing is not

true.’[241]

After a while, the prodigy which the Platonist disclaimed, became a

usual attribute of Christian saints. Thus St. Richard, then chancellor

to St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, one day softly opening the

chapel door, to see why the archbishop did not come to dinner, saw him

raised high in the air, with his knees bent and his arms stretched out;

falling gently to the ground, and seeing the chancellor, he complained

that he had hindered him of great spiritual delight and comfort. So St.

Philip Neri used to be sometimes seen raised several yards from the

ground during his rapturous devotions, with a bright light shining from

his countenance. St. Ignatius Loyola is declared to have been raised

about two feet under the same circumstances, and similar legends of

devout ascetics being not only metaphorically but materially ‘raised

above the earth’ are told in the lives of St. Dominic, St. Dunstan, St.

Theresa, and other less-known saints. In the last century, Dom Calmet

speaks of knowing a good monk who rises sometimes from the ground and

remains involuntarily suspended, especially on seeing some devotional

image or hearing some devout prayer, and also a nun who has often seen

herself raised in spite of herself to a certain distance from the earth.

Unfortunately the great commentator does not specify any witnesses as

having seen the monk and nun rise in the air. If they only thought

themselves thus elevated, their stories can only rank with that of the

young man mentioned by De Maistre, who so often seemed to himself to

float in the air, that he came to suspect that gravitation might not be

natural to man.[242] The hallucination of rising and floating in the air

is extremely common, and ascetics of all religions are especially liable

to it.

Among modern accounts of diabolic possession, also, the rising in the

air is described as taking place not subjectively but objectively. In

1657, Richard Jones, a sprightly lad of twelve years old, living at

Shepton Mallet, was bewitched by one Jane Brooks; he was seen to rise in

the air and pass over a garden wall some thirty yards, and at other

times was found in a room with his hands flat against a beam at the top

of the room, and his body two or three feet from the ground, nine people

at a time seeing him in this latter position. Jane Brooks was

accordingly condemned and executed at Chard Assizes in March, 1658.

Richard, the Surrey demoniac of 1689, was hoisted up in the air and let

down by Satan; at the beginning of his fits he was, as it were, blown or

snatched or borne up suddenly from his chair, as if he would have flown

away, but that those who held him hung to his arms and legs and clung

about him. One account (not the official medical one) of the demoniacal

possessions at Morzine in Savoy, in 1864, relates that a patient was

held suspended in the air by an invisible force during some seconds or

minutes above the cemetery, in the presence of the archbishop.[243]

Modern spiritualists claim this power as possessed by certain

distinguished living mediums, who, indeed, profess to rival in sober

fact the aerostatic miracles of Buddhist and Catholic legend. The force

employed is of course considered to be that of the spirits.

The performances of tied mediums have been specially represented in

England by the Davenport Brothers, who ‘are generally recognized by

Spiritualists as genuine media, and attribute the reverse opinion so

deeply rooted in the public mind, to the untruthfulness of the London

and many other newspapers.’ The performers were bound fast and shut by

themselves in a dark cabinet, with musical instruments, whence not only

musical sounds proceeded, but the coats of the mediums were taken off

and replaced; yet on inspection their bodies were discovered still

bound. The spirits would also release the bound mediums from their

cords, however carefully tied about them.[244] Now the idea of

supernatural unbinding is very ancient, vouched for as it is by no less

a personage than the crafty Odysseus himself, in his adventure on board

the ship of the Thesprotians:

‘Me on the well-benched vessel, strongly bound,

They leave, and snatch their meal upon the beach.

But to my help the gods themselves unwound

My cords with ease, though firmly twisted round.’

In early English chronicle, we find it in a story told by the Venerable

Bede. A certain Imma was found all but dead on the field of battle, and

taken prisoner, but when he began to recover and was put in bonds to

prevent his escaping, no sooner did his binders leave him but he was

loose again. The earl who owned him enquired whether he had about him

such ‘loosening letters’ (literas solutorias) as tales were told of; the

man replied that he knew naught of such arts; yet when his owner sold

him to another master, there was still no binding him. The received

explanation of this strange power was emphatically a spiritual one. His

brother had sought for his dead body, and finding another like him,

buried it and proceeded to say masses for his brother’s soul, by the

celebration whereof it came to pass that no one could fasten him, for he

was out of bonds again directly. So they sent him home to Kent, whence

he duly returned his ransom, and his story, it is related, stimulated

many to devotion, who understood by it how salutary are masses to the

redemption both of soul and body. Again, there prevailed in Scotland up

to the 18th century this notion: when the lunatics who had been brought

to St. Fillan’s Pool to be bathed, were laid bound in the neighbouring

church next night, if they were found loose in the morning their

recovery was expected, but if at dawn they were still bound, their cure

was doubtful.

The untying trick performed among savages is so similar to that of our

mountebanks, that when we find the North American Indian jugglers doing

both this and the familiar trick of breathing fire, we are at a loss to

judge whether they inherited these two feats from their savage

ancestors, or borrowed them from the white men. The point is not,

however, the mere performance of the untying trick, but its being

attributed to the help of spiritual beings. This notion is thoroughly at

home in savage culture. It comes out well in the Esquimaux’ accounts

which date from early in the 18th century. Cranz thus describes the

Greenland angekok setting out on his mystic journey to heaven and hell.

When he has drummed awhile and made all sorts of wondrous contortions,

he is himself bound with a thong by one of his pupils, his head between

his legs, and his hands behind his back. All the lamps in the house are

put out, and the windows darkened, for no one must see him hold

intercourse with his spirit, no one must move or even scratch his head,

that the spirit may not be interfered with—or rather, says the

missionary, that no one may catch him at his trickery, for there is no

going up to heaven in broad daylight. At last, after strange noises have

been heard, and a visit has been received or paid to the torngak or

spirit, the magician reappears unbound, but pale and excited, and gives

an account of his adventures. Castrén’s account of the similar

proceedings of the Siberian shamans is as follows: ‘They are practised’

he says, ‘in all sorts of conjuring-tricks, by which they know how to

dazzle the simple crowd, and inspire greater trust in themselves. One of

the most usual juggleries of the shamans in the Government of Tomsk

consists of the following hocus-pocus, a wonder to the Russians as well

as to the Samoieds. The shaman sits down on the wrong side of a dry

reindeer-hide spread in the middle of the floor. There he lets himself

be bound hand and foot by the assistants. The shutters are closed, and

the shaman begins to invoke his ministering spirits. All at once there

arises a mysterious ghostliness in the dark space. Voices are heard from

different parts, both within and without the yurt, while on the dry

reindeer skin there is a rattling and drumming in regular time. Bears

growl, snakes hiss, and squirrels leap about in the room. At last this

uncanny work ceases, and the audience impatiently await the result of

the game. A few moments pass in this expectation, and behold, the shaman

walks in free and unbound from outside. No one doubts that it was the

spirits who were drumming, growling, and hissing, who released the

shaman from his bonds, and who carried him by secret ways out of the

yurt.’[245]

On the whole, the ethnography of spiritualism bears on practical opinion

somewhat in this manner. Beside the question of the absolute truth or

falsity of the alleged possessions, names-oracles, doubles, brain-waves,

furniture movings, and floatings in the air, there remains the history

of spiritualistic belief as a matter of opinion. Hereby it appears that

the received spiritualistic theory of the alleged phenomena belongs to

the philosophy of savages. As to such matters as apparitions or

possessions this is obvious, and it holds in more extreme cases. Suppose

a wild North American Indian looking on at a spirit-séance in London. As

to the presence of disembodied spirits, manifesting themselves by raps,

noises, voices, and other physical actions, the savage would be

perfectly at home in the proceedings, for such things are part and

parcel of his recognized system of nature. The part of the affair really

strange to him would be the introduction of such arts as spelling and

writing, which do belong to a different state of civilization from his.

The issue raised by the comparison of savage, barbaric, and civilized

spiritualism, is this: Do the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar

necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer, and the Boston medium, share the

possession of belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import,

which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two

centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless? Is what we are

habitually boasting of and calling new enlightenment, then, in fact a

decay of knowledge? If so, this is a truly remarkable case of

degeneration, and the savages whom some ethnographers look on as

degenerate from a higher civilization, may turn on their accusers and

charge them with having fallen from the high level of savage knowledge.

Throughout the whole of this varied investigation, whether of the

dwindling survival of old culture, or of its bursting forth afresh in

active revival, it may perhaps be complained that its illustrations

should be chosen so much among things worn out, worthless, frivolous, or

even bad with downright harmful folly. It is in fact so, and I have

taken up this course of argument with full knowledge and intent. For,

indeed, we have in such enquiries continual reason to be thankful for

fools. It is quite wonderful, even if we hardly go below the surface of

the subject, to see how large a share stupidity and unpractical

conservatism and dogged superstition have had in preserving for us

traces of the history of our race, which practical utilitarianism would

have remorselessly swept away. The savage is firmly, obstinately

conservative. No man appeals with more unhesitating confidence to the

great precedent-makers of the past; the wisdom of his ancestors can

control against the most obvious evidence his own opinions and actions.

We listen with pity to the rude Indian as he maintains against civilized

science and experience the authority of his rude forefathers. We smile

at the Chinese appealing against modern innovation to the golden

precepts of Confucius, who in his time looked back with the same

prostrate reverence to sages still more ancient, counselling his

disciples to follow the seasons of Hea, to ride in the carriage of Yin,

to wear the ceremonial cap of Chow.

The nobler tendency of advancing culture, and above all of scientific

culture, is to honour the dead without grovelling before them, to profit

by the past without sacrificing the present to it. Yet even the modern

civilized world has but half learnt this lesson, and an unprejudiced

survey may lead us to judge how many of our ideas and customs exist

rather by being old than by being good. Now in dealing with hurtful

superstitions, the proof that they are things which it is the tendency

of savagery to produce, and of higher culture to destroy, is accepted as

a fair controversial argument. The mere historical position of a belief

or custom may raise a presumption as to its origin which becomes a

presumption as to its authenticity. Dr. Middleton’s celebrated Letter

from Rome shows cases in point. He mentions the image of Diana at

Ephesus which fell from the sky, thereby damaging the pretensions of the

Calabrian image of St. Dominic, which, according to pious tradition, was

likewise brought down from heaven. He notices that as the blood of St.

Januarius now melts miraculously without heat, so ages ago the priests

of Gnatia tried to persuade Horace, on his road to Brundusium, that the

frankincense in their temple had the habit of melting in like manner:

‘... dehinc Gnatia lymphis

Iratis exstructa dedit risusque jocosque;

Dum flamma sine thura liquescere limine sacro,

Persuadere cupit: credat Judæus Apella;

Non ego.’[246]

Thus ethnographers, not without a certain grim satisfaction, may at

times find means to make stupid and evil superstitions bear witness

against themselves.

Moreover, in working to gain an insight into the general laws of

intellectual movement, there is practical gain in being able to study

them rather among antiquarian relics of no intense modern interest, than

among those seething problems of the day on which action has to be taken

amid ferment and sharp strife. Should some moralist or politician speak

contemptuously of the vanity of studying matters without practical

moment, it will generally be found that his own mode of treatment will

consist in partizan diatribes on the questions of the day, a proceeding

practical enough, especially in confirming those who agree with him

already, but the extreme opposite to the scientific way of eliciting

truth. The ethnographer’s course, again, should be like that of the

anatomist who carries on his studies if possible rather on dead than on

living subjects; vivisection is nervous work, and the humane

investigator hates inflicting needless pain. Thus when the student of

culture occupies himself in viewing the bearings of exploded

controversies, or in unravelling the history of long-superseded

inventions, he is gladly seeking his evidence rather in such dead old

history, than in the discussions where he and those he lives among are

alive with intense party feeling, and where his judgment is biassed by

the pressure of personal sympathy, and even it may be of personal gain

or loss. So, from things which perhaps never were of high importance,

things which have fallen out of popular significance, or even out of

popular memory, he tries to elicit general laws of culture, often to be

thus more easily and fully gained than in the arena of modern philosophy

and politics.

But the opinions drawn from old or worn-out culture are not to be left

lying where they were shaped. It is no more reasonable to suppose the

laws of mind differently constituted in Australia and in England, in the

time of the cave-dwellers and in the time of the builders of sheet-iron

houses, than to suppose that the laws of chemical combination were of

one sort in the time of the coal-measures, and are of another now. The

thing that has been will be; and we are to study savages and old nations

to learn the laws that under new circumstances are working for good or

ill in our own development. If it is needful to give an instance of the

directness with which antiquity and savagery bear upon our modern life,

let it be taken in the facts just brought forward on the relation of

ancient sorcery to the belief in witchcraft which was not long since one

of the gravest facts of European history, and of savage spiritualism to

beliefs which so deeply affect our civilization now. No one who can see

in these cases, and in many others to be brought before him in these

volumes, how direct and close the connexion may be between modern

culture and the condition of the rudest savage, will be prone to accuse

students who spend their labour on even the lowest and most trifling

facts of ethnography, of wasting their hours in the satisfaction of a

frivolous curiosity.

Footnote 160:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 119.

Footnote 161:

‘Life of Nath. Pearce,’ ed. by J. J. Halls, vol. i. p. 286.

Footnote 162:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 328; vol. ii. p. 273; see vol. iv. p.

425.

Footnote 163:

Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ part ii. p. 435.

Footnote 164:

Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 6; see p. 16.

Footnote 165:

Jas. Gardner, ‘Faiths of the World,’ s.v. ‘Exorcism.’

Footnote 166:

Shortt, ‘Tribes of Neilgherries,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. pp.

247, 277; Sir W. Elliot in ‘Trans. Congress of Prehistoric

Archæology,’ 1868, p. 253.

Footnote 167:

F. Rühs, ‘Finland,’ p. 296; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 202.

Footnote 168:

Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. pp. 81-3; see p. 313.

Footnote 169:

Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 128; see p. 239.

Footnote 170:

For an examination of numerous magical arts, mostly coming under this

category, see ‘Early History of Mankind,’ chaps. vi. and x.

Footnote 171:

Stanbridge, ‘Abor. of Victoria,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 299;

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 364; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Africa,’ p.

215; Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ vol. i. p. 124; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche

Volksaberglaube,’ p. 195; general references in ‘Early History of

Mankind,’ p. 129.

Footnote 172:

Burton, ‘W. and W. from West Africa,’ p. 411.

Footnote 173:

W. Gregory, ‘Letters on Animal Magnetism,’ p. 128.

Footnote 174:

Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 361; Collins, ‘New South Wales,’ vol.

i. pp. 561, 594.

Footnote 175:

Shortt, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 278.

Footnote 176:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 117.

Footnote 177:

See Grote, vol. iii. pp. 113, 351.

Footnote 178:

Hardy, ‘Eastern Monachism,’ p. 241.

Footnote 179:

Oldfield, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 246.

Footnote 180:

Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 134.

Footnote 181:

See specimen and description in the Christy Museum.

Footnote 182:

Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 130, 363.

Footnote 183:

Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 31.

Footnote 184:

R. Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom. of W. of England,’ 2nd ser. p. 165; Brand, ‘Pop.

Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 231.

Footnote 185:

Wuttke, p. 100.

Footnote 186:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 560.

Footnote 187:

Brand, vol. iii. p. 240.

Footnote 188:

Hunt, _ibid._ p. 148.

Footnote 189:

Wuttke, p. 165; Brand, vol. iii. p. 305.

Footnote 190:

Magalhanes de Gandavo, p. 125; D’Orbigny, vol. ii. p. 168.

Footnote 191:

St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 202; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii.

p. 357.

Footnote 192:

Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 90; Polack, vol. i. p. 248.

Footnote 193:

Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 202.

Footnote 194:

Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 381.

Footnote 195:

See Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Occulta Philosophia,’ i. 53; ‘De Vanitate

Scient.’ 37; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1073; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 285;

Brand, vol. iii. pp. 184-227.

Footnote 196:

Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 241.

Footnote 197:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 279.

Footnote 198:

Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ pp. 236, 241; R. Taylor, ‘N. Z.’ p. 334.

Footnote 199:

Artemidorus, ‘Oneirocritica;’ Cockayne, ‘Leechdoms, &c., of Early

England,’ vol. iii.; Seafield, ‘Literature, &c., of Dreams;’ Brand,

vol. iii.; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes, &c.,’ p. 217, &c., &c.

Footnote 200:

St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 74, 115; Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol.

iv. p. 150; Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. i. p. 255.

Footnote 201:

Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. p. 281; Hooker, ‘Himalayan

Journals,’ vol. i. p. 135; ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p. 27; Latham, ‘Descr.

Eth.’ vol. i. p. 61.

Footnote 202:

Cieza de Leon, p. 289; Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 183.

Footnote 203:

Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 32; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 417, 518.

Footnote 204:

Plin. xi. 73. See Cic. de Divinatione, ii. 12.

Footnote 205:

Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 32.

Footnote 206:

Le Jeune, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. i. p. 90.

Footnote 207:

J. H. Plath, ‘Rel. d. alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 89; Klemm, ‘Cultur.

Gesch.’ vol. iii. pp. 109, 199; vol. iv. p. 221; Rubruquis, in

Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 65; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1067; R. F. Burton,

‘Sindh,’ p. 189; M. A. Walker, ‘Macedonia,’ p. 169.

Footnote 208:

Brand, vol. iii. p. 339; Forbes Leslie, vol. ii. p. 491.

Footnote 209:

Maury, ‘Magie, &c.’, p. 74; Brand, vol. iii. p. 348, &c. See figure in

Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Occult. Philosoph.,’ ii. 27.

Footnote 210:

R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 205; Shortland, p. 139; Callaway,

‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 330, &c.; Theophylact. in Brand, vol. iii.

p. 332. Compare mentions of similar devices; Herodot. iv. 67

(Scythia); Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 350.

Footnote 211:

Migne’s ‘Dic. des Sciences Occultes.’

Footnote 212:

Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 200;

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 146.

Footnote 213:

Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 170. See Macpherson, p. 106 (Khonds).

Footnote 214:

Ammian. Marcellin. xxix. 1.

Footnote 215:

Chevreul, ‘De la Baguette Divinatoire, du Pendule dit Explorateur et

des Tables Tournantes,’ Paris, 1854; Brand, vol. iii. p. 332; Grimm,

‘D. M.’ p. 926; H. B. Woodward, in ‘Geological Mag.,’ Nov. 1872;

Wuttke, p. 94.

Footnote 216:

Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Speciebus Magiæ,’ xxi.; Brand, vol. iii. p.

351; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1062.

Footnote 217:

De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St. Petersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 212.

Footnote 218:

Shortland, ‘Trads., &c. of New Zealand,’ p. 138.

Footnote 219:

See Cicero, ‘De Div.’ i.; Lucian, ‘De Astrolog.’; Cornelius Agrippa,

‘De Occulta Philosophia;’ Sibly, ‘Occult Sciences;’ Brand, vol. iii.

Footnote 220:

Plin. xvi. 75; xviii. 75; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 676; Brand, vol. ii. p.

169; vol. iii. p. 144.

Footnote 221:

Bacon, ‘Novum Organum.’ The original story is that of Diagoras; see

Cicero, ‘De Natura Deorum,’ iii. 37; Diog. Laërt. lib. vi., Diogenes,

6.

Footnote 222:

Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ pp. 428, 435; Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol.

i. pp. 57, 113, 121.

Footnote 223:

See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xxxiv.; Lecky, ‘Hist. of Rationalism,’ vol. i.

chap. i.; Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek;’ Raynald, ‘Annales

Ecclesiastici,’ vol. ii., Greg. IX. (1233), xli.-ii.; Innoc. VIII.

(1484), lxxiv.

Footnote 224:

See also Dasent, ‘Introd. to Norse Tales;’ Maury, ‘Magie, &c.,’ ch.

vii.

Footnote 225:

Lane, ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ vol. i. p. 30; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp.

435, 465, 1056; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 265, 287; vol. iii. p.

204; D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Annals of Scotland,’ vol. ii. p. 126;

Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 15, 20, 122, 220.

Footnote 226:

Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. pp. 1-43; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p.

50; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer,’ p. 923; Pictet, ‘Origines

Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 459; Manu, viii., 114-5; see Plin. vii. 2.

Footnote 227:

Swedenborg, ‘The True Christian Religion,’ London, 1855, Nos. 156,

157, 281, 851.

Footnote 228:

Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth,’ pp. 473, 481.

Footnote 229:

St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 82; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 111;

‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. iii. pp. 232, 259, 288; Boecler, ‘Ehsten

Aberglaube,’ p. 147.

Footnote 230:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 74.

Footnote 231:

Brand, vol. ii. p. 486.

Footnote 232:

Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part ii. The invisible drummer

appears to have been one William Drury; see ‘Pepys’ Diary,’ vol. i. p.

227.

Footnote 233:

Brand, vol. iii. pp. 225, 233; Grimm, pp. 801, 1089, 1141; Wuttke, pp.

38-9, 208; Shortland, ‘Trads. of New Zealand,’ p. 137 (ominous ticking

of insect, doubtful whether idea native, or introduced by foreigners).

Footnote 234:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 393.

Footnote 235:

Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 112; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol.

iii. p. 252; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 159.

Footnote 236:

Toehla, ‘Aurifontina Chymica,’ cited by K. R. H. Mackenzie, in

‘Spiritualist,’ Mar. 15, 1870.

Footnote 237:

Nicephor. Callist. Ecclesiast. Hist. viii. 23; Stanley, ‘Eastern

Church,’ p. 172.

Footnote 238:

‘Pneumatologie Positive et Expérimentale; La Réalité des Esprits et le

Phénomène Merveilleux de leur Écriture Directe démontrés,’ par le

Baron L. de Guldenstubbé. Paris, 1857.

Footnote 239:

Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 38, 126, 150; ‘Eastern Monachism,’ pp.

272, 285, 382; Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. i. p. 412; Bastian,

‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 390; Philostrati Vita Apollon. Tyan. iii.

15. See the mention among the Saadhs of India (17th century), by

Trant, in ‘Missionary Register,’ July, 1820, pp. 294-6.

Footnote 240:

Lucian, Philopseudes, 13.

Footnote 241:

Eunapius in Iambl.

Footnote 242:

Alban Butler, ‘Lives of the Saints,’ vol. i. p. 674; Calmet, ‘Diss.

sur les Apparitions, &c.,’ chap. xxi.; De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St.

Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. pp. 158, 175. See also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol.

ii. p. 578; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 159.

Footnote 243:

Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part ii.; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’

p. 161.

Footnote 244:

‘Spiritualist,’ Feb. 15, 1870. Orrin Abbott, ‘The Davenport Brothers,’

New York, 1864.

Footnote 245:

Homer, Odyss. xiv. 345 (Worsley’s Trans.); Beda, ‘Historia

Ecclesiastica,’ iv. 22; Grimm, ‘D. M.,’ p. 1180 (an old German

loosing-charm is given from the Merseburg MS.); J. Y. Simpson, in

‘Proc. Ant. Soc. Scotland,’ vol. iv.; Keating, ‘Long’s Exp. to St.

Peter’s River,’ vol. ii. p. 159; Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 189; Cranz,

‘Grönland,’ p. 269; Castrén, ‘Reiseberichte,’ 1845-9, p. 173.

Footnote 246:

Conyers Middleton, ‘A Letter from Rome,’ 1729; Hor. Sat. I. v. 98.

CHAPTER V.

EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

Element of directly expressive Sound in Language—Test by independent

correspondence in distinct languages—Constituent processes of

Language—Gesture—Expression of feature, &c.—Emotional

Tone—Articulate sounds, vowels determined by musical quality and

pitch, consonants—Emphasis and Accent—Phrase-melody,

Recitative—Sound-Words—Interjections—Calls to Animals—Emotional

Cries—Sense-Words formed from Interjections—Affirmative and Negative

particles, &c.

In carrying on the enquiry into the development of culture, evidence of

some weight is to be gained from an examination of Language. Comparing

the grammars and dictionaries of races at various grades of

civilization, it appears that, in the great art of speech, the educated

man at this day substantially uses the method of the savage, only

expanded and improved in the working out of details. It is true that the

languages of the Tasmanian and the Chinese, of the Greenlander and the

Greek, differ variously in structure; but this is a secondary

difference, underlaid by a primary similarity in method, namely, the

expression of ideas by articulate sounds habitually allotted to them.

Now all languages are found on inspection to contain some articulate

sounds of a directly natural and directly intelligible kind. These are

sounds of interjectional or imitative character, which have their

meaning not by inheritance from parents or adoption from foreigners, but

by being taken up directly from the world of sound into the world of

sense. Like pantomimic gestures, they are capable of conveying their

meaning of themselves, without reference to the particular language they

are used in connexion with. From the observation of these, there have

arisen speculations as to the origin of language, treating such

expressive sounds as the fundamental constituents of language in

general, and considering those of them which are still plainly

recognizable as having remained more or less in their original state,

long courses of adaptation and variation having produced from such the

great mass of words in all languages, in which no connexion between idea

and sound can any longer be certainly made out. Thus grew up doctrines

of a ‘natural’ origin of language, which, dating from classic times,

were developed in the eighteenth century into a system by that powerful

thinker, the President Charles de Brosses, and in our own time have been

expanded and solidified by a school of philologers, among whom Mr.

Hensleigh Wedgwood is the most prominent.[247] These theories have no

doubt been incautiously and fancifully worked. No wonder that students

who found in nature real and direct sources of articulate speech, in

interjectional sounds like _ah!_ _ugh!_ _h’m!_ _sh!_ and in imitative

sounds like _purr_, _whiz_, _tomtom_, _cuckoo_, should have thought that

the whole secret of language lay within their grasp, and that they had

only to fit the keys thus found into one hole after another to open

every lock. When a philosopher has a truth in his hands, he is apt to

stretch it farther than it will bear. The magic umbrella must spread and

spread till it becomes a tent wide enough to shelter the king’s army.

But it must be borne in mind that what criticism touches in these

opinions is their exaggeration, not their reality. That interjections

and imitative words are really taken up to some extent, be it small or

large, into the very body and structure of language, no one denies. Such

a denial, if anyone offered it, the advocates of the disputed theories

might dispose of in the single phrase, that they would neither be

_pooh-poohed_ nor _hooted_ down. It may be shown within the limits of

the most strict and sober argument, that the theory of the origin of

language in natural and directly expressive sounds does account for a

considerable fraction of the existing copia verborum, while it raises a

presumption that, could we trace the history of words more fully, it

would account for far more.

In here examining interjectional and imitative sounds with their

derivative words, as well as certain other parts of language of a more

or less cognate character, I purpose to bring forward as far as possible

new evidence derived from the languages of savage and barbarous races.

By so doing it becomes practicable to use a check which in great measure

stops the main source of uncertainty and error in such enquiries, the

habit of etymologizing words off-hand from expressive sounds, by the

unaided and often flighty fancy of a philologer. By simply enlarging the

survey of language, the province of the imagination is brought within

narrower limits. If several languages, which cannot be classed as

distinctly of the same family, unite in expressing some notion by a

particular sound which may fairly claim to be interjectional or

imitative, their combined authority will go far to prove the claim a

just one. For if it be objected that such words may have passed into the

different languages from a common source, of which the trace is for the

most part lost, this may be answered by the question, Why is there not a

proportionate agreement between the languages in question throughout the

far larger mass of words which cannot pretend to be direct sound-words?

If several languages have independently chosen like words to express

like meanings, then we may reasonably suppose that we are not deluding

ourselves in thinking such words highly appropriate to their purpose.

They are words which answered the conditions of original language,

conforming as they do to the saying of Thomas Aquinas, that the names of

things ought to agree with their natures, ‘nomina debent naturis rerum

congruere.’ Applied in such comparison, the languages of the lower races

contribute evidence of excellent quality to the problem. It will at the

same time and by the same proofs appear, that savages possess in a high

degree the faculty of uttering their minds directly in emotional tones

and interjections, of going straight to nature to furnish themselves

with imitative sounds, including reproductions of their own direct

emotional utterances, as means of expression of ideas, and of

introducing into their formal language words so produced. They have

clearly thus far the means and power of producing language. In so far as

the theories under consideration account for the original formation of

language, they countenance the view that this formation took place among

mankind in a savage state, and even, for anything appearing to the

contrary, in a still lower stage of culture than has survived to our

day.[248]

The first step in such investigation is to gain a clear idea of the

various elements of which spoken language is made up. These may be

enumerated as gesture, expression of feature, emotional tone, emphasis,

force, speed, &c. of utterance, musical rhythm and intonation, and the

formation of the vowels and consonants which are the skeleton of

articulate speech.

In the common intercourse of men, speech is habitually accompanied by

gesture, the hands, head, and body aiding and illustrating the spoken

phrase. So far as we can judge, the visible gesture and the audible word

have been thus used in combination since times of most remote antiquity

in the history of our race. It seems, however, that in the daily

intercourse of the lower races, gesture holds a much more important

place than we are accustomed to see it fill, a position even encroaching

on that which articulate speech holds among ourselves. Mr. Bonwick

confirms by his experience Dr. Milligan’s account of the Tasmanians as

using ‘signs to eke out the meaning of monosyllabic expressions, and to

give force, precision, and character to vocal sounds.’ Captain Wilson

remarks on the use of gesticulation in modifying words in the Chinook

Jargon. There is confirmation to Spix and Martius’ description of low

Brazilian tribes completing by signs the meaning of their scanty

sentences, thus making the words ‘wood-go’ serve to say ‘I will go into

the wood,’ by pointing the mouth like a snout in the direction meant.

The Rev. J. L. Wilson, describing the Grebo language of West Africa,

remarks that they have personal pronouns, but seldom use them in

conversation, leaving it to gesture to determine whether a verb is to be

taken in the first or second person; thus the words ‘ni ne’ will mean ‘I

do it,’ or ‘you do it,’ according to the significant gestures of the

speaker.[249] Beside such instances, it will hereafter be noticed that

the lower races, in counting, habitually use gesture-language for a

purpose to which higher races apply word-language. To this prominent

condition of gesture as a means of expression among rude tribes, and to

the development of pantomime in public show and private intercourse

among such peoples as the Neapolitans of our own day, the most extreme

contrast may be found in England, where, whether for good or ill,

suggestive pantomime is now reduced to so small a compass in social

talk, and even in public oratory.

Changes of the bodily attitude, corresponding in their fine gradations

with changes of the feelings, comprise conditions of the surface of the

body, postures of the limbs, and also especially those expressive

attitudes of the face to which our attention is particularly directed

when we notice one another. The visible expression of the features is a

symptom which displays the speaker’s state of mind, his feelings of

pleasure or disgust, of pride or humility, of faith or doubt, and so

forth. Not that there is between the emotion and its bodily expression

any originally intentional connexion. It is merely that a certain action

of our physical machinery shows symptoms which we have learnt by

experience to refer to a mental cause, as we judge by seeing a man sweat

or limp that he is hot or footsore. Blushing is caused by certain

emotions, and among Europeans it is a visible expression or symptom of

them; not so among South American Indians, whose blushes, as Mr. David

Forbes points out, may be detected by the hand or a thermometer, but

being concealed by the dark skin cannot serve as a visible sign of

feeling.[250] By turning these natural processes to account, men

contrive to a certain extent to put on particular physical expressions,

frowning or smiling for instance, in order to simulate the emotions

which would naturally produce such expressions, or merely to convey the

thought of such emotions to others. Now it is well known to every one

that physical expression by feature, &c., forming a part of the

universal gesture-language, thus serves as an important adjunct to

spoken language. It is not so obvious, but on examination will prove to

be true, that such expression by feature itself acts as a formative

power in vocal language. Expression of countenance has an action beyond

that of mere visible gesture. The bodily attitude brought on by a

particular state of mind affects the position of the organs of speech,

both the internal larynx, &c., and the external features whose change

can be watched by the mere looker-on. Even though the expression of the

speaker’s face may not be seen by the hearer, the effect of the whole

bodily attitude of which it forms part is not thereby done away with.

For on the position thus taken by the various organs concerned in

speech, depends what I have here called ‘emotional tone,’ whereby the

voice carries direct expression of the speaker’s feeling.

The ascertaining of the precise physical mode in which certain attitudes

of the internal and external face come to correspond to certain moods of

mind, is a physiological problem as yet little understood; but the fact

that particular expressions of face are accompanied by corresponding and

dependent expressions of emotional tone, only requires an observer or a

looking-glass to prove it. The laugh made with a solemn, contemptuous,

or sarcastic face, is quite different from that which comes from a

joyous one; the _ah! oh! ho! hey!_ and so on, change their modulations

to match the expression of countenance. The effect of the emotional tone

does not even require fitness in the meaning of the spoken words, for

nonsense or an unknown tongue may be made to convey, when spoken with

expressive intonation, the feelings which are displayed upon the

speaker’s face. This expression may even be recognized in the dark by

noticing the tone it gives forth, while the forced character given by

the attempt to bring out a sound not matching even the outward play of

the features can hardly be hidden by the most expert ventriloquist, and

in such forcing, the sound perceptibly drags the face into the attitude

that fits with it. The nature of communication by emotional tone seems

to me to be somewhat on this wise. It does not appear that particular

tones at all belong directly and of themselves to particular emotions,

but that their action depends on the vocal organs of the speaker and

hearer. Other animals, having vocal organs different from man’s, have

accordingly, as we know, a different code of emotional tones. An

alteration in man’s vocal organs would bring a corresponding alteration

in the effect of tone in expressing feeling; the tone which to us

expresses surprise or anger might come to express pleasure, and so

forth. As it is, children learn by early experience that such and such a

tone indicates such and such an emotion, and this they make out partly

by finding themselves uttering such tones when their feelings have

brought their faces to the appropriate attitudes, and partly by

observing the expression of voice in others. At three or four years old

they are to be seen in the act of acquiring this knowledge, turning

round to look at the speaker’s face and gesture to make sure of the

meaning of the tone. But in later years this knowledge becomes so

familiar that it is supposed to have been intuitive. Then, when men talk

together, the hearer receives from each emotional tone an indication, a

signal, of the speaker’s attitude of body, and through this of his state

of mind. These he can recognize, and even reproduce in himself, as the

operator at one end of a telegraphic wire can follow, by noticing his

needles, the action of his colleague at the other. In watching the

process which thus enables one man to take a copy of another’s emotions

through their physical effects on his vocal tone, we may admire the

perfection with which a means so simple answers an end so complex, and

apparently so remote.

By eliminating from speech all effects of gesture, of expression of

face, and of emotional tone, we go far toward reducing it to that system

of conventional articulate sounds which the grammarian and the

comparative philologist habitually consider as language. These

articulate sounds are capable of being roughly set down in signs

standing for vowels and consonants, with the aid of accents and other

significant marks; and they may then again be read aloud from these

written signs, by any one who has learnt to give its proper sound to

each letter.

What vowels are, is a matter which has been for some years well

understood.[251] They are compound musical tones such as, in the vox

humana stop of the organ, are sounded by reeds (vibrating tongues)

fitted to organ-pipes of particular construction. The manner of

formation of vowels by the voice is shortly this. There are situated in

the larynx a pair of vibrating membranes called the vocal chords, which

may be rudely imitated by stretching a piece of sheet india-rubber over

the open end of a tube, so as to form two half-covers to it, ‘like the

parchment of a drum split across the middle;’ when the tube is blown

through, the india-rubber flaps will vibrate as the vocal chords do in

the larynx, and give out a sound. In the human voice, the musical effect

of the vibrating chords is increased by the cavity of the mouth, which

acts as a resonator or sounding-box, and which also, by its shape at any

moment, modifies the musical ‘quality’ or ‘timbre’ of the sound

produced. This, not the less felt because its effects are not registered

in musical notation, depends on the harmonic overtones accompanying the

fundamental tone which alone musical notation takes account of. It makes

the difference between the same note on two instruments, flute and piano

for instance, while some instruments, as the violin, can give to one

note a wide variation of quality. To such quality the formation of

vowels is due. This is perfectly shown by the common Jew’s harp, which

when struck can be made to utter the vowels a, e, i, o, u, &c., by

simply putting the mouth in the proper position for speaking these

vowels. In this experiment the player’s voice emits no sound, but the

vibrating tongue of the Jew’s harp placed in front of the mouth acts as

a substitute for the vocal chords, and the vowel-sounds are produced by

the various positions of the cavity of the mouth, modifying the quality

of the note, by bringing out with different degrees of strength the

series of harmonic tones of which it is composed. As to musical theory,

emotional tone and vowel-tone are connected. In fact, an emotional tone

may be defined as a vowel, whose particular musical quality is that

produced by the human vocal organs, when adjusted to a particular state

of feeling.

Europeans, while using modulation of musical pitch as affecting the

force of words in a sentence, know nothing of making it alter the

dictionary-meaning of a word. But this device is known elsewhere,

especially in South-East Asia, where rises and falls of tone, to some

extent like those which serve us in conveying emphasis, question and

answer, &c., actually give different signification. Thus in Siamese,

_há_=to seek, _hã_=pestilence, _hà_=five. The consequence of this

elaborate system of tone-accentuation is the necessity of an

accumulation of expletive particles, to supply the place of the

oratorical or emphatic intonation, which being thus given over to the

dictionary is lost for the grammar. Another consequence is, that the

system of setting poetry to music becomes radically different from ours;

to sing a Siamese song to a European tune makes the meaning of the

syllables alter according to their rise and fall in pitch, and turns

their sense into the wildest nonsense.[252] In West Africa, again, the

same device appears: thus in Dahoman _so_=stick, _só_=horse,

_sò_=thunder; Yoruba, _bá_=with, _bà_=bend.[253] For practical purposes,

this linguistic music is hardly to be commended, but theoretically it is

interesting, as showing that man does not servilely follow an intuitive

or inherited scheme of language, but works out in various ways the

resources of sound as a means of expression.

The theory of consonants is much more obscure than that of vowels. They

are not musical vibrations as vowels are, but noises accompanying them.

To the musician such noises as the rushing of the wind from the

organ-pipe, the scraping of the violin, the sputtering of the flute, are

simply troublesome as interfering with his musical tones, and he takes

pains to diminish them as much as may be. But in the art of language

noises of this kind, far from being avoided, are turned to immense

account by being used as consonants, in combination with the musical

vowels. As to the positions and movements of the vocal organs in

producing consonants, an excellent account with anatomical diagrams is

given in Professor Max Müller’s second series of Lectures. For the

present purpose of passing in review the various devices by which the

language-maker has contrived to make sound a means of expressing

thought, perhaps no better illustration of their nature can be mentioned

than Sir Charles Wheatstone’s account of his speaking machine;[254] for

one of the best ways of studying difficult phenomena is to see them

artificially imitated. The instrument in question pronounced Latin,

French, and Italian words well: it could say, ‘Je vous aime de tout mon

cœur,’ ‘Leopoldus Secundus Romanorum Imperator,’ and so forth, but it

was not so successful with German. As to the vowels, they were of course

simply sounded by suitable reeds and pipes. To affect them with

consonants, contrivances were arranged to act like the human organs.

Thus _p_ was made by suddenly removing the operator’s hand from the

mouth of the figure, and _b_ in the same way, except that the mouth was

not quite covered, while an outlet like the nostrils was used in forming

_m_; _f_ and _v_ were rendered by modifying the shape of the mouth by a

hand; air was made to rush through small tubes to produce the sibilants

_s_ and _sh_; and the liquids _r_ and _l_ were sounded by the action of

tremulous reeds. As Wheatstone remarks, the most important use of such

ingenious mechanical imitations of speech may be to fix and preserve an

accurate register of the pronunciation of different languages. A

perfectly arranged speaking machine would in fact represent for us that

framework of language which consists of mere vowels and consonants,

though without most of those expressive adjuncts which go to make up the

conversation of speaking men.

Of vowels and consonants capable of being employed in language, man is

able to pronounce and distinguish an enormous variety. But this great

stock of possible sounds is nowhere brought into use altogether. Each

language or dialect of the world is found in practice to select a

limited series of definite vowels and consonants, keeping with tolerable

exactness to each, and thus choosing what we may call its phonetic

alphabet. Neglecting such minor differences as occur in the speech of

individuals or small communities, each dialect of the world may be said

to have its own phonetic system, and these phonetic systems vary widely.

Our vowels, for instance, differ much from those of French and Dutch.

French knows nothing of either of the sounds which we write as _th_ in

_thin_ and _that_, while the Castilian lisped _c_, the so-called

_ceceo_, is a third consonant which we must again make shift to write as

_th_, though it is quite distinct in sound from both our own. It is

quite a usual thing for us to find foreign languages wanting letters

even near in sound to some of ours, while possessing others unfamiliar

to ourselves. Among such cases are the Chinese difficulty in pronouncing

_r_, and the want of _s_ and _f_ in Australian dialects. When foreigners

tried to teach the Mohawks, who have no labials in their language, to

pronounce words with _p_ and _b_ in them, they protested that it was too

ridiculous to expect people to shut their mouths to speak; and the

Portuguese discoverers of Brazil, remarking that the natives had neither

_f_, _l_, nor _r_ in their language, neatly described them as a people

with neither _fé_, _ley_, nor _rey_, neither faith, law, nor king. It

may happen, too, that sounds only used by some nations as interjectional

noises, unwritten and unwriteable, shall be turned to account by others

in their articulate language. Something of this kind occurs with the

noises called ‘clicks.’ Such sounds are familiar to us as interjections;

thus the lateral click made in the cheek (and usually in the left cheek)

is continually used in driving horses, while varieties of the dental and

palatal click made with the tongue against the teeth and the roof of the

mouth, are common in the nursery as expressions of surprise, reproof, or

satisfaction. Thus, too, the natives of Tierra del Fuego express ‘no’ by

a peculiar cluck, as do also the Turks, who accompany it with the

gesture of throwing back the head; and it appears from the accounts of

travellers that the clicks of surprise and admiration among the natives

of Australia are much like those we hear at home. But though here these

clicking noises are only used interjectionally, it is well known that

South African races have taken such sounds up into their articulate

speech and have made, as we may say, letters of them. The very name of

Hottentots, applied to the Namaquas and other kindred tribes, appears to

be not a native name (as Peter Kolb thought) but a rude imitative word

coined by the Dutch to express the clicking ‘_hot_ en _tot_,’ and the

term _Hottentotism_ has been thence adopted as a medical description of

one of the varieties of stammering. North-West America is another

district of the world distinguished for the production of strange

clucking, gurgling, and grunting letters, difficult or impossible to

European voices. Moreover, there are many sounds capable of being used

in articulate speech, varieties of chirping, whistling, blowing, and

sucking noises, of which some are familiar to our own use as calls to

animals, or interjectional noises of contempt or surprise, but which no

tribe is known to have brought into their alphabet. With all the vast

phonetic variety of known languages, the limits of possible utterance

are far from being reached.

Up to a certain point we can understand the reasons which have guided

the various tribes of mankind in the selection of their various

alphabets; ease of utterance to the speaker, combined with distinctness

of effect to the hearer, have been undoubtedly among the principal of

the selecting causes. We may fairly connect with the close uniformity of

men’s organs of speech all over the world, the general similarity which

prevails in the phonetic systems of the most different languages, and

which gives us the power of roughly writing down so large a proportion

of any one language by means of an alphabet intended for any other. But

while we thus account by physical similarity for the existence of a kind

of natural alphabet common to mankind, we must look to other causes to

determine the selection of sounds used in different languages, and to

account for those remarkable courses of change which go on in languages

of a common stock, producing in Europe such variations of one original

word as _pater_, _father_, _vater_, or in the islands of Polynesia

offering us the numeral 5 under the strangely-varied forms of _lima_,

_rima_, _dima_, _nima_, and _hima_. Changes of this sort have acted so

widely and regularly, that since the enunciation of Grimm’s law their

study has become a main part of philology. Though their causes are as

yet so obscure, we may at least argue that such wide and definite

operations cannot be due to chance or arbitrary fancy, but must be the

result of laws as wide and definite as themselves.