This is an extraordinary range of diffusion of a ceremony apparently
meaningless. Is the idea that, by loosing the bonds, the seer demonstrates
the agency of spirits, after the manner of the Davenport Brothers?[28] But
the Graeco-Egyptian medium did _not_ undo the swathings of linen, in which
he was rolled, _like a mummy_. They had to be unswathed for him, by
others.[29] Again, a dead body, among the Australians, is corded up tight,
as soon as the breath is out of it, if it is to be buried, or before being
exposed on a platform, if that is the custom.[30] Again, in the Highlands
second-sight was thus acquired: the would-be seer 'must run a Tedder
(tether) of Hair, _which bound a corpse to the Bier_, about his Middle
from end to end,' and then look between his legs till he sees a funeral
cross two marches.[31] The Greenland seer is bound 'with his head between
his legs.'[32]
Can it be possible, judging from Australia, Scotland, Egypt, that the
binding, as of a corpse or mummy, is a symbolical way of putting the seer
on a level with the dead, who will then communicate with him? In three
remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to
prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the
seer is tied up--in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in
North America, a bull's hide in the Highlands.
Binding the seer is not a universal Red Indian custom; it seems to cease
in Labrador, and elsewhere, southwards, where the prophet enters a magic
lodge, unbound. Among the Narquapees, he sits cross-legged, and the lodge
begins to answer questions by leaping about.[33] The Eskimo bounds, though
he is tied up.
It would be decisive, if we could find that, wherever the sorcerer is
bound, the dead are bound also. I note the following examples, but the
Creeks do not, I think, bind the magician.
Among the Creeks,
'The corpse is placed in a hole, with a blanket wrapped about it, and the
legs bent under it _and tied together_.'[34] The dead Greenlanders were
'wrapped and sewed up in their best deer-skins.'[35]
Carver could only learn that, among the Indians he knew, dead bodies were
'wrapped in skins;' that they were also swathed with cords he does not
allege, but he was not permitted to see all the ceremonies.
My theory is, at least, plausible, for this manner of burying the dead,
tied tightly up, with the head between the legs (as in the practice of
Scottish and Greenland seers), is very old and widely diffused. Ellis
says, of the Tahitians, 'the body of the dead man was ... placed in a
sitting posture, with the knees elevated, _the face pressed down between
the knees_,... and the whole body tied with cord or cinet, wound repeatedly
round.'[36]
The binding may originally have been meant to keep the corpse, or ghost,
from 'walking.' I do not know that Tahitian prophets were ever tied up, to
await inspiration. But I submit that the frequency of the savage form of
burial with the corpse tied up, or swathed, sometimes with the head
between the legs; and the recurrence of the savage practice of similarly
binding the sorcerer, probably points to a purpose of introducing the
seer to the society of the dead. The custom, as applied to prophets, might
survive, even where the burial rite had altered, or cannot be ascertained,
and might survive, for corpses, where it had gone out of use, for seers.
The Scotch used to justify their practice of putting the head between
the knees when, bound with a corpse's hair tether, they learned to
be second-sighted, by what Elijah did. The prophet, on the peak of
Carmel, 'cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his
knees.'[37] But the cases are not analogous. Elijah had been hearing a
premonitory 'sound of abundance of rain' in a cloudless sky. He was
probably engaged in prayer, not in prophecy.
Kirk, by the way, notes that if the wind changes, while the Scottish seer
is bound, he is in peril of his life. So children are told, in Scotland,
that, if the wind changes while they are making faces, the grimace will be
permanent. The seer will, in the same way, become what he pretends to be,
a corpse.
This desertion of Carver's tale may be pardoned for the curiosity of the
topic. He goes on:
'Being thus bound up like an Egyptian mummy' (Carver unconsciously making
my point), 'the seer was lifted into the chest-like enclosure. I could now
also discern him as plain as I had ever done, and I took care not to turn
my eyes away a moment'--in which effort he probably failed.
The priest now began to mutter, and finally spoke in a mixed jargon of
scarcely intelligible dialects. He now yelled, prayed, and foamed at the
mouth, till in about three quarters of an hour he was exhausted and
speechless. 'But in an instant he sprang upon his feet, notwithstanding at
the time he was put in it appeared impossible for him to move either his
legs or arms, and shaking off his covering, as quick as if the bands with
which it had been bound were burst asunder,' he prophesied. The Great
Spirit did not say when the traders would arrive, but, just after high
noon, next day, a canoe would arrive, and the people in it would tell when
the traders were to appear.
Next day, just after high noon, a canoe came round a point of land about a
league away, and the men in it, who had met the traders, said they would
come in two days, which they did. Carver, professing freedom from any
tincture of credulity, leaves us 'to draw what conclusions we please.'
The natural inference is 'private information,' about which the only
difficulty is that Carver, who knew the topography and the chances of a
secret messenger arriving to prompt the Jossakeed, does not allude to this
theory.[38] He seems to think such successes not uncommon.
All that psychology can teach anthropology, on this whole topic of
'possession;' is that secondary or alternating personalities are facts
_in rerum natura_, that the man or woman in one personality may have no
conscious memory of what was done or said in the other, and that cases of
knowledge said to be supernormally gained in the secondary state are worth
inquiring about, if there be a chance of getting good evidence.
A few fairly respectable savage instances are given in Dr. Gibier's 'Le
Fakirisme Occidental' and in Mr. Manning's 'Old New Zealand;' but, while
modern civilised parallels depend on the solitary case of Mrs. Piper (for
no other case has been well observed), no affirmative conclusion can be
drawn from Chinese, Maori, Zulu, or Red Indian practice.
[Footnote 1: _Among the Zulus_, p. 120.]
[Footnote 2:_ Burmah_, p. 107.]
[Footnote 3: Hodgson, _Proceedings_, S.P.E., vol. xiii. pt. xxxiii. Dr.
Hodgson by no means agrees with this view of the case--the case of Mrs.
Piper.]
[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 184.]
[Footnote 5: Nevius's _Demon Possession in China_, a curious collection of
examples by an American missionary. The reports of Catholic missionaries
abound in cases.]
[Footnote 6: Op. cit. p. 169.]
[Footnote 7: Putnam, 1881.]
[Footnote 8: Nevius, p. 33.]
[Footnote 9: Ibid. p. 35.]
[Footnote 10: Op. cit. p. 38.]
[Footnote 11: See 'Fetishism and Spiritualism.']
[Footnote 12: _Nécroses et Idées Fixes_. Alcan, Paris, 1898. This is the
first of a series of works connected with the Laboratoire de Psychologie,
at the Salpétritère, in Paris.]
[Footnote 13: 'Macleod shall return, but Macrimmon shall never!']
[Footnote 14: See Ribot, _Les Maladies de la Personnalité,_; Bourru
et Burot, _Variations de la Personnalité_; Janet, _L'Automatisme
Psychologique_; James, _Principles of Psychology_; Myers, in _Proceedings_
of S.P.R., 'The Mechanism of Genius,' 'The Subliminal Self.']
[Footnote 15: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 133.]
[Footnote 16: Doolittle's _Chinese_, i. 143; ii. 110, 320.]
[Footnote 17: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., pt. xxxiii.]
[Footnote 18: _Proceedings_, S.P.R., vi. 436-650; viii. 1-167; xiii.
284-582].
[Footnote 19: _The Will to Believe_, p. 814.]
[Footnote 20: _Figaro_, January 14, 1895.]
[Footnote 21: _Proceedings_, vi. 605, 606.]
[Footnote 22: _Proceedings_, S.P.R, part xxxiii. vol. xiii.]
[Footnote 23: Op. cit. part xxxiii. p. 406.]
[Footnote 24: See 'Fetishism.' Compare Callaway, p. 328.]
[Footnote 25: Callaway, pp. 361-374.]
[Footnote 26: _Cock Lane and Common Sense_, p. 66.]
[Footnote 27: Brough Smyth, i. 475. This point is disputed, but I did not
invent it, and a case appears in Mr. Curr's work on the natives.]
[Footnote 28: _Prim. Cult_. i. 152.]
[Footnote 29: Eusebius, _Prap. Evang_. v. 9.]
[Footnote 30: Brough Smyth, i. 100, 113.]
[Footnote 31: Kirk, _Secret Commonwealth_ 1691.]
[Footnote 32: Crantz, p. 209.]
[Footnote 33: Père Arnaud, in Hind's _Labrador_, ii. 102.]
[Footnote 34: Major Swan, 1791, official letter on the Creek Indians,
Schoolcraft, v. 270.]
[Footnote 35: Crantz, p. 237.]
[Footnote 36: _Polynesian Researches_, i. 519.]
[Footnote 37: 1 Kings xviii. 42.]
[Footnote 38: Carver, pp. 123, 184.]
VIII
FETISHISM AND SPIRITUALISM
It has been shown how the doctrine of souls was developed according to the
anthropological theory. The hypothesis as to how souls of the dead were
later elevated to the rank of gods, or supplied models after which such
gods might be inventively fashioned, will be criticised in a later
chapter. Here it must suffice to say that the conception of a separable
surviving soul of a dead man was not only not essential to the savage's
idea of his supreme god, as it seems to me, but would have been wholly
inconsistent with that conception. There exist, however, numerous forms of
savage religion in addition to the creed in a Supreme Being, and these
contribute their streams to the ocean of faith. Thus among the kinds of
belief which served in the development of Polytheism, was Fetishism,
itself an adaptation and extension of the idea of separable souls. In this
regard, like ancestor-worship, it differs from the belief in a Supreme
Being, which, as we shall try to demonstrate, is not derived from the
theory of ghosts or souls at all.
_Fetish_ (_fétiche_) seems to come from Portuguese _feitiço_, a talisman
or amulet, applied by the Portuguese to various material objects
regarded by the negroes of the west coast with more or less of religious
reverence. These objects may be held sacred in some degree for a number of
incongruous reasons. They may be tokens, or may be of value in sympathetic
magic, or merely _odd_, and therefore probably endowed with unknown mystic
qualities. Or they may have been pointed out in a dream, or met in a
lucky hour and associated with good fortune, or they may (like a tree with
an unexplained stir in its branches, as reported by Kohl) have seemed to
show signs of life by spontaneous movements; in fact, a thing may be what
Europeans call a fetish for scores of reasons. For our present purpose, as
Mr. Tylor says, 'to class an object as a fetish demands explicit statement
that a spirit is considered as embodied in it, or acting through it, or
communicating by it, or, at least, that the people it belongs to do
habitually think this of such objects; or it must be shown that the object
is treated as having personal consciousness or power, is talked with,
worshipped...' and so forth. The in-dwelling spirit may be human, as when
a fetish is made out of a friend's skull, the spirit in which may even be
asked for oracles, like the Head of Bran in Welsh legend.
We have tried to show that the belief in human souls may be, in part at
least, based on supernormal phenomena which Materialism disregards. We
shall now endeavour to make it probable that Fetishism (the belief in the
souls tenanting inanimate objects) may also have sources which perhaps are
not normal, or which at all events seemed supernormal to savages. We say
'perhaps not normal' because the phenomena now to be discussed are of the
most puzzling character. We may lean to the belief in a supernormal cause
of certain hallucinations, but the alleged movements of inanimate objects
which probably supply one origin of Fetishism, one suggestion of the
presence of a spirit in things dead, leave the inquiring mind in
perplexity. In following Mr. Tylor's discussion of the subject, it is
necessary to combine what he says about Spiritualism in his fourth with
what he says about Fetishism in his fourteenth and later chapters. For
some reason his book is so arranged that he criticises 'Spiritualism'
long before he puts forward his doctrine of the origin and development of
the belief in spirits.
We have seen a savage reason for supposing that human spirits inhabit
certain lifeless things, such as skulls and other relics of the dead. But
how did it come to be thought that a spirit dwelt in a lifeless and
motionless piece of stone or stick? Mr. Tylor, perhaps, leads us to a
plausible conjecture by writing: 'Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in
Keeling Island, who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll:
this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming
inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively, like
a table or a hat at a modern spirit séance.'[1] Now M. Lefébure has
pointed out (in 'Mélusine') that, according to De Brosses, the African
conjurers gave an appearance of independent motion to small objects, which
were then accepted as fetishes, being visibly animated. M. Lefébure
next compares, like Mr. Tylor, the alleged physical phenomena of
spiritualism, the flights and movements of inanimate objects apparently
untouched.
The question thus arises, Is there any truth whatever in these world-wide
and world-old stories of inanimate objects acting like animated things?
Has fetishism one of its origins in the actual field of supernormal
experience in the X region? This question we do not propose to answer,
as the evidence, though practically universal, may be said to rest on
imposture and illusion. But we can, at least, give a sketch of the nature
of the evidence, beginning with that as to the apparently _voluntary_
movements of objects, _not_ untouched. Mr. Tylor quotes from John Bell's
'Journey in Asia' (1719) an account of a Mongol Lama who wished to
discover certain stolen pieces of damask. His method was to sit on a
bench, when 'he carried it, or, as was commonly believed, it carried him,
to the very tent' of the thief. Here the bench is innocently believed to
be self-moving. Again, Mr. Rowley tells how in Manganjah the sorcerer, to
find out a criminal, placed, with magical ceremonies, two staffs of wood
in the hands of some young men. 'The sticks whirled and dragged the men
round like mad,' and finally escaped and rolled to the feet of the
wife of a chief, who was then denounced as the guilty person.[2]
Mr. Duff Macdonald describes the same practice among the Yaos:[3]
'The sorcerer occasionally makes men take hold of a stick, which, after a
time, begins to move as if endowed with life, and ultimately carries them
off bodily and with great speed to the house of the thief.'
The process is just that of Jacques Aymard in the celebrated story of the
detection of the Lyons murderer.[4]
In Melanesia, far enough away, Dr. Codrington found a similar practice,
and here the sticks are explicitly said by the natives to be moved by
_spirits_.[5] The wizard and a friend hold a bamboo stick by each end, and
ask what man's ghost is afflicting a patient. At the mention of the
right ghost 'the stick becomes violently agitated.' In the same way, the
bamboo 'would run about' with a man holding it only on the palms of his
hands. Again, a hut is built with a partition down the middle. Men sit
there with their hands _under_ one end of the bamboo, while the other end
is extended into the empty half of the hut. They then call over the names
of the recently dead, till 'they feel the bamboo moving in their hands.' A
bamboo placed on a sacred tree, 'when the name of a ghost is called, moves
of itself, and will lift and drag people about.' Put up into a tree, it
would lift them from the ground. In other cases the holding of the sticks
produces convulsions and trance.[6] The divining sticks of the Maori are
also 'guided by spirits,'[7] and those of the Zulu sorcerers rise, fall,
and jump about.[8]
These Zulu performances must be really very curious. In the last chapter
we told how a Zulu named John, having a shilling to lay out in the
interests of psychical research, declined to pay a perplexed diviner, and
reserved his capital far a more meritorious performance. He tried a medium
named Unomantshintshi, who divined by Umabakula, or dancing sticks--
'If they say "no," they fall suddenly; if they say "yes," they arise and
jump about very much, and leap on the person who has come to inquire. They
"fix themselves on the place where the sick man is affected; ... if the
head, they leap on his head.... Many believe in Umabakula more than in the
diviner. But there are not many who have the Umabakula."'
Dr. Callaway's informant only knew two Umabakulists, John was quite
satisfied, paid his shilling, and went home.[9]
The sticks are about a foot long. It is not reported that they are moved
by spirits, nor do they seem to be regarded as fetishes.
Mr. Tylor also cites a form of the familiar pendulum experiment. Among the
Karens a ring is suspended by a thread over a metal basin. The relations
of the dead strike the basin, and when he who was dearest to the ghost
touches it the spirit twists the thread till it breaks, and the ring falls
into the basin. With us a ring is held by a thread over a tumbler, and our
unconscious movements swing it till it strikes the hour. How the Karens
manage it is less obvious. These savage devices with animated sticks
clearly correspond to the more modern 'table-turning.' Here, when the
players are honest, the pushing is certainly _unconscious_.
I have tested this in two ways--first by trying the minimum of _conscious_
muscular action that would stir a table at which I was alone, and by
comparing the absolute unconsciousness of muscular action when the table
began to move in response to no _voluntary_ push. Again, I tried with a
friend, who said, 'You are pushing,' when I gently removed my hands
altogether, though they seemed to rest on the table, which still revolved.
My friend was himself unconsciously pushing. It is undeniable that, to
a solitary experimenter, the table _seems_ to make little darts of its own
will in a curious way. Thus, the unconsciousness of muscular action on the
part of savages engaged in the experiment with sticks would lead them to
believe that spirits were animating the wood. The same fallacy beset the
table-turners of 1855-65, and was, to some extent, exposed by Faraday.
Of course, savages would be even more convinced by the dancing spoon of
Mr. Darwin's tale, by the dancing sticks of the Zulus, and the rest,
whether the phenomena were supernormal or merely worked by unseen strings.
The same remark applies to modern experimenters, when, as they declare,
various objects move untouched, without physical contact.
Still more analogous than turning tables to the savage use of inspired
sticks for directing the inquirer to a lost object or to a criminal, is
the modern employment of the divining-rod--a forked twig which, held by
the ends, revolves in the hands of the performer when he reaches the
object of his quest. He, like the savage cited, is occasionally agitated
in a convulsive manner; and cases are quoted in which the twig writhes
when held in a pair of tongs! The best-known modern treatise on the
divining-rod is that of M. Chevreul, 'La Baguette Divinatoire' (1854). We
have also 'L'Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes,' by M.
Figuier (1860). In 1781 Thouvenel published his 600 experiments with
Bleton and others; and Hegel refers to Amoretti's collection of hundreds
of cases. The case of Jacques Aymard, who in the seventeenth century
discovered a murderer by the use of the rod in true savage fashion, is
well known. In modern England the rod is used in the interests of private
individuals and public bodies (such as Trinity College, Cambridge) for the
discovery of water.
Professor Barrett has lately published a book of 280 pages, in which
evidence of failures and successes is collected.[10] Professor Barrett
gives about one hundred and fifty cases, in which he was only able to
discover, on good authority, twelve failures. He gives a variety of tests
calculated to check frauds and chance coincidence, and he publishes
opinions, hostile or agnostic, by geologists. The evidence, as a general
rule, is what is called first-hand in other inquiries. The actual
spectators, and often the owners of the land, or the persons in whose
interest water was wanted, having been present, give their testimony; and
it is certain that the 'diviner' is called in by people of sense and
education, commonly too practical to have a theory, and content with
getting what they want, especially where scientific experts have
failed.[11]
In Mr. Barrett's opinion, the subconscious perception of indications of
the presence of water produces an equally unconscious muscular 'spasm,'
which twirls the rod till it often breaks. Yet 'it is almost impossible to
imitate its characteristic movement by any voluntary effort.' I have
myself held the hands of an amateur performer when the twig was moving,
and neither by sight nor touch could I detect any muscular movement on his
part, much less a spasm. The person was bailiff on a large estate, and,
having accidentally discovered that he possessed the gift, used it when he
wanted wells dug for the tenants on the property.
The whole topic is obscure; nor am I concerned here with the successes or
failures of the divining-rod. But the movements of the twig have never, to
my knowledge, been attributed by modern English performers to the
operation of spirits. They say 'electricity.' Mr. Tylor merely writes:
'The action of the famous divining-rod, with its curiously versatile
sensibility to water, ore, treasure, and thieves, seems to belong partly
to trickery and partly to more or less conscious direction by honester
operators.'
As the divining-rod is the only instance in which automatism, whatever its
nature and causes, has been found of practical value by practical men, and
as it is obviously associated with a number of analogous phenomena, both
in civilised and savage life, it certainly deserves the attention of
science. But no advance will be made till scientifically trained inquirers
themselves arrange and test a large number of experiments. Knowledge of
the geological ignorance of the dowsers, examples of fraud on their part,
and cases of failure or reported failure, with a general hostile bias, may
prevent such experiments from being made by scientific experts on an
adequate scale. Such experts ought, of course, to avoid working the
dowsers into a state of irritation.
It is just worth while to notice cases in which the rod acts like those of
the Melanesians, Africans, and other savages. A Mr. Thomas Welton
published an English translation of 'La Verge de Jacob' (Lyon, 1693). In
1651 he asked his servant to bring into the garden 'a stick that stood
behind the parlour door. In great terror she brought it to the garden, her
hand firmly clutched on it, nor could she let it go.' When Mrs. Welton
took the stick, 'it drew her with very considerable velocity to nearly the
centre of the garden,' where a well was found. Mr. Welton is not likely to
have known of the lately published savage examples. The coincidence with
the African and Melanesian cases is, therefore, probably undesigned.
Again, in 1694, the rod was used by le Père Menestrier and others, just as
it is by savages, to indicate by its movements answers to all sorts of
questions. Experiments of this kind have not been made by Professor
Barrett, and other modern inquirers, except by M. Richet, as a mode of
detecting automatic action. But it would be just as sensible to use the
twig as to use planchette or any other 'autoscopic' apparatus. If these
elicit knowledge unconsciously present to the mind, mere water-finding
ought not to be the sole province of the rod. In the same class as
these rods is the forked twig which, in China, is held at each end by
two persons, and made to write in the sand. The little apparatus called
_planchette_, or the other, the _ouija_, is of course, consciously or
unconsciously, pushed by the performers. In the case of the twig, as held
by water-seekers, the difficulty of consciously moving it so as to
escape close observation is considerable.