CHAPTER XIV.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider Doctrine

of Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural

Religion—Definition of Spirits similar to and apparently modelled on

that of Souls—Transition stage: classes of Souls passing

into good and evil Demons—Manes-Worship—Doctrine of

Embodiment of Spirits in human, animal, vegetable, and inert

bodies—Demoniacal Possession and Obsession as causes of Disease and

Oracle-inspiration—Fetishism—Disease-spirits embodied—Ghost attached

to remains of Corpse—Fetish produced by a Spirit embodied in,

attached to, or operating through, an Object—Analogues

of Fetish-doctrine in Modern Science—Stock-and-Stone

Worship—Idolatry—Survival of Animistic Phraseology in modern

Language—Decline of Animistic theory of Nature.

The general scheme of Animism, of which the doctrine of souls hitherto

discussed forms part, thence expands to complete the full general

philosophy of Natural Religion among mankind. Conformably with that

early childlike philosophy in which human life seems the direct key to

the understanding of nature at large, the savage theory of the universe

refers its phenomena in general to the wilful action of pervading

personal spirits. It was no spontaneous fancy, but the reasonable

inference that effects are due to causes, which led the rude men of old

days to people with such ethereal phantoms their own homes and haunts,

and the vast earth and sky beyond. Spirits are simply personified

causes. As men’s ordinary life and actions were held to be caused by

souls, so the happy or disastrous events which affect mankind, as well

as the manifold physical operations of the outer-world, were accounted

for as caused by soul-like beings, spirits whose essential similarity of

origin is evident through all their wondrous variety of power and

function. Much that the primitive animistic view thus explains, has been

indeed given over by more advanced education to the ‘metaphysical’ and

‘positive’ stages of thought. Yet animism is still plainly to be traced

onward from the intellectual state of the lower races, along the course

of the higher culture, whether its doctrines have been continued and

modified into the accepted philosophy of religion, or whether they have

dwindled into mere survivals in popular superstition. Though all I here

undertake is to sketch in outline such features of this spiritualistic

philosophy as I can see plainly enough to draw at all, scarcely

attempting to clear away the haze that covers great parts of the

subject, yet even so much as I venture on is a hard task, made yet

harder by the responsibility attaching to it. For it appears that to

follow the course of animism on from its more primitive stages, is to

account for much of mediæval and modern opinion whose meaning and reason

could hardly be comprehended without the aid of a development-theory of

culture, taking in the various processes of new formation, abolition,

survival, and revival. Thus even the despised ideas of savage races

become a practically important topic to the modern world, for here, as

usual, whatever bears on the origin of philosophic opinion, bears also

on its validity.

At this point of the investigation, we come fully into sight of the

principle which has been all along implied in the use of the word

Animism, in a sense beyond its narrower meaning of the doctrine of

souls. By using it to express the doctrine of spirits generally, it is

practically asserted that the idea of souls, demons, deities, and any

other classes of spiritual beings, are conceptions of similar nature

throughout, the conceptions of souls being the original ones of the

series. It was best, from this point of view, to begin with a careful

study of souls, which are the spirits proper to men, animals, and

things, before extending the survey of the spirit-world to its fullest

range. If it be admitted that souls and other spiritual beings are

conceived of as essentially similar in their nature, it may be

reasonably argued that the class of conceptions based on evidence most

direct and accessible to ancient men, is the earlier and fundamental

class. To grant this, is in effect to agree that the doctrine of souls,

founded on the natural perceptions of primitive man, gave rise to the

doctrine of spirits, which extends and modifies its general theory for

new purposes, but in developments less authenticated and consistent,

more fanciful and far-fetched. It seems as though the conception of a

human soul, when once attained to by man, served as a type or model on

which he framed not only his ideas of other souls of lower grade, but

also his ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that

sports in the long grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the

world, the Great Spirit.

The doctrines of the lower races fully justify us in classing their

spiritual beings in general as similar in nature to the souls of men. It

will be incidentally shown here, again and again, that souls have the

same qualities attributed to them as other spirits, are treated in like

fashion, and pass without distinct breaks into every part of the general

spiritual definition. The similar nature of soul and other spirit is, in

fact, one of the commonplaces of animism, from its rudest to its most

cultured stages. It ranges from the native New Zealanders’ and West

Indians’ conceptions of the ‘atua’ and the ‘cemi,’ beings which require

special definition to show whether they are human souls or demons or

deities of some other class,[229] and so onward to the declaration of

Philo Judæus, that souls, demons, and angels differ indeed in name, but

are in reality one,[230] and to the state of mind of the modern Roman

Catholic priest, who is cautioned in the rubric concerning the

examination of a possessed patient, not to believe the demon if he

pretends to be the soul of some saint or deceased person, or a good

angel (neque ei credatur, si dæmon simularet se esse animam alicujus

Sancti, vel defuncti, vel Angelum bonum).[231] Nothing can bring more

broadly into view the similar nature of souls and other spiritual beings

than the existence of a full transitional series of ideas. Souls of dead

men are in fact considered as actually forming one of the most important

classes of demons and deities.

It is quite usual for savage tribes to live in terror of the souls of

the dead as harmful spirits. Thus Australians have been known to

consider the ghosts of the unburied dead as becoming malignant

demons.[232] New Zealanders have supposed the souls of their dead to

become so changed in nature as to be malignant to their nearest and

dearest friends in life;[233] the Caribs said that, of man’s various

souls, some go to the seashore and capsize boats, others to the forest

to be evil spirits;[234] among the Sioux Indians the fear of a ghost’s

vengeance has been found to act as a check on murder;[235] of some

tribes in Central Africa it may be said that their main religious

doctrine is the belief in ghosts, and that the main characteristic of

these ghosts is to do harm to the living.[236] The Patagonians lived in

terror of the souls of their wizards, which become evil demons after

death;[237] Turanian tribes of North Asia fear their shamans even more

when dead than when alive, for they become a special class of spirits

who are the hurtfullest in all nature, and who among the Mongols plague

the living on purpose to make them bring offerings.[238] In China it is

held that the multitudes of wretched destitute spirits in the world

below, such as souls of lepers and beggars, can sorely annoy the living;

therefore at certain times they are to be appeased with offerings of

food, scant and beggarly; and a man who feels unwell, or fears a mishap

in business, will prudently have some mock-clothing and mock-money burnt

for these ‘gentlemen of the lower regions.’[239] Notions of this sort

are widely prevalent in Indo-China and India; whole orders of demons

there were formerly human souls, especially of people left unburied or

slain by plague or violence, of bachelors or of women who died in

childbirth, and who henceforth wreak their vengeance on the living. They

may, however, be propitiated by temples and offerings, and thus have

become in fact a regular class of local deities.[240] Among them may be

counted the diabolic soul of a certain wicked British officer, whom

native worshippers in the Tinnevelly district still propitiate by

offering at his grave the brandy and cheroots he loved in life.[241]

India even carried theory into practice by an actual manufacture of

demons, as witness the two following accounts. A certain brahman, on

whose lands a kshatriya raja had built a house, ripped himself up in

revenge, and became a demon of the kind called brahmadasyu, who has been

ever since the terror of the whole country, and is the most common

village deity in Kharakpur.[242] Toward the close of the last century

there were two brahmans, out of whose house a man had wrongfully, as

they thought, taken forty rupees; whereupon one of the brahmans

proceeded to cut off his own mother’s head, with the professed view,

entertained by both mother and son, that her spirit, excited by the

beating of a large drum during forty days, might haunt, torment, and

pursue to death the taker of their money and those concerned with him.

Declaring with her last words that she would blast the thief, the

spiteful hag deliberately gave up her life to take ghostly vengeance for

those forty rupees.[243] By instances like these it appears that we may

trace up from the psychology of the lower races the familiar ancient and

modern European tales of baleful ghost-demons. The old fear even now

continues to vouch for the old belief.

Happily for man’s anticipation of death, and for the treatment of the

sick and aged, thoughts of horror and hatred do not preponderate in

ideas of deified ancestors, who are regarded on the whole as kindly

patron spirits, at least to their own kinsfolk and worshippers.

Manes-worship is one of the great branches of the religion of mankind.

Its principles are not difficult to understand, for they plainly keep up

the social relations of the living world. The dead ancestor, now passed

into a deity, simply goes on protecting his own family and receiving

suit and service from them as of old; the dead chief still watches over

his own tribe, still holds his authority by helping friends and harming

enemies, still rewards the right and sharply punishes the wrong. It will

be enough to show by a few characteristic examples the general position

of manes-worship among mankind, from the lower culture upward.[244] In

the two Americas it appears not unfrequently, from the low savage level

of the Brazilian Camacans, to the somewhat higher stage of northern

Indian tribes whom we hear of as praying to the spirits of their

forefathers for good weather or luck in hunting, and fancying when an

Indian falls into the fire that the ancestral spirits pushed him in to

punish neglect of the customary gifts, while the Natchez of Louisiana

are said to have even gone so far as to build temples for dead men.[245]

Turning to the dark races of the Pacific, we find the Tasmanians laying

their sick round a corpse on the funeral pile, that the dead might come

in the night and take out the devils that caused the diseases; it is

asserted in a general way of the natives, that they believed most

implicitly in the return of the spirits of their departed friends or

relations to bless or injure them as the case might be.[246] In Tanna,

the gods are spirits of departed ancestors, aged chiefs becoming deities

after death, presiding over the growth of yams and fruit trees, and

receiving from the islanders prayer and offerings of first fruits.[247]

Nor are the fairer Polynesians behind in this respect. Below the great

mythological gods of Tonga and New Zealand, the souls of chiefs and

warriors form a lower but active and powerful order of deities, who in

the Tongan paradise intercede for man’s benefit with the higher deities,

who direct the Maori war parties on the march, hover over them and give

them courage in the fight, and, watching jealously their own tribes and

families, punish any violation of the sacred laws of tapu.[248] Thence

we trace the doctrine into the Malay islands, where the souls of

deceased ancestors are looked to for prosperity in life and help in

distress.[249] In Madagascar, the worship of the spirits of the dead is

remarkably associated with the Vazimbas, the aborigines of the island,

who are said still to survive as a distinct race in the interior, and

whose peculiar graves testify to their former occupancy of other

districts. These graves, small in size, and distinguished by a cairn and

an upright stone slab or altar, are places which the Malagasy regard

with equal fear and veneration, and their faces become sad and serious

when they even pass near. To take a stone or pluck a twig from one of

these graves, to stumble against one in the dark, would be resented by

the angry Vazimba inflicting disease, or coming in the night to carry

off the offender to the region of ghosts. The Malagasy is thus enabled

to account for every otherwise unaccountable ailment by his having

knowingly or unknowingly given offence to some Vazimba. They are not

indeed always malevolent, they may be placable or implacable, or partake

of both characters. Thus it comes to pass, that at the altar-slab which

long ago some rude native family set up for commemoration or dutiful

offering of food to a dead kinsman, a barbaric supplanting race now

comes to smear the burnt fat of sacrifice, and set up the heads of

poultry and sheep and the horns of bullocks, that the mysterious tenant

may be kind, not cruel, with his superhuman powers.[250]

On the continent of Africa, manes-worship appears with extremest

definiteness and strength. Thus Zulu warriors, aided by the ‘amatongo,’

the spirits of their ancestors, conquer in the battle; but if the dead

turn their backs on the living, the living fall in the fight, to become

ancestral spirits in their turn. In anger the ‘itongo’ seizes a living

man’s body and inflicts disease and death; in beneficence he gives

health, and cattle, and corn, and all men wish. Even the little children

and old women, of small account in life, become at death spirits having

much power, the infants for kindness, the crones for malice. But it is

especially the head of each family who receives the worship of his kin.

Why it is naturally and reasonably so, a Zulu thus explains. ‘Although

they worship the many Amatongo of their tribe, making a great fence

around them for their protection; yet their father is far before all

others when they worship the Amatongo. Their father is a great treasure

to them even when he is dead. And those of his children who are already

grown up know him thoroughly, his gentleness, and his bravery.’ ‘Black

people do not worship all Amatongo indifferently, that is, all the dead

of their tribe. Speaking generally, the head of each house is worshipped

by the children of that house; for they do not know the ancients who are

dead, nor their laud-giving names, nor their names. But their father

whom they knew is the head by whom they begin and end in their prayer,

for they know him best, and his love for his children; they remember his

kindness to them whilst he was living; they compare his treatment of

them whilst he was living, support themselves by it, and say, “He will

still treat us in the same way now he is dead. We do not know why he

should regard others besides us; he will regard us only.”’[251] It will

be seen in another place how the Zulu follows up the doctrine of divine

ancestors till he reaches a first ancestor of man and creator of the

world, the primæval Unkulunkulu. In West Africa, manes-worship displays

in contrast its two special types. On the one hand, we see the North

Guinea negroes transferring the souls of the dead, according to their

lives, to the rank of good and evil spirits, and if evil worshipping

them the more zealously, as fear is to their minds a stronger impulse

than love. On the other hand, in Southern Guinea, we see the deep

respect paid to the aged during life, passing into worship when death

has raised them to yet higher influence. There the living bring to the

images of the dead food and drink, and even a small portion of their

profits gained in trade; they look especially to dead relatives for help

in the trials of life, and ‘it is no uncommon thing to see large groups

of men and women, in times of peril or distress, assembled along the

brow of some commanding eminence, or along the skirts of some dense

forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones upon the spirits

of their ancestors.’[252]

In Asia, manes-worship comes to the surface in all directions. The rude

Veddas of Ceylon believe in the guardianship of the spirits of the dead;

these, they say, are ‘ever watchful, coming to them in sickness,

visiting them in dreams, giving them flesh when hunting;’ and in every

calamity and want they call for aid on the ‘kindred spirits,’ and

especially the shades of departed children, the ‘infant spirits.’[253]

Among non-Hindu tribes of India, whose religions more or less represent

præ-Brahmanic and præ-Buddhistic conditions, wide and deep traces appear

of an ancient and surviving cultus of ancestors.[254] Among Turanian

tribes spread over the northern regions of the Old World, a similar

state of things may be instanced from the Mongols, worshipping as good

deities the princely souls of Genghis Khan’s family, at whose head

stands the divine Genghis himself.[255] Nor have nations of the higher

Asiatic culture generally rejected the time-honoured rite. In Japan the

‘Way of the Kami,’ better known to foreigners as the Sin-tu religion, is

one of the officially recognized faiths, and in it there is still kept

up in hut and palace the religion of the rude old mountain-tribes of the

land, who worshipped their divine ancestors, the Kami, and prayed to

them for help and blessing. To the time of these ancient Kami, say the

modern Japanese, the rude stone implements belong which are found in the

ground in Japan as elsewhere: to modern ethnologists, however, these

bear witness not of divine but savage parentage.[256] In Siam the lower

orders scruple to worship the great gods, lest through ignorance they

should blunder in the complex ritual; they prefer to pray to the

‘theparak,’ a lower class of deities among whom the souls of great men

take their places at death.[257] In China, as every one knows,

ancestor-worship is the dominant religion of the land, and interesting

problems are opened out to the Western mind by the spectacle of a great

people who for thousands of years have been thus seeking the living

among the dead. Nowhere is the connexion between parental authority and

conservatism more graphically shown. The worship of ancestors, begun

during their life, is not interrupted but intensified when death makes

them deities. The Chinese, prostrate bodily and mentally before the

memorial tablets that contain the souls of his ancestors, little thinks

that he is all the while proving to mankind how vast a power unlimited

filial obedience, prohibiting change from ancestral institutions, may

exert in stopping the advance of civilization. The thought of the souls

of the dead as sharing the happiness and glory of their descendants is

one which widely pervades the world, but most such ideas would seem

vague and weak to the Chinese, who will try hard for honour in his

competitive examination with the special motive of glorifying his dead

ancestors, and whose titles of rank will raise his deceased father and

grandfather a grade above himself, as though, with us, Zachary Macaulay

and Copley the painter should now have viscounts’ coronets officially

placed on their tombstones. As so often happens, what is jest to one

people is sober sense to another. There are 300 millions of Chinese who

would hardly see a joke in Charles Lamb reviling the stupid age that

would not read him, and declaring that he would write for antiquity. Had

he been a Chinese himself, he might have written his book in all

seriousness for the benefit of his great-great-grandfather. Among the

Chinese, manes-worship is no rite of mere affection. The living want the

help of the ancestral spirits, who reward virtue and punish vice: ‘The

exalted ancestor will bring thee, O Prince, much good!’—‘Ancestors and

fathers will abandon you and give you up, and come not to help, and ye

will die.’ If no help comes in time of need, the Chinese will reproach

his ancestor, or even come to doubt his existence. Thus in a Chinese ode

the sufferers in a dreadful drought cry, ‘Heu-tsi cannot or will not

help.... Our ancestors have surely perished.... Father, mother,

ancestors, how could you calmly bear this?’ Nor does manes-worship stop

short with direct family ties; it is naturally developed to produce, by

deification of the heroic dead, a series of superior gods to whom

worship is given by the public at large. Thus, according to legend, the

War-god or Military Sage was once in human life a distinguished soldier,

the Mechanics’ god was a skilful workman and inventor of tools, the

Swine-god was a hog-breeder who lost his pigs and died of sorrow, and

the Gamblers’ god, a desperate gamester who lost his all and died of

want, is represented by a hideous image called a ‘devil gambling for

cash,’ and in this shape receives the prayers and offerings of confirmed

gamblers, his votaries. The spirits of San-kea Ta-te, and Chang-yuen-sze

go to partake of the offerings set out in their temples, returning

flushed and florid from their meal; and the spirit of Confucius is

present in the temple, where twice a year the Emperor does sacrifice to

him.[258]

The Hindu unites in some degree with the Chinese as to ancestor-worship,

and especially as to the necessity of having a son by blood or adoption,

who shall offer the proper sacrifices to him after death. ‘May there be

born in our lineage,’ the manes are supposed to say, ‘a man to offer to

us, on the thirteenth day of the moon, rice boiled in milk, honey and

ghee.’ Offerings made to the divine manes, the ‘pitaras’ (patres,

fathers) as they are called, preceded and followed by offerings to the

greater deities, give to the worshipper merit and happiness.[259] In

classic Europe, apotheosis lies part within the limits of myth, where it

was applied to fabled ancestors, and part within the limits of actual

history, as where Julius and Augustus shared its honours with the vile

Domitian and Commodus. The most special representatives of

ancestor-worship in Europe were perhaps the ancient Romans, whose word

‘manes’ has become the recognized name for ancestral deities in modern

civilized language; they embodied them as images, set them up as

household patrons, gratified them with offerings and solemn homage, and

counting them as or among the infernal gods, inscribed on tombs D. M.,

‘Diis Manibus.’[260] The occurrence of this D. M. in Christian epitaphs

is an often-noticed case of religious survival.

Although full ancestor-worship is not practised in modern Christendom,

there remains even now within its limits a well-marked worship of the

dead. A crowd of saints, who were once men and women, now form an order

of inferior deities, active in the affairs of men and receiving from

them reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under the definition of

manes. This Christian cultus of the dead, belonging in principle to the

older manes-worship, was adapted to answer another purpose in the course

of religious transition in Europe. The local gods, the patron gods of

particular ranks and crafts, the gods from whom men sought special help

in special needs, were too near and dear to the inmost heart of

præ-Christian Europe to be done away with without substitutes. It proved

easier to replace them by saints who could undertake their particular

professions, and even succeed them in their sacred dwellings. The system

of spiritual division of labour was in time worked out with wonderful

minuteness in the vast array of professional saints, among whom the most

familiar to modern English ears are St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians;

St. Luke, patron of painters; St. Peter, of fishmongers; St. Valentine,

of lovers; St. Sebastian, of archers; St. Crispin, of cobblers; St.

Hubert, who cures the bite of mad dogs; St. Vitus, who delivers madmen

and sufferers from the disease which bears his name; St. Fiacre, whose

name is now less known by his shrine than by the hackney-coaches called

after him in the seventeenth century. Not to dwell here minutely on an

often-treated topic, it will be enough to touch on two particular

points. First, as to the direct historical succession of the Christian

saint to the heathen deity, the following are two very perfect

illustrations. It is well known that Romulus, mindful of his own

adventurous infancy, became after death a Roman deity propitious to the

health and safety of young children, so that nurses and mothers would

carry sickly infants to present them in his little round temple at the

foot of the Palatine. In after ages the temple was replaced by the

church of St. Theodorus, and there Dr. Conyers Middleton, who drew

public attention to its curious history, used to look in and see ten or

a dozen women, each with a sick child in her lap, sitting in silent

reverence before the altar of the saint. The ceremony of blessing

children, especially after vaccination, may still be seen there on

Thursday mornings.[261] Again, Sts. Cosmas and Damianus, according to

Maury, owe their recognized office to a similar curious train of events.

They were martyrs who suffered under Diocletian, at Ægææ in Cilicia. Now

this place was celebrated for the worship of Æsculapius, in whose temple

incubation, i.e. sleeping for oracular dreams, was practised. It seems

as though the idea was transferred on the spot to the two local saints,

for we next hear of them as appearing in a dream to the Emperor

Justinian, when he was ill at Byzantium. They cured him, he built them a

temple, their cultus spread far and wide, and they frequently appeared

to the sick to show them what they should do. Legend settled that Cosmas

and Damianus were physicians while they lived on earth, and at any rate

they are patron-saints of the profession of medicine to this day.[262]

Second, as to the actual state of hagiolatry in modern Europe, it is

obvious on a broad view that it is declining among the educated classes.

Yet modern examples may be brought forward to show ideas as extreme as

those which prevailed more widely a thousand years ago. In the Church of

the Jesuit College at Rome lies buried St. Aloysius Gonzaga, on whose

festival it is customary especially for the college students to write

letters to him, which are placed on his gaily decorated and illuminated

altar, and afterwards burnt unopened. The miraculous answering of these

letters is vouched for in an English book of 1870. To the same year

belongs an English tract commemorating a late miraculous cure. An

Italian lady afflicted with a tumour and incipient cancer of the breast

was exhorted by a Jesuit priest to recommend herself to the Blessed John

Berchmans, a pious Jesuit novice from Belgium, who died in 1621, and was

beatified in 1865. Her adviser procured for her ‘three small packets of

dust gathered from the coffin of this saintly innocent, a little cross

made of the boards of the room the blessed youth occupied, as well as

some portion of the wadding in which his venerable head was wrapped.’

During nine days’ devotion the patient accordingly invoked the Blessed

John, swallowed small portions of his dust in water, and at last pressed

the cross to her breast so vehemently that she was seized with sickness,

went to sleep, and awoke without a symptom of the complaint. And when

Dr. Panegrossi the physician beheld the incredible cure, and heard that

the patient had addressed herself to the Blessed Berchmans, he bowed his

head, saying, ‘When such physicians interfere, we have nothing more to

say!’[263] To sum up the whole history of manes-worship, it is plain

that in our time the dead still receive worship from far the larger half

of mankind, and it may have been much the same ever since the remote

periods of primitive culture in which the religion of the manes probably

took its rise.

It has now been seen that the theory of souls recognizes them as capable

either of independent existence, or of inhabiting human, animal, or

other bodies. On the principle here maintained, that the general theory

of spirits is modelled on the theory of souls, we shall be able to

account for several important branches of the lower philosophy of

religion, which without such explanation may appear in great measure

obscure or absurd. Like souls, other spirits are supposed able either to

exist and act flitting free about the world, or to become incorporate

for more or less time in solid bodies. It will be well at once to get a

secure grasp of this theory of Embodiment, for without it we shall be

stopped every moment by a difficulty in understanding the nature of

spirits, as defined in the lower animism. The theory of embodiment

serves several highly important purposes in savage and barbarian

philosophy. On the one hand it provides an explanation of the phenomena

of morbid exaltation and derangement, especially as connected with

abnormal utterance, and this view is so far extended as to produce an

almost general doctrine of disease. On the other hand, it enables the

savage either to ‘lay’ a hurtful spirit in some foreign body, and so get

rid of it, or to carry about a useful spirit for his service in a

material object, to set it up as a deity for worship in the body of an

animal, or in a block or stone or image or other thing, which contains

the spirit as a vessel contains a fluid: this is the key to strict

fetishism, and in no small measure to idolatry. In briefly considering

these various branches of the Embodiment-theory, there may be

conveniently included certain groups of cases often impossible to

distinguish apart. These cases belong theoretically rather to obsession

than possession, the spirits not actually inhabiting the bodies, but

hanging or hovering about them and affecting them from the outside.

As in normal conditions the man’s soul, inhabiting his body, is held to

give it life, to think, speak, and act through it, so an adaptation of

the self-same principle explains abnormal conditions of body or mind, by

considering the new symptoms as due to the operation of a second

soul-like being, a strange spirit. The possessed man, tossed and shaken

in fever, pained and wrenched as though some live creature were tearing

or twisting him within, pining as though it were devouring his vitals

day by day, rationally finds a personal spiritual cause for his

sufferings. In hideous dreams he may even sometimes see the very ghost

or nightmare-fiend that plagues him. Especially when the mysterious

unseen power throws him helpless on the ground, jerks and writhes him in

convulsions, makes him leap upon the bystanders with a giant’s strength

and a wild beast’s ferocity, impels him, with distorted face and frantic

gesture, and voice not his own nor seemingly even human, to pour forth

wild incoherent raving, or with thought and eloquence beyond his sober

faculties to command, to counsel, to foretell—such a one seems to those

who watch him, and even to himself, to have become the mere instrument

of a spirit which has seized him or entered into him, a possessing demon

in whose personality the patient believes so implicitly that he often

imagines a personal name for it, which it can declare when it speaks in

its own voice and character through his organs of speech; at last,

quitting the medium’s spent and jaded body, the intruding spirit departs

as it came. This is the savage theory of dæmoniacal possession and

obsession, which has been for ages, and still remains, the dominant

theory of disease and inspiration among the lower races. It is obviously

based on an animistic interpretation, most genuine and rational in its

proper place in man’s intellectual history, of the actual symptoms of

the cases. The general doctrine of disease-spirits and oracle-spirits

appears to have its earliest, broadest, and most consistent position

within the limits of savagery. When we have gained a clear idea of it in

this its original home, we shall be able to trace it along from grade to

grade of civilization, breaking away piecemeal under the influence of

new medical theories, yet sometimes expanding in revival, and at least

in lingering survival holding its place into the midst of our modern

life. The possession-theory is not merely known to us by the statements

of those who describe diseases in accordance with it. Disease being

accounted for by attack of spirits, it naturally follows that to get rid

of these spirits is the proper means of cure. Thus the practices of the

exorcist appear side by side with the doctrine of possession, from its

first appearance in savagery to its survival in modern civilization; and

nothing could display more vividly the conception of a disease or a

mental affection as caused by a personal spiritual being than the

proceedings of the exorcist who talks to it, coaxes or threatens it,

makes offerings to it, entices or drives it out of the patient’s body,

and induces it to take up its abode in some other. That the two great

effects ascribed to such spiritual influence in obsession and

possession, namely, the infliction of ailments and the inspiration of

oracles, are not only mixed up together but often run into absolute

coincidence, accords with the view that both results are referred to one

common cause. Also that the intruding or invading spirit may be either a

human soul or may belong to some other class in the spiritual hierarchy,

countenances the opinion that the possession-theory is derived from, and

indeed modelled on, the ordinary theory of the soul acting on the body.

In illustrating the doctrine by typical examples from the enormous mass

of available details, it will hardly be possible to discriminate among

the operating spirits, between those which are souls and those which are

demons, nor to draw an exact line between obsession by a demon outside

and possession by a demon inside, nor between the condition of the

demon-tormented patient and the demon-actuated doctor, seer, or priest.

In a word, the confusion of these conceptions in the savage mind only

fairly represents their intimate connexion in the Possession-theory

itself.

In the Australian-Tasmanian district, disease and death are ascribed to

more or less defined spiritual influences; descriptions of a demon

working a sorcerer’s wicked will by coming slyly behind his victim and

hitting him with his club on the back of his neck, and of a dead man’s

ghost angered by having his name uttered, and creeping up into the

utterer’s body to consume his liver, are indeed peculiarly graphic

details of savage animism.[264] The theory of disease-spirits is well

stated in its extreme form among the Mintira, a low race of the Malay

peninsula. Their ‘hantu’ or spirits have among their functions that of

causing ailments; thus the ‘hantu kalumbahan’ causes small-pox; the

‘hantu kamang’ brings on inflammation and swellings in the hands and

feet; when a person is wounded, the ‘hantu pari’ fastens on the wound

and sucks, and this is the cause of the blood flowing. And thus, as the

describer says, ‘To enumerate the remainder of the hantus would be

merely to convert the name of every species of disease known to the

Mintira into a proper one. If any new disease appeared, it would be

ascribed to a hantu bearing the same name.’[265] It will help us to an

idea of the distinct personality which the disease-demon has in the

minds of the lower races, to notice the Orang Laut of this district

placing thorns and brush in the paths leading to a part where small-pox

had broken out, to keep the demons off; just as the Khonds of Orissa try

with thorns, and ditches, and stinking oil poured on the ground, to

barricade the paths to their hamlets against the goddess of small-pox,

Jugah Pennu.[266] Among the Dayaks of Borneo, ‘to have been smitten by a

spirit’ is to be ill; sickness may be caused by invisible spirits

inflicting invisible wounds with invisible spears, or entering men’s

bodies and driving out their souls, or lodging in their hearts and

making them raving mad. In the Indian Archipelago, the personal

semi-human nature of the disease-spirits is clearly acknowledged by

appeasing them with feasts and dances and offerings of food set out for

them away in the woods, to induce them to quit their victims, or by

sending tiny proas to sea with offerings, that spirits which have taken

up their abode in sick men’s bowels may embark and not come back.[267]

The animistic theory of disease is strongly marked in Polynesia, where

every sickness is ascribed to spiritual action of deities, brought on by

the offerings of enemies, or by the victim’s violation of the laws of

tapu. Thus in New Zealand each ailment is caused by a spirit,

particularly an infant or undeveloped human spirit, which sent into the

patient’s body gnaws and feeds inside; and the exorcist, finding the

path by which such a disease-spirit came from below to feed on the

vitals of a sick relative, will persuade it by a charm to get upon a

flax-stalk and set off home. We hear, too, of an idea of the parts of

the body—forehead, breast, stomach, feet, &c.—being apportioned each to

a deity who inflicts aches and pains and ailments there.[268] So in the

Samoan group, when a man was near death, people were anxious to part on

good terms with him, feeling assured that if he died with angry feelings

towards any one, he would certainly return and bring calamity on that

person or some one closely allied to him. This was considered a frequent

source of disease and death, the spirit of a departed member of the

family returning and taking up his abode in the head, chest, or stomach

of a living man, and so causing sickness and death. If a man died

suddenly, it was thought that he was eaten by the spirit that took him;

and though the soul of one thus devoured would go to the common

spirit-land of the departed, yet it would have no power of speech there,

and if questioned could but beat its breast. It completes this account

to notice that the disease-inflicting souls of the departed were the

same which possessed the living under more favourable circumstances,

coming to talk through a certain member of the family, prophesying

future events, and giving directions as to family affairs.[269] Farther

east, in the Georgian and Society Islands, evil demons are sent to

scratch and tear people into convulsions and hysterics, to torment poor

wretches as with barbed hooks, or to twist and knot inside them till

they die writhing in agony. But madmen are to be treated with great

respect, as entered by a god, and idiots owe the kindness with which

they are appeased and coaxed to the belief in their superhuman

inspiration.[270] Here, and elsewhere in the lower culture, the old real

belief has survived which has passed into a jest of civilized men in the

famous phrase of the ‘inspired idiot.’

American ethnography carries on the record of rude races ascribing

disease to the action of evil spirits. Thus the Dacotas believe that the

spirits punish them for misconduct, especially for neglecting to make

feasts for the dead; these spirits have the power to send the spirit of

something, as of a bear, deer, turtle, fish, tree, stone, worm, or

deceased person, which entering the patient causes disease; the

medicine-man’s cure consists in reciting charms over him, singing

‘He-le-li-lah, &c.,’ to the accompaniment of a gourd-rattle with beads

inside, ceremonially shooting a symbolic bark representation of the

intruding creature, sucking over the seat of pain to get the spirit out,

and firing guns at it as it is supposed to be escaping.[271] Such

processes were in full vogue in the West Indies in the time of Columbus,

when Friar Roman Pane put on record his quaint account of the native

sorcerer pulling the disease off the patient’s legs (as one pulls off a

pair of trousers), going out of doors to blow it away, and bidding it

begone to the mountain or the sea; the performance concluding with the

regular sucking-cure and the pretended extraction of some stone or bit

of flesh, or such thing, which the patient is assured that his

patron-spirit or deity (cemi) put into him to cause the disease, in

punishment for neglect to build him a temple or honour him with prayer

or offerings of goods.[272] Patagonians considered sickness as caused by

a spirit entering the patient’s body; ‘they believe every sick person to

be possessed of an evil demon; hence their physicians always carry a

drum with figures of devils painted on it, which they strike at the beds

of sick persons to drive out from the body the evil demon which causes

the disorder.’[273] In Africa, according to the philosophy of the

Basutos and the Zulus, the causes of disease are the ghosts of the dead,

come to draw the living to themselves, or to compel them to sacrifice

meat-offerings. They are recognized by the diviners, or by the patient

himself, who sees in dreams the departed spirit come to torment him.

Congo tribes in like manner consider the souls of the dead, passed into

the ranks of powerful spirits, to cause disease and death among mankind.

Thus, in both these districts, medicine becomes an almost entirely

religious matter of propitiatory sacrifice and prayer addressed to the

disease-inflicting manes. The Barolong give a kind of worship to

deranged persons, as being under the direct influence of a deity; while

in East Africa the explanation of madness and idiocy is simple and

typical—‘he has fiends.’[274] Negroes of West Africa, on the supposition

that an attack of illness has been caused by some spiritual being, can

ascertain to their satisfaction what manner of spirit has done it, and

why. The patient may have neglected his ‘wong’ or fetish-spirit, who has

therefore made him ill; or it may be his own ‘kla’ or personal

guardian-spirit, who on being summoned explains that he has not been

treated respectfully enough, &c.; or it may be a ‘sisa’ or ghost of some

dead man, who has taken this means of making known that he wants perhaps

a gold ornament that was left behind when he died.[275] Of course, the

means of cure will then be to satisfy the demands of the spirit. Another

aspect of the negro doctrine of disease-spirits is displayed in the

following description from Guinea, by the Rev. J. L. Wilson, the

missionary:—‘Demoniacal possessions are common, and the feats performed

by those who are supposed to be under such influence are certainly not

unlike those described in the New Testament. Frantic gestures,

convulsions, foaming at the mouth, feats of supernatural strength,

furious ravings, bodily lacerations, gnashing of teeth, and other things

of a similar character, may be witnessed in most of the cases which are

supposed to be under diabolical influence.’[276] The remark several

times made by travellers is no doubt true, that the spiritualistic

theory of disease has tended strongly to prevent progress in the medical

art among the lower races. Thus among the Bodo and Dhimal of North-East

India, who ascribe all diseases to a deity tormenting the patient for

some impiety or neglect, the exorcists divine the offended god and

appease him with the promised sacrifice of a hog; these exorcists are a

class of priests, and the people have no other doctors.[277] Where the

world-wide doctrine of disease-demons has held sway, men’s minds, full

of spells and ceremonies, have scarce had room for thought of drugs and

regimen.

The cases in which disease-possession passes into oracle-possession are

especially connected with hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic

affections. Mr. Backhouse describes a Tasmanian native sorcerer,

‘affected with fits of spasmodic contraction of the muscles of one

breast, which he attributes, as they do all other diseases, to the

devil’; this malady served to prove his inspiration to his people.[278]

When Dr. Mason was preaching near a village of heathen Pwo, a man fell

down in an epileptic fit, his familiar spirit having come over him to

forbid the people to listen to the missionary, and he sang out his

denunciations like one frantic. This man was afterwards converted, and

told the missionary that ‘he could not account for his former exercises,

but that it certainly appeared to him as though a spirit spoke, and he

must tell what was communicated.’ In this Karen district flourishes the

native ‘wee’ or prophet, whose business is to work himself into the

state in which he can see departed spirits, visit their distant home,

and even recall them to the body, thus raising the dead; these wees are

nervous excitable men, such as would become mediums, and in giving

oracles they go into actual convulsions.[279] Dr. Callaway’s details of

the state of the Zulu diviners are singularly instructive. Their

symptoms are ascribed to possession by ‘amatongo’ or ancestral spirits;

the disease is common, from some it departs of its own accord, others

have the ghost laid which causes it, and others let the affection take

its course and become professional diviners, whose powers of finding

hidden things and giving apparently inaccessible information are vouched

for by native witnesses, who at the same time are not blind to their

tricks and their failures. The most perfect description is that of a

hysterical visionary, who had ‘the disease which precedes the power to

divine.’ This man describes that well-known symptom of hysteria, the

heavy weight creeping up within him to his shoulders, his vivid dreams,

his waking visions of objects that are not there when he approaches, the

songs that come to him without learning, the sensation of flying in the

air. This man was ‘of a family who are very sensitive, and become

doctors.’[280] Persons whose constitutional unsoundness induces morbid

manifestations are indeed marked out by nature to become seers and

sorcerers. Among the Patagonians, patients seized with falling sickness

or St. Vitus’s dance were at once selected for magicians, as chosen by

the demons themselves who possessed, distorted, and convulsed them.[281]

Among Siberian tribes, the shamans select children liable to convulsions

as suitable to be brought up to the profession, which is apt to become

hereditary with the epileptic tendencies it belongs to.[282] Thus, even

in the lower culture, a class of sickly brooding enthusiasts begin to

have that power over the minds of their lustier fellows, which they have

kept in so remarkable a way through the course of history.

Morbid oracular manifestations are habitually excited on purpose, and

moreover the professional sorcerer commonly exaggerates or wholly feigns

them. In the more genuine manifestations the medium may be so intensely

wrought upon by the idea that a possessing spirit is speaking from

within him, that he may not only give this spirit’s name and speak in

its character, but possibly may in good faith alter his voice to suit

the spiritual utterance. This gift of spirit-utterance, which belongs to

‘ventriloquism’ in the ancient and proper sense of the term, of course

lapses into sheer trickery. But that the phenomena should be thus

artificially excited or dishonestly counterfeited, rather confirms than

alters the present argument. Real or simulated, the details of

oracle-possession alike illustrate popular belief. The Patagonian wizard

begins his performance with drumming and rattling till the real or

pretended epileptic fit comes on by the demon entering him, who then

answers questions from within him with a faint and mournful voice.[283]

In Southern India and Ceylon the so-called ‘devil-dancers’ have to work

themselves into paroxysms, to gain the inspiration whereby they profess

to cure their patients.[284] So, with furious dancing to the music and

chanting of the attendants, the Bodo priest brings on the fit of

maniacal inspiration in which the deity fills him and gives oracles

through him.[285] In Kamchatka the female shamans, when Billukai came

down into them in a thunderstorm, would prophesy; or, receiving spirits

with a cry of ‘hush!’ their teeth chattered as in fever, and they were

ready to divine.[286] Among the Singpho of South-East Asia, when the

‘natzo’ or conjurer is sent for to a sick patient, he calls on his ‘nat’

or demon, the soul of a deceased foreign prince, who descends into him

and gives the required answers.[287] In the Pacific Islands, spirits of

the dead would enter for a time the body of a living man, inspiring him

to declare future events, or to execute some commission from the higher

deities. The symptoms of oracular possession among savages have been

especially well described in this region of the world. The Fijian priest

sits looking steadfastly at a whale’s tooth ornament, amid dead silence.

In a few minutes he trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs come

on, which increase to strong convulsions, with swelling of the veins,

murmurs and sobs. Now the god has entered him, and with eyes rolling and

protruding, unnatural voice, pale face and livid lips, sweat streaming

from every pore, and the whole aspect of a furious madman, he gives the

divine answer, and then, the symptoms subsiding, he looks round with a

vacant stare, and the deity returns to the land of spirits. In the

Sandwich Islands, where the god Oro thus gave his oracles, his priest

ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but with his limbs

convulsed, his features distorted and terrific, his eyes wild and

strained, he would roll on the ground foaming at the mouth, and reveal

the will of the possessing god in shrill cries and sounds violent and

indistinct, which the attending priests duly interpreted to the people.

In Tahiti, it was often noticed that men who in the natural state showed

neither ability nor eloquence, would in such convulsive delirium burst

forth into earnest lofty declamation, declaring the will and answers of

the gods, and prophesying future events, in well-knit harangues full of

the poetic figure and metaphor of the professional orator. But when the

fit was over, and sober reason returned, the prophet’s gifts were

gone.[288] Lastly, the accounts of oracular possession in Africa show

the primitive ventriloquist in perfect types of morbid knavery. In

Sofala, after a king’s funeral, his soul would enter into a sorcerer,

and speaking in the familiar tones that all the bystanders recognized,

would give counsel to the new monarch how to govern his people.[289]

About a century ago, a negro fetish-woman of Guinea is thus described in

the act of answering an enquirer who has come to consult her. She is

crouching on the earth, with her head between her knees and her hands up

to her face, till, becoming inspired by the fetish, she snorts and foams

and gasps. Then the suppliant may put his question, ‘Will my friend or

brother get well of this sickness?’—‘What shall I give thee to set him

free from his sickness?’ and so forth. Then the fetish-woman answers in

a thin, whistling voice, and with the old-fashioned idioms of

generations past; and thus the suppliant receives his command, perhaps

to kill a white cock and put him at a four-cross way, or tie him up for

the fetish to come and fetch him, or perhaps merely to drive a dozen

wooden pegs into the ground, so to bury his friend’s disease with

them.[290]

The details of demoniacal possession among barbaric and civilized

nations need no elaborate description, so simply do they continue the

savage cases.[291] But the state of things we notice here agrees with

the conclusion that the possession-theory belongs originally to the

lower culture, and is gradually superseded by higher medical knowledge.

Surveying its course through the middle and higher civilization, we

shall notice first a tendency to limit it to certain peculiar and severe

affections, especially connected with mental disorder, such as epilepsy,

hysteria, delirium, idiocy, madness; and after this a tendency to

abandon it altogether, in consequence of the persistent opposition of

the medical faculty. Among the nations of South-East Asia, obsession and

possessions by demons is strong at least in popular belief. The Chinese

attacked with dizziness, or loss of the use of his limbs, or other

unaccountable disease, knows that he has been influenced by a malignant

demon, or punished for some offence by a deity whose name he will

mention, or affected by his wife of a former existence, whose spirit has

after a long search discovered him. Exorcism of course exists, and when

the evil spirit or influence is expelled, it is especially apt to enter

some person standing near; hence the common saying, ‘idle spectators

should not be present at an exorcism.’ Divination by possessed mediums

is usual in China: among such is the professional woman who sits at a

table in contemplation, till the soul of a deceased person from whom

communication is desired enters her body and talks through her to the

living; also the man into whom a deity is brought by invocations and

mesmeric passes, when, assuming the divine figure and attitude, he

pronounces the oracle.[292] In Burma, the fever-demon of the jungle

seizes trespassers on his domain, and shakes them in ague till he is

exorcised, while falls and apoplectic fits are the work of other

spirits. The dancing of women by demoniacal possession is treated by the

doctor covering their heads with a garment, and thrashing them soundly

with a stick, the demon and not the patient being considered to feel the

blows; the possessing spirit may be prevented from escaping by a knotted

and charmed cord hung round the bewitched person’s neck, and when a

sufficient beating has induced it to speak by the patient’s voice and

declare its name and business, it may either be allowed to depart, or

the doctor tramples on the patient’s stomach till the demon is stamped

to death. For an example of invocation and offerings, one characteristic

story told by Dr. Bastian will suffice. A Bengali cook was seized with

an apoplectic fit, which his Burmese wife declared was but a just

retribution, for the godless fellow had gone day after day to market to

buy pounds and pounds of meat, yet in spite of her remonstrances would

never give a morsel to the patron-spirit of the town; as a good wife,

however, she now did her best for her suffering husband, placing near

him little heaps of coloured rice for the ‘nat,’ and putting on his

fingers rings with prayers addressed to the same offended being—‘Oh ride

him not!’—‘Ah let him go!’—‘Grip him not so hard!’—‘Thou shalt have

rice!’—‘Ah, how good that tastes!’ How explicitly Buddhism recognizes

such ideas, may be judged from one of the questions officially put to

candidates for admission as monks or talapoins—‘Art thou afflicted by

madness or the other ills caused by giants, witches, or evil demons of

the forest and mountain?’[293] Within our own domain of British India,

the possession-theory and the rite of exorcism belonging to it may be

perfectly studied to this day. There the doctrine of sudden ailment or

nervous disease being due to a blast or possession by a ‘bhut,’ or

being, that is, a demon, is recognized as of old; there the old witch

who has possessed a man and made him sick or deranged, will answer

spiritually out of his body and say who she is and where she lives;

there the frenzied demoniac may be seen raving, writhing, tearing,

bursting his bonds, till, subdued by the exorcist, his fury subsides, he

stares and sighs, falls helpless to the ground, and comes to himself;

and there the deities caused by excitement, singing, and incense to

enter into men’s bodies, manifest their presence with the usual

hysterical or epileptic symptoms, and speaking in their own divine name

and personality, deliver oracles by the vocal organs of the inspired

medium.[294]

In the Ancient Babylonian-Assyrian texts, the exorcism-formulas show the

doctrine of disease-demons in full development, and similar opinions

were current in ancient Greece and Rome, to whose languages indeed our

own owes the technical terms of the subject, such as ‘demoniac’ and

‘exorcist.’ Homer’s sick men racked with pain are tormented by a hateful

demon (στυγερὸς δέ οἱ ἔχραε δαίμων). ‘Epilepsy’ (ἐπίληψις) was, as its

name imports, the ‘seizure’ of the patient by a superhuman agent: the

agent being more exactly defined in ‘nympholepsy,’ the state of being

seized or possessed by a nymph, i.e., rapt or entranced (νυμφόληπτος,

lymphatus). The causation of mental derangement and delirious utterance

by spiritual possession was an accepted tenet of Greek philosophy. To be

insane was simply to have an evil spirit, as when Sokrates said of those

who denied demonic or spiritual knowledge, that they themselves were

demoniac (δαιμονᾶν ἔφη), and Alexander ascribed to the influence of

offended Dionysos the ungovernable drunken fury in which he killed his

friend Kleitos; raving madness was obsession or possession by an evil

demon (κἀκοδαιμονία). So the Romans called madmen ‘larvati,’ ‘larvarum

pleni,’ full of ghosts. Patients possessed by demons stared and foamed,

and the spirits spoke from within them by their voices. The craft of the

exorcist was well known. As for oracular possession, its theory and

practice remained in fullest vigour through the classic world, scarce

altered from the times of lowest barbarism. Could a South Sea Islander

have gone to Delphi to watch the convulsive struggles of the Pythia, and

listen to her raving, shrieking utterances, he would have needed no

explanation whatever of a rite so absolutely in conformity with his own

savage philosophy.[295]

The Jewish doctrine of possession[296] at no time in its long course

exercised a direct influence on the opinion of the civilized world

comparable to that produced by the mentions of demoniacal possession in

the New Testament. It is needless to quote here even a selection from

the familiar passages of the Gospels and Acts which display the manner

in which certain described symptoms were currently accounted for in

public opinion. Regarding these documents from an ethnographic point of

view, it need only be said that they prove, incidentally but absolutely,

that Jews and Christians at that time held the doctrine which had

prevailed for ages before, and continued to prevail for ages after,

referring to possession and obsession by spirits the symptoms of mania,

epilepsy, dumbness, delirious and oracular utterance, and other morbid

conditions, mental and bodily.[297] Modern missionary works, such as

have been cited here, give the most striking evidence of the

correspondence of these demoniac symptoms with such as may still be

observed among uncivilized races. During the early centuries of

Christianity, demoniacal possession indeed becomes peculiarly

conspicuous, perhaps not from unusual prevalence of the animistic theory

of disease, but simply because a period of intense religious excitement

brought it more than usually into requisition. Ancient ecclesiastical

records describe, under the well-known names of ‘dæmoniacs’

(δαιμονιζόμενοι), ‘possessed’ (κατεχόμενοι), ‘energumens’

(ἐνεργούμενοι), the class of persons whose bodies are seized or

possessed by an evil spirit; such attacks being frequently attended with

great commotions and vexations and disturbances of the body, occasioning

sometimes frenzy and madness, sometimes epileptic fits, and other

violent tossings and contortions. These energumens formed a recognised

part of an early Christian congregation, a standing-place apart being

assigned to them in the church. The church indeed seems to have been the

principal habitation of these afflicted creatures, they were occupied

out of service-time in such work as sweeping, daily food was provided

for them, and they were under the charge of a special order of clergy,

the exorcists, whose religious function was to cast out devils by prayer

and adjuration and laying on of hands. As to the usual symptoms of

possession, Justin, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Cyril, Minucius, Cyprian,

and other early Fathers, give copious descriptions of demons entering

into the bodies of men, disordering their health and minds, driving them

to wander among the tombs, forcing them to writhe and wallow and rave

and foam, howling and declaring their own diabolical names by the

patients’ voices, but when overcome by conjuration or by blows

administered to their victims, quitting the bodies they had entered, and

acknowledging the pagan deities to be but devils.[298]

On a subject so familiar to educated readers I may be excused from

citing at length a vast mass of documents, barbaric in nature and only

more or less civilized in circumstance, to illustrate the continuance of

the doctrine of possession and the rite of exorcism through the middle

ages and into modern times. A few salient examples will suffice. For a

type of medical details, we may instance the recipes in the ‘Early

English Leechdoms’: a cake of the ‘thost’ of a white hound baked with

meal is to be taken against the attack by dwarves (i.e. convulsions); a

drink of herbs worked up off clear ale with the aid of garlic, holy

water, and singing of masses, is to be drunk by a fiend-sick patient out

of a church bell. Philosophical argument may be followed in the

dissertations of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ concerning demons

substantially inhabiting men and causing illness in them, enquiries

which may be pursued under the auspices of Glanvil in the ‘Saducismus

Triumphatus.’ Historical anecdote bears record of the convulsive

clairvoyant demon who possessed Nicola Aubry, and under the Bishop of

Laon’s exorcism testified in an edifying manner to the falsity of

Calvinism; of Charles VI. of France, who was possessed, and whose demon

a certain priest tried in vain to transfer into the bodies of twelve men

who were chained up to receive it; of the German woman at Elbingerode

who in a fit of toothache wished the devil might enter into her teeth,

and who was possessed by six demons accordingly, which gave their names

as Schalk der Wahrheit, Wirk, Widerkraut, Myrrha, Knip, Stüp; of George

Lukins of Yatton, whom seven devils threw into fits and talked and sang

and barked out of, and who was delivered by a solemn exorcism by seven

clergymen at the Temple Church at Bristol in the year 1788.[299] A

strong sense of the permanence of the ancient doctrine may be gained

from accounts of the state of public opinion in Europe, from Greece and

Italy to France, where within the last century derangement and hysteria

were still popularly ascribed to possession and treated by exorcism,

just as in the dark ages.[300] In the year 1861, at Morzine, at the

south of the Lake of Geneva, there might be seen in full fury an

epidemic of diabolical possession worthy of a Red Indian settlement or a

negro kingdom of West Africa, an outburst which the exorcisms of a

superstitious priest had so aggravated that there were a hundred and ten

raving demoniacs in that single village.[301] The following is from a

letter written in 1862 by Mgr. Anouilh, a French missionary-bishop in

China. ‘Le croiriez-vous? dix villages se sont convertis. Le diable est

furieux et fait les cent coups. Il y a eu, pendant les quinze jours que

je viens de prêcher, cinq ou six possessions. Nos catéchumènes avec

l’eau bénite chassent les diables, guérissent les malades. J’ai vu des

choses merveilleuses. Le diable m’est d’un grand secours pour convertir

les païens. Comme au temps de Notre-Seigneur, quoique père du mensonge,

il ne peut s’empêcher de dire la vérité. Voyez ce pauvre possédé faisant

mille contorsions et disant à grands cris: “Pourquoi prêches-tu la vraie

religion? Je ne puis souffrir que tu m’enlèves mes disciples.”—“Comment

t’appelles-tu?” lui demande le catéchiste. Après quelques refus: “Je

suis l’envoyé de Lucifer”—“Combien êtes-vous?”—“Nous sommes vingt-deux.”

“L’eau bénite et le signe de la croix ont délivré ce possédé.”’[302] To

conclude the series with a modern spiritualistic instance, one of those

where the mediums feel themselves entered and acted through by a spirit

other than their own soul. The Rev. Mr. West of Philadelphia describes

how a certain possessed medium went through the sword exercise, and fell

down senseless; when he came to himself again, the spirit within him

declared itself to be the soul of a deceased ancestor of the minister’s,

who had fought and died in the American War.[303] We in England now

hardly hear of demoniacal possession except as a historical doctrine of

divines. We have discarded from religious services the solemn ceremony

of casting out devils from the bodies of the possessed, a rite to this

day officially retained in the Rituals of the Greek and Roman Churches.

Cases of diabolical influence alleged from time to time among ourselves

are little noticed except by newspaper paragraphs on superstition and

imposture. If, however, we desire to understand the doctrine of

possession, its origin and influence in the world, we must look beyond

countries where public opinion has passed into this stage, and must

study the demoniac theory as it still prevails in lower and lowest

levels of culture.

It has to be thoroughly understood that the changed aspect of the

subject in modern opinion is not due to disappearance of the actual

manifestations which early philosophy attributed to demoniacal

influence. Hysteria and epilepsy, delirium and mania, and such like

bodily and mental derangement, still exist. Not only do they still

exist, but among the lower races, and in superstitious districts among

the higher, they are still explained and treated as of old. It is not

too much to assert that the doctrine of demoniacal possession is kept

up, substantially the same theory to account for substantially the same

facts, by half the human race, who thus stand as consistent

representatives of their forefathers back into primitive antiquity. It

is in the civilized world, under the influence of the medical doctrines

which have been developing since classic times, that the early animistic

theory of these morbid phenomena has been gradually superseded by views

more in accordance with modern science, to the great gain of our health

and happiness. The transition which has taken place in the famous insane

colony of Gheel in Belgium is typical. In old days, the lunatics were

carried there in crowds to be exorcised from their demons at the church

of St. Dymphna; to Gheel they still go, but the physician reigns in the

stead of the exorcist. Yet wherever, in times old or new, demoniacal

influences are brought forward to account for affections which

scientific physicians now explain on a different principle, care must be

taken not to misjudge the ancient doctrine and its place in history. As

belonging to the lower culture it is a perfectly rational philosophical

theory to account for certain pathological facts. But just as mechanical

astronomy gradually superseded the animistic astronomy of the lower

races, so biological pathology gradually supersedes animistic pathology,

the immediate operation of personal spiritual beings in both cases

giving place to the operation of natural processes.

We now pass to the consideration of another great branch of the lower

religion of the world, a development of the same principles of spiritual

operation with which we have become familiar in the study of the

possession-theory. This is the doctrine of Fetishism. Centuries ago, the

Portuguese in West Africa, noticing the veneration paid by the negroes

to certain objects, such as trees, fish, plants, idols, pebbles, claws

of beasts, sticks and so forth, very fairly compared these objects to

the amulets or talismans with which they were themselves familiar, and

called them _feitiço_ or ‘charm,’ a word derived from Latin _factitius_,

in the sense of ‘magically artful.’ Modern French and English adopted

this word from the Portuguese as _fétiche_, _fetish_, although curiously

enough both languages had already possessed the word for ages in a

different sense, Old French _faitis_, ‘well made, beautiful,’ which Old

English adopted as _fetys_, ‘well made, neat.’ It occurs in the

commonest of all quotations from Chaucer:

‘And Frensch sche spak ful faire and _fetysly_,

Aftur the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,

For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe.’

The President de Brosses, a most original thinker of the 18th century,

struck by the descriptions of the African worship of material and

terrestrial objects, introduced the word Fétichisme as a general

descriptive term,[304] and since then it has obtained great currency by

Comte’s use of it to denote a general theory of primitive religion, in

which external objects are regarded as animated by a life analogous to

man’s. It seems to me, however, more convenient to use the word Animism

for the doctrine of spirits in general, and to confine the word

Fetishism to that subordinate department which it properly belongs to,

namely, the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or

conveying influence through, certain material objects. Fetishism will be

taken as including the worship of ‘stocks and stones,’ and thence it

passes by an imperceptible gradation into Idolatry.

Any object whatsoever may be a fetish. Of course, among the endless

multitude of objects, not as we should say physically active, but to

which ignorant men ascribe mysterious power, we are not to apply

indiscriminately the idea of their being considered vessels or vehicles

or instruments of spiritual beings. They may be mere signs or tokens set

up to represent ideal notions or ideal beings, as fingers or sticks are

set up to represent numbers. Or they may be symbolic charms working by

imagined conveyance of their special properties, as an iron ring to give

firmness, or a kite’s foot to give swift flight. Or they may be merely

regarded in some undefined way as wondrous ornaments or curiosities. The

tendency runs through all human nature to collect and admire objects

remarkable in beauty, form, quality, or scarceness. The shelves of

ethnological museums show heaps of the objects which the lower races

treasure up and hang about their persons—teeth and claws, roots and

berries, shells and stones, and the like. Now fetishes are in great

measure selected from among such things as these, and the principle of

their attraction for savage minds is clearly the same which still guides

the superstitious peasant in collecting curious trifles ‘for luck.’ The

principle is one which retains its force in far higher ranges of culture

than the peasant’s. Compare the Ostyak’s veneration for any peculiar

little stone he has picked up, with the Chinese love of collecting

curious varieties of tortoise-shell, or an old-fashioned English

conchologist’s delight in a reversed shell. The turn of mind which in a

Gold-Coast negro would manifest itself in a museum of monstrous and most

potent fetishes, might impel an Englishman to collect scarce

postage-stamps or queer walking-sticks. In the love of abnormal

curiosities there shows itself a craving for the marvellous, an

endeavour to get free from the tedious sense of law and uniformity in

nature. As to the lower races, were evidence more plentiful as to the

exact meaning they attach to objects which they treat with mysterious

respect, it would very likely appear more often and more certainly than

it does now, that these objects seem to them connected with the action

of spirits, so as to be, in the strict sense in which the word is here

used, real fetishes. But this must not be taken for granted. 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 and power, is talked with, worshipped,

prayed to, sacrificed to, petted or ill-treated with reference to its

past or future behaviour to its votaries. In the instances now selected,

it will be seen that in one way or another they more or less satisfy

such conditions. In investigating the exact significance of fetishes in

use among men, savage or more civilized, the peculiar difficulty is to

know whether the effect of the object is thought due to a whole personal

spirit embodied in or attached to it, or to some less definable

influence exerted through it. In some cases this point is made clear,

but in many it remains doubtful.

It will help us to a clearer conception of the nature of a fetish, to

glance at a curious group of nations which connect a disease at once

with spiritual influence, and with the presence of some material object.

They are a set of illustrations of the savage principle, that a disease

or an actual disease-spirit may exist embodied in a stick or stone or

such-like material object. Among the natives of Australia, one hears of

the sorcerers extracting from their own bodies by passes and

manipulations a magical essence called ‘boylya,’ which they can make to

enter the patient’s body like pieces of quartz, which causes pain there

and consumes the flesh, and may be magically extracted either as

invisible or in the form of a bit of quartz. Even the spirit of the

waters, ‘nguk-wonga,’ which had caused an attack of erysipelas in a

boy’s leg (he had been bathing too long when heated) is declared to have

been extracted by the conjurers from the affected part in the shape of a

sharp stone.[305] The Caribs, who very distinctly referred diseases to

the action of hostile demons or deities, had a similar sorcerer’s

process of extracting thorns or splinters from the affected part as the

peccant causes, and it is said that in the Antilles morsels of stone and

bone so extracted were wrapped up in cotton by the women, as protective

fetishes in childbirth.[306] The Malagasy, considering all diseases as

inflicted by an evil spirit, consult a diviner, whose method is often to

remove the disease by means of a ‘faditra;’ this is some object, such as

a little grass, ashes, a sheep, a pumpkin, the water the patient has

rinsed his mouth with, or what not, and when the priest has counted on

it the evils that may injure the patient, and charged the faditra to

take them away for ever, it is thrown away, and the malady with it.[307]

Among those strong believers in disease-spirits, the Dayaks of Borneo,

the priest, waving and jingling charms over the affected part of the

patient, pretends to extract stones, splinters, and bits of rag, which

he declares are spirits; of such evil spirits he will occasionally bring

half-a-dozen out of a man’s stomach, and as he is paid a fee of six

gallons of rice for each, he is probably disposed (like a chiropodist

under similar circumstances) to extract a good many.[308] The most

instructive accounts of this kind are those which reach us from Africa.

Dr. Callaway has taken down at length a Zulu account of the method of

stopping out disease caused by spirits of the dead. If a widow is

troubled by her late husband’s ghost coming and talking to her night

after night as though still alive, till her health is affected and she

begins to waste away, they find a ‘nyanga’ or sorcerer who can bar out

the disease. He bids her not lose the spittle collected in her mouth

while she is dreaming, and gives her medicine to chew when she wakes.

Then he goes with her to lay the ‘itongo,’ or ghost; perhaps he shuts it

up in a bulb of the inkomfe plant, making a hole in the side of this,

putting in the medicine and the dream-spittle, closing the hole with a

stopper, and re-planting the bulb. Leaving the place, he charges her not

to look back till she gets home. Thus the dream is barred; it may still

come occasionally, but no longer infests the woman; the doctor prevails

over the dead man as regards that dream. In other cases the cure of a

sick man attacked by the ancestral spirits may be effected with some of

his blood put into a hole in an anthill by the doctor, who closes the

hole with a stone, and departs without looking back; or the patient may

be scarified over the painful place, and the blood put into the mouth of

a frog, caught for the purpose and carried back. So the disease is

barred out from the man.[309] In West Africa, a case in point is the

practice of transferring a sick man’s ailment to a live fowl, which is

set free with it, and if any one catches the fowl, the disease goes to

him.[310] Captain Burton’s account from Central Africa is as follows.

Disease being possession by a spirit or ghost, the ‘mganga’ or sorcerer

has to expel it, the principal remedies being drumming, dancing, and

drinking, till at last the spirit is enticed from the body of the

patient into some inanimate article, technically called a ‘keti’ or

stool for it. This may be an ornament, such as a peculiar bead or a

leopard’s claw, or it may be a nail or rag, which by being driven into

or hung to a ‘devil’s tree’ has the effect of laying the disease-spirit.

Or disease-spirits may be extracted by chants, one departing at the end

of each stave, when a little painted stick made for it is flung on the

ground, and some patients may have as many as a dozen ghosts extracted,

for here also the fee is so much apiece.[311] In Siam, the Laos sorcerer

can send his ‘phi phob’ or demon into a victim’s body, where it turns

into a fleshy or leathery lump, and causes disease ending in death.[312]

Thus, on the one hand, the spirit-theory of disease is seen to be

connected with that sorcerer’s practice prevalent among the lower races,

of pretending to extract objects from the patient’s body, such as

stones, bones, balls of hair, &c., which are declared to be causes of

disease conveyed by magical means into him; of this proceeding I have

given a detailed account elsewhere, under the name of the

‘sucking-cure.’[313] On the other hand, there appears among the lower

races that well-known conception of a disease or evil influence as an

individual being, which may be not merely conveyed by an infected object

(though this of course may have much to do with the idea), but may be

removed by actual transfer from the patient into some other animal or

object. Thus Pliny informs us how pains in the stomach may be cured by

transmitting the ailment from the patient’s body into a puppy or duck,

which will probably die of it;[314] it is considered baneful to a Hindu

woman to be a man’s third wife, wherefore the precaution is taken of

first betrothing him to a tree, which dies in her stead;[315] after the

birth of a Chinese baby, its father’s trousers are hung in the room

wrong side up, that all evil influences may enter into them instead of

into the child.[316] Modern folklore still cherishes such ideas. The

ethnographer may still study in the ‘white witchcraft’ of European

peasants the arts of curing a man’s fever or headache by transferring it

to a crawfish or a bird, or of getting rid of ague or gout or warts by

giving them to a willow, elder, fir, or ash-tree, with suitable charms,

‘Goe morgen, olde, ick geef oe de Kolde,’ ‘Goden Abend, Herr Fleder,

hier bring ick mien Feber, ick bind em di an und gah davan,’ ‘Ash-tree,

ashen tree, pray buy this wart of me,’ and so forth; or of nailing or

plugging an ailment into a tree-trunk, or conveying it away by some of

the patient’s hair or nail-parings or some such thing, and so burying

it. Looking at these proceedings from a moral point of view, the

practice of transferring the ailment to a knot or a lock of hair and

burying it is the most harmless, but another device is a very pattern of

wicked selfishness. In England, warts may be touched each with a pebble,

and the pebbles in a bag left on the road to church, to give up their

ailments to the unlucky finder; in Germany, a plaister from a sore may

be left at a cross-way to transfer the disease to a passer-by; I am told

on medical authority that the bunches of flowers which children offer to

travellers in Southern Europe are sometimes intended for the ungracious

purpose of sending some disease away from their homes.[317] One case of

this group, mentioned to me by Mr. Spottiswoode, is particularly

interesting. In Thuringia it is considered that a string of

rowan-berries, a rag, or any small article, touched by a sick person and

then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any

person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick person

from the disease. This gives great probability to Captain Burton’s

suggestion that the rags, locks of hair, and what not, hung on trees

near sacred places by the superstitious from Mexico to India and from

Ethiopia to Ireland, are deposited there as actual receptacles of

disease; the African ‘devil’s trees’ and the sacred trees of Sindh, hung

with rags through which votaries have transferred their complaints,

being typical cases of a practice surviving in lands of higher culture.

The spirits which enter or otherwise attach themselves to objects may be

human souls. Indeed one of the most natural cases of the fetish-theory

is when a soul inhabits or haunts what is left of its former body. It is

plain enough that by a simple association of ideas the dead person is

imagined to keep up a connexion with his remains. Thus we read of the

Mandan women going year after year to take food to the skulls of their

dead kinsfolk, and sitting by the hour to chat and jest in their most

endearing strain with the relics of a husband or child;[318] thus the

Guinea negroes, who keep the bones of parents in chests, will go to talk

with them in the little huts which serve for their tombs.[319] And thus,

from the savage who keeps and carries with his household property the

cleaned bones of his forefathers,[320] to the mourner among ourselves

who goes to weep at the grave of one beloved, imagination keeps together

the personality and the relics of the dead. Here, then, is a course of

thought open to the animistic thinker, leading him on from fancied

association to a belief in the real presence of a spiritual being in a

material object. Thus there is no difficulty in understanding how the

Karens thought the spirits of the dead might come back from the other

world to reanimate their bodies;[321] nor how the Marian islanders

should have kept the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts

as household gods, and even expected them to give oracles out of their

skulls;[322] nor how the soul of a dead Carib might be thought to abide

in one of his bones, taken from the grave and carefully wrapped in

cotton, in which state it could answer questions, and even bewitch an

enemy if a morsel of his property were wrapped up with it;[323] nor how

the dead Santal should be sent to his fathers by the ceremony of

committing to the sacred river morsels of his skull from the

funeral-pile.[324] Such ideas are of great interest in studying the

burial rites of mankind, especially the habit of keeping relics of the

dead as vehicles of superhuman power, and of even preserving the whole

body as a mummy, as in Peru and Egypt. The conception of such human

relics becoming fetishes, inhabited or at least acted through by the

souls which formerly belonged to them, will give a rational explanation

of much relic-worship otherwise obscure.

A further stretch of imagination enables the lower races to associate

the souls of the dead with mere objects, a practice which may have had

its origin in the merest childish make-believe, but which would lead a

thorough savage animist straight on to the conception of the soul

entering the object as a body. 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.[325] Among the Salish Indians of

Oregon, the conjurers bring back men’s lost souls as little stones or

bones or splinters, and pretend to pass them down through the tops of

their heads into their hearts, but great care must be taken to remove

the spirits of any dead people that may be in the lot, for the patient

receiving one would die.[326] There are indigenous Kol tribes of India

who work out this idea curiously in bringing back the soul of a deceased

man into the house after the funeral, apparently to be worshipped as a

household spirit; while some catch the spirit re-embodied in a fowl or

fish, the Binjwar of Raepore bring it home in a pot of water, and the

Bunjia in a pot of flour.[327] The Chinese hold such theories with

extreme distinctness, considering one of a man’s three spirits to take

up its abode in the ancestral tablet, where it receives messages and

worship from the survivors; while the long keeping of the dead man’s

gilt and lacquered coffin, and the reverence and offerings continued at

the tomb, are connected with the thought of a spirit lingering about the

corpse. Consistent with these quaint ideas are ceremonies in vogue in

China, of bringing home in a cock (live or artificial) the spirit of a

man deceased in a distant place, and of enticing into a sick man’s coat

the departing spirit which has already left his body, and so conveying

it back.[328] Tatar folklore illustrates the idea of soul-embodiment in

the quaint but intelligible story of the demon-giant who could not be

slain, for he did not keep his soul in his body, but in a twelve-headed

snake carried in a bag on his horse’s back; the hero finds out the

secret and kills the snake, and then the giant dies too. This tale is

curious, as very likely indicating the original sense of a well-known

group of stories in European folklore, the Scandinavian one, for

instance, where the giant cannot be made an end of, because he keeps his

heart not in his body, but in a duck’s egg in a well far away; at last

the young champion finds the egg and crushes it, and the giant

bursts.[329] Following the notion of soul-embodiment into civilized

times, we learn that ‘A ghost may be laid for any term less than an

hundred years, and in any place or body, full or empty; as, a solid

oak—the pommel of a sword—a barrel of beer, if a yeoman or simple

gentleman—or a pipe of wine, if an esquire or a justice.’ This is from

Grose’s bantering description in the 18th century of the art of ‘laying’

ghosts,[330] and it is one of the many good instances of articles of

serious savage belief surviving as jests among civilized men.

Thus other spiritual beings, roaming free about the world, find

fetish-objects to act through, to embody themselves in, to present them

visibly to their votaries. It is extremely difficult to draw a distinct

line of separation between the two prevailing sets of ideas relating to

spiritual action through what we call inanimate objects. Theoretically

we can distinguish the notion of the object acting as it were by the

will and force of its own proper soul or spirit, from the notion of some

foreign spirit entering its substance or acting on it from without, and

so using it as a body or instrument. But in practice these conceptions

blend almost inextricably. This state of things is again a confirmation

of the theory of animism here advanced, which treats both sets of ideas

as similar developments of the same original idea, that of the human

soul, so that they may well shade imperceptibly into one another. To

depend on some typical descriptions of fetishism and its allied

doctrines in different grades of culture, is a safer mode of treatment

than to attempt too accurate a general definition.

There is a quaint story, dating from the time of Columbus, which shows

what mysterious personality and power rude tribes could attach to

lifeless matter. The cacique Hatuey, it is related, heard by his spies

in Hispaniola that the Spaniards were coming to Cuba. So he called his

people together, and talked to them of the Spaniards—how they persecuted

the natives of the islands, and how they did such things for the sake of

a great lord whom they much desired and loved. Then, taking out a basket

with gold in it, he said, ‘Ye see here their lord whom they serve and go

after; and, as ye have heard, they are coming hither to seek this lord.

Therefore let us make him a feast, that when they come he may tell them

not to do us harm.’ So they danced and sang from night to morning before

the gold-basket, and then the cacique told them not to keep the

Christian’s lord anywhere, for if they kept him in their very bowels

they would have to bring him out; so he bade them cast him to the bottom

of the river, and this they did.[331] If this story be thought too good

to be true, at any rate it does not exaggerate authentic savage ideas.

The ‘maraca’ or ceremonial rattle, used by certain rude Brazilian

tribes, was an eminent fetish. It was a calabash with a handle and a

hole for a mouth, and stones inside; yet to its votaries it seemed no

mere rattle, but the receptacle of a spirit that spoke from it when

shaken; therefore the Indians set up their maracas, talked to them, set

food and drink and burned incense before them, held annual feasts in

their honour, and would even go to war with their neighbours to satisfy

the rattle-spirits’ demand for human victims.[332] Among the North

American Indians, the fetish-theory seems involved in that remarkable

and general proceeding known as getting ‘medicine.’ Each youth obtains

in a vision or dream a sight of his medicine, and considering how

thoroughly the idea prevails that the forms seen in visions and dreams

are spirits, this of itself shows the animistic nature of the matter.

The medicine thus seen may be an animal, or part of one, such as skin or

claws, feather or shell, or such a thing as a plant, a stone, a knife, a

pipe; this object he must obtain, and thenceforward through life it

becomes his protector. Considered as a vehicle or receptacle of a

spirit, its fetish-nature is shown in many ways; its owner will do

homage to it, make feasts in its honour, sacrifice horses, dogs, and

other valuable objects to it or its spirit, fast to appease it if

offended, have it burned with him to conduct him as a guardian-spirit to

the happy hunting-grounds. Beside these special protective objects, the

Indians, especially the medicine-men (the word is French, ‘médecin,’

applied to these native doctors or conjurers, and since stretched to

take in all that concerns their art), use multitudes of other fetishes

as means of spiritual influence.[333] Among the Turanian tribes of

Northern Asia, where Castrén describes the idea of spirits contained in

material objects, to which they belong, and wherein they dwell in the

same incomprehensible way as the souls in a man’s body, we may notice

the Ostyak’s worship of objects of scarce or peculiar quality, and also

the connexion of the shamans or sorcerers with fetish-objects, as where

the Tatars consider the innumerable rags and tags, bells and bits of

iron, that adorn the shaman’s magic costume, to contain spirits helpful

to their owner in his magic craft.[334] John Bell, in his journey across

Asia in 1719, relates a story which well illustrates Mongol ideas as to

the action of self-moving objects. A certain Russian merchant told him

that once some pieces of damask were stolen out of his tent. He

complained, and the Kutuchtu Lama ordered the proper steps to be taken

to find out the thief. One of the Lamas took a bench with four feet, and

after turning it several times in different directions, at last it

pointed directly to the tent where the stolen goods lay concealed. The

Lama now mounted astride the bench, and soon carried it, or, as was

commonly believed, it carried him, to the very tent, where he ordered

the damask to be produced. The demand was directly complied with: for it

is vain in such cases to offer any excuse.[335]

A more recent account from Central Africa may be placed as a pendant to

this Asiatic account of divination by a fetish-object. The Rev. H.

Rowley says of the Manganja, that they believed the medicine-men could

impart a power for good or evil to objects either animate or inanimate,

which objects the people feared, though they did not worship them. This

missionary once saw this art employed to detect the thief who had stolen

some corn. The people assembled round a large fig-tree. The magician, a

wild-looking man, produced two sticks, like our broomsticks, which after

mysterious manipulation and gibberish he delivered to four young men,

two holding each stick. A zebra-tail and a calabash-rattle were given to

a young man and a boy. The medicine-man rolled himself about in hideous

fashion, and chanted an unceasing incantation; the bearers of the tail

and rattle went round the stick-holders, and shook these implements over

their heads. After a while the men with the sticks had spasmodic

twitchings of the arms and legs, these increased nearly to convulsions,

they foamed at the mouth, their eyes seemed starting from their heads,

they realized to the full the idea of demoniacal possession. According

to the native notion, it was the sticks which were possessed primarily,

and through them the men, who could hardly hold them. The sticks whirled

and dragged the men round and round like mad, through bush and thorny

shrub, and over every obstacle, nothing stopped them, their bodies were

torn and bleeding; at last they came back to the assembly, whirled round

again, and rushed down the path to fall panting and exhausted in the hut

of one of a chief’s wives, the sticks rolling to her very feet,

denouncing her as the thief. She denied it, but the medicine-man

answered, ‘The spirit has declared her guilty, the spirit never lies.’

However, the ‘muavi’ or ordeal-poison was administered to a cock, as

deputy for the woman; the bird threw it up, and she was acquitted.[336]

Fetishism in the lower civilization is thus by no means confined to the

West African negro with whom we specially associate the term. Yet, what

with its being in fact extremely prevalent there, and what with the

attention of foreign observers having been particularly drawn to it, the

accounts from West Africa are certainly the fullest and most minute on

record. The late Professor Waitz’s generalization of the principle

involved in these is much to the purpose. He thus describes the negro’s

conception of his fetish. ‘According to his view, a spirit dwells or can

dwell in every sensible object, and often a very great and mighty one in

an insignificant thing. This spirit he does not consider as bound fast

and unchangeably to the corporeal thing it dwells in, but it has only

its usual or principal abode in it. The negro indeed in his conception

not uncommonly separates the spirit from the sensible object which it

inhabits, he even sometimes contrasts the one with the other, but most

usually combines the two as forming a whole, and this whole is (as the

Europeans call it) the “fetish,” the object of his religious worship.’

Some further particulars will show how this principle is worked out.

Fetishes (native names for them are ‘grigri,’ ‘juju,’ &c.) may be mere

curious mysterious objects that strike a negro’s fancy, or they may be

consecrated or affected by a priest or fetish-man; the theory of their

influence is that they belong to or are made effectual by a spirit or

demon yet they have to stand the test of experience, and if they fail to

bring their owner luck and safety, he discards them for some more

powerful medium. The fetish can see and hear and understand and act, its

possessor worships it, talks familiarly with it as a dear and faithful

friend, pours libations of rum over it, and in times of danger calls

loudly and earnestly on it as if to wake up its spirit and energy. To

give an idea of the sort of things which are chosen as fetishes, and of

the manner in which they are associated with spiritual influences,

Römer’s account from Guinea about a century ago may serve. In the

fetish-house, he says, there hang or lie thousands of rubbishy trifles,

a pot with red earth and a cock’s feather stuck in it, pegs wound over

with yarn, red parrots’ feathers, men’s hair, and so forth. The

principal thing in the hut is the stool for the fetish to sit on, and

the mattress for him to rest on, the mattress being no bigger than a

man’s hand and the stool in proportion, and there is a little bottle of

brandy always ready for him. Here the word fetish is used as it often

is, to denote the spirit which dwells in this rudimentary temple, but we

see that the innumerable quaint trifles which we call fetishes were

associated with the deity in his house. Römer once peeped in at an open

door, and found an old negro caboceer sitting amid twenty thousand

fetishes in his private fetish-museum, thus performing his devotions.

The old man told him he did not know the hundredth part of the use they

had been to him; his ancestors and he had collected them, each had done

some service. The visitor took up a stone about as big as a hen’s egg,

and its owner told its history. He was once going out on important

business, but crossing the threshold he trod on this stone and hurt

himself. Ha ha! thought he, art thou here? So he took the stone, and it

helped him through his undertaking for days. In our own time, West

Africa is still a world of fetishes. The traveller finds them on every

path, at every ford, on every house-door, they hang as amulets round

every man’s neck, they guard against sickness or inflict it if

neglected, they bring rain, they fill the sea with fishes willing to

swim into the fisherman’s net, they catch and punish thieves, they give

their owner a bold heart and confound his enemies, there is nothing that

the fetish cannot do or undo, if it be but the right fetish. Thus the

one-sided logic of the barbarian, making the most of all that fits and

glossing over all that fails, has shaped a universal fetish-philosophy

of the events of life. So strong is the pervading influence, that the

European in Africa is apt to catch it from the negro, and himself, as

the saying is, ‘become black.’ Thus even yet some traveller, watching a

white companion asleep, may catch a glimpse of some claw or bone or

such-like sorcerer’s trash secretly fastened round his neck.[337]

European life, lastly, shows well-marked traces of the ancient doctrine

of spirits or mysterious influences inhabiting objects. Thus a mediæval

devil might go into an old sow, a straw, a barleycorn, or a willow-tree.

A spirit might be carried about in a solid receptacle for use:—

‘Besides in glistering glasses fayre, or else in christall cleare,

They sprightes enclose.’