in qualities passing from brutes and lifeless things, we find some races
avoiding oil, lest the game slip through their fingers, abstaining from
the flesh of deer, lest it engenders timidity, and from that of pigs and
of tortoises lest the eater has very small eyes. Dr. Tylor gives an
apposite illustration of a kindred superstition in the Hessian lad who
thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby-girl’s cap
in his pocket as a symbolical way of repudiating manhood. So the thief of
our London slums hopes to evade the police by carrying a piece of coal or
slate in his pocket for luck. Among ourselves there was an old medical
saw, “Hare-flesh engendereth melancholy bloude,” and in Swift’s _Polite
Conversation_ we have this reason assigned by Lady Answerall when asked to
eat it; whilst faith is not yet extinct in the “Doctrine of Signatures,”
or the notion that the appearance of a plant indicates the disease for
which it is a remedy, as the “eye-bright,” the black purple spot on the
corolla of which was said to show that it was good for weak eyes. In
referring to the mandrake superstition (a plant whose roots are said to
rudely resemble the human form) as illustration of the “recognised
principles in magic that things like each other, however superficially,
affect each other in a mystic way and possess identical properties,” Mr.
Andrew Lang quotes a Melanesian belief that a stone in the shape of a pig,
of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find, because it made pigs
prolific and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots.[64]
Brand remarks[65] that the custom of giving infants coral to help in
cutting the teeth is said to be a survival of an old belief in it as an
amulet; and in English, Sicilian, and West Indian folk-lore, we find the
belief that it changes colour in sympathy with the pale or healthy look of
the wearer. An old Latin author says,[66] “It putteth of lightenynge,
whirle-wynde, tempeste, and storms fro shyppes and houses that it is in.”
We are each of us hundreds of thousands of years old, and although our
customs and beliefs have a far less venerable antiquity, their sources lie
not less in primitive thought. Like the survival of the ancient Roman
workman’s “casula” or “little house” or “shelter” in the chasuble of the
priest; like the use of stone knives in circumcision long after the
discovery of metals; the general tends to become special; the common, its
primitive need or service forgotten, to become sacred. Sometimes the early
idea abides; the Crees, who carry about the bones of the dead carefully
wrapped up as a fetish; the Caribs, who think such relics can answer
questions; the Xomanes, who drink the powdered bones in water, that they
may receive the spirit; the Algonquins, whose god Manobozho turned bits of
his own flesh or his wife’s into raccoons for food; the Iroquois cited
above; represent the barbarous ancestry of higher races, whether of the
Bacchanalians described by Arnobius,[67] who thought that the fulness of
the divine majesty was imparted to them when they tore and ate the
struggling rams with mouths dripping with gore, or of the faithful who
receive nutriment through the symbols of the Cross. And the prayers of
savage and civilised have this in common, that some advantage is thereby
sought by the utterer; their sacrifices are alike the giving up of one’s
goods or one’s self to a deity who may be appeased or bribed thereby;
their fastings are cultivated as inducing the abnormal states in which
their old men dream dreams and their young men see visions of spirits
appearing as angels ascending and descending between earth and the abode
of the blest. Baptisms are the ancient lustrations, which water, as the
cleansing element, suggested; and the eastward position, over which
priests and ecclesiastics have fought, is the undoubted relic of worship
of the rising sun.
In short, there is no rite or ceremony yet practised and revered amongst
us which is not the lineal descendant of barbaric thought and usage,
expressing a need which, were men less the slaves of custom and indolence,
would long since have found loftier form than in genuflexion before shrine
and reliquary. By an exercise of imagination not possible but for these
being a felicitous “gesture language” of the cries of human souls, a mass
of heathen and pagan rites have been transformed into those of the
Christian faith. That they have come to be mistaken for the ideas
symbolised, that with the loftiest spiritual teaching there should remain
commingled belief in miraculous power in fragments (mostly spurious) of
dead men and their clothes; only shows the persistency of that notion of a
vital connection between the lifeless and the living which this section
has sought to illustrate.
§ V.
BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS.
The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the
subjective, and between the name and the person or thing, which has been
illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how
the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and
compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind.
They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of
mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the meaning of his
surroundings. The phantasies which have defiled through the brain in
coherent order, or danced in mazy whirl about its sinuous passages when
complete sleep was lacking, leave their footprints on the memory, and they
are strong of head and heart, true pepticians, like the countryman cited
by Carlyle, who, “for his part, had no system,” whose composure on awaking
is not affected by the harmonious or discordant, the pleasant or
disagreeable, illusions which have made up their dreams. In the felicitous
words of Lucretius, “When sleep has chained down our limbs in sweet
slumber, and the whole body is sunk in profound repose, yet then we seem
to ourselves to be awake and to be moving our limbs, and amid the thick
darkness of night we think we see the sun and the daylight; and though in
a confined room, we seem to be passing to new climates, seas, rivers,
mountains, and to be crossing plains on foot, and to hear voices, though
the austere silence of night prevails all round, and to be uttering
speech, though quite silent. Many are the other things of this marvellous
sort we see, which all seek to shake, as it were, the credit of the
senses: quite in vain, since the greatest part of these cases cheat us on
account of the mental suppositions which we add of ourselves, taking those
things as seen which have not been seen by the senses. For nothing is
harder than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, which the mind
without hesitation adds on of itself.”[68]
While for us dreams fill an empty moment in the telling, albeit now and
again nurturing such remains of superstition as cling to the majority of
people, they are to the untrained intelligence, unable to distinguish fact
from fiction, or to follow any sequence of ideas, as solid as the
experiences of waking moments. As a Zulu, well expressing the limits of
savage thought, said to Bishop Callaway, “Our knowledge does not urge us
to search out the roots of it, we do not try to see them, if any one
thinks ever so little, he soon gives it up, and passes on to what he sees
with his eyes; and he does not understand the real state of even what he
sees.” Nor does his language clear the confusion within when he tells what
he has seen and heard and felt, where he has been and what he has done,
for the speech cannot transcend the thought, and therefore can represent
neither to himself nor to his hearers the difference between the illusions
of the night and the realities of the day. The dead relatives and friends
who appear in dreams and live their old life, with whom he joins in the
battle, the chase, and the feast, the foes with whom he struggles, the
wild beasts from whom he flees, or in whose clutches he feels himself, and
with shrieks awakens his squaw, the long distances he travels to sunnier
climes lit by a light that never was on land or sea, are all real, and no
“baseless fabric of a vision.” That now and again he should have walked in
his sleep would confirm the seeming reality; still more so would the
intensified form of dreaming called “nightmare,”[69] when hideous spectres
sit upon the breast, stopping breath and paralysing motion, and to which
is largely due the creation of the vast army of nocturnal demons that fill
the folk-lore of the world, and that, under infinite variety of repellent
form, have had place in the hierarchy of religions.
Dreams are in the main referred by the savage either to the entrance into
him of some outside spirit, as among the Fijians, who believe that the
spirit of a living man will leave the body to trouble sleeping folk, or to
the real doings of himself.
When the Greenlander dreams of hunting, or fishing, or courting, he
believes that the soul quits the body; the Dyaks of Borneo think that
during sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body or travels far away,
being endowed, whether present or absent, with conditions which in waking
moments are lacking. Wherever we find a low state of mental development
the like belief exists. In Mr. im Thurn’s elaborate work on the _Indians
of Guiana_ we have corroborative evidence, the more valuable because of
its freshness. He tells us that the dreams which come to the Indian are to
him as real as any of the events of his waking life. To him dream-acts
and waking-acts differ only in one respect--namely, that the former are
done only by the spirit, the latter are done by the spirit in its body.
Seeing other men asleep, and afterwards hearing from them the things which
they suppose themselves to have done when asleep, the Indian has no
difficulty in reconciling that which he hears with the fact that the
bodies of the sleepers were in his sight and motionless throughout the
time of supposed action, because he never questions that the spirits,
leaving the sleepers, played their part in dream-adventures. Mr. im Thurn
illustrates the complete belief of the Indian in the unbroken continuity
of his dream-life and waking-life by incidents which came under his own
notice, and which are quoted as serving the present argument better than
any theorising.
One morning when it was important to me to get away from a camp on the
Essequibo River, at which I had been detained for some days by the
illness of some of my Indian companions, I found that one of the
invalids, a young Macusi, though better in health, was so enraged
against me that he refused to stir, for he declared that, with great
want of consideration for his weak health, I had taken him out during
the night and had made him haul the canoe up a series of difficult
cataracts. Nothing could persuade him that this was but a dream, and
it was some time before he was so far pacified as to throw himself
sulkily into the bottom of the canoe. At that time we were all
suffering from a great scarcity of food, and, hunger having its usual
effect in producing vivid dreams, similar events frequently occurred.
More than once the men declared in the morning that some absent man,
whom they named, had come during the night, and had beaten, or
otherwise maltreated them; and they insisted on much rubbing of the
bruised parts of their bodies. Another instance was amusing. In the
middle of one night I was awakened by an Arawak named Sam, the captain
or head-man of the Indians who were with me, only to be told the
bewildering words, “George speak me very bad, boss; you cut his bits!”
It was some time before I could collect my senses sufficiently to
remember that “bits,” or fourpenny-pieces, are the units in which,
among Creoles and semi-civilised Indians, calculation of money, and
consequently of wages, is made; that to cut bits means to reduce the
number of bits or wages given; and to understand that Captain Sam,
having dreamed that his subordinate George had spoken insolently to
him, the former, with a fine sense of the dignity of his office, now
insisted that the culprit should be punished in real life. One more
incident, of which the same Sam was the hero, may be told for the sake
of the humour, though it did not happen within my personal experience,
but was told me by a friend. This friend, in whose employ Sam was at
the time, told his man, as they sat round the fire one night, of the
Zulu or some other African war which was then in progress, and in so
doing inadvertently made frequent use of the expression, “to punish
the niggers.” That night, after all in camp had been asleep for some
time, they were raised by loud cries for help. Sam, who was one of the
most powerful Indians I ever saw, was “punishing a nigger” who
happened to be one of the party; with one hand he had firmly grasped
the back of the breeches-band of the black man, and had twisted this
round so tightly that the poor wretch was almost cut in two. Sam
sturdily maintained that he had received orders from his master for
this outrageous conduct, and on inquiry it turned out that he had
dreamed this.[70]
Taking an illustration from nearer home, although from a more remote time,
we have in the Scandinavian _Vatnsdæla Saga_ a curious account of three
Finns who were shut up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by
Ingimund, a Norwegian chief, to visit Iceland, and inform him of the line
of the country where he was to settle. Their bodies became rigid, and they
sent their souls on their errand, and, on their awaking at the end of
three days, gave an accurate account of the Vatnsdæl, in which Ingimund
ultimately dwelt. No wonder that in mediæval times, when witches swept the
air and harried the cattle, swooning and other forms of insensibility were
adduced in support of the theory of soul-absence, or that we find among
savages--as the Tajals of the Luzon islands--objections to waking a
sleeper lest the soul happens to be out of the body. As a corollary to
this belief in soul-absence, fear arises lest it be prolonged to the peril
of the owner, and hence a rough and ready theory of the cause of disease
is framed, for savages rarely die in their beds.
§ VI.
BARBARIC THEORY OF DISEASE.
That disease is a derangement of functions interrupting their natural
action, and carrying attendant pain as its indication, could not enter the
head of the uncivilised: and, indeed, among ourselves a cold or a fever is
commonly thought of as an entity in the body which has stolen in, and,
having been caught, must be somehow expelled. With the universal primitive
belief in spiritual agencies everywhere inhaled with the breath or
swallowed with the food or drink, all diseases were regarded as their
work, whether, as remarked above, through absence of the rightful spirit
or subtle entrance of some hostile one. If these be the causes to which
sicknesses are due, obviously the only cure is to get rid of them, and
hence the sorcerer and the medicine-man find their services in request in
casting out the demon by force, or enticing him by cajolery, or in
bringing back the truant soul.
To the savage mind no other explanation of illness is possible than that
it is due to the exit of one’s own spirit or to the intrusion of a
stronger one, whether of revengeful man or animal. An old Dakota, whose
son had sore eyes, said that nearly thirty years before, when the latter
was a boy, he fastened a pin to a stick and speared a minnow with it, and
it was strange that after so long a time the fish should come to seek
revenge. When an Indian is attacked by any wild beast he believes that the
avenging Kenaima has transferred his spirit to the animal which seizes
him, and if he has even a toothache, of which more presently, then the
Kenaima has insinuated himself in the shape of a worm. The tribal chief
among the Brazilian natives acts as doctor, and when he visits the sick he
asks what animal the patient has offended, and if no cure is effected, the
convenient explanation is at hand that the right animal has not been
found. At the death of Iron Arms, a noted North American Indian warrior,
it was said that he died because the doctor made a mistake, thinking that
a prairie-dog had entered him, when it was a mud-hen. In the weird
mythology of the Finns the third daughter of the ruler of Tuonela, the
underworld, sits on a rock rising from hell-river, beneath which the
spirits of all diseases are shut up. As she whirls the rock round like a
millstone the spirits escape and go on their torturing errand to mortals.
The more abnormal and striking phases of disease manifest when a man is
writhing under intense agony, as if torn and twisted by some fiendish
living thing, or when in delirium he raves and starts, or when thrown down
in epilepsy he struggles convulsively, or when he shivers in an ague, or
when in more violent forms of madness he seems endowed with superhuman
strength; the various symptoms attending hysteria; each and all support
that theory of spirit-influence which survives among advanced races in
referring disease to supernatural causes. For the ancient theories of a
divine government under which disease is the expression of the anger of
the gods, and medicine the token of their healing mercy, and the current
notions that any epidemic or pestilence is a visitation of God, are
identical in character, however improved in feature, with the barbaric
belief illustrated above; and in the ages when belief in the devil as one
walking to and fro upon the earth was rampant, he especially was regarded
as bringer of both bane and antidote. “He may,” says an old writer,
“inflict diseases, which is an effect he may occasion _applicando activa
passivis_ (by applying actives to passives), and by the same means he may
likewise cure ... and not only may he cure diseases laid on by himself, as
Wierus observes, but even natural diseases, since he knows the natural
causes and the origin of even those better than the physicians can, who
are not present when diseases are contracted, and who, _being younger than
he_, must have less experience.”[71] In Lancashire folk-lore “casting out
the ague” was but another name for “casting out the devil”; in the Arabic
language the words for epilepsy and possession by demons are the same; and
in such phrases as a man being “beside himself,” “transported,” “out of
his mind,” or in the converse, as when it is said in the parable of the
prodigal son, “he came to himself”; in the words “ecstasy,” which means a
displacement or removal of the soul, and “catalepsy,” a seizing of the
body by some external power, we have language preserving the primitive
ideas of an intruding or departing spirit. Such minor actions as gaping
and sneezing confirm the belief. The philosophy of the latter, as Mr. Gill
remarks in his _Myths and Songs of the South Pacific_, is that the spirit
having gone travelling about, its return to the body is naturally attended
with some difficulty and excitement, occasioning a tingling and enlivening
sensation all over the body. And the like explanation lies at the root of
the mass of customs attendant on sneezing, and of the superstitions
generated by it, which extend through the world.
Williams tells us that among the Fijians, when any one faints or dies,
their spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after
it, and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying
at full length and bawling out lustily for the return of his soul. So in
China, when a child is lying dangerously ill, its mother will go outside
into the garden and call its name, in the hope of bringing back the
wandering spirit. But for all the ills that flesh is heir to, from
hiccupping to madness, from toothache to broken limbs, the patient seldom
dares to doctor himself; neither the etiquette of the ordained
medicine-man nor the orthodox therapeutics favour that show of
independence. The methods adopted by the faculty vary in detail, but they
are ruled by a single assumption. When a Chinaman is dying, and the soul
is believed to be already out of the body, a relative holds up his coat on
a bamboo stick, and a Taoist priest seeks by incantations to bring back
the truant soul so that it may re-enter the sick man. Among the Six
Nations the Indians sought to discover the intruder by gathering a
quantity of ashes and scattering them in the cabin where the sick person
was lying. A similar recipe for tracking demons is given in the _Talmud_;
but, as more nearly bearing on the Indian practice, a Polish custom
mentioned by Grimm[72] may be quoted. When the white folk torment a sick
man a friend walks round him carrying a sieveful of ashes on his back, and
lets the ashes run out till the floor round the bed is covered with them.
The next morning all the lines in the ashes are counted, and the result
told to a wise woman, who prescribes accordingly.
A favourite mode of treatment is blowing upon or sucking the diseased
organ, and deception is no infrequent resort when the sorcerer secretes
thorns or fishbones, beetles or worms, in his mouth, and then pretends
that he has extracted them. Cranz says that the Eskimo old women appear to
suck from a swollen leg scraps of leather or a parcel of hair which they
have previously crammed into their mouths, and in Australia the same dodge
is practised, when the sorcerer makes believe that he has drawn out a
piece of bone from the affected part. That toothache is due to a worm is a
belief which exists throughout Europe and Asia, and from the Orkneys to
New Zealand. Shakspere refers to it in _Much Ado about Nothing_, Act III.
Scene ii.--
_Don Pedro._ What! sigh for the toothache?
_Leonata._ Where is but a humour or a worm;
and instances are current of this superstition being acted upon in rural
districts, whilst in China the itinerant dentist conceals a worm in the
stick which he applies to the aching tooth, and on the stick being gently
tapped, the worm wriggles out to the satisfaction of the sufferer. But
among barbaric races the treatment of disease is ordinarily the reverse of
soothing. Here and there the virtues of some plant have been discovered by
accident, and, whilst exalted into a deity in its native home, it has
become, like cinchona, a priceless boon to the fever-stricken all over the
world; but, speaking broadly, the medicine-man is no Melampus, winning
the secret of their healing balm from herb and tree. Nor has he much faith
in magic or charm compared to his faith in noise, in incantations, with
their accompanying hideous grimaces and gestures, and their deafening
yells with clang of instrument to drown the sufferer’s groans and chase
away the demon. Not unfrequently, when the patient is kept without food so
as to starve out the indwelling enemy, or when the body is pommelled and
squeezed to force him out, the remedy helps the disease! An illustration
or two from a great mass at command must suffice. Among the Mapuches the
sorcerer adopts the canonical howls and grimaces. Making himself as
horrible-looking as he can, he begins beating a drum and working himself
into a frenzy until he falls to the ground with his breast working
convulsively. As soon as he falls, a number of young men outside the hut,
who are there to help him in frightening the disease-bringing spirit out
of the patient, add their defiant yells, and dash at full speed, with
lighted torches, against the hut. If this does not succeed, and the
patient dies, the result is attributed to witchcraft. When a Pawnee chief
had some ribs and an arm broken, the medicine-men danced round him, and
raised their voices from murmurous chants to howls, accompanying the music
by blows upon the wounded man’s breast to banish the bad spirit. In olden
time this rough-and-tumble business of blows, to which immersion was
added, was applied to lunatics in these islands. And, in fact, until some
local paper narrates a current superstition, we seldom awaken to the fact
how widely the theological explanation of diseases and the empirical
choice of remedies still obtains, each being survivals of barbaric theory
and practice.
The savage who has more faith, as a curative, in plants that grow on
burial-places, and the Christian, who ascribed special healing power to
turf and dew from a saint’s grave,[73] differ no whit in kind; and so
ingrained was the medicinal belief in virtue inhering in fragments of the
dead, that not even the satire of “Reynard the Fox,” telling how the wolf
was cured of his earache, and the hare of his fever, the moment that they
lay down on the grave of the martyred hen, could give quietus to the
notion that grated skulls and sacramental shillings were specifics for the
healing of the faithful.
This reference to like practices reminds us how belief in the action of
invisible agencies has passed into the practice of confession among
advanced races outside Christendom, as in Mexico and Peru. The Roman
Catholic priests were not less astonished at finding this in vogue on
their arrival in South America than the good Father Huc when, on reaching
Tibet, he found shaven monks wearing rosaries, worshipping relics, using
holy water, and a grand Lama decked in mitre, cope, and cross.[74] But, as
the Italian proverb has it, the world is one country, and “we have all
one human heart,” so that the confessional has the like explanation in
east as in west. If the disease be the work of an offended deity or of an
avenging spirit, let the wrong-doer admit his fault, and trust to him who
is credited with influence with the unseen to exorcise the intruder.
§ VII.
BARBARIC THEORY OF A SECOND SELF OR SOUL.