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ОглавлениеThe Golden Bough : a study of magic and religion by
Sir James George Frazer
CONTENTS Preface Subject Index
Chapter 1. The King of the Wood
1. Diana and Virbius
2. Artemis and Hippolytus
3. Recapitulation
Chapter 2. Priestly Kings
Chapter 3. Sympathetic Magic
1. The Principles of Magic
2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic
3. Contagious Magic
4. The Magician's Progress
Chapter 4. Magic and Religion
Chapter 5. The Magical Control of the Weather
1. The Public Magician
2. The Magical Control of Rain
3. The Magical Control of the Sun
4. The Magical Control of the Wind Chapter 6. Magicians as Kings Chapter 7. Incarnate Human Gods
Chapter 8. Departmental Kings of Nature
Chapter 9. The Worship of Trees
1. Tree-spirits
2. Beneficent Powers of Tree-Spirits
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Chapter 10. Relics of Tree Worship in Modern Europe
Chapter 11. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation
Chapter 12. The Sacred Marriage
1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility
2. The Marriage of the Gods
Chapter 13. The Kings of Rome and Alba
1. Numa and Egeria
2. The King as Jupiter
Chapter 14. Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium
Chapter 15. The Worship of the Oak Chapter 16. Dianus and Diana Chapter 17. The Burden of Royalty
1. Royal and Priestly Taboos
2. Divorce of the Spiritual from the Temporal Power
Chapter 18. The Perils of the Soul
1. The Soul as a Mannikin
2. Absence and Recall of the Soul
3. The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection
Chapter 19. Tabooed Acts
1. Taboos on Intercourse with Strangers
2. Taboos on Eating and Drinking
3. Taboos on Showing the Face
4. Taboos on Quitting the House
5. Taboos on Leaving Food over
Chapter 20. Tabooed Persons
1. Chiefs and Kings tabooed
2. Mourners tabooed
3. Women tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth
4. Warriors tabooed
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5. Manslayers tabooed
6. Hunters and Fishers tabooed
Chapter 21. Tabooed Things
1. The Meaning of Taboo
2. Iron tabooed
3. Sharp Weapons tabooed
4. Blood tabooed
5. The Head tabooed
6. Hair tabooed
7. Ceremonies at Hair-cutting
8. Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails
9. Spittle tabooed
10. Foods tabooed
11. Knots and Rings tabooed
Chapter 22. Tabooed Words
1. Personal Names tabooed
2. Names of Relations tabooed
3. Names of the Dead tabooed
4. Names of Kings and other Sacred Persons tabooed
5. Names of Gods tabooed
Chapter 23. Our Debt to the Savage
Chapter 24. The Killing of the Divine King
1. The Mortality of the Gods
2. Kings killed when their Strength fails
3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term
Chapter 25. Temporary Kings
Chapter 26. Sacrifice of the King's Son Chapter 27. Succession to the Soul Chapter 28. The Killing of the Tree-Spirit
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1. The Whitsuntide Mummers
2. Burying the Carnival
3. Carrying out Death
4. Bringing in Summer
5. Battle of Summer and Winter
6. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko
7. Death and Revival of Vegetation
8. Analogous Rites in India
9. The Magic Spring
Chapter 29. The Myth of Adonis Chapter 30. Adonis in Syria Chapter 31. Adonis in Cyprus Chapter 32. The Ritual of Adonis
Chapter 33. The Gardens of Adonis Chapter 34. The Myth and Ritual of Attis Chapter 35. Attis as a God of Vegetation Chapter 36. Human Representatives of Attis Chapter 37. Oriental Religions in the West Chapter 38. The Myth of Osiris
Chapter 39. The Ritual of Osiris
1. The Popular Rites
2. The Official Rites
Chapter 40. The Nature of Osiris
1. Osiris a Corngod
2. Osiris a Tree-spirit
3. Osiris a God of Fertility
4. Osiris a God of the Dead
Chapter 41. Isis
Chapter 42. Osiris and the Sun
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Chapter 43. Dionysus
Chapter 44. Demeter and Persephone
Chapter 45. Corn-Mother and Corn-Maiden in N. Europe
Chapter 46. Corn-Mother in Many Lands
1. The Corn-mother in America
2. The Rice-mother in the East Indies
3. The Spirit of the Corn embodied in Human Beings
4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter
Chapter 47. Lityerses
1. Songs of the Corn Reapers
2. Killing the Cornspirit
3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops
4. The Cornspirit slain in his Human Representatives
Chapter 48. The CornSpirit as an Animal
1. Animal Embodiments of the Cornspirit
2. The Cornspirit as a Wolf or a Dog
3. The Cornspirit as a Cock
4. The Cornspirit as a Hare
5. The Cornspirit as a Cat
6. The Cornspirit as a Goat
7. The Cornspirit as a Bull, Cow, or Ox
8. The Cornspirit as a Horse or Mare
9. The Cornspirit as a Pig (Boar or Sow)
10. On the Animal Embodiments of the Cornspirit
Chapter 49. Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals
1. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull
2. Demeter, the Pig and the Horse
3. Attis, Adonis, and the Pig
4. Osiris, the Pig and the Bull
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5. Virbius and the Horse
Chapter 50. Eating the God
1. The Sacrament of First-Fruits
2. Eating the God among the Aztecs
3. Many Manii at Aricia
Chapter 51. Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet
Chapter 52. Killing the Divine Animal
1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard
2. Killing the Sacred Ram
3. Killing the Sacred Serpent
4. Killing the Sacred Turtles
5. Killing the Sacred Bear
Chapter 53. The Propitiation of Wild Animals By Hunters
Chapter 54. Types of Animal Sacrament
1. The Egyptian and the Aino Types of Sacrament
2. Processions with Sacred Animals
Chapter 55. The Transference of Evil
1. The Transference to Inanimate Objects
2. The Transference to Animals
3. The Transference to Men
4. The Transference of Evil in Europe
Chapter 56. The Public Expulsion of Evils
1. The Omnipresence of Demons
2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils
3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils
Chapter 57. Public Scapegoats
1. The Expulsion of Embodied Evils
2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle
3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle
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4. On Scapegoats in General
Chapter 58. Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity
1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome
2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece
3. The Roman Saturnalia
Chapter 59. Killing the God in Mexico
Chapter 60. Between Heaven and Earth
1. Not to touch the Earth
2. Not to see the Sun
3. The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
4. Reasons for the Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
Chapter 61. The Myth of Balder
Chapter 62. The FireFestivals of Europe
1. The Firefestivals in general
2. The Lenten Fires
3. The Easter Fires
4. The Beltane Fires
5. The Midsummer Fires
6. The Hallowe'en Fires
7. The Midwinter Fires
8. The Needfire
Chapter 63. The Interpretation of the FireFestivals
1. On the Firefestivals in general
2. The Solar Theory of the Firefestivals
3. The Purificatory Theory of the Firefestivals
Chapter 64. The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires
1. The Burning of Effigies in the Fires
2. The Burning of Men and Animals in the Fires
Chapter 65. Balder and the Mistletoe
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Chapter 66. The External Soul in Folk-Tales
Chapter 67. The External Soul in Folk-Custom
1. The External Soul in Inanimate Things
2. The External Soul in Plants
3. The External Soul in Animals
4. The Ritual of Death and Resurrection
Chapter 68. The Golden Bough Chapter 69. Farewell to Nemi Preface
THE PRIMARY aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at
Aricia. When I first set myself to solve the problem more than thirty years ago, I thought that the solution could be propounded
very briefly, but I soon found that to render it probable or even intelligible it was necessary to discuss certain more general questions,
some of which had hardly been broached before. In successive editions the discussion of these and kindred topics has occupied
more and more space, the enquiry has branched out in more and more directions, until the two volumes of the original work have
expanded into twelve. Meantime a wish has often been expressed that the book should be issued in a more compendious form. This
abridgment is an attempt to meet the wish and thereby to bring the work within the range of a wider circle of readers. While the
bulk of the book has been greatly reduced, I have endeavoured to retain its leading principles, together with an amount of evidence
sufficient to illustrate them clearly. The language of the original has also for the most part been preserved, though here and there the
exposition has been somewhat condensed. In order to keep as much of the text as possible I have sacrificed all the notes, and with
them all exact references to my authorities. Readers who desire to ascertain the source of any particular statement must therefore
consult the larger work, which is fully documented and provided with a complete bibliography.
In the abridgment I have neither added new matter nor altered the views expressed in the last edition; for the evidence which has come to my knowledge in the meantime has on the whole served either to confirm my former conclusions or to furnish fresh il-
lustrations of old principles. Thus, for example, on the crucial question of the practice of putting kings to death either at the end
of a fixed period or whenever their health and strength began to fail, the body of evidence which points to the wide prevalence of
such a custom has been considerably augmented in the interval. A striking instance of a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished
by the powerful mediaeval kingdom of the Khazars in Southern Russia, where the kings were liable to be put to death either on the
expiry of a set term or whenever some public calamity, such as drought, dearth, or defeat in war, seemed to indicate a failure of their
natural powers. The evidence for the systematic killing of the Khazar kings, drawn from the accounts of old Arab travellers, has
been collected by me elsewhere.[1] Africa, again, has supplied several fresh examples of a similar practice of regicide. Among them
the most notable perhaps is the custom formerly observed in Bunyoro of choosing every year from a particular clan a mock king,
who was supposed to incarnate the late king, cohabited with his widows at his temple-tomb, and after reigning for a week was stran-
gled.[2] The custom presents a close parallel to the ancient Babylonian festival of the Sacaea, at which a mock king was dressed in
the royal robes, allowed to enjoy the real king's concubines, and after reigning for five days was stripped, scourged, and put to death.
That festival in its turn has lately received fresh light from certain Assyrian inscriptions,[3] which seem to confirm the interpretation
which I formerly gave of the festival as a New Year celebration and the parent of the Jewish festival of Purim.[4] Other recently
discovered parallels to the priestly kings of Aricia are African priests and kings who used to be put to death at the end of seven or of
two years, after being liable in the interval to be attacked and killed by a strong man, who thereupon succeeded to the priesthood or
the kingdom.[5]
[1] J. G. Frazer, "The Killing of the Khazar Kings," Folk-lore, xxviii. (1917), pp. 382-407.
[2] Rev. J. Roscoe, The Soul of Central Africa (London, 1922), p. 200. Compare J. G. Frazer, &147;The Mackie Ethnological Expedi-
tion to Central Africa," Man, xx. (1920), p. 181.
[3] H. Zimmern, Zum babylonischen Neujahrsfest (Leipzig, 1918). Compare A. H. Sayce, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, July
1921, pp. 440-442.
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[4] The Golden Bough, Part VI. The Scapegoat, pp. 354 sqq., 412 sqq.
[5] P. Amaury Talbot in Journal of the African Society, July 1916, pp. 309 sq.; id., in Folk-lore, xxvi. (1916), pp. 79 sq.; H. R. Palmer,
in Journal of the African Society, July 1912, pp. 403, 407 sq.
With these and other instances of like customs before us it is no longer possible to regard the rule of succession to the priesthood
of Diana at Aricia as exceptional; it clearly exemplifies a widespread institution, of which the most numerous and the most similar
cases have thus far been found in Africa. How far the facts point to an early influence of Africa on Italy, or even to the existence of
an African population in Southern Europe, I do not presume to say. The prehistoric historic relations between the two continents
are still obscure and still under investigation.
Whether the explanation which I have offered of the institution is correct or not must be left to the future to determine. I shall always be ready to abandon it if a better can be suggested. Meantime in committing the book in its new form to the judgment of the public I desire to guard against a misapprehension of its scope which appears to be still rife, though I have sought to correct
it before now. If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its importance in the history of religion, still less because I would deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the significance of a priest who bore the title of King of the Wood, and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough--the Golden Bough--from a tree in the sacred grove. But I am so far from
regarding the reverence for trees as of supreme importance for the evolution of religion that I consider it to have been altogether
subordinate to other factors, and in particular to the fear of the human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably
the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion. I hope that after this explicit disclaimer I shall no longer be taxed with
embracing a system of mythology which I look upon not merely as false but as preposterous and absurd. But I am too familiar with
the hydra of error to expect that by lopping off one of the monster's heads I can prevent another, or even the same, from sprouting
again. I can only trust to the candour and intelligence of my readers to rectify this serious misconception of my views by a compari-
son with my own express declaration.
J. G. FRAZER.
1 BRICK COURT, TEMPLE, LONDON, June 1922.
I. The King of the Wood
1. Diana and Virbius
WHO does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake
of Nemi-- "Diana's Mirror," as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the
Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose
terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still
linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.
In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood. The lake and the grove were sometimes known as the lake and grove of Aricia. But the town of Aricia (the modern La Riccia) was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the Alban Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he
kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was
himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant. To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the
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sun on a bright day. The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music--the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold
water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.
The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation we must go farther afield. No one will probably deny that such a custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial times, stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a smooth-shaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches into the early history
of man have revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an inference, in default of
direct evidence as to how the priesthood did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration. But it will be more or less probable according to the degree of completeness with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. The object of this book is, by meeting
these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.
I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have come down to us on the subject. According to one story the worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing Thoas, King of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were trans-
ported from Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the Capitoline slope, beside the temple of Concord.
The bloody ritual which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers; it is said that every stranger who landed
on the shore was sacrificed on her altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew
a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its boughs.
Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title of
King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis). According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch was that Golden Bough
which, at the Sibyl's bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead. The flight of the slave
represented, it was said, the flight of Orestes; his combat with the priest was a reminiscence of the human sacrifices once offered to
the Tauric Diana. This rule of succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for amongst his other freaks Caligula,
thinking that the priest of Nemi had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to slay him; and a Greek traveller, who visited
Italy in the age of the Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still the prize of victory in a single combat.
Of the worship of Diana at Nemi some leading features can still be made out. From the votive offerings which have been found on the site, it appears that she was conceived of especially as a huntress, and further as blessing men and women with offspring, and granting expectant mothers an easy delivery. Again, fire seems to have played a foremost part in her ritual. For during her annual festival, held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was reflected by the lake; and throughout the length and breadth of Italy the day was kept with holy rites at every domestic hearth. Bronze statuettes found in her precinct represent the goddess herself holding a torch in her raised right hand; and women whose prayers had been heard by her came crowned with wreaths and bearing lighted torches to the sanctuary in fulfilment of their vows. Some one unknown dedicated a perpetually burning lamp in a little shrine at Nemi for the safety of the Emperor Claudius
and his family. The terra-cotta lamps which have been discovered in the grove may perhaps have served a like purpose for humbler persons. If so, the analogy of the custom to the Catholic practice of dedicating holy candles in churches would be obvious. Further, the title of Vesta borne by Diana at Nemi points clearly to the maintenance of a perpetual holy fire in her sanctuary. A large circular
basement at the north-east corner of the temple, raised on three steps and bearing traces of a mosaic pavement, probably supported
a round temple of Diana in her character of Vesta, like the round temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum. Here the sacred fire would
seem to have been tended by Vestal Virgins, for the head of a Vestal in terra-cotta was found on the spot, and the worship of a
perpetual fire, cared for by holy maidens, appears to have been common in Latium from the earliest to the latest times. Further, at
the annual festival of the goddess, hunting dogs were crowned and wild beasts were not molested; young people went through a
purificatory ceremony in her honour; wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted of a kid cakes served piping hot on plates of
leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the boughs.
But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi. Two lesser divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph
of the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to fall in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Le Mole,
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because here were established the mills of the modern village of Nemi. The purling of the stream as it ran over the pebbles is mentioned by Ovid, who tells us that he had often drunk of its water. Women with child used to sacrifice to Egeria, because she was believed, like Diana, to be able to grant them an easy delivery. Tradition ran that the nymph had been the wife or mistress of the wise king Numa, that he had consorted with her in the secrecy of the sacred grove, and that the laws which he gave the Romans had been inspired by communion with her divinity. Plutarch compares the legend with other tales of the loves of goddesses for mortal men,
such as the love of Cybele and the Moon for the fair youths Attis and Endymion. According to some, the trysting-place of the lovers
was not in the woods of Nemi but in a grove outside the dripping Porta Capena at Rome, where another sacred spring of Egeria
gushed from a dark cavern. Every day the Roman Vestals fetched water from this spring to wash the temple of Vesta, carrying it in
earthenware pitchers on their heads. In Juvenal's time the natural rock had been encased in marble, and the hallowed spot was pro-
faned by gangs of poor Jews, who were suffered to squat, like gypsies, in the grove. We may suppose that the spring which fell into
the lake of Nemi was the true original Egeria, and that when the first settlers moved down from the Alban hills to the banks of the
Tiber they brought the nymph with them and found a new home for her in a grove outside the gates. The remains of baths which
have been discovered within the sacred precinct, together with many terra-cotta models of various parts of the human body, suggest
that the waters of Egeria were used to heal the sick, who may have signified their hopes or testified their gratitude by dedicating
likenesses of the diseased members to the goddess, in accordance with a custom which is still observed in many parts of Europe. To
this day it would seem that the spring retains medicinal virtues.
The other of the minor deities at Nemi was Virbius. Legend had it that Virbius was the young Greek hero Hippolytus, chaste and fair, who learned the art of venery from the centaur Chiron, and spent all his days in the greenwood chasing wild beasts with the virgin huntress Artemis (the Greek counterpart of Diana) for his only comrade. Proud of her divine society, he spurned the love of women, and this proved his bane. For Aphrodite, stung by his scorn, inspired his stepmother Phaedra with love of him; and when
he disdained her wicked advances she falsely accused him to his father Theseus. The slander was believed, and Theseus prayed to his sire Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong. So while Hippolytus drove in a chariot by the shore of the Saronic Gulf, the sea-god sent a fierce bull forth from the waves. The terrified horses bolted, threw Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged him at their
hoofs to death. But Diana, for the love she bore Hippolytus, persuaded the leech Aesculapius to bring her fair young hunter back
to life by his simples. Jupiter, indignant that a mortal man should return from the gates of death, thrust down the meddling leech
himself to Hades. But Diana hid her favourite from the angry god in a thick cloud, disguised his features by adding years to his life,
and then bore him far away to the dells of Nemi, where she entrusted him to the nymph Egeria, to live there, unknown and solitary,
under the name of Virbius, in the depth of the Italian forest. There he reigned a king, and there he dedicated a precinct to Diana.
He had a comely son, Virbius, who, undaunted by his father's fate, drove a team of fiery steeds to join the Latins in the war against
Aeneas and the Trojans. Virbius was worshipped as a god not only at Nemi but elsewhere; for in Campania we hear of a special
priest devoted to his service. Horses were excluded from the Arician grove and sanctuary because horses had killed Hippolytus. It
was unlawful to touch his image. Some thought that he was the sun. "But the truth is," says Servius, "that he is a deity associated
with Diana, as Attis is associated with the Mother of the Gods, and Erichthonius with Minerva, and Adonis with Venus." What the
nature of that association was we shall enquire presently. Here it is worth observing that in his long and chequered career this mythi-
cal personage has displayed a remarkable tenacity of life. For we can hardly doubt that the Saint Hippolytus of the Roman calendar,
who was dragged by horses to death on the thirteenth of August, Diana's own day, is no other than the Greek hero of the same
name, who, after dying twice over as a heathen sinner, has been happily resuscitated as a Christian saint.
It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the stories told to account for Diana's worship at Nemi are unhistorical. Clearly they belong to that large class of myths which are made up to explain the origin of a religious ritual and have no other foundation than the resemblance, real or imaginary, which may be traced between it and some foreign ritual. The incongruity of these Nemi myths is indeed transparent, since the foundation of the worship is traced now to Orestes and now to Hippolytus, according
as this or that feature of the ritual has to be accounted for. The real value of such tales is that they serve to illustrate the nature of
the worship by providing a standard with which to compare it; and further, that they bear witness indirectly to its venerable age by
showing that the true origin was lost in the mists of a fabulous antiquity. In the latter respect these Nemi legends are probably more
to be trusted than the apparently historical tradition, vouched for by Cato the Elder, that the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana
by a certain Egerius Baebius or Laevius of Tusculum, a Latin dictator, on behalf of the peoples of Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Cora, Tibur, Pometia, and Ardea. This tradition indeed speaks for the great age of the sanctuary, since it seems to date
its foundation sometime before 495 B.C., the year in which Pometia was sacked by the Romans and disappears from history. But
we cannot suppose that so barbarous a rule as that of the Arician priesthood was deliberately instituted by a league of civilised
communities, such as the Latin cities undoubtedly were. It must have been handed down from a time beyond the memory of man,
when Italy was still in a far ruder state than any known to us in the historical period. The credit of the tradition is rather shaken than
confirmed by another story which ascribes the foundation of the sanctuary to a certain Manius Egerius, who gave rise to the saying,
"There are many Manii at Aricia." This proverb some explained by alleging that Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and dis-
tinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name
Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who
lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius
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of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both names to the mythical Egeria, excite our suspicion. Yet the tradition recorded by Cato seems too circumstantial, and its sponsor too respectable, to allow us to dismiss it as an idle fiction. Rather we may suppose that it refers to some ancient restoration or reconstruction of the sanctuary, which was actually carried out by the confederate states. At any rate it testifies to a belief that the grove had been from early times a common place of worship for many of the oldest cities of the country, if not for the whole Latin confederacy.
2. Artemis and Hippolytus
I HAVE said that the Arician legends of Orestes and Hippolytus, though worthless as history, have a certain value in so far as they may help us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing it with the ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask
ourselves, Why did the author of these legends pitch upon Orestes and Hippolytus in order to explain Virbius and the King of the
Wood? In regard to Orestes, the answer is obvious. He and the image of the Tauric Diana, which could only be appeased with hu-
man blood, were dragged in to render intelligible the murderous rule of succession to the Arician priesthood. In regard to Hippoly-
tus the case is not so plain. The manner of his death suggests readily enough a reason for the exclusion of horses from the grove;
but this by itself seems hardly enough to account for the identification. We must try to probe deeper by examining the worship as
well as the legend or myth of Hippolytus.
He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troezen, situated on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay, where groves of oranges and lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires above the garden of Hesperides, now clothe the strip of fertile shore at the foot of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of the tranquil bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon's sacred island, its peaks veiled in the sombre green of the pines. On this fair coast Hippolytus was worshipped. Within his sanctuary stood a temple with an ancient image. His service was performed by a priest who held office for life; every year a sacrificial festival was held in his honour; and his untimely fate was yearly mourned, with weeping and doleful chants, by unwedded maids. Youths and maidens dedicated locks of their hair in his temple before marriage. His grave existed at Troezen, though the people would not show it. It has been suggested, with great plausibility, that in the handsome Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis, cut off in his youthful prime, and yearly mourned by damsels, we have one of those mortal lovers of a goddess who appear so often in ancient religion, and of whom Adonis is the most familiar type. The rivalry of Artemis and Phaedra for the affection of Hippolytus reproduces, it is said,
under different names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and Proserpine for the love of Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of Aphrodite.
The theory probably does no injustice either to Hippolytus or to Artemis. For Artemis was originally a great goddess of fertility, and,
on the principles of early religion, she who fertilises nature must herself be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male
consort. On this view, Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis at Troezen, and the shorn tresses offered to him by the Troezenian
youths and maidens before marriage were designed to strengthen his union with the goddess, and so to promote the fruitfulness of
the earth, of cattle, and of mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there
were worshipped two female powers named Damia and Auxesia, whose connexion with the fertility of the ground is unquestionable.
When Epidaurus suffered from a dearth, the people, in obedience to an oracle, carved images of Damia and Auxesia out of sacred
olive wood, and no sooner had they done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again. Moreover, at Troezen itself, and appar-
ently within the precinct of Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing was held in honour of these maidens, as the Troezeni-
ans called them; and it is easy to show that similar customs have been practised in many lands for the express purpose of ensuring
good crops. In the story of the tragic death of the youthful Hippolytus we may discern an analogy with similar tales of other fair but
mortal youths who paid with their lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal goddess. These hapless lovers were prob-
ably not always mere myths, and the legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the
anemone, or the crimson flush of the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty fleeting as the summer flowers. Such
fables contain a deeper philosophy of the relation of the life of man to the life of nature--a sad philosophy which gave birth to a
tragic practice. What that philosophy and that practice were, we shall learn later on.
3. Recapitulation
WE can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified Hippolytus, the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who, according to
Servius, stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the Mother of the Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility
in general, and of childbirth in particular. As such she, like her Greek counterpart, needed a male partner. That partner, if Servius is
right, was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the sacred grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical prede-
cessor or archetype of the line of priests who served Diana under the title of Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him, one after
the other, to a violent end. It is natural, therefore, to conjecture that they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same relation in
which Virbius stood to her; in short, that the mortal King of the Wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself. If the sacred
tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not only have
worshipped it as his goddess but embraced it as his wife. There is at least nothing absurd in the supposition, since even in the time
of Pliny a noble Roman used thus to treat a beautiful beech-tree in another sacred grove of Diana on the Alban hills. He embraced
it, he kissed it, he lay under its shadow, he poured wine on its trunk. Apparently he took the tree for the goddess. The custom of
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physically marrying men and women to trees is still practised in India and other parts of the East. Why should it not have obtained in ancient Latium?
Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle and of the fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed; that her holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burned perpetually in a round temple within the precinct; that associated with her was a water-nymph Egeria who discharged one of Diana's own functions by succouring women in travail, and who was popularly supposed to have mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove; further, that Diana of the Wood herself had a male companion Virbius by name, who was to her what Adonis was to Venus, or Attis to Cybele; and, lastly, that this mythical Virbius was represented in historical times by a line of priests known as Kings of the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.
Clearly these conclusions do not of themselves suffice to explain the peculiar rule of succession to the priesthood. But perhaps the survey of a wider field may lead us to think that they contain in germ the solution of the problem. To that wider survey we must now address ourselves. It will be long and laborious, but may possess something of the interest and charm of a voyage of discovery, in which we shall visit many strange foreign lands, with strange foreign peoples, and still stranger customs. The wind is in the shrouds: we shake out our sails to it, and leave the coast of Italy behind us for a time.
II. Priestly Kings
THE questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly two: first, why had Diana's priest at Nemi, the King of the Wood, to slay his predecessor? second, why before doing so had he to pluck the branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of the ancients identified with Virgil's Golden Bough?
The first point on which we fasten is the priest's title. Why was he called the King of the Wood? Why was his office spoken of as a kingdom?
The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites.
In republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were religious. Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly, and to have centered round the Common Hearth of the state. Some Greek states had several of these titular kings, who held office simultaneously. At Rome the tradition was that the Sacrificial King had been appointed after the abolition of the monarchy in order
to offer the sacrifices which before had been offered by the kings. A similar view as to the origin of the priestly kings appears to have
prevailed in Greece. In itself the opinion is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of Sparta, almost the only purely
Greek state which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the
kings as descendants of the god. One of the two Spartan kings held the priesthood of Zeus Lacedaemon, the other the priesthood
of Heavenly Zeus.
This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred slaves, and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pessinus. Teutonic kings, again, in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position, and to have exercised the powers, of high priests. The Emperors of China offered public sacrifices, the details of which were regulated by the ritual books. The King of Madagascar was highpriest of the realm. At the
great festival of the new year, when a bullock was sacrificed for the good of the kingdom, the king stood over the sacrifice to offer prayer and thanksgiving, while his attendants slaughtered the animal. In the monarchical states which still maintain their independence among the Gallas of Eastern Africa, the king sacrifices on the mountain tops and regulates the immolation of human victims; and the dim light of tradition reveals a similar union of temporal and spiritual power, of royal and priestly duties, in the kings of that delightful region of Central America whose ancient capital, now buried under the rank growth of the tropical forest, is marked by
the stately and mysterious ruins of Palenque.
When we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests also, we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of
their office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty form of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings
were revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to
bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and
are sought, if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give
rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece
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with early modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own wellbeing and that of his fellow-men.
This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern no-tion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal
agency. The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of superstition. In early society the king is frequently a magician as well as a priest; indeed he appears to have often attained to power by virtue of his supposed proficiency in the black or white art. Hence in order to understand the evolution of the kingship and the sacred character with which the office has commonly been invested in the eyes of savage or barbarous peoples, it is essential to have some acquaintance with the principles of magic and to form some conception of the extraordinary hold which that ancient system
of superstition has had on the human mind in all ages and all countries. Accordingly I propose to consider the subject in some detail. III. Sympathetic Magic
1. The Principles of Magic
IF we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each
other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the
Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the
magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to
a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or
not. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law of Contact
or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic. To denote the first of these branches of magic the term Homoeopathic is perhaps
preferable, for the alternative term Imitative or Mimetic suggests, if it does not imply, a conscious agent who imitates, thereby
limiting the scope of magic too narrowly. For the same principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art are implicitly
believed by him to regulate the operations of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws of Similarity and
Contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as
well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural law, that is, as a
statement of the rules which determine the sequence of events throughout the world, it may be called Theoretical Magic: regarded
as a set of precepts which human beings observe in order to compass their ends, it may be called Practical Magic. At the same time
it is to be borne in mind that the primitive magician knows magic only on its practical side; he never analyses the mental processes
on which his practice is based, never reflects on the abstract principles involved in his actions. With him, as with the vast majority of
men, logic is implicit, not explicit: he reasons just as he digests his food in complete ignorance of the intellectual and physiological
processes which are essential to the one operation and to the other. In short, to him magic is always an art, never a science; the very
idea of science is lacking in his undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the
magician's practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles
from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science behind the bastard art.
If my analysis of the magician's logic is correct, its two great principles turn out to be merely two different misapplications of the
association of ideas. Homoeopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity: contagious magic is founded on the
association of ideas by contiguity. Homoeopathic magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which resemble each other are
the same: contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that things which have once been in contact with each other are always
in contact. But in practice the two branches are often combined; or, to be more exact, while homoeopathic or imitative magic may
be practised by itself, contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of the homoeopathic or imitative principle.
Thus generally stated the two things may be a little difficult to grasp, but they will readily become intelligible when they are illustrated
by particular examples. Both trains of thought are in fact extremely simple and elementary. It could hardly be otherwise, since they
are familiar in the concrete, though certainly not in the abstract, to the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of ignorant and
dull-witted people everywhere. Both branches of magic, the homoeopathic and the contagious, may conveniently be comprehended
under the general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympa-
thy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike
that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each
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other through a space which appears to be empty.
It may be convenient to tabulate as follows the branches of magic according to the laws of thought which underlie them:
Sympathetic Magic
(Law of Sympathy)
|
-------------------------------
| |
Homoeopathic Magic Contagious Magic
(Law of Similarity) (Law of Contact)
I will now illustrate these two great branches of sympathetic magic by examples, beginning with homoeopathic magic.
2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic
PERHAPS the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples
in many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so
does the man, and that when it perishes he must die. A few instances out of many may be given to prove at once the wide diffu-
sion of the practice over the world and its remarkable persistence through the ages. For thousands of years ago it was known to the
sorcerers of ancient India, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as of Greece and Rome, and at this day it is still resorted to by cunning and
malignant savages in Australia, Africa, and Scotland. Thus the North American Indians, we are told, believe that by drawing the fig-
ure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body, and then pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any
other injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person represented. For example, when an Ojebway Indian desires to work
evil on any one, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into
it, believing that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain
in the corresponding part of his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain
magic words as he does so. The Peruvian Indians moulded images of fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked
or feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul.
A Malay charm of the same sort is as follows. Take parings of nails, hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended victim, enough to represent every part of his person, and then make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees' comb. Scorch the figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every night for seven nights, and say:
"It is not wax that I am scorching,
It is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch."
After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die. This charm obviously combines the principles of homoeopathic and contagious magic; since the image which is made in the likeness of an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him, namely, his nails, hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay charm, which resembles the Ojebway practice still more closely, is to make a corpse of wax from an empty bees' comb and of the length of a footstep; then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is blind; pierce the stomach, and he is sick; pierce the head, and his head aches; pierce the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you would kill him outright, transfix the image from the head downwards; enshroud it as you would a corpse; pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then bury it in the middle of a path where your victim will be sure to step over it. In order that his blood may
not be on your head, you should say:
"It is not I who am burying him,
It is Gabriel who is burying him."
Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than you
are.
If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the
Bataks of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believ-
ing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a
man who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton,
which the woman clasps in her arms, as if she would suckle it. Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs
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to the woman's head, saying, "O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child
fall and descend into my hands and on my lap." Then he asks the woman, "Has the child come?" and she answers, "Yes, it is sucking
already." After that the man holds the fowl on the husband's head, and mumbles some form of words. Lastly, the bird is killed and
laid, together with some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the
woman has been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her. Here the pretence that a child has been born is a purely
magical rite designed to secure, by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child really shall be born; but an attempt is made to add to
the efficacy of the rite by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magic is here blent with and reinforced by religion.
Among some of the Dyaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labour, a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery
in a rational manner by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime another wizard outside the room exerts himself to attain
the same end by means which we should regard as wholly irrational. He, in fact, pretends to be the expectant mother; a large stone
attached to his stomach by a cloth wrapt round his body represents the child in the womb, and, following the directions shouted to
him by his colleague on the real scene of operations, he moves this make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation of the movements of the real baby till the infant is born.
The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption, and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life. If you pretend to give birth to a boy, or even to a great bearded
man who has not a drop of your blood in his veins, then, in the eyes of primitive law and philosophy, that boy or man is really your
son to all intents and purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that when Zeus persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the god-
dess got into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom, pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the ground in imita-
tion of a real birth; and the historian adds that in his own day the same mode of adopting children was practised by the barbarians.
At the present time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy whom she intends
to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes; ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son, and inherits the whole property
of his adoptive parents. Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a grownup man or woman, a great many
people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated in public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to
crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front he is stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the areca palm
and tied to a woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son or daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the
house and back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established between the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very
strict; an offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned more heinous than one committed against a real child. In ancient
Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed,
was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman's lap, then
washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix
freely with living folk. In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his
return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in
the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morn-
ing he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in
particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.
Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent sickness. The ancient Hindoos performed an elaborate ceremony, based on homoeopathic magic, for the cure of jaundice. Its main drift was to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures and yellow things, such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for the patient a healthy red colour from a living, vigorous source, namely, a red bull. With this intention, a priest recited the following spell: "Up to the sun shall go thy heart-ache and thy jaundice: in the colour of the red bull do we envelop thee! We envelop thee in red tints, unto long life. May this person go unscathed and be free of yellow colour! The cows whose divinity is Rohini, they who, moreover, are themselves red (rohinih)--in their every form and every strength we do envelop thee. Into the parrots, into the thrush, do we put thy jaundice, and, furthermore, into the yellow wagtail do we put thy jaundice." While he uttered these words, the priest, in order to infuse the rosy hue of health
into the sallow patient, gave him water to sip which was mixed with the hair of a red bull; he poured water over the animal's back and made the sick man drink it; he seated him on the skin of a red bull and tied a piece of the skin to him. Then in order to improve his colour by thoroughly eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus. He first daubed him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of tumeric or curcuma (a yellow plant), set him on a bed, tied three yellow birds, to wit, a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by means of a yellow string to the foot of the bed; then pouring water over the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with
it no doubt the jaundice, from him to the birds. After that, by way of giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red bull, wrapt them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient's skin. The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. "Such is the nature," says Plutarch, "and such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives the malady which issues, like a stream, through the eye-sight." So well recognised among birdfanciers was this valuable property of the stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds
for sale they kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it and be cured for nothing. The virtue of the bird lay
not in its colour but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the yellow jaundice. Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same,
16
bird, to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice, because if a jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird. He mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.
One of the great merits of homoeopathic magic is that it enables the cure to be performed on the person of the doctor instead of
on that of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and inconvenience, while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish before
him. For example, the peasants of Perche, in France, labour under the impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought about
by the patient's stomach becoming unhooked, as they call it, and so falling down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called in to restore the
organ to its proper place. After hearing the symptoms he at once throws himself into the most horrible contortions, for the purpose
of unhooking his own stomach. Having succeeded in the effort, he next hooks it up again in another series of contortions and
grimaces, while the patient experiences a corresponding relief. Fee five francs. In like manner a Dyak medicine-man, who has been
fetched in a case of illness, will lie down and pretend to be dead. He is accordingly treated like a corpse, is bound up in mats, taken
out of the house, and deposited on the ground. After about an hour the other medicine-men loose the pretended dead man and
bring him to life; and as he recovers, the sick person is supposed to recover too. A cure for a tumour, based on the principle of ho-
moeopathic magic, is prescribed by Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius the First, in his curious work on medicine.
It is as follows. Take a root of vervain, cut it across, and hang one end of it round the patient's neck, and the other in the smoke of
the fire. As the vervain dries up in the smoke, so the tumour will also dry up and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove
ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root
absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples,
to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything
that comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples will fall from your body; only you must be very careful not to
wipe them with your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to it.
Further, homoeopathic and in general sympathetic magic plays a great part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to
secure an abundant supply of food. On the principle that like produces like, many things are done by him and his friends in deliber-
ate imitation of the result which he seeks to attain; and, on the other hand, many things are scrupulously avoided because they bear
some more or less fanciful resemblance to others which would really be disastrous.
Nowhere is the theory of sympathetic magic more systematically carried into practice for the maintenance of the food supply than in the barren regions of Central Australia. Here the tribes are divided into a number of totem clans, each of which is charged with
the duty of multiplying their totem for the good of the community by means of magical ceremonies. Most of the totems are edible
animals and plants, and the general result supposed to be accomplished by these ceremonies is that of supplying the tribe with food
and other necessaries. Often the rites consist of an imitation of the effect which the people desire to produce; in other words, their
magic is homoeopathic or imitative. Thus among the Warramunga the headman of the white cockatoo totem seeks to multiply white
cockatoos by holding an effigy of the bird and mimicking its harsh cry. Among the Arunta the men of the witchetty grub totem per-
form ceremonies for multiplying the grub which the other members of the tribe use as food. One of the ceremonies is a pantomime
representing the fully-developed insect in the act of emerging from the chrysalis. A long narrow structure of branches is set up to
imitate the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure a number of men, who have the grub for their totem, sit and sing of the crea-
ture in its various stages. Then they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture, and as they do so they sing of the insect emerging from
the chrysalis. This is supposed to multiply the numbers of the grubs. Again, in order to multiply emus, which are an important article
of food, the men of the emu totem paint on the ground the sacred design of their totem, especially the parts of the emu which they
like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers, wearing head-dresses
to represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions.
The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once.
The islanders of Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Toradjas of
Central Celebes believe that things of the same sort attract each other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital ether. Hence they
hang up the jawbones of deer and wild pigs in their houses, in order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the living
creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. In the island of Nias, when a wild pig has fallen into the pit prepared for it,
the animal is taken out and its back is rubbed with nine fallen leaves, in the belief that this will make nine more wild pigs fall into the
pit, just as the nine leaves fell from the tree. In the East Indian islands of Saparoea, Haroekoe, and Noessa Laut, when a fisherman is
about to set a trap for fish in the sea, he looks out for a tree, of which the fruit has been much pecked at by birds. From such a tree
he cuts a stout branch and makes of it the principal post in his fish-trap; for he believes that, just as the tree lured many birds to its
fruit, so the branch cut from that tree will lure many fish to the trap.
The western tribes of British New Guinea employ a charm to aid the hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. A small beetle, which
17
haunts coco-nut trees, is placed in the hole of the spear-haft into which the spear-head fits. This is supposed to make the spear-head stick fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast to a man's skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter has set
his nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes some way off, then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it, lets himself be caught in it, and cries, "Hillo! what's this? I'm afraid I'm caught." After that the net is sure to catch game. A pantomime of the same sort has been acted within the living memory in our Scottish Highlands. The Rev. James Macdonald, now of Reay in Caithness, tells us that in his boyhood when he was fishing with companions about Loch Aline and they had had no bites for a long time, they used to make a pretence of throwing one of their fellows overboard and hauling him out of the water, as if he were a fish; after that the trout or silloch would begin to nibble, according as the boat was on fresh or salt water. Before a Carrier Indian goes out to snare martens, he sleeps by himself for about ten nights beside the fire with a little stick pressed down on his neck. This naturally causes
the fall-stick of his trap to drop down on the neck of the marten. Among the Galelareese, who inhabit a district in the northern part of Halmahera, a large island to the west of New Guinea, it is a maxim that when you are loading your gun to go out shooting, you should always put the bullet in your mouth before you insert it in the gun; for by so doing you practically eat the game that is to be
hit by the bullet, which therefore cannot possibly miss the mark. A Malay who has baited a trap for crocodiles, and is awaiting results, is careful in eating his curry always to begin by swallowing three lumps of rice successively; for this helps the bait to slide more easily down the crocodile's throat. He is equally scrupulous not to take any bones out of his curry; for, if he did, it seems clear that the sharp-pointed stick on which the bait is skewered would similarly work itself loose, and the crocodile would get off with the bait.
Hence in these circumstances it is prudent for the hunter, before he begins his meal, to get somebody else to take the bones out of
his curry, otherwise he may at any moment have to choose between swallowing a bone and losing the crocodile.
This last rule is an instance of the things which the hunter abstains from doing lest, on the principle that like produces like, they should spoil his luck. For it is to be observed that the system of sympathetic magic is not merely composed of positive precepts; it comprises a very large number of negative precepts, that is, prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also what to leave undone. The positive precepts are charms: the negative precepts are taboos. In fact the whole doctrine of taboo, or at all events a large part of it, would seem to be only a special application of sympathetic magic, with its two great laws of similarity and con-
tact. Though these laws are certainly not formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by the savage, they are
nevertheless implicitly believed by him to regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. He thinks that if he acts
in a certain way, certain consequences will inevitably follow in virtue of one or other of these laws; and if the consequences of a
particular act appear to him likely to prove disagreeable or dangerous, he is naturally careful not to act in that way lest he should in-
cur them. In other words, he abstains from doing that which, in accordance with his mistaken notions of cause and effect, he falsely
believes would injure him; in short, he subjects himself to a taboo. Thus taboo is so far a negative application of practical magic.
Positive magic or sorcery says, "Do this in order that so and so may happen." Negative magic or taboo says, "Do not do this, lest so
and so should happen." The aim of positive magic or sorcery is to produce a desired event; the aim of negative magic or taboo is to
avoid an undesirable one. But both consequences, the desirable and the undesirable, are supposed to be brought about in accordance
with the laws of similarity and contact. And just as the desired consequence is not really effected by the observance of a magical
ceremony, so the dreaded consequence does not really result from the violation of a taboo. If the supposed evil necessarily followed
a breach of taboo, the taboo would not be a taboo but a precept of morality or common sense. It is not a taboo to say, "Do not put
your hand in the fire"; it is a rule of common sense, because the forbidden action entails a real, not an imaginary evil. In short, those
negative precepts which we call taboo are just as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery. The two things are
merely opposite sides or poles of one great disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of ideas. Of that fallacy,
sorcery is the positive, and taboo the negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theo-
retical and practical, then taboo may be defined as the negative side of practical magic. To put this in tabular form:
Magic
|
----------------------
| |
Theoretical Practical
(Magic as a (Magic as a
pseudo-science) pseudo-art)
|
-----------------
| |
Positive Magic Negative Magic or Sorcery or Taboo
I have made these remarks on taboo and its relations to magic because I am about to give some instances of taboos observed by
hunters, fishermen, and others, and I wished to show that they fall under the head of Sympathetic Magic, being only particular ap-
plications of that general theory. Thus, among the Esquimaux boys are forbidden to play cat's cradle, because if they did so their
18
fingers might in later life become entangled in the harpoonline. Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law of similarity, which is the basis of homoeopathic magic: as the child's fingers are entangled by the string in playing cat's cradle, so they will be entangled by the harpoonline when he is a man and hunts whales. Again, among the Huzuls of the Carpathian Mountains the wife of a hunter may not spin while her husband is eating, or the game will turn and wind like the spindle, and the hunter will be unable
to hit it. Here again the taboo is clearly derived from the law of similarity. So, too, in most parts of ancient Italy women were forbidden by law to spin on the highroads as they walked, or even to carry their spindles openly, because any such action was believed to injure the crops. Probably the notion was that the twirling of the spindle would twirl the cornstalks and prevent them from growing straight. So, too, among the Ainos of Saghalien a pregnant woman may not spin nor twist ropes for two months before her delivery,
because they think that if she did so the child's guts might be entangled like the thread. For a like reason in Bilaspore, a district of
India, when the chief men of a village meet in council, no one present should twirl a spindle; for they think that if such a thing were
to happen, the discussion, like the spindle, would move in a circle and never be wound up. In some of the East Indian islands any
one who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in; he may not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would
in like manner stop in front of the hunter's snares and then turn back, instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar reason it
is a rule with the Toradjas of Central Celebes that no one may stand or loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a pregnant
woman, for such delay would retard the birth of the child; and in various parts of Sumatra the woman herself in these circumstances
is forbidden to stand at the door or on the top rung of the houseladder under pain of suffering hard labour for her imprudence in neglecting so elementary a precaution. Malays engaged in the search for camphor eat their food dry and take care not to pound their
salt fine. The reason is that the camphor occurs in the form of small grains deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the camphor
tree. Accordingly it seems plain to the Malay that if, while seeking for camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground, the camphor
would be found also in fine grains; whereas by eating his salt coarse he ensures that the grains of the camphor will also be large.
Camphor hunters in Borneo use the leathery sheath of the leaf-stalk of the Penang palm as a plate for food, and during the whole of
the expedition they will never wash the plate, for fear that the camphor might dissolve and disappear from the crevices of the tree.
Apparently they think that to wash their plates would be to wash out the camphor crystals from the trees in which they are imbed-
ded. The chief product of some parts of Laos, a province of Siam, is lac. This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the young
branches of trees, to which the little creatures have to be attached by hand. All who engage in the business of gathering the gum
abstain from washing themselves and especially from cleansing their heads, lest by removing the parasites from their hair they should
detach the other insects from the boughs. Again, a Blackfoot Indian who has set a trap for eagles, and is watching it, would not eat
rosebuds on any account; for he argues that if he did so, and an eagle alighted near the trap, the rosebuds in his own stomach would
make the bird itch, with the result that instead of swallowing the bait the eagle would merely sit and scratch himself. Following this
train of thought the eagle hunter also refrains from using an awl when he is looking after his snares; for surely if he were to scratch
with an awl, the eagles would scratch him. The same disastrous consequence would follow if his wives and children at home used an
awl while he is out after eagles, and accordingly they are forbidden to handle the tool in his absence for fear of putting him in bodily
danger.
Among the taboos observed by savages none perhaps are more numerous or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods,
and of such prohibitions many are demonstrably derived from the law of similarity and are accordingly examples of negative magic.
Just as the savage eats many animals or plants in order to acquire certain desirable qualities with which he believes them to be en-
dowed, so he avoids eating many other animals and plants lest he should acquire certain undesirable qualities with which he believes
them to be infected. In eating the former he practises positive magic; in abstaining from the latter he practises negative magic. Many
examples of such positive magic will meet us later on; here I will give a few instances of such negative magic or taboo. For example,
in Madagascar soldiers are forbidden to eat a number of foods lest on the principle of homoeopathic magic they should be tainted
by certain dangerous or undesirable properties which are supposed to inhere in these particular viands. Thus they may not taste
hedgehog, "as it is feared that this animal, from its propensity of coiling up into a ball when alarmed, will impart a timid shrinking
disposition to those who partake of it." Again, no soldier should eat an ox's knee, lest like an ox he should become weak in the knees
and unable to march. Further, the warrior should be careful to avoid partaking of a cock that has died fighting or anything that has
been speared to death; and no male animal may on any account be killed in his house while he is away at the wars. For it seems obvi-
ous that if he were to eat a cock that had died fighting, he would himself be slain on the field of battle; if he were to partake of an
animal that had been speared, he would be speared himself; if a male animal were killed in his house during his absence, he would
himself be killed in like manner and perhaps at the same instant. Further, the Malagasy soldier must eschew kidneys, because in the
Malagasy language the word for kidney is the same as that for "shot"; so shot he would certainly be if he ate a kidney.
The reader may have observed that in some of the foregoing examples of taboos the magical influence is supposed to operate at considerable distances; thus among the Blackfeet Indians the wives and children of an eagle hunter are forbidden to use an awl dur-ing his absence, lest the eagles should scratch the distant husband and father; and again no male animal may be killed in the house of a Malagasy soldier while he is away at the wars, lest the killing of the animal should entail the killing of the man. This belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubts science may entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have no difficulty in convincing a savage; the savage believed in it
19
long ago, and what is more, he acted on his belief with a logical consistency such as his civilised brother in the faith has not yet, so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct. For the savage is convinced not only that magical ceremonies affect persons and things
afar off, but that the simplest acts of daily life may do so too. Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends and relations
at a distance is often regulated by a more or less elaborate code of rules, the neglect of which by the one set of persons would, it is
supposed, entail misfortune or even death on the absent ones. In particular when a party of men are out hunting or fighting, their
kinsfolk at home are often expected to do certain things or to abstain from doing certain others, for the sake of ensuring the safety
and success of the distant hunters or warriors. I will now give some instances of this magical telepathy both in its positive and in its
negative aspect.
In Laos when an elephant hunter is starting for the chase, he warns his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence; for if she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled herself it would slip through them. When a Dyak village has turned out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be "butter-fingered" and the prey would slip through their hands.
Elephant-hunters in East Africa believe that, if their wives prove unfaithful in their absence, this gives the elephant power over his pursuer, who will accordingly be killed or severely wounded. Hence if a hunter hears of his wife's misconduct, he abandons the chase and returns home. If a Wagogo hunter is unsuccessful, or is attacked by a lion, he attributes it to his wife's misbehaviour at home, and returns to her in great wrath. While he is away hunting, she may not let any one pass behind her or stand in front of her as she sits; and she must lie on her face in bed. The Moxos Indians of Bolivia thought that if a hunter's wife was unfaithful to him
in his absence he would be bitten by a serpent or a jaguar. Accordingly, if such an accident happened to him, it was sure to entail the punishment, and often the death, of the woman, whether she was innocent or guilty. An Aleutian hunter of sea-otters thinks that he cannot kill a single animal if during his absence from home his wife should be unfaithful or his sister unchaste.
The Huichol Indians of Mexico treat as a demigod a species of cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant does not grow in their country, and has to be fetched every year by men who make a journey of forty-three days for the purpose. Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to the safety of their absent husbands by never walking fast, much less running, while the men
are on the road. They also do their best to ensure the benefits which, in the shape of rain, good crops, and so forth, are expected to flow from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject themselves to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their husbands. During the whole of the time which elapses till the festival of the cactus is held, neither party washes except on certain occasions, and then only with water brought from the distant country where the holy plant grows. They also fast much, eat no salt, and are bound to strict continence. Any one who breaks this law is punished with illness, and, moreover, jeopardises the result which all are striving for. Health, luck, and life are to be gained by gathering the cactus, the gourd of the God of Fire; but inasmuch as the
pure fire cannot benefit the impure, men and women must not only remain chaste for the time being, but must also purge themselves from the taint of past sin. Hence four days after the men have started the women gather and confess to Grandfather Fire with what men they have been in love from childhood till now. They may not omit a single one, for if they did so the men would not find a
single cactus. So to refresh their memories each one prepares a string with as many knots as she has had lovers. This she brings to the temple, and, standing before the fire, she mentions aloud all the men she has scored on her string, name after name. Having ended
her confession, she throws the string into the fire, and when the god has consumed it in his pure flame, her sins are forgiven her and she departs in peace. From now on the women are averse even to letting men pass near them. The cactus-seekers themselves make
in like manner a clean breast of all their frailties. For every peccadillo they tie a knot on a string, and after they have "talked to all the five winds" they deliver the rosary of their sins to the leader, who burns it in the fire.
Many of the indigenous tribes of Sarawak are firmly persuaded that were the wives to commit adultery while their husbands are searching for camphor in the jungle, the camphor obtained by the men would evaporate. Husbands can discover, by certain knots in the tree, when the wives are unfaithful; and it is said that in former days many women were killed by jealous husbands on no better evidence than that of these knots. Further, the wives dare not touch a comb while their husbands are away collecting the camphor; for if they did so, the interstices between the fibres of the tree, instead of being filled with the precious crystals, would be empty
like the spaces between the teeth of a comb. In the Kei Islands, to the southwest of New Guinea, as soon as a vessel that is about to sail for a distant port has been launched, the part of the beach on which it lay is covered as speedily as possible with palm branches, and becomes sacred. No one may thenceforth cross that spot till the ship comes home. To cross it sooner would cause the vessel to
perish. Moreover, all the time that the voyage lasts three or four young girls, specially chosen for the duty, are supposed to remain in
sympathetic connexion with the mariners and to contribute by their behaviour to the safety and success of the voyage. On no ac-
count, except for the most necessary purpose, may they quit the room that has been assigned to them. More than that, so long as the
vessel is believed to be at sea they must remain absolutely motionless, crouched on their mats with their hands clasped between their
knees. They may not turn their heads to the left or to the right or make any other movement whatsoever. If they did, it would cause
the boat to pitch and toss; and they may not eat any sticky stuff, such as rice boiled in coco-nut milk, for the stickiness of the food
would clog the passage of the boat through the water. When the sailors are supposed to have reached their destination, the strict-
ness of these rules is somewhat relaxed; but during the whole time that the voyage lasts the girls are forbidden to eat fish which have
20
sharp bones or stings, such as the sting-ray, lest their friends at sea should be involved in sharp, stinging trouble.
Where beliefs like these prevail as to the sympathetic connexion between friends at a distance, we need not wonder that above everything else war, with its stern yet stirring appeal to some of the deepest and tenderest of human emotions, should quicken in the anxious relations left behind a desire to turn the sympathetic bond to the utmost account for the benefit of the dear ones who
may at any moment be fighting and dying far away. Hence, to secure an end so natural and laudable, friends at home are apt to resort to devices which will strike us as pathetic or ludicrous, according as we consider their object or the means adopted to effect it. Thus
in some districts of Borneo, when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife or, if he is unmarried, his sister must wear a sword day and night in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the
morning, lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep by an enemy. Among the Sea Dyaks of Banting in
Sarawak the women strictly observe an elaborate code of rules while the men are away fighting. Some of the rules are negative and
some are positive, but all alike are based on the principles of magical homoeopathy and telepathy. Amongst them are the following.
The women must wake very early in the morning and open the windows as soon as it is light; otherwise their absent husbands will
oversleep themselves. The women may not oil their hair, or the men will slip. The women may neither sleep nor doze by day, or the
men will be drowsy on the march. The women must cook and scatter popcorn on the verandah every morning; so will the men be
agile in their movements. The rooms must be kept very tidy, all boxes being placed near the walls; for if any one were to stumble
over them, the absent husbands would fall and be at the mercy of the foe. At every meal a little rice must be left in the pot and put
aside; so will the men far away always have something to eat and need never go hungry. On no account may the women sit at the
loom till their legs grow cramped, otherwise their husbands will likewise be stiff in their joints and unable to rise up quickly or to run
away from the foe. So in order to keep their husbands' joints supple the women often vary their labours at the loom by walking up
and down the verandah. Further, they may not cover up their faces, or the men would not to be able to find their way through the tall
grass or jungle. Again, the women may not sew with a needle, or the men will tread on the sharp spikes set by the enemy in the path.
Should a wife prove unfaithful while her husband is away, he will lose his life in the enemy's country. Some years ago all these rules
and more were observed by the women of Banting, while their husbands were fighting for the English against rebels. But alas! these
tender precautions availed them little; for many a man, whose faithful wife was keeping watch and ward for him at home, found a
soldier's grave.
In the island of Timor, while war is being waged, the highpriest never quits the temple; his food is brought to him or cooked inside; day and night he must keep the fire burning, for if he were to let it die out, disaster would be fall the warriors and would continue so long as the hearth was cold. Moreover, he must drink only hot water during the time the army is absent; for every draught of cold water would damp the spirits of the people, so that they could not vanquish the enemy. In the Kei Islands, when the warriors have departed, the women return indoors and bring out certain baskets containing fruits and stones. These fruits and stones they anoint and place on a board, murmuring as they do so, "O lord sun, moon, let the bullets rebound from our husbands, brothers, betrothed, and other relations, just as raindrops rebound from these objects which are smeared with oil." As soon as the first shot is heard,
the baskets are put aside, and the women, seizing their fans, rush out of the houses. Then, waving their fans in the direction of the enemy, they run through the village, while they sing, "O golden fans! let our bullets hit, and those of the enemy miss." In this custom
the ceremony of anointing stones, in order that the bullets may recoil from the men like raindrops from the stones, is a piece of
pure homoeopathic or imitative magic; but the prayer to the sun, that he will be pleased to give effect to the charm, is a religious and
perhaps later addition. The waving of the fans seems to be a charm to direct the bullets towards or away from their mark, according
as they are discharged from the guns of friends or foes.
An old historian of Madagascar informs us that "while the men are at the wars, and until their return, the women and girls cease not day and night to dance, and neither lie down nor take food in their own houses. And although they are very voluptuously inclined, they would not for anything in the world have an intrigue with another man while their husband is at the war, believing firmly that
if that happened, their husband would be either killed or wounded. They believe that by dancing they impart strength, courage,
and good fortune to their husbands; accordingly during such times they give themselves no rest, and this custom they observe very
religiously."
Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast the wives of men who are away with the army paint themselves white, and adorn their persons with beads and charms. On the day when a battle is expected to take place, they run about armed with guns, or sticks carved to look like guns, and taking green paw-paws (fruits shaped somewhat like a melon), they hack them with knives, as
if they were chopping off the heads of the foe. The pantomime is no doubt merely an imitative charm, to enable the men to do to the enemy as the women do to the paw-paws. In the West African town of Framin, while the Ashantee war was raging some years ago, Mr. Fitzgerald Marriott saw a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers to the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short petticoat. At their head was a shrivelled old sorceress in a very short white petticoat, her black hair arranged in a sort of long projecting horn, and her black face, breasts, arms, and legs profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried long white brushes made of buffalo or horse tails, and as they danced they sang, "Our husbands have gone to Ashanteeland; may they sweep their enemies off the face of the earth!"
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Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, when the men were on the war-path, the women performed dances at frequent intervals. These dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition. The dancers flourished their knives, threw long
sharp-pointed sticks forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or warding off the enemy, and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a life-saving apparatus. The women always pointed their weapons towards the enemy's country. They painted their faces red and sang as they danced, and they prayed to the weapons to preserve their husbands and help them to kill many foes. Some had eagle-down stuck on the points of their sticks. When the dance was over, these weapons were hidden. If a woman whose husband was at the war thought she saw hair or a piece of a scalp on the weapon when she took it out, she knew that her husband had killed an enemy. But if she saw a stain of blood on it, she knew he was wounded or dead. When the men of the Yuki tribe in California were away fighting, the women at home did not sleep; they danced continually in a circle, chanting and waving leafy wands. For they said that if they danced all the time, their husbands would not grow tired. Among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, when the men had gone to war, the women at home would get up very early in the morning and pretend to make war by falling upon their children and feigning to take them for slaves. This was supposed to help their husbands to go and do likewise. If a wife were unfaithful to her husband while he was away on the war-path, he would probably be killed. For ten nights all the women at home lay with their heads towards the point of the compass to which the war-canoes had paddled away. Then they changed about, for the warriors were supposed to be coming home across the sea. At Mas-set the Haida women danced and sang war-songs all the time their husbands were away at the wars, and they had to keep everything about them in a certain order. It was thought that a wife might kill her husband by not observing these customs. When a band of Carib Indians of the Orinoco had gone on the war-path, their friends left in the village used to calculate as nearly as they could the exact moment when the absent warriors would be advancing to attack the enemy. Then they took two lads, laid them down on a bench, and inflicted a most severe scourging on their bare backs. This the youths submitted to without a murmur, supported in their sufferings by the firm conviction, in which they had been bred from childhood, that on the constancy and fortitude with which they
bore the cruel ordeal depended the valour and success of their comrades in the battle.
Among the many beneficent uses to which a mistaken ingenuity has applied the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, is
that of causing trees and plants to bear fruit in due season. In Thuringen the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which
reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed
that this will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the interior of Sumatra rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang
loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. Similarly, in ancient Mexico a festival was
held in honour of the goddess of maize, or "the long-haired mother," as she was called. It began at the time "when the plant had
attained its full growth, and fibres shooting forth from the top of the green ear indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this
festival the women wore their long hair unbound, shaking and tossing it in the dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial,
in order that the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion, that the grain might be correspondingly large and flat, and that the
people might have abundance." In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high in the air are approved homoeopathic modes of
making the crops grow high. Thus in Franche-Comte they say that you should dance at the Carnival in order to make the hemp grow
tall.
The notion that a person can influence a plant homoeopathically by his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a Ma-lay woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her body naked in reaping the rice, she explained that she did it to make the rice-husks thinner, as she was tired of pounding thick-husked rice. Clearly, she thought that the less clothing she wore the less
husk there would be on the rice. The magic virtue of a pregnant woman to communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants, who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and the corn swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest remonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women to sow the fields in the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts, the men answered, "Father, you don't understand these things, and that is why they vex you. You know that women are
accustomed to bear children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two or three basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them sow, then; we men don't know as much about it as they do."
Thus on the theory of homoeopathic magic a person can influence vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the bad character of his acts or states: for example, a fruitful woman makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren.
Hence this belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions or rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things lest they should homoeopathically infect the fruits of the
earth with their own undesirable state or condition. All such customs of abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative
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magic or taboo. Thus, for example, arguing from what may be called the infectiousness of personal acts or states, the Galelareese say that you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit-tree, or the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground; and that when you are eating water-melon you ought not to mix the pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, the tree that springs from that graft will let its fruit fall untimely. When the Chams of Cochinchina are sowing their dry rice fields and desire that no shower should fall, they eat their rice dry in order to prevent rain from spoiling the crop.
In the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence vegetation homoeopathically. He infects trees or plants with qualities or accidents, good or bad, resembling and derived from his own. But on the principle of homoeopathic magic the influence is mutual:
the plant can infect the man just as much as the man can infect the plant. In magic, as I believe in physics, action and reaction are
equal and opposite. The Cherokee Indians are adepts in practical botany of the homoeopathic sort. Thus wiry roots of the catgut
plant are so tough that they can almost stop a plowshare in the furrow. Hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction
of the roots to make the hair strong, and Cherokee ball-players wash themselves with it to toughen their muscles. It is a Galelareese
belief that if you eat a fruit which has fallen to the ground, you will yourself contract a disposition to stumble and fall; and that if
you partake of something which has been forgotten (such as a sweet potato left in the pot or a banana in the fire), you will become
forgetful. The Galelareese are also of opinion that if a woman were to consume two bananas growing from a single head she would
give birth to twins. The Guarani Indians of South America thought that a woman would become a mother of twins if she ate a
double grain of millet. In Vedic times a curious application of this principle supplied a charm by which a banished prince might be
restored to his kingdom. He had to eat food cooked on a fire which was fed with wood which had grown out of the stump of a tree
which had been cut down. The recuperative power manifested by such a tree would in due course be communicated through the fire
to the food, and so to the prince, who ate the food which was cooked on the fire which was fed with the wood which grew out of
the tree. The Sudanese think that if a house is built of the wood of thorny trees, the life of the people who dwell in that house will
likewise be thorny and full of trouble.
There is a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic which works by means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear
nor speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people blind, deaf and dumb by the use of dead men's bones or anything
else that is tainted by the infection of death. Thus among the Galelareese, when a young man goes a-wooing at night, he takes a little
earth from a grave and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart's house just above the place where her parents sleep. This, he fancies,
will prevent them from waking while he converses with his beloved, since the earth from the grave will make them sleep as sound as
the dead. Burglars in all ages and many lands have been patrons of this species of magic, which is very useful to them in the exercise
of their profession. Thus a South Slavonian housebreaker sometimes begins operations by throwing a dead man's bone over the
house, saying, with pungent sarcasm, "As this bone may waken, so may these people waken"; after that not a soul in the house can
keep his or her eyes open. Similarly, in Java the burglar takes earth from a grave and sprinkles it round the house which he intends
to rob; this throws the inmates into a deep sleep. With the same intention a Hindoo will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the
house; Indians of Peru scatter the dust of dead men's bones; and Ruthenian burglars remove the marrow from a human shin-bone,
pour tallow into it, and having kindled the tallow, march thrice round the house with this candle burning, which causes the inmates
to sleep a death-like sleep. Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg-bone and play upon it; whereupon all persons
within hearing are overcome with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this maleficent purpose the left fore-arm of a
woman who had died in giving birth to her first child; but the arm had to be stolen. With it they beat the ground before they entered
the house which they designed to plunder; this caused every one in the house to lose all power of speech and motion; they were as
dead, hearing and seeing everything, but perfectly powerless; some of them, however, really slept and even snored. In Europe similar
properties were ascribed to the Hand of Glory, which was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been hanged. If a candle
made of the fat of a malefactor who had also died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the Hand of Glory as in a candlestick, it
rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented; they could not stir a finger any more than if they were dead. Sometimes
the dead man's hand is itself the candle, or rather bunch of candles, all its withered fingers being set on fire; but should any member
of the household be awake, one of the fingers will not kindle. Such nefarious lights can only be extinguished with milk. Often it is
prescribed that the thief 's candle should be made of the finger of a newborn or, still better, unborn child; sometimes it is thought
needful that the thief should have one such candle for every person in the house, for if he has one candle too little somebody in the
house will wake and catch him. Once these tapers begin to burn, there is nothing but milk that will put them out. In the seventeenth
century robbers used to murder pregnant women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs. An ancient Greek robber or
burglar thought he could silence and put to flight the fiercest watchdogs by carrying with him a brand plucked from a funeral pyre.
Again, Servian and Bulgarian women who chafe at the restraints of domestic life will take the copper coins from the eyes of a
corpse, wash them in wine or water, and give the liquid to their husbands to drink. After swallowing it, the husband will be as blind
to his wife's peccadilloes as the dead man was on whose eyes the coins were laid.
Further, animals are often conceived to possess qualities of properties which might be useful to man, and homoeopathic or imita-
23
tive magic seeks to communicate these properties to human beings in various ways. Thus some Bechuanas wear a ferret as a charm, because, being very tenacious of life, it will make them difficult to kill. Others wear a certain insect, mutilated, but living, for a similar purpose. Yet other Bechuana warriors wear the hair of a hornless ox among their own hair, and the skin of a frog on their mantle, because a frog is slippery, and the ox, having no horns, is hard to catch; so the man who is provided with these charms believes that
he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the frog. Again, it seems plain that a South African warrior who twists tufts of rat's hair among his own curly black locks will have just as many chances of avoiding the enemy's spear as the nimble rat has of avoiding things thrown at it; hence in these regions rats' hair is in great demand when war is expected. One of the ancient books of India prescribes that when a sacrifice is offered for victory, the earth out of which the altar is to be made should be taken from a place
where a boar has been wallowing, since the strength of the boar will be in that earth. When you are playing the one-stringed lute, and your fingers are stiff, the thing to do is to catch some long-legged field spiders and roast them, and then rub your fingers with the ashes; that will make your fingers as lithe and nimble as the spiders' legs--at least so think the Galelareese. To bring back a runaway slave an Arab will trace a magic circle on the ground, stick a nail in the middle of it, and attach a beetle by a thread to the nail, taking care that the sex of the beetle is that of the fugitive. As the beetle crawls round and round, it will coil the thread about the nail, thus shortening its tether and drawing nearer to the centre at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopathic magic the runaway slave will be drawn back to his master.
Among the western tribes of British New Guinea, a man who has killed a snake will burn it and smear his legs with the ashes when he goes into the forest; for no snake will bite him for some days afterwards. If a South Slavonian has a mind to pilfer and steal at market, he has nothing to do but to burn a blind cat, and then throw a pinch of its ashes over the person with whom he is higgling; after that he can take what he likes from the booth, and the owner will not be a bit the wiser, having become as blind as the deceased cat with whose ashes he has been sprinkled. The thief may even ask boldly, "Did I pay for it?" and the deluded huckster will reply, "Why, certainly." Equally simple and effectual is the expedient adopted by natives of Central Australia who desire to cultivate their beards. They prick the chin all over with a pointed bone, and then stroke it carefully with a magic stick or stone, which represents
a kind of rat that has very long whiskers. The virtue of these whiskers naturally passes into the representative stick or stone, and thence by an easy transition to the chin, which, consequently, is soon adorned with a rich growth of beard. The ancient Greeks thought that to eat the flesh of the wakeful nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping; that to smear the eyes of a blear-sighted person with the gall of an eagle would give him the eagle's vision; and that a raven's eggs would restore the blackness of the raven to silvery hair. Only the person who adopted this last mode of concealing the ravages of time had to be most careful to keep his mouth full of oil all the time he applied the eggs to his venerable locks, else his teeth as well as his hair would be dyed raven black, and no amount of scrubbing and scouring would avail to whiten them again. The hair-restorer was in fact a shade too powerful, and in ap-
plying it you might get more than you bargained for.
The Huichol Indians admire the beautiful markings on the backs of serpents. Hence when a Huichol woman is about to weave or embroider, her husband catches a large serpent and holds it in a cleft stick, while the woman strokes the reptile with one hand down the whole length of its back; then she passes the same hand over her forehead and eyes, that she may be able to work as beautiful patterns in the web as the markings on the back of the serpent.
On the principle of homoeopathic magic, inanimate things, as well as plants and animals, may diffuse blessing or bane around them, according to their own intrinsic nature and the skill of the wizard to tap or dam, as the case may be, the stream of weal or woe. In Samaracand women give a baby sugar candy to suck and put glue in the palm of its hand, in order that, when the child grows up, his words may be sweet and precious things may stick to his hands as if they were glued. The Greeks thought that a garment made from the fleece of a sheep that had been torn by a wolf would hurt the wearer, setting up an itch or irritation in his skin. They were also
of opinion that if a stone which had been bitten by a dog were dropped in wine, it would make all who drank of that wine to fall out among themselves. Among the Arabs of Moab a childless woman often borrows the robe of a woman who has had many children, hoping with the robe to acquire the fruitfulness of its owner. The Caffres of Sofala, in East Africa, had a great dread of being struck with anything hollow, such as a reed or a straw, and greatly preferred being thrashed with a good thick cudgel or an iron bar, even though it hurt very much. For they thought that if a man were beaten with anything hollow, his inside would waste away till he died.
In eastern seas there is a large shell which the Buginese of Celebes call the "old man" (kadjawo). On Fridays they turn these "old men" upside down and place them on the thresholds of their houses, believing that whoever then steps over the threshold of the house will live to be old. At initiation a Brahman boy is made to tread with his right foot on a stone, while the words are repeated, "Tread on this stone; like a stone be firm"; and the same ceremony is performed, with the same words, by a Brahman bride at her
marriage. In Madagascar a mode of counteracting the levity of fortune is to bury a stone at the foot of the heavy house-post. The
common custom of swearing upon a stone may be based partly on a belief that the strength and stability of the stone lend confir-
mation to an oath. Thus the old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus tells us that "the ancients, when they were to choose a king,
were wont to stand on stones planted in the ground, and to proclaim their votes, in order to foreshadow from the steadfastness of
the stones that the deed would be lasting."
But while a general magical efficacy may be supposed to reside in all stones by reason of their common properties of weight and
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solidity, special magical virtues are attributed to particular stones, or kinds of stone, in accordance with their individual or specific
qualities of shape and colour. For example, the Indians of Peru employed certain stones for the increase of maize, others for the
increase of potatoes, and others again for the increase of cattle. The stones used to make maize grow were fashioned in the likeness
of cobs of maize, and the stones destined to multiply cattle had the shape of sheep.
In some parts of Melanesia a like belief prevails that certain sacred stones are endowed with miraculous powers which correspond in their nature to the shape of the stone. Thus a piece of water-worn coral on the beach often bears a surprising likeness to a breadfruit. Hence in the Banks Islands a man who finds such a coral will lay it at the root of one of his breadfruit trees in the expecta-
tion that it will make the tree bear well. If the result answers his expectation, he will then, for a proper remuneration, take stones
of less-marked character from other men and let them lie near his, in order to imbue them with the magic virtue which resides in it.
Similarly, a stone with little discs upon it is good to bring in money; and if a man found a large stone with a number of small ones
under it, like a sow among her litter, he was sure that to offer money upon it would bring him pigs. In these and similar cases the
Melanesians ascribe the marvellous power, not to the stone itself, but to its indwelling spirit; and sometimes, as we have just seen, a
man endeavours to propitiate the spirit by laying down offerings on the stone. But the conception of spirits that must be propitiated
lies outside the sphere of magic, and within that of religion. Where such a conception is found, as here, in conjunction with purely
magical ideas and practices, the latter may generally be assumed to be the original stock on which the religious conception has been
at some later time engrafted. For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.
But to this point we shall return presently.
The ancients set great store on the magical qualities of precious stones; indeed it has been maintained, with great show of reason, that such stones were used as amulets long before they were worn as mere ornaments. Thus the Greeks gave the name of tree-agate to a stone which exhibits tree-like markings, and they thought that if two of these gems were tied to the horns or necks of oxen at the plough, the crop would be sure to be plentiful. Again, they recognised a milkstone which produced an abundant supply of milk in women if only they drank it dissolved in honey-mead. Milkstones are used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and
Melos at the present day; in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in order to ensure an abundant flow of milk. Again, the Greeks believed in a stone which cured snake-bites, and hence was named the snake-stone; to test its efficacy you had only to grind the stone to powder and sprinkle the powder on the wound. The wine-coloured amethyst received its name, which means "not drunken," because it was supposed to keep the wearer of it sober; and two brothers who desired to live at unity were advised to carry magnets about with them, which, by drawing the twain together, would clearly prevent them from falling out.
The ancient books of the Hindoos lay down a rule that after sunset on his marriage night a man should sit silent with his wife till
the stars begin to twinkle in the sky. When the pole-star appears, he should point it out to her, and, addressing the star, say, "Firm art
thou; I see thee, the firm one. Firm be thou with me, O thriving one!" Then, turning to his wife, he should say, "To me Brihaspati
has given thee; obtaining offspring through me, thy husband, live with me a hundred autumns." The intention of the ceremony is
plainly to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It
is the wish expressed in Keats's last sonnet:
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.
Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance which here engages our attention, to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man, of animals, and of plants. In the flowing tide they see not merely a symbol, but a cause of exuberance, of prosperity, and of life, while in the ebbing tide they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure, of weakness, and of death. The Breton peasant fancies that clover sown when the tide is coming in will grow well, but that if the plant be sown at
low water or when the tide is going out, it will never reach maturity, and that the cows which feed on it will burst. His wife believes that the best butter is made when the tide has just turned and is beginning to flow, that milk which foams in the churn will go on foaming till the hour of high water is past, and that water drawn from the well or milk extracted from the cow while the tide is rising will boil up in the pot or saucepan and overflow into the fire. According to some of the ancients, the skins of seals, even after they had been parted from their bodies, remained in secret sympathy with the sea, and were observed to ruffle when the tide was on the ebb. Another ancient belief, attributed to Aristotle, was that no creature can die except at ebb tide. The belief, if we can trust Pliny, was confirmed by experience, so far as regards human beings, on the coast of France. Philostratus also assures us that at Cadiz dying people never yielded up the ghost while the water was high. A like fancy still lingers in some parts of Europe. On the Cantabrian coast they think that persons who die of chronic or acute disease expire at the moment when the tide begins to recede. In Portugal,
all along the coast of Wales, and on some parts of the coast of Brittany, a belief is said to prevail that people are born when the tide comes in, and die when it goes out. Dickens attests the existence of the same superstition in England. "People can't die, along the coast," said Mr. Pegotty, "except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in--not properly born till flood." The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to
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Kent. Shakespeare must have been familiar with it, for he makes Falstaff die "even just between twelve and one, e'en at the turning
o' the tide." We meet the belief again on the Pacific coast of North America among the Haidas. Whenever a good Haida is about to
die he sees a canoe manned by some of his dead friends, who come with the tide to bid him welcome to the spirit land. "Come with
us now," they say, "for the tide is about to ebb and we must depart." At Port Stephens, in New South Wales, the natives always buried
their dead at flood tide, never at ebb, lest the retiring water should bear the soul of the departed to some distant country.
To ensure a long life the Chinese have recourse to certain complicated charms, which concentrate in themselves the magical essence
emanating, on homoeopathic principles, from times and seasons, from persons and from things. The vehicles employed to trans-
mit these happy influences are no other than grave-clothes. These are provided by many Chinese in their lifetime, and most people
have them cut out and sewn by an unmarried girl or a very young woman, wisely calculating that, since such a person is likely to
live a great many years to come, a part of her capacity to live long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus stave off for many
years the time when they shall be put to their proper use. Further, the garments are made by preference in a year which has an
intercalary month; for to the Chinese mind it seems plain that grave-clothes made in a year which is unusually long will possess the
capacity of prolonging life in an unusually high degree. Amongst the clothes there is one robe in particular on which special pains
have been lavished to imbue it with this priceless quality. It is a long silken gown of the deepest blue colour, with the word "longev-
ity" embroidered all over it in thread of gold. To present an aged parent with one of these costly and splendid mantles, known as
"longevity garments," is esteemed by the Chinese an act of filial piety and a delicate mark of attention. As the garment purports to
prolong the life of its owner, he often wears it, especially on festive occasions, in order to allow the influence of longevity, created
by the many golden letters with which it is bespangled, to work their full effect upon his person. On his birthday, above all, he hardly
ever fails to don it, for in China common sense bids a man lay in a large stock of vital energy on his birthday, to be expended in the
form of health and vigour during the rest of the year. Attired in the gorgeous pall, and absorbing its blessed influence at every pore,
the happy owner receives complacently the congratulations of friends and relations, who warmly express their admiration of these
magnificent cerements, and of the filial piety which prompted the children to bestow so beautiful and useful a present on the author
of their being.
Another application of the maxim that like produces like is seen in the Chinese belief that the fortunes of a town are deeply affected by its shape, and that they must vary according to the character of the thing which that shape most nearly resembles. Thus it is
related that long ago the town of Tsuen-cheu-fu, the outlines of which are like those of a carp, frequently fell a prey to the depredations of the neighbouring city of Yung-chun, which is shaped like a fishing-net, until the inhabitants of the former town conceived the plan of erecting two tall pagodas in their midst. These pagodas, which still tower above the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu, have ever
since exercised the happiest influence over its destiny by intercepting the imaginary net before it could descend and entangle in its meshes the imaginary carp. Some forty years ago the wise men of Shanghai were much exercised to discover the cause of a local rebellion. On careful enquiry they ascertained that the rebellion was due to the shape of a large new temple which had most unfortunately been built in the shape of a tortoise, an animal of the very worst character. The difficulty was serious, the danger was pressing; for to pull down the temple would have been impious, and to let it stand as it was would be to court a succession of similar or worse disasters. However, the genius of the local professors of geomancy, rising to the occasion, triumphantly surmounted the difficulty
and obviated the danger. By filling up two wells, which represented the eyes of the tortoise, they at once blinded that disreputable
animal and rendered him incapable of doing further mischief.
Sometimes homoeopathic or imitative magic is called in to annul an evil omen by accomplishing it in mimicry. The effect is to circumvent destiny by substituting a mock calamity for a real one. In Madagascar this mode of cheating the fates is reduced to a regular system. Here every man's fortune is determined by the day or hour of his birth, and if that happens to be an unlucky one
his fate is sealed, unless the mischief can be extracted, as the phrase goes, by means of a substitute. The ways of extracting the
mischief are various. For example, if a man is born on the first day of the second month (February), his house will be burnt down
when he comes of age. To take time by the forelock and avoid this catastrophe, the friends of the infant will set up a shed in a field
or in the cattle-fold and burn it. If the ceremony is to be really effective, the child and his mother should be placed in the shed and
only plucked, like brands, from the burning hut before it is too late. Again, dripping November is the month of tears, and he who is
born in it is born to sorrow. But in order to disperse the clouds that thus gather over his future, he has nothing to do but to take the
lid off a boiling pot and wave it about. The drops that fall from it will accomplish his destiny and so prevent the tears from trickling
from his eyes. Again, if fate has decreed that a young girl, still unwed, should see her children, still unborn, descend before her with
sorrow to the grave, she can avert the calamity as follows. She kills a grasshopper, wraps it in a rag to represent a shroud, and mourns
over it like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted. Moreover, she takes a dozen or more other grasshoppers,
and having removed some of their superfluous legs and wings she lays them about their dead and shrouded fellow. The buzz of the
tortured insects and the agitated motions of their mutilated limbs represent the shrieks and contortions of the mourners at a funeral.
After burying the deceased grasshopper she leaves the rest to continue their mourning till death releases them from their pain; and
having bound up her dishevelled hair she retires from the grave with the step and carriage of a person plunged in grief. Thenceforth
she looks cheerfully forward to seeing her children survive her; for it cannot be that she should mourn and bury them twice over.
Once more, if fortune has frowned on a man at his birth and penury has marked him for her own, he can easily erase the mark in
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question by purchasing a couple of cheap pearls, price three halfpence, and burying them. For who but the rich of this world can thus afford to fling pearls away?
3. Contagious Magic
THUS far we have been considering chiefly that branch of sympathetic magic which may be called homoeopathic or imitative. Its leading principle, as we have seen, is that like produces like, or, in other words, that an effect resembles its cause. The other great branch of sympathetic magic, which I have called Contagious Magic, proceeds upon the notion that things which have once been conjoined must remain ever afterwards, even when quite dissevered from each other, in such a sympathetic relation that whatever is
done to the one must similarly affect the other. Thus the logical basis of Contagious Magic, like that of Homoeopathic Magic, is a
mistaken association of ideas; its physical basis, if we may speak of such a thing, like the physical basis of Homoeopathic Magic, is
a material medium of some sort which, like the ether of modern physics, is assumed to unite distant objects and to convey impressions from one to the other. The most familiar example of Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may
work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut. This superstition is world-wide; instances of it in regard to hair and nails will be noticed later on in this work.
Among the Australian tribes it was a common practice to knock out one or more of a boy's front teeth at those ceremonies of initiation to which every male member had to submit before he could enjoy the rights and privileges of a full-grown man. The reason of the practice is obscure; all that concerns us here is the belief that a sympathetic relation continued to exist between the lad and his teeth after the latter had been extracted from his gums. Thus among some of the tribes about the river Darling, in New South Wales, the extracted tooth was placed under the bark of a tree near a river or water-hole; if the bark grew over the tooth, or if the tooth
fell into the water, all was well; but if it were exposed and the ants ran over it, the natives believed that the boy would suffer from a disease of the mouth. Among the Murring and other tribes of New South Wales the extracted tooth was at first taken care of by an old man, and then passed from one headman to another, until it had gone all round the community, when it came back to the lad's father, and finally to the lad himself. But however it was thus conveyed from hand to hand, it might on no account be placed in a bag containing magical substances, for to do so would, they believed, put the owner of the tooth in great danger. The late Dr. Howitt
once acted as custodian of the teeth which had been extracted from some novices at a ceremony of initiation, and the old men earnestly besought him not to carry them in a bag in which they knew that he had some quartz crystals. They declared that if he did so the magic of the crystals would pass into the teeth, and so injure the boys. Nearly a year after Dr. Howitt's return from the ceremony he was visited by one of the principal men of the Murring tribe, who had travelled some two hundred and fifty miles from his home
to fetch back the teeth. This man explained that he had been sent for them because one of the boys had fallen into ill health, and it
was believed that the teeth had received some injury which had affected him. He was assured that the teeth had been kept in a box
apart from any substances, like quartz crystals, which could influence them; and he returned home bearing the teeth with him care-
fully wrapt up and concealed.
The Basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth, lest these should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings who haunt graves, and who could harm the owner of the tooth by working magic on it. In Sussex some fifty years ago a maidservant remonstrated strongly against the throwing away of children's cast teeth, affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any animal,
the child's new tooth would be, for all the world, like the teeth of the animal that had bitten the old one. In proof of this she named old Master Simmons, who had a very large pig's tooth in his upper jaw, a personal defect that he always averred was caused by his mother, who threw away one of his cast teeth by accident into the hog's trough. A similar belief has led to practices intended, on
the principles of homoeopathic magic, to replace old teeth by new and better ones. Thus in many parts of the world it is custom-
ary to put extracted teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat, in the hope that, through the sympathy which
continues to subsist between them and their former owner, his other teeth may acquire the same firmness and excellence as the teeth
of these rodents. For example, in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim among the people that when you have had a
tooth taken out you should insert it in a mouse's hole. To do so with a child's milk-tooth which has fallen out will prevent the child
from having toothache. Or you should go behind the stove and throw your tooth backwards over your head, saying "Mouse, give me
your iron tooth; I will give you my bone tooth." After that your other teeth will remain good. Far away from Europe, at Raratonga, in
the Pacific, when a child's tooth was extracted, the following prayer used to be recited:
"Big rat! little rat!
Here is my old tooth.
Pray give me a new one."
Then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house, because rats make their nests in the decayed thatch. The reason assigned for invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats' teeth were the strongest known to the natives.
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Other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a sympathetic union with the body, after the physical connexion has been
severed, are the navel-string and the afterbirth, including the placenta. So intimate, indeed, is the union conceived to be, that the
fortunes of the individual for good or evil throughout life are often supposed to be bound up with one or other of these portions of
his person, so that if his navel-string or afterbirth is preserved and properly treated, he will be prosperous; whereas if it be injured or
lost, he will suffer accordingly. Thus certain tribes of Western Australia believe that a man swims well or ill, according as his mother
at his birth threw the navel-string into water or not. Among the natives on the Pennefather River in Queensland it is believed that
a part of the child's spirit (cho-i) stays in the afterbirth. Hence the grandmother takes the afterbirth away and buries it in the sand.
She marks the spot by a number of twigs which she sticks in the ground in a circle, tying their tops together so that the structure
resembles a cone. When Anjea, the being who causes conception in women by putting mud babies into their wombs, comes along
and sees the place, he takes out the spirit and carries it away to one of his haunts, such as a tree, a hole in a rock, or a lagoon where
it may remain for years. But sometime or other he will put the spirit again into a baby, and it will be born once more into the world.
In Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands, the navel-string is placed in a shell and then disposed of in such a way as shall best adapt
the child for the career which the parents have chosen for him; for example, if they wish to make him a good climber, they will hang
the navel-string on a tree. The Kei islanders regard the navel-string as the brother or sister of the child, according to the sex of the
infant. They put it in a pot with ashes, and set it in the branches of a tree, that it may keep a watchful eye on the fortunes of its
comrade. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, as among many other peoples of the Indian Archipelago, the placenta passes for the child's younger brother or sister, the sex being determined by the sex of the child, and it is buried under the house. According to the Bataks
it is bound up with the child's welfare, and seems, in fact, to be the seat of the transferable soul, of which we shall hear something
later on. The Karo Bataks even affirm that of a man's two souls it is the true soul that lives with the placenta under the house; that is
the soul, they say, which begets children.
The Baganda believe that every person is born with a double, and this double they identify with the afterbirth, which they regard as
a second child. The mother buries the afterbirth at the root of a plantain tree, which then becomes sacred until the fruit has ripened,
when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the family. Among the Cherokees the navel-string of a girl is buried under a corn-
mortar, in order that the girl may grow up to be a good baker; but the navel-string of a boy is hung up on a tree in the woods, in
order that he may be a hunter. The Incas of Peru preserved the navel-string with the greatest care, and gave it to the child to suck
whenever it fell ill. In ancient Mexico they used to give a boy's navel-string to soldiers, to be buried by them on a field of battle, in
order that the boy might thus acquire a passion for war. But the navel-string of a girl was buried beside the domestic hearth, because
this was believed to inspire her with a love of home and taste for cooking and baking.
Even in Europe many people still believe that a person's destiny is more or less bound up with that of his navel-string or afterbirth. Thus in Rhenish Bavaria the navel-string is kept for a while wrapt up in a piece of old linen, and then cut or pricked to pieces according as the child is a boy or a girl, in order that he or she may grow up to be a skilful workman or a good sempstress. In Berlin the midwife commonly delivers the dried navel-string to the father with a strict injunction to preserve it carefully, for so long as it is kept the child will live and thrive and be free from sickness. In Beauce and Perche the people are careful to throw the navel-string neither into water nor into fire, believing that if that were done the child would be drowned or burned.
Thus in many parts of the world the navel-string, or more commonly the afterbirth, is regarded as a living being, the brother or sister of the infant, or as the material object in which the guardian spirit of the child or part of its soul resides. Further, the sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a person and his afterbirth or navel-string comes out very clearly in the widespread custom
of treating the afterbirth or navel-string in ways which are supposed to influence for life the character and career of the person, making him, if it is a man, a nimble climber, a strong swimmer, a skilful hunter, or a brave soldier, and making her, if it is a woman, a cunning sempstress, a good baker, and so forth. Thus the beliefs and usages concerned with the afterbirth or placenta, and to a
less extent with the navel-string, present a remarkable parallel to the widespread doctrine of the transferable or external soul and
the customs founded on it. Hence it is hardly rash to conjecture that the resemblance is no mere chance coincidence, but that in the
afterbirth or placenta we have a physical basis (not necessarily the only one) for the theory and practice of the external soul. The
consideration of that subject is reserved for a later part of this work.
A curious application of the doctrine of contagious magic is the relation commonly believed to exist between a wounded man and the agent of the wound, so that whatever is subsequently done by or to the agent must correspondingly affect the patient either for good or evil. Thus Pliny tells us that if you have wounded a man and are sorry for it, you have only to spit on the hand that gave the wound, and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated. In Melanesia, if a man's friends get possession of the arrow which wounded him, they keep it in a damp place or in cool leaves, for then the inflammation will be trifling and will soon subside. Meantime the enemy who shot the arrow is hard at work to aggravate the wound by all the means in his power. For this purpose he and
his friends drink hot and burning juices and chew irritating leaves, for this will clearly inflame and irritate the wound. Further, they keep the bow near the fire to make the wound which it has inflicted hot; and for the same reason they put the arrow-head, if it has been recovered, into the fire. Moreover, they are careful to keep the bow-string taut and to twang it occasionally, for this will cause the wounded man to suffer from tension of the nerves and spasms of tetanus. "It is constantly received and avouched," says Bacon,
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"that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself. In this experiment, upon the relation of men
of credit (though myself, as yet, am not fully inclined to believe it), you shall note the points following: first, the ointment wherewith
this is done is made of divers ingredients, whereof the strangest and hardest to come by are the moss upon the skull of a dead man
unburied, and the fats of a boar and a bear killed in the act of generation." The precious ointment compounded out of these and
other ingredients was applied, as the philosopher explains, not to the wound but to the weapon, and that even though the injured
man was at a great distance and knew nothing about it. The experiment, he tells us, had been tried of wiping the ointment off the
weapon without the knowledge of the person hurt, with the result that he was presently in a great rage of pain until the weapon was
anointed again. Moreover, "it is affirmed that if you cannot get the weapon, yet if you put an instrument of iron or wood resembling
the weapon into the wound, whereby it bleedeth, the anointing of that instrument will serve and work the effect." Remedies of the
sort which Bacon deemed worthy of his attention are still in vogue in the eastern counties of England. Thus in Suffolk if a man cuts
himself with a bill-hook or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils it to prevent the wound from fester-
ing. If he runs a thorn or, as he calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted thorn. A man came to a doctor with an
inflamed hand, having run a thorn into it while he was hedging. On being told that the hand was festering, he remarked, "That didn't
ought to, for I greased the bush well after I pulled it out." If a horse wounds its foot by treading on a nail, a Suffolk groom will
invariably preserve the nail, clean it, and grease it every day, to prevent the foot from festering. Similarly Cambridgeshire labourers
think that if a horse has run a nail into its foot, it is necessary to grease the nail with lard or oil and put it away in some safe place,
or the horse will not recover. A few years ago a veterinary surgeon was sent for to attend a horse which had ripped its side open on
the hinge of a farm gatepost. On arriving at the farm he found that nothing had been done for the wounded horse, but that a man
was busy trying to pry the hinge out of the gatepost in order that it might be greased and put away, which, in the opinion of the
Cambridge wiseacres, would conduce to the recovery of the animal. Similarly Essex rustics opine that, if a man has been stabbed
with a knife, it is essential to his recovery that the knife should be greased and laid across the bed on which the sufferer is lying. So in
Bavaria you are directed to anoint a linen rag with grease and tie it on the edge of the axe that cut you, taking care to keep the sharp
edge upwards. As the grease on the axe dries, your wound heals. Similarly in the Harz Mountains they say that if you cut yourself,
you ought to smear the knife or the scissors with fat and put the instrument away in a dry place in the name of the Father, of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost. As the knife dries, the wound heals. Other people, however, in Germany say that you should stick the
knife in some damp place in the ground, and that your hurt will heal as the knife rusts. Others again, in Bavaria, recommend you to
smear the axe or whatever it is with blood and put it under the eaves.
The train of reasoning which thus commends itself to English and German rustics, in common with the savages of Melanesia and America, is carried a step further by the aborigines of Central Australia, who conceive that under certain circumstances the near relations of a wounded man must grease themselves, restrict their diet, and regulate their behaviour in other ways in order to ensure his recovery. Thus when a lad has been circumcised and the wound is not yet healed, his mother may not eat opossum, or a certain kind of lizard, or carpet snake, or any kind of fat, for otherwise she would retard the healing of the boy's wound. Every day she greases her digging-sticks and never lets them out of her sight; at night she sleeps with them close to her head. No one is allowed
to touch them. Every day also she rubs her body all over with grease, as in some way this is believed to help her son's recovery. Another refinement of the same principle is due to the ingenuity of the German peasant. It is said that when one of his pigs or sheep breaks its leg, a farmer of Rhenish Bavaria or Hesse will bind up the leg of a chair with bandages and splints in due form. For some days thereafter no one may sit on that chair, move it, or knock up against it; for to do so would pain the injured pig or sheep and hinder the cure. In this last case it is clear that we have passed wholly out of the region of contagious magic and into the region of homoeopathic or imitative magic; the chair-leg, which is treated instead of the beast's leg, in no sense belongs to the animal, and the application of bandages to it is a mere simulation of the treatment which a more rational surgery would bestow on the real patient.
The sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a man and the weapon which has wounded him is probably founded on the notion that the blood on the weapon continues to feel with the blood in his body. For a like reason the Papuans of Tumleo, an island off New Guinea, are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages with which their wounds have been dressed, for they fear that if these rags fell into the hands of an enemy he might injure them magically thereby. Once when a man with a wound in his mouth, which bled constantly, came to the missionaries to be treated, his faithful wife took great pains to collect all the blood and cast it into
the sea. Strained and unnatural as this idea may seem to us, it is perhaps less so than the belief that magic sympathy is maintained
between a person and his clothes, so that whatever is done to the clothes will be felt by the man himself, even though he may be far
away at the time. In the Wotjobaluk tribe of Victoria a wizard would sometimes get hold of a man's opossum rug and roast it slowly
in the fire, and as he did so the owner of the rug would fall sick. If the wizard consented to undo the charm, he would give the rug
back to the sick man's friends, bidding them put it in water, "so as to wash the fire out." When that happened, the sufferer would feel
a refreshing coolness and probably recover. In Tanna, one of the New Hebrides, a man who had a grudge at another and desired his
death would try to get possession of a cloth which had touched the sweat of his enemy's body. If he succeeded, he rubbed the cloth
carefully over with the leaves and twigs of a certain tree, rolled and bound cloth, twigs, and leaves into a long sausage-shaped bundle,
and burned it slowly in the fire. As the bundle was consumed, the victim fell ill, and when it was reduced to ashes, he died. In this
last form of enchantment, however, the magical sympathy may be supposed to exist not so much between the man and the cloth as
between the man and the sweat which issued from his body. But in other cases of the same sort it seems that the garment by itself is
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enough to give the sorcerer a hold upon his victim. The witch in Theocritus, while she melted an image or lump of wax in order that her faithless lover might melt with love of her, did not forget to throw into the fire a shred of his cloak which he had dropped in her house. In Prussia they say that if you cannot catch a thief, the next best thing you can do is to get hold of a garment which he may have shed in his flight; for if you beat it soundly, the thief will fall sick. This belief is firmly rooted in the popular mind. Some eighty or ninety years ago, in the neighbourhood of Berend, a man was detected trying to steal honey, and fled, leaving his coat behind him. When he heard that the enraged owner of the honey was mauling his lost coat, he was so alarmed that he took to his bed and died.
Again, magic may be wrought on a man sympathetically, not only through his clothes and severed parts of himself, but also through the impressions left by his body in sand or earth. In particular, it is a world-wide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure
the feet that made them. Thus the natives of South-eastern Australia think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz, glass, bone, or charcoal in his footprints. Rheumatic pains are often attributed by them to this cause. Seeing a Tatungolung
man very lame, Mr. Howitt asked him what was the matter. He said, "some fellow has put bottle in my foot." He was suffering from
rheumatism, but believed that an enemy had found his foot-track and had buried it in a piece of broken bottle, the magical influence
of which had entered his foot.
Similar practices prevail in various parts of Europe. Thus in Mecklenburg it is thought that if you drive a nail into a man's footprint
he will fall lame; sometimes it is required that the nail should be taken from a coffin. A like mode of injuring an enemy is resorted to
in some parts of France. It is said that there was an old woman who used to frequent Stow in Suffolk, and she was a witch. If, while
she walked, any one went after her and stuck a nail or a knife into her footprint in the dust, the dame could not stir a step till it was
withdrawn. Among the South Slavs a girl will dig up the earth from the footprints of the man she loves and put it in a flower-pot.
Then she plants in the pot a marigold, a flower that is thought to be fadeless. And as its golden blossom grows and blooms and
never fades, so shall her sweetheart's love grow and bloom, and never, never fade. Thus the love-spell acts on the man through the
earth he trod on. An old Danish mode of concluding a treaty was based on the same idea of the sympathetic connexion between
a man and his footprints: the covenanting parties sprinkled each other's footprints with their own blood, thus giving a pledge of
fidelity. In ancient Greece superstitions of the same sort seem to have been current, for it was thought that if a horse stepped on the
track of a wolf he was seized with numbness; and a maxim ascribed to Pythagoras forbade people to pierce a man's footprints with a
nail or a knife.
The same superstition is turned to account by hunters in many parts of the world for the purpose of running down the game. Thus a German huntsman will stick a nail taken from a coffin into the fresh spoor of the quarry, believing that this will hinder the animal from escaping. The aborigines of Victoria put hot embers in the tracks of the animals they were pursuing. Hottentot hunters throw into the air a handful of sand taken from the footprints of the game, believing that this will bring the animal down. Thompson Indians used to lay charms on the tracks of wounded deer; after that they deemed it superfluous to pursue the animal any further that day, for being thus charmed it could not travel far and would soon die. Similarly, Ojebway Indians placed "medicine" on the track
of the first deer or bear they met with, supposing that this would soon bring the animal into sight, even if it were two or three days' journey off; for this charm had power to compress a journey of several days into a few hours. Ewe hunters of West Africa stab the footprints of game with a sharp-pointed stick in order to maim the quarry and allow them to come up with it.
But though the footprint is the most obvious it is not the only impression made by the body through which magic may be wrought
on a man. The aborigines of South-eastern Australia believe that a man may be injured by burying sharp fragments of quartz, glass,
and so forth in the mark made by his reclining body; the magical virtue of these sharp things enters his body and causes those acute
pains which the ignorant European puts down to rheumatism. We can now understand why it was a maxim with the Pythagoreans
that in rising from bed you should smooth away the impression left by your body on the bed-clothes. The rule was simply an old
precaution against magic, forming part of a whole code of superstitious maxims which antiquity fathered on Pythagoras, though
doubtless they were familiar to the barbarous forefathers of the Greeks long before the time of that philosopher.
4. The Magician's Progress
WE have now concluded our examination of the general principles of sympathetic magic. The examples by which I have illustrated them have been drawn for the most part from what may be called private magic, that is from magical rites and incantations practised for the benefit or the injury of individuals. But in savage society there is commonly to be found in addition what we may call public magic, that is, sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole community. Wherever ceremonies of this sort are observed for the com-
mon good, it is obvious that the magician ceases to be merely a private practitioner and becomes to some extent a public functionary.
The development of such a class of functionaries is of great importance for the political as well as the religious evolution of society.
For when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a position
of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession accordingly draws
into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men of the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect of honour, wealth,
and power such as hardly any other career could offer. The acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to
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play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he is often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to him. But the more sagacious he is,
the more likely he is to see through the fallacies which impose on duller wits. Thus the ablest members of the profession must tend to be more or less conscious deceivers; and it is just these men who in virtue of their superior ability will generally come to the top and win for themselves positions of the highest dignity and the most commanding authority. The pitfalls which beset the path of
the professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes
in his own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor. The honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations will produce their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only really, as they always do, but conspicuously and disastrously, as they often do, he is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure, and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head by his
disappointed and angry employers.
The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character. If we could balance the harm they do by their knavery against the benefits they confer by their superior sagacity, it might well be found that the good greatly outweighed the evil. For more mischief has probably been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by intelligent rascals. Once your shrewd rogue has attained the height of his ambition, and has no longer any selfish end to further, he may, and often does, turn his talents, his experience, his resources, to the service of the public. Many men who have been least scrupulous in the acquisition of power have been most beneficent in the use
of it, whether the power they aimed at and won was that of wealth, political authority, or what not. In the field of politics the wily intriguer, the ruthless victor, may end by being a wise and magnanimous ruler, blessed in his lifetime, lamented at his death, admired and applauded by posterity. Such men, to take two of the most conspicuous instances, were Julius Caesar and Augustus. But once
a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.
Thus, so far as the public profession of magic affected the constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of affairs in
the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a democracy,
or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general the savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult males, but by a
council of elders. The change, by whatever causes produced, and whatever the character of the early rulers, was on the whole very
beneficial. For the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No human
being is so hidebound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow
and difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible
master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of
iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The least pos-
sible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest
and dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise, while the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents
a uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn
capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues
and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by
opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men's natural abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all who
have the real good of their fellows at heart. Once these elevating influences have begun to operate--and they cannot be for ever
suppressed--the progress of civilisation becomes comparatively rapid. The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry
through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect; and if, as will often hap-
pen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the common, he will readily avail himself of the opportunity. Even the whims and
caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe
ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind,
it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly
favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress. For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary
submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the per-
petual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge
which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.
Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissoci-
ated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere
accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have followed close on the heels of victory, and that the
great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilisation, thus healing in peace the wounds
they inflicted in war. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs are our witnesses in the past: we may yet live to see a
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similar outburst in Japan. Nor, to remount the stream of history to its sources, is it an accident that all the first great strides towards civilisation have been made under despotic and theocratic governments, like those of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme
ruler claimed and received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double character of a king and a god. It is hardly too much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and, paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is
more liberty in the best sense--liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies--under the most absolute des-
potism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage life, where the individual's lot is cast from the cradle
to the grave in the iron mould of hereditary custom.
So far, therefore, as the public profession of magic has been one of the roads by which the ablest men have passed to supreme power, it has contributed to emancipate mankind from the thraldom of tradition and to elevate them into a larger, freer life, with a broader outlook on the world. This is no small service rendered to humanity. And when we remember further that in another direction magic has paved the way for science, we are forced to admit that if the black art has done much evil, it has also been the source of much good; that if it is the child of error, it has yet been the mother of freedom and truth.
IV. Magic and Religion
THE examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate the general principles of sympathetic magic in its two branches, to which we have given the names of Homoeopathic and Contagious respectively. In some cases of magic which have come before us we have seen that the operation of spirits is assumed, and that an attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. But these cases are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit magic tinged and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs
in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell,
will inevitably be attended by the desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations should chance to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another sorcerer. He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward being: he abases himself before no awful deity. Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called the laws of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to break these laws in the smallest particular, is to incur failure, and may even expose the unskilful practitioner himself to
the utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and exercised
in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In
both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the op-
eration of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the
course of nature. Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the causes of things and can
touch the secret springs that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world. Hence the strong attraction which magic
and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge.
They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless prom-
ises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling
mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.
The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association
of ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces homoeopathic or imitative magic: a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The principles of associa-
tion are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied they yield
science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all
magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. From the
earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advan-
tage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere
dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.
If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to enquire how it stands related to religion. But the view we take of that relation will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have formed of the nature of religion itself; hence a writer may reasonably be expected to define his conception of religion before he proceeds to investigate its relation to magic. There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy every
one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards to employ
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the word consistently in that sense throughout his work. By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first, since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him. But unless the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology; in the language of St. James, "faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone." In other words, no man is religious who does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he
is religious; if the other acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral according as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good. Hence belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always take the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward ceremonies. Its aim is to please the deity, and if the deity is one who delights in charity and mercy and purity more than in oblations of blood, the chanting of hymns, and
the fumes of incense, his worshippers will best please him, not by prostrating themselves before him, by intoning his praises, and by filling his temples with costly gifts, but by being pure and merciful and charitable towards men, for in so doing they will imitate, so
far as human infirmity allows, the perfections of the divine nature. It was this ethical side of religion which the Hebrew prophets, inspired with a noble ideal of God's goodness and holiness, were never weary of inculcating. Thus Micah says: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" And at a later time much of the force by which Christianity conquered the world was drawn from the same high conception of God's moral nature and the duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it. "Pure religion and undefiled," says St. James, "be-
fore God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
But if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings who rule the world, and, second, an attempt to win their favour, it clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events from the channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this implied elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed to the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume that the
processes of nature are rigid and invariable in their operation, and that they can as little be turned from their course by persuasion
and entreaty as by threats and intimidation. The distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns on their answer
to the crucial question, Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as
a conciliation of the superhuman powers, assumes the former member of the alternative. For all conciliation implies that the being
conciliated is a conscious or personal agent, that his conduct is in some measure uncertain, and that he can be prevailed upon to vary
it in the desired direction by a judicious appeal to his interests, his appetites, or his emotions. Conciliation is never employed towards
things which are regarded as inanimate, nor towards persons whose behaviour in the particular circumstances is known to be deter-
mined with absolute certainty. Thus in so far as religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned
from their purpose by persuasion, it stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of which take for granted
that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws
acting mechanically. In magic, indeed, the assumption is only implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true that magic often deals with
spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them exactly
in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as reli-
gion would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings, whether human or divine, are in the last resort subject to those impersonal
forces which control all things, but which nevertheless can be turned to account by any one who knows how to manipulate them by
the appropriate ceremonies and spells. In ancient Egypt, for example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even the high-
est gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them with destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes, without going quite
so far as that, the wizard declared that he would scatter the bones of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved contuma-
cious. Similarly in India at the present day the great Hindoo trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is subject to the sorcerers,
who, by means of their spells, exercise such an ascendency over the mightiest deities, that these are bound submissively to execute on
earth below, or in heaven above, whatever commands their masters the magicians may please to issue. There is a saying everywhere
current in India: "The whole universe is subject to the gods; the gods are subject to the spells (mantras); the spells to the Brahmans;
therefore the Brahmans are our gods."
This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful sense of the
divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence of it, such claims and such a demeanour must have appeared an impious
and blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives that belong to God alone. And sometimes, we may suspect, lower motives concurred
to whet the edge of the priest's hostility. He professed to be the proper medium, the true intercessor between God and man, and
no doubt his interests as well as his feelings were often injured by a rival practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road to
fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour.
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Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an ear-
lier stage the functions of priest and sorcerer were often combined or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet differentiated
from each other. To serve his purpose man wooed the goodwill of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the same time
he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which he hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without the
help of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and magical rites simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations almost in
the same breath, knowing or recking little of the theoretical inconsistency of his behaviour, so long as by hook or crook he contrived
to get what he wanted. Instances of this fusion or confusion of magic with religion have already met us in the practices of Melanesi-
ans and of other peoples.
The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among peoples that have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in
ancient India and ancient Egypt; it is by no means extinct among European peasantry at the present day. With regard to ancient India
we are told by an eminent Sanscrit scholar that "the sacrificial ritual at the earliest period of which we have detailed information is
pervaded with practices that breathe the spirit of the most primitive magic." Speaking of the importance of magic in the East, and
especially in Egypt, Professor Maspero remarks that "we ought not to attach to the word magic the degrading idea which it almost
inevitably calls up in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The faithful who desired to obtain
some favour from a god had no chance of succeeding except by laying hands on the deity, and this arrest could only be effected by
means of a certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers, and chants, which the god himself had revealed, and which obliged him to do
what was demanded of him."
Among the ignorant classes of modern Europe the same confusion of ideas, the same mixture of religion and magic, crops up in
various forms. Thus we are told that in France "the majority of the peasants still believe that the priest possesses a secret and irresist-
ible power over the elements. By reciting certain prayers which he alone knows and has the right to utter, yet for the utterance of
which he must afterwards demand absolution, he can, on an occasion of pressing danger, arrest or reverse for a moment the action
of the eternal laws of the physical world. The winds, the storms, the hail, and the rain are at his command and obey his will. The
fire also is subject to him, and the flames of a conflagration are extinguished at his word." For example, French peasants used to be,
perhaps are still, persuaded that the priests could celebrate, with certain special rites, a Mass of the Holy Spirit, of which the efficacy
was so miraculous that it never met with any opposition from the divine will; God was forced to grant whatever was asked of Him
in this form, however rash and importunate might be the petition. No idea of impiety or irreverence attached to the rite in the minds
of those who, in some of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular means to take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The
secular priests generally refused to say the Mass of the Holy Spirit; but the monks, especially the Capuchin friars, had the reputation
of yielding with less scruple to the entreaties of the anxious and distressed. In the constraint thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to
be laid by the priest upon the deity we seem to have an exact counterpart of the power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to their
magicians. Again, to take another example, in many villages of Provence the priest is still reputed to possess the faculty of averting
storms. It is not every priest who enjoys this reputation; and in some villages, when a change of pastors takes place, the parishion-
ers are eager to learn whether the new incumbent has the power (pouder), as they call it. At the first sign of a heavy storm they put
him to the proof by inviting him to exorcise the threatening clouds; and if the result answers to their hopes, the new shepherd is
assured of the sympathy and respect of his flock. In some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this respect stood higher
than that of his rector, the relations between the two have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has had to translate the
rector to another benefice. Again, Gascon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes
induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint Secaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do
know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite
sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch,
can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Secaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted
church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the
desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o' love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble
the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black
and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant
has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which
no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the
mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it.
They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Secaire.
Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with religion in many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for thinking that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was a time when man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of such wants as transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first place a consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and
religion may incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion in the history of humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is nothing but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary processes of the mind, namely the association
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of ideas by virtue of resemblance or contiguity; and that on the other hand religion assumes the operation of conscious or personal
agents, superior to man, behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the conception of personal agents is more complex than a
simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas; and a theory which assumes that the course of nature is determined by
conscious agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and reflection,
than the view that things succeed each other simply by reason of their contiguity or resemblance. The very beasts associate the ideas
of things that are like each other or that have been found together in their experience; and they could hardly survive for a day if
they ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible
animals or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume
that the honour of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human reason. Thus, if magic be deduced immediately
from elementary processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an error into which the mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests
on conceptions which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have yet attained to, it becomes probable that magic
arose before religion in the evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend nature to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and
enchantments before he strove to coax and mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.
The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is confirmed inductively by the observation that among the aborigines of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.
But if in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase, that they attempted to force the great powers of nature to do their pleasure before they thought of courting their favour by offerings and prayer--in short that, just as on the material side of human culture there has everywhere been an Age of Stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere been an Age of Magic? There are reasons for answering this question in the affirmative. When we survey the existing races of mankind from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore, we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but descend into the minuter subdivi-
sions of states and commonwealths, nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that the surface of
society all over the world is cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses opened up by the
disintegrating influence of religious dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences, which affect mainly the
intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual agreement among
the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind. One of the great
achievements of the nineteenth century was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus
to discover its substantial identity everywhere. It is beneath our feet--and not very far beneath them--here in Europe at the present
day, and it crops up on the surface in the heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever the advent of a higher civilisation has not
crushed it under ground. This universal faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of magic. While religious systems
differ not only in different countries, but in the same country in different ages, the system of sympathetic magic remains everywhere
and at all times substantially alike in its principles and practice. Among the ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe it
is very much what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among the lowest savages surviving in the
remotest corners of the world. If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal,
with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," as the sure and
certain credential of its own infallibility.
It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation.
We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet. Now and then the polite world is startled by a paragraph in a newspaper which tells how in Scotland an image has been found stuck full of pins for
the purpose of killing an obnoxious laird or minister, how a woman has been slowly roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a girl has been murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those candles of human tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade unseen. But whether the influences that make for further progress, or those that threaten to undo what has already been accomplished, will ultimately prevail; whether the impulsive energy of the minority or the dead weight of the majority
of mankind will prove the stronger force to carry us up to higher heights or to sink us into lower depths, are questions rather for the sage, the moralist, and the statesman, whose eagle vision scans the future, than for the humble student of the present and the past. Here we are only concerned to ask how far the uniformity, the universality, and the permanence of a belief in magic, compared with
the endless variety and the shifting character of religious creeds, raises a presumption that the former represents a ruder and earlier
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phase of the human mind, through which all the races of mankind have passed or are passing on their way to religion and science.
If an Age of Religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise, been preceded by an Age of Magic, it is natural that we should enquire what causes have led mankind, or rather a portion of them, to abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to be-take themselves to religion instead. When we reflect upon the multitude, the variety, and the complexity of the facts to be explained, and the scantiness of our information regarding them, we shall be ready to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so profound a problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the most we can do in the present state of our knowledge is to hazard a
more or less plausible conjecture. With all due diffidence, then, I would suggest that a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood
and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful
method of turning her resources to account. The shrewder intelligences must in time have come to perceive that magical ceremo-
nies and incantations did not really effect the results which they were designed to produce, and which the majority of their simpler
fellows still believed that they did actually produce. This great discovery of the inefficacy of magic must have wrought a radical
though probably slow revolution in the minds of those who had the sagacity to make it. The discovery amounted to this, that men
for the first time recognised their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which hitherto they had believed to be
completely within their control. It was a confession of human ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for causes what
were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain. His painful toil had been wasted,
his curious ingenuity had been squandered to no purpose. He had been pulling at strings to which nothing was attached; he had been
marching, as he thought, straight to the goal, while in reality he had only been treading in a narrow circle. Not that the effects which
he had striven so hard to produce did not continue to manifest themselves. They were still produced, but not by him. The rain still
fell on the thirsty ground: the sun still pursued his daily, and the moon her nightly journey across the sky: the silent procession of
the seasons still moved in light and shadow, in cloud and sunshine across the earth: men were still born to labour and sorrow, and
still, after a brief sojourn here, were gathered to their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things indeed went on as before, yet all
seemed different to him from whose eyes the old scales had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the pleasing illusion that it was he
who guided the earth and the heaven in their courses, and that they would cease to perform their great revolutions were he to take
his feeble hand from the wheel. In the death of his enemies and his friends he no longer saw a proof of the resistless potency of his
own or of hostile enchantments; he now knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a force stronger than any that he could
wield, and in obedience to a destiny which he was powerless to control.
Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty, his old happy confidence in himself and his powers rudely shaken, our primitive philosopher must have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he came to rest, as in a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new system of faith and practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his harass-ing doubts and a substitute, however precarious, for that sovereignty over nature which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the great world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be because there were other beings, like himself, but
far stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own magic. It was they, as he now believed, and not he himself, who made the stormy wind to blow, the lightning to flash, and the thunder to roll; who had laid the foundations of the solid earth and set bounds to the restless sea that
it might not pass; who caused all the glorious lights of heaven to shine; who gave the fowls of the air their meat and the wild beasts
of the desert their prey; who bade the fruitful land to bring forth in abundance, the high hills to be clothed with forests, the bubbling
springs to rise under the rocks in the valleys, and green pastures to grow by still waters; who breathed into man's nostrils and made
him live, or turned him to destruction by famine and pestilence and war. To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced in
all the gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself, humbly confessing his dependence on their invisible
power, and beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good things, to defend him from the perils and dangers by which
our mortal life is compassed about on every hand, and finally to bring his immortal spirit, freed from the burden of the body, to
some happier world, beyond the reach of pain and sorrow, where he might rest with them and with the spirits of good men in joy
and felicity for ever.
In this, or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be conceived to have made the great transition from magic to religion. But even in them the change can hardly ever have been sudden; probably it proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its more
or less perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of man's powerlessness to influence the course of nature on a grand scale must have been gradual; he cannot have been shorn of the whole of his fancied dominion at a blow. Step by step he must have been driv-en back from his proud position; foot by foot he must have yielded, with a sigh, the ground which he had once viewed as his own. Now it would be the wind, now the rain, now the sunshine, now the thunder, that he confessed himself unable to wield at will; and
as province after province of nature thus fell from his grasp, till what had once seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a prison, man must have been more and more profoundly impressed with a sense of his own helplessness and the might of the invisible
beings by whom he believed himself to be surrounded. Thus religion, beginning as a slight and partial acknowledgment of powers superior to man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession of man's entire and absolute dependence on the divine; his old free bearing is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest prostration before the mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit his will to theirs: In la sua volontade e nostra pace. But this deepening sense of religion, this more perfect
36
submission to the divine will in all things, affects only those higher intelligences who have breadth of view enough to comprehend the vastness of the universe and the littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their
purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all. They are, indeed,
drilled by their betters into an outward conformity with its precepts and a verbal profession of its tenets; but at heart they cling to
their old magical superstitions, which may be discountenanced and forbidden, but cannot be eradicated by religion, so long as they
have their roots deep down in the mental framework and constitution of the great majority of mankind.
The reader may well be tempted to ask, How was it that intelligent men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How could
they continue to cherish expectations that were invariably doomed to disappointment? With what heart persist in playing venerable
antics that led to nothing, and mumbling solemn balderdash that remained without effect? Why cling to beliefs which were so flatly
contradicted by experience? How dare to repeat experiments that had failed so often? The answer seems to be that the fallacy was
far from easy to detect, the failure by no means obvious, since in many, perhaps in most cases, the desired event did actually follow,
at a longer or shorter interval, the performance of the rite which was designed to bring it about; and a mind of more than common
acuteness was needed to perceive that, even in these cases, the rite was not necessarily the cause of the event. A ceremony intended
to make the wind blow or the rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will always be followed, sooner or later, by the occurrence
it is meant to bring to pass; and primitive man may be excused for regarding the occurrence as a direct result of the ceremony, and
the best possible proof of its efficacy. Similarly, rites observed in the morning to help the sun to rise, and in spring to wake the
dreaming earth from her winter sleep, will invariably appear to be crowned with success, at least within the temperate zones; for in
these regions the sun lights his golden lamp in the east every morning, and year by year the vernal earth decks herself afresh with a
rich mantle of green. Hence the practical savage, with his conservative instincts, might well turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the
theoretical doubter, the philosophic radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and spring might not, after all, be direct consequences
of the punctual performance of certain daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun might perhaps continue to rise and trees to blos-
som though the ceremonies were occasionally intermitted, or even discontinued altogether. These sceptical doubts would naturally
be repelled by the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries subversive of the faith and manifestly contradicted by experience.
"Can anything be plainer," he might say, "than that I light my twopenny candle on earth and that the sun then kindles his great fire
in heaven? I should be glad to know whether, when I have put on my green robe in spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same?
These are facts patent to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters
of hairs and choppers of logic. Theories and speculation and all that may be very well in their way, and I have not the least objec-
tion to your indulging in them, provided, of course, you do not put them in practice. But give me leave to stick to facts; then I know
where I am." The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious to us, because it happens to deal with facts about which we have long made up
our minds. But let an argument of precisely the same calibre be applied to matters which are still under debate, and it may be ques-
tioned whether a British audience would not applaud it as sound, and esteem the speaker who used it a safe man--not brilliant or
showy, perhaps, but thoroughly sensible and hard-headed. If such reasonings could pass muster among ourselves, need we wonder
that they long escaped detection by the savage?
V. The Magical Control of the Weather
1. The Public Magician
THE READER may remember that we were led to plunge into the labyrinth of magic by a consideration of two different types of man-god. This is the clue which has guided our devious steps through the maze, and brought us out at last on higher ground, whence, resting a little by the way, we can look back over the path we have already traversed and forward to the longer and steeper road we have still to climb.
As a result of the foregoing discussion, the two types of human gods may conveniently be distinguished as the religious and the
magical man-god respectively. In the former, a being of an order different from and superior to man is supposed to become incar-
nate, for a longer or a shorter time, in a human body, manifesting his superhuman power and knowledge by miracles wrought and
prophecies uttered through the medium of the fleshly tabernacle in which he has deigned to take up his abode. This may also appro-
priately be called the inspired or incarnate type of man-god. In it the human body is merely a frail earthly vessel filled with a divine
and immortal spirit. On the other hand, a man-god of the magical sort is nothing but a man who possesses in an unusually high
degree powers which most of his fellows arrogate to themselves on a smaller scale; for in rude society there is hardly a person who
does not dabble in magic. Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or inspired type derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped
to hide his heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mould, a man-god of the latter type draws his extraordinary power from
a certain physical sympathy with nature. He is not merely the receptacle of a divine spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is so
delicately attuned to the harmony of the world that a touch of his hand or a turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through
the universal framework of things; and conversely his divine organism is acutely sensitive to such slight changes of environment as
would leave ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the line between these two types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it
in theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows I shall not insist on it.
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We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for the benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and that according as it is directed to one or other of these two objects it may be called private or public magic. Further, I pointed out that the public magician occupies a position of great influence, from which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may advance step by
step to the rank of a chief or king. Thus an examination of public magic conduces to an understanding of the early kingship, since
in savage and barbarous society many chiefs and kings appear to owe their authority in great measure to their reputation as magi-
cians.
Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed to secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food.
The examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of food--the hunter, the fisher, the farmer--all resort to magical
practices in the pursuit of their various callings; but they do so as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and their families,
rather than as public functionaries acting in the interest of the whole people. It is otherwise when the rites are performed, not by
the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves, but by professional magicians on their behalf. In primitive society, where uniform-
ity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man
is more or less his own magician; he practises charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies. But a great
step in advance has been taken when a special class of magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men have
been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the healing
of diseases, the forecasting of the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other object of general utility. The impotence of the
means adopted by most of these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense importance of the institution itself. Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelihood
by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature. It was at
once their duty and their interest to know more than their fellows, to acquaint themselves with everything that could aid man in his
arduous struggle with nature, everything that could mitigate his sufferings and prolong his life. The properties of drugs and minerals,
the causes of rain and drought, of thunder and lightning, the changes of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the daily and yearly journeys of the sun, the motions of the stars, the mystery of life, and the mystery of death, all these things must have excited the
wonder of these early philosophers, and stimulated them to find solutions of problems that were doubtless often thrust on their
attention in the most practical form by the importunate demands of their clients, who expected them not merely to understand
but to regulate the great processes of nature for the good of man. That their first shots fell very far wide of the mark could hardly
be helped. The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those
which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no
doubt appear to us manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test
of experience. Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately
adhered to them after better had been propounded. Certainly no men ever had stronger incentives in the pursuit of truth than these
savage sorcerers. To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their
life. This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the
most powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since, if you would appear to know anything, by far the best
way is actually to know it. Thus, however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions
which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of incalcu-
lable good to humanity. They were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators and
discoverers in every branch of natural science. They began the work which has since been carried to such glorious and beneficent
issues by their successors in after ages; and if the beginning was poor and feeble, this is to be imputed to the inevitable difficulties
which beset the path of knowledge rather than to the natural incapacity or wilful fraud of the men themselves.
2. The Magical Control of Rain
OF THE THINGS which the public magician sets himself to do for the good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the
weather and especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain. Water is an essential of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends
upon showers. Without rain vegetation withers, animals and men languish and die. Hence in savage communities the rain-maker is a
very important personage; and often a special class of magicians exists for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water-supply. The
methods by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are commonly, though not always, based on the principle of
homoeopathic or imitative magic. If they wish to make rain they simulate it by sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their object is
to stop rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture.
Such attempts are by no means confined, as the cultivated reader might imagine, to the naked inhabitants of those sultry lands like
Central Australia and some parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, where often for months together the pitiless sun beats down out
of a blue and cloudless sky on the parched and gaping earth. They are, or used to be, common enough among outwardly civilised
folk in the moister climate of Europe. I will now illustrate them by instances drawn from the practice both of public and private
magic.
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Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of an old sacred grove. One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two firebrands together and made the sparks fly, to imitate lightning; and the third, who was called "the rain-maker," had a bunch of twigs with which he sprinkled water from a vessel on all sides. To put an end to drought and bring down rain, women and girls of the village of Ploska are wont to go naked by night to the boundaries of the village and there pour water on the ground. In Halmahera, or Gilolo, a large island to the west of New Guinea, a wizard makes rain by dipping a branch of a particular kind of tree in water and then scattering the moisture from the dripping bough over the ground. In New Britain the rain-maker wraps some leaves of
a red and green striped creeper in a banana-leaf, moistens the bundle with water, and buries it in the ground; then he imitates with his mouth the plashing of rain. Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America, when the corn is withering for want of rain, the members of the sacred Buffalo Society fill a large vessel with water and dance four times round it. One of them drinks some of
the water and spirts it into the air, making a fine spray in imitation of a mist or drizzling rain. Then he upsets the vessel, spilling the water on the ground; whereupon the dancers fall down and drink up the water, getting mud all over their faces. Lastly, they squirt
the water into the air, making a fine mist. This saves the corn. In springtime the Natchez of North America used to club together to purchase favourable weather for their crops from the wizards. If rain was needed, the wizards fasted and danced with pipes full of water in their mouths. The pipes were perforated like the nozzle of a watering-can, and through the holes the rain-maker blew
the water towards that part of the sky where the clouds hung heaviest. But if fine weather was wanted, he mounted the roof of his hut, and with extended arms, blowing with all his might, he beckoned to the clouds to pass by. When the rains do not come in due season the people of Central Angoniland repair to what is called the rain-temple. Here they clear away the grass, and the leader pours beer into a pot which is buried in the ground, while he says, "Master Chauta, you have hardened your heart towards us, what would you have us do? We must perish indeed. Give your children the rains, there is the beer we have given you." Then they all partake
of the beer that is left over, even the children being made to sip it. Next they take branches of trees and dance and sing for rain.
When they return to the village they find a vessel of water set at the doorway by an old woman; so they dip their branches in it and
wave them aloft, so as to scatter the drops. After that the rain is sure to come driving up in heavy clouds. In these practices we see a
combination of religion with magic; for while the scattering of the water-drops by means of branches is a purely magical ceremony,
the prayer for rain and the offering of beer are purely religious rites. In the Mara tribe of Northern Australia the rain-maker goes to
a pool and sings over it his magic song. Then he takes some of the water in his hands, drinks it, and spits it out in various directions.
After that he throws water all over himself, scatters it about, and returns quietly to the camp. Rain is supposed to follow. The Arab
historian Makrizi describes a method of stopping rain which is said to have been resorted to by a tribe of nomads called Alqamar in
Hadramaut. They cut a branch from a certain tree in the desert, set it on fire, and then sprinkled the burning brand with water. After
that the vehemence of the rain abated, just as the water vanished when it fell on the glowing brand. Some of the Eastern Angamis
of Manipur are said to perform a somewhat similar ceremony for the opposite purpose, in order, namely, to produce rain. The head
of the village puts a burning brand on the grave of a man who has died of burns, and quenches the brand with water, while he prays
that rain may fall. Here the putting out the fire with water, which is an imitation of rain, is reinforced by the influence of the dead
man, who, having been burnt to death, will naturally be anxious for the descent of rain to cool his scorched body and assuage his
pangs.
Other people besides the Arabs have used fire as a means of stopping rain. Thus the Sulka of New Britain heat stones red hot in the fire and then put them out in the rain, or they throw hot ashes in the air. They think that the rain will soon cease to fall, for it does
not like to be burned by the hot stones or ashes. The Telugus send a little girl out naked into the rain with a burning piece of wood in her hand, which she has to show to the rain. That is supposed to stop the downpour. At Port Stevens in New South Wales the medicine-men used to drive away rain by throwing fire-sticks into the air, while at the same time they puffed and shouted. Any man of the Anula tribe in Northern Australia can stop rain by simply warming a green stick in the fire, and then striking it against the wind.
In time of severe drought the Dieri of Central Australia, loudly lamenting the impoverished state of the country and their own half-starved condition, call upon the spirits of their remote predecessors, whom they call Mura-muras, to grant them power to make a heavy rainfall. For they believe that the clouds are bodies in which rain is generated by their own ceremonies or those of neighbouring tribes, through the influence of the Mura-muras. The way in which they set about drawing rain from the clouds is this. A hole
is dug about twelve feet long and eight or ten broad, and over this hole a conical hut of logs and branches is made. Two wizards, supposed to have received a special inspiration from the Mura-muras, are bled by an old and influential man with a sharp flint; and the blood, drawn from their arms below the elbow, is made to flow on the other men of the tribe, who sit huddled together in the hut. At the same time the two bleeding men throw handfuls of down about, some of which adheres to the blood-stained bodies of their comrades, while the rest floats in the air. The blood is thought to represent the rain, and the down the clouds. During the ceremony two large stones are placed in the middle of the hut; they stand for gathering clouds and presage rain. Then the wizards who were bled carry away the two stones for about ten or fifteen miles, and place them as high as they can in the tallest tree. Meanwhile the other men gather gypsum, pound it fine, and throw it into a water-hole. This the Mura-muras see, and at once they cause clouds to appear in the sky. Lastly, the men, young and old, surround the hut, and, stooping down, butt at it with their heads, like so many rams. Thus they force their way through it and reappear on the other side, repeating the process till the hut is wrecked. In doing this
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they are forbidden to use their hands or arms; but when the heavy logs alone remain, they are allowed to pull them out with their hands. "The piercing of the hut with their heads symbolises the piercing of the clouds; the fall of the hut, the fall of the rain." Obviously, too, the act of placing high up in trees the two stones, which stand for clouds, is a way of making the real clouds to mount up
in the sky. The Dieri also imagine that the foreskins taken from lads at circumcision have a great power of producing rain. Hence the Great Council of the tribe always keeps a small stock of foreskins ready for use. They are carefully concealed, being wrapt up
in feathers with the fat of the wild dog and of the carpet snake. A woman may not see such a parcel opened on any account. When the ceremony is over, the foreskin is buried, its virtue being exhausted. After the rains have fallen, some of the tribe always undergo a surgical operation, which consists in cutting the skin of their chest and arms with a sharp flint. The wound is then tapped with a flat stick to increase the flow of blood, and red ochre is rubbed into it. Raised scars are thus produced. The reason alleged by the
natives for this practice is that they are pleased with the rain, and that there is a connexion between the rain and the scars. Apparently the operation is not very painful, for the patient laughs and jokes while it is going on. Indeed, little children have been seen to crowd round the operator and patiently take their turn; then after being operated on, they ran away, expanding their little chests and singing for the rain to beat upon them. However, they were not so well pleased next day, when they felt their wounds stiff and sore. In Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming
blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the ground. The people of Egghiou, a district of Abyssinia,
used to engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other, village against village, for a week together every January for the purpose of
procuring rain. Some years ago the emperor Menelik forbade the custom. However, the following year the rain was deficient, and the
popular outcry so great that the emperor yielded to it, and allowed the murderous fights to be resumed, but for two days a year only.
The writer who mentions the custom regards the blood shed on these occasions as a propitiatory sacrifice offered to spirits who
control the showers; but perhaps, as in the Australian and Javanese ceremonies, it is an imitation of rain. The prophets of Baal, who
sought to procure rain by cutting themselves with knives till the blood gushed out, may have acted on the same principle.
There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather. This curious
superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular restric-
tions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure. Thus the Tsimshian
Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control the weather; therefore they pray to wind and rain, "Calm down, breath of the
twins." Further, they think that the wishes of twins are always fulfilled; hence twins are feared, because they can harm the man they
hate. They can also call the salmon and the olachen or candle-fish, and so they are known by a name which means "making plenti-
ful." In the opinion of the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia twins are transformed salmon; hence they may not go near water,
lest they should be changed back again into the fish. In their childhood they can summon any wind by motions of their hands, and
they can make fair or foul weather, and also cure diseases by swinging a large wooden rattle. The Nootka Indians of British Colum-
bia also believe that twins are somehow related to salmon. Hence among them twins may not catch salmon, and they may not eat or
even handle the fresh fish. They can make fair or foul weather, and can cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then wash-
ing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds. The Shuswap Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate
twins with the grizzly bear, for they call them "young grizzly bears." According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with
supernatural powers. In particular they can make good or bad weather. They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the air;
they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down on
the ends of spruce branches.
The same power of influencing the weather is attributed to twins by the Baronga, a tribe of Bantu negroes who, inhabit the shores
of Delagoa Bay in South-eastern Africa. They bestow the name of Tilo--that is, the sky--on a woman who has given birth to twins,
and the infants themselves are called the children of the sky. Now when the storms which generally burst in the months of Septem-
ber and October have been looked for in vain, when a drought with its prospect of famine is threatening, and all nature, scorched
and burnt up by a sun that has shone for six months from a cloudless sky, is panting for the beneficent showers of the South African
spring, the women perform ceremonies to bring down the longed-for rain on the parched earth. Stripping themselves of all their
garments, they assume in their stead girdles and head-dresses of grass, or short petticoats made of the leaves of a particular sort of
creeper. Thus attired, uttering peculiar cries and singing ribald songs, they go about from well to well, cleansing them of the mud and
impurities which have accumulated in them. The wells, it may be said, are merely holes in the sand where a little turbid unwholesome
water stagnates. Further, the women must repair to the house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drench
her with water, which they carry in little pitchers. Having done so they go on their way, shrieking out their loose songs and dancing
immodest dances. No man may see these leaf-clad women going their rounds. If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him
aside. When they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It often
happens, too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the graves of twins. For they think that the grave of a twin
ought always to be moist, for which reason twins are regularly buried near a lake. If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive,
they will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on the side of a hill. "No wonder," says the wizard in such a
case, "that the sky is fiery. Take up his body and dig him a grave on the shore of the lake." His orders are at once obeyed, for this is
supposed to be the only means of bringing down the rain.
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Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation which Professor Oldenberg has given of the rules to be observed by a Brahman who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian collection known as the Samaveda. The hymn, which bears the name of the Sakvari song, was believed to embody the might of Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt; and hence, on account of the dreadful and dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the bold student who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his fellow-men, and to retire from the village into the forest. Here for a space of time, which might vary, according to different doctors of the law, from one to twelve years, he had to observe certain rules of life, among which were the following. Thrice a day he
had to touch water; he must wear black garments and eat black food; when it rained, he might not seek the shelter of a roof, but had to sit in the rain and say, "Water is the Sakvari song"; when the lightning flashed, he said, "That is like the Sakvari song"; when the thunder pealed, he said, "The Great One is making a great noise." He might never cross a running stream without touching water; he might never set foot on a ship unless his life were in danger, and even then he must be sure to touch water when he went on board; "for in water," so ran the saying, "lies the virtue of the Sakvari song." When at last he was allowed to learn the song itself, he had
to dip his hands in a vessel of water in which plants of all sorts had been placed. If a man walked in the way of all these precepts, the rain-god Parjanya, it was said, would send rain at the wish of that man. It is clear, as Professor Oldenberg well points out, that
"all these rules are intended to bring the Brahman into union with water, to make him, as it were, an ally of the water powers, and to guard him against their hostility. The black garments and the black food have the same significance; no one will doubt that they refer to the rain-clouds when he remembers that a black victim is sacrificed to procure rain; 'it is black, for such is the nature of rain.' In respect of another raincharm it is said plainly, 'He puts on a black garment edged with black, for such is the nature of rain.' We may
therefore assume that here in the circle of ideas and ordinances of the Vedic schools there have been preserved magical practices of
the most remote antiquity, which were intended to prepare the rain-maker for his office and dedicate him to it."
It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather-doctor to observe precisely opposite rules of conduct. In the tropical island of Java, where the rich vegetation attests the abundance of the rainfall, ceremonies
for the making of rain are rare, but ceremonies for the prevention of it are not uncommon. When a man is about to give a great
feast in the rainy season and has invited many people, he goes to a weather-doctor and asks him to "prop up the clouds that may
be lowering." If the doctor consents to exert his professional powers, he begins to regulate his behaviour by certain rules as soon
as his customer has departed. He must observe a fast, and may neither drink nor bathe; what little he eats must be eaten dry, and in
no case may he touch water. The host, on his side, and his servants, both male and female, must neither wash clothes nor bathe so
long as the feast lasts, and they have all during its continuance to observe strict chastity. The doctor seats himself on a new mat in his
bedroom, and before a small oil-lamp he murmurs, shortly before the feast takes place, the following prayer or incantation: "Grand-
father and Grandmother Sroekoel" (the name seems to be taken at random; others are sometimes used), "return to your country.
Akkemat is your country. Put down your water-cask, close it properly, that not a drop may fall out." While he utters this prayer the
sorcerer looks upwards, burning incense the while. So among the Toradjas the rain-doctor, whose special business it is to drive away
rain, takes care not to touch water before, during, or after the discharge of his professional duties. He does not bathe, he eats with
unwashed hands, he drinks nothing but palm wine, and if he has to cross a stream he is careful not to step in the water. Having thus
prepared himself for his task he has a small hut built for himself outside of the village in a ricefield, and in this hut he keeps up a
little fire, which on no account may be suffered to go out. In the fire he burns various kinds of wood, which are supposed to possess
the property of driving off rain; and he puffs in the direction from which the rain threatens to come, holding in his hand a packet of
leaves and bark which derive a similar cloud-compelling virtue, not from their chemical composition, but from their names, which
happen to signify something dry or volatile. If clouds should appear in the sky while he is at work, he takes lime in the hollow of
his hand and blows it towards them. The lime, being so very dry, is obviously well adapted to disperse the damp clouds. Should rain
afterwards be wanted, he has only to pour water on his fire, and immediately the rain will descend in sheets.
The reader will observe how exactly the Javanese and Toradja observances, which are intended to prevent rain, form the antithesis of the Indian observances, which aim at producing it. The Indian sage is commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly as well
as on various special occasions; the Javanese and Toradja wizards may not touch it at all. The Indian lives out in the forest, and even when it rains he may not take shelter; the Javanese and the Toradja sit in a house or a hut. The one signifies his sympathy with water by receiving the rain on his person and speaking of it respectfully; the others light a lamp or a fire and do their best to drive the rain
away. Yet the principle on which all three act is the same; each of them, by a sort of childish make-believe, identifies himself with the phenomenon which he desires to produce. It is the old fallacy that the effect resembles its cause: if you would make wet weather, you must be wet; if you would make dry weather, you must be dry.
In South-eastern Europe at the present day ceremonies are observed for the purpose of making rain which not only rest on the same general train of thought as the preceding, but even in their details resemble the ceremonies practised with the same intention by the Baronga of Delagoa Bay. Among the Greeks of Thessaly and Macedonia, when a drought has lasted a long time, it is customary to send a procession of children round to all the wells and springs of the neighbourhood. At the head of the procession walks a girl adorned with flowers, whom her companions drench with water at every halting-place, while they sing an invocation, of which the following is part:
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"Perperia all fresh bedewed, Freshen all the neighbourhood; By the woods, on the highway,
As thou goest, to God now pray:
O my God, upon the plain,
Send thou us a still, small rain;
That the fields may fruitful be,
And vines in blossom we may see;
That the grain be full and sound,
And wealthy grow the folks around."
In time of drought the Serbians strip a girl to her skin and clothe her from head to foot in grass, herbs, and flowers, even her face being hidden behind a veil of living green. Thus disguised she is called the Dodola, and goes through the village with a troop of
girls. They stop before every house; the Dodola keeps turning herself round and dancing, while the other girls form a ring about her singing one of the Dodola songs, and the housewife pours a pail of water over her. One of the songs they sing runs thus:
"We go through the village; The clouds go in the sky;
We go faster,
Faster go the clouds;
They have overtaken us,
And wetted the corn and the vine."
At Poona in India, when rain is needed, the boys dress up one of their number in nothing but leaves and call him King of Rain. Then they go round to every house in the village, where the householder or his wife sprinkles the Rain King with water, and gives
the party food of various kinds. When they have thus visited all the houses, they strip the Rain King of his leafy robes and feast
