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The Golden
Bough
By
Sir James
George Frazer
Published 1922
PREFACE
THE primary aim of this book
is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succes-sion
to the priesthood of Diana at
Aricia. When I first set myself to solve the problem more
hthan 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 condesed. In order to
keep as much of the text as possible I have sacrificed all the
notes, and with them all exact
reference 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 illustrations of old princi-ples.
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 aug-mented
in the interval. A striking
instance of a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished by the
powerful mediaeval kingdom of
the Khazars in
to be put to death either on
the expiry of a set of terms 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 Khazar kings, drawn from the accounts of old Arab
travellers, has been collected
by me elsewhere. Africa, again, has supplied several fresh
examples of a similar practice
of regicide. Among them the most notable perhaps is the cus-tom
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 strangled. 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. The festival in its turn has lately received fresh light
from certain Assyrian
inscriptions, 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.
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 inter-
-------
Page
1?val to be attacked and
killed by a strong man, who thereupon succeeded to the priesthood or
the kingdom.
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
the existence of an African
population in
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 wor-ship
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 primi-tive
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 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
I
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Page 2?CONTENTS
Chapter
I. THE KING OF THE WOOD
1. Diana and Virbius
2. Artemis and Hippolytus
3. Recapitulation
II. PRIESTLY KINGS
III. SYMPATHETIC MAGIC
1. The Principles of Magic
2. Homoeopathic or Imitative
Magic
3. Contagious Magic
4. The Magician’s Progress
IV. MAGIC AND RELIGION
V. 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
VI. MAGICIANS AS KINGS
VII. INCARNATE HUMAN GODS
VIII. DEPARTMENTAL KINGS OF
NATURE
IX. THE WORSHIP OF TREES
1. Tree-spirits
2. Beneficent Powers of
Tree-spirits
X. RELICS OF TREE WORSHIP IN
MODERN
XI. THE INFLUENCE OF THE SEXES
ON VEGETATION
XII. THE SACRED MARRIAGE
1. Diana as a Goddess of
Fertility
2. The Marriage of the Gods
XIII. THE KINGS OF
1. Numa and Egeria
2. The King as Jupiter
XIV. THE SUCCESSION TO THE
KINGDOM IN ANCIENT
XV. THE WORSHIP OF THE OAK
XVI. DIANUS AND DIANA
XVII. THE BURDEN OF ROYALTY
1. Royal and Priestly Taboos
2. Divorce of the Spiritual
from the Temporal Power
XVIII. 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
XIX. 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
-------
Page 3?XX. TABOOED PERSONS
1. Chiefs and Kings tabooed
2. Mourners tabooed
3. Women tabooed at
Menstruation and Childbirth
4. Warriors tabooed
5. Manslayers tabooed
6. Hunters and Fishers tabooed
XXI. 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
XXII. 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
XXIII. OUR DEBT TO THE SAVAGE
XXIV. 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
XXV. TEMPORARY KINGS
XXVI. SACRIFICE OF THE KING’S
SON
XXVII. SUCCESSION TO THE SOUL
XXVIII. THE KILLING OF THE
TREE-SPIRIT
1. The Whitsuntide Mummers
2. Burying the Carnival
3. Carrying out Death
4. Bringing in Summer
5.
6. Death and Resurrection of
Kostrubonko
7. Death and Revival of
Vegetation
8. Analogous Rites in
9. The Magic Spring
XXIX. THE MYTH OF ADONIS
XXX. ADONIS IN
XXXI. ADONIS IN
XXXII. THE RITUAL OF ADONIS
XXXIII. THE GARDENS OF ADONIS
XXXIV. THE MYTH AND RITUAL OF
ATTIS
XXXVI. ATTIS AS A GOD OF
VEGETATION
-------
Page 4?XXXVI. HUMAN REPRESENTATIVES OF ATTIS
XXXVII. ORIENTAL RELIGIONS IN
THE WEST
XXXVIII. THE MYTH OF OSIRIS
XXXIX. THE RITUAL OF OSIRIS
1. The Popular Rites
2. The Official Rites
XL. THE NATURE OF OSIRIS
1. Osiris a Corn-god
2. Osiris a Tree-spirit
3. Osiris a God of Fertility
4. Osiris a God of the Dead
XLI.
XLII. OSIRIS AND THE SUN
XLIII. DIONYSUS
XLIV. DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
XLV. THE CORN-MOTHER AND THE
CORN-MAIDEN IN NORTHERN EUROPE
XLVI. THE 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
XLVII. LITYERSES
1. Songs of the Corn Reapers
2. Killing the Corn-spirit
3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops
4. The Corn-spirit slain in
his Human Representatives
XLVIII. THE CORN-SPIRIT AS AN
ANIMAL
1. Animal Embodiments of the
Corn-spirit
2. The Corn-spirit as a Wolf
or a Dog
3. The Corn-spirit as a Cock
4. The Corn-spirit as a Hare
5. The Corn-spirit as a Cat
6. The Corn-spirit as a Goat
7. The Corn-spirit as a Bull,
Cow, or Ox
8. The Corn-spirit as a Horse
or Mare
9. The Corn-spirit as a Pig
(Boar or Sow)
10. On the Animal Embodiments
of the Corn-spirit
XLIX. 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
5. Virbius and the Horse
L. EATING THE GOD
1. The Sacrament of
First-Fruits
2. Eating the God among the
Aztecs
3. Many Manii at Aricia
LI. HOMOEOPATHIC MAGIC OF A
FLESH DIET
LII. KILLING THE DIVINE ANIMAL
1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard
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Page 5?2. Killing the Sacred Ram
3. Killing the Sacred Serpent
4. Killing the Sacred Turtles
5. Killing the Sacred Bear
LIII. THE PROPITIATION OF WILD
ANIMALS BY HUNTERS
LIV. TYPES OF ANIMAL SACRAMENT
1. The Egyptian and the Aino
Types of Sacrament
2. Processions with Sacred
Animals
LV. 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
LVI. THE PUBLIC EXPULSION OF
EVILS
1. The Omnipresence of Demons
2. The Occasional Expulsion of
Evils
3. The Periodic Expulsion of
Evils
LVII. 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
4. On Scapegoats in General
LVIII. HUMAN SCAPEGOATS IN
CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient
2. The Human Scapegoat in
Ancient
3. The Roman Saturnalia
LIX. KILLING THE GOD IN
LX. 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
LXI. THE MYTH OF BALDER
LXII. THE FIRE-FESTIVALS OF
1. The Fire-festivals 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 Need-fire.
LXIII. THE INTERPRETATION OF
THE FIRE-FESTIVALS
1. On the Fire-festivals in
general
2. The Solar Theory of the
Fire-festivals
3. The Purificatory Theory of
the Fire-festivals
LXIV. 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
LXV. BALDER AND THE MISTLETOE
-------
Page 6?LXVI. THE EXTERNAL SOUL IN FOLK-TALES
LXVII. 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
LXVIII. THE GOLDEN BOUGH
LXIX. FAREWELL TO NEMI
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Page 7?Chapter 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
”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 vil-lages
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
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 relax-ation
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 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 sin-ister
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 melan-choly
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
-------
Page 8?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 cus-tom,
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 sub-ject.
According to one story the
worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who,
after killing Thoas, King of
the Tauric Chersonese (the
bringing with him the image of
the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death
his bones were transported
from Aricia to
on the Capitoline slope,
beside the
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
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
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
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Page 9?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 per-petual
holy fire in her sanctuary. A
large circular basement at the north-east corner of the tem-ple,
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, 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 mis-tress
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 mor-tal
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 profaned 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 mod-els
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 likeness-es
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
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Page 10?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 mythical 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 distinguished 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 dif-ferences
of opinion, together with the
discrepancy between Manius Egerius 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
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Page 11?its sponsor too respectable, to allow us to dismiss it as an idle
fiction. Rather we may sup-pose
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 human blood, were dragged in to render
intelligible the murderous
rule of succession to the Arician priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus
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
obe-dience
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 apparently
within the precinct of Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing
was held in honour of these
maidens, as the Troezenians called them; and it is easy
to show that similar customs
have been practised in many lands for the express purpose of
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Page 12?ensuring good crops. In the story of the tragic death of the youthful
Hippolytus we may dis-cern
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 probably 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 predecessor 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 embodi-ment,
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 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 her-self
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 succes-sion
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 our-selves.
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
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Page 13?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.
Chapter 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 pre-vailed
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 high-priest 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 slaugh-tered
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 immola-tion
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 hav-ing
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
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Page 14?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 expect-ed
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 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 well-being 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 proba-bly
still older, conception in
which we may detect a germ of the modern notion of natural law
or the view of nature as a
series of events occurring in an invariable order without the inter-vention
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 extraordi-nary
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.
Chapter 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 prin-ciple
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 nar-rowly.
For the same principles which
the magician applies in the practice of his art are implic-itly
believed by him to regulate
the operations of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly
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Page 15?assumes that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are of universal
application and are not limit-ed
to human actions. In short,
magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a falla-cious
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 igno-rance
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 sci-ence
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 appli-cations;
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 appli-cation
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 peo-ple
everywhere. Both branches of
magic, the homoeopathic and the contagious, may conve-niently
be comprehended under the
general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume
that things act on each other
at a distance through a secret sympathy, 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 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)
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Page 16?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 injur-ing
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
diffusion 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 figure 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 per-son
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 slow-ly
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 com-bines
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 prac-tice
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 suf-fer.
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 mid-dle
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
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Page 17?great deal better able to bear it than you are.
If homoeopathic or imitative
magic, working by means of images, has commonly been prac-tised
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, believing 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 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 suf-ferer.
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 goddess got into bed, and
clasping the burly hero to her
bosom, pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the
ground in imitation 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 estab-
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Page
18?lished between the two by
this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict; an offence commit-ted
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 morning 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 yel-low
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 yel-low
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 tem-perament
of the creature that it draws
out and receives the malady which issues, like a
stream, through the eyesight.”
So well recognised among birdfanciers was this valuable prop-erty
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 jaun-dice.
Pliny tells of another, or
perhaps the same, 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
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Page 19?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 corre-sponding
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 homoeopathic
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 deliberate 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 perform cere-monies
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 creature 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, espe-cially
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
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Page 20?the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the
bird as it stands aim-lessly
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 spir-its
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 ani-mal
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 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 pan-tomime
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 scrupu-lous
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
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Page 21?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
contact. Though these laws are
certainly not formulated in so many words nor even con-ceived
in the abstract by the savage,
they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to regu-late
the course of nature quite
independently of human will. He thinks that if he acts in a cer-tain
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 dan-gerous,
he is naturally careful not to
act in that way lest he should incur 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 conse-quences,
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 con-ception
of the association of ideas.
Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the nega-tive
pole. If we give the general
name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theoreti-cal
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 pseudo-science)
(Magic as a pseudo-art)
|
|
_____________________
|
|
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Page 22?Positive
Negative
Magic or
Magic or
Sorcery
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 applications of that
general theory. Thus, among
the Esquimaux boys are forbidden to play cat’s cradle, because
if they did so their fingers
might in later life become entangled in the harpoon-line. 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 harpoon-line
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 corn-stalks 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 house-ladder
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 imbedded. 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
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Page 23?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 endowed,
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 nega-tive
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 forbid-den
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 obvious 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 sol-dier
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 during 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 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 fight-ing,
their kinsfolk at home are
often expected to do certain things or to abstain from doing
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Page 24?certain others, for the sake of ensuring the safety and success of the
distant hunters or war-riors.
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 demi-god 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 run-ning,
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, more-over,
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 ben-efit
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.
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Page 25?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 account,
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
strictness of these rules is somewhat relaxed; but during the
whole time that the voyage
lasts the girls are forbidden to eat fish which have 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 dis-tance,
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 rela-tions
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 think-ing
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 posi-tive,
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 win-dows
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
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Page 26?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 hus-band
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 high-priest 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 befall 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 wav-ing
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 pro-
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Page
27?fusely adorned with white
circles and crescents. All carried long white brushes made of buffa-lo
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!”
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 hus-band
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 Masset 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 suc-cess
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 sea-son.
In Thüringen 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 festi-val
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 pro-
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Page
28?fusion, 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-Comté 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 Malay 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 fruit-ful
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
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
watermelon 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 29?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 fall-en
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 ren-der
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 sweet-heart’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 profes-sion.
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 can-dle
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, howev-er,
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 pre-sented;
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
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Page 30?candle should be made of the finger of a new-born 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 centu-ry
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
imitative 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 short-ening
its tether and drawing nearer
to the centre at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopath-ic
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 point-ed
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
repre-sentative
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
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Page 31?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 applying 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”
(kadjâwo). 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 mar-riage.
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 confirmation 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 solidity, special magical virtues are attributed to partic-ular
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
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Page 32?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 bread-fruit. Hence in
the Banks Islands a man who
finds such a coral will lay it at the root of one of his bread-fruit
trees in the expectation that
it will make the tree bear well. If the result answers his expecta-tion,
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 milk-stone which produced an abundant supply
of milk in women if only they
drank it dissolved in honey-mead. Milk-stones 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 clear-ly
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
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Page 33?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 peo-ple
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 Kent. Shakespeare must have been
familiar with it, for he makes
Falstaff die “even just between twelve and one, e’en at the turn-ing
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 con-centrate
in themselves the magical
essence emanating, on homoeopathic principles, from
times and seasons, from
persons and from things. The vehicles employed to transmit 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 “longevity” 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 per-son.
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
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Page 34?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 char-acter.
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 occa-sion,
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 accomplish-ing
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 real-ly
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 contin-ue
their mourning till death releases
them from their pain; and having bound up her dishev-elled
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
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Page 35?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
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 sympa-thetic
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 similar-ly
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 sympa-thy
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 communi-ty,
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 magi-cal
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 sub-stances,
like quartz crystals, which
could influence them; and he returned home bearing the
teeth with him carefully wrapt
up and concealed.
The Basutos are careful to
conceal their extracted teeth, lest these should fall into the hands
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Page 36?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 maid-servant 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 simi-lar
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 customary 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 fol-lowing
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.
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, includ-ing
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 proper-ly
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 concep-tion
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 watch-ful
eye on the fortunes of its
comrade. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, as among many other
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Page 37?peoples of the Indian Archipelago, the placenta passes for the child’s
younger brother or sis-ter,
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 sup-posed
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 con-cerned
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 nec-essarily
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
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Page 38?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, “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 festering. 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 recov-er.
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 peo-ple,
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
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Page 39?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 car-pet
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 there-after
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 hap-pened,
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
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.
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Page 40?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 sympa-thetic
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 pur-pose
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 fur-ther
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, sup-posing
that this would soon bring the
animal into sight, even if it were two or three days’ jour-ney
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 forefa-
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Page
41?thers 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 common 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 sup-posed
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 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 saga-cious
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, con-scious
or unconscious. Accordingly
the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extrava-gant
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 incanta-tions
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 intelli-gent
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
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Page 42?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 what-ever
the character of the early
rulers, was on the whole very beneficial. For the rise of monar-chy
appears to be an essential
condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No
human being is so hide-bound
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 possible 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 suf-ficed
to effect; and if, as will
often happen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the com-mon,
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 neigh-bours
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 perpetual
struggle for a bare
subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that
dis-interested
pursuit of knowledge which is
the noblest and most powerful instrument to amelio-rate
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
dissociated 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 similar outburst
in Japan. Nor, to remount the stream of history to its sources, is
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Page 43?it an accident that all the first great strides towards civilisation
have been made under despot-ic
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 liber-ty
in the best sense—liberty to
think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies—
under the most absolute
despotism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent free-dom
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.
Chapter 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 identi-cal
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, accompa-nied
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 anoth-er
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 neg-lect
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 operation 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 seek-
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44?er, on through the
wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises 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 pro-duces
contagious magic. The
principles of association 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 natu-ral
phenomena to his own
advantage, 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 gold-en
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 reli-gion.
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 reli-gion,
and to frame a definition of
it which would satisfy every one must obviously be impossi-ble.
All that a writer can do is,
first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards
to employ the word
consistently in that sense throughout his work. By religion, then, I
under-stand
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 ele-ments,
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
lan-guage
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
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Page 45?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, “before 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 persua-sion
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 gov-ern
the world conscious and
personal, or unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as a concili-ation
of the superhuman powers,
assumes the former member of the alternative. For all con-ciliation
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 direc-tion
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 determined 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 propiti-ating
them as religion 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 highest 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
contumacious. 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 submis-sively
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.”
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Page 46?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-suf-ficiency
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.
Yet this antagonism, familiar
as it is to us, seems to have made its appearance comparatively
late in the history of
religion. At an earlier 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 good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and sacri-fice,
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 incan-tations
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
Melanesians 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 primi-tive
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 mix-ture
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 irresistible 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 effi-cacy
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
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Page 47?who, in some of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular
means to take the king-dom
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 counter-part
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 parishioners 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 rec-tor,
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
Sécaire. 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 par-don
them; that right belongs to
the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire 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 conse-crates
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 Sécaire.
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 tran-scended
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 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 attrib-utes
to the animals a belief that
the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisi-
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Page
48?ble 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 ele-mentary
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 reli-gion
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, capri-cious,
or irascible deity by the soft
insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.
The conclusion which we have
thus reached deductively from a consideration of the funda-mental
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 con-spicuously
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 subdivisions 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 dif-fer
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
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Page 49?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 minis-ter,
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 accom-plished,
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 states-man,
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 per-manence
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 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 por-tion
of them, to abandon magic as a
principle of faith and practice and to betake 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 haz-ard
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 ceremonies 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 pro-duce
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
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Page 50?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
harassing doubts and a substitute, however precarious, for that sover-eignty
over nature which he had
reluctantly abdicated. If the great world went on its way with-out
the help of him or his
fellows, it must surely be because there were other beings, like him-self,
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 sor-row,
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 driven 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 thun-der,
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 sur-rounded.
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
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Page 51?absolute dependence on the divine; his old free bearing is exchanged
for an attitude of lowli-est
prostration before the
mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit
his will to theirs: In la sua
volontade è nostra pace. But this deepening sense of religion, this
more perfect 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 little-ness
of man. Small minds cannot
grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their pur-blind
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 reli-gion,
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 fail-ure
by no means obvious, since in
many, perhaps in most cases, the desired event did actu-ally
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 intend-ed
to make the wind blow or the
rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will always be fol-lowed,
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 pos-sible
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 per-haps
continue to rise and trees to
blossom though the ceremonies were occasionally intermit-ted,
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 two-penny
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 objection
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 questioned
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
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Page 52?wonder that they long escaped detection by the savage?
Chapter 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 con-sideration
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 incarnate, for a longer or
a shorter time, in a human
body, manifesting his super-human power and knowledge by mira-cles
wrought and prophecies uttered
through the medium of the fleshly tabernacle in which he
has deigned to take up his
abode. This may also appropriately be called the inspired or incar-nate
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 dab-ble
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, howev-er
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.
We have seen that in practice
the magic art may be employed for the benefit either of individ-uals
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 reputa-tion
as magicians.
Among the objects of public
utility which magic may be employed to secure, the most essen-tial
is an adequate supply of food.
The examples cited in preceding pages prove that the pur-veyors
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 them-selves,
but by professional magicians
on their behalf. In primitive society, where uniformity of
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Page 53?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 commu-nity
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 manu-al
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 sea-sons,
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 perpet-ually
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 hypothe-ses,
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 pur-suit
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 just-ly
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
incalculable good to humanity. They were the direct predeces-sors,
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
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Page 54?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.
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 ham-mer
on a kettle or small cask to
imitate thunder; the second knocked two fire-brands 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 spring-time 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 ves-sel
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 resort-
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Page
55?ed 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 some-what 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 rain-fall.
For they believe that the
clouds are bodies in which rain is generated by their own cere-monies
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 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 feath-ers
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
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Page 56?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 repre-sents
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, vil-lage
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 them-selves
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, especial-ly
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 restrictions 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 weath-er;
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 plentiful.” 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 dis-eases
by swinging a large wooden
rattle. The Nootka Indians of British Columbia 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 washing them, which may repre-sent
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 September and
October have been looked for in vain, when a drought with its
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Page 57?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.
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 differ-ent
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 gar-ments
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 signif-icance;
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 rain-charm 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 antiqui-ty,
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
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Page 58?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 con-sents
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: “Grandfather 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 rice-field, 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 produc-ing
it. The Indian sage is
commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly as well as on vari-ous
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 pro-duce.
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 mak-ing
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:
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 59?“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 dis-guised
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
house-holder or his wife
sprinkles the Rain King with water, and gives the party food of vari-ous
kinds. When they have thus
visited all the houses, they strip the Rain King of his leafy
robes and feast upon what they
have gathered.
Bathing is practised as a
rain-charm in some parts of Southern and Western Russia.
Sometimes after service in church
the priest in his robes has been thrown down on the
ground and drenched with water
by his parishioners. Sometimes it is the women who, without
stripping off their clothes,
bathe in crowds on the day of St. John the Baptist, while they dip in
the water a figure made of
branches, grass, and herbs, which is supposed to represent the
saint. In Kursk, a province of
Southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the women seize a
passing stranger and throw him
into the river, or souse him from head to foot. Later on we
shall see that a passing
stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some natu-ral
power. It is recorded in
official documents that during a drought in 1790 the peasants of
Scheroutz and Werboutz
collected all the women and compelled them to bathe, in order that
rain might fall. An Armenian
rain-charm is to throw the wife of a priest into the water and
drench her. The Arabs of North
Africa fling a holy man, willy-nilly, into a spring as a remedy
for drought. In Minahassa, a
province of North Celebes, the priest bathes as a rain-charm. In
Central Celebes when there has
been no rain for a long time and the rice-stalks begin to
shrivel up, many of the
villagers, especially the young folk, go to a neighbouring brook and
splash each other with water,
shouting noisily, or squirt water on one another through bamboo
tubes. Sometimes they imitate
the plump of rain by smacking the surface of the water with
their hands, or by placing an
inverted gourd on it and drumming on the gourd with their fin-
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Page
60?gers.
Women are sometimes supposed
to be able to make rain by ploughing, or pretending to
plough. Thus the Pshaws and
Chewsurs of the Caucasus have a ceremony called “ploughing
the rain,” which they observe
in time of drought. Girls yoke themselves to a plough and drag it
into a river, wading in the
water up to their girdles. In the same circumstances Armenian girls
and women do the same. The
oldest woman, or the priest’s wife, wears the priest’s dress,
while the others, dressed as
men, drag the plough through the water against the stream. In
the Caucasian province of
Georgia, when a drought has lasted long, marriageable girls are
yoked in couples with an
ox-yoke on their shoulders, a priest holds the reins, and thus har-nessed
they wade through rivers,
puddles, and marshes, praying, screaming, weeping, and
laughing. In a district of
Transylvania when the ground is parched with drought, some girls
strip themselves naked, and,
led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow
and carry it across the fields
to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow
and keep a tiny flame burning
on each corner of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in
the water and go home. A
similar rain-charm is resorted to in some parts of India; naked
women drag a plough across a
field by night, while the men keep carefully out of the way, for
their presence would break the
spell.
Sometimes the rain-charm
operates through the dead. Thus in New Caledonia the rain-mak-ers
blackened themselves all over,
dug up a dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed
them, and hung the skeleton
over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton to
run down on the leaves. They
believed that the soul of the deceased took up the water, con-verted
it into rain, and showered it
down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed,
it is not long since the
peasants of any district that chanced to be afflicted with drought used
to dig up the corpse of some
one who had drunk himself to death and sink it in the nearest
swamp or lake, fully persuaded
that this would ensure the fall of the needed rain. In 1868 the
prospect of a bad harvest,
caused by a prolonged drought, induced the inhabitants of a vil-lage
in the Tarashchansk district
to dig up the body of a Raskolnik, or Dissenter, who had
died in the preceding
December. Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was left of it,
about the head, exclaiming,
“Give us rain!” while others poured water on it through a sieve.
Here the pouring of water
through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and
reminds us of the manner in
which Strepsiades in Aristophanes imagined that rain was made
by Zeus. Sometimes, in order
to procure rain, the Toradjas make an appeal to the pity of the
dead. Thus, in the village of
Kalingooa, there is the grave of a famous chief, the grandfather
of the present ruler. When the
land suffers from unseasonable drought, the people go to this
grave, pour water on it, and
say, “O grandfather, have pity on us; if it is your will that this year
we should eat, then give
rain.” After that they hang a bamboo full of water over the grave;
there is a small hole in the
lower end of the bamboo, so that the water drips from it continual-ly.
The bamboo is always refilled
with water until rain drenches the ground. Here, as in New
Caledonia, we find religion
blent with magic, for the prayer to the dead chief, which is purely
religious, is eked out with a
magical imitation of rain at his grave. We have seen that the
Baronga of Delagoa Bay drench
the tombs of their ancestors, especially the tombs of twins,
as a raincharm. Among some of
the Indian tribes in the region of the Orinoco it was custom-ary
for the relations of a
deceased person to disinter his bones a year after burial, burn them,
and scatter the ashes to the
winds, because they believed that the ashes were changed into
rain, which the dead man sent
in return for his obsequies. The Chinese are convinced that
when human bodies remain unburied,
the souls of their late owners feel the discomfort of
rain, just as living men would
do if they were exposed without shelter to the inclemency of the
weather. These wretched souls,
therefore, do all in their power to prevent the rain from falling,
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Page 61?and often their efforts are only too successful. Then drought ensues,
the most dreaded of all
calamities in China, because
bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in its train. Hence it has
been a common practice of the
Chinese authorities in time of drought to inter the dry bones of
the unburied dead for the
purpose of putting an end to the scourge and conjuring down the
rain.
Animals, again, often play an
important part in these weather-charms. The Anula tribe of
Northern Australia associate
the dollar-bird with rain, and call it the rain-bird. A man who has
the bird for his totem can
make rain at a certain pool. He catches a snake, puts it alive into
the pool, and after holding it
under water for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the
side of the creek. Then he
makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in imitation of a rainbow,
and sets it up over the snake.
After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic
rainbow; sooner or later the
rain will fall. They explain this procedure by saying that long ago
the dollar-bird had as a mate
at this spot a snake, who lived in the pool and used to make
rain by spitting up into the
sky till a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell. A common
way of making rain in many
parts of Java is to bathe a cat or two cats, a male and a female;
sometimes the animals are
carried in procession with music. Even in Batavia you may from
time to time see children
going about with a cat for this purpose; when they have ducked it in
a pool, they let it go.
Among the Wambugwe of East
Africa, when the sorcerer desires to make rain, he takes a
black sheep and a black calf
in bright sunshine, and has them placed on the roof of the com-mon
hut in which the people live
together. Then he slits the stomachs of the animals and
scatters their contents in all
directions. After that he pours water and medicine into a vessel; if
the charm has succeeded, the
water boils up and rain follows. On the other hand, if the sor-cerer
wishes to prevent rain from
falling, he withdraws into the interior of the hut, and there
heats a rock-crystal in a
calabash. In order to procure rain the Wagogo sacrifice black fowls,
black sheep, and black cattle
at the graves of dead ancestors, and the rain-maker wears
black clothes during the rainy
season. Among the Matabele the rain-charm employed by sor-cerers
was made from the blood and
gall of a black ox. In a district of Sumatra, in order to
procure rain, all the women of
the village, scantily clad, go to the river, wade into it, and
splash each other with the
water. A black cat is thrown into the stream and made to swim
about for a while, then
allowed to escape to the bank, pursued by the splashing of the
women. The Garos of Assam
offer a black goat on the top of a very high mountain in time of
drought. In all these cases
the colour of the animal is part of the charm; being black, it will
darken the sky with
rain-clouds. So the Bechuanas burn the stomach of an ox at evening,
because they say, “The black
smoke will gather the clouds and cause the rain to come.” The
Timorese sacrifice a black pig
to the Earth-goddess for rain, a white or red one to the Sun-god
for sunshine. The Angoni
sacrifice a black ox for rain and a white one for fine weather.
Among the high mountains of
Japan there is a district in which, if rain has not fallen for a long
time, a party of villagers
goes in procession to the bed of a mountain torrent, headed by a
priest, who leads a black dog.
At the chosen spot they tether the beast to a stone, and make
it a target for their bullets
and arrows. When its life-blood bespatters the rocks, the peasants
throw down their weapons and
lift up their voices in supplication to the dragon divinity of the
stream, exhorting him to send
down forthwith a shower to cleanse the spot from its defile-ment.
Custom has prescribed that on
these occasions the colour of the victim shall be black,
as an emblem of the wished-for
rain-clouds. But if fine weather is wanted, the victim must be
white, without a spot.
The intimate association of
frogs and toads with water has earned for these creatures a wide-
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62?spread reputation as
custodians of rain; and hence they often play a part in charms designed
to draw needed showers from
the sky. Some of the Indians of the Orinoco held the toad to be
the god or lord of the waters,
and for that reason feared to kill the creature. They have been
known to keep frogs under a
pot and to beat them with rods when there was a drought. It is
said that the Aymara Indians
often make little images of frogs and other aquatic animals and
place them on the tops of the
hills as a means of bringing down rain. The Thompson Indians
of British Columbia and some
people in Europe think that to kill a frog will cause rain to fall. In
order to procure rain people
of low caste in the Central Provinces of India will tie a frog to a
rod covered with green leaves
and branches of the nîm tree (Azadirachta Indica) and carry it
from door to door singing:
“Send soon, O frog, the jewel
of water!
And ripen the wheat and millet
in the field.”
The Kapus or Reddis are a
large caste of cultivators and landowners in the Madras
Presidency. When rain fails,
women of the caste will catch a frog and tie it alive to a new win-nowing
fan made of bamboo. On this
fan they spread a few margosa leaves and go from
door to door singing, “Lady
frog must have her bath. Oh! rain-god, give a little water for her at
least.” While the Kapu women
sing this song, the woman of the house pours water over the
frog and gives an alms,
convinced that by so doing she will soon bring rain down in torrents.
Sometimes, when a drought has
lasted a long time, people drop the usual hocus-pocus of
imitative magic altogether,
and being far too angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek
by threats and curses or even
downright physical force to extort the waters of heaven from
the supernatural being who
has, so to say, cut them off at the main. In a Japanese village,
when the guardian divinity had
long been deaf to the peasants’ prayers for rain, they at last
threw down his image and, with
curses loud and long, hurled it head foremost into a stinking
rice-field. “There,” they
said, “you may stay yourself for a while, to see how you will feel after
a few days’ scorching in this
broiling sun that is burning the life from our cracking fields.” In
the like circumstances the
Feloupes of Senegambia cast down their fetishes and drag them
about the fields, cursing them
till rain falls.
The Chinese are adepts in the
art of taking the kingdom of heaven by storm. Thus, when rain
is wanted they make a huge
dragon of paper or wood to represent the rain-god, and carry it
about in procession; but if no
rain follows, the mock-dragon is execrated and torn to pieces.
At other times they threaten
and beat the god if he does not give rain; sometimes they pub-licly
depose him from the rank of
deity. On the other hand, if the wished-for rain falls, the god
is promoted to a higher rank
by an imperial decree. In April 1888 the mandarins of Canton
prayed to the god Lung-wong to
stop the incessant downpour of rain; and when he turned a
deaf ear to their petitions
they put him in a lock-up for five days. This had a salutary effect.
The rain ceased and the god
was restored to liberty. Some years before, in time of drought,
the same deity had been
chained and exposed to the sun for days in the courtyard of his
temple in order that he might
feel for himself the urgent need of rain. So when the Siamese
need rain, they set out their
idols in the blazing sun; but if they want dry weather, they unroof
the temples and let the rain
pour down on the idols. They think that the inconvenience to
which the gods are thus
subjected will induce them to grant the wishes of their worshippers.
The reader may smile at the
meteorology of the Far East; but precisely similar modes of
procuring rain have been
resorted to in Christian Europe within our own lifetime. By the end
of April 1893 there was great
distress in Sicily for lack of water. The drought had lasted six
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Page 63?months. Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of cloudless blue. The
gardens of the Conca
d’Oro, which surround Palermo
with a magnificent belt of verdure, were withering. Food was
becoming scarce. The people
were in great alarm. All the most approved methods of procur-ing
rain had been tried without
effect. Processions had traversed the streets and the fields.
Men, women, and children,
telling their beads, had lain whole nights before the holy images.
Consecrated candles had burned
day and night in the churches. Palm branches, blessed on
Palm Sunday, had been hung on
the trees. At Solaparuta, in accordance with a very old cus-tom,
the dust swept from the
churches on Palm Sunday had been spread on the fields. In
ordinary years these holy
sweepings preserve the crops; but that year, if you will believe me,
they had no effect whatever.
At Nicosia the inhabitants, bare-headed and bare-foot, carried
the crucifixes through all the
wards of the town and scourged each other with iron whips. It
was all in vain. Even the
great St. Francis of Paolo himself, who annually performs the mira-cle
of rain and is carried every
spring through the market-gardens, either could not or would
not help. Masses, vespers,
concerts, illuminations, fire-works—nothing could move him. At
last the peasants began to
lose patience. Most of the saints were banished. At Palermo they
dumped St. Joseph in a garden
to see the state of things for himself, and they swore to leave
him there in the sun till rain
fell. Other saints were turned, like naughty children, with their
faces to the wall. Others
again, stripped of their beautiful robes, were exiled far from their
parishes, threatened, grossly
insulted, ducked in horse-ponds. At Caltanisetta the golden
wings of St. Michael the
Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with wings of
pasteboard; his purple mantle
was taken away and a clout wrapt about him instead. At Licata
the patron saint, St. Angelo,
fared even worse, for he was left without any garments at all; he
was reviled, he was put in
irons, he was threatened with drowning or hanging. “Rain or the
rope!” roared the angry people
at him, as they shook their fists in his face.
Sometimes an appeal is made to
the pity of the gods. When their corn is being burnt up by
the sun, the Zulus look out
for a “heaven bird,” kill it, and throw it into a pool. Then the heav-en
melts with tenderness for the
death of the bird; “it wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral
wail.” In Zululand women
sometimes bury their children up to the neck in the ground, and
then retiring to a distance
keep up a dismal howl for a long time. The sky is supposed to melt
with pity at the sight. Then
the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain will soon fol-low.
They say that they call to
“the lord above” and ask him to send rain. If it comes they
declare that “Usondo rains.”
In times of drought the Guanches of Teneriffe led their sheep to
sacred ground, and there they
separated the lambs from their dams, that their plaintive bleat-ing
might touch the heart of the
god. In Kumaon a way of stopping rain is to pour hot oil in the
left ear of a dog. The animal
howls with pain, his howls are heard by Indra, and out of pity for
the beast’s sufferings the god
stops the rain. Sometimes the Toradjas attempt to procure rain
as follows. They place the
stalks of certain plants in water, saying, “Go and ask for rain, and
so long as no rain falls I
will not plant you again, but there shall you die.” Also they string
some fresh-water snails on a
cord, and hang the cord on a tree, and say to the snails, “Go
and ask for rain, and so long
as no rain comes, I will not take you back to the water.” Then
the snails go and weep, and
the gods take pity and send rain. However, the foregoing cere-monies
are religious rather than
magical, since they involve an appeal to the compassion of
higher powers.
Stones are often supposed to
possess the property of bringing on rain, provided they be
dipped in water or sprinkled
with it, or treated in some other appropriate manner. In a
Samoan village a certain stone
was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-making
god, and in time of drought
his priests carried the stone in procession and dipped it in a
stream. Among the Ta-ta-thi
tribe of New South Wales, the rain-maker breaks off a piece of
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Page 64?quartz-crystal and spits it towards the sky; the rest of the crystal he
wraps in emu feathers,
soaks both crystal and
feathers in water, and carefully hides them. In the Keramin tribe of
New South Wales the wizard
retires to the bed of a creek, drops water on a round flat stone,
then covers up and conceals
it. Among some tribes of North-western Australia the rain-maker
repairs to a piece of ground
which is set apart for the purpose of rain-making. There he builds
a heap of stones or sand,
places on the top of it his magic stone, and walks or dances round
the pile chanting his
incantations for hours, till sheer exhaustion obliges him to desist, when
his place is taken by his
assistant. Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are kindled.
No layman may approach the
sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being performed.
When the Sulka of New Britain
wish to procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of
certain fruits and set them
out, along with certain other plants and buds, in the sun. Then a
handful of twigs is dipped in
water and weighted with stones, while a spell is chanted. After
that rain should follow. In
Manipur, on a lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a stone
which the popular imagination
likens to an umbrella. When rain is wanted, the rajah fetches
water from a spring below and
sprinkles it on the stone. At Sagami in Japan there is a stone
which draws down rain whenever
water is poured on it. When the Wakondyo, a tribe of
Central Africa, desire rain,
they send to the Wawamba, who dwell at the foot of snowy moun-tains,
and are the happy possessors
of a “rain-stone.” In consideration of a proper payment,
the Wawamba wash the precious
stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of water. After
that the rain cannot fail to
come. In the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches
sought to make rain by carrying
water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular
point high up on a rock; after
that they imagined that the clouds would soon gather, and that
rain would begin to fall.
But customs of this sort are
not confined to the wilds of Africa and Asia or the torrid deserts of
Australia and the New World.
They have been practised in the cool air and under the grey
skies of Europe. There is a
fountain called Barenton, of romantic fame, in those “wild woods
of Broceliande,” where, if
legend be true, the wizard Merlin still sleeps his magic slumber in
the hawthorn shade. Thither
the Breton peasants used to resort when they needed rain. They
caught some of the water in a
tankard and threw it on a slab near the spring. On Snowdon
there is a lonely tarn called
Dulyn, or the Black Lake, lying “in a dismal dingle surrounded by
high and dangerous rocks.” A
row of stepping-stones runs out into the lake, and if any one
steps on the stones and throws
water so as to wet the farthest stone, which is called the Red
Altar, “it is but a chance
that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weather.” In
these cases it appears
probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded as more or less
divine. This appears from the
custom sometimes observed of dipping a cross in the Fountain
of Barenton to procure rain,
for this is plainly a Christian substitute for the old pagan way of
throwing water on the stone.
At various places in France it is, or used till lately to be, the
practice to dip the image of a
saint in water as a means of procuring rain. Thus, beside the
old priory of Commagny, there
is a spring of St. Gervais, whither the inhabitants go in proces-sion
to obtain rain or fine weather
according to the needs of the crops. In times of great
drought they throw into the
basin of the fountain an ancient stone image of the saint that
stands in a sort of niche from
which the fountain flows. At Collobrières and Carpentras a simi-lar
practice was observed with the
images of St. Pons and St. Gens respectively. In several
villages of Navarre prayers
for rain used to be offered to St. Peter, and by way of enforcing
them the villagers carried the
image of the saint in procession to the river, where they thrice
invited him to reconsider his
resolution and to grant their prayers; then, if he was still obsti-nate,
they plunged him in the water,
despite the remonstrances of the clergy, who pleaded
with as much truth as piety
that a simple caution or admonition administered to the image
would produce an equally good
effect. After this the rain was sure to fall within twenty-four
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Page 65?hours. Catholic countries do not enjoy a monopoly of making rain by
ducking holy images in
water. In Mingrelia, when the
crops are suffering from want of rain, they take a particularly
holy image and dip it in water
every day till a shower falls; and in the Far East the Shans
drench the images of Buddha
with water when the rice is perishing of drought. In all such
cases the practice is probably
at bottom a sympathetic charm, however it may be disguised
under the appearance of a
punishment or a threat.
Like other peoples, the Greeks
and Romans sought to obtain rain by magic, when prayers
and processions had proved
ineffectual. For example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees
were parched with drought, the
priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain spring on
Mount Lycaeus. Thus troubled,
the water sent up a misty cloud, from which rain soon fell
upon the land. A similar mode
of making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera
near New Guinea. The people of
Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze chariot which they kept
in a temple. When they desired
a shower they shook the chariot and the shower fell. Probably
the rattling of the chariot was
meant to imitate thunder; we have already seen that mock thun-der
and lightning form part of a
rain-charm in Russia and Japan. The legendary Salmoneus,
King of Elis, made mock
thunder by dragging bronze kettles behind his chariot, or by driving
over a bronze bridge, while he
hurled blazing torches in imitation of lightning. It was his impi-ous
wish to mimic the thundering
car of Zeus as it rolled across the vault of heaven. Indeed
he declared that he was
actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to himself as such.
Near a temple of Mars, outside
the walls of Rome, there was kept a certain stone known as
the lapis manalis. In time of
drought the stone was dragged into Rome, and this was sup-posed
to bring down rain
immediately.
3. THE MAGICAL CONTROL OF THE
SUN
As the magician thinks he can
make rain, so he fancies he can cause the sun to shine, and
can hasten or stay its going
down. At an eclipse the Ojebways used to imagine that the sun
was being extinguished. So
they shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping thus to rekindle his
expiring light. The Sencis of
Peru also shot burning arrows at the sun during an eclipse, but
apparently they did this not
so much to relight his lamp as to drive away a savage beast with
which they supposed him to be
struggling. Conversely during an eclipse of the moon some
tribes of the Orinoco used to
bury lighted brands in the ground; because, said they, if the
moon were to be extinguished,
all fire on earth would be extinguished with her, except such
as was hidden from her sight.
During an eclipse of the sun the Kamtchatkans were wont to
bring out fire from their huts
and pray the great luminary to shine as before. But the prayer
addressed to the sun shows
that this ceremony was religious rather than magical. Purely
magical, on the other hand,
was the ceremony observed on similar occasions by the Chilcotin
Indians. Men and women tucked
up their robes, as they do in travelling, and then leaning on
staves, as if they were heavy
laden, they continued to walk in a circle till the eclipse was over.
Apparently they thought thus
to support the failing steps of the sun as he trod his weary
round in the sky. Similarly in
ancient Egypt the king, as the representative of the sun, walked
solemnly round the walls of a
temple in order to ensure that the sun should perform his daily
journey round the sky without
the interruption of an eclipse or other mishap. And after the
autumnal equinox the ancient
Egyptians held a festival called “the nativity of the sun’s walk-ing-
stick,” because, as the
luminary declined daily in the sky, and his light and heat dimin-ished,
he was supposed to need a
staff on which to lean. In New Caledonia when a wizard
desires to make sunshine, he
takes some plants and corals to the burial-ground, and fashions
them into a bundle, adding two
locks of hair cut from a living child of his family, also two teeth
or an entire jawbone from the
skeleton of an ancestor. He then climbs a mountain whose top
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Page 66?catches the first rays of the morning sun. Here he deposits three sorts
of plants on a flat
stone, places a branch of dry
coral beside them, and hangs the bundle of charms over the
stone. Next morning he returns
to the spot and sets fire to the bundle at the moment when
the sun rises from the sea. As
the smoke curls up, he rubs the stone with the dry coral,
invokes his ancestors and
says: “Sun! I do this that you may be burning hot, and eat up all
the clouds in the sky.” The
same ceremony is repeated at sunset. The New Caledonians also
make a drought by means of a
disc-shaped stone with a hole in it. At the moment when the
sun rises, the wizard holds
the stone in his hand and passes a burning brand repeatedly into
the hole, while he says: “I
kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up
our land, so that it may
produce nothing.” The Banks Islanders make sunshine by means of a
mock sun. They take a very
round stone, called a vat loa or sunstone, wind red braid about it,
and stick it with owls’
feathers to represent rays, singing the proper spell in a low voice. Then
they hang it on some high
tree, such as a banyan or a casuarina, in a sacred place.
The offering made by the
Brahman in the morning is supposed to produce the sun, and we
are told that “assuredly it
would not rise, were he not to make that offering.” The ancient
Mexicans conceived the sun as
the source of all vital force; hence they named him
Ipalnemohuani, “He by whom men
live.” But if he bestowed life on the world, he needed also
to receive life from it. And
as the heart is the seat and symbol of life, bleeding hearts of men
and animals were presented to
the sun to maintain him in vigour and enable him to run his
course across the sky. Thus
the Mexican sacrifices to the sun were magical rather than reli-gious,
being designed, not so much to
please and propitiate him, as physically to renew his
energies of heat, light, and
motion. The constant demand for human victims to feed the solar
fire was met by waging war
every year on the neighbouring tribes and bringing back troops of
captives to be sacrificed on
the altar. Thus the ceaseless wars of the Mexicans and their cruel
system of human sacrifices,
the most monstrous on record, sprang in great measure from a
mistaken theory of the solar
system. No more striking illustration could be given of the disas-trous
consequences that may flow in
practice from a purely speculative error. The ancient
Greeks believed that the sun
drove in a chariot across the sky; hence the Rhodians, who
worshipped the sun as their
chief deity, annually dedicated a chariot and four horses to him,
and flung them into the sea
for his use. Doubtless they thought that after a year’s work his old
horses and chariot would be
worn out. From a like motive, probably, the idolatrous kings of
Judah dedicated chariots and
horses to the sun, and the Spartans, Persians, and
Massagetae sacrificed horses
to him. The Spartans performed the sacrifice on the top of
Mount Taygetus, the beautiful
range behind which they saw the great luminary set every
night. It was as natural for
the inhabitants of the valley of Sparta to do this as it was for the
islanders of Rhodes to throw
the chariot and horses into the sea, into which the sun seemed
to them to sink at evening.
For thus, whether on the mountain or in the sea, the fresh horses
stood ready for the weary god
where they would be most welcome, at the end of his day’s
journey.
As some people think they can
light up the sun or speed him on his way, so others fancy they
can retard or stop him. In a
pass of the Peruvian Andes stand two ruined towers on opposite
hills. Iron hooks are clamped
into their walls for the purpose of stretching a net from one
tower to the other. The net is
intended to catch the sun. Stories of men who have caught the
sun in a noose are widely
spread. When the sun is going southward in the autumn, and sink-ing
lower and lower in the Arctic
sky, the Esquimaux of Iglulik play the game of cat’s cradle in
order to catch him in the
meshes of the string and so prevent his disappearance. On the con-trary,
when the sun is moving
northward in the spring, they play the game of cup-and-ball to
hasten his return. When an
Australian blackfellow wishes to stay the sun from going down till
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Page 67?he gets home, he puts a sod in the fork of a tree, exactly facing the
setting sun. On the other
hand, to make it go down
faster, the Australians throw sand into the air and blow with their
mouths towards the sun,
perhaps to waft the lingering orb westward and bury it under the
sands into which it appears to
sink at night.
As some people imagine they
can hasten the sun, so others fancy they can jog the tardy
moon. The natives of New
Guinea reckon months by the moon, and some of them have been
known to throw stones and
spears at the moon, in order to accelerate its progress and so to
hasten the return of their
friends, who were away from home for twelve months working on a
tobacco plantation. The Malays
think that a bright glow at sunset may throw a weak person
into a fever. Hence they
attempt to extinguish the glow by spitting out water and throwing
ashes at it. The Shuswap
Indians believe that they can bring on cold weather by burning the
wood of a tree that has been
struck by lightning. The belief may be based on the observation
that in their country cold
follows a thunder-storm. Hence in spring, when these Indians are
travelling over the snow on
high ground, they burn splinters of such wood in the fire in order
that the crust of the snow may
not melt.
4. THE MAGICAL CONTROL OF THE
WIND
Once more, the savage thinks
he can make the wind to blow or to be still. When the day is
hot and a Yakut has a long way
to go, he takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an
animal or fish, winds a
horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick. He then waves
the stick about, uttering a
spell. Soon a cool breeze begins to blow. In order to procure a cool
wind for nine days the stone
should first be dipped in the blood of a bird or beast and then
presented to the sun, while
the sorcerer makes three turns contrary to the course of the lumi-nary.
If a Hottentot desires the
wind to drop, he takes one of his fattest skins and hangs it on
the end of a pole, in the
belief that by blowing the skin down the wind will lose all its force and
must itself fall. Fuegian
wizards throw shells against the wind to make it drop. The natives of
the island of Bibili, off New
Guinea, are reputed to make wind by blowing with their mouths. In
stormy weather the Bogadjim people
say, “The Bibili folk are at it again, blowing away.”
Another way of making wind
which is practised in New Guinea is to strike a “wind-stone” light-ly
with a stick; to strike it
hard would bring on a hurricane. So in Scotland witches used to
raise the wind by dipping a
rag in water and beating it thrice on a stone, saying:
“I knok this rag upone this
stane
To raise the wind in the
divellis name,
It sall not lye till I please
againe.”
In Greenland a woman in
child-bed and for some time after delivery is supposed to possess
the power of laying a storm.
She has only to go out of doors, fill her mouth with air, and com-ing
back into the house blow it
out again. In antiquity there was a family at Corinth which
enjoyed the reputation of
being able to still the raging wind; but we do not know in what man-ner
its members exercised a useful
function, which probably earned for them a more solid
recompense than mere repute
among the seafaring population of the isthmus. Even in
Christian times, under the
reign of Constantine, a certain Sopater suffered death at
Constantinople on a charge of
binding the winds by magic, because it happened that the
corn-ships of Egypt and Syria
were detained afar off by calms or head-winds, to the rage and
disappointment of the hungry
Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used to sell wind to storm-stayed
mariners. The wind was
enclosed in three knots; if they undid the first knot, a moder-ate
wind sprang up; if the second,
it blew half a gale; if the third, a hurricane. Indeed the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 68?Esthonians, whose country is divided from Finland only by an arm of the
sea, still believe in
the magical powers of their
northern neighbours. The bitter winds that blow in spring from the
north and north-east, bringing
ague and rheumatic inflammations in their train, are set down
by the simple Esthonian
peasantry to the machinations of the Finnish wizards and witches. In
particular they regard with
special dread three days in spring to which they give the name of
Days of the Cross; one of them
falls on the Eve of Ascension Day. The people in the neigh-bourhood
of Fellin fear to go out on
these days lest the cruel winds from Lappland should
smite them dead. A popular
Esthonian song runs:
Wind of the Cross! rushing and
mighty!
Heavy the blow of thy wings
sweeping past!
Wild wailing wind of
misfortune and sorrow,
Wizards of Finland ride by on
the blast.
It is said, too, that sailors,
beating up against the wind in the Gulf of Finland, sometimes see
a strange sail heave in sight
astern and overhaul them hand over hand. On she comes with a
cloud of canvas—all her
studding—sails out—right in the teeth of the wind, forging her way
through the foaming billows,
dashing back the spray in sheets from her cutwater, every sail
swollen to bursting, every
rope strained to cracking. Then the sailors know that she hails from
Finland.
The art of tying up the wind
in three knots, so that the more knots are loosed the stronger will
blow the wind, has been
attributed to wizards in Lappland and to witches in Shetland, Lewis,
and the Isle of Man. Shetland
seamen still buy winds in the shape of knotted handkerchiefs or
threads from old women who
claim to rule the storms. There are said to be ancient crones in
Lerwick now who live by
selling wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leathern bag from
Aeolus, King of the Winds. The
Motumotu in New Guinea think that storms are sent by an
Oiabu sorcerer; for each wind
he has a bamboo which he opens at pleasure. On the top of
Mount Agu in Togo, a district
of West Africa, resides a fetish called Bagba, who is supposed
to control the wind and the
rain. His priest is said to keep the winds shut up in great pots.
Often the stormy wind is
regarded as an evil being who may be intimidated, driven away, or
killed. When storms and bad
weather have lasted long and food is scarce with the Central
Esquimaux, they endeavour to
conjure the tempest by making a long whip of seaweed,
armed with which they go down
to the beach and strike out in the direction of the wind, crying
“Taba (it is enough)!” Once
when north-westerly winds had kept the ice long on the coast and
food was becoming scarce, the
Esquimaux performed a ceremony to make a calm. A fire was
kindled on the shore, and the
men gathered round it and chanted. An old man then stepped
up to the fire and in a
coaxing voice invited the demon of the wind to come under the fire and
warm himself. When he was
supposed to have arrived, a vessel of water, to which each man
present had contributed, was
thrown on the flames by an old man, and immediately a flight of
arrows sped towards the spot
where the fire had been. They thought that the demon would
not stay where he had been so
badly treated. To complete the effect, guns were discharged
in various directions, and the
captain of a European vessel was invited to fire on the wind with
cannon. On the twenty-first of
February 1883 a similar ceremony was performed by the
Esquimaux of Point Barrow,
Alaska, with the intention of killing the spirit of the wind. Women
drove the demon from their
houses with clubs and knives, with which they made passes in
the air; and the men,
gathering round a fire, shot him with their rifles and crushed him under a
heavy stone the moment that
steam rose in a cloud from the smouldering embers, on which a
tub of water had just been
thrown.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 69?The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco ascribe the rush of a whirl-wind
to the passage of a
spirit and they fling sticks
at it to frighten it away. When the wind blows down their huts, the
Payaguas of South America
snatch up firebrands and run against the wind, menacing it with
the blazing brands, while
others beat the air with their fists to frighten the storm. When the
Guaycurus are threatened by a
severe storm, the men go out armed, and the women and
children scream their loudest
to intimidate the demon. During a tempest the inhabitants of a
Batak village in Sumatra have
been seen to rush from their houses armed with sword and
lance. The rajah placed
himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they hewed and
hacked at the invisible foe.
An old woman was observed to be specially active in the defence
of her house, slashing the air
right and left with a long sabre. In a violent thunderstorm, the
peals sounding very near, the
Kayans of Borneo have been seen to draw their swords threat-eningly
half out of their scabbards,
as if to frighten away the demons of the storm. In Australia
the huge columns of red sand
that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by the
natives to be spirits passing
along. Once an athletic young black ran after one of these mov-ing
columns to kill it with
boomerangs. He was away two or three hours, and came back very
weary, saying he had killed
Koochee (the demon), but that Koochee had growled at him and
he must die. Of the Bedouins
of Eastern Africa it is said that “no whirl-wind ever sweeps
across the path without being
pursued by a dozen savages with drawn creeses, who stab into
the centre of the dusty column
in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding
on the blast.”
In the light of these examples
a story told by Herodotus, which his modern critics have treat-ed
as a fable, is perfectly
credible. He says, without however vouching for the truth of the
tale, that once in the land of
the Psylli, the modern Tripoli, the wind blowing from the Sahara
had dried up all the
water-tanks. So the people took counsel and marched in a body to make
war on the south wind. But
when they entered the desert the simoon swept down on them
and buried them to a man. The
story may well have been told by one who watched them dis-appearing,
in battle array, with drums
and cymbals beating, into the red cloud of whirling
sand.
Chapter VI
Magicians as Kings
THE foregoing evidence may
satisfy us that in many lands and many races magic has
claimed to control the great
forces of nature for the good of man. If that has been so, the
practitioners of the art must
necessarily be personages of importance and influence in any
society which puts faith in
their extravagant pretensions, and it would be no matter for sur-prise
if, by virtue of the
reputation which they enjoy and of the awe which they inspire, some
of them should attain to the
highest position of authority over their credulous fellows. In point
of fact magicians appear to
have often developed into chiefs and kings.
Let us begin by looking at the
lowest race of men as to whom we possess comparatively full
and accurate information, the
aborigines of Australia. These savages are ruled neither by
chiefs nor kings. So far as
their tribes can be said to have a political constitution, it is a
democracy or rather an
oligarchy of old and influential men, who meet in council and decide
on all measures of importance
to the practical exclusion of the younger men. Their delibera-tive
assembly answers to the senate
of later times: if we had to coin a word for such a gov-ernment
of elders we might call it a
gerontocracy. The elders who in aboriginal Australia thus
meet and direct the affairs of
their tribe appear to be for the most part the headmen of their
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 70?respective totem clans. Now in Central Australia, where the desert
nature of the country and
the almost complete isolation
from foreign influences have retarded progress and preserved
the natives on the whole in
their most primitive state, the headmen of the various totem clans
are charged with the important
task of performing magical ceremonies for the multiplication of
the totems, and as the great
majority of the totems are edible animals or plants, it follows that
these men are commonly
expected to provide the people with food by means of magic.
Others have to make the rain
to fall or to render other services to the community. In short,
among the tribes of Central
Australia the headmen are public magicians. Further, their most
important function is to take
charge of the sacred storehouse, usually a cleft in the rocks or a
hole in the ground, where are
kept the holy stones and sticks (churinga) with which the souls
of all the people, both living
and dead, are apparently supposed to be in a manner bound up.
Thus while the headmen have
certainly to perform what we should call civil duties, such as to
inflict punishment for breaches
of tribal custom, their principal functions are sacred or magi-cal.
When we pass from Australia to
New Guinea we find that, though the natives stand at a far
higher level of culture than
the Australian aborigines, the constitution of society among them
is still essentially
democratic or oligarchic, and chieftainship exists only in embryo. Thus Sir
William MacGregor tells us
that in British New Guinea no one has ever arisen wise enough,
bold enough, and strong enough
to become the despot even of a single district. “The nearest
approach to this has been the
very distant one of some person becoming a renowned wizard;
but that has only resulted in
levying a certain amount of blackmail.”
According to a native account,
the origin of the power of Melanesian chiefs lies entirely in the
belief that they have
communication with mighty ghosts, and wield that supernatural power
whereby they can bring the
influence of the ghosts to bear. If a chief imposed a fine, it was
paid because the people
universally dreaded his ghostly power, and firmly believed that he
could inflict calamity and
sickness upon such as resisted him. As soon as any considerable
number of his people began to
disbelieve in his influence with the ghosts, his power to levy
fines was shaken. Again, Dr.
George Brown tells us that in New Britain “a ruling chief was
always supposed to exercise
priestly functions, that is, he professed to be in constant com-munication
with the tebarans (spirits),
and through their influence he was enabled to bring
rain or sunshine, fair winds
or foul ones, sickness or health, success or disaster in war, and
generally to procure any
blessing or curse for which the applicant was willing to pay a suffi-cient
price.”
Still rising in the scale of
culture we come to Africa, where both the chieftainship and the king-ship
are fully developed; and here
the evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the magi-cian,
and especially out of the
rain-maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus among the
Wambugwe, a Bantu people of
East Africa, the original form of government was a family
republic, but the enormous
power of the sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised
them to the rank of petty
lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living in the country in 1894 two
were much dreaded as
magicians, and the wealth of cattle they possessed came to them
almost wholly in the shape of
presents bestowed for their services in that capacity. Their prin-cipal
art was that of rain-making.
The chiefs of the Wataturu, another people of East Africa,
are said to be nothing but
sorcerers destitute of any direct political influence. Again, among
the Wagogo of East Africa the
main power of the chiefs, we are told, is derived from their art
of rain-making. If a chief
cannot make rain himself, he must procure it from some one who
can.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 71?Again, among the tribes of the Upper Nile the medicine-men are
generally the chiefs. Their
authority rests above all upon
their supposed power of making rain, for “rain is the one thing
which matters to the people in
those districts, as if it does not come down at the right time it
means untold hardships for the
community. It is therefore small wonder that men more cun-ning
than their fellows should
arrogate to themselves the power of producing it, or that having
gained such a reputation, they
should trade on the credulity of their simpler neighbours.”
Hence “most of the chiefs of
these tribes are rain-makers, and enjoy a popularity in proportion
to their powers to give rain
to their people at the proper season.... Rain-making chiefs always
build their villages on the
slopes of a fairly high hill, as they no doubt know that the hills
attract the clouds, and that
they are, therefore, fairly safe in their weather forecasts.” Each of
these rain-makers has a number
of rain-stones, such as rock-crystal, aventurine, and
amethyst, which he keeps in a
pot. When he wishes to produce rain he plunges the stones in
water, and taking in his hand
a peeled cane, which is split at the top, he beckons with it to the
clouds to come or waves them
away in the way they should go, muttering an incantation the
while. Or he pours water and
the entrails of a sheep or goat into a hollow in a stone and then
sprinkles the water towards
the sky. Though the chief acquires wealth by the exercise of his
supposed magical powers, he
often, perhaps generally, comes to a violent end; for in time of
drought the angry people
assemble and kill him, believing that it is he who prevents the rain
from falling. Yet the office
is usually hereditary and passes from father to son. Among the
tribes which cherish these
beliefs and observe these customs are the Latuka, Bari, Laluba,
and Lokoiya.
In Central Africa, again, the
Lendu tribe, to the west of Lake Albert, firmly believe that certain
people possess the power of
making rain. Among them the rain-maker either is a chief or
almost invariably becomes one.
The Banyoro also have a great respect for the dispensers of
rain, whom they load with a
profusion of gifts. The great dispenser, he who has absolute and
uncontrollable power over the
rain, is the king; but he can depute his power to other persons,
so that the benefit may be
distributed and the heavenly water laid on over the various parts of
the kingdom.
In Western as well as in
Eastern and Central Africa we meet with the same union of chiefly
with magical functions. Thus
in the Fan tribe the strict distinction between chief and medicine-man
does not exist. The chief is
also a medicine-man and a smith to boot; for the Fans
esteem the smith’s craft
sacred, and none but chiefs may meddle with it.
As to the relation between the
offices of chief and rain-maker in South Africa a well-informed
writer observes: “In very old
days the chief was the great Rain-maker of the tribe. Some
chiefs allowed no one else to
compete with them, lest a successful Rain-maker should be
chosen as chief. There was
also another reason: the Rain-maker was sure to become a rich
man if he gained a great
reputation, and it would manifestly never do for the chief to allow
any one to be too rich. The
Rain-maker exerts tremendous control over the people, and so it
would be most important to
keep this function connected with royalty. Tradition always places
the power of making rain as
the fundamental glory of ancient chiefs and heroes, and it seems
probable that it may have been
the origin of chieftainship. The man who made the rain would
naturally become the chief. In
the same way Chaka [the famous Zulu despot] used to declare
that he was the only diviner in
the country, for if he allowed rivals his life would be insecure.”
Similarly speaking of the
South African tribes in general, Dr. Moffat says that “the rain-maker
is in the estimation of the
people no mean personage, possessing an influence over the
minds of the people superior
even to that of the king, who is likewise compelled to yield to the
dictates of this
arch-official.”
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 72?The foregoing evidence renders it probable that in Africa the king has
often been developed
out of the public magician,
and especially out of the rain-maker. The unbounded fear which
the magician inspires and the
wealth which he amasses in the exercise of his profession may
both be supposed to have
contributed to his promotion. But if the career of a magician and
especially of a rain-maker
offers great rewards to the successful practitioner of the art, it is
beset with many pitfalls into
which the unskilful or unlucky artist may fall. The position of the
public sorcerer is indeed a
very precarious one; for where the people firmly believe that he
has it in his power to make
the rain to fall, the sun to shine, and the fruits of the earth to grow,
they naturally impute drought
and dearth to his culpable negligence or wilful obstinacy, and
they punish him accordingly.
Hence in Africa the chief who fails to procure rain is often exiled
or killed. Thus, in some parts
of West Africa, when prayers and offerings presented to the
king have failed to procure
rain, his subjects bind him with ropes and take him by force to the
grave of his forefathers that
he may obtain from them the needed rain. The Banjars in West
Africa ascribe to their king
the power of causing rain or fine weather. So long as the weather
is fine they load him with presents
of grain and cattle. But if long drought or rain threatens to
spoil the crops, they insult
and beat him till the weather changes. When the harvest fails or
the surf on the coast is too
heavy to allow of fishing, the people of Loango accuse their king
of a “bad heart” and depose
him. On the Grain Coast the high priest or fetish king, who bears
the title of Bodio, is
responsible for the health of the community, the fertility of the earth, and
the abundance of fish in the
sea and rivers; and if the country suffers in any of these respects
the Bodio is deposed from his
office. In Ussukuma, a great district on the southern bank of
the Victoria Nyanza, “the rain
and locust question is part and parcel of the Sultan’s govern-ment.
He, too, must know how to make
rain and drive away the locusts. If he and his medi-cine-
men are unable to accomplish
this, his whole existence is at stake in times of distress.
On a certain occasion, when
the rain so greatly desired by the people did not come, the
Sultan was simply driven out
(in Ututwa, near Nassa). The people, in fact, hold that rulers
must have power over Nature
and her phenomena.” Again, we are told of the natives of the
Nyanaza region generally that
“they are persuaded that rain only falls as a result of magic,
and the important duty of
causing it to descend devolves on the chief of the tribe. If rain does
not come at the proper time,
everybody complains. More than one petty king has been ban-ished
his country because of
drought.” Among the Latuka of the Upper Nile, when the crops
are withering, and all the
efforts of the chief to draw down rain have proved fruitless, the peo-ple
commonly attack him by night,
rob him of all he possesses, and drive him away. But often
they kill him.
In many other parts of the world
kings have been expected to regulate the course of nature
for the good of their people
and have been punished if they failed to do so. It appears that the
Scythians, when food was
scarce, used to put their king in bonds. In ancient Egypt the sacred
kings were blamed for the
failure of the crops, but the sacred beasts were also held responsi-ble
for the course of nature. When
pestilence and other calamities had fallen on the land, in
consequence of a long and
severe drought, the priests took the animals by night and threat-ened
them, but if the evil did not
abate they slew the beasts. On the coral island of Niue or
Savage Island, in the South
Pacific, there formerly reigned a line of kings. But as the kings
were also high priests, and
were supposed to make the food grow, the people became angry
with them in times of scarcity
and killed them; till at last, as one after another was killed, no
one would be king, and the
monarchy came to an end. Ancient Chinese writers inform us that
in Corea the blame was laid on
the king whenever too much or too little rain fell and the crops
did not ripen. Some said that
he must be deposed, others that he must be slain.
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Page 73?Among the American Indians the furthest advance towards civilisation
was made under the
monarchical and theocratic
governments of Mexico and Peru; but we know too little of the
early history of these
countries to say whether the predecessors of their deified kings were
medicine-men or not. Perhaps a
trace of such a succession may be detected in the oath
which the Mexican kings, when
they mounted the throne, swore that they would make the sun
to shine, the clouds to give
rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to bring forth fruits in abun-dance.
Certainly, in aboriginal
America the sorcerer or medicine-man, surrounded by a halo of
mystery and an atmosphere of
awe, was a personage of great influence and importance, and
he may well have developed
into a chief or king in many tribes, though positive evidence of
such a development appears to
be lacking. Thus Catlin tells us that in North America the
medicine-men “are valued as
dignitaries in the tribe, and the greatest respect is paid to them
by the whole community; not
only for their skill in their materia medica, but more especially
for their tact in magic and
mysteries, in which they all deal to a very great extent.... In all
tribes their doctors are
conjurers—are magicians—are sooth-sayers, and I had like to have
said high-priests, inasmuch as
they superintend and conduct all their religious ceremonies;
they are looked upon by all as
oracles of the nation. In all councils of war and peace, they
have a seat with the chiefs,
are regularly consulted before any public step is taken, and the
greatest deference and respect
is paid to their opinions.” Similarly in California “the shaman
was, and still is, perhaps the
most important individual among the Maidu. In the absence of
any definite system of
government, the word of a shaman has great weight: as a class they
are regarded with much awe,
and as a rule are obeyed much more than the chief.”
In South America also the
magicians or medicine-men seem to have been on the highroad to
chieftainship or kingship. One
of the earliest settlers on the coast of Brazil, the Frenchman
Thevet, reports that the
Indians “hold these pages (or medicine-men) in such honour and rev-erence
that they adore, or rather
idolise them. You may see the common folk go to meet
them, prostrate themselves,
and pray to them, saying, ‘Grant that I be not ill, that I do not die,
neither I nor my children,’ or
some such request. And he answers, ‘You shall not die, you shall
not be ill,’ and such like
replies. But sometimes if it happens that these pages do not tell the
truth, and things turn out otherwise
than they predicted, the people make no scruple of killing
them as unworthy of the title
and dignity of pages.” Among the Lengua Indians of the Gran
Chaco every clan has its
cazique or chief, but he possesses little authority. In virtue of his
office he has to make many
presents, so he seldom grows rich and is generally more shabbi-ly
clad than any of his subjects.
“As a matter of fact the magician is the man who has most
power in his hands, and he is
accustomed to receive presents instead of to give them.” It is
the magician’s duty to bring
down misfortune and plagues on the enemies of his tribe, and to
guard his own people against
hostile magic. For these services he is well paid, and by them
he acquires a position of
great influence and authority.
Throughout the Malay region
the rajah or king is commonly regarded with superstitious vener-ation
as the possessor of
supernatural powers, and there are grounds for thinking that he too,
like apparently so many
African chiefs, has been developed out of a simple magician. At the
present day the Malays firmly
believe that the king possesses a personal influence over the
works of nature, such as the
growth of the crops and the bearing of fruit-trees. The same pro-lific
virtue is supposed to reside,
though in a lesser degree, in his delegates, and even in the
persons of Europeans who
chance to have charge of districts. Thus in Selangor, one of the
native states of the Malay
Peninsula, the success or failure of the rice-crops is often attributed
to a change of district
officers. The Toorateyas of Southern Celebes hold that the prosperity of
the rice depends on the
behaviour of their princes, and that bad government, by which they
mean a government which does
not conform to ancient custom, will result in a failure of the
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Page 74?crops.
The Dyaks of Sarawak believed
that their famous English ruler, Rajah Brooke, was endowed
with a certain magical virtue
which, if properly applied, could render the rice-crops abundant.
Hence when he visited a tribe,
they used to bring him the seed which they intended to sow
next year, and he fertilised
it by shaking over it the women’s necklaces, which had been pre-viously
dipped in a special mixture.
And when he entered a village, the women would wash
and bathe his feet, first with
water, and then with the milk of a young coco-nut, and lastly with
water again, and all this
water which had touched his person they preserved for the purpose
of distributing it on their
farms, believing that it ensured an abundant harvest. Tribes which
were too far off for him to
visit used to send him a small piece of white cloth and a little gold
or silver, and when these
things had been impregnated by his generative virtue they buried
them in their fields, and
confidently expected a heavy crop. Once when a European remarked
that the rice-crops of the
Samban tribe were thin, the chief immediately replied that they could
not be otherwise, since Rajah
Brooke had never visited them, and he begged that Mr. Brooke
might be induced to visit his
tribe and remove the sterility of their land.
The belief that kings possess
magical or supernatural powers by virtue of which they can fer-tilise
the earth and confer other
benefits on their subjects would seem to have been shared
by the ancestors of all the
Aryan races from India to Ireland, and it has left clear traces of
itself in our own country down
to modern times. Thus the ancient Hindoo law-book called The
Laws of Manu describes as
follows the effects of a good king’s reign: “In that country where
the king avoids taking the
property of mortal sinners, men are born in due time and are long-lived.
And the crops of the
husbandmen spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die
not, and no misshaped
offspring is born.” In Homeric Greece kings and chiefs were spoken of
as sacred or divine; their
houses, too, were divine and their chariots sacred; and it was
thought that the reign of a
good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley,
the trees to be loaded with
fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the sea to yield fish. In the Middle
Ages, when Waldemar I., King
of Denmark, travelled in Germany, mothers brought their
infants and husbandmen their
seed for him to lay his hands on, thinking that children would
both thrive the better for the
royal touch, and for a like reason farmers asked him to throw the
seed for them. It was the
belief of the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the cus-toms
of their ancestors, the
seasons were mild, the crops plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the
waters abounded with fish, and
the fruit trees had to be propped up on account of the weight
of their produce. A canon
attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that
attend the reign of a just
king “fine weather, calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with
fruit.” On the other hand,
dearth, dryness of cows, blight of fruit, and scarcity of corn were
regarded as infallible proofs
that the reigning king was bad.
Perhaps the last relic of such
superstitions which lingered about our English kings was the
notion that they could heal
scrofula by their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the
King’s Evil. Queen Elizabeth
often exercised this miraculous gift of healing. On Midsummer
Day 1633, Charles the First
cured a hundred patients at one swoop in the chapel royal at
Holyrood. But it was under his
son Charles the Second that the practice seems to have
attained its highest vogue. It
is said that in the course of his reign Charles the Second
touched near a hundred
thousand persons for scrofula. The press to get near him was some-times
terrific. On one occasion six
or seven of those who came to be healed were trampled to
death. The cool-headed William
the Third contemptuously refused to lend himself to the
hocuspocus; and when his
palace was besieged by the usual unsavoury crowd, he ordered
them to be turned away with a
dole. On the only occasion when he was importuned into lay-
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75?ing his hand on a patient,
he said to him, “God give you better health and more sense.”
However, the practice was
continued, as might have been expected, by the dull bigot James
the Second and his dull
daughter Queen Anne.
The kings of France also
claimed to possess the same gift of healing by touch, which they
are said to have derived from
Clovis or from St. Louis, while our English kings inherited it
from Edward the Confessor.
Similarly the savage chiefs of Tonga were believed to heal scrof-ula
and cases of indurated liver by
the touch of their feet; and the cure was strictly homoeo-pathic,
for the disease as well as the
cure was thought to be caused by contact with the royal
person or with anything that
belonged to it.
On the whole, then, we seem to
be justified in inferring that in many parts of the world the
king is the lineal successor
of the old magician or medicine-man. When once a special class
of sorcerers has been
segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the discharge
of duties on which the public
safety and welfare are believed to depend, these men gradually
rise to wealth and power, till
their leaders blossom out into sacred kings. But the great social
revolution which thus begins
with democracy and ends in despotism is attended by an intel-lectual
revolution which affects both
the conception and the functions of royalty. For as time
goes on, the fallacy of magic
becomes more and more apparent to the acuter minds and is
slowly displaced by religion;
in other words, the magician gives way to the priest, who,
renouncing the attempt to
control directly the processes of nature for the good of man, seeks
to attain the same end
indirectly by appealing to the gods to do for him what he no longer
fancies he can do for himself.
Hence the king, starting as a magician, tends gradually to
exchange the practice of magic
for the priestly functions of prayer and sacrifice. And while the
distinction between the human
and the divine is still imperfectly drawn, it is often imagined
that men may themselves attain
to godhead, not merely after their death, but in their lifetime,
through the temporary or
permanent possession of their whole nature by a great and powerful
spirit. No class of the
community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the possible
incarnation of a god in human
form. The doctrine of that incarnation, and with it the theory of
the divinity of kings in the
strict sense of the word, will form the subject of the following chap-ter.
Chapter VII
Incarnate Human Gods
THE instances which in the
preceding chapters I have drawn from the beliefs and practices of
rude peoples all over the
world, may suffice to prove that the savage fails to recognise those
limitations to his power over
nature which seem so obvious to us. In a society where every
man is supposed to be endowed
more or less with powers which we should call supernatural,
it is plain that the
distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has
scarcely emerged. The
conception of gods as superhuman beings endowed with powers to
which man possesses nothing
comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slow-ly
evolved in the course of
history. By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are not
regarded as greatly, if at
all, superior to man; for they may be frightened and coerced by him
into doing his will. At this
stage of thought the world is viewed as a great democracy; all
beings in it, whether natural
or supernatural, are supposed to stand on a footing of tolerable
equality. But with the growth
of his knowledge man learns to realise more clearly the vastness
of nature and his own
littleness and feebleness in presence of it. The recognition of his
help-lessness
does not, however, carry with
it a corresponding belief in the impotence of those
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Page 76?supernatural beings with which his imagination peoples the universe. On
the contrary, it
enhances his conception of
their power. For the idea of the world as a system of impersonal
forces acting in accordance
with fixed and invariable laws has not yet fully dawned or dark-ened
upon him. The germ of the idea
he certainly has, and he acts upon it, not only in magic
art, but in much of the
business of daily life. But the idea remains undeveloped, and so far as
he attempts to explain the
world he lives in, he pictures it as the manifestation of conscious
will and personal agency. If
then he feels himself to be so frail and slight, how vast and pow-erful
must he deem the beings who
control the gigantic machinery of nature! Thus as his old
sense of equality with the
gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at the same time the hope of
directing the course of nature
by his own unaided resources, that is, by magic, and looks
more and more to the gods as
the sole repositories of those supernatural powers which he
once claimed to share with
them. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacri-fice
assume the leading place in
religious ritual; and magic, which once ranked with them as
a legitimate equal, is
gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black
art. It is not regarded as an
encroachment, at once vain and impious, on the domain of the
gods, and as such encounters
the steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation and
influence rise or fall with
those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period the distinction
between religion and
superstition has emerged, we find that sacrifice and prayer are the
resource of the pious and
enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of
the superstitious and
ignorant. But when, still later, the conception of the elemental forces as
personal agents is giving way
to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it implic-itly
is on the idea of a necessary
and invariable sequence of cause and effect, independent of
personal will, reappears from
the obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by inves-tigating
the causal sequences in
nature, directly prepares the way for science. Alchemy leads
up to chemistry.
The notion of a man-god, or of
a human being endowed with divine or supernatural powers,
belongs essentially to that
earlier period of religious history in which gods and men are still
viewed as beings of much the
same order, and before they are divided by the impassable gulf
which, to later thought, opens
out between them. Strange, therefore, as may seem to us the
idea of a god incarnate in
human form, it has nothing very startling for early man, who sees in
a man-god or a god-man only a
higher degree of the same supernatural powers which he
arrogates in perfect good
faith to himself. Nor does he draw any very sharp distinction
between a god and a powerful
sorcerer. His gods are often merely invisible magicians who
behind the veil of nature work
the same sort of charms and incantations which the human
magician works in a visible
and bodily form among his fellows. And as the gods are common-ly
believed to exhibit themselves
in the likeness of men to their worshippers, it is easy for the
magician, with his supposed
miraculous powers, to acquire the reputation of being an incar-nate
deity. Thus beginning as
little more than a simple conjurer, the medicine-man or magi-cian
tends to blossom out into a
full-blown god and king in one. Only in speaking of him as a
god we must beware of
importing into the savage conception of deity those very abstract and
complex ideas which we attach
to the term. Our ideas on this profound subject are the fruit of
a long intellectual and moral
evolution, and they are so far from being shared by the savage
that he cannot even understand
them when they are explained to him. Much of the controver-sy
which has raged as to the
religion of the lower races has sprung merely from a mutual
misunderstanding. The savage
does not understand the thoughts of the civilised man, and
few civilised men understand
the thoughts of the savage. When the savage uses his word for
god, he has in his mind a
being of a certain sort: when the civilised man uses his word for
god, he has in his mind a
being of a very different sort; and if, as commonly happens, the two
men are equally unable to
place themselves at the other’s point of view, nothing but confu-
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77?sion and mistakes can
result from their discussions. If we civilised men insist on limiting the
name of God to that particular
conception of the divine nature which we ourselves have
formed, then we must confess
that the savage has no god at all. But we shall adhere more
closely to the facts of
history if we allow most of the higher savages at least to possess a
rudimentary notion of certain
supernatural beings who may fittingly be called gods, though not
in the full sense in which we
use the word. That rudimentary notion represents in all probabili-ty
the germ out of which the civilised
peoples have gradually evolved their own high concep-tions
of deity; and if we could
trace the whole course of religious development, we might find
that the chain which links our
idea of the Godhead with that of the savage is one and unbro-ken.
With these explanations and
cautions I will now adduce some examples of gods who have
been believed by their
worshippers to be incarnate in living human beings, whether men or
women. The persons in whom a
deity is thought to reveal himself are by no means always
kings or descendants of kings;
the supposed incarnation may take place even in men of the
humblest rank. In India, for
example, one human god started in life as a cotton-bleacher and
another as the son of a
carpenter. I shall therefore not draw my examples exclusively from
royal personages, as I wish to
illustrate the general principle of the deification of living men, in
other words, the incarnation
of a deity in human form. Such incarnate gods are common in
rude society. The incarnation
may be temporary or permanent. In the former case, the incar-nation-
commonly known as inspiration
or possession-reveals itself in supernatural knowledge
rather than in supernatural
power. In other words, its usual manifestations are divination and
prophecy rather than miracles.
On the other hand, when the incarnation is not merely tempo-rary,
when the divine spirit has
permanently taken up its abode in a human body, the god-man
is usually expected to
vindicate his character by working miracles. Only we have to
remember that by men at this
stage of thought miracles are not considered as breaches of
natural law. Not conceiving
the existence of natural law, primitive man cannot conceive a
breach of it. A miracle is to
him merely an unusually striking manifestation of a common
power.
The belief in temporary
incarnation or inspiration is world-wide. Certain persons are supposed
to be possessed from time to
time by a spirit or deity; while the possession lasts, their own
personality lies in abeyance,
the presence of the spirit is revealed by convulsive shiverings
and shakings of the man’s
whole body, by wild gestures and excited looks, all of which are
referred, not to the man
himself, but to the spirit which has entered into him; and in this
abnormal state all his
utterances are accepted as the voice of the god or spirit dwelling in him
and speaking through him.
Thus, for example, in the Sandwich Islands, the king, personating
the god, uttered the responses
of the oracle from his concealment in a frame of wicker-work.
But in the southern islands of
the Pacific the god “frequently entered the priest, who, inflated
as it were with the divinity,
ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but moved and spoke
as entirely under supernatural
influence. In this respect there was a striking resemblance
between the rude oracles of
the Polynesians, and those of the celebrated nations of ancient
Greece. As soon as the god was
supposed to have entered the priest, the latter became vio-lently
agitated, and worked himself
up to the highest pitch of apparent frenzy, the muscles of
the limbs seemed convulsed,
the body swelled, the countenance became terrific, the features
distorted, and the eyes wild
and strained. In this state he often rolled on the earth, foaming at
the mouth, as if labouring under
the influence of the divinity by whom he was possessed,
and, in shrill cries, and
violent and often indistinct sounds, revealed the will of the god. The
priests, who were attending,
and versed in the mysteries, received, and reported to the peo-ple,
the declarations which had
been thus received. When the priest had uttered the response
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Page 78?of the oracle, the violent paroxysm gradually subsided, and comparative
composure ensued.
The god did not, however,
always leave him as soon as the communication had been made.
Sometimes the same taura, or
priest, continued for two or three days possessed by the spirit
or deity; a piece of a native
cloth, of a peculiar kind, worn round one arm, was an indication of
inspiration, or of the
indwelling of the god with the individual who wore it. The acts of the man
during this period were
considered as those of the god, and hence the greatest attention was
paid to his expressions, and
the whole of his deportment.... When uruhia (under the inspira-tion
of the spirit), the priest was
always considered as sacred as the god, and was called,
during this period, atua, god,
though at other times only denominated taura or priest.”
But examples of such temporary
inspiration are so common in every part of the world and are
now so familiar through books
on ethnology that it is needless to multiply illustrations of the
general principle. It may be
well, however, to refer to two particular modes of producing tem-porary
inspiration, because they are
perhaps less known than some others, and because we
shall have occasion to refer
to them later on. One of these modes of producing inspiration is
by sucking the fresh blood of
a sacrificed victim. In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a
lamb was sacrificed by night
once a month; a woman, who had to observe a rule of chastity,
tasted the blood of the lamb,
and thus being inspired by the god she prophesied or divined. At
Aegira in Achaia the priestess
of Earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended
into the cave to prophesy.
Similarly among the Kuruvikkarans, a class of bird-catchers and
beggars in Southern India, the
goddess Kali is believed to descend upon the priest, and he
gives oracular replies after
sucking the blood which streams from the cut throat of a goat. At a
festival of the Alfoors of
Minahassa, in Northern Celebes, after a pig has been killed, the
priest rushes furiously at it,
thrusts his head into the carcase, and drinks of the blood. Then
he is dragged away from it by
force and set on a chair, whereupon he begins to prophesy
how the rice-crop will turn
out that year. A second time he runs at the carcase and drinks of
the blood; a second time he is
forced into the chair and continues his predictions. It is thought
that there is a spirit in him
which possesses the power of prophecy.
The other mode of producing
temporary inspiration, to which I shall here refer, consists in the
use of a sacred tree or plant.
Thus in the Hindoo Koosh a fire is kindled with twigs of the
sacred cedar; and the Dainyal
or sibyl, with a cloth over her head, inhales the thick pungent
smoke till she is seized with
convulsions and falls senseless to the ground. Soon she rises
and raises a shrill chant,
which is caught up and loudly repeated by her audience. So Apollo’s
prophetess ate the sacred
laurel and was fumigated with it before she prophesied. The
Bacchanals ate ivy, and their
inspired fury was by some believed to be due to the exciting
and intoxicating properties of
the plant. In Uganda the priest, in order to be inspired by his
god, smokes a pipe of tobacco
fiercely till he works himself into a frenzy; the loud excited
tones in which he then talks
are recognised as the voice of the god speaking through him. In
Madura, an island off the
north coast of Java, each spirit has its regular medium, who is
oftener a woman than a man. To
prepare herself for the reception of the spirit she inhales the
fumes of incense, sitting with
her head over a smoking censer. Gradually she falls into a sort
of trance accompanied by
shrieks, grimaces, and violent spasms. The spirit is now supposed
to have entered into her, and
when she grows calmer her words are regarded as oracular,
being the utterances of the
indwelling spirit, while her own soul is temporarily absent.
The person temporarily
inspired is believed to acquire, not merely divine knowledge, but also,
at least occasionally, divine
power. In Cambodia, when an epidemic breaks out, the inhabi-tants
of several villages unite and
go with a band of music at their head to look for the man
whom the local god is supposed
to have chosen for his temporary incarnation. When found,
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Page 79?the man is conducted to the altar of the god, where the mystery of
incarnation takes place.
Then the man becomes an object
of veneration to his fellows, who implore him to protect the
village against the plague. A
certain image of Apollo, which stood in a sacred cave at Hylae
near Magnesia, was thought to
impart superhuman strength. Sacred men, inspired by it,
leaped down precipices, tore
up huge trees by the roots, and carried them on their backs
along the narrowest defiles.
The feats performed by inspired dervishes belong to the same
class.
Thus far we have seen that the
savage, failing to discern the limits of his ability to control
nature, ascribes to himself
and to all men certain powers which we should now call supernat-ural.
Further, we have seen that,
over and above this general supernaturalism, some persons
are supposed to be inspired
for short periods by a divine spirit, and thus temporarily to enjoy
the knowledge and power of the
indwelling deity. From beliefs like these it is an easy step to
the conviction that certain
men are permanently possessed by a deity, or in some other unde-fined
way are endued with so high a
degree of supernatural power as to be ranked as gods
and to receive the homage of
prayer and sacrifice. Sometimes these human gods are restrict-ed
to purely supernatural or
spiritual functions. Sometimes they exercise supreme political
power in addition. In the
latter case they are kings as well as gods, and the government is a
theocracy. Thus in the
Marquesas or Washington Islands there was a class of men who were
deified in their lifetime.
They were supposed to wield a supernatural power over the elements:
they could give abundant
harvests or smite the ground with barrenness; and they could inflict
disease or death. Human
sacrifices were offered to them to avert their wrath. There were not
many of them, at the most one
or two in each island. They lived in mystic seclusion. Their
powers were sometimes, but not
always, hereditary. A missionary has described one of these
human gods from personal
observation. The god was a very old man who lived in a large
house within an enclosure. In
the house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the house
and on the trees round it were
hung human skeletons, head down. No one entered the enclo-sure
except the persons dedicated
to the service of the god; only on days when human vic-tims
were sacrificed might ordinary
people penetrate into the precinct. This human god
received more sacrifices than
all the other gods; often he would sit on a sort of scaffold in
front of his house and call
for two or three human victims at a time. They were always
brought, for the terror he
inspired was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and offer-ings
were sent to him from every
side. Again, of the South Sea Islands in general we are told
that each island had a man who
represented or personified the divinity. Such men were called
gods, and their substance was
confounded with that of the deity. The man-god was some-times
the king himself; oftener he
was a priest or subordinate chief.
The ancient Egyptians, far
from restricting their adoration to cats and dogs and such small
deer, very liberally extended
it to men. One of these human deities resided at the village of
Anabis, and burnt sacrifices
were offered to him on the altars; after which, says Porphyry, he
would eat his dinner just as
if he were an ordinary mortal. In classical antiquity the Sicilian
philosopher Empedocles gave
himself out to be not merely a wizard but a god. Addressing
his fellow-citizens in verse
he said:
“O friends, in this great city
that climbs the yellow slope
Of Agrigentum’s citadel, who
make good works your scope,
Who offer to the stranger a
haven quiet and fair,
All hail! Among you honoured I
walk with lofty air.
With garlands, blooming
garlands you crown my noble brow,
A mortal man no longer, a
deathless godhead now.
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Page 80?Where e’er I go, the people crowd round and worship pay,
And thousands follow seeking
to learn the better way.
Some crave prophetic visions,
some smit with anguish sore
Would fain hear words of
comfort and suffer pain no more.”
He asserted that he could
teach his disciples how to make the wind to blow or be still, the
rain to fall and the sun to
shine, how to banish sickness and old age and to raise the dead.
When Demetrius Poliorcetes
restored the Athenian democracy in 307 B.C., the Athenians
decreed divine honours to him
and his father Antigonus, both of them being then alive, under
the title of the Saviour Gods.
Altars were set up to the Saviours, and a priest appointed to
attend to their worship. The
people went forth to meet their deliverer with hymns and dances,
with garlands and incense and
libations; they lined the streets and sang that he was the only
true god, for the other gods
slept, or dwelt far away, or were not. In the words of a contempo-rary
poet, which were chanted in
public and sung in private:
“Of all the gods the greatest
and the dearest
To the city are come.
For Demeter and Demetrius
Together time has brought.
She comes to hold the Maiden’s
awful rites,
And he joyous and fair and
laughing,
As befits a god.
A glorious sight, with all his
friends about him,
He in their midst,
They like to stars, and he the
sun.
Son of Poseidon the mighty,
Aphrodite’s son,
All hail!
The other gods dwell far away,
Or have no ears,
Or are not, or pay us no heed.
But thee we present see,
No god of wood or stone, but
godhead true.
Therefore to thee we pray.”
The ancient Germans believed
that there was something holy in women, and accordingly
consulted them as oracles.
Their sacred women, we are told, looked on the eddying rivers
and listened to the murmur or
the roar of the water, and from the sight and sound foretold
what would come to pass. But
often the veneration of the men went further, and they wor-shipped
women as true and living goddesses.
For example, in the reign of Vespasian a cer-tain
Veleda, of the tribe of the
Bructeri, was commonly held to be a deity, and in that charac-ter
reigned over her people, her
sway being acknowledged far and wide. She lived in a tower
on the river Lippe, a
tributary of the Rhine. When the people of Cologne sent to make a treaty
with her, the ambassadors were
not admitted to her presence; the negotiations were conduct-ed
through a minister, who acted
as the mouthpiece of her divinity and reported her oracular
utterances. The example shows
how easily among our rude forefathers the ideas of divinity
and royalty coalesced. It is
said that among the Getae down to the beginning of our era there
was always a man who
personified a god and was called God by the people. He dwelt on a
sacred mountain and acted as
adviser to the king.
According to the early
Portuguese historian, Dos Santos, the Zimbas, or Muzimbas, a people
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Page 81?of South-eastern Africa, “do not adore idols or recognize any god, but
instead they venerate
and honour their king, whom
they regard as a divinity, and they say he is the greatest and
best in the world. And the
said king says of himself that he alone is god of the earth, for which
reason if it rains when he
does not wish it to do so, or is too hot, he shoots arrows at the sky
for not obeying him.” The
Mashona of Southern Africa informed their bishop that they had
once had a god, but that the
Matabeles had driven him away. “This last was in reference to a
curious custom in some
villages of keeping a man they called their god. He seemed to be
consulted by the people and
had presents given to him. There was one at a village belonging
to a chief Magondi, in the old
days. We were asked not to fire off any guns near the village, or
we should frighten him away.”
This Mashona god was formerly bound to render an annual
tribute to the king of the
Matabele in the shape of four black oxen and one dance. A mission-ary
has seen and described the deity
discharging the latter part of his duty in front of the royal
hut. For three mortal hours,
without a break, to the banging of a tambourine, the click of cas-tanettes,
and the drone of a monotonous
song, the swarthy god engaged in a frenzied dance,
crouching on his hams like a
tailor, sweating like a pig, and bounding about with an agility
which testified to the
strength and elasticity of his divine legs.
The Baganda of Central Africa
believed in a god of Lake Nyanza, who sometimes took up his
abode in a man or woman. The
incarnate god was much feared by all the people, including
the king and the chiefs. When
the mystery of incarnation had taken place, the man, or rather
the god, removed about a mile
and a half from the margin of the lake, and there awaited the
appearance of the new moon
before he engaged in his sacred duties. From the moment that
the crescent moon appeared
faintly in the sky, the king and all his subjects were at the com-mand
of the divine man, or Lubare
(god), as he was called, who reigned supreme not only in
matters of faith and ritual,
but also in questions of war and state policy. He was consulted as
an oracle; by his word he
could inflict or heal sickness, withhold rain, and cause famine.
Large presents were made him
when his advice was sought. The chief of Urua, a large region
to the west of Lake
Tanganyika, “arrogates to himself divine honours and power and pretends
to abstain from food for days
without feeling its necessity; and, indeed, declares that as a god
he is altogether above requiring
food and only eats, drinks, and smokes for the pleasure it
affords him.” Among the
Gallas, when a woman grows tired of the cares of housekeeping,
she begins to talk
incoherently and to demean herself extravagantly. This is a sign of the
descent of the holy spirit
Callo upon her. Immediately her husband prostrates himself and
adores her; she ceases to bear
the humble title of wife and is called “Lord”; domestic duties
have no further claim on her,
and her will is a divine law.
The king of Loango is honoured
by his people “as though he were a god; and he is called
Sambee and Pango, which mean
god. They believe that he can let them have rain when he
likes; and once a year, in
December, which is the time they want rain, the people come to beg
of him to grant it to them.”
On this occasion the king, standing on his throne, shoots an arrow
into the air, which is
supposed to bring on rain. Much the same is said of the king of
Mombasa. Down to a few years
ago, when his spiritual reign on earth was brought to an
abrupt end by the carnal
weapons of English marines and bluejackets, the king of Benin was
the chief object of worship in
his dominions. “He occupies a higher post here than the Pope
does in Catholic Europe; for
he is not only God’s vicegerent upon earth, but a god himself,
whose subjects both obey and
adore him as such, although I believe their adoration to arise
rather from fear than love.”
The king of Iddah told the English officers of the Niger Expedition,
“God made me after his own
image; I am all the same as God; and he appointed me a king.”
A peculiarly bloodthirsty
monarch of Burma, by name Badonsachen, whose very countenance
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Page 82?reflected the inbred ferocity of his nature, and under whose reign more
victims perished by
the executioner than by the
common enemy, conceived the notion that he was something
more than mortal, and that
this high distinction had been granted him as a reward for his
numerous good works.
Accordingly he laid aside the title of king and aimed at making himself
a god. With this view, and in
imitation of Buddha, who, before being advanced to the rank of a
divinity, had quitted his
royal palace and seraglio and retired from the world, Badonsachen
withdrew from his palace to an
immense pagoda, the largest in the empire, which he had
been engaged in constructing
for many years. Here he held conferences with the most
learned monks, in which he
sought to persuade them that the five thousand years assigned
for the observance of the law
of Buddha were now elapsed, and that he himself was the god
who was destined to appear
after that period, and to abolish the old law by substituting his
own. But to his great
mortification many of the monks undertook to demonstrate the contrary;
and this disappointment,
combined with his love of power and his impatience under the
restraints of an ascetic life,
quickly disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and drove him
back to his palace and his
harem. The king of Siam “is venerated equally with a divinity. His
subjects ought not to look him
in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he
passes, and appear before him
on their knees, their elbows resting on the ground.” There is a
special language devoted to
his sacred person and attributes, and it must be used by all who
speak to or of him. Even the
natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar vocabulary. The
hairs of the monarch’s head,
the soles of his feet, the breath of his body, indeed every single
detail of his person, both
outward and inward, have particular names. When he eats or drinks,
sleeps or walks, a special
word indicates that these acts are being performed by the sover-eign,
and such words cannot possibly
be applied to the acts of any other person whatever.
There is no word in the
Siamese language by which any creature of higher rank or greater
dignity than a monarch can be
described; and the missionaries, when they speak of God, are
forced to use the native word
for king.
But perhaps no country in the
world has been so prolific of human gods as India; nowhere
has the divine grace been
poured out in a more liberal measure on all classes of society from
kings down to milkmen. Thus
amongst the Todas, a pastoral people of the Neilgherry Hills of
Southern India, the dairy is a
sanctuary, and the milkman who attends to it has been
described as a god. On being
asked whether the Todas salute the sun, one of these divine
milkmen replied, “Those poor
fellows do so, but I,” tapping his chest, “I, a god! why should I
salute the sun?” Every one,
even his own father, prostrates himself before the milkman, and
no one would dare to refuse
him anything. No human being, except another milkman, may
touch him; and he gives
oracles to all who consult him, speaking with the voice of a god.
Further, in India “every king
is regarded as little short of a present god.” The Hindoo law-book
of Manu goes farther and says
that “even an infant king must not be despised from an idea
that he is a mere mortal; for
he is a great deity in human form.” There is said to have been a
sect in Orissa some years ago
who worshipped the late Queen Victoria in her lifetime as their
chief divinity. And to this
day in India all living persons remarkable for great strength or valour
or for supposed miraculous
powers run the risk of being worshipped as gods. Thus, a sect in
the Punjaub worshipped a deity
whom they called Nikkal Sen. This Nikkal Sen was no other
than the redoubted General
Nicholson, and nothing that the general could do or say damped
the ardour of his adorers. The
more he punished them, the greater grew the religious awe
with which they worshipped
him. At Benares not many years ago a celebrated deity was
incarnate in the person of a
Hindoo gentleman who rejoiced in the euphonious name of
Swami Bhaskaranandaji
Saraswati, and looked uncommonly like the late Cardinal Manning,
only more ingenuous. His eyes
beamed with kindly human interest, and he took what is
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Page 83?described as an innocent pleasure in the divine honours paid him by his
confiding worship-pers.
At Chinchvad, a small town
about ten miles from Poona in Western India, there lives a family
of whom one in each generation
is believed by a large proportion of the Mahrattas to be an
incarnation of the
elephant-headed god Gunputty. That celebrated deity was first made flesh
about the year 1640 in the
person of a Brahman of Poona, by name Mooraba Gosseyn, who
sought to work out his
salvation by abstinence, mortification, and prayer. His piety had its
reward. The god himself
appeared to him in a vision of the night and promised that a portion
of his, that is, of Gunputty’s
holy spirit should abide with him and with his seed after him even
to the seventh generation. The
divine promise was fulfilled. Seven successive incarnations,
transmitted from father to
son, manifested the light of Gunputty to a dark world. The last of
the direct line, a
heavy-looking god with very weak eyes, died in the year 1810. But the cause
of truth was too sacred, and
the value of the church property too considerable, to allow the
Brahmans to contemplate with
equanimity the unspeakable loss that would be sustained by a
world which knew not Gunputty.
Accordingly they sought and found a holy vessel in whom the
divine spirit of the master
had revealed itself anew, and the revelation has been happily con-tinued
in an unbroken succession of
vessels from that time to this. But a mysterious law of
spiritual economy, whose
operation in the history of religion we may deplore though we can-not
alter, has decreed that the
miracles wrought by the god-man in these degenerate days
cannot compare with those
which were wrought by his predecessors in days gone by; and it
is even reported that the only
sign vouchsafed by him to the present generation of vipers is
the miracle of feeding the
multitude whom he annually entertains to dinner at Chinchvad.
A Hindoo sect, which has many
representatives in Bombay and Central India, holds that its
spiritual chiefs or Maharajas,
as they are called, are representatives or even actual incarna-tions
on earth of the god Krishna.
And as Krishna looks down from heaven with most favour
on such as minister to the
wants of his successors and vicars on earth, a peculiar rite called
Self-devotion has been
instituted, whereby his faithful worshippers make over their bodies,
their souls, and, what is
perhaps still more important, their worldly substance to his adorable
incarnations; and women are
taught to believe that the highest bliss for themselves and their
families is to be attained by
yielding themselves to the embraces of those beings in whom the
divine nature mysteriously
coexists with the form and even the appetites of true humanity.
Christianity itself has not
uniformly escaped the taint of these unhappy delusions; indeed it
has often been sullied by the
extravagances of vain pretenders to a divinity equal to or even
surpassing that of its great
Founder. In the second century Montanus the Phrygian claimed to
be the incarnate Trinity,
uniting in his single person God the Father, God the Son, and God
the Holy Ghost. Nor is this an
isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single ill-balanced
mind. From the earliest times
down to the present day many sects have believed that Christ,
nay God himself, is incarnate
in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this belief
to its logical conclusion by
adoring each other. Tertullian records that this was done by his fel-low-
Christians at Carthage in the
second century; the disciples of St. Columba worshipped
him as an embodiment of
Christ; and in the eighth century Elipandus of Toledo spoke of
Christ as “a god among gods,”
meaning that all believers were gods just as truly as Jesus
himself. The adoration of each
other was customary among the Albigenses, and is noticed
hundreds of times in the
records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in the early part of the four-teenth
century.
In the thirteenth century
there arose a sect called the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit,
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united to the deity in
an ineffable manner and become
one with the source and parent of all things, and that he
who had thus ascended to God
and been absorbed in his beatific essence, actually formed
part of the Godhead, was the
Son of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself,
and enjoyed thereby a glorious
immunity from the trammels of all laws human and divine.
Inwardly transported by this
blissful persuasion, though outwardly presenting in their aspect
and manners a shocking air of
lunacy and distraction, the sectaries roamed from place to
place, attired in the most
fantastic apparel and begging their bread with wild shouts and clam-our,
spurning indignantly every
kind of honest labour and industry as an obstacle to divine
contemplation and to the
ascent of the soul towards the Father of spirits. In all their excur-sions
they were followed by women
with whom they lived on terms of the closest familiarity.
Those of them who conceived
they had made the greatest proficiency in the higher spiritual
life dispensed with the use of
clothes altogether in their assemblies, looking upon decency
and modesty as marks of inward
corruption, characteristics of a soul that still grovelled under
the dominion of the flesh and
had not yet been elevated into communion with the divine spirit,
its centre and source.
Sometimes their progress towards this mystic communion was acceler-ated
by the Inquisition, and they
expired in the flames, not merely with unclouded serenity,
but with the most triumphant
feelings of cheerfulness and joy.
About the year 1830 there
appeared, in one of the States of the American Union bordering on
Kentucky, an impostor who
declared that he was the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind,
and that he had reappeared on
earth to recall the impious, the unbelieving, and sinners to
their duty. He protested that
if they did not mend their ways within a certain time, he would
give the signal, and in a
moment the world would crumble to ruins. These extravagant preten-sions
were received with favour even
by persons of wealth and position in society. At last a
German humbly besought the new
Messiah to announce the dreadful catastrophe to his fel-low-
countrymen in the German
language, as they did not understand English, and it seemed
a pity that they should be
damned merely on that account. The would-be Saviour in reply con-fessed
with great candour that he did
not know German. “What!” retorted the German, “you
the Son of God, and don’t
speak all languages, and don’t even know German? Come, come,
you are a knave, a hypocrite,
and a madman. Bedlam is the place for you.” The spectators
laughed, and went away ashamed
of their credulity.
Sometimes, at the death of the
human incarnation, the divine spirit transmigrates into another
man. The Buddhist Tartars
believe in a great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as
Grand Lamas at the head of the
most important monasteries. When one of these Grand
Lamas dies his disciples do not
sorrow, for they know that he will soon reappear, being born
in the form of an infant.
Their only anxiety is to discover the place of his birth. If at this time
they see a rainbow they take
it as a sign sent them by the departed Lama to guide them to
his cradle. Sometimes the
divine infant himself reveals his identity. “I am the Grand Lama,” he
says, “the living Buddha of
such and such a temple. Take me to my old monastery. I am its
immortal head.” In whatever
way the birthplace of the Buddha is revealed, whether by the
Buddha’s own avowal or by the
sign in the sky, tents are struck, and the joyful pilgrims, often
headed by the king or one of
the most illustrious of the royal family, set forth to find and bring
home the infant god. Generally
he is born in Tibet, the holy land, and to reach him the cara-van
has often to traverse the most
frightful deserts. When at last they find the child they fall
down and worship him. Before,
however, he is acknowledged as the Grand Lama whom they
seek he must satisfy them of
his identity. He is asked the name of the monastery of which he
claims to be the head, how far
off it is, and how many monks live in it; he must also describe
the habits of the deceased
Grand Lama and the manner of his death. Then various articles,
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Page 85?as prayer-books, tea-pots, and cups, are placed before him, and he has
to point out those
used by himself in his
previous life. If he does so without a mistake his claims are admitted,
and he is conducted in triumph
to the monastery. At the head of all the Lamas is the Dalai
Lama of Lhasa, the Rome of
Tibet. He is regarded as a living god, and at death his divine
and immortal spirit is born
again in a child. According to some accounts the mode of discover-ing
the Dalai Lama is similar to
the method, already described, of discovering an ordinary
Grand Lama. Other accounts
speak of an election by drawing lots from a golden jar.
Wherever he is born, the trees
and plants put forth green leaves; at his bidding flowers bloom
and springs of water rise; and
his presence diffuses heavenly blessings.
But he is by no means the only
man who poses as a god in these regions. A register of all the
incarnate gods in the Chinese
empire is kept in the Li fan yiian or Colonial Office at Peking.
The number of gods who have
thus taken out a license is one hundred and sixty. Tibet is
blessed with thirty of them,
Northern Mongolia rejoices in nineteen, and Southern Mongolia
basks in the sunshine of no
less than fifty-seven. The Chinese government, with a paternal
solicitude for the welfare of
its subjects, forbids the gods on the register to be reborn any-where
but in Tibet. They fear lest
the birth of a god in Mongolia should have serious political
consequences by stirring the
dormant patriotism and warlike spirit of the Mongols, who might
rally round an ambitious
native deity of royal lineage and seek to win for him, at the point of
the sword, a temporal as well
as a spiritual kingdom. But besides these public or licensed
gods there are a great many
little private gods, or unlicensed practitioners of divinity, who
work miracles and bless their
people in holes and corners; and of late years the Chinese gov-ernment
has winked at the rebirth of
these pettifogging deities outside of Tibet. However,
once they are born, the
government keeps its eye on them as well as on the regular practi-tioners,
and if any of them misbehaves
he is promptly degraded, banished to a distant
monastery, and strictly
forbidden ever to be born again in the flesh.
From our survey of the
religious position occupied by the king in rude societies we may infer
that the claim to divine and
supernatural powers put forward by the monarchs of great histori-cal
empires like those of Egypt,
Mexico, and Peru, was not the simple outcome of inflated
vanity or the empty expression
of a grovelling adulation; it was merely a survival and exten-sion
of the old savage apotheosis
of living kings. Thus, for example, as children of the Sun
the Incas of Peru were revered
like gods; they could do no wrong, and no one dreamed of
offending against the person,
honour, or property of the monarch or of any of the royal race.
Hence, too, the Incas did not,
like most people, look on sickness as an evil. They considered
it a messenger sent from their
father the Sun to call them to come and rest with him in heav-en.
Therefore the usual words in
which an Inca announced his approaching end were these:
“My father calls me to come
and rest with him.” They would not oppose their father’s will by
offering sacrifice for
recovery, but openly declared that he had called them to his rest. Issuing
from the sultry valleys upon
the lofty tableland of the Colombian Andes, the Spanish con-querors
were astonished to find, in
contrast to the savage hordes they had left in the swelter-ing
jungles below, a people
enjoying a fair degree of civilisation, practising agriculture, and liv-ing
under a government which
Humboldt has compared to the theocracies of Tibet and
Japan. These were the
Chibchas, Muyscas, or Mozcas, divided into two kingdoms, with capi-tals
at Bogota and Tunja, but
united apparently in spiritual allegiance to the high pontiff of
Sogamozo or Iraca. By a long
and ascetic novitiate, this ghostly ruler was reputed to have
acquired such sanctity that
the waters and the rain obeyed him, and the weather depended
on his will. The Mexican kings
at their accession, as we have seen, took an oath that they
would make the sun to shine,
the clouds to give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to bring
forth fruits in abundance. We
are told that Montezuma, the last king of Mexico, was wor-
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86?shipped by his people as a
god.
The early Babylonian kings,
from the time of Sargon I. till the fourth dynasty of Ur or later,
claimed to be gods in their
lifetime. The monarchs of the fourth dynasty of Ur in particular had
temples built in their honour;
they set up their statues in various sanctuaries and commanded
the people to sacrifice to
them; the eighth month was especially dedicated to the kings, and
sacrifices were offered to
them at the new moon and on the fifteenth of each month. Again,
the Parthian monarchs of the
Arsacid house styled themselves brothers of the sun and moon
and were worshipped as deities.
It was esteemed sacrilege to strike even a private member
of the Arsacid family in a
brawl.
The kings of Egypt were
deified in their lifetime, sacrifices were offered to them, and their
worship was celebrated in
special temples and by special priests. Indeed the worship of the
kings sometimes cast that of
the gods into the shade. Thus in the reign of Merenra a high offi-cial
declared that he had built
many holy places in order that the spirits of the king, the ever-living
Merenra, might be invoked
“more than all the gods.” “It has never been doubted that the
king claimed actual divinity;
he was the ‘great god,’ the ‘golden Horus,’ and son of Ra. He
claimed authority not only
over Egypt, but over ‘all lands and nations,’ ‘the whole world in its
length and its breadth, the
east and the west,’ ‘the entire compass of the great circuit of the
sun,’ ‘the sky and what is in
it, the earth and all that is upon it,’ ‘every creature that walks
upon two or upon four legs,
all that fly or flutter, the whole world offers her productions to
him.’ Whatever in fact might
be asserted of the Sun-god, was dogmatically predicable of the
king of Egypt. His titles were
directly derived from those of the Sun-god.” “In the course of his
existence,” we are told, “the
king of Egypt exhausted all the possible conceptions of divinity
which the Egyptians had framed
for themselves. A superhuman god by his birth and by his
royal office, he became the
deified man after his death. Thus all that was known of the divine
was summed up in him.”
We have now completed our
sketch, for it is no more than a sketch, of the evolution of that
sacred kingship which attained
its highest form, its most absolute expression, in the monar-chies
of Peru and Egypt.
Historically, the institution appears to have originated in the order of
public magicians or
medicine-men; logically it rests on a mistaken deduction from the associ-ation
of ideas. Men mistook the
order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imag-ined
that the control which they
have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to
exercise a corresponding
control over things. The men who for one reason or another,
because of the strength or the
weakness of their natural parts, were supposed to possess
these magical powers in the highest
degree, were gradually marked off from their fellows and
became a separate class, who
were destined to exercise a most far-reaching influence on the
political, religious, and
intellectual evolution of mankind. Social progress, as we know, con-sists
mainly in a successive
differentiation of functions, or, in simpler language, a division of
labour. The work which in
primitive society is done by all alike and by all equally ill, or nearly
so, is gradually distributed
among different classes of workers and executed more and more
perfectly; and so far as the
products, material or immaterial, of this specialised labour are
shared by all, the whole
community benefits by the increasing specialisation. Now magicians
or medicine-men appear to
constitute the oldest artificial or professional class in the evolution
of society. For sorcerers are
found in every savage tribe known to us; and among the lowest
savages, such as the
Australian aborigines, they are the only professional class that exists.
As time goes on, and the
process of differentiation continues, the order of medicine-men is
itself subdivided into such
classes as the healers of disease, the makers of rain, and so forth;
while the most powerful member
of the order wins for himself a position as chief and gradual-
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87?ly develops into a sacred
king, his old magical functions falling more and more into the back-ground
and being exchanged for
priestly or even divine duties, in proportion as magic is slow-ly
ousted by religion. Still
later, a partition is effected between the civil and the religious
aspect of the kingship, the
temporal power being committed to one man and the spiritual to
another. Meanwhile the
magicians, who may be repressed but cannot be extirpated by the
predominance of religion,
still addict themselves to their old occult arts in preference to the
newer ritual of sacrifice and
prayer; and in time the more sagacious of their number perceive
the fallacy of magic and hit
upon a more effectual mode of manipulating the forces of nature
for the good of man; in short,
they abandon sorcery for science. I am far from affirming that
the course of development has
everywhere rigidly followed these lines: it has doubtless var-ied
greatly in different
societies. I merely mean to indicate in the broadest outline what I con-ceive
to have been its general
trend. Regarded from the industrial point of view the evolution
has been from uniformity to
diversity of function: regarded from the political point of view, it
has been from democracy to
despotism. With the later history of monarchy, especially with
the decay of despotism and its
displacement by forms of government better adapted to the
higher needs of humanity, we
are not concerned in this enquiry: our theme is the growth, not
the decay, of a great and, in
its time, beneficent institution.
Chapter VIII
Departmental Kings of Nature
THE preceding investigation
has proved that the same union of sacred functions with a royal
title which meets us in the King
of the Wood at Nemi, the Sacrificial King at Rome, and the
magistrate called the King at
Athens, occurs frequently outside the limits of classical antiquity
and is a common feature of
societies at all stages from barbarism to civilisation. Further, it
appears that the royal priest
is often a king, not only in name but in fact, swaying the sceptre
as well as the crosier. All
this confirms the traditional view of the origin of the titular and
priestly kings in the
republics of ancient Greece and Italy. At least by showing that the
combi-nation
of spiritual and temporal
power, of which Graeco-Italian tradition preserved the memo-ry,
has actually existed in many
places, we have obviated any suspicion of improbability that
might have attached to the
tradition. Therefore we may now fairly ask, May not the King of
the Wood have had an origin
like that which a probable tradition assigns to the Sacrificial
King of Rome and the titular
King of Athens? In other words, may not his predecessors in
office have been a line of
kings whom a republican revolution stripped of their political power,
leaving them only their
religious functions and the shadow of a crown? There are at least two
reasons for answering this
question in the negative. One reason is drawn from the abode of
the priest of Nemi; the other
from his title, the King of the Wood. If his predecessors had been
kings in the ordinary sense,
he would surely have been found residing, like the fallen kings of
Rome and Athens, in the city
of which the sceptre had passed from him. This city must have
been Aricia, for there was
none nearer. But Aricia was three miles off from his forest sanctu-ary
by the lake shore. If he
reigned, it was not in the city, but in the greenwood. Again his title,
King of the Wood, hardly allows
us to suppose that he had ever been a king in the common
sense of the word. More likely
he was a king of nature, and of a special side of nature, name-ly,
the woods from which he took
his title. If we could find instances of what we may call
departmental kings of nature,
that is of persons supposed to rule over particular elements or
aspects of nature, they would
probably present a closer analogy to the King of the Wood than
the divine kings we have been
hitherto considering, whose control of nature is general rather
than special. Instances of
such departmental kings are not wanting.
On a hill at Bomma near the
mouth of the Congo dwells Namvulu Vumu, King of the Rain and
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Page 88?Storm. Of some of the tribes on the Upper Nile we are told that they
have no kings in the
common sense; the only persons
whom they acknowledge as such are the Kings of the Rain,
Mata Kodou, who are credited
with the power of giving rain at the proper time, that is, the
rainy season. Before the rains
begin to fall at the end of March the country is a parched and
arid desert; and the cattle,
which form the people’s chief wealth, perish for lack of grass. So,
when the end of March draws
on, each householder betakes himself to the King of the Rain
and offers him a cow that he
may make the blessed waters of heaven to drip on the brown
and withered pastures. If no
shower falls, the people assemble and demand that the king
shall give them rain; and if
the sky still continues cloudless, they rip up his belly, in which he
is believed to keep the
storms. Amongst the Bari tribe one of these Rain Kings made rain by
sprinkling water on the ground
out of a handbell.
Among tribes on the outskirts
of Abyssinia a similar office exists and has been thus described
by an observer: “The
priesthood of the Alfai, as he is called by the Barea and Kunama, is a
remarkable one; he is believed
to be able to make rain. This office formerly existed among
the Algeds and appears to be
still common to the Nuba negroes. The Alfai of the Barea, who
is also consulted by the
northern Kunama, lives near Tembadere on a mountain alone with
his family. The people bring
him tribute in the form of clothes and fruits, and cultivate for him
a large field of his own. He
is a kind of king, and his office passes by inheritance to his broth-er
or sister’s son. He is
supposed to conjure down rain and to drive away the locusts. But if
he disappoints the people’s
expectation and a great drought arises in the land, the Alfai is
stoned to death, and his
nearest relations are obliged to cast the first stone at him. When we
passed through the country,
the office of Alfai was still held by an old man; but I heard that
rain-making had proved too
dangerous for him and that he had renounced his office.”
In the backwoods of Cambodia
live two mysterious sovereigns known as the King of the Fire
and the King of the Water.
Their fame is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese
peninsula; but only a faint
echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few years ago no
European, so far as is known,
had ever seen either of them; and their very existence might
have passed for a fable, were
it not that till lately communications were regularly maintained
between them and the King of
Cambodia, who year by year exchanged presents with them.
Their royal functions are of a
purely mystic or spiritual order; they have no political authority;
they are simple peasants,
living by the sweat of their brow and the offerings of the faithful.
According to one account they
live in absolute solitude, never meeting each other and never
seeing a human face. They
inhabit successively seven towers perched upon seven moun-tains,
and every year they pass from
one tower to another. People come furtively and cast
within their reach what is
needful for their subsistence. The kingship lasts seven years, the
time necessary to inhabit all
the towers successively; but many die before their time is out.
The offices are hereditary in
one or (according to others) two royal families, who enjoy high
consideration, have revenues
assigned to them, and are exempt from the necessity of tilling
the ground. But naturally the
dignity is not coveted, and when a vacancy occurs, all eligible
men (they must be strong and
have children) flee and hide themselves. Another account,
admitting the reluctance of
the hereditary candidates to accept the crown, does not counte-nance
the report of their
hermit-like seclusion in the seven towers. For it represents the peo-ple
as prostrating themselves
before the mystic kings whenever they appear in public, it being
thought that a terrible
hurricane would burst over the country if this mark of homage were
omitted. Like many other
sacred kings, of whom we shall read in the sequel, the Kings of Fire
and Water are not allowed to
die a natural death, for that would lower their reputation.
Accordingly when one of them
is seriously ill, the elders hold a consultation and if they think
he cannot recover they stab
him to death. His body is burned and the ashes are piously col-
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Page
89?lected and publicly
honoured for five years. Part of them is given to the widow, and she keeps
them in an urn, which she must
carry on her back when she goes to weep on her husband’s
grave.
We are told that the Fire
King, the more important of the two, whose supernatural powers
have never been questioned,
officiates at marriages, festivals, and sacrifices in honour of the
Yan or spirit. On these
occasions a special place is set apart for him; and the path by which
he approaches is spread with
white cotton cloths. A reason for confining the royal dignity to
the same family is that this
family is in possession of certain famous talismans which would
lose their virtue or disappear
if they passed out of the family. These talismans are three: the
fruit of a creeper called Cui,
gathered ages ago at the time of the last deluge, but still fresh
and green; a rattan, also very
old but bearing flowers that never fade; and lastly, a sword con-taining
a Yan or spirit, who guards it
constantly and works miracles with it. The spirit is said to
be that of a slave, whose
blood chanced to fall upon the blade while it was being forged, and
who died a voluntary death to
expiate his involuntary offence. By means of the two former tal-ismans
the Water King can raise a
flood that would drown the whole earth. If the Fire King
draws the magic sword a few
inches from its sheath, the sun is hidden and men and beasts
fall into a profound sleep;
were he to draw it quite out of the scabbard, the world would come
to an end. To this wondrous
brand sacrifices of buffaloes, pigs, fowls, and ducks are offered
for rain. It is kept swathed
in cotton and silk; and amongst the annual presents sent by the
King of Cambodia were rich
stuffs to wrap the sacred sword.
Contrary to the common usage
of the country, which is to bury the dead, the bodies of both
these mystic monarchs are
burnt, but their nails and some of their teeth and bones are reli-giously
preserved as amulets. It is while
the corpse is being consumed on the pyre that the
kinsmen of the deceased
magician flee to the forest and hide themselves, for fear of being
elevated to the invidious
dignity which he has just vacated. The people go and search for
them, and the first whose
lurking place they discover is made King of Fire or Water.
These, then, are examples of
what I have called departmental kings of nature. But it is a far
cry to Italy from the forests
of Cambodia and the sources of the Nile. And though Kings of
Rain, Water, and Fire have
been found, we have still to discover a King of the Wood to match
the Arician priest who bore
that title. Perhaps we shall find him nearer home.
Chapter IX
The Worship of Trees
1. TREE-SPIRITS
IN the religious history of
the Aryan race in Europe the worship of trees has played an impor-tant
part. Nothing could be more
natural. For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with
immense primaeval forests, in
which the scattered clearings must have appeared like islets in
an ocean of green. Down to the
first century before our era the Hercynian forest stretched
eastward from the Rhine for a
distance at once vast and unknown; Germans whom Caesar
questioned had travelled for
two months through it without reaching the end. Four centuries
later it was visited by the
Emperor Julian, and the solitude, the gloom, the silence of the forest
appear to have made a deep
impression on his sensitive nature. He declared that he knew
nothing like it in the Roman
empire. In our own country the wealds of Kent, Surrey, and
Sussex are remnants of the
great forest of Anderida, which once clothed the whole of the
south-eastern portion of the
island. Westward it seems to have stretched till it joined another
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Page 90?forest that extended from Hampshire to Devon. In the reign of Henry II.
the citizens of London
still hunted the wild bull and
the boar in the woods of Hampstead. Even under the later
Plantagenets the royal forests
were sixty-eight in number. In the forest of Arden it was said
that down to modern times a
squirrel might leap from tree to tree for nearly the whole length
of Warwickshire. The
excavation of ancient pile-villages in the valley of the Po has shown that
long before the rise and
probably the foundation of Rome the north of Italy was covered with
dense woods of elms,
chestnuts, and especially of oaks. Archaeology is here confirmed by
history; for classical writers
contain many references to Italian forests which have now disap-peared.
As late as the fourth century
before our era Rome was divided from central Etruria by
the dreaded Ciminian forest,
which Livy compares to the woods of Germany. No merchant, if
we may trust the Roman
historian, had ever penetrated its pathless solitudes; and it was
deemed a most daring feat when
a Roman general, after sending two scouts to explore its
intricacies, led his army into
the forest and, making his way to a ridge of the wooded moun-tains,
looked down on the rich
Etrurian fields spread out below. In Greece beautiful woods of
pine, oak, and other trees
still linger on the slopes of the high Arcadian mountains, still adorn
with their verdure the deep
gorge through which the Ladon hurries to join the sacred Alpheus,
and were still, down to a few
years ago, mirrored in the dark blue waters of the lonely lake of
Pheneus; but they are mere
fragments of the forests which clothed great tracts in antiquity,
and which at a more remote
epoch may have spanned the Greek peninsula from sea to sea.
From an examination of the Teutonic
words for “temple” Grimm has made it probable that
amongst the Germans the oldest
sanctuaries were natural woods. However that may be, tree-worship
is well attested for all the
great European families of the Aryan stock. Amongst the
Celts the oak-worship of the
Druids is familiar to every one, and their old word for sanctuary
seems to be identical in
origin and meaning with the Latin nemus, a grove or woodland glade,
which still survives in the
name of Nemi. Sacred groves were common among the ancient
Germans, and tree-worship is
hardly extinct amongst their descendants at the present day.
How serious that worship was
in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty
appointed by the old German
laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The
culprit’s navel was to be cut
out and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and
he