Part 8

No traces of articles related to the religion of the Pharaohs are found in the burial places of the aborigines. In place of the statuettes and funerary divinities of later times are found rude figurines of animals cut in green schists. They represent fishes, tortoises with eyes adorned with hard stone or nacre, and numerous signs the origin of which is unknown, and were apparently regarded as fetiches or divinities. Articles of pottery are very numerous, very crude, and of a great variety of forms. It is not necessary to suppose that the people who have left these relics were savages or barbarians. History and even the present age afford instances of many peoples who have obtained considerable degrees of civilization while backward in some of the arts. It is hardly possible to achieve delicacy of design and finish without the use of metals. I believe I have shown that an age of stone once existed in Egypt, and that it furthermore played an important part, even in Pharaonic civilization.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Author's Recherches sur les Origines de l'Egypte._

SUPERSTITION AND CRIME.

BY PROF. E. P. EVANS.

In January, 1898, an elderly woman came in great anxiety to a priest of the Church of St. Ursula, in Munich, Bavaria, and complained that the devil haunted her house at night and frightened her by making a great noise. In explanation of this unseasonable and undesirable visit from the lower world she stated that a joint-stock company had been formed in Berlin, with a branch in Munich, for the purpose of discovering hidden treasures, and that in order to attain this object a human sacrifice must be made to the devil, and that she had been selected as the victim. A woman, whose husband was a stockholder in the aforesaid company, had kindly communicated to her this information, so that she might be prepared and have time to set her house in order. Satan, however, grew impatient of the promised sacrifice, and began to look after her. The priest sent one of his younger assistants at the altar to read appropriate prayers in the haunted house, and thus exorcise the evil spirit. We can hardly suppose that his reverence believed in the reality of the reported apparition, and yet he could not assert its impossibility by calling in question the existence of the devil or the actuality of diabolical agencies in human affairs without undermining the foundations of the ecclesiastical system, of which he was an acknowledged supporter. Such a declaration would "take away our hope," as the Scotchman said of the denial of a literal hell-fire and the doctrine of eternal punishment. It was for the same reason that the great body of the Catholic clergy, from Pope Leo XIII and the highest dignitaries of the church down to the humblest country vicar, so easily fell into the snares laid by Leo Taxil and accepted the signature of the devil Bitru as genuine, and his revelations concerning the pact of the freemasons with Satan as authentic. It is certainly somewhat startling to meet with such a case of gross superstition as the above-mentioned in one of the seats of modern science and centers of European civilization. In rural districts, remote from the influences of intellectual culture, however, instances of this kind are of quite frequent occurrence, and often result in the commission of crime. Human sacrifices to Satan are still by no means uncommon in many parts of Russia, and are supposed to be effective in warding off famine and in staying the ravages of pestilence. Even in Germany and other countries of western Europe the belief in their prophylactic virtue is remarkably prevalent, and would be often put into practice were it not for the stricter administration of justice and the greater terror of the law.

In October, 1889, the criminal court in the governmental province of Archangelsk, in northern Russia, sentenced a Samoyede, Jefrern Pyrerka, to fifteen years' imprisonment with hard labor for the murder of a maiden named Ssavaney. His sole defense was that an unusually severe winter with a heavy fall of snow had produced a famine followed by scurvy, of which all his children had died. He therefore made an image of the devil out of wood, smeared its lips with fat, and set it up on a hillock. He then attempted to lasso one of his companions, Andrey Tabarey, and had already thrown the noose round his neck, when the energetic wife of the intended victim intervened and rescued her husband. Shortly afterward he succeeded in strangling the girl and offering her as a sacrifice to his idol. In the province of Novgorod, known as "the darkest Russia," it is a general custom among the country people to sacrifice some animal, usually a black cat, a black cock, or a black dog, by burying it alive, in order to check the spread of cholera. In the village of Kamenka, a peasant, whose son had died of this disease, interred with the body eight live tomcats. The immolation of dumb animals, however, is deemed less efficacious than that of human beings. On one occasion, when the cholera was raging severely, a deputation of peasants waited upon their parson, stating that they had determined to bury him alive in order to appease the demon of the plague. He escaped this horrible death only by apparently acceding to their wishes and craving a few days' respite in order to prepare for such a solemn ceremony; meanwhile he took the measures necessary to secure his safety and thwarted the purpose of his loving parishioners. In Okopovitchi, a village of the same province, the peasants succeeded in enticing an aged woman, Lucia Manjkov, into the cemetery, where they thrust her alive into the grave containing the bodies of those who had died of the epidemic, and quickly covered her up. When brought to trial they proved that they had acted on the advice of a military surgeon, Kosakovitch, who was therefore regarded as the chief culprit, and sentenced to be knouted by the hangman, and then to undergo twelve years' penal servitude in Siberia. We are indebted for these instances of barbarous superstition to the researches of Augustus Löwenstimm, associate jurisconsult in the department of justice at St. Petersburg, who has derived them from thoroughly authentic and mostly official sources. He reports several occurrences of a similar kind during the epidemics of cholera in 1831, 1855, and 1872. Indeed, it is very difficult to abolish such pagan practices so long as the clergy foster the notion that animal sacrifices are expiatory and propitiatory in their effects. In some parts of the province of Vologda it is still customary on the day dedicated to the prophet Elias (July 20th in the Greek calendar) to offer up bullocks, he-goats, or other quadrupeds within the precincts of the church. The animal is driven into the courtyard surrounding the sacred edifice and there slaughtered; the flesh is boiled in a large kettle, one half of it being kept by the peasants who provide the sacrifice, while the other half is distributed among the priests and sacristans.[26]

The belief that the walls of dams, bridges, aqueducts, and buildings are rendered preternaturally strong by immuring a living human being within them still prevails in many countries of Christendom, and there is hardly an old castle in Europe that has not a legend of this sort connected with it. Usually a child is supposed to be selected for this purpose, and the roving bands of gypsies are popularly accused of furnishing the infant victims. The custom of depositing gold coins or other precious objects in the foundation stones of important public edifices is doubtless a survival of the ancient superstition.[27]

Löwenstimm mentions a curious superstition of pagan origin still practiced in portions of Russia, and known as "_korovya smertj_" (cow-death) and "_opachivaniye_" (plowing roundabout). If pestilence or murrain prevails in a village, an old woman of repute as a seeress or fortune-teller enters the confines of the village at midnight and beats a pan. Thereupon all the women of the place assemble in haste, armed with divers domestic utensils--frying-pans, pokers, tongs, shovels, scythes, and cudgels. After shutting the cattle in their stalls, and warning the men not to leave their houses, a procession is formed. The seeress takes off her dress and pronounces a curse upon Death. She is then hitched to a plow, together with a bevy of virgins and a misshapen woman, if such a one can be found, and a continuous and closed furrow is drawn round the village three times. When the procession starts, the image of some saint suitable to the occasion, that of St. Blasius, for example, in the case of murrain, is borne in front of it; this is followed by the seeress, clad only in a shift, with disheveled hair and riding on a broomstick; after her come women and maidens drawing the plow, and behind them the rest of the crowd, shrieking and making a fearful din. They kill every animal they meet, and if a man is so unfortunate as to fall in with them he is mercilessly beaten, and usually put to death. In the eyes of these raging women he is not a human being, but Death himself in the form of a were-wolf, who seeks to cross their path and thus break the charm and destroy the healing virtue of the furrow. The ceremony varies in different places, and generally ends by burying alive a cat, cock, or dog. In some districts the whole population of the village, both men and women, take part in the procession, and are often attended by the clergy with sacred images and consecrated banners. During the prevalence of the pest in the province of Podolia, in 1738, the inhabitants of the village of Gummenez, while marching in procession through the fields, met Michael Matkovskij, a nobleman of a neighboring village, who was looking for his stray horses. The strange man, wandering about with an eager look and a bridle in his hand, was regarded as the incarnate pestilence, and was therefore seized and most brutally beaten and left lying half naked and half dead on the ground. At length he recovered his senses and succeeded with great difficulty in reaching his home. No sooner was it known that he was still alive than the peasants rushed into his house, dragged him to their village, subjected him to terrible tortures, and finally burned him. A curious feature of these remedial rites is the mixture of paganism and Christianity which characterizes them; and it is an unquestionable though almost incredible fact that their atoning efficacy is often quite as firmly believed in by the village priests of the Russian Church as by the most ignorant members of their flock. In the autumn of 1894 some Russian peasants in the district of Kazan slew one of their own number as a sacrifice to the gods of the Votiaks, a Finnish race dwelling on the Volga, Viatka, and Kama Rivers. Even orthodox Christians of the Greek Church, although regarding these gods as devils, fear and seek to propitiate them, especially in times of public distress.

Still more widely diffused is the practice of infanticide as the sequence of superstition. The belief that dwarfs or gnomes, dwelling in the inner parts of the earth, carry off beautiful newborn babes and leave their own deformed offspring in their stead is not confined to any one people, but is current alike in Germanic, Celtic, Romanic, and Slavic countries, and causes a misshapen child to be looked upon with suspicion and subjected to cruel tortures and even killed. The supposed changeling is often severely beaten with juniper rods and the scourging attended with incantations, so as to compel the wicked fairies to reclaim their deformed bantling and restore the stolen child. If the castigation proves ineffective, more summary measures are frequently taken, and the supposititious suckling is thrown out of the window on a dunghill or immersed in boiling water. In 1877, in the city of New York, an Irish immigrant and his wife burned their child to death under the delusion that they were ridding themselves of a changeling. Cases of this kind are quite common in Ireland, where the victims are sometimes adults.[28] Not long since Magoney, an Irish peasant, had a sickly child, which the most careful nurture failed to restore to health and strength. The parents, therefore, became convinced that a changeling had been imposed upon them, and when the boy was four years old they resolved to have recourse to boiling water, in which he was kept, notwithstanding his shrieks and protestations that he was not an elf, but their own Johnny Magoney, until death released him from his torments.

Wilhelm Mannhardt, the celebrated writer on folklore, states that when, in 1850, he was in Löblau, a village of West Prussia, he saw a man brutally maltreating a boy on the street. On inquiry he found that the lad had done nothing worthy of blame, but that his only fault was an exceptionally large head. This cranial peculiarity, offensively conspicuous in what seems to have been a narrow-headed family, was reason enough for the parents to disown their offspring, and to treat him as the counterfeit of a child foisted in by the fairies. At Hadersleben, a considerable market town of North Silesia, the wife of a farmer, in 1883, gave birth to a puny infant, which the parents at once assumed to be a changeling. In order to defeat the evil designs of the elves and to compel the restoration of their own child, they held the newborn over a bed of live coals on the hearth until it was covered with blisters and died in intense agony. In East Prussia, the Mazurs, a Polish race, whose only notable contribution to modern civilization and the gayety of nations is the mazurka, take precautionary measures by placing a book (usually the Bible, although any book will do) under the head of the newborn babe, so as to prevent the devil from spiriting it away and substituting for it one of his own hellish brood, thus unwittingly furnishing a marvelous illustration of the beneficent influence of the printing press and the magic power of literature. The Estonian inhabitants of the island of Oesel in Livonia refrain from kindling a fire in the house while the rite of baptism is being celebrated, lest the light of the flames should render it easier for Satan surreptitiously to exchange an imp for the infant. After the sacred ceremony has been performed there is supposed to be no danger of such a substitution.

One of the most incredible instances of this extremely silly and surprisingly persistent superstition occurred in 1871 at Biskunizy, a village of Prussian Posen, where a laborer, named Bekker, had by industry and frugality gradually acquired a competence and been able to buy a house of his own, in which he led a happy domestic life with his wife and five children, of whom he was very fond. After fourteen years of unbroken felicity the wife's elder sister, Marianne Chernyak, came from Poland to pay them a visit. This woman was a crackbrained devotee, who spent half her time in going to mass and the other half in backbiting her neighbors. She also claimed that she could detect at once whether a person is in league with Satan, and could cast out devils. The villagers came to look upon her as a witch, and avoided all association with her, especially as her aberrations manifested themselves in exceedingly malevolent and mischievous forms. Unfortunately, she acquired complete ascendency over her younger sister, who accepted her absurd pretensions as real. On November 19, 1871, Marianne, after returning from confession, went to bed, but at midnight Mrs. Bekker, who slept with her youngest child, a boy about a year old, was awakened by a fearful shriek and lit the lamp. Thereupon the sister rushed into the room, crying: "The demons have stolen your child and put a changeling in your bed: beat him, beat him, if you wish to have your child again!" Under the influence of this suggestion, which seemed to be almost hypnotic in its character, the bewildered mother began to beat the boy. The aunt now seized him and swung him to and fro, as if she would fling him out of the window, at the same time calling out to Satan: "There! you have him; take your brat!" She then gave him back to his mother with the words: "Throw him to the ground, drub him, beat him to death; otherwise you will never recover your child." This advice was followed, and the boy severely strapped with a heavy girdle as he lay on the floor. Meanwhile Bekker, hearing the noise, got up and at first tried to intervene for the protection of his son, but was easily convinced by his wife that she was doing the right thing, and persuaded to aid her in discomfiting the devil by beating the boy with a juniper stick. The process of exorcism, thus renewed with increased vigor, soon proved fatal. At this juncture, as the son of the aunt, a lad of five years, threw himself down with loud lamentations beside the dead body of his little cousin, his mother cried out: "Beat him; he is not my child! Why should we spare him? We shall get other children!" Thereupon he, too, was maltreated in the same manner until he expired. The aunt then declared that the devil had crept into the stovepipe, and went to work to demolish the stove, but, when she was prevented from doing so, fled into the garden, where she was found the next morning by the school-teacher. By this time Bekker and his wife seem to have come to their senses, and were sitting by the corpses of the murdered children, weeping and praying, as the neighbors entered the house. The trial, which took place at Ostrov in January, 1872, led to the introduction of conflicting expert testimony concerning the mental soundness of the accused, and the matter was finally referred to a commission of psychiaters in Berlin, who decided that Bekker and his wife were not suffering from mental disease, and therefore not irresponsible, but that the aunt was subject to periodical insanity to such a degree as not to be accountable for her actions. Curiously enough, the jurors remained uninfluenced by this testimony, and pronounced her guilty of the crime laid to her charge, and in accordance with this verdict the court sentenced her to three years' imprisonment with hard labor. The jurors even went so far as to declare that she herself did not believe in the existence of elf children or satanic changelings, but made use of this popular superstition for her own selfish purposes, and that she guilefully denounced her own boy as an imp in order to get rid of him. In this verdict, or rather in the considerations urged in support of it, it is easy to perceive the effects of strong local prejudice against the accused, who had the reputation of being a lazy, malicious, and crafty person, and was therefore denied the extenuation of honest self-deception. Indeed, in such cases it is always more or less difficult to determine where sincere delusion ceases and conscious swindling begins. Just at this point the annals of superstition present many puzzling problems, the solution of which is of special interest as well as of great practical importance not only to the psychologist and psychiater, but also to the legislator and jurisprudent, who have to do with the enactment and administration of criminal laws.