CHAPTER XI. THE EXTERNAL SOUL IN FOLK-CUSTOM.

§ 1. The External Soul in Inanimate Things.

(M122) Thus the idea that the soul may be deposited for a longer or shorter time in some place of security outside the body, or at all events in the hair, is found in the popular tales of many races. It remains to shew that the idea is not a mere figment devised to adorn a tale, but is a real article of primitive faith, which has given rise to a corresponding set of customs.

(M123) We have seen that in the tales the hero, as a preparation for battle, sometimes removes his soul from his body, in order that his body may be invulnerable and immortal in the combat. With a like intention the savage removes his soul from his body on various occasions of real or imaginary peril. Thus among the people of Minahassa in Celebes, when a family moves into a new house, a priest collects the souls of the whole family in a bag, and afterwards restores them to their owners, because the moment of entering a new house is supposed to be fraught with supernatural danger.(411) In Southern Celebes, when a woman is brought to bed, the messenger who fetches the doctor or the midwife always carries with him something made of iron, such as a chopping-knife, which he delivers to the doctor. The doctor must keep the thing in his house till the confinement is over, when he gives it back, receiving a fixed sum of money for doing so. The chopping-knife, or whatever it is, represents the woman’s soul, which at this critical time is believed to be safer out of her body than in it. Hence the doctor must take great care of the object; for were it lost, the woman’s soul would assuredly, they think, be lost with it.(412) But in Celebes the convenience of occasionally depositing the soul in some external object is apparently not limited to human beings. The Alfoors, or Toradjas, who inhabit the central district of that island, and among whose industries the working of iron occupies a foremost place, attribute to the metal a soul which would be apt to desert its body under the blows of the hammer, if some means were not found to detain it. Accordingly in every smithy of Poso—for that is the name of the country of these people—you may see hanging up a bundle of wooden instruments, such as chopping-knives, swords, spear-heads, and so forth. This bundle goes by the name of _lamoa_, which is the general word for “gods,” and in it the soul of the iron that is being wrought in the smithy is, according to one account, supposed to reside. “If we did not hang the _lamoa_ over the anvil,” they say, “the iron would flow away and be unworkable,” on account of the absence of the soul.(413) However, according to another interpretation these wooden models are substitutes offered to the gods in room of the iron, whose soul the covetous deities might otherwise abstract for their own use, thus making the metal unmalleable.(414)

(M124) Among the Dyaks of Pinoeh, a district of South-Eastern Borneo, when a child is born, a medicine-man is sent for, who conjures the soul of the infant into half a coco-nut, which he thereupon covers with a cloth and places on a square platter or charger suspended by cords from the roof. This ceremony he repeats at every new moon for a year.(415) The intention of the ceremony is not explained by the writer who describes it, but we may conjecture that it is to place the soul of the child in a safer place than its own frail little body. This conjecture is confirmed by the reason assigned for a similar custom observed elsewhere in the Indian Archipelago. In the Kei Islands, when there is a newly-born child in a house, an empty coco-nut, split and spliced together again, may sometimes be seen hanging beside a rough wooden image of an ancestor. The soul of the infant is believed to be temporarily deposited in the coco-nut in order that it may be safe from the attacks of evil spirits; but when the child grows bigger and stronger, the soul will take up its permanent abode in its own body. Similarly among the Esquimaux of Alaska, when a child is sick, the medicine-man will sometimes extract its soul from its body and place it for safe-keeping in an amulet, which for further security he deposits in his own medicine-bag. (416) It seems probable that many amulets have been similarly regarded as soul-boxes, that is, as safes in which the souls of the owners are kept for greater security.(417) An old Mang’anje woman in the West Shire district of British Central Africa used to wear round her neck an ivory ornament, hollow, and about three inches long, which she called her life or soul (_moyo wanga_). Naturally, she would not part with it; a planter tried to buy it of her, but in vain.(418) When Mr. James Macdonald was one day sitting in the house of a Hlubi chief, awaiting the appearance of that great man, who was busy decorating his person, a native pointed to a pair of magnificent ox-horns, and said, “Ntame has his soul in these horns.” The horns were those of an animal which had been sacrificed, and they were held sacred. A magician had fastened them to the roof to protect the house and its inmates from the thunder-bolt. “The idea,” adds Mr. Macdonald, “is in no way foreign to South African thought. A man’s soul there may dwell in the roof of his house, in a tree, by a spring of water, or on some mountain scaur.”(419) Among the natives of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain there is a secret society which goes by the name of Ingniet or Ingiet. On his entrance into it every man receives a stone in the shape either of a human being or of an animal, and henceforth his soul is believed to be knit up in a manner with the stone. If it breaks, it is an evil omen for him; they say that the thunder has struck the stone and that he who owns it will soon die. If nevertheless the man survives the breaking of his soul-stone, they say that it was not a proper soul-stone and he gets a new one instead.(420) The emperor Romanus Lecapenus was once informed by an astronomer that the life of Simeon, prince of Bulgaria, was bound up with a certain column in Constantinople, so that if the capital of the column were removed, Simeon would immediately die. The emperor took the hint and removed the capital, and at the same hour, as the emperor learned by enquiry, Simeon died of heart disease in Bulgaria.(421) The deified kings of ancient Egypt appear to have enjoyed the privilege of depositing their spiritual doubles or souls (_ka_) during their lifetime in a number of portrait statues, properly fourteen for each king, which stood in the chamber of adoration (_pa douaït_) of the temple and were revered as the equivalents or representatives of the monarchs themselves.(422) Among the Karens of Burma “the knife with which the navel string is cut is carefully preserved for the child. The life of the child is supposed to be in some way connected with it, for, if lost or destroyed, it is said the child will not be long lived.”(423) Among the Shawnee Indians of North America it once happened that an eminent man was favoured with a special revelation by the Great Spirit. Wisely refusing to hide the sacred light of revelation under a bushel, he generously communicated a few sparks of the illumination to John Tanner, a white man who lived for many years as an Indian among the Indians. “Henceforth,” said the inspired sage, “the fire must never be suffered to go out in your lodge. Summer and winter, day and night, in the storm, or when it is calm, you must remember that the life in your body, and the fire in your lodge, are the same, and of the same date. If you suffer your fire to be extinguished, at that moment your life will be at its end.”(424)

(M125) Again, we have seen that in folk-tales a man’s soul or strength is sometimes represented as bound up with his hair, and that when his hair is cut off he dies or grows weak. So the natives of Amboyna used to think that their strength was in their hair and would desert them if it were shorn. A criminal under torture in a Dutch Court of that island persisted in denying his guilt till his hair was cut off, when he immediately confessed. One man, who was tried for murder, endured without flinching the utmost ingenuity of his torturers till he saw the surgeon standing with a pair of shears. On asking what this was for, and being told that it was to cut his hair, he begged they would not do it, and made a clean breast. In subsequent cases, when torture failed to wring a confession from a prisoner, the Dutch authorities made a practice of cutting off his hair.(425) In Ceram it is still believed that if young people have their hair cut they will be weakened and enervated thereby.(426)

(M126) Here in Europe it used to be thought that the maleficent powers of witches and wizards resided in their hair, and that nothing could make any impression on these miscreants so long as they kept their hair on. Hence in France it was customary to shave the whole bodies of persons charged with sorcery before handing them over to the torturer. Millaeus witnessed the torture of some persons at Toulouse, from whom no confession could be wrung until they were stripped and completely shaven, when they readily acknowledged the truth of the charge. A woman also, who apparently led a pious life, was put to the torture on suspicion of witchcraft, and bore her agonies with incredible constancy, until complete depilation drove her to admit her guilt. The noted inquisitor Sprenger contented himself with shaving the head of the suspected witch or wizard; but his more thorough-going colleague Cumanus shaved the whole bodies of forty-one women before committing them all to the flames. He had high authority for this rigorous scrutiny, since Satan himself, in a sermon preached from the pulpit of North Berwick church, comforted his many servants by assuring them that no harm could befall them “sa lang as their hair wes on, and sould newir latt ane teir fall fra thair ene.”(427) Similarly in Bastar, a province of India, “if a man is adjudged guilty of witchcraft, he is beaten by the crowd, his hair is shaved, the hair being supposed to constitute his power of mischief, his front teeth are knocked out, in order, it is said, to prevent him from muttering incantations.... Women suspected of sorcery have to undergo the same ordeal; if found guilty, the same punishment is awarded, and after being shaved, their hair is attached to a tree in some public place.”(428) So among the Bhils of India, when a woman was convicted of witchcraft and had been subjected to various forms of persuasion, such as hanging head downwards from a tree and having pepper put into her eyes, a lock of hair was cut from her head and buried in the ground, “that the last link between her and her former powers of mischief might be broken.”(429) In like manner among the Aztecs of Mexico, when wizards and witches “had done their evil deeds, and the time came to put an end to their detestable life, some one laid hold of them and cropped the hair on the crown of their heads, which took from them all their power of sorcery and enchantment, and then it was that by death they put an end to their odious existence.”(430)

§ 2. The External Soul in Plants.

(M127) Further it has been shewn that in folk-tales the life of a person is sometimes so bound up with the life of a plant that the withering of the plant will immediately follow or be followed by the death of the person.(431) Similarly among the natives of the Pennefather River in Queensland, when a visiter has made himself very agreeable and taken his departure, an effigy of him about three or four feet long is cut on some soft tree, such as the _Canarium australasicum_, so as to face in the direction taken by the popular stranger. Afterwards from observing the state of the tree the natives infer the corresponding state of their absent friend, whose illness or death are apparently supposed to be portended by the fall of the leaves or of the tree.(432) In Uganda, when a new royal enclosure with its numerous houses was built for a new king, barkcloth trees used to be planted at the main entrance by priests of each principal deity and offerings were laid under each tree for its particular god. Thenceforth “the trees were carefully guarded and tended, because it was believed that as they grew and flourished, so the king’s life and power would increase.”(433) Among the M’Bengas in Western Africa, about the Gaboon, when two children are born on the same day, the people plant two trees of the same kind and dance round them. The life of each of the children is believed to be bound up with the life of one of the trees; and if the tree dies or is thrown down, they are sure that the child will soon die.(434) In Sierra Leone also it is customary at the birth of a child to plant a shoot of a _malep_-tree, and they think that the tree will grow with the child and be its god. If a tree which has been thus planted withers away, the people consult a sorcerer on the subject.(435) Among the Wajagga of German East Africa, when a child is born, it is usual to plant a cultivated plant of some sort behind the house. The plant is thenceforth carefully tended, for they believe that were it to wither away the child would die. When the navel-string drops from the infant, it is buried under the plant. The species of birth-plant varies with the clan; members of one clan, for example, plant a particular sort of banana, members of another clan plant a sugar-cane, and so on.(436) Among the Swahili of East Africa, when a child is born, the afterbirth and navel-string are buried in the courtyard and a mark is made on the spot. Seven days afterwards, the hair of the child is shaved and deposited, along with the clippings of its nails, in the same place. Then over all these relics of the infant’s person a coco-nut is planted. As the tree grows up from the nut, the child likes to point it out to his playfellows and tell them, “This coco-nut palm is my navel.” In planting the coco-nut the parents say, “May God cause our child to grow up, that he or she may one day enjoy the coco-nut milk of the tree which we plant here.”(437) Though it is not expressly affirmed, we may perhaps assume that such a birth-tree is supposed to stand in a sympathetic relation with the life of the person. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of a tree.(438) The chief of Old Town in Calabar kept his soul in a sacred grove near a spring of water. When some Europeans, in frolic or ignorance, cut down part of the grove, the spirit was most indignant and threatened the perpetrators of the deed, according to the king, with all manner of evil.(439) Among the Fans of the French Congo, when a chief’s son is born, the remains of the navel-string are buried under a sacred fig-tree, and “thenceforth great importance is attached to the growth of the tree; it is strictly forbidden to touch it. Any attempt on the tree would be considered as an attack on the human being himself.”(440) Among the Boloki of the Upper Congo a family has a plant with red leaves (called _nkungu_) for its totem. When a woman of the family is with child for the first time, one of the totemic plants is planted near the hearth outside the house and is never destroyed, otherwise it is believed that the child would be born thin and weak and would remain puny and sickly. “The healthy life of the children and family is bound up with the healthiness and life of the totem tree as respected and preserved by the family.”(441) Among the Baganda of Central Africa a child’s afterbirth was called the second child and was believed to be animated by a spirit, which at once became a ghost. The afterbirth was usually buried at the root of a banana tree, and afterwards the tree was carefully guarded by old women, who prevented any one from going near it; they tied ropes of fibre from tree to tree to isolate it, and all the child’s excretions were thrown into this enclosure. When the fruit ripened, it was cut by the old woman in charge. The reason for guarding the tree thus carefully was a belief that if any stranger were to eat of the fruit of the tree or to drink beer brewed from it, he would carry off with him the ghost of the child’s afterbirth, which had been buried at the root of the banana-tree, and the living child would then die in order to follow its twin ghost. Whereas a grandparent of the child, by eating the fruit or drinking the beer, averted this catastrophe and ensured the health of the child.(442) Among the Wakondyo, at the north-western corner of Lake Albert Nyanza, it is customary to bury the afterbirth at the foot of a young banana-tree, and the fruit of this particular tree may be eaten by no one but the woman who assisted at the birth.(443) The reason for the custom is not mentioned, but probably, as among the Baganda, the life of the child is supposed to be bound up with the life of the tree, since the afterbirth, regarded as a spiritual double of the infant, has been buried at the root of the tree.

(M128) Some of the Papuans unite the life of a new-born child sympathetically with that of a tree by driving a pebble into the bark of the tree. This is supposed to give them complete mastery over the child’s life; if the tree is cut down, the child will die.(444) After a birth the Maoris used to bury the navel-string in a sacred place and plant a young sapling over it. As the tree grew, it was a _tohu oranga_ or sign of life for the child; if it flourished, the child would prosper; if it withered and died, the parents augured the worst for their child.(445) In the Chatham Islands, when the child of a leading man received its name, it was customary to plant a tree, “the growth of which was to be as the growth of the child,” and during the planting priests chanted a spell.(446) In some parts of Fiji the navel-string of a male child is planted together with a coco-nut or the slip of a breadfruit-tree, and the child’s life is supposed to be intimately connected with that of the tree.(447) With certain Malayo-Siamese families of the Patani States it is customary to bury the afterbirth under a banana-tree, and the condition of the tree is afterwards regarded as ominous of the child’s fate for good or evil.(448) In Southern Celebes, when a child is born, a coco-nut is planted and watered with the water in which the afterbirth and navel-string have been washed. As it grows up, the tree is called the “contemporary” of the child.(449) So in Bali a coco-palm is planted at the birth of a child. It is believed to grow up equally with the child, and is called its “life-plant.”(450) On certain occasions the Dyaks of Borneo plant a palm-tree, which is believed to be a complete index of their fate. If it flourishes, they reckon on good fortune; but if it withers or dies, they expect misfortune.(451) Amongst the Dyaks of Landak and Tajan, districts of Dutch Borneo, it is customary to plant a fruit-tree for a child, and henceforth in the popular belief the fate of the child is bound up with that of the tree. If the tree shoots up rapidly, it will go well with the child; but if the tree is dwarfed or shrivelled, nothing but misfortune can be expected for its human counterpart.(452) According to another account, at the naming of children and certain other festivals the Dyaks are wont to set a _sawang_-plant, roots and all, before a priestess; and when the festival is over, the plant is replaced in the ground. Such a plant becomes thenceforth a sort of prophetic index for the person in whose honour the festival was held. If the plant thrives, the man will be fortunate; if it fades or perishes, some evil will befall him.(453) The Dyaks also believe that at the birth of every person on earth a flower grows up in the spirit world and leads a life parallel to his. If the flower flourishes, the man enjoys good health, but if it droops, so does he. Hence when he has dreamed bad dreams or has felt unwell for several days, he infers that his flower in the other world is neglected or sickly, and accordingly he employs a medicine-man to tend the precious plant, weed the soil, and sweep it up, in order that the earthly and unearthly life may prosper once more.(454)

(M129) It is said that there are still families in Russia, Germany, England, France, and Italy who are accustomed to plant a tree at the birth of a child. The tree, it is hoped, will grow with the child, and it is tended with special care.(455) The custom is still pretty general in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland; an apple-tree is planted for a boy and a pear-tree for a girl, and the people think that the child will flourish or dwindle with the tree.(456) In Mecklenburg the afterbirth is thrown out at the foot of a young tree, and the child is then believed to grow with the tree.(457) In Bosnia, when the children of a family have died one after the other, the hair of the next child is cut with some ceremony by a stranger, and the mother carries the shorn tresses into the garden, where she ties them to a fine young tree, in order that her child may grow and flourish like the tree.(458) At Muskau, in Lausitz, it used to be customary for bride and bridegroom on the morning of their wedding-day to plant a pair of young oaks side by side, and as each of the trees flourished or withered, so the good luck of the person who planted it was believed to wax or wane.(459) On a promontory in Lake Keitele, in Finland, there used to stand an old fir-tree, which according to tradition had been planted by the first colonists to serve as a symbol or token of their fortune. First-fruits of the harvest used to be offered to the tree before any one would taste of the new crop; and whenever a branch fell, it was deemed a sign that some one would die. More and more the crown of the tree withered away, and in the same proportion the family whose ancestors had planted the fir dwindled away, till only one old woman was left. At last the tree fell, and soon afterwards the old woman departed this life.(460) When Lord Byron first visited his ancestral estate of Newstead “he planted, it seems, a young oak in some part of the grounds, and had an idea that as _it_ flourished so should _he_.”(461) On a day when the cloud that settled on the later years of Sir Walter Scott lifted a little, and he heard that _Woodstock_ had sold for over eight thousand pounds, he wrote in his journal: “I have a curious fancy; I will go set two or three acorns, and judge by their success in growing whether I shall succeed in clearing my way or not.”(462) Near the Castle of Dalhousie, not far from Edinburgh, there grows an oak-tree, called the Edgewell Tree, which is popularly believed to be linked to the fate of the family by a mysterious tie; for they say that when one of the family dies, or is about to die, a branch falls from the Edgewell Tree. Thus, on seeing a great bough drop from the tree on a quiet, still day in July 1874, an old forester exclaimed, “The laird’s deid noo!” and soon after news came that Fox Maule, eleventh Earl of Dalhousie, was dead.(463) At Howth Castle in Ireland there is an old tree with which the fortunes of the St. Lawrence family are supposed to be connected. The branches of the tree are propped on strong supports, for tradition runs that when the tree falls the direct line of the Earls of Howth will become extinct.(464) On the old road from Hanover to Osnabrück, at the village of Oster-Kappeln, there used to stand an ancient oak, which put out its last green shoot in the year 1849. The tree was conjecturally supposed to be contemporary with the Guelphs; and in the year 1866, so fatal for the house of Hanover, on a calm summer afternoon, without any visible cause, the veteran suddenly fell with a crash and lay stretched across the highroad. The peasants regarded its fall as an ill omen for the reigning family, and when King George V. heard of it he gave orders that the giant trunk should be set up again, and it was done with much trouble and at great expense, the stump being supported in position by iron chains clamped to the neighbouring trees. But the king’s efforts to prop the falling fortunes of his house were vain; a few months after the fall of the oak Hanover formed part of the Prussian monarchy.(465)

(M130) In the midst of the “Forbidden City” at Peking there is a tiny private garden, where the emperors of the now fallen Manchu dynasty used to take the air and refresh themselves after the cares of state. In accordance with Chinese taste the garden is a labyrinth of artificial rockeries, waterfalls, grottoes, and kiosks, in which everything is as unlike nature as art can make it. The trees in particular (_Arbor vitae_), the principal ornament of the garden, exhibit the last refinement of the gardener’s skill, being clipped and distorted into a variety of grotesque shapes. Only one of the trees remained intact and had been spared these deformations for centuries. Far from being stunted by the axe or the shears, the tree was carefully tended and encouraged to shoot up to its full height. “It was the ‘Life-tree of the Dynasty,’ and according to legend the prosperity or fall of the present dynasty went hand in hand with the welfare or death of the tree. Certainly, if we accept the tradition, the days of the present reigning house must be numbered, for all the care and attention lavished on the tree have been for some years in vain. A glance at our illustration shews the tree as it still surpasses all its fellows in height and size; but it owes its pre-eminence only to the many artificial props which hold it up. In reality the ‘Life-tree of the Dynasty’ is dying, and might fall over night, if one of its artificial props were suddenly to give way. For the superstitious Chinese—and superstitious they certainly are—it is a very, very evil omen.”(466) Some twelve years have passed since this passage was written, and in the interval the omen has been fulfilled—the Manchu dynasty has fallen. We may conjecture that the old tree in the quaint old garden has fallen too. So vain are all human efforts to arrest the decay of royal houses by underpropping trees on which nature herself has passed a sentence of death.

(M131) At Rome in the ancient sanctuary of Quirinus there grew two old myrtle-trees, one named the Patrician and the other the Plebeian. For many years, so long as the patricians were in the ascendant, their myrtle-tree flourished and spread its branches abroad, while the myrtle of the plebeians was shrivelled and shrunken; but from the time of the Marsian war, when the power of the nobles declined, their myrtle in like manner drooped and withered, whereas that of the popular party held up its head and grew strong.(467) Thrice when Vespasia was with child, an old oak in the garden of the Flavian family near Rome suddenly put forth branches. The first branch was puny and soon withered away, and the girl who was born accordingly died within the year; the second branch was long and sturdy; and the third was like a tree. So on the third occasion the happy father reported to his mother that a future emperor was born to her as a grandchild. The old lady only laughed to think that at her age she should keep her wits about her, while her son had lost his; yet the omen of the oak came true, for the grandson was afterwards the emperor Vespasian.(468)

(M132) In England children are sometimes passed through a cleft ash-tree as a cure for rupture or rickets, and thenceforward a sympathetic connexion is supposed to exist between them and the tree. An ash-tree which had been used for this purpose grew at the edge of Shirley Heath, on the road from Hockly House to Birmingham. “Thomas Chillingworth, son of the owner of an adjoining farm, now about thirty-four, was, when an infant of a year old, passed through a similar tree, now perfectly sound, which he preserves with so much care that he will not suffer a single branch to be touched, for it is believed the life of the patient depends on the life of the tree, and the moment that it is cut down, be the patient ever so distant, the rupture returns, and a mortification ensues, and terminates in death, as was the case in a man driving a waggon on the very road in question.” “It is not uncommon, however,” adds the writer, “for persons to survive for a time the felling of the tree.”(469) The ordinary mode of effecting the cure is to split a young ash-sapling longitudinally for a few feet and pass the child, naked, either three times or three times three through the fissure at sunrise. In the West of England it is said that the passage should be “against the sun.” As soon as the ceremony has been performed, the tree is bound tightly up and the fissure plastered over with mud or clay. The belief is that just as the cleft in the tree closes up, so the rupture in the child’s body will be healed; but that if the rift in the tree remains open, the rupture in the child will remain too, and if the tree were to die, the death of the child would surely follow.(470)

(M133) Down to the second half of the nineteenth century the remedy was still in common use at Fittleworth and many other places in Sussex. The account of the Sussex practice and belief is notable because it brings out very clearly the sympathetic relation supposed to exist between the ruptured child and the tree through which it has been passed. We are told that the patient “must be passed nine times every morning on nine successive days at sunrise through a cleft in a sapling ash-tree, which has been so far given up by the owner of it to the parents of the child, as that there is an understanding it shall not be cut down during the life of the infant who is to be passed through it. The sapling must be sound at heart, and the cleft must be made with an axe. The child on being carried to the tree must be attended by nine persons, each of whom must pass it through the cleft from west to east. On the ninth morning the solemn ceremony is concluded by binding the tree lightly with a cord, and it is supposed that as the cleft closes the health of the child will improve. In the neighbourhood of Petworth some cleft ash-trees may be seen, through which children have very recently been passed. I may add, that only a few weeks since, a person who had lately purchased an ash-tree standing in this parish, intending to cut it down, was told by the father of a child, who had some time before been passed through it, that the infirmity would be sure to return upon his son if it were felled. Whereupon the good man said, he knew that such would be the case; and therefore he would not fell it for the world.”(471)

(M134) A similar cure for various diseases, but especially for rupture and rickets, has been commonly practised in other parts of Europe, as Germany, France, Denmark, and Sweden; but in these countries the tree employed for the purpose is usually not an ash but an oak; sometimes a willow-tree is allowed or even prescribed instead. With these exceptions the practice and the belief are nearly the same on the Continent as in England: a young oak is split longitudinally and the two sides held forcibly apart while the sick child is passed through the cleft; then the opening in the tree is closed, and bound up, and it is believed that as the cleft in the tree heals by the parts growing together again, so the rupture in the child will be simultaneously cured. It is often laid down that the ceremony must be performed in the strictest silence; sometimes the time prescribed is before sunrise, and sometimes the child must be passed thrice through the cleft.(472) In Oldenburg and Mecklenburg they say that the cure should be performed on St. John’s Eve (Midsummer Eve) by three men named John, who assist each other in holding the split oak-sapling open and passing the child through it.(473) Some people, however, prefer Good Friday or Christmas Eve as the season for the performance of the ceremony.(474) In Denmark copper coins are laid as an offering at the foot of the tree through which sick persons have been passed; and threads, ribbons, or bandages which have been worn by the sufferers are tied to a branch of the tree.(475) In the Greek island of Ceos, when a child is sickly, the parents carry it out into the country “and the father selects a young oak; this they split up from the root, then the father is assisted by another man in holding the tree open whilst the mother passes the child three times through, and then they bind up the tree well, cover it all over with manure, and carefully water it for forty days. In the same fashion they bind up the child for a like period, and after the lapse of this time they expect that it will be quite well.”(476)

(M135) In Mecklenburg, as in England, the sympathetic relation thus established between the tree and the child is so close that if the tree is cut down the child will die.(477) In the island of Rügen people believe that when a person who has been thus cured of rupture dies, his soul passes into the same oak-tree through which his body was passed in his youth.(478) Thus it seems that in ridding himself of the disease the sufferer is supposed to transfer a certain vital part of his person to the tree so that it is impossible to injure the tree without at the same time injuring the man; and in Rügen this partial union is thought to be completed by the transmigration of the man’s soul at death into the tree. Apparently the disease is conceived as something physical, which clings to the patient but can be stripped off him and left behind on the farther side of the narrow aperture through which he has forced his way; when the aperture is closed by the natural growth of the tree, the door is as it were shut against the disease, which is then unable to pursue and overtake the sufferer. Hence the idea at the root of the custom is not so much that the patient has transferred his ailment to the tree, as that the tree forms an impervious barrier between him and the malady which had hitherto afflicted him. This interpretation is confirmed by the following parallels.

(M136) In those parts of Armenia which are covered with forests, many great and ancient trees are revered as sacred and receive marks of homage. The people burn lights before them, fumigate them with incense, sacrifice cocks and wethers to them, and creep through holes in their trunks or push lean and sickly children through them “in order to put a stop to the influence of evil spirits.”(479) Apparently, they think that evil spirits cannot creep through the cleft in the holy tree, and therefore that the sick who have effected the passage are safe from their demoniacal pursuers. The same conception of a fissure in a tree as an obstacle placed in the path of pursuing spirits meets us in a number of savage customs. Thus in the island of Nias, when a man is in training for the priesthood, he has to be introduced to the various spirits between whom and mankind it will be his office to mediate. A priest takes him to an open window, and while the drums are beating points out to him the great spirit in the sun who calls away men to himself through death; for it is needful that the future priest should know him from whose grasp he will often be expected to wrest the sick and dying. In the evening twilight he is led to the graves and shewn the envious spirits of the dead, who also are ever drawing away the living to their own shadowy world. Next day he is conducted to a river and shewn the spirit of the waters; and finally they take him up to a mountain and exhibit to him the spirits of the mountains, who have diverse shapes, some appearing like swine, others like buffaloes, others like goats, and others again like men with long hair on their bodies. When he has seen all this, his education is complete, but on his return from the mountain the new priest may not at once enter his own house. For the people think that, were he to do so, the dangerous spirits by whom he is still environed would stay in the house and visit both the family and the pigs with sickness. Accordingly he betakes himself to other villages and passes several nights there, hoping that the spirits will leave him and settle on the friends who receive him into their houses; but naturally he does not reveal the intention of his visits to his hosts. Lastly, before he enters his own dwelling, he looks out for some young tree by the way, splits it down the middle, and then creeps through the fissure, in the belief that any spirit which may still be clinging to him will thus be left sticking to the tree.(480) Again, among the Bilqula or Bella Coola Indians of British Columbia “the bed of a mourner must be protected against the ghost of the deceased. His male relatives stick a thorn-bush into the ground at each corner of their beds. After four days these are thrown into the water. Mourners must rise early and go into the woods, where they stick four thorn-bushes into the ground, at the corners of a square, in which they cleanse themselves by rubbing their bodies with cedar branches. They also swim in ponds. After swimming they cleave four small trees and creep through the clefts, following the course of the sun. This they do on four subsequent mornings, cleaving new trees every day. Mourners cut their hair short. The hair that has been cut off is burnt. If they should not observe these regulations, it is believed that they would dream of the deceased.”(481) To the savage, who fails to distinguish the visions of sleep from the appearances of waking life, the apparition of a dead man in a dream is equivalent to the actual presence of the ghost; and accordingly he seeks to keep off the spiritual intruder, just as he might a creature of flesh and blood, by fencing his bed with thorn-bushes. Similarly the practice of creeping through four cleft trees is clearly an attempt to shake off the clinging ghost and leave it adhering to the trees, just as in Nias the future priest hopes to rid himself in like manner of the dangerous spirits who have dogged his steps from the mountains and the graves.

(M137) This interpretation of the custom is strongly confirmed by a funeral ceremony which Dr. Charles Hose witnessed at the chief village of the Madangs, a tribe of Kayans who occupy a hitherto unexplored district in the heart of Borneo. “Just across the river from where we were sitting,” says Dr. Hose, “was the graveyard, and there I witnessed a funeral procession as the day was drawing to a close. The coffin, which was a wooden box made from a tree-trunk, was decorated with red and black patterns in circles, with two small wooden figures of men placed at either end; it was lashed with rattans to a long pole, and by this means was lifted to the shoulders of the bearers, who numbered thirteen in all, and who then carried it to the burying-ground. After the mourners had all passed over to the graveyard, a man quickly cut a couple of small sticks, each five feet long and about an inch in diameter. One of these he split almost the whole way down, and forced the unsplit end into the ground, when the upper part opened like a V, leaving sufficient room for each person to pass through. He next split the top of the other stick, and, placing another short stick in the cleft, made a cross, which he also forced into the ground. The funeral procession climbed the mound on which the cemetery was situated, passing through the V of the cleft stick in single file. As soon as the coffin had been placed on the stage erected for the purpose, the people commenced their return, following on one another’s heels as quickly as possible, each spitting out the words, ‘_Pit balli krat balli jat tesip bertatip!_’ (‘Keep back, and close out all things evil, and sickness’) as they passed through the V-shaped stick. The whole party having left the graveyard, the gate was closed by the simple process of tying the cleft ends of the stick together, and a few words were then said to the cross-stick, which they call _ngring_, or the wall that separates the living from the dead. All who had taken part in the ceremony then went and bathed before returning to their homes, rubbing their skins with rough pebbles, the old Mosaic idea of the uncleanness of the dead, as mentioned in Numbers (chap. xix.), evidently finding a place among their religious beliefs. It is apparently a great relief to their minds to think that they can shut out the spirit of the deceased. They believe that the spirit of the dead is not aware that life has left the body until a short time after the coffin has been taken to the graveyard, and then not until the spirit has had leisure to notice the clothes, weapons, and other articles belonging to its earthly estate, which are placed with the coffin. But before this takes place the gate has been closed.”(482)

(M138) Here the words uttered by the mourners in passing through the cloven stick shew clearly that they believe the stick to act as a barrier or fence, on the further side of which they leave behind the ghost or other dangerous spirit whose successful pursuit might entail sickness and death on the survivors. Thus the passage of these Madang mourners through the cleft stick is strictly analogous to the passage of ruptured English children through a cleft ash-tree. Both are simply ways of leaving an evil thing behind. Similarly the subsequent binding up of the cloven stick in Borneo is analogous to the binding up of the cloven ash-tree in England. Both are ways of barricading the road against the evil which is dogging your steps; having passed through the doorway you slam the door in the face of your pursuer. Yet it seems probable that the intention of binding up the cleft in a tree through which a ruptured patient has been passed is not merely that of shutting the door on the malady conceived as a personal being; combined with this idea is perhaps the notion that in virtue of the law of magical homoeopathy the rupture in the body of the sufferer will close up exactly in the same measure as the cleft in the tree closes up through the force of bandages and of natural growth. That this shade of meaning attaches to the custom is rendered probable by a comparison of an ancient Roman cure for dislocation, which has been preserved for us by the grave authority of the elder Cato. He recommended that a green reed, four or five feet long, should be taken, split down the middle, and held by two men to the dislocated bones while a curious and now unintelligible spell was recited; then, when the spell had been recited and the aperture in the reed had closed, the reed was to be tied to the dislocated limb, and a perfect cure might be expected. Apparently it was supposed that just as the two sides of the split reed came together and coalesced after being held apart, so the dislocated bones would come together and fit into their proper places.(483)

(M139) But the usual idea in passing through a narrow aperture as a cure or preventive of evil would seem to be simply that of giving the slip to a dangerous pursuer. With this intention, doubtless, the savage Thays of Tonquin repair after a burial to the banks of a stream and there creep through a triangle formed by leaning two reeds against each other, while the sorcerer souses them with dirty water. All the relations of the deceased must wash their garments in the stream before they return home, and they may not set foot in the house till they have shorn their hair at the foot of the ladder. Afterwards the sorcerer comes and sprinkles the whole house with water for the purpose of expelling evil spirits.(484) Here again we cannot doubt that the creeping through the triangle of reeds is intended to rid the mourners of the troublesome ghost. So when the Kamtchatkans had disposed of a corpse after their usual fashion by throwing it to the dogs to be devoured, they purified themselves as follows. They went into the forest and cut various roots which they bent into rings, and through these rings they crept twice. Afterwards they carried the rings back to the forest and flung them away westward. The Koryaks, a people of the same region, burn their dead and hold a festival in honour of the departed a year after the death. At this festival, which takes place on the spot where the corpse was burned, or, if that is too far off, on a neighbouring height, they sacrifice two young reindeer which have never been in harness, and the sorcerer sticks a great many reindeer horns in the earth, believing that thereby he is dispatching a whole herd of these animals to their deceased friend in the other world. Then they all hasten home, and purify themselves by passing between two poles planted in the ground, while the sorcerer strikes them with a stick and adjures death not to carry them off.(485) The Tokoelawi in the interior of Central Celebes hold a great sacrificial festival on the eighth day after the death of a man or the ninth day after the death of a woman. When the guests return homewards after the festival they pass under two poles placed in a slanting direction against each other, and they may not look round at the house where the death occurred. “In this way they take a final leave of the soul of the deceased. Afterwards no more sacrifices are offered to the soul.”(486) Among the Toboengkoe, another tribe in the interior of Central Celebes, when a man buries his wife, he goes to the grave by a different road from that along which the corpse is carried; and on certain days afterwards he bathes, and on returning from the bath must pass through a teepee-shaped erection, which is formed by splitting a pole up the middle and separating the two split pieces except at the top. “This he must do in order that his second wife, if he has one, may not soon die.”(487) Here the notion probably is that the jealous ghost of the dead wife seeks to avenge herself on her living rival by carrying off her soul with her to deadland. Hence to prevent this catastrophe the husband tries to evade the ghost, first by going to the grave along a different path, and second by passing under a cleft stick, through which as usual the spirit cannot follow him.

(M140) In the light of the foregoing customs, as well as of a multitude of ceremonies observed for a similar purpose in all parts of the world,(488) we may safely assume that when people creep through rings after a death or pass between poles after a sacrifice to the dead, their intention simply is to interpose a barrier between themselves and the ghost; they make their way through a narrow pass or aperture through which they hope that the ghost will not be able to follow them. To put it otherwise, they conceive that the spirit of the dead is sticking to them like a burr, and that like a burr it may be rubbed or scraped off and left adhering to the sides of the opening through which they have squeezed themselves.

(M141) Similarly, when a pestilence is raging among the Koryaks, they kill a dog, wind its guts about two poles, and pass between the poles,(489) doubtless for the sake of giving the slip to the demon of the plague in the same way that they give the slip to the ghost. When the Kayans of Borneo have been dogged by an evil spirit on a journey and are nearing their destination, they fashion a small archway of boughs, light a fire under it, and pass in single file under the archway and over the fire, spitting into the fire as they pass. By this ceremony, we are told, “they thoroughly exorcise the evil spirits and emerge on the other side free from all baleful influences.”(490) Here, to make assurance doubly sure, a fire as well as an archway is interposed between the travellers and the dreadful beings who are walking unseen behind. To crawl under a bramble which has formed an arch by sending down a second root into the ground, is an English and Welsh cure for whooping-cough, rheumatism, boils, and other complaints. In some parts of the west of England they say that to get rid of boils the thing to do is to crawl through such a natural arch nine times against the sun; but in Devonshire the patient should creep through the arch thrice with the sun, that is from east to west. When a child is passed through it for whooping-cough, the operators ought to say:

“_In bramble, out cough,_ _Here I leave the whooping-cough._”(491)

In Perigord and other parts of France the same cure is employed for boils.(492) In Bulgaria, when a person suffers from a congenital malady such as scrofula, a popular cure is to take him to a neighbouring village and there make him creep naked thrice through an arch, which is formed by inserting the lower ends of two vine branches in the ground and joining their upper ends together. When he has done so, he hangs his clothes on a tree, and dons other garments. On his way home the patient must also crawl under a ploughshare, which is held high enough to let him pass.(493) Further, when whooping-cough is prevalent in a Bulgarian village, an old woman will scrape the earth from under the root of a willow-tree. Then all the children of the village creep through the opening thus made, and a thread from the garment of each of them is hung on the willow. Adults sometimes go through the same ceremony after recovering from a dangerous illness.(494) Similarly, when sickness is rife among some of the villages to the east of Lake Nyassa, the inhabitants crawl through an arch formed by bending a wand and inserting the two ends in the ground. By way of further precaution they wash themselves on the spot with medicine and water, and then bury the medicine and the evil influence together in the earth. The same ceremony is resorted to as a means of keeping off evil spirits, wild beasts, and enemies.(495)

(M142) In Uganda “sometimes a medicine-man directed a sick man to provide an animal, promising that he would come and transfer the sickness to the animal. The medicine-man would then select a plantain-tree near the house, kill the animal by it, and anoint the sick man with its blood, on his forehead, on each side of his chest, and on his legs above the knees. The plantain-tree selected had to be one that was about to bear fruit, and the medicine-man would split the stem from near the top to near the bottom, leaving a few inches not split both at the top and at the bottom; the split stem would be held open so that the sick man could step through it, and in doing so he would leave his clothing at the plantain-tree, and would run into the house without looking back. When he entered the house, new clothes would be given him to wear. The plantain, the clothing, and meat would be carried away by the medicine-man, who would deposit the plantain-tree on waste land, but would take the meat and clothing for himself. Sometimes the medicine-man would kill the animal near the hut, lay a stout stick across the threshold, and narrow the doorway by partially filling it with branches of trees; he would then put some of the blood on either side of the narrow entrance, and some on the stick across the threshold, and would also anoint with it the sick man, who would be taken outside for the purpose. The patient would then re-enter the house, letting his clothing fall off, as he passed through the doorway. The medicine-man would carry away the branches, the stick, the clothing, and the meat. The branches and the stick he would cast upon waste land, but the meat and the clothing he would keep for himself.”(496) Here the notion of transferring the sickness to the animal is plainly combined with, we may almost say overshadowed by the notion that the ailment is left behind adhering to the cleft plantain-stem or to the stick and branches of the narrow opening through which the patient has made his way. That obviously is why the plantain-stem or the stick and branches are thrown away on waste land, lest they should infect other people with the sickness which has been transferred to them.

(M143) The Kai of German New Guinea attribute sickness to the agency either of ghosts or of sorcerers, but suspicion always falls at first on ghosts, who are deemed even worse than the sorcerers. To cure a sick man they will sometimes cleave a stick in the middle, leaving the two ends intact, and then oblige the sufferer to insert his head through the cleft. After that they stroke his whole body with the stick from head to foot. “The stick with the soul-stuff of the ghosts is then hurled away or otherwise destroyed, whereupon the sick man is supposed to recover.”(497) Here the ghosts who cause the sickness are clearly supposed to be scraped from the patient’s body by means of the cleft stick, and to be thrown away or destroyed with the implement. The Looboos, a primitive tribe in the Mandailing district of Sumatra, stand in great fear of the wandering spirits of the dead (_soemangots_). But “they know all sorts of means of protecting themselves against the unwelcome visits of the spirits. For example, if a man has lost his way in the forest, he thinks that this is the work of such a spirit (_soemangot_), who dogs the wanderer and bedims his sight. So in order to throw the malignant spirit off the track he takes a rattan and splits it through the middle. By bending the rattan an opening is made, through which he creeps. After that the rattan is quickly stretched and the opening closes. By this procedure the spirit (so they think) cannot find the opening again and so cannot further follow his victim.”(498) Here therefore, the passage through a cleft stick is conceived in the clearest way as an escape from a spiritual pursuer, and the closing of the aperture when the fugitive has passed through it is nothing but the slamming of the door in the face of his invisible foe.

(M144) A similar significance is probably to be attached to other cases of ceremonially passing through a cleft stick even where the intention of the rite is not expressly alleged. Thus among the Ovambo of German South-West Africa young women who have become marriageable perform a variety of ceremonies; among other things they dance in the large and the small cattle-kraal. On quitting the large cattle-kraal after the dance, and on entering and quitting the small cattle-kraal, they are obliged to pass, one after the other, through the fork of a cleft stick, of which the two sides are held wide open by an old man.(499) Among the Washamba of German East Africa, when a boy has been circumcised, two women bring a long sugar-cane, which still bears its leaves. The cane is split at some distance from its upper and lower ends and the two sides are held apart so as to form a cleft or opening; at the lower end of the cleft a _danga_ ring is fastened. The father and mother of the circumcised youth now place the sugar-cane between them, touch the ring with their feet, and then slip through the cleft; and after them the lad’s aunt must also pass through the cleft sugar-cane.(500) In both these cases the passage through the cleft stick is probably intended to give the slip to certain dangerous spirits, which are apt to molest people at such critical seasons as puberty and circumcision.

(M145) Again, the passage through a ring or hoop is resorted to for like reasons as a mode of curing or preventing disease. Thus in Sweden, when a natural ring has been found in a tree, it is carefully removed and treasured in the family; for sick and especially rickety children are healed by merely passing through it.(501) A young married woman in Sweden, who suffered from an infirmity, was advised by a wise woman to steal three branches of willow, make them into a hoop, and creep through it naked, taking care not to touch the hoop and to keep perfectly silent. The hoop was afterwards to be burnt. She carried out the prescription faithfully, and her faith was rewarded by a perfect cure.(502) No doubt her infirmity was thought to adhere to the hoop and to be burnt with it. Similarly in Scotland children who suffered from hectic fever and consumptive patients used to be healed by passing thrice through a circular wreath of woodbine, which was cut during the increase of the March moon and was let down over the body of the sufferer from the head to the feet. Thus Jonet Stewart cured sundry women by “taking ane garland of grene woodbynd, and causing the patient pas thryis throw it, quhilk thairefter scho cut in nyne pieces, and cast in the fyre.” Another wise woman transmitted the sick “throw are girth of woodbind thryis thre times, saying, ‘I do this in name of the Father, the Sone, and the Halie Ghaist.’ ”(503) The Highlanders of Strathspey used to force all their sheep and lambs to pass through a hoop of rowan-tree on All Saints’ Day and Beltane (the first of November and the first of May),(504) probably as a means of warding off the witches and fairies, who are especially dreaded at these seasons, and against whose malignant arts the rowan-tree affords an efficient protection. In Oldenburg when a cow gives little or no milk, they milk her through a hole in a branch. In Eversten they say that this should be done through a ring which an oak-tree has formed round the scar where a branch has been sawn off. Others say the beast should be milked through a “witch’s nest,” that is, through the boughs of a birch-tree which have grown in a tangle. Such a “witch’s nest” is also hung up in a pig’s stye to protect the pig against witchcraft.(505) Hence the aim of milking a cow through a “witch’s nest” or through a natural wooden ring is no doubt to deliver the poor creature from an artful witch who has been draining away the milk into her own pail, as witches are too apt to do. Again, in Oldenburg sick children, and also adults and animals, are passed through a ring of rough unwashed yarn, just as it comes from the reel. To complete the cure you should throw a hot coal thrice through the ring, then spit through it thrice, and finally bury the yarn under a stone, where you leave it to rot. The writer who reports these remedies explains them as intended to strip the witchcraft, as you might say, from the bodies of the victims, whether human or animal, on whom the witch has cast her spell.(506) Among the Lushais of Assam “five to ten days after the child is born its body is said to be covered with small pimples, its lips become black and its strength decreases. The family then obtain a particular kind of creeping plant called _vawm_, which they make into a coil. In the evening everything in the house that has a lid or covering is uncovered, and the child is thrice passed through this coil, which act is supposed to clear the child’s skin and restore its strength. After this is finished, the parents go to bed and the pots or other receptacles are covered again by any of the other members of the family. The parents themselves must not replace any of these lids for fear that they might shut up the spirit of the child in them.”(507) When the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia fear the outbreak of an epidemic, a medicine-man takes a large ring of hemlock branches and causes every member of the tribe to pass through it. Each person puts his head through the ring and then moves the ring downwards over his body till it has almost reached his feet, when he steps out of it, right foot first. They think that this prevents the epidemic from breaking out.(508) In Asia Minor, “if a person is believed to be possessed by an evil spirit, one form of treatment is to heat an iron-chain red-hot, form it into a ring and pass the afflicted person through the opening, on the theory that the evil spirit cannot pass the hot chain, and so is torn from his victim and left behind.”(509) Here the intention of the passage through the aperture is avowedly to shake off a spiritual pursuer, who is deterred from further pursuit not only by the narrowness of the opening but by the risk of burning himself in the attempt to make his way through it.

(M146) But if the intention of these ceremonies is essentially to rid the performer of some harmful thing, whether a disease or a ghost or a demon, which is supposed to be clinging to him, we should expect to find that any narrow hole or opening would serve the purpose as well as a cleft tree or stick, an arch or ring of boughs, or a couple of posts fixed in the ground. And this expectation is not disappointed. On the coast of Morven and Mull thin ledges of rock may be seen pierced with large holes near the sea. Consumptive people used to be brought thither, and after the tops of nine waves had been caught in a dish and thrown on the patient’s head, he was made to pass through one of the rifted rocks thrice in the direction of the sun.(510) “On the farm of Crossapol in Coll there is a stone called _Clach Thuill_, that is, the Hole Stone, through which persons suffering from consumption were made to pass three times in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They took meat with them each time, and left some on the stone. The bird that took the food away had the consumption laid upon it. Similar stones, under which the patient can creep, were made use of in other islands.”(511) Here it is manifest that the patient left his disease behind him on the stone, since the bird which carried off the food from the stone caught the disease. In the Aberdeenshire river Dee, at Cambus o’ May, near Ballater, there is a rock with a hole in it large enough to let a person pass through. Legend runs that childless women used to wade out to the stone and squeeze themselves through the hole. It is said that a certain noble lady tried the effect of the charm not very many years ago with indifferent success.(512) In the parish of Madern in Cornwall, near the village of Lanyon, there is a perforated stone called the _Mên-an-tol_ or “holed stone,” through which people formerly crept as a remedy for pains in the back and limbs; and at certain times of the year parents drew their children through the hole to cure them of the rickets.(513) The passage through the stone was also deemed a cure for scrofula, provided it was made against the sun and repeated three times or three times three.(514)

(M147) Near the little town of Dourgne, not far from Castres, in Southern France, there is a mountain, and on the top of the mountain is a tableland, where a number of large stones may be seen planted in the ground about a cross and rising to a height of two to five feet above the ground. Almost all of them are pierced with holes of different sizes. From time immemorial people used to assemble at Dourgne and the neighbourhood every year on the sixth of August, the festival of St. Estapin. The palsied, the lame, the blind, the sick of all sorts, flocked thither to seek and find a cure for their various infirmities. Very early in the morning they set out from the villages where they had lodged or from the meadows where for want of better accommodation they had been forced to pass the night, and went on pilgrimage to the chapel of St. Estapin, which stands in a gorge at the southern foot of the mountain. Having gone nine times in procession round the chapel, they hobbled, limped, or crawled to the tableland on the top of the mountain. There each of them chose a stone with a hole of the requisite size and thrust his ailing member through the hole. For there are holes to suit every complaint; some for the head, some for the arm, some for the leg, and so on. Having performed this simple ceremony they were cured; the lame walked, the blind saw, the palsied recovered the use of their limbs, and so on. The chapel of the saint is adorned with the crutches and other artificial aids, now wholly superfluous, which the joyful pilgrims left behind them in token of their gratitude and devotion.(515) About two miles from Gisors, in the French department of Oise, there is a dolmen called Trie or Trie- Chateau, consisting of three upright stones with a fourth and larger stone laid horizontally on their tops. The stone which forms the back wall of the dolmen is pierced about the middle by an irregularly shaped hole, through which the people of the neighbourhood used from time immemorial to pass their sickly children in the firm belief that the passage through the stone would restore them to health.(516)

(M148) In the church of St. Corona at the village of Koppenwal, in Lower Bavaria, there is a hole in the stone on which the altar rests. Through this hole, while service was going on, the peasants used to creep, believing that having done so they would not suffer from pains in their back at harvest.(517) In the crypt of the old cathedral at Freising in Bavaria there is a tomb which is reputed to contain the relics of St. Nonnosius. Between a pillar of the tomb and the wall there is a narrow opening, through which persons afflicted with pains in the back creep in order to obtain thereby some mitigation of their pangs.(518) In Upper Austria, above the Lake of Aber, which is a sheet of dark-green water nestling among wooded mountains, there stands the Falkenstein chapel of St. Wolfgang built close to the face of a cliff that rises from a little green dale. A staircase leads up from the chapel to a narrow, dark, dripping cleft in the rock, through which pilgrims creep in a stooping posture “in the belief that they can strip off their bodily sufferings or sins on the face of the rock.”(519) Women with child also crawl through the hole, hoping thus to obtain an easy delivery.(520) In the Greek island of Cythnos, when a child is sickly, the mother will take it to a hole in a rock about half an hour distant from Messaria. There she strips the child naked and pushes it through the hole in the rock, afterwards throwing away the old garments and clothing the child in new ones.(521)

(M149) Near Everek, on the site of the ancient Caesarea in Asia Minor, there is a rifted rock through which persons pass to rid themselves of a cough.(522) A writer well acquainted with Asia Minor has described how he visited “a well-known pool of water tucked away in a beautiful nook high up among the Anatolian mountains, and with a wide reputation for sanctity and healing powers. We arrived just as the last of a flock of three hundred sheep were being passed through a peculiar hole in the thin ledge of a huge rock to deliver them from a disease of the liver supposed to prevent the proper laying on of fat.”(523) Among the Kawars of the Central Provinces in India a man who suffers from intermittent fever will try to cure it by walking through a narrow passage between two houses.(524) In a ruined church of St. Brandon, about ten miles from Dingle, in the west of Ireland, there is a narrow window, through which sick women pass thrice in order to be cured.(525) The Hindoos of the Punjaub think that the birth of a son after three girls is unlucky for the parents, and in order to avert the ill-luck they resort to a number of devices. Amongst other things they break the centre of a bronze plate and remove all but the rim; then they pass the luckless child through the bronze rim. Moreover, they make an opening in the roof of the room where the birth took place, and then pull the infant out through the opening; and further they pass the child under the sill of the door.(526) By these passages through narrow apertures they apparently hope to rid the child of the ill-luck which is either pursuing it or sticking to it like a burr. For in this case, as in many similar ones, it might be hard to say whether the riddance is conceived as an escape from the pursuit of a maleficent spirit or as the abrasion of a dangerous substance which adheres to the person of the sufferer.

(M150) Another way of ridding man and beast of the clinging infection of disease is to pass them through a hole dug in the ground. This mode of cure was practised in Europe during the Middle Ages, and has survived in Denmark down to modern times. In a sermon preached by St. Eloi, Bishop of Noyon, in the sixth century, he forbade the faithful to practise lustrations and to drive their sheep through hollow trees and holes in the earth, “because by this they seem to consecrate them to the devil.”(527) Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 690 A.D., decreed that “if any one for the health of his little son shall pass through a hole in the ground and then close it behind him with thorns, let him do penance for eleven days on bread and water.”(528) Here the closing of the hole with thorns after the patient or his representative has passed through is plainly intended to barricade the narrow way against the pursuit of sickness personified as a demon; hence it confirms the general interpretation here given of these customs. Again, Burchard, Bishop of Worms, who died in A.D. 1025, repeated the same condemnation: “Hast thou done what certain women are wont to do? I mean those who have squalling babes; they dig the earth and pierce it, and through that hole they drag the babe, and they say that thus the squalling babe ceases to squall. If thou has done this or consented unto it, thou shalt do penance for fifteen days on bread and water.”(529) At Fünen in Denmark, as late as the latter part of the nineteenth century, a cure for childish ailments was to dig up several sods, arrange them so as to form a hole, and then to pass the sick child through it.(530) A simplified form of this cure is adopted in Jutland. At twelve o’clock on a Thursday night you go to a churchyard, dig up a circular piece of turf, and make a hole in it large enough to permit the passage through it of your infant progeny. Taking the sod with you, go home, salute nobody on the way, and speak to nobody. On getting to your house, take the child and pass it thrice through the turf from right to left; then take the turf back to the churchyard and replace it in position. If the turf takes root and grows afresh, the child will recover; but if the turf withers, there is no hope. Elsewhere it is at the hour of sunset rather than of midnight that people cut the turf in the churchyard. The same cure is applied to cattle which have been bewitched; though naturally in that case you must cut a much bigger turf and make a much bigger hole in it to let a horse or a cow through than is necessary for an infant.(531) Here, again, the conception of a sympathetic relation, established between the sufferer and the thing which has rid him of his ailment, comes out clearly in the belief, that if the turf through which the child has been passed thrives, the child will thrive also, but that if the turf withers, the child will die. Among the Corannas, a people of the Hottentot race on the Orange River, “when a child recovers from a dangerous illness, a trench is dug in the ground, across the middle of which an arch is thrown, and an ox made to stand upon it; the child is then dragged under the arch. After this ceremony the animal is killed, and eaten by married people who have children, none else being permitted to participate of the feast.”(532) Here the attempt to leave the sickness behind in the hole, which is probably the essence of the ceremony, may perhaps be combined with an endeavour to impart to the child the strength and vigour of the animal. Ancient India seems also to have been familiar with the same primitive notion that sickness could, as it were, be stripped off the person of the sufferer by passing him through a narrow aperture; for in the Rigveda it is said that Indra cured Apala of a disease of the skin by drawing her through the yoke of the chariot; “thus the god made her to have a golden skin, purifying her thrice.”(533)

(M151) At the small village of Damun, on the Kabenau river, in German New Guinea, a traveller witnessed the natives performing a ceremony of initiation, of which the following rite formed part. The candidates for initiation, six in number, were boys and lads of various ages from about four years of age to sixteen or seventeen. The company betook themselves to the bed of a small stream, where at the end of a gully a hollow in the rocks formed a natural basin. At the entrance to the gully a sort of yoke, so the traveller calls it, was erected by means of some poles, and from the cross-piece plants were hung so as to make an arch. One of the men took up his station in front of the arch, and as each candidate came up, the man seized him, spat on his breast and back a clot of red spittle, and gave him several severe blows with the stock of a plant. After that the candidate, who had previously stripped himself naked, passed under the leafy arch and bathed in the rocky pool at the other end of the gully. All the time that this solemnity was proceeding another man sat perched on a neighbouring rock, beating a drum and singing. Only men took part in the ceremony.(534) Though no explanation of the ceremony is given by the observer who witnessed it, we may suppose that by passing under the yoke or arch the novices were supposed to rid themselves of certain evil influences, whether conceived as spiritual or not, which they left behind them on the further side of the barrier. This interpretation is confirmed by the bath which each candidate took immediately afterwards. In short the whole purpose of the rite would seem to have been purificatory.

(M152) With the preceding examples before us, it seems worth while to ask whether the ancient Italian practice of making conquered enemies to pass under a yoke may not in its origin have been a purificatory ceremony, designed to rid the foe of some uncanny powers before dismissing him to his home. For apparently the ceremony was only observed with prisoners who were about to be released;(535) had it been a mere mark of ignominy, there seems to be no reason why it should not have been inflicted also on men who were doomed to die. This conjectural explanation of the ceremony is confirmed by the tradition that the Roman Horatius was similarly obliged by his fellow-countrymen to pass under a yoke as a form of purification for the murder of his sister. The yoke by passing under which he cleansed himself from his sister’s blood was still to be seen in Rome when Livy was writing his history under the emperor Augustus. It was an ancient wooden beam spanning a narrow lane in an old quarter of the city, the two ends of the beam being built into the masonry of the walls on either side; it went by the name of the Sister’s Beam, and whenever the wood decayed and threatened to fall, the venerable monument, which carried back the thoughts of passers-by to the kingly age of Rome, was repaired at the public expense.(536) If our interpretation of these customs is right, it was the ghost of his murdered sister whom the Roman hero gave the slip to by passing under the yoke; and it may have been the angry ghosts of slaughtered Romans from whom the enemy’s soldiers were believed to be delivered when they marched under the yoke before being dismissed by their merciful conquerors to their homes.

(M153) In a former part of this work we saw that homicides in general and victorious warriors in particular are often obliged to perform a variety of ceremonies for the purpose of ridding them of the dangerous ghosts of their victims.(537) If the ceremony of passing under the yoke was primarily designed, as I have suggested, to free the soldiers from the angry ghosts of the men whom they had slain, we should expect to find that the victorious Romans themselves observed a similar ceremony after a battle for a similar purpose. Was this the original meaning of passing under a triumphal arch? In other words, may not the triumphal arch have been for the victors what the yoke was for the vanquished, a barrier to protect them against the pursuit of the spirits of the slain? That the Romans felt the need of purification from the taint of bloodshed after a battle appears from the opinion of Masurius, mentioned by Pliny, that the laurel worn by soldiers in a triumphal procession was intended to purge them from the slaughter of the enemy.(538) A special gate, the _Porta Triumphalis_, was reserved for the entrance of a victorious army into Rome;(539) and it would be in accordance with ancient religious views if this distinction was originally not so much an honour conferred as a precaution enforced to prevent the ordinary gates from being polluted by the passage of thousands of blood-guilty men.(540)

§ 3. The External Soul in Animals.

(M154) But in practice, as in folk-tales, it is not merely with inanimate objects and plants that a person is occasionally believed to be united by a bond of physical sympathy. The same bond, it is supposed, may exist between a man and an animal, so that the welfare of the one depends on the welfare of the other, and when the animal dies the man dies also. The analogy between the custom and the tales is all the closer because in both of them the power of thus removing the soul from the body and stowing it away in an animal is often a special privilege of wizards and witches. Thus the Yakuts of Siberia believe that every shaman or wizard keeps his soul, or one of his souls, incarnate in an animal which is carefully concealed from all the world. “Nobody can find my external soul,” said one famous wizard, “it lies hidden far away in the stony mountains of Edzhigansk.” Only once a year, when the last snows melt and the earth turns black, do these external souls of wizards appear in the shape of animals among the dwellings of men. They wander everywhere, yet none but wizards can see them. The strong ones sweep roaring and noisily along, the weak steal about quietly and furtively. Often they fight, and then the wizard whose external soul is beaten, falls ill or dies. The weakest and most cowardly wizards are they whose souls are incarnate in the shape of dogs, for the dog gives his human double no peace, but gnaws his heart and tears his body. The most powerful wizards are they whose external souls have the shape of stallions, elks, black bears, eagles, or boars. Again, the Samoyeds of the Turukhinsk region hold that every shaman has a familiar spirit in the shape of a boar, which he leads about by a magic belt. On the death of the boar the shaman himself dies; and stories are told of battles between wizards, who send their spirits to fight before they encounter each other in person.(541) In Yorkshire witches are thought to stand in such peculiarly close relations to hares, that if a particular hare is killed or wounded, a certain witch will at the same moment be killed or receive a hurt in her body exactly corresponding to the wound in the hare.(542) However, this fancy is probably a case of the general European belief that witches have the power of temporarily transforming themselves into certain animals, particularly hares and cats, and that any hurts inflicted on such transformed animals are felt by the witches who are concealed in the animals.(543) But the notion that a person can temporarily transform himself into an animal differs from the notion that he can deposit his soul for a longer or shorter period in an animal, while he himself retains the human form; though in the cloudy mind of the peasant and the savage the two ideas may not always be sharply distinguished. The Malays believe that “the soul of a person may pass into another person or into an animal, or rather that such a mysterious relation can arise between the two that the fate of the one is wholly dependent on that of the other.”(544)

(M155) Among the Melanesians of Mota, one of the New Hebrides islands, the conception of an external soul is carried out in the practice of daily life. The Mota word for soul is _atai_. “The use of the word _atai_ in Mota seems properly and originally to have been to signify something peculiarly and intimately connected with a person and sacred to him, something that he has set his fancy upon when he has seen it in what has seemed to him a wonderful manner, or some one has shewn it to him as such. Whatever the thing might be the man believed it to be the reflection of his own personality; he and his _atai_ flourished, suffered, lived, and died together. But the word must not be supposed to have been borrowed from this use and applied secondarily to describe the soul; the word carries a sense with it which is applicable alike to that second self, the visible object so mysteriously connected with the man, and to this invisible second self which we call the soul. There is another Mota word, _tamaniu_, which has almost if not quite the same meaning as _atai_ has when it describes something animate or inanimate which a man has come to believe to have an existence intimately connected with his own. The word _tamaniu_ may be taken to be properly ‘likeness,’ and the noun form of the adverb _tama_, as, like. It was not every one in Mota who had his _tamaniu_; only some men fancied that they had this relation to a lizard, a snake, or it might be a stone; sometimes the thing was sought for and found by drinking the infusion of certain leaves and heaping together the dregs; then whatever living thing was first seen in or upon the heap was the _tamaniu_. It was watched but not fed or worshipped; the natives believed that it came at call, and that the life of the man was bound up with the life of his _tamaniu_, if a living thing, or with its safety; should it die, or if not living get broken or be lost, the man would die. Hence in case of sickness they would send to see if the _tamaniu_ was safe and well. This word has never been used apparently for the soul in Mota; but in Aurora in the New Hebrides it is the accepted equivalent. It is well worth observing that both the _atai_ and the _tamaniu_, and it may be added the Motlav _talegi_, is something which has a substantial existence of its own, as when a snake or stone is a man’s _atai_ or _tamaniu_; a soul then when called by these names is conceived of as something in a way substantial.”(545)

(M156) From this account, which we owe to the careful and accurate researches of the Rev. Dr. Codrington, we gather that while every person in Mota has a second self or external soul in a visible object called an _atai_, only some people have, it may be, a second external soul in another visible object called a _tamaniu_. We may conjecture that persons who have a _tamaniu_ in addition to an _atai_ are more than usually anxious as to the state of their soul, and that they seek to put it in perfect security by what we may call a system of double insurance, calculating that if one of their external souls should die or be broken, they themselves may still survive by virtue of the survival of the other. Be that as it may, the _tamaniu_ discharges two functions, one of them defensive and the other offensive. On the one hand, so long as it lives or remains unbroken, it preserves its owner in life; and on the other hand it helps him to injure his enemies. In its offensive character, if the _tamaniu_ happens to be an eel, it will bite its owner’s enemy; if it is a shark, it will swallow him. In its defensive character, the state of the _tamaniu_ is a symptom or life-token of the state of the man; hence when he is ill he will visit and examine it, or if he cannot go himself he will send another to inspect it and report. In either case the man turns the animal, if animal it be, carefully over in order to see what is the matter with it; should something be found sticking to its skin, it is removed, and through the relief thus afforded to the creature the sick man recovers. But if the animal should be found dying, it is an omen of death for the man; for whenever it dies he dies also.(546)

(M157) In Melanesia a native doctor was once attending to a sick man. Just then “a large eagle-hawk came soaring past the house, and Kaplen, my hunter, was going to shoot it; but the doctor jumped up in evident alarm, and said, ‘Oh, don’t shoot; that is my spirit’ (_niog_, literally, my shadow); ‘if you shoot that, I will die.’ He then told the old man, ‘If you see a rat to-night, don’t drive it away, ’tis my spirit (_niog_), or a snake which will come to-night, that also is my spirit.’ ”(547) It does not appear whether the doctor in this case, like the giant or warlock in the tales, kept his spirit permanently in the bird or in the animal, or whether he only transferred it temporarily to the creature for the purpose of enabling him the better to work the cure, perhaps by sending out his own soul in a bird or beast to find and bring back the lost soul of the patient. In either case he seems to have thought, like the giant or warlock in the stories, that the death of the bird or the animal would simultaneously entail his own. A family in Nauru, one of the Marshall Islands, apparently imagine that their lives are bound up with a species of large fish, which has a huge mouth and devours human beings; for when one of these fish was killed, the members of the family cried, “Our guardian spirit is killed, now we must all die!”(548)

(M158) The theory of an external soul deposited in an animal appears to be very prevalent in West Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the Cameroons, and the Gaboon.(549) In the latter part of the nineteenth century two English missionaries, established at San Salvador, the capital of the King of Congo, asked the natives repeatedly whether any of them had seen the strange, big, East African goat which Stanley had given to a chief at Stanley Pool in 1877. But their enquiries were fruitless; no native would admit that he had seen the goat. Some years afterwards the missionaries discovered why they could obtain no reply to their enquiry. All the people, it turned out, imagined that the missionaries believed the spirit of the King of Salvador to be contained in the goat, and that they wished to obtain possession of the animal in order to exercise an evil influence on his majesty.(550) The belief from the standpoint of the Congo savages was natural enough, since in that region some chiefs regularly link their fate to that of an animal. Thus the Chief Bankwa of Ndolo, on the Moeko River, had conferred this honour on a certain hippopotamus of the neighbourhood, at which he would allow nobody to shoot.(551) At the village of Ongek, in the Gaboon, a French missionary slept in the hut of an old Fan chief. Awakened about two in the morning by a rustling of dry leaves, he lit a torch, when to his horror he perceived a huge black serpent of the most dangerous sort, coiled in a corner, with head erect, shining eyes, and hissing jaws, ready to dart at him. Instinctively he seized his gun and pointed it at the reptile, when suddenly his arm was struck up, the torch was extinguished, and the voice of the old chief said, “Don’t fire! don’t fire! I beg of you. In killing the serpent, it is me that you would kill. Fear nothing. The serpent is my _elangela_.” So saying he flung himself on his knees beside the reptile, put his arms about it, and clasped it to his breast. The serpent received his caresses quietly, manifesting neither anger nor fear, and the chief carried it off and laid it down beside him in another hut, exhorting the missionary to have no fear and never to speak of the subject.(552) His curiosity being excited by this adventure, the missionary, Father Trilles, pursued his enquiries and ascertained that among the Fans of the Gaboon every wizard is believed at initiation to unite his life with that of some particular wild animal by a rite of blood-brotherhood; he draws blood from the ear of the animal and from his own arm, and inoculates the animal with his own blood, and himself with the blood of the beast. Henceforth such an intimate union is established between the two that the death of the one entails the death of the other. The alliance is thought to bring to the wizard or sorcerer a great accession of power, which he can turn to his advantage in various ways. In the first place, like the warlock in the fairy tales who has deposited his life outside of himself in some safe place, the Fan wizard now deems himself invulnerable. Moreover, the animal with which he has exchanged blood has become his familiar, and will obey any orders he may choose to give it; so he makes use of it to injure and kill his enemies. For that reason the creature with whom he establishes the relation of blood-brotherhood is never a tame or domestic animal, but always a ferocious and dangerous wild beast, such as a leopard, a black serpent, a crocodile, a hippopotamus, a wild boar, or a vulture. Of all these creatures the leopard is by far the commonest familiar of Fan wizards, and next to it comes the black serpent; the vulture is the rarest. Witches as well as wizards have their familiars; but the animals with which the lives of women are thus bound up generally differ from those to which men commit their external souls. A witch never has a panther for her familiar, but often a venomous species of serpent, sometimes a horned viper, sometimes a black serpent, sometimes a green one that lives in banana-trees; or it may be a vulture, an owl, or other bird of night. In every case the beast or bird with which the witch or wizard has contracted this mystic alliance is an individual, never a species; and when the individual animal dies the alliance is naturally at an end, since the death of the animal is supposed to entail the death of the man.(553)

(M159) Similar beliefs are held by the natives of the Cross River valley within the German provinces of the Cameroons. Groups of people, generally the inhabitants of a village, have chosen various animals, with which they believe themselves to stand on a footing of intimate friendship or relationship. Amongst such animals are hippopotamuses, elephants, leopards, crocodiles, gorillas, fish, and serpents, all of them creatures which are either very strong or can easily hide themselves in the water or a thicket. This power of concealing themselves is said to be an indispensable condition of the choice of animal familiars, since the animal friend or helper is expected to injure his owner’s enemy by stealth; for example, if he is a hippopotamus, he will bob up suddenly out of the water and capsize the enemy’s canoe. Between the animals and their human friends or kinsfolk such a sympathetic relation is supposed to exist that the moment the animal dies the man dies also, and similarly the instant the man perishes so does the beast. From this it follows that the animal kinsfolk may never be shot at or molested for fear of injuring or killing the persons whose lives are knit up with the lives of the brutes. This does not, however, prevent the people of a village, who have elephants for their animal friends, from hunting elephants. For they do not respect the whole species but merely certain individuals of it, which stand in an intimate relation to certain individual men and women; and they imagine that they can always distinguish these brother elephants from the common herd of elephants which are mere elephants and nothing more. The recognition indeed is said to be mutual. When a hunter, who has an elephant for his friend, meets a human elephant, as we may call it, the noble animal lifts up a paw and holds it before his face, as much as to say, “Don’t shoot.” Were the hunter so inhuman as to fire on and wound such an elephant, the person whose life was bound up with the elephant would fall ill.(554)

(M160) The Balong of the Cameroons think that every man has several souls, of which one is in his body and another in an animal, such as an elephant, a wild pig, a leopard, and so forth. When a man comes home, feeling ill, and says, “I shall soon die,” and dies accordingly, the people aver that one of his souls has been killed in a wild pig or a leopard, and that the death of the external soul has caused the death of the soul in his body. Hence the corpse is cut open, and a diviner determines, from an inspection of the inwards, whether the popular surmise is correct or not.(555)

(M161) A similar belief in the external souls of living people is entertained by the Ibos, an important tribe of the Niger delta, who inhabit a country west of the Cross River. They think that a man’s spirit can quit his body for a time during life and take up its abode in an animal. This is called _ishi anu_, “to turn animal.” A man who wishes to acquire this power procures a certain drug from a wise man and mixes it with his food. After that his soul goes out and enters into the animal. If it should happen that the animal is killed while the man’s soul is lodged in it, the man dies; and if the animal be wounded, the man’s body will presently be covered with boils. This belief instigates to many deeds of darkness; for a sly rogue will sometimes surreptitiously administer the magical drug to his enemy in his food, and having thus smuggled the other’s soul into an animal will destroy the creature, and with it the man whose soul is lodged in it.(556) A like belief is reported to prevail among the tribes of the Obubura Hill district on the Cross River in Southern Nigeria. Once when Mr. Partridge’s canoe-men wished to catch fish near a town of the Assiga tribe, the people objected, saying, “Our souls live in those fish, and if you kill them we shall die.”(557)

(M162) The negroes of Calabar, at the mouth of the Niger, believe that every person has four souls, one of which always lives outside of his or her body in the form of a wild beast in the forest. This external soul, or bush soul, as Miss Kingsley calls it, may be almost any animal, for example, a leopard, a fish, or a tortoise; but it is never a domestic animal and never a plant. Unless he is gifted with second sight, a man cannot see his own bush soul, but a diviner will often tell him what sort of creature his bush soul is, and after that the man will be careful not to kill any animal of that species, and will strongly object to any one else doing so. A man and his sons have usually the same sort of animals for their bush souls, and so with a mother and her daughters. But sometimes all the children of a family take after the bush soul of their father; for example, if his external soul is a leopard, all his sons and daughters will have leopards for their external souls. And on the other hand, sometimes they all take after their mother; for instance, if her external soul is a tortoise, all the external souls of her sons and daughters will be tortoises too. So intimately bound up is the life of the man with that of the animal which he regards as his external or bush soul, that the death or injury of the animal necessarily entails the death or injury of the man. And, conversely, when the man dies, his bush soul can no longer find a place of rest, but goes mad and rushes into the fire or charges people and is knocked on the head, and that is an end of it. When a person is sick, the diviner will sometimes tell him that his bush soul is angry at being neglected; thereupon the patient will make an offering to the offended spirit and deposit it in a tiny hut in the forest at the spot where the animal, which is his external soul, was last seen. If the bush soul is appeased, the patient recovers; but if it is not, he dies. Yet the foolish bush soul does not understand that in injuring the man it injures itself, and that it cannot long survive his decease.(558)

(M163) Such is the account which Miss Kingsley gives of the bush souls of the Calabar negroes. Some fresh particulars are furnished by Mr. Richard Henshaw, Agent for Native Affairs at Calabar. He tells us that a man may only marry a woman who has the same sort of bush soul as himself; for example, if his bush soul is a leopard, his wife also must have a leopard for her bush soul. Further, we learn from Mr. Henshaw that a person’s bush soul need not be that either of his father or of his mother. For example, a child with a hippopotamus for his bush soul may be born into a family, all the members of which have wild pigs for their bush souls; this happens when the child is a reincarnation of a man whose external soul was a hippopotamus. In such a case, if the parents object to the intrusion of an alien soul, they may call in a medicine-man to check its growth and finally abolish it altogether, after which they will give the child their own bush soul. Or they may leave the matter over till the child comes of age, when he will choose a bush soul for himself with the help of a medicine-man, who will also select the piece of bush or water in which the chosen animal lives. When a man dies, then the animal which contains his external soul “becomes insensible and quite unconscious of the approach of danger. Thus a hunter can capture or kill him with perfect ease.” Sacrifices are often offered to prevent other people from killing the animal in which a man’s bush soul resides. The tribes of Calabar which hold these beliefs as to the bush soul are the Efik and Ekoi.(559) The belief of the Calabar negroes in the external soul has been described as follows by a missionary: “_Ukpong_ is the native word we have taken to translate our word _soul_. It primarily signifies the shadow of a person. It also signifies that which dwells within a man on which his life depends, but which may detach itself from the body, and visiting places and persons here and there, again return to its abode in the man.... Besides all this, the word is used to designate an animal possessed of an _ukpong_, so connected with a person’s _ukpong_, that they mutually act upon each other. When the leopard, or crocodile, or whatever animal may be a man’s _ukpong_, gets sick or dies, the like thing happens to him. Many individuals, it is believed, have the power of changing themselves into the animals which are their _ukpong_.”(560)

(M164) Among the Ekoi of the Oban district, in Southern Nigeria, it is usual to hear a person say of another that he or she “possesses” such and such an animal, meaning that the person has the power to assume the shape of that particular creature. It is their belief that by constant practice and by virtue of certain hereditary secrets a man can quit his human body and put on that of a wild beast. They say that in addition to the soul which animates his human body everybody has a bush soul which at times he can send forth to animate the body of the creature which he “possesses.” When he wishes his bush soul to go out on its rambles, he drinks a magic potion, the secret of which has been handed down from time immemorial, and some of which is always kept ready for use in an ancient earthen pot set apart for the purpose. No sooner has he drunk the mystic draught than his bush soul escapes from him and floats away invisible through the town into the forest. There it begins to swell and, safe in the shadow of the trees, takes on the shape of the man’s animal double, it may be an elephant, a leopard, a buffalo, a wild boar, or a crocodile. Naturally the potion differs according to the kind of animal into which a man is temporarily converted. It would be absurd, for example, to expect that the dose which turns you into an elephant should also be able to turn you into a crocodile; the thing is manifestly impossible. A great advantage of these temporary conversions of a man into a beast is that it enables the convert in his animal shape to pay out his enemy without being suspected. If, for example, you have a grudge at a man who is a well-to-do farmer, all that you have to do is to turn yourself by night into a buffalo, an elephant, or a wild boar, and then, bursting into his fields, stamp about in them till you have laid the standing crops level with the ground. That is why in the neighbourhood of large well-tilled farms, people prefer to keep their bush souls in buffaloes, elephants, and wild boars, because these animals are the most convenient means of destroying a neighbour’s crops. Whereas where the farms are small and ill-kept, as they are round about Oban, it is hardly worth a man’s while to take the trouble of turning into a buffalo or an elephant for the paltry satisfaction of rooting up a few miserable yams or such like trash. So the Oban people keep their bush souls in leopards and crocodiles, which, though of little use for the purpose of destroying a neighbour’s crops, are excellent for the purpose of killing the man himself first and eating him afterwards. But the power of turning into an animal has this serious disadvantage that it lays you open to the chance of being wounded or even slain in your animal skin before you have time to put it off and scramble back into your human integument. A remarkable case of this sort happened only a few miles from Oban not long ago. To understand it you must know that the chiefs of the Ododop tribe, who live about ten miles from Oban, keep their bush souls, whenever they are out on a ramble, in the shape of buffaloes. Well, one day the District Commissioner at Oban saw a buffalo come down to drink at a stream which runs through his garden. He shot at the beast and hit it, and it ran away badly wounded. At the very same moment the head chief of the Ododop tribe, ten miles away, clapped his hand to his side and said, “They have killed me at Oban.” Death was not instantaneous, for the buffalo lingered in pain for a couple of days in the forest, but an hour or two before its dead body was discovered by the trackers the chief expired. Just before he died, with touching solicitude he sent a message warning all people who kept their external souls in buffaloes to profit by his sad fate and beware of going near Oban, which was not a safe place for them. Naturally, when a man keeps his external soul from time to time in a beast, say in a wild cow, he is not so foolish as to shoot an animal of that particular sort, for in so doing he might perhaps be killing himself. But he may kill animals in which other people keep their external souls. For example, a wild cow man may freely shoot an antelope or a wild boar; but should he do so and then have reason to suspect that the dead beast is the animal double of somebody with whom he is on friendly terms, he must perform certain ceremonies over the carcase and then hurry home, running at the top of his speed, to administer a particular medicine to the man whom he has unintentionally injured. In this way he may possibly be in time to save the life of his friend from the effects of the deplorable accident.(561)

(M165) Near Eket in North Calabar there is a sacred lake, the fish of which are carefully preserved because the people believe that their own souls are lodged in the fish, and that with every fish killed a human life would be simultaneously extinguished.(562) In the Calabar River not very many years ago there used to be a huge old crocodile, popularly supposed to contain the external soul of a chief who resided in the flesh at Duke Town. Sporting vice-consuls used from time to time to hunt the animal, and once a peculiarly energetic officer contrived to hit it. Forthwith the chief was laid up with a wound in his leg. He gave out that a dog had bitten him, but no doubt the wise shook their heads and refused to be put off with so flimsy a pretext.(563) Again, among several tribes on the banks of the Niger between Lokoja and the delta there prevails “a belief in the possibility of a man possessing an _alter ego_ in the form of some animal such as a crocodile or a hippopotamus. It is believed that such a person’s life is bound up with that of the animal to such an extent that, whatever affects the one produces a corresponding impression upon the other, and that if one dies the other must speedily do so too. It happened not very long ago that an Englishman shot a hippopotamus close to a native village; the friends of a woman who died the same night in the village demanded and eventually obtained five pounds as compensation for the murder of the woman.”(564) Among the Montols of Northern Nigeria, “in many of the compounds there will be found a species of snake, of a non-poisonous sort, which, when full grown, attains a length of about five feet and a girth of eight or nine inches. These snakes live in and about the compound. They are not specially fed by the people of the place, nor are places provided for them to nest in. They live generally in the roofs of the small granaries and huts that make up the compound. They feed upon small mammals, and no doubt serve a useful purpose in destroying vermin which might otherwise eat the stored grain. They are not kept for the purpose of destroying vermin, however. The Montols believe that at the birth of every individual of their race, male and female, one of these snakes, of the same sex, is also born. If the snake be killed, his human partner in life dies also and at the same time. If the wife of a compound-owner gives birth to a son, shortly after the interesting event, the snake of the establishment will be seen with a young one of corresponding sex. From the moment of birth, these two, the snake and the man, share a life of common duration, and the measure of the one is the measure of the other. Hence every care is taken to protect these animals from injury, and no Montol would in any circumstances think of injuring or killing one. It is said that a snake of this kind never attempts any injury to a man. There is only one type of snake thus regarded.”(565) Among the Angass, of the Kanna District in Northern Nigeria, “when a man is born, he is endowed with two distinct entities, life and a _kurua_ (Arabic _rin_).... When the _rin_ enters a man, its counterpart enters some beast or snake at the same time, and if either dies, so also does the body containing the counterpart. This, however, in no wise prevents a man from killing any game, etc., he may see, though he knows full well that he is causing thereby the death of some man or woman. When a man dies, his life and _rin_ both leave him, though the latter is asserted sometimes to linger near the place of death for a day or two.”(566) Again, at the town of Paha, in the northern territory of the Gold Coast, there are pools inhabited by crocodiles which are worshipped by the people. The natives believe that for every death or birth in the town a similar event takes place among the crocodiles.(567)

(M166) In South Africa the conception of an external soul deposited in an animal, which is so common in West Africa, appears to be almost unknown; at least I have met with no clear traces of it in literature. The Bechuanas, indeed, commonly believe that if a man wounds a crocodile, the man will be ill as long as the crocodile is ill of its wound, and that if the crocodile dies, the man dies too. This belief is not, apparently, confined to the Bechuana clan which has the crocodile for its totem, but is shared by all the other clans; all of them certainly hold the crocodile in respect.(568) It does not appear whether the sympathetic relation between a man and a crocodile is supposed by the Bechuanas to be lifelong, or only to arise at the moment when the man wounds the animal; in the latter case the shedding of the crocodile’s blood might perhaps be thought to establish a relationship of affinity or sympathy between the two. The Zulus believe that every man is attended by an ancestral spirit (_ihlozi_, or rather _idhlozi_) in the form of a serpent, “which specially guards and helps him, lives with him, wakes with him, sleeps and travels with him, but always under ground. If it ever makes its appearance, great is the joy, and the man must seek to discover the meaning of its appearance. He who has no _ihlozi_ must die. Therefore if any one kills an _ihlozi_ serpent, the man whose _ihlozi_ it was dies, but the serpent comes to life again.”(569) But the conception of a dead ancestor incarnate in a snake, on which the welfare or existence of one of his living descendants depends, is rather that of a guardian spirit than of an external soul.

(M167) Amongst the Zapotecs of Central America, when a woman was about to be confined, her relations assembled in the hut, and began to draw on the floor figures of different animals, rubbing each one out as soon as it was completed. This went on till the moment of birth, and the figure that then remained sketched upon the ground was called the child’s _tona_ or second self. “When the child grew old enough, he procured the animal that represented him and took care of it, as it was believed that health and existence were bound up with that of the animal’s, in fact that the death of both would occur simultaneously,” or rather that when the animal died the man would die too.(570) Among the Indians of Guatemala and Honduras the _nagual_ or _naual_ is “that animate or inanimate object, generally an animal, which stands in a parallel relation to a particular man, so that the weal and woe of the man depend on the fate of the _nagual_.”(571) According to an old writer, many Indians of Guatemala “are deluded by the devil to believe that their life dependeth upon the life of such and such a beast (which they take unto them as their familiar spirit), and think that when that beast dieth they must die; when he is chased, their hearts pant; when he is faint, they are faint; nay, it happeneth that by the devil’s delusion they appear in the shape of that beast (which commonly by their choice is a buck, or doe, a lion, or tigre, or dog, or eagle) and in that shape have been shot at and wounded.”(572) Herrera’s account of the way in which the Indians of Honduras acquired their _naguals_, runs thus: “The devil deluded them, appearing in the shape of a lion or a tiger, or a coyte, a beast like a wolf, or in the shape of an alligator, a snake, or a bird, that province abounding in creatures of prey, which they called _naguales_, signifying keepers or guardians, and when the bird died the Indian that was in league with him died also, which often happened and was looked upon as infallible. The manner of contracting this alliance was thus. The Indian repaired to the river, wood, hill, or most obscure place, where he called upon the devils by such names as he thought fit, talked to the rivers, rocks, or woods, said he went to weep that he might have the same his predecessors had, carrying a cock or a dog to sacrifice. In that melancholy fit he fell asleep, and either in a dream or waking saw some one of the aforesaid birds or other creatures, whom he entreated to grant him profit in salt, cacao, or any other commodity, drawing blood from his own tongue, ears, and other parts of his body, making his contract at the same time with the said creature, the which either in a dream or waking told him, ‘Such a day you shall go abroad asporting, and I will be the first bird or other animal you shall meet, and will be your _nagual_ and companion at all times.’ Whereupon such friendship was contracted between them, that when one of them died the other did not survive, and they fancied that he who had no _nagual_ could not be rich.”(573) The Indians were persuaded that the death of their _nagual_ would entail their own. Legend affirms that in the first battles with the Spaniards on the plateau of Quetzaltenango the _naguals_ of the Indian chiefs fought in the form of serpents. The _nagual_ of the highest chief was especially conspicuous, because it had the form of a great bird, resplendent in green plumage. The Spanish general Pedro de Alvarado killed the bird with his lance, and at the same moment the Indian chief fell dead to the ground.(574)

(M168) In many tribes of South-Eastern Australia each sex used to regard a particular species of animals in the same way that a Central American Indian regarded his _nagual_, but with this difference, that whereas the Indian apparently knew the individual animal with which his life was bound up, the Australians only knew that each of their lives was bound up with some one animal of the species, but they could not say with which. The result naturally was that every man spared and protected all the animals of the species with which the lives of the men were bound up; and every woman spared and protected all the animals of the species with which the lives of the women were bound up; because no one knew but that the death of any animal of the respective species might entail his or her own; just as the killing of the green bird was immediately followed by the death of the Indian chief, and the killing of the parrot by the death of Punchkin in the fairy tale. Thus, for example, the Wotjobaluk tribe of South-Eastern Australia “held that ‘the life of Ngŭnŭngŭnŭt (the Bat) is the life of a man, and the life of Yártatgŭrk (the Nightjar) is the life of a woman,’ and that when either of these creatures is killed the life of some man or of some woman is shortened. In such a case every man or every woman in the camp feared that he or she might be the victim, and from this cause great fights arose in this tribe. I learn that in these fights, men on one side and women on the other, it was not at all certain which would be victorious, for at times the women gave the men a severe drubbing with their yamsticks, while often women were injured or killed by spears.” The Wotjobaluk said that the bat was the man’s “brother” and that the nightjar was his “wife.”(575) The particular species of animals with which the lives of the sexes were believed to be respectively bound up varied somewhat from tribe to tribe. Thus whereas among the Wotjobaluk the bat was the animal of the men, at Gunbower Creek on the Lower Murray the bat seems to have been the animal of the women, for the natives would not kill it for the reason that “if it was killed, one of their lubras [women] would be sure to die in consequence.”(576) In the Kurnai tribe of Gippsland the emu-wren (_Stipiturus malachurus_) was the “man’s brother” and the superb warbler (_Malurus cyaneus_) was the “woman’s sister”; at the initiation of young men into the tribal mysteries the name of the emu-wren was invoked over the novices for the purpose of infusing manly virtue into them.(577) Among the Yuin on the south-eastern coast of Australia, the “woman’s sister” was the tree-creeper (_Climacteris scandens_), and the men had both the bat and the emu-wren for their “brothers.”(578) In the Kulin nation each sex had a pair of “brothers” and “sisters”; the men had the bat and the emu-wren for their “brothers,” and the women had the superb warbler and the small nightjar for their “sisters.”(579) It is notable that in South-Eastern Australia the animals thus associated with the lives of men and women were generally flying creatures, either birds or bats. However, in the Port Lincoln tribe of South Australia the man’s “brother” and the woman’s “sister” seem to have been identified with the male and female respectively of a species of lizard; for we read that “a small kind of lizard, the male of which is called _ibirri_, and the female _waka_, is said to have divided the sexes in the human species; an event that would appear not to be much approved of by the natives, since either sex has a mortal hatred against the opposite sex of these little animals, the men always destroying the _waka_ and the women the _ibirri_.”(580) But whatever the particular sorts of creature with which the lives of men and women were believed to be bound up, the belief itself and the fights to which it gave rise are known to have prevailed over a large part of South-Eastern Australia, and probably they extended much farther.(581) The belief was a very serious one, and so consequently were the fights which sprang from it. Thus among some tribes of Victoria “the common bat belongs to the men, who protect it against injury, even to the half-killing of their wives for its sake. The fern owl, or large goatsucker, belongs to the women, and, although a bird of evil omen, creating terror at night by its cry, it is jealously protected by them. If a man kills one, they are as much enraged as if it was one of their children, and will strike him with their long poles.”(582)

(M169) The jealous protection thus afforded by Australian men and women to bats and owls respectively (for bats and owls seem to be the creatures usually allotted to the two sexes)(583) is not based upon purely selfish considerations. For each man believes that not only his own life but the lives of his father, brothers, sons, and so on are bound up with the lives of particular bats, and that therefore in protecting the bat species he is protecting the lives of all his male relations as well as his own. Similarly, each woman believes that the lives of her mother, sisters, daughters, and so forth, equally with her own, are bound up with the lives of particular owls, and that in guarding the owl species she is guarding the lives of all her female relations besides her own. Now, when men’s lives are thus supposed to be contained in certain animals, it is obvious that the animals can hardly be distinguished from the men, or the men from the animals. If my brother John’s life is in a bat, then, on the one hand, the bat is my brother as well as John; and, on the other hand, John is in a sense a bat, since his life is in a bat. Similarly, if my sister Mary’s life is in an owl, then the owl is my sister and Mary is an owl. This is a natural enough conclusion, and the Australians have not failed to draw it. When the bat is the man’s animal, it is called his brother; and when the owl is the woman’s animal, it is called her sister. And conversely a man addresses a woman as an owl, and she addresses him as a bat.(584) So with the other animals allotted to the sexes respectively in other tribes. For example, among the Kurnai all emu-wrens were “brothers” of the men, and all the men were emu-wrens; all superb warblers were “sisters” of the women, and all the women were superb warblers.(585)

§ 4. A Suggested Theory of Totemism.(586)

(M170) But when a savage names himself after an animal, calls it his brother, and refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his totem. Accordingly in the tribes of South-Eastern Australia which we have been considering the bat and the owl, the emu-wren and the superb warbler, may properly be described as totems of the sexes. But the assignation of a totem to a sex is comparatively rare, and has hitherto been discovered nowhere but in Australia. Far more commonly the totem is appropriated not to a sex, but to a clan, and is hereditary either in the male or female line. The relation of an individual to the clan totem does not differ in kind from his relation to the sex totem; he will not kill it, he speaks of it as his brother, and he calls himself by its name. Now if the relations are similar, the explanation which holds good of the one ought equally to hold good of the other. Therefore the reason why a clan revere a particular species of animals or plants (for the clan totem may be a plant) and call themselves after it, would seem to be a belief that the life of each individual of the clan is bound up with some one animal or plant of the species, and that his or her death would be the consequence of killing that particular animal, or destroying that particular plant. This explanation of totemism squares very well with Sir George Grey’s definition of a totem or _kobong_ in Western Australia. He says: “A certain mysterious connection exists between a family and its _kobong_, so that a member of the family will never kill an animal of the species to which his _kobong_ belongs, should he find it asleep; indeed he always kills it reluctantly, and never without affording it a chance to escape. This arises from the family belief that some one individual of the species is their nearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime, and to be carefully avoided. Similarly, a native who has a vegetable for his _kobong_ may not gather it under certain circumstances, and at a particular period of the year.”(587) Here it will be observed that though each man spares all the animals or plants of the species, they are not all equally precious to him; far from it, out of the whole species there is only one which is specially dear to him; but as he does not know which the dear one is, he is obliged to spare them all from fear of injuring the one. Again, this explanation of the clan totem harmonizes with the supposed effect of killing one of the totem species. “One day one of the blacks killed a crow. Three or four days afterwards a Boortwa (crow) [_i.e._ a man of the Crow clan] named Larry died. He had been ailing for some days, but the killing of his _wingong_ [totem] hastened his death.”(588) Here the killing of the crow caused the death of a man of the Crow clan, exactly as, in the case of the sex-totems, the killing of a bat causes the death of a Bat-man or the killing of an owl causes the death of an Owl-woman. Similarly, the killing of his _nagual_ causes the death of a Central American Indian, the killing of his bush soul causes the death of a Calabar negro, the killing of his _tamaniu_ causes the death of a Banks Islander, and the killing of the animal in which his life is stowed away causes the death of the giant or warlock in the fairy tale.

(M171) Thus it appears that the story of “The giant who had no heart in his body” may perhaps furnish the key to the relation which is supposed to subsist between a man and his totem. The totem, on this theory, is simply the receptacle in which a man keeps his life, as Punchkin kept his life in a parrot, and Bidasari kept her soul in a golden fish. It is no valid objection to this view that when a savage has both a sex totem and a clan totem his life must be bound up with two different animals, the death of either of which would entail his own. If a man has more vital places than one in his body, why, the savage may think, should he not have more vital places than one outside it? Why, since he can put his life outside himself, should he not transfer one portion of it to one animal and another to another? The divisibility of life, or, to put it otherwise, the plurality of souls, is an idea suggested by many familiar facts, and has commended itself to philosophers like Plato,(589) as well as to savages. It finds favour also with the sages of China, who tell us that every human being is provided with what may be called a male soul (_shen_) and a female soul (_kwei_), which by their harmonious co-operation compose an organic unity. However, some Chinese philosophers will have it that each of the five viscera has its own separate male soul (_shen_); and a Taoist treatise written about the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century has even enriched science with a list of about three dozen souls distributed over the various parts of the human frame; indeed, not content with a bare catalogue of these souls, the learned author has annexed to the name and surname of each a brief description of its size and stature, of the kind of dress in which it is clothed and the shape of hat it wears.(590) It is only when the notion of a soul, from being a quasi-scientific hypothesis, becomes a theological dogma that its unity and indivisibility are insisted upon as essential. The savage, unshackled by dogma, is free to explain the facts of life by the assumption of as many souls as he thinks necessary. Hence, for example, the Caribs supposed that there was one soul in the head, another in the heart, and other souls at all the places where an artery is felt pulsating.(591) Some of the Hidatsa Indians explain the phenomena of gradual death, when the extremities appear dead first, by supposing that man has four souls, and that they quit the body, not simultaneously, but one after the other, dissolution being only complete when all four have departed.(592) Some of the Dyaks of Borneo and the Malays of the Peninsula believe that every man has seven souls.(593) The Alfoors of Poso in Celebes are of opinion that he has three.(594) The natives of Laos suppose that the body is the seat of thirty spirits, which reside in the hands, the feet, the mouth, the eyes, and so on.(595) Hence, from the primitive point of view, it is perfectly possible that a savage should have one soul in his sex totem and another in his clan totem. However, as I have observed, sex totems have been found nowhere but in Australia; so that as a rule the savage who practises totemism need not have more than one soul out of his body at a time.(596)

(M172) If this explanation of the totem as a receptacle in which a man keeps his soul or one of his souls is correct, we should expect to find some totemic people of whom it is expressly said that every man amongst them is believed to keep at least one soul permanently out of his body, and that the destruction of this external soul is supposed to entail the death of its owner. Such a people are the Battas of Sumatra. The Battas are divided into exogamous clans (_margas_) with descent in the male line; and each clan is forbidden to eat the flesh of a particular animal. One clan may not eat the tiger, another the ape, another the crocodile, another the dog, another the cat, another the dove, another the white buffalo, and another the locust. The reason given by members of a clan for abstaining from the flesh of the particular animal is either that they are descended from animals of that species, and that their souls after death may transmigrate into the animals, or that they or their forefathers have been under certain obligations to the creatures. Sometimes, but not always, the clan bears the name of the animal.(597) Thus the Battas have totemism in full. But, further, each Batta believes that he has seven or, on a more moderate computation, three souls. One of these souls is always outside the body, but nevertheless whenever it dies, however far away it may be at the time, that same moment the man dies also.(598) The writer who mentions this belief says nothing about the Batta totems; but on the analogy of the Australian, Central American, and African evidence we may conjecture that the external soul, whose death entails the death of the man, is housed in the totemic animal or plant.

(M173) Against this view it can hardly be thought to militate that the Batta does not in set terms affirm his external soul to be in his totem, but alleges other grounds for respecting the sacred animal or plant of his clan. For if a savage seriously believes that his life is bound up with an external object, it is in the last degree unlikely that he will let any stranger into the secret. In all that touches his inmost life and beliefs the savage is exceedingly suspicious and reserved; Europeans have resided among savages for years without discovering some of their capital articles of faith, and in the end the discovery has often been the result of accident.(599) Above all, the savage lives in an intense and perpetual dread of assassination by sorcery; the most trifling relics of his person—the clippings of his hair and nails, his spittle, the remnants of his food, his very name(600)—all these may, he fancies, be turned by the sorcerer to his destruction, and he is therefore anxiously careful to conceal or destroy them. But if in matters such as these, which are but the outposts and outworks of his life, he is so shy and secretive, how close must be the concealment, how impenetrable the reserve in which he enshrouds the inner keep and citadel of his being! When the princess in the fairy tale asks the giant where he keeps his soul, he often gives false or evasive answers, and it is only after much coaxing and wheedling that the secret is at last wrung from him. In his jealous reticence the giant resembles the timid and furtive savage; but whereas the exigencies of the story demand that the giant should at last reveal his secret, no such obligation is laid on the savage; and no inducement that can be offered is likely to tempt him to imperil his soul by revealing its hiding-place to a stranger. It is therefore no matter for surprise that the central mystery of the savage’s life should so long have remained a secret, and that we should be left to piece it together from scattered hints and fragments and from the recollections of it which linger in fairy tales.

§ 5. The Ritual of Death and Resurrection.

(M174) This view of totemism throws light on a class of religious rites of which no adequate explanation, so far as I am aware, has yet been offered. Amongst many savage tribes, especially such as are known to practise totemism, it is customary for lads at puberty to undergo certain initiatory rites, of which one of the commonest is a pretence of killing the lad and bringing him to life again. Such rites become intelligible if we suppose that their substance consists in extracting the youth’s soul in order to transfer it to his totem. For the extraction of his soul would naturally be supposed to kill the youth or at least to throw him into a death-like trance, which the savage hardly distinguishes from death. His recovery would then be attributed either to the gradual recovery of his system from the violent shock which it had received, or, more probably, to the infusion into him of fresh life drawn from the totem. Thus the essence of these initiatory rites, so far as they consist in a simulation of death and resurrection, would be an exchange of life or souls between the man and his totem. The primitive belief in the possibility of such an exchange of souls comes clearly out in the story of the Basque hunter who affirmed that he had been killed by a bear, but that the bear had, after killing him, breathed its own soul into him, so that the bear’s body was now dead, but he himself was a bear, being animated by the bear’s soul.(601) This revival of the dead hunter as a bear is exactly analogous to what, on the theory here suggested, is supposed to take place in the ceremony of killing a lad at puberty and bringing him to life again. The lad dies as a man and comes to life again as an animal; the animal’s soul is now in him, and his human soul is in the animal. With good right, therefore, does he call himself a Bear or a Wolf, etc., according to his totem; and with good right does he treat the bears or the wolves, etc., as his brethren, since in these animals are lodged the souls of himself and his kindred.

(M175) Examples of this supposed death and resurrection at initiation are as follows. In the Wonghi or Wonghibon tribe of New South Wales “the youths on approaching manhood attend a meeting of the tribe. The ceremonies of initiation are secret, and at them none but the men of the tribe who have been initiated attend with the novices. At the spot where the ceremonies are to be performed, a large oval space is cleared. The old men of the tribe conduct the ceremonies, and the ‘medicine man’ of the tribe is the master of them. Part of the proceedings consists in knocking out a tooth and giving a new designation to the novice, indicating the change from youth to manhood. When the tooth is knocked out, a loud humming noise is heard, which is made with an instrument of the following description: a flat piece of wood is made with serrated edges, and having a hole at one end, to which a string is attached, and this swung round produces a humming noise. The uninitiated are not even allowed to see this instrument. Women are forbidden to be present at these ceremonies, and should one, by accident or otherwise, witness them, the penalty is death. The penalty for revealing the secrets is probably the same. When everything is prepared the women and children are covered with boughs, and the men retire, with the young fellows who are to be initiated, to a little distance. It is said that the youths are sent away a short distance one by one, and that they are each met in turn by a Being, who, so far as I can understand, is believed to be something between a blackfellow and a spirit. This Being, called Thuremlin, it is said, takes the youth to a distance, kills him, and in some instances cuts him up, after which he restores him to life and knocks out a tooth. Their belief in the power of Thuremlin is undoubted.”(602)

(M176) The foregoing account, while it applies strictly to one tribe only, may be regarded as typical of the initiation ceremonies performed on young men throughout the tribes of South-Eastern and Central Australia, except that among the Central tribes the practice of knocking out a tooth on these occasions is replaced by the equally mysterious and much severer bodily mutilations of circumcision and subincision, which are not practised by the tribes of the South-East.(603) The instrument whose humming or booming sound accompanies the critical operation of knocking out the tooth of the novice, is the now well-known bull-roarer, which figures in many savage rites of initiation. Its true nature is concealed from the women and uninitiated lads, who are taught to believe that its sonorous and long-drawn notes are the voice of the mythical being, often called Daramulun, who lives in the sky, instituted the rites, and superintends their performance. The hollow roar of the slat of wood, as it is swung round and round, “represents the muttering of thunder, and the thunder is the voice of Daramulun, and therefore its sound is of the most sacred character. Umbara once said to me, ‘Thunder is the voice of him (pointing upward to the sky) calling on the rain to fall and make everything grow up new.’ ”(604) This supposed resemblance of the sound to thunder probably explains a certain use which the Dieri, a tribe of Central Australia, made of the instrument. When a young man had passed through an initiatory rite, which consisted in cutting a row of gashes in his back, he was given a bull-roarer, and when he went out in search of game, he used to twirl the implement in the belief that by doing so, while his wounds were still unhealed, he created a good harvest of snakes, lizards, and other reptiles, which the natives employ as food; but on the contrary they imagined that these supplies of food would be cut off for ever, if a woman were to see a bull-roarer which had been swung at the rites of initiation.(605) No doubt these savages, living in a parched wilderness where the existence of plants and animals depends on rare and irregular showers,(606) have observed that the fall of rain is regularly followed by a great and sudden increase in the food supply, and that this increase is most marked after violent thunder-storms. Hence by making a noise like thunder with the help of bull-roarers they probably hope, on the principle of imitative magic, to bring on a thunder-storm and with it a fertilizing deluge of rain.

(M177) For the same reason in the parched and torrid regions of Arizona and New Mexico the Indians make great use of the bull-roarer in their ceremonies for procuring rain. For example, when Captain Bourke was at the Pueblo Indian village of Walpi in the month of August, 1881, he saw the instrument in use at the snake dance. “The medicine-men twirled it rapidly, and with a uniform motion, about the head and from front to rear, and succeeded in faithfully imitating the sound of a gust of rain-laden wind. As explained to me by one of the medicine-men, by making this sound they compelled the wind and rain to come to the aid of the crops. At a later date I found it in use among the Apache, and for the same purpose.”(607) The Zuñi Indians of New Mexico whirl bull-roarers “to create enthusiasm” among the mythical beings who are supposed to cause rain, or for the purpose of making them gather in the air over the village.(608) In a Zuñi rain-making ceremony, while one medicine-man whirls a bull-roarer, another whips up a mixture of water and meal into frothy suds symbolic of clouds, and a third plays a flute. “All this is an invocation to the gods for rain—the one great and perpetual prayer of the people of this arid land.”(609) This supposed connexion of the instrument with thunder-storms explains why the Navajos of the same torrid country say that the bull-roarer should always be made of wood from a pine-tree that has been struck by lightning;(610) and why the Bakairi of Brazil call the unpretentious instrument by a name that means “thunder and lightning.”(611) The resemblance of the sound of the bull-roarer to the roaring of the wind is doubtless the reason why in the Torres Straits Islands wizards whirled bull-roarers in order to make the wind to blow,(612) and why, when Caffres wish for calm weather, they forbid boys to play with bull-roarers, because they think that the booming noise attracts a gale of wind.(613) Hence, as an instrument whose sound resembles the rumbling of thunder, the roar of wind, and the patter of rain, the bull-roarer is naturally swung by agricultural savages as a powerful means of promoting the growth of the crops. In the island of Kiwai, off the mouth of the Fly River in British New Guinea, bull-roarers are whirled in order to ensure a good crop of yams, sweet potatoes, and bananas.(614) Similarly the Yabim of German New Guinea imagine that by twirling bull-roarers while they mention the names of the dead they produce a fine crop of taro.(615)

(M178) But why among the Dieri of Central Australia should the power of attracting rain and so ensuring a supply of food be specially attributed to a young man whose back has just been scored and whose wounds are still raw? Perhaps the reason may be that the blood dripping from the gashes is thought to resemble rain and therefore to be endowed with a magical potency of drawing showers from the clouds. The conjecture is confirmed by the observation that the Dieri actually do bleed themselves avowedly for the purpose of making rain, and they are not the only people in Australia and elsewhere who have resorted to this singular mode of putting an end to a drought.(616) Altogether the foregoing evidence seems to hint that the whole virtue of the bull-roarer resides, as its English name implies, in its voice, and that its original significance was simply that of a magical instrument for causing thunder, wind, and rain.(617) When these natural phenomena came to be personified as spirits, the sound of the bull-roarer was naturally interpreted as their voice.

(M179) Among the tribes on the Brisbane River in Queensland the weird sound of the bull-roarers swung at initiation was believed by the women and children to be made by the wizards in swallowing the boys and bringing them up again as young men. The Ualaroi of the Upper Darling River said that the boy met a ghost, who killed him and brought him to life again as a young man. Among the natives on the Lower Lachlan and Murray Rivers it was Thrumalun (Daramulun) who was thought to slay and resuscitate the novices.(618) In the Arunta tribe of Central Australia, at the moment when the lads are being circumcised, the bull-roarer sounds in the darkness all round the ceremonial ground; and the awestruck women, listening in the distance, believe that it is the voice of a spirit called Twanyirika, who lives in wild and inaccessible regions and only comes out when a youth is initiated. They think that the spirit enters the body of the lad after the operation of circumcision has been performed and carries him away into the bush, keeping him there till his wound is healed. While the newly circumcised youth is out in the wilds, carefully secluded from the sight of the women and children, he constantly sounds the bull-roarer. When he has recovered from the wound, the spirit leaves him and he returns to camp an initiated, or rather partially initiated, man. He has learned, at all events, the secret of Twanyirika; for no sooner is he circumcised than an elder brother comes up to him, and placing in his hands a bundle of sacred sticks or stones (_churinga_), says, “Here is Twanyirika, of whom you have heard so much. They are _churinga_ and will help you to heal quickly; guard them well, or else you and your mothers and sisters will be killed.”(619)

(M180) In this account nothing is said about killing the lad and bringing him to life again; but a belief in the death and resurrection of the novices at initiation is expressly affirmed to be part of the feminine creed in other tribes of Central Australia. Thus in the Unmatjera tribe both women and children believe that Twanyirika kills the youth and afterwards brings him to life again during the period of initiation. The rites of initiation in this tribe, as in the other Central tribes, comprise the operations of circumcision and subincision; and as soon as the second of these has been performed on him, the young man receives from his father a sacred stick (_churinga_), with which, he is told, his spirit was associated in the remotest past. While he is out in the bush recovering from his wounds, he must swing the bull-roarer, or a being who lives up in the sky will swoop down and carry him off.(620) In the Urabunna tribe of Central Australia a lad at initiation receives a bull-roarer, the very name of which (_chimbaliri_) is never heard by women and children. They are taught to believe that the sound of it is the voice of a spirit called Witurna, who takes the boy away, cuts out all his bowels, provides him with a new set, and brings him back an initiated youth. The lad is warned that on no account may he allow a woman or a child to see the sacred stick, else he and his mother and sisters will fall down as dead as stones.(621) In the Binbinga tribe, on the western coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, the women and children believe that the noise of the bull-roarer at initiation is made by a spirit named Katajalina, who lives in an ant-hill and comes out and eats up the boy, afterwards restoring him to life.(622) Similarly among their neighbours the Anula the women imagine that the droning sound of the bull-roarer is produced by a spirit called Gnabaia, who swallows the lads at initiation and afterwards disgorges them in the form of initiated men. In this tribe, after a lad has been subincised as well as circumcised, he is presented with a bull-roarer and informed that the instrument was originally made by the whirlwind, that it is sacred or tabooed, and that it may on no account be shewn to women or children.(623)

(M181) Among the tribes settled on the southern coast of New South Wales, of which the Coast Murring tribe may be regarded as typical, the drama of resurrection from the dead was exhibited in a graphic form to the novices at initiation. Before they were privileged to witness this edifying spectacle they had been raised to the dignity of manhood by an old man, who promoted them to their new status by the simple process of knocking a tooth out of the mouth of each with the help of a wooden chisel and hammer. The ceremony of the resurrection has been described for us in detail by an eye-witness, the late Dr. A. W. Howitt, one of the best authorities on the customs of the Australian aborigines. The scene selected for the sacred drama was the bottom of a deep valley, where a sluggish stream wound through a bed of tall sharp-edged sedge. Though the hour was between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning, the sun had but just peeped over the mountains which enclosed the valley like a wall on the east; and while the upper slopes, clothed with a forest of tall rowan trees, looked warm and bright in sunshine, which shot between the grey stems and under the light feathery foliage of the trees, all the bottom of the dell was still in deep shadow and dank with the moisture of the night’s rain. While the novices rested and warmed themselves at a crackling fire, the initiated men laid their heads together, prepared a stock of decorations made of stringy bark, and dug a grave. There was some discussion as to the shape of the grave, but the man who was to be buried in it decided the question by declaring that he would be laid in it on his back at full length. He was a man of the eagle-hawk totem and belonged to the tribal subdivision called Yibai. So while two men under his directions were digging the grave with sticks in the friable granitic soil, he superintended the costume of the other actors in the drama. Sheets of bark were beaten out into fleeces of stringy fibre, and in these garments six performers were clothed from head to foot so that not even a glimpse could be obtained of their faces. Four of them were tied together by a cord which was fastened to the back of their heads, and each of them carried two pieces of bark in his hands. The other two walked free, but hobbled along bent double and supporting their tottery steps on staves to mark the weight of years; for they played the part of two medicine-men of venerable age and great magical power. By this time the grave was ready, and the eagle-hawk man stretched himself in it at full length on a bed of leaves, his head resting on a rolled-up blanket, just as if he were a corpse. In his two hands, crossed on his chest, he held the stem of a young tree (_Persoonia linearis_), which had been pulled up by the roots and now stood planted on his chest, so that the top of it rose several feet above the level of the ground. A light covering of dried sticks filled the grave, and dead leaves, tufts of grass, and small plants were artistically arranged over them so as to complete the illusion. All being now ready, the novices were led by their sisters’ husbands to the grave and placed in a row beside it, while a singer, perched on the trunk of a fallen tree at the head of the grave, crooned a melancholy ditty, the song of Yibai. Though the words of the song consisted merely of a monotonous repetition of the words _Burrin-burrin Yibai_, that is, Stringy-bark Yibai, they were understood to refer to the eagle-hawk totem, as well as to the tribal subdivision of the buried man. Then to the slow, plaintive but well-marked air of the song the actors began to move forward, winding among the trees, logs, and rocks. On came the four disguised men, stepping in time to the music, swaying from side to side, and clashing their bark clappers together at every step, while beside them hobbled the two old men keeping a little aloof to mark their superior dignity. They represented a party of medicine-men, guided by two reverend seniors, who had come on pilgrimage to the grave of a brother medicine-man, him of the eagle-hawk totem, who lay buried here in the lonely valley, now illumined by the warm rays of the sun; for by this time the morning was wearing on to noon. When the little procession, chanting an invocation to Daramulun, had defiled from among the rocks and trees into the open, it drew up on the side of the grave opposite to the novices, the two old men taking up a position in the rear of the dancers. For some time the dance and song went on till the tree that seemed to grow from the grave began to quiver. “Look there!” cried the sisters’ husbands to the novices, pointing to the trembling leaves. As they looked, the tree quivered more and more, then was violently agitated and fell to the ground, while amid the excited dancing of the dancers and the chanting of the tuneful choir the supposed dead man spurned from him the superincumbent mass of sticks and leaves, and springing to his feet danced his magic dance in the grave itself, and exhibited in his mouth the magic substances which he was supposed to have received from Daramulun in person.(624)

(M182) In some tribes of Central and Northern Australia the initiation of a medicine-man into the mysteries of his craft is supposed to be accomplished by certain spirits, who kill him, cut out his internal organs, and having provided him with a new set bring him to life again. Sometimes the spirits kindly replace the man’s human organs by their own spiritual organs; sometimes along with the new organs they insert magical stones in his body or even a serpent, and the stones or the serpents naturally endow the new wizards with marvellous powers. In some tribes the initiation takes place in a cave, where the spirits dwell. After the man has been restored to life with a new heart, a new pair of lungs, and so forth, he returns to his people in a more or less dazed condition, which his friends may at first mistake for insanity, though afterwards they recognize its true character as inspiration.(625) One eminent medical practitioner in the Unmatjera tribe assured Messrs. Spencer and Gillen that when he came to himself after the operation, which in his case was performed by an aged doctor, he had completely forgotten who he was and all about his past life. After a time his venerable friend led him back to the camp and shewed it to him, and said, “That woman there is your wife,” for she had gone clean out of his head.(626) We shall see presently that this temporary oblivion, a natural effect of the shock to the nervous system produced by resuscitation from the dead, is characteristic of novices under similar circumstances in other lands. Among the Arunta of Alice Springs the cave where the mystic initiation takes place is a limestone cavern in a range of hills which rises to the north of the wide level expanse known as the Emily plain. None of the ordinary natives would dare to set foot in the awful grotto, which they believe to extend for miles into the bowels of the earth and to be tenanted by certain ancestral spirits, who live there in perpetual sunshine and amid streams of running water, an earthly paradise by contrast with the arid sun-scorched steppes and barren mountains outside. White men have explored the cave, and if they perceived no spirits, they found bats in plenty. The man who aspires to the rank of a wizard lies down at the mouth of the cave and falls asleep; and as he sleeps one of the ancestral spirits steals up to him and drives an invisible spear through his neck from back to front. The point of the spear comes out through the man’s tongue, leaving a hole through which you could put your little finger, and this hole the man retains for the rest of his natural life, or at least so long as he retains his magical powers; for if the hole should close up, these spiritual gifts and graces would depart from him. A second thrust from the invisible spear transfixes the man’s head from ear to ear; he drops down dead, and is immediately transported into the depths of the cavern, where the spirits dissect his dead body, extract the old viscera, and replace them with a new set in the manner already described.(627)

(M183) In this account of the manner in which medicine-men obtain their magical powers not only are the supposed death and resurrection of the novice worthy of attention, but also the exchange of internal organs which in the Binbinga and Mara tribes is supposed to be effected between the man and the spirit;(628) for this exchange resembles that which, on the theory I have suggested, may be thought to take place between a lad and his totem at the ceremonies of initiation which mark the momentous transition from boyhood to manhood. Further, the bodily mutilation which is the visible sign of the medicine-man’s initiation (for however the hole may be made it certainly exists in the tongues of regular Arunta practitioners) corresponds to the bodily mutilations of other sorts, which in many savage tribes attest to the world that the mutilated persons are fullgrown men. What the precise meaning of such mutilations may be, still remains very obscure; but they seem in some cases to be directly associated with the conception of death and resurrection.

(M184) This association certainly comes out plainly in the rites of initiation through which in some parts of New Guinea all lads must pass before they attain to the status of adults. The rites are observed by a group of tribes who occupy contiguous territories about Finsch Harbour and Huon Gulf in German New Guinea. The tribes in question are the Yabim, the Bukaua, the Kai, and the Tami. All of them except the Kai belong to the Melanesian stock and are therefore presumably immigrants from the adjoining islands; but the Kai, who inhabit the rugged, densely wooded, and rainy mountains inland from Finsch Harbour, belong to the aboriginal Papuan stock and differ from their neighbours in speech as well as in appearance. Yet the rites of initiation which all these tribes celebrate and the beliefs which they associate with them are so similar that a single description will apply accurately enough to them all. All of them, like many Australian tribes, require every male member of the tribe to be circumcised before he ranks as a full-grown man; and the tribal initiation, of which circumcision is the central feature, is conceived by them, as by some Australian tribes, as a process of being swallowed and disgorged by a mythical monster, whose voice is heard in the humming sound of the bull-roarer. Indeed the New Guinea tribes not only impress this belief on the minds of women and children, but enact it in a dramatic form at the actual rites of initiation, at which no woman or uninitiated person may be present. For this purpose a hut about a hundred feet long is erected either in the village or in a lonely part of the forest. It is modelled in the shape of the mythical monster; at the end which represents his head it is high, and it tapers away at the other end. A betel-palm, grubbed up with the roots, stands for the backbone of the great being and its clustering fibres for his hair; and to complete the resemblance the butt end of the building is adorned by a native artist with a pair of goggle eyes and a gaping mouth. When after a tearful parting from their mothers and women folk, who believe or pretend to believe in the monster that swallows their dear ones, the awe-struck novices are brought face to face with this imposing structure, the huge creature emits a sullen growl, which is in fact no other than the humming note of bull-roarers swung by men concealed in the monster’s belly. The actual process of deglutition is variously enacted. Among the Tami it is represented by causing the candidates to defile past a row of men who hold bull-roarers over their heads; among the Kai it is more graphically set forth by making them pass under a scaffold on which stands a man, who makes a gesture of swallowing and takes in fact a gulp of water as each trembling novice passes beneath him. But the present of a pig, opportunely offered for the redemption of the youth, induces the monster to relent and disgorge his victim; the man who represents the monster accepts the gift vicariously, a gurgling sound is heard, and the water which had just been swallowed descends in a jet on the novice. This signifies that the young man has been released from the monster’s belly. However, he has now to undergo the more painful and dangerous operation of circumcision. It follows immediately, and the cut made by the knife of the operator is explained to be a bite or scratch which the monster inflicted on the novice in spewing him out of his capacious maw. While the operation is proceeding, a prodigious noise is made by the swinging of bull-roarers to represent the roar of the dreadful being who is in the act of swallowing the young men.

(M185) When, as sometimes happens, a lad dies from the effect of the operation, he is buried secretly in the forest, and his sorrowing mother is told that the monster has a pig’s stomach as well as a human stomach, and that unfortunately her son slipped into the wrong stomach, from which it was impossible to extricate him. After they have been circumcised the lads must remain for some months in seclusion, shunning all contact with women and even the sight of them. They live in the long hut which represents the monster’s belly; among the Yabim they beguile the tedium of this enforced leisure by weaving baskets and playing on certain sacred flutes, which are never used except on these occasions. The instruments are of two patterns. One is called the male and the other the female; and they are believed to be married to each other. No woman may see these mysterious flutes; if she did, she would die. When the long seclusion is over, the lads, now ranking as initiated men, are brought back with great pomp and ceremony to the village, where they are received with sobs and tears of joy by the women, as if the grave had given up its dead. At first the young men keep their eyes rigidly closed or even sealed with a plaster of chalk, and they appear not to understand the words of command which are given them by an elder. Gradually, however, they come to themselves as if awaking from a stupor, and next day they bathe and wash off the crust of white chalk with which their bodies had been coated.(629)

(M186) It is highly significant that all these tribes of New Guinea apply the same word to the bull-roarer and to the monster, who is supposed to swallow the novices at circumcision, and whose fearful roar is represented by the hum of the harmless wooden instruments. The word in the speech of the Yabim and Bukaua is _balum_; in that of the Kai it is _ngosa_; and in that of the Tami it is _kani_. Further, it deserves to be noted that in three languages out of the four the same word which is applied to the bull-roarer and to the monster means also a ghost or spirit of the dead, while in the fourth language (the Kai) it signifies “grandfather.” From this it seems to follow that the being who swallows and disgorges the novices at initiation is believed to be a powerful ghost or ancestral spirit, and that the bull-roarer, which bears his name, is his material representative. That would explain the jealous secrecy with which the sacred implement is kept from the sight of women. While they are not in use, the bull-roarers are stowed away in the men’s club-houses, which no woman may enter; indeed no woman or uninitiated person may set eyes on a bull-roarer under pain of death.(630) Similarly among the Tugeri or Kaya-Kaya, a large Papuan tribe on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, the name of the bull-roarer, which they call _sosom_, is given to a mythical giant, who is supposed to appear every year with the south-east monsoon. When he comes, a festival is held in his honour and bull-roarers are swung. Boys are presented to the giant, and he kills them, but considerately brings them to life again.(631)

(M187) In certain districts of Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian Islands, the drama of death and resurrection used to be acted with much solemnity before the eyes of young men at initiation. The ceremonies were performed in certain sacred precincts of oblong shape, enclosed by low walls or rows of stones but open to the sky. Such a precinct was called a _Nanga_, and it might be described as a temple dedicated to the worship of ancestors; for in it sacrifices and prayers were offered to the ancestral spirits. For example, the first-fruits of the yam harvest were regularly presented with great ceremony to the souls of the dead in the temple before the bulk of the crop was dug for the people’s use, and no man might taste of the new yams until this solemn offering had been made. The yams so offered were piled up in the sacred enclosure and left to rot there; if any man were so bold as to eat of these dedicated fruits, it was believed that he would go mad.(632) Any initiated man had the right of approaching the ancestral spirits at any time in their holy place, where he would pray to them for help and protection and propitiate them by laying down his offering of a pig, or yams, or eels, or cloth, or what not.(633) Of these offerings perhaps the most curious was that of the foreskins of young men, who were circumcised as a sort of vicarious sacrifice or atonement for the recovery of a sick relative, it might be either their father or one of their father’s brothers. The bloody foreskins, stuck in the cleft of a split reed, were presented to the ancestral gods in the temple by the chief priest, who prayed for the sick man’s recovery.(634) The temple or sacred enclosure was divided into two or three compartments by cross walls of stones, and the inmost of these compartments was the _Nanga-tambu-tambu_, or Holy of Holies.(635)

(M188) In these open-air temples of the dead the ceremony of initiating young men was performed as a rule every year at the end of October or the beginning of November, which was the commencement of the Fijian New Year; hence the novices who were initiated at that season went by the name of _Vilavou_ or New Year’s Men. The exact time for celebrating the rite was determined by the flowering of the _ndrala_ tree (_Erythrina_); but it roughly coincided with the New Year of the Tahitians and Hawaiians, who dated the commencement of the year by observation of the Pleiades. The highlanders of Fiji, who alone celebrated these rites, did not trouble their heads about the stars.(636) As a preparation for the solemnity the heads of the novices were shaved and their beards, if they had any, were carefully eradicated. On four successive days they went in procession to the temple and there deposited in the Holy of Holies their offerings of cloth and weapons to the ancestral spirits. But on the fifth and great day of the festival, when they again entered the sacred ground, they beheld a sight which froze their souls with horror. Stretched on the ground was a row of dead or seemingly dead and murdered men, their bodies cut open and covered with blood, their entrails protruding. At the further end sat the High Priest, regarding them with a stony glare, and to reach him the trembling novices had to crawl on hands and knees over the ghastly blood-bedabbled corpses that lay between. Having done so they drew up in a line before him. Suddenly he blurted out a piercing yell, at which the counterfeit dead men started to their feet and ran down to the river to cleanse themselves from the blood and guts of pigs with which they were beslobbered. The High Priest now unbent his starched dignity, and skipping from side to side cried in stridulous tones, “Where are the people of my enclosure? Are they gone to Tonga Levu? Are they gone to the deep sea?” He was soon answered by a deep-mouthed chant, and back from the river marched the dead men come to life, clean, fresh, and garlanded, swaying their bodies in time to the music of their solemn hymn. They took their places in front of the novices and a religious silence ensued. Such was the drama of death and resurrection. It was immediately followed by a sacramental meal. Four old men of the highest order of initiates now entered the Holy of Holies. The first bore a cooked yam carefully wrapt up in leaves so that no part of it should touch the hands of the bearer: the second carried a piece of baked pork similarly enveloped: the third held a drinking-cup full of water and wrapt round with native cloth; and the fourth bore a napkin of the same stuff. The first elder passed along the row of novices putting the end of the yam into each of their mouths, and as he did so each of them nibbled a morsel of the sacred food: the second elder did the same with the hallowed pork: the third elder followed with the holy water, with which each novice merely wetted his lips; and the fourth elder wiped all their mouths with his napkin. Then the high priest or one of the elders addressed the young men, warning them solemnly against the sacrilege of betraying to the profane vulgar any of the high mysteries which they had witnessed, and threatening all such traitors with the vengeance of the gods. The general intention of the initiatory rites seems to have been to introduce the young men to the worshipful spirits of the dead at their temple, and to cement the bond between them by a sacramental meal.(637)

(M189) The people of Rook, an island between New Guinea and New Britain, hold festivals at which one or two disguised men, their heads covered with wooden masks, go dancing through the village, followed by all the other men. They demand that the circumcised boys who have not yet been swallowed by Marsaba (the devil) shall be given up to them. The boys, trembling and shrieking, are delivered to them, and must creep between the legs of the disguised men. Then the procession moves through the village again, and announces that Marsaba has eaten up the boys, and will not disgorge them till he receives a present of pigs, taro, and so forth. So all the villagers, according to their means, contribute provisions, which are then consumed in the name of Marsaba.(638) In New Britain all males are members of an association called the Duk-duk. The boys are admitted to it very young, but are not fully initiated till their fourteenth year, when they receive from the Tubuvan or Tubuan a terrible blow with a cane, which is supposed to kill them. The Tubuan and the Duk-duk are two disguised men who represent cassowaries. They dance with a short hopping step in imitation of the cassowary. Each of them wears a huge hat like an extinguisher, woven of grass or palm-fibres; it is six feet high, and descends to the wearer’s shoulders, completely concealing his head and face. From the neck to the knees the man’s body is hidden by a crinoline made of the leaves of a certain tree fastened on hoops, one above the other. The Tubuan is regarded as a female, the Duk-duk as a male. The former is supposed to breed and give birth to the novices, who are accordingly looked upon as newly born. The female masks are very plain compared with the male masks. Two of them are regularly kept from year to year in order that they may annually breed new Duk-duks. When they are wanted for this purpose they are brought forth, decorated afresh, and provided with new leaf dresses to match. According to one account, women and children may not look upon one of these disguised men or they would die. So strong is this superstition among them that they will run away and hide as soon as they hear him coming, for they are aware of his approach through a peculiar shrieking noise he utters as he goes along. In the district of Berara, where red is the Duk-duk colour, the mere sight of a red cloth is enough to make the women take to their heels. The common herd are not allowed to know who the masker is. If he stumbles and his hat falls to the ground, disclosing his face, or his crinoline is torn to tatters by the bushes, his attendants immediately surround him to hide his person from the vulgar eye. According to one writer, indeed, the performer who drops his mask, or lets it fall so that the sharp point at the top sticks in the ground, is put to death. The institution of the Duk-duk is common to the neighbouring islands of New Ireland and the Duke of York.(639)

(M190) Among the Galelareese and Tobelorese of Halmahera, an island to the west of New Guinea, boys go through a form of initiation, part of which seems to consist in a pretence of begetting them anew. When a number of boys have reached the proper age, their parents agree to celebrate the ceremony at their common expense, and they invite others to be present at it. A shed is erected, and two long tables are placed in it, with benches to match, one for the men and one for the women. When all the preparations have been made for a feast, a great many skins of the rayfish, and some pieces of a wood which imparts a red colour to water, are taken to the shed. A priest or elder causes a vessel to be placed in the sight of all the people, and then begins, with significant gestures, to rub a piece of the wood with the ray-skin. The powder so produced is put in the vessel, and at the same time the name of one of the boys is called out. The same proceeding is repeated for each boy. Then the vessels are filled with water, after which the feast begins. At the third cock-crow the priest smears the faces and bodies of the boys with the red water, which represents the blood shed at the perforation of the _hymen_. Towards daybreak the boys are taken to the wood, and must hide behind the largest trees. The men, armed with sword and shield, accompany them, dancing and singing. The priest knocks thrice on each of the trees behind which a boy is hiding. All day the boys stay in the wood, exposing themselves to the heat of the sun as much as possible. In the evening they bathe and return to the shed, where the women supply them with food.(640)

(M191) In the west of Ceram boys at puberty are admitted to the Kakian association.(641) Modern writers have commonly regarded this association as primarily a political league instituted to resist foreign domination. In reality its objects are purely religious and social, though it is possible that the priests may have occasionally used their powerful influence for political ends. The society is in fact merely one of those widely-diffused primitive institutions, of which a chief object is the initiation of young men. In recent years the true nature of the association has been duly recognized by the distinguished Dutch ethnologist, J. G. F. Riedel. The Kakian house is an oblong wooden shed, situated under the darkest trees in the depth of the forest, and is built to admit so little light that it is impossible to see what goes on in it. Every village has such a house. Thither the boys who are to be initiated are conducted blindfold, followed by their parents and relations. Each boy is led by the hand by two men, who act as his sponsors or guardians, looking after him during the period of initiation. When all are assembled before the shed, the high priest calls aloud upon the devils. Immediately a hideous uproar is heard to proceed from the shed. It is made by men with bamboo trumpets, who have been secretly introduced into the building by a back door, but the women and children think it is made by the devils, and are much terrified. Then the priests enter the shed, followed by the boys, one at a time. As soon as each boy has disappeared within the precincts, a dull chopping sound is heard, a fearful cry rings out, and a sword or spear, dripping with blood, is thrust through the roof of the shed. This is a token that the boy’s head has been cut off, and that the devil has carried him away to the other world, there to regenerate and transform him. So at sight of the bloody sword the mothers weep and wail, crying that the devil has murdered their children. In some places, it would seem, the boys are pushed through an opening made in the shape of a crocodile’s jaws or a cassowary’s beak, and it is then said that the devil has swallowed them. The boys remain in the shed for five or nine days. Sitting in the dark, they hear the blast of the bamboo trumpets, and from time to time the sound of musket shots and the clash of swords. Every day they bathe, and their faces and bodies are smeared with a yellow dye, to give them the appearance of having been swallowed by the devil. During his stay in the Kakian house each boy has one or two crosses tattooed with thorns on his breast or arm. When they are not sleeping, the lads must sit in a crouching posture without moving a muscle. As they sit in a row cross-legged, with their hands stretched out, the chief takes his trumpet, and placing the mouth of it on the hands of each lad, speaks through it in strange tones, imitating the voice of the spirits. He warns the lads, under pain of death, to observe the rules of the Kakian society, and never to reveal what has passed in the Kakian house. The novices are also told by the priests to behave well to their blood relations, and are taught the traditions and secrets of the tribe.

(M192) Meantime the mothers and sisters of the lads have gone home to weep and mourn. But in a day or two the men who acted as guardians or sponsors to the novices return to the village with the glad tidings that the devil, at the intercession of the priests, has restored the lads to life. The men who bring this news come in a fainting state and daubed with mud, like messengers freshly arrived from the nether world. Before leaving the Kakian house, each lad receives from the priest a stick adorned at both ends with cock’s or cassowary’s feathers. The sticks are supposed to have been given to the lads by the devil at the time when he restored them to life, and they serve as a token that the youths have been in the spirit land. When they return to their homes they totter in their walk, and enter the house backward, as if they had forgotten how to walk properly; or they enter the house by the back door. If a plate of food is given to them, they hold it upside down. They remain dumb, indicating their wants by signs only. All this is to shew that they are still under the influence of the devil or the spirits. Their sponsors have to teach them all the common acts of life, as if they were new-born children. Further, upon leaving the Kakian house the boys are strictly forbidden to eat of certain fruits until the next celebration of the rites has taken place. And for twenty or thirty days their hair may not be combed by their mothers or sisters. At the end of that time the high priest takes them to a lonely place in the forest, and cuts off a lock of hair from the crown of each of their heads. After these initiatory rites the lads are deemed men, and may marry; it would be a scandal if they married before.

(M193) In the region of the Lower Congo a simulation of death and resurrection is, or rather used to be, practised by the members of a guild or secret society called _ndembo_. The society had nothing to do with puberty or circumcision, though the custom of circumcision is common in the country. Young people and adults of both sexes might join the guild; after initiation they were called “the Knowing Ones” (_nganga_). To found a branch of the society it was necessary to have an albino, who, whether a child, lad, or adult, was the acknowledged head of the society.(642) The ostensible reason for starting a branch of the guild in a district was commonly an epidemic of sickness, “and the idea was to go into _ndembo_ to die, and after an indefinite period, from a few months to two or three years, to be resurrected with a new body not liable to the sickness then troubling the countryside. Another reason for starting a _ndembo_ was a dearth of children in a district. It was believed that good luck in having children would attend those who entered or died _ndembo_. But the underlying idea was the same, _i.e._ to get a ‘new body’ that would be healthy and perform its functions properly.” The quarters of the society were always a stockaded enclosure in a great thick forest; a gate of planks painted yellow and red gave access to it, and within there was an assemblage of huts. The place was fenced to keep intruders from prying into the mysteries of the guild, and it was near water. Uninitiated persons might walk on the public roads through the forest, but if they were caught in bye-paths or hunting in the woods, they were flogged, fined, and sometimes killed. They might not even look upon the persons of those who had “died _ndembo_”; hence when these sanctified persons were roving about the forest or going to the river, the booming notes of a drum warned the profane vulgar to keep out of their way.

(M194) When the stockade and the huts in the forest were ready to receive all who wished to put off the old man or woman and to put on the new, one of the initiates gave the sign and the aspirant after the higher life dropped down like dead in some public place, it might be the market or the centre of the town where there were plenty of people to witness the edifying spectacle. The initiates immediately spread a pall over him or her, beat the earth round about the pretended corpse with plantain stalks, chanted incantations, fired guns, and cut capers. Then they carried the seemingly dead body away into the forest and disappeared with it into the stockade. The spectacle proved infectious; one after another in the emotional, excitable crowd of negroes followed the example, dropped down like dead, and were carried off, sometimes in a real cataleptic state. In this way fifty to a hundred or more novices might feign death and be transported into the sacred enclosure. There they were supposed not only to die but to rot till only a single bone of their body remained, of which the initiated had to take the greatest care in expectation of the joyful resurrection that was soon to follow. However, though they were both dead and rotten, they consumed a large quantity of food, which their credulous relatives brought to them in baskets, toiling with the loads on their backs over the long paths through the forest in the sweltering heat of the tropical day. If the relations failed to discharge this pious and indispensable duty, their kinsman in the sacred enclosure ran a risk of dying in good earnest, or rather of being spirited away to a distant town and sold as a slave.

(M195) Shut up within the stockade for months or years, the men and women, boys and girls, dispensed with the superfluity of clothes, rubbed their naked bodies with red ochre or powdered camwood instead, and gave themselves up to orgies of unbridled lust. Some feeble attempts were made to teach them the rudiments of a secret language, but the vocabulary was small and its principles lacking in ingenuity. The time during which this seclusion lasted might vary from three months to three years. When the circumstances which had furnished the pretext for instituting the society had passed away, whether it was that the epidemic had died out or that the birth-rate had sensibly increased, murmurs would begin to be heard among friends and relatives in the town, who did not see why they should be taxed any longer to support a set of idle and dissolute ruffians in the forest, and why they should trudge day after day in the sweat of their brow to carry provisions to them. So the supplies would begin to run short, and whenever that happened the mystery of the resurrection was sure to follow very soon after.

(M196) Accordingly it would be announced that on a certain market-day the new initiates, now raised from the dead, would reveal themselves in all their glory to the astonished gaze of the public. The glad tidings were received with enthusiasm, and crowds assembled from all the country round about to welcome those who had come back from the world beyond the grave. When all were gathered in eager expectancy in the market-place, the sounds of distant music would be heard, and soon the gay procession would defile into the open square and march round it, while the dusky skins, reddened with camwood powder, glistened in the sunshine, the gay garments fluttered in the wind, and the tassels of palm-leaf fibre dangled at every arm. In the crowd of spectators many parents would recognize their children in the marching figures of the procession, and girls and boys would point out their brothers and sisters and eagerly call out their names. But in the stolid faces of the initiates not an eye would gleam with recognition, not a muscle would twitch with an involuntary expression of delight; for having just been raised from the dead they were supposed to know nothing of their former life, of friends and relations, of home and country. There might be in the crowd a mother or a sister not seen for years; or, more moving still, the novice might look in vain for loved and remembered faces that would never be seen in the market-place again. But whatever his feelings might be, he must rigidly suppress them under pain of a flogging, a fine, or even death. At last the parade was over and the procession broke up. Then the old hands introduced the new hands to their own parents and brothers and sisters, to their old homes and haunts. For still the novices kept up the pretence that everything was new and strange to them, that they could not speak their mother tongue, that they did not know their own fathers and mothers, their own town and their own houses; nay that they had forgotten even how to eat their food. So everything and everybody had to be shewn to them and their names and meanings explained. Their guides would lead them about the town, pointing out the various roads and telling where they led to—this one to the watering-place on the river, this to the forest, that to the farms, and so on: they would take up the commonest domestic utensils and shew what they were used for: they would even chew the food and put it into the mouths of the novices, like mother birds feeding their callow young. For some time afterwards the resuscitated persons, attended by their mentors, would go about the town and the neighbourhood acting in a strange way like children or mad folk, seizing what they wanted and trying to beat or even kill such as dared to refuse them anything. Their guardian would generally restrain these sallies; but sometimes he would arrange with his hopeful pupils to be out of sight when two or three of them clubbed together to assault and rob an honest man, and would only return in time to share the booty. After a while, however, the excitement created by the resurrection would wear off; the dead folk come to life were expected to have learned their lessons, and if they forgot themselves, their memory was promptly refreshed by the law.(643)

(M197) The following account of the rites, as practised in this part of Africa, was given to Adolf Bastian by an interpreter. “The great fetish lives in the interior of the forest-land, where nobody sees him and nobody can see him. When he dies, the fetish priests carefully collect his bones in order to bring them to life again, and they nourish them, that he may be clothed anew in flesh and blood. But it is not good to speak of it. In the land of Ambamba every one must die once, and when the fetish priest shakes his calabash against a village, all the men and lads whose hour is come fall into a state of lifeless torpidity, from which they generally arise after three days. But if the fetish loves a man he carries him away into the bush and buries him in the fetish house, often for many years. When he comes to life again, he begins to eat and drink as before, but his understanding is gone and the fetish man must teach him and direct him in every motion, like the smallest child. At first this can only be done with a stick, but gradually his senses return, so that it is possible to talk with him, and when his education is complete, the priest brings him back to his parents. They would seldom recognize their son but for the express assurances of the fetish priest, who moreover recalls previous events to their memory. He who has not gone through the ceremony of the new birth in Ambamba is universally looked down upon and is not admitted to the dances.”(644)

(M198) In the same part of Africa we hear of a fetish called Malassi, the votaries of which form a secret order of the usual sort with a variety of ranks to which the initiates are promoted. “The candidate is plunged into a magic sleep within the temple-hut, and while he sleeps he beholds a bird or other object with which his existence is henceforth sympathetically bound up, just as the life of the young Indian is bound up with the animal which he sees in his dream at puberty. All who have been born again at initiation, after their return to a normal state, bear the name of Swamie (a sacred designation also in India) or, if they are women, Sumbo (Tembo), and wear as a token the ring called _sase_, which consists of an iron hoop with a fruit attached to it.”(645) Similarly among the Fans of the Gaboon a young warrior acquires his guardian spirit by dreaming. He is secluded in the forest, drinks a fermented and intoxicating liquor, and smokes hemp. Then he falls into a heavy sleep, and next morning he must describe exactly to the fetish priest the animal, tree, mineral, or whatever it may have been which he saw in his dream. This magical dream is repeated on three successive nights; and after that the young man is sent forth by the priest to seek and bring back the beast, bird, reptile, or whatever it was of which he dreamed. The youth obeys, reduces the animal or thing to cinders or ashes, and preserves these calcined remains as a talisman which will protect him against many dangers.(646) However, in these rites there is no clear simulation of dying and coming to life again.

(M199) Rites of death and resurrection were formerly observed in Quoja, on the west coast of Africa, to the north of the Congo. They are thus described by an old writer:—“They have another ceremony which they call Belli-Paaro, but it is not for everybody. For it is an incorporation in the assembly of the spirits, and confers the right of entering their groves, that is to say, of going and eating the offerings which the simple folk bring thither. The initiation or admission to the Belli-Paaro is celebrated every twenty or twenty-five years. The initiated recount marvels of the ceremony, saying that they are roasted, that they entirely change their habits and life, and that they receive a spirit quite different from that of other people and quite new lights. The badge of membership consists in some lines traced on the neck between the shoulders; the lines seem to be pricked with a needle. Those who have this mark pass for persons of spirit, and when they have attained a certain age they are allowed a voice in all public assemblies; whereas the uninitiated are regarded as profane, impure, and ignorant persons, who dare not express an opinion on any subject of importance. When the time for the ceremony has come, it is celebrated as follows. By order of the king a place is appointed in the forest, whither they bring the youths who have not been marked, not without much crying and weeping; for it is impressed upon the youths that in order to undergo this change it is necessary to suffer death. So they dispose of their property, as if it were all over with them. There are always some of the initiated beside the novices to instruct them. They teach them to dance a certain dance called _killing_, and to sing verses in praise of Belli. Above all, they are very careful not to let them die of hunger, because if they did so, it is much to be feared that the spiritual resurrection would profit them nothing. This manner of life lasts five or six years, and is comfortable enough, for there is a village in the forest, and they amuse themselves with hunting and fishing. Other lads are brought thither from time to time, so that the last comers have not long to stay. No woman or uninitiated person is suffered to pass within four or five leagues of the sacred wood. When their instruction is completed, they are taken from the wood and shut up in small huts made for the purpose. Here they begin once more to hold communion with mankind and to talk with the women who bring them their food. It is amusing to see their affected simplicity. They pretend to know no one, and to be ignorant of all the customs of the country, such as the customs of washing themselves, rubbing themselves with oil, and so forth. When they enter these huts, their bodies are all covered with the feathers of birds, and they wear caps of bark which hang down before their faces. But after a time they are dressed in clothes and taken to a great open place, where all the people of the neighbourhood are assembled. Here the novices give the first proof of their capacity by dancing a dance which is called the dance of Belli. After the dance is over, the novices are taken to the houses of their parents by their instructors.”(647)

(M200) Miss Kingsley informs us that “the great point of agreement between all these West African secret societies lies in the methods of initiation. The boy, if he belongs to a tribe that goes in for tattooing, is tattooed, and is handed over to instructors in the societies’ secrets and formulae. He lives, with the other boys of his tribe undergoing initiation, usually under the rule of several instructors, and for the space of one year. He lives always in the forest, and is naked and smeared with clay. The boys are exercised so as to become inured to hardship; in some districts, they make raids so as to perfect themselves in this useful accomplishment. They always take a new name, and are supposed by the initiation process to become new beings in the magic wood, and on their return to their village at the end of their course, they pretend to have entirely forgotten their life before they entered the wood; but this pretence is not kept up beyond the period of festivities given to welcome them home. They all learn, to a certain extent, a new language, a secret language only understood by the initiated. The same removal from home and instruction from initiated members is observed also with the girls. However, in their case, it is not always a forest-grove they are secluded in, sometimes it is done in huts. Among the Grain Coast tribes, however, the girls go into a magic wood until they are married. Should they have to leave the wood for any temporary reason, they must smear themselves with white clay. A similar custom holds good in Okÿon, Calabar district, where, should a girl have to leave the fattening-house, she must be covered with white clay.”(648)

(M201) Among the natives of the Sherbro, an island lying close to the coast of Sierra Leone, there is a secret society called the _purra_ or _poro_, “which is partly of a religious, but chiefly of a political nature. It resembles free-masonry in excluding females, and in obliging every member by a solemn oath, which I believe is seldom violated, not to divulge the sacred mysteries, and to yield a prompt and implicit obedience to every order of their superiors. Boys of seven or eight years of age are admitted, or rather serve a novitiate until they arrive at a proper age; for it is difficult to procure exact information, and even somewhat dangerous to make many inquiries. Every person on entering the society lays aside his former name and assumes a new one; to call him by his old name would produce a dispute. They have a superior or head _purra_ man, assisted by a grand council, whose commands are received with the most profound reverence and absolute submission, both by the subordinate councils and by individuals. Their meetings are held in the most retired spots, amid the gloom of night, and carried on with inquisitorial secrecy. When the _purra_ comes into a town, which is always at night, it is accompanied with the most dreadful howlings, screams, and other horrid noises. The inhabitants, who are not members of the society, are obliged to secure themselves within doors; should any one be discovered without, or attempting to peep at what is going forward, he would inevitably be put to death. To restrain the curiosity of the females, they are ordered to continue within doors, clapping their hands incessantly, so long as the _purra_ remains. Like the secret tribunal, which formerly existed in Germany, it takes cognizance of offences, particularly of witchcraft and murder, but above all of contumacy and disobedience in any of its own members, and punishes the guilty with death in so secret and sudden a manner, that the perpetrators are never known: indeed, such is the dread created by this institution, that they are never even inquired after.”(649) When the members of the _purra_ or _poro_ society visit a town, the leader of the troop, whom an English writer calls “the Poro devil,” draws discordant notes from a sort of reed flute, the holes of which are covered with spiders’ webs. The only time when this devil and his rout make a prolonged stay in the town is on the evening before the day on which the newly initiated lads are to be brought back from the forest. Then the leader and his satellites parade the streets for hours, while all the uninitiated men, women, and children remain shut up in their houses, listening to the doleful strains of the flute, which signify that the devil is suffering the pangs of childbirth before he brings forth the initiated lads; for he is supposed to have been pregnant with them the whole of the rainy season ever since they entered into the forest. When they come forth from the wood, they wear four or five coils of twisted ferns round their waists in token of their being initiated members of the order.(650) Among the Soosoos of Senegambia there is a similar secret society called _semo_: “the natives who speak English call it African masonry. As the whole ceremonies are kept very private, it is difficult to discover in what they consist: but it is said that the novices are met in the woods by the old men, who cut marks on several parts of their bodies, but most commonly on the belly; they are also taught a language peculiar to the _semo_, and swear dreadful oaths never to divulge the secrets revealed to them. The young men are then made to live in the woods for twelve months, and are supposed to be at liberty to kill any one who approaches and does not understand the language of the _semo_.... It is said, when women are so unfortunate as to intrude upon the _semo_, they kill them, cut off their breasts, and hang them up by the side of the paths as a warning to others. This circumstance is perhaps less deserving of credit, because the Soosoos are fond of telling wonderful and horrid stories respecting this institution. They say, for instance, that when first initiated their throats are cut, and they continue dead for some time; at length they are reanimated and initiated into the mysteries of the institution, and are enabled to ramble about with much more vigour than they possessed before.”(651)

(M202) While the belief or the pretence of death and resurrection at initiation is common among the negroes of West Africa, few traces of it appear to be found among the tribes in the southern, central, and eastern parts of that continent; and it is notable that in these regions secret societies, which flourish in the West, are also conspicuously absent. However, the Akikuyu of British East Africa “have a curious custom which requires that every boy just before circumcision must be born again. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the labour pains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed. He lives on milk for some days afterwards.”(652) A fuller description of the ceremony was given by a member of the Kikuyu tribe as follows: “A day is appointed, any time of year, by father and mother. If the father is dead another elder is called in to act as proxy in his stead, or if the mother is not living another woman to act in her place. Any woman thus acting as representative is looked upon in future by the boy as his own mother. A goat or sheep is killed in the afternoon by any one, usually not by the father, and the stomach and intestines reserved. The ceremony begins in the evening. A piece of skin is cut in a circle, and passed over one shoulder of the candidate and under the other arm. The stomach of the goat is similarly treated and passed over the other shoulder and under the other arm. All the boy’s ornaments are removed, but not his clothes. No men are allowed inside the hut, but women are present. The mother sits on a hide on the floor with the boy between her knees. The sheep’s gut is passed round the woman and brought in front of the boy. The woman groans as in labour, another woman cuts the gut, and the boy imitates the cry of a new-born infant. The women present all applaud, and afterwards the assistant and the mother wash the boy. That night the boy sleeps in the same hut as the mother.”(653) Here the cutting of the sheep’s gut, which unites the mother to the boy, is clearly an imitation of severing the navel string. Nor is it boys alone who are born again among the Akikuyu. “Girls go through the rite of second birth as well as boys. It is sometimes administered to infants. At one time the new birth was combined with circumcision, and so the ceremony admitted to the privileges and religious rites of the tribe. Afterwards trouble took place on account of mere boys wishing to take their place alongside of the young men and maintaining they were justified in doing so. The old men then settled the matter by separating the two. Unless the new birth has been administered the individual is not in a position to be admitted to circumcision, which is the outward sign of admittance to the nation. Any who have not gone through the rite cannot inherit property, nor take any part in the religious rites of the country.”(654) For example, a man who has not been born again is disqualified for carrying his dying father out into the wilds and for disposing of his body after death. The new birth seems to take place usually about the tenth year, but the age varies with the ability of the father to provide a goat, whose guts are necessary to enable the boy or girl to be born again in due form.(655)

(M203) Among the Bondeis, a tribe on the coast of German East Africa, opposite to the island of Pemba, one of the rites of initiation into manhood consists in a pretence of slaying one of the lads with a sword; the entrails of a fowl are placed on the boy’s stomach to make the pretence seem more real.(656) Among the Bushongo, who inhabit a district of the Belgian Congo bounded on the north and east by the Sankuru River and on the west by the Kasai, young boys had formerly to undergo certain rites of initiation, amongst which a simulation of killing them would seem to have had a place, though in recent times the youths have been allowed to escape the ordeal by the payment of a fine. The supreme chief of the tribe, who in old days bore the title of God on Earth (_Chembe Kunji_), used to assemble all the lads who had just reached puberty and send them away into the forest, where they remained for several months under the care of one of his sons. During their seclusion they were deemed unclean and might see no one; if they chanced to meet a woman, she had to flee before them. By night the old men marched round the quarters of the novices, raising hideous cries and whirling bull-roarers, the noise of which the frightened lads took to be the voices of ghosts. They wore nothing but a comb, and passed their leisure hours in learning to make mats and baskets. After about a month they had to submit to the first ordeal. A trench about ten feet deep was dug in the ground and roofed over with sticks and earth so as to form a dark tunnel. In the sides of the tunnel were cut niches, and in each niche a man took post, whose business it was to terrify the novices. For this purpose one of them was disguised in the skin of a leopard, a second was dressed as a warrior with a knife in his hand, a third was a smith with his furnace and red-hot irons, and a fourth was masked to look like an ugly ape, while he too gripped a knife in his hand. The novices generally recoiled in dismay from each of these apparitions, and it was only by means of reiterated taunts and threats that the elders forced them to traverse the whole length of the tunnel. After the lapse of another month the youths had to face another ordeal of a similar character. A low tunnel, about three feet deep, was dug in the earth, and sticks were inserted in it so that their tops projected from the surface of the ground. At the end of the tunnel a calabash was set full of goat’s blood. By way of encouraging the timid novices the master of the ceremonies himself crawled through the tunnel, his progress under ground being revealed to the novices above ground by the vibrations of the sticks with which he collided in the dark passage. Then having bedabbled his nose, his mouth, and all the rest of his body with the goat’s blood, he emerged from the tunnel on hands and knees, dripping with gore and to all appearance in the last stage of exhaustion. Then he lay prostrate on his stomach in a state of collapse; the elders declared him to be dead and carried him off. The chief now ordered the lads to imitate the example set them by the master of the ceremonies, but they begged and prayed to be excused. At first the chief was inexorable, but in time he relented and agreed to accept a fine of so many cowries as a ransom paid by the youths for exemption from the ordeal. A month later the last of the ordeals took place. A great trunk of a tree was buried with its lower end in the earth and surrounded for three-quarters of its circumference with arrows stuck in the ground so that the barbs were pointed towards the tree. The chief and the leading men sat down at the gap in the circle of arrows, so as to conceal the gap from the eyes of the novices and other spectators, among whom the women were allowed to be present. To the eyes of the uninitiated it now seemed that the tree was surrounded by a bristling hedge of arrows, to fall upon which would be death. All being ready the master of the ceremonies climbed the tree amid breathless silence, and having reached the top, which was decorated with a bunch of leaves, he looked about him and asked the women, “Shall I come down?” “No! no!” they shrieked, “you will be killed by the arrows.” Then, turning disdainfully from these craven souls, the gallant man addressed himself to the youths and repeated his question, “Shall I come down?” A shout of “Yes!” gave the answer that might have been expected from these heroic spirits. In response the master of the ceremonies at once slid down the tree and, dropping neatly to the ground just at the gap in the hedge of arrows, presented himself unscathed to the gaze of the excited assembly. The chief now ordered the young men to go up and do likewise. But the dauntless courage with which they had contemplated the descent of the master of the ceremonies entirely forsook them when it came to their turn to copy his shining example. Their mothers, too, raised a loud cry of protest, joining their prayers and entreaties to those of their hopeful sons. After some discussion the chief consented to accept a ransom, and the novices were dispensed from the ordeal. Then they bathed and were deemed to have rid themselves of their uncleanness, but they had still to work for the chief for three months before they ranked as full-grown men and might return to their villages.(657)

(M204) Among the Indians of Virginia, an initiatory ceremony, called _Huskanaw_, took place every sixteen or twenty years, or oftener, as the young men happened to grow up. The youths were kept in solitary confinement in the woods for several months, receiving no food but an infusion of some intoxicating roots, so that they went raving mad, and continued in this state eighteen or twenty days. “Upon this occasion it is pretended that these poor creatures drink so much of the water of Lethe that they perfectly lose the remembrance of all former things, even of their parents, their treasure, and their language. When the doctors find that they have drunk sufficiently of the Wysoccan (so they call this mad potion), they gradually restore them to their senses again by lessening the intoxication of their diet; but before they are perfectly well they bring them back into their towns, while they are still wild and crazy through the violence of the medicine. After this they are very fearful of discovering anything of their former remembrance; for if such a thing should happen to any of them, they must immediately be _Huskanaw’d_ again; and the second time the usage is so severe that seldom any one escapes with life. Thus they must pretend to have forgot the very use of their tongues, so as not to be able to speak, nor understand anything that is spoken, till they learn it again. Now, whether this be real or counterfeit, I don’t know; but certain it is that they will not for some time take notice of anybody nor anything with which they were before acquainted, being still under the guard of their keepers, who constantly wait upon them everywhere till they have learnt all things perfectly over again. Thus they unlive their former lives, and commence men by forgetting that they ever have been boys.”(658)

(M205) Among some of the Indian tribes of North America there exist certain religious associations which are only open to candidates who have gone through a pretence of being killed and brought to life again. In 1766 or 1767 Captain Jonathan Carver witnessed the admission of a candidate to an association called “the friendly society of the Spirit” (_Wakon-Kitchewah_) among the Naudowessies, a Siouan or Dacotan tribe in the region of the great lakes. The candidate knelt before the chief, who told him that “he himself was now agitated by the same spirit which he should in a few moments communicate to him; that it would strike him dead, but that he would instantly be restored again to life; to this he added, that the communication, however terrifying, was a necessary introduction to the advantages enjoyed by the community into which he was on the point of being admitted. As he spoke this, he appeared to be greatly agitated; till at last his emotions became so violent, that his countenance was distorted, and his whole frame convulsed. At this juncture he threw something that appeared both in shape and colour like a small bean, at the young man, which seemed to enter his mouth, and he instantly fell as motionless as if he had been shot.” For a time the man lay like dead, but under a shower of blows he shewed signs of consciousness, and finally, discharging from his mouth the bean, or whatever it was that the chief had thrown at him, he came to life.(659) In other tribes, for example, the Ojebways, Winnebagoes, and Dacotas or Sioux, the instrument by which the candidate is apparently slain is the medicine-bag. The bag is made of the skin of an animal (such as the otter, wild cat, serpent, bear, raccoon, wolf, owl, weasel), of which it roughly preserves the shape. Each member of the society has one of these bags, in which he keeps the odds and ends that make up his “medicine” or charms. “They believe that from the miscellaneous contents in the belly of the skin bag or animal there issues a spirit or breath, which has the power, not only to knock down and kill a man, but also to set him up and restore him to life.” The mode of killing a man with one of these medicine-bags is to thrust it at him; he falls like dead, but a second thrust of the bag restores him to life.(660) Among the Dacotas the institution of the medicine-bag or mystery-sack was attributed to Onktehi, the great spirit of the waters, who ordained that the bag should consist of the skin of the otter, raccoon, weasel, squirrel, or loon, or a species of fish and of serpents. Further, he decreed that the bag should contain four sorts of medicines of magical qualities, which should represent fowls, quadrupeds, herbs, and trees. Accordingly, swan’s down, buffalo hair, grass roots, and bark from the roots of trees are kept by the Dacotas in their medicine-bags. From this combination there proceeds a magical influence (_tonwan_) so powerful that no human being can of his own strength withstand it. When the god of the waters had prepared the first medicine-bag, he tested its powers on four candidates for initiation, who all perished under the shock. So he consulted with his wife, the goddess of the earth, and by holding up his left hand and pattering on the back of it with the right, he produced myriads of little shells, whose virtue is to restore life to those who have been slain by the medicine-bag. Having taken this precaution, the god chose four other candidates and repeated the experiment of initiation with success, for after killing them with the bag he immediately resuscitated them by throwing one of the shells into their vital parts, while he chanted certain words assuring them that it was only sport and bidding them rise to their feet. That is why to this day every initiated Dacota has one of these shells in his body. Such was the divine origin of the medicine-dance of the Dacotas. The initiation takes place in a special tent. The candidate, after being steamed in a vapour-bath for four successive days, plants himself on a pile of blankets, and behind him stands an aged member of the order. “Now the master of the ceremonies, with the joints of his knees and hips considerably bent, advances with an unsteady, uncouth hitching, sack in hand, wearing an aspect of desperate energy, and uttering his ‘Heen, heen, heen’ with frightful emphasis, while all around are enthusiastic demonstrations of all kinds of wild passions. At this point the sack is raised near a painted spot on the breast of the candidate, at which the _tonwan_ is discharged. At the instant the brother from behind gives him a push and he falls dead, and is covered with blankets. Now the frenzied dancers gather around, and in the midst of bewildering and indescribable noises, chant the words uttered by the god at the institution of the ceremony, as already recorded. Then the master throws off the covering, and chewing a piece of the bone of the Onktehi, spirts it over him, and he begins to show signs of returning life. Then as the master pats energetically upon the breast of the initiated person, he, convulsed, strangling, struggling, and agonizing, heaves up the shell which falls from his mouth on a sack placed in readiness to receive it. Life is restored and entrance effected into the awful mysteries. He belongs henceforth to the medicine-dance, and has a right to enjoy the medicine-feast.”(661)

(M206) A ceremony witnessed by the castaway John R. Jewitt during his captivity among the Indians of Nootka Sound doubtless belongs to this class of customs. The Indian king or chief “discharged a pistol close to his son’s ear, who immediately fell down as if killed, upon which all the women of the house set up a most lamentable cry, tearing handfuls of hair from their heads, and exclaiming that the prince was dead; at the same time a great number of the inhabitants rushed into the house armed with their daggers, muskets, etc., enquiring the cause of their outcry. These were immediately followed by two others dressed in wolf skins, with masks over their faces representing the head of that animal. The latter came in on their hands and feet in the manner of a beast, and taking up the prince, carried him off upon their backs, retiring in the same manner they entered.”(662) In another place Jewitt mentions that the young prince—a lad of about eleven years of age—wore a mask in imitation of a wolf’s head.(663) Now, as the Indians of this part of America are divided into totem clans, of which the Wolf clan is one of the principal, and as the members of each clan are in the habit of wearing some portion of the totem animal about their person,(664) it is probable that the prince belonged to the Wolf clan, and that the ceremony described by Jewitt represented the killing of the lad in order that he might be born anew as a wolf, much in the same way that the Basque hunter supposed himself to have been killed and to have come to life again as a bear.

(M207) This conjectural explanation of the ceremony has, since it was first put forward, been confirmed by the researches of Dr. Franz Boas among these Indians; though it would seem that the community to which the chief’s son thus obtained admission was not so much a totem clan as a secret society called Tlokoala, whose members imitated wolves. The name Tlokoala is a foreign word among the Nootka Indians, having been borrowed by them from the Kwakiutl Indians, in whose language the word means the finding of a _manitoo_ or personal totem. The Nootka tradition runs that this secret society was instituted by wolves who took away a chief’s son and tried to kill him, but, failing to do so, became his friends, taught him the rites of the society, and ordered him to teach them to his friends on his return home. Then they carried the young man back to his village. They also begged that whenever he moved from one place to another he would kindly leave behind him some red cedar-bark to be used by them in their own ceremonies; and to this custom the Nootka tribes still adhere. Every new member of the society must be initiated by the wolves. At night a pack of wolves, personated by Indians dressed in wolf-skins and wearing wolf-masks, make their appearance, seize the novice, and carry him into the woods. When the wolves are heard outside the village, coming to fetch away the novice, all the members of the society blacken their faces and sing, “Among all the tribes is great excitement, because I am Tlokoala.” Next day the wolves bring back the novice dead, and the members of the society have to revive him. The wolves are supposed to have put a magic stone into his body, which must be removed before he can come to life. Till this is done the pretended corpse is left lying outside the house. Two wizards go and remove the stone, which appears to be quartz, and then the novice is resuscitated.(665) Among the Niska Indians of British Columbia, who are divided into four principal clans with the raven, the wolf, the eagle, and the bear for their respective totems, the novice at initiation is always brought back by an artificial totem animal. Thus when a man was about to be initiated into a secret society called Olala, his friends drew their knives and pretended to kill him. In reality they let him slip away, while they cut off the head of a dummy which had been adroitly substituted for him. Then they laid the decapitated dummy down and covered it over, and the women began to mourn and wail. His relations gave a funeral banquet and solemnly burnt the effigy. In short, they held a regular funeral. For a whole year the novice remained absent and was seen by none but members of the secret society. But at the end of that time he came back alive, carried by an artificial animal which represented his totem.(666)

(M208) In these ceremonies the essence of the rite appears to be the killing of the novice in his character of a man and his restoration to life in the form of the animal which is thenceforward to be, if not his guardian spirit, at least linked to him in a peculiarly intimate relation. It is to be remembered that the Indians of Guatemala, whose life was bound up with an animal, were supposed to have the power of appearing in the shape of the particular creature with which they were thus sympathetically united.(667) Hence it seems not unreasonable to conjecture that in like manner the Indians of British Columbia may imagine that their life depends on the life of some one of that species of creature to which they assimilate themselves by their costume. At least if that is not an article of belief with the Columbian Indians of the present day, it may very well have been so with their ancestors in the past, and thus may have helped to mould the rites and ceremonies both of the totem clans and of the secret societies. For though these two sorts of communities differ in respect of the mode in which membership of them is obtained—a man being born into his totem clan but admitted into a secret society later in life—we can hardly doubt that they are near akin and have their root in the same mode of thought.(668) That thought, if I am right, is the possibility of establishing a sympathetic relation with an animal, a spirit, or other mighty being, with whom a man deposits for safe-keeping his soul or some part of it, and from whom he receives in return a gift of magical powers.

(M209) The Carrier Indians, who dwell further inland than the tribes we have just been considering, are divided into four clans with the grouse, the beaver, the toad, and the grizzly bear for their totems. But in addition to these clan totems the tribe recognized a considerable number of what Father Morice calls honorific totems, which could be acquired, through the performance of certain rites, by any person who wished to improve his social position. Each totem clan had a certain number of honorific totems or crests, and these might be assumed by any member of the clan who fulfilled the required conditions; but they could not be acquired by members of another clan. Thus the Grouse clan had for its honorific totems or crests the owl, the moose, the weasel, the crane, the wolf, the full moon, the wind, and so on; the Toad clan had the sturgeon, the porcupine, the wolverine, the red-headed woodpecker, the “darding knife,” and so forth; the Beaver clan had the mountain-goat for one of its honorific totems; and the goose was a honorific totem of the Grizzly Bear clan. But the common bear, as a honorific totem or crest, might be assumed by anybody, whatever his clan. The common possession of a honorific totem appears to have constituted the same sort of bond among the Carrier Indians as the membership of a secret society does among the coast tribes of British Columbia; certainly the rites of initiation were similar. This will be clear from Father Morice’s account of the performances, which I will subjoin in his own words. “The connection of the individual with his crest appeared more especially during ceremonial dances, when the former, attired, if possible, with the spoils of the latter, was wont to personate it in the gaze of an admiring assemblage. On all such occasions, man and totem were also called by the same name. The adoption of any such ’rite’ or crest was usually accompanied by initiatory ceremonies or observances corresponding to the nature of the crest, followed in all cases by a distribution of clothes to all present. Thus whenever anybody resolved upon getting received as _Lulem_ or Bear, he would, regardless of the season, divest himself of all his wearing apparel and don a bear-skin, whereupon he would dash into the woods there to remain for the space of three or four days and nights in deference to the wonts of his intended totem animal. Every night a party of his fellow-villagers would sally out in search of the missing ‘bear.’ To their loud calls: _Yi! Kelulem_ (Come on, Bear!) he would answer by angry growls in imitation of the bear. The searching party making for the spot where he had been heard, would find by a second call followed by a similar answer that he had dexterously shifted to some opposite quarter in the forest. As a rule, he could not be found, but had to come back of himself, when he was speedily apprehended and conducted to the ceremonial lodge, where he would commence his first bear-dance in conjunction with all the other totem people, each of whom would then personate his own particular totem. Finally would take place the _potlatch_ [distribution of property] of the newly initiated ‘bear,’ who would not forget to present his captor with at least a whole dressed skin. The initiation to the ‘Darding Knife’ was quite a theatrical performance. A lance was prepared which had a very sharp point so arranged that the slightest pressure on its tip would cause the steel to gradually sink into the shaft. In the sight of the multitude crowding the lodge, this lance was pressed on the bare chest of the candidate and apparently sunk in his body to the shaft, when he would tumble down simulating death. At the same time a quantity of blood—previously kept in the mouth—would issue from the would-be corpse, making it quite clear to the uninitiated gazers-on that the terrible knife had had its effect, when lo! upon one of the actors striking up one of the chants specially made for the circumstance and richly paid for, the candidate would gradually rise up a new man, the particular _protégé_ of the ‘Darding Knife.’ ”(669)

(M210) In the former of these two initiatory rites of the Carrier Indians the prominent feature is the transformation of the man into his totem animal; in the latter it is his death and resurrection. But in substance, probably, both are identical. In both the novice dies as a man and revives as his totem, whether that be a bear, a “darding” knife, or what not; in other words, he has deposited his life or some portion of it in his totem, with which accordingly for the future he is more or less completely identified. Hard as it may be for us to conceive why a man should choose to identify himself with a knife, whether “darding” or otherwise, we have to remember that in Celebes it is to a chopping-knife or other iron tool that the soul of a woman in labour is transferred for safety;(670) and the difference between a chopping-knife and a “darding” knife, considered as a receptacle for a human soul, is perhaps not very material. Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia warriors who had a knife, an arrow, or any other weapon for their personal totem or guardian spirit, enjoyed this signal advantage over their fellows that they were for all practical purposes invulnerable. If an arrow did hit them, which seldom happened, they vomited the blood up, and the hurt soon healed. Hence these arrow-proof warriors rarely wore armour, which would indeed have been superfluous, and they generally took the most dangerous posts in battle. So convinced were the Thompson Indians of the power of their personal totem or guardian spirit to bring them back to life, that some of them killed themselves in the sure hope that the spirit would immediately raise them up from the dead. Others, more prudently, experimented on their friends, shooting them dead and then awaiting more or less cheerfully their joyful resurrection. We are not told that success crowned these experimental demonstrations of the immortality of the soul.(671)

(M211) The Toukaway Indians of Texas, one of whose totems is the wolf, have a ceremony in which men, dressed in wolf-skins, run about on all fours, howling and mimicking wolves. At last they scratch up a living tribesman, who has been buried on purpose, and putting a bow and arrows in his hands, bid him do as the wolves do—rob, kill, and murder.(672) The ceremony probably forms part of an initiatory rite like the resurrection from the grave of the old man in the Australian rites.

(M212) The simulation of death and resurrection or of a new birth at initiation appears to have lingered on, or at least to have left traces of itself, among peoples who have advanced far beyond the stage of savagery. Thus, after his investiture with the sacred thread—the symbol of his order—a Brahman is called “twice born.” Manu says, “According to the injunction of the revealed texts the first birth of an Aryan is from his natural mother, the second happens on the tying of the girdle of Muñga grass, and the third on the initiation to the performance to a Srauta sacrifice.”(673) A pretence of killing the candidate perhaps formed part of the initiation to the Mithraic mysteries.(674)

(M213) Thus, on the theory here suggested, wherever totemism is found, and wherever a pretence is made of killing and bringing to life again the novice at initiation, there may exist or have existed not only a belief in the possibility of permanently depositing the soul in some external object—animal, plant, or what not—but an actual intention of so doing. If the question is put, why do men desire to deposit their life outside their bodies? the answer can only be that, like the giant in the fairy tale, they think it safer to do so than to carry it about with them, just as people deposit their money with a banker rather than carry it on their persons. We have seen that at critical periods the life or soul is sometimes temporarily stowed away in a safe place till the danger is past. But institutions like totemism are not resorted to merely on special occasions of danger; they are systems into which every one, or at least every male, is obliged to be initiated at a certain period of life. Now the period of life at which initiation takes place is regularly puberty; and this fact suggests that the special danger which totemism and systems like it are intended to obviate is supposed not to arise till sexual maturity has been attained, in fact, that the danger apprehended is believed to attend the relation of the sexes to each other. It would be easy to prove by a long array of facts that the sexual relation is associated in the primitive mind with many serious perils; but the exact nature of the danger apprehended is still obscure. We may hope that a more exact acquaintance with savage modes of thought will in time disclose this central mystery of primitive society, and will thereby furnish the clue, not only to totemism, but to the origin of the marriage system.