medicine-man will sometimes bring the lost soul of a sick man into a puppet and restore it to the patient by pressing the puppet to his breast.[1] In Uea, one of the Loyalty Islands, the souls of the dead seem to have been credited with the power of stealing the souls of the living. For when a man was sick the soul-doctor would go with a large troop of men and women to the graveyard. Here the men played on flutes and the women whistled softly to lure the soul home. After this had gone on for some time they formed in procession and moved homewards, the flutes playing and the women whistling all the way, leading back the wandering soul and driving it gently along with open palms. On entering the patient’s dwelling they commanded the soul in a loud voice to enter his body.[2] In Madagascar, when a sick man had lost his soul, his friends went to the family tomb, and making a hole in it, begged the soul of the patient’s father to give them a soul for his son, who had none. So saying they clapped a bonnet on the hole, and folding up the soul in the bonnet, brought it to the patient, who put the bonnet on his head, and thus received a new soul or got back his old one.[3]
Often the abduction of a man’s soul is set down to demons. The Annamites believe that when a man meets a demon and speaks to him, the demon inhales the man’s breath and soul.[4] When a Dyak is about to leave a forest through which he has been walking alone, he never forgets to ask the demons to give him back his soul, for it may be that some forest-devil has
- ↑ James Dawson, Australian Aboriginies, p. 57 sq.
- ↑ W. W. Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, p. 171 sq.
- ↑ G. A. Wilken, “Het animisme,” in De Indische Gids, June 1884, p. 937.
- ↑ Landes, “Contes et légendes annamites,” No. 76 in Cochinchine Française, Excursions et Reconnaissances, No. 23, p. 80.
